Daemonic Labs, a fledgling San Francisco startup with offices in Argentina, is today launching a new (and perhaps, yet another) location-based photo journaling service called Dabble at the DEMO conference in Silicon Valley.
Daemonic Labs has been beta-testing its service with about 5,000 testers from around the world. It already boasts a staff of 11 employees and has recently raised $2.2 million in funding from Granite Ventures and unnamed angel investors, but today’s the day it’s publicly unveiling the Dabble iOS and Web apps.
An Android app is already in the works too, in case you’re wondering.
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Basically, Dabble lets users collect and share ‘experiences’ and attach them to places by pinning virtual ‘postcards’ on a map. The idea behind the app is that people will use their smartphones to create a virtual layer over the world filled with geo-tagged pictures and content that can be useful to others.
The company was founded by former Googler and ex-Twitter VP of Business Operations Santosh Jayaram, along with serial entrepreneur Antonio Altamirano (Sun Microsystems, AKQA, Tangelo) and Pete Goettner, GP at Worldview Venture Partners and formerly co-founder of eLearning enterprise solutions company DigitalThink (acquired by Convergys for $120 million in 2004).
Says Jayaram:
“We created Dabble because we wanted to go anywhere – say, Paris, San Francisco, or our own neighborhood – and be connected with content from friends and others who were there before us. We wanted to fill the map with what matters to us, and find interesting content.”
Described as a “geo-located journal of postcards that’s social and engaging”, Daemonic Labs wants Dabble users to capture location-tagged human experiences, ideas and memories and thus attach an ever-growing catalogue of content to places that can be relevant to friends and future visitors.
Ultimately, the startup says, Dabble wants to make the world a “smaller, more intimate place”. A lofty goal indeed, but at least the app works well and looks great.
The elephant in the room is, of course, that there are a lot of apps out there that are similar, including services like Trover, Hipster, Pinwheel, Instagram, GyPSii, Snapr, HipGeo, Pictonote, Streamzoo, Foursquare, LiveShare, Ditto, Storie and Penzu.
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