Wow, we had a great time at the Denver Museum of Art on Friday night. We projected a Brightkite Satellite screen on a wall and watched people stop and interact with it while they were walking to and from other exhibits. We posted different questions throughout the night to get responses from people (i.e. “what’s your favorite nighttime spot in Denver?”, “what’s your favorite quote?” and even “what was the best day of your life?”). Several people stayed for a while and sent in many different messages. People really understood the concept of “checking in” at a physical location. We explained that the website would show their exact location on a map and that it would let them see every message that was posted from this location. (A concept we call Placestreaming or Placecasting).
We’ll be back at the museum next month so if you’re in the Denver area be sure to stop by the next Untitled event. Over the next couple weeks we’ll be doing this at a couple different events. We’ll write about them as they happen. In the meantime take a look at some of the pictures from the event. And keep reading below for some exciting news.
Here I am getting feedback from people using the service.
The interior architecture of the museum is just as impressive as the exterior.
In other news we’re happy to announce that we’ve hired the lead developer from Socialthing! We’re very lucky to have him as part of our team but he’s twice as lucky to be on ours. Brady, one of our founders, had to negotiate with Ben for a while to make it happen. Take a look at the pictures below. Ben is a fierce negotiator. He kept holding out for a company car and a 4-10 workweek. Brady worked his magic though and Ben eventually settled for no pay as well as a no say whatsoever on product direction decisions.
Welcome aboard Ben!…… 
Brady locks in the deal… sweet!
Update: We were obviously joking about Ben. He’s got plenty of work over at socialthing!
Tomorrow night our service will be a featured evening exhibit at the Denver Art Museum! They’ll be displaying a large projected Brightkite Satellite during their monthly Untitled series event. The Brightkite Satellite will display messages sent from users who are “checked in” at the Museum. We’ll have instructions telling people how they can check in and how they can post messages.
This officially marks our first client for Brightkite so we’re very excited. A few of us are planning to go over there tomorrow night to get feedback from people using it. If you’re in the Denver/Boulder area you should swing by and check it out. The event runs from 6pm to 10pm on Friday July 27th. If you haven’t been to the museum then you’ve got to come. The Architecture is breathtaking and the exhibits are pretty good too. My favorite is the temporary exhibit called Radar.
We’ll be posting pictures from the event on this blog.
The museum is located here.
Placestreaming, as in the stream of content originating from a specific place. We think this really captures what Brightkite is all about. We enable location based conversations. And location based conversations, in aggregate, are placestreams.
The excitement of the iPhone brought about an activity Techcrunch called Evenstreaming. Arrington coined the term when he talked about how Robert Scoble and several others basically broadcasted themselves sitting in line overnight waiting to buy the iPhone, the most highly anticipated technology release in history. Arrington called Evenstreaming “the seed of a revolution” and “the missing link in Web 2.0’s challenge to network television”.
Just before Evenstreaming, people were talking a lot about Lifestreaming. Lifestreaming being the stream of content published by someone about themselves. Twitter, Jaiku, Blogs, Tumblr and these live video tools let people stream themselves.
But we’re really excited about Placestreaming. We’re all about places and we want to let people share what they have to say when they’re in specific locations. If you think about it, events happen in places. Our lives happen in places. The place oftentimes dictates our experience there to a large extent. The place is relevant to how people interact when they’re there.
So Brightkite lets lets you stream from a place, or about a place. You can do this when you’re there or when you’re at home on your computer. When other people are in that place, they can read what people have streamed from that location - this is when it gets fun. People begin to communicate in a new way, and new connections are made that might never have been made before. Social Placestreaming emerges.
Stay tuned for more.