TechStars Investor Day & What is Brightkite?

August 22nd, 2007

Hats off to David Cohen, Brad Feld, and the rest of the TechStars mentors for an unbeatable summer. For the Brightkite team, TechStars was truly a once in a lifetime opportunity. Armed with the mentors’ knowledge and sometimes sobering critical advice, we were able to take what began as an interesting and somewhat disjointed idea and morph it into a viable business opportunity. TechStars has opened doors to knowledge, avenues, people and friends that would otherwise be difficult to access. On behalf of the Brightkite team I would like to say, Thank You!

David Cohen & Brad Feld introducing the TechStars Investor Day.

So, now we can finally sleep, at least a little anyway. After weeks of watching the sunrise due to endless product iterations and the mounting pressure of TechStars investor/demo day, the Brightkite platform is now well on its way.

The TechStars investor/demo day was an all around success, for Brightkite and for the other teams as well. Our pitch practice and hard work on the product is beginning to pay off. During the past few days we have received a great deal of investor interest in Brightkite. Over the coming weeks weâ€™ll be meeting with several potential investors and working hard on revving the product. We’ll write more on investment and product as they develop.

Although investor day was good for press exposure, there appears to be some misunderstanding surrounding what the Brightkite product does. Blogs such as TechCrunch and others have described Brightkite as “Place Based Notifications”, this is not entirely correct, or really correct at all. Notifications were never mentioned in the pitch, or in the context of Brightkite during the demo, so we are unsure where this came from.

Notifications were the focus of our first product, Loopnote.

Brightkite is all about answering the question “Where Are You?” and then sharing that information with multiple location based applications.

What exactly does this mean? We are going to dispel any myths by describing in detail what Brightkite is all about. Later this week we will be posting details about the Brightkite Location Platform API, the Brightkite Geo-Spatial Storage API and some fun LBS applications we are building to showcase the location platform.

It is understandable that people think we are about notifications, but we have shifted our focus. Brightkite has gone through quite a metamorphosis over the summer. We have emerged at the other end of TechStars scratching our own itch, and answering the question “Where Are You?” .

Services like Twitter ask “What are you doing?”, Facebook asks “Who are you friends?”… Well Brightkite asks “Where are you?”.

Think of the possibilities….

Posted by Brady Becker at 4:46 PM in TechStars

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