Location-based service Banjo underwent a transformation today. It overhauled its mobile apps today across all devices, no longer curating content by individuals, but rather by events. The company has also redesigned the interface of its apps to make them more intuitive, building them from the ground up for iOS 7 and Android 4.4 KitKat.
The most significant aspect of Banjo 4.0 is the curation of content. When the service launched in 2012, it competed alongside the likes of Sonar and Highlight, but evolved to focus on just location. Users could see what others were publicly sharing across various social networks in locations around the world. Today, the app gets more specific — it displays results based on location and the event taking place there (e.g. the Winter Olympics in Sochi, the Golden Globes in Los Angeles, etc.).
Damien Patton, Banjo’s CEO and founder, says: “We are witnessing a transformation in the way content is created and consumed. This perfect storm is being fed by the convergence of three powerful and distinct forces: Mobile + Social + Cloud = Real Time Web.”
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He believes that just looking at data by location is uninteresting and mainstream audiences want more. Waze is proof of this theory since it focuses on location and traffic. To that end, Banjo is looking at content across two dimensions. Users will be able to pull up any public photos, videos, and posts as it relates to any event happening around the world.
Banjo isn’t disclosing how its technology can pinpoint when a live event is taking place — it’s only attributing it to its secret algorithm.
The company has rewritten all five of its mobile apps — yes, five — one each for iOS, iPad, Android phone, and supported Android 7-inch and 10-inch tablets. However, there remains but one SDK for developers.
Patton also shared with us some statistics about Banjo users: to date the app has been downloaded more than 6 million times and the average time spent on the app was over 4 minutes per session. It has also curated 9 billion posts in this version so far.
Photo credit: Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images
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