Start-up links people in neighbourhood
Yobongo uses outdated chatroom as a means of communication on smartphones
Natalie Armstrong
SAN FRANCISCO // Entrepreneur Caleb Elston is using an outdated form of communication - chat rooms - to try to make it "less socially awkward to meet people".
"A lot of people have written off chat-style communication as a category failure, and we really want to challenge that assumption," says Mr Elston, the chief executive and co-founder of Yobongo, a start-up based in San Francisco.
Yobongo relies on geo-location technology to randomly connect users in the same city or neighbourhood through a mobile application.
"You know there are people at the coffee shop, there's people at the restaurants, there's people in your building who you never meet but you know, these guys have to be good people," says Mr Elston.
Yobongo's app uses an algorithm that determines which users will have interesting conversations and instantly connects up to 12 individuals at a time. From there chat-room participants can break off into private conversations.
"For people who are a little bit more reserved, they can come in and get a lot of value out of understanding what's happening nearby." Mr Elston says most social networks connect people who are already friends, but Yobongo is a vehicle to make new friendships through creating more "authentic" conversations.
"You don't follow anyone, you don't have to friend anyone, you don't have to pick from a room," says Mr Elston, 24, who previously worked as the vice president of product at the video streaming start-up Justin.TV with co-founder David Kasper. "We instantly connect you with people and you see the conversation that's happening around you."
Yobongo uses chat-based software, similar to what was popular in the late 1990s before spammers corrupted it by "inserting junk into that conversation", Mr Elston says. Yobongo is trying to resurrect chat rooms as a means of communication by providing what he refers to as an "elegant experience" on smartphones.
Mr Elston says other "novelty" chat services, such as Chatroulette, failed because they focused exclusively on "only random experience" and were "not intended to build real relationships".
The free Yobongo app is available only for the iPhone and iPod Touch and works in just three cities: San Francisco, New York and Austin - where it launched during the South By Southwest (SXSW) conference in March.
Yobongo has a total of more than 10,000 users, says Mr Elston, adding most of them have moved to their city from smaller towns and are finding it harder to meet people.
Yobongo this month released its upgraded version of the app with additional features such as "multi-tasking" which allows the user to leave the conversation and return without missing anything. Another new function, called "ponderings", is a 15-character blurb that lets people know what's on the user's mind to help spark a new topic of conversation.
Yobongo is hoping to cash in on the rapidly expanding US mobile market, which totalled 427.8 million units sold in the first quarter, according to data from the research group Gartner. Total global mobile phone sales are expected to hit nearly 1.8 billion units this year.
"We only have a billion PCs connected to the internet, but we'll have 5 to 6 billion mobile devices," says Mr Elston. He says the changing landscape "means that for many people their first experience with anything connected to the internet will be on their mobile device".
Earlier this year, Yobongo raised US$1.35 million Dh4.95m)in its first round of fundraising.
Mr Elston says users are on the Yobongo app for hours and people come in four to six times a day. This is a "massive engagement for a web service", he says, despite the popular tech publication All Things Digital dubbing Yobongo the "often empty chat room".
* Reuters
