‘Path meets Google Latitude for skiers‘ app Snowciety debuted at The Next Web Conference Europe’s Startup Rally earlier this year, winning the Best B2C App category. While things have been quiet from the Dutch team behind it since then, as the skiing season kicks into gear, they’re back with a more social approach and a brand new Android app.
Snowciety began as a way for friends on ski slopes to keep track of each other and share their experiences with each other. Now it’s going social by adding a newsfeed of all friends’ adventures on the slopes, and user profiles that collect and summarize each run you do.
In addition to an updated iOS app, an Android version is available for the first time. While Snowciety is undoubtedly a niche offering, enough people are fanatical skiers and snowboarders to make this a potentially popular app on- and off-piste.
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Founded by keen snowboarders Timan Rebel and Ronald Treur, Snowciety has an opportunity to make an impact on the slopes of the northern hemisphere over the next few months. In the southern hemisphere’s winter, Rebel says that the team learned a lot about how skiers in different parts of the world differ.
“We learned that skiers from Australia and New Zealand are much more like Americans than like European skiers. We learned earlier that there is a big difference in mentality between European and American skiers. Americans see skiing as a work-out and are much more competitive than their European counterparts. For Europeans, skiing is much more recreational and the fun and social aspects are more important than the work-out. Europeans tend to take long lunches and wait halfway down the slope for friends who fall behind.
“We believe that Snowciety will be more popular with European skiers,” Rebel says, “because we focus more on the social than on the competitive side of skiing. Therefore it was not a big surprise that the skiers from Australia were a bit less enthusiastic. Still, a couple of hundred people signed up and helped us get the feedback we needed to get ready for this season in the Northern Hemisphere.”
If you’re lucky enough to be heading on-piste this winter, Snowciety is well worth a try.
Image credit: AFP/Getty Images
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