About Last Night Wants ...

They say that all work and no play makes for some dull boys, and I think brothers Darren and Derek Dodge certainly seem to agree with that sentiment. The two of them have just launched a new iPhone app called About Last Night here on our Disrupt stage that aims to connect fans of the nightlife and help them find the best parties, clubs, concerts, and games every night. “We like to think of ourselves as a social network completely geared around nightlife,” Darren told me. About Last Night is a simple service to get started with — after logging in with their Facebook credentials, users can share photos and videos of where they are, tag their Facebook friends, and upvote the events they attend if they’re particularly good. Images of events and venues that are especially well-rated are pushed to the top of the app’s main activity feed and can even garner bronze, silver, and gold medals to highlight just how good a time everyone is having. Those posts can be set to private if users want to keep some parts of their night hush-hush, but they generally don’t last too long anyway. In a bid to make sure users come back again and again, those posts will disappear after 48 hours. Users can navigate through the app by swiping left and right from the main landing page — they’ll always be just a swipe or two away from listings of nearby events, friend activity, and locations that they’ve chosen to follow. Tapping an icon on the top left causes the entire panel to slide to the right, revealing a control panel a la the Facebook iOS app from which users can search for their friends on ALN. With all the location posting, About Last Night sounds a bit reminiscent of Foursquare. Indeed, the brothers Dodge told me that Foursquare got people into the rhythm of checking in, a behavior they’re clearly keen to harness. Still, their unwavering focus on the nightlife also means that their audience of potential users are avowed fans of finding things to do into the wee hours of the morning, an audience that they believe plenty of brands are itching to reach. While the brothers are all about making sure you get to have a good time — the idea struck them while enjoying the heady party scene in college, after all — they also want brands and venues to be able to connect directly with their users. “Brands spend billions of dollars yearly on the nightlife,” Darren noted to me. “But they’ve had no other way to reach these people other than advertising.” Then plan to do this by giving them the ability to create sponsored and contextual posts to be injected into the streams of users who follow specific brands or venues. Those venues will also be able to offer discounts and deals a la Groupon to lure people through their doors. But that will all come in time, and they tell me that they don’t plan to monetize the service yet — they’re planning to flip that switch within the next few months. Disrupt Q&A Q: How big a market can this address? What are the demographics? A: Nightlife is huge, we think that college kids we be heavy users, but anyone who goes out often will benefit. Q: Do you have a sense of the scale needed to attract national brands A: We’re already talking to big brands — Sam Adams for one. Q: How you brands know when to send out deals? A: Will be able to detect when a user is actually at the location, businesses will create their targeted posts from a web front-end. Q: How will heavy partiers remember to set their sensitive posts to private? A: There’s a rocker directly in the Post page that’s pretty hard to miss.

Ron Conway Will “Never”...

In case you were wondering: Ron Conway says he will not be running for mayor of San Francisco. Apparently that was on Mike Arrington’s mind when he interviewed Conway and SV Angel partner David Lee on-stage at Disrupt today. He said he heard from more than one source that Conway is considering a run “somewhere down the line,” and asked flat-out if that’s true. “That’s a rumor I can assure you is false,” Conway replied. “There’s an old saying: ‘Never say never.’ I actually believe in that saying, but I will never run for mayor of San Francisco.” Had he explored it at all? “Not for a nanosecond.” The idea isn’t quite as out-of-left-field as it sounds. Conway has been visibly involved in civic issues recently — apparently he met with Senator Chuck Schumer recently to discuss SOPA/PIPA and immigration issues, and along with current Mayor Ed Lee and former TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde, he recently helped launch a program called sfCITI aimed at helping the tech industry and the city work together. (In fact, Conway’s relationship with Mayor Lee seemed close enough to prompt a largely critical Bay Citizen article printed in The New York Times .) When grilled about how much of his time he’s “throwing away on government work” (Arrington’s words), Conway estimated that it was 20 percent. On the mayoral question, Conway’s response might seem pretty definitive, but Arrington wasn’t satisfied. He asked if Conway might be lying. (Conway: “I would never lie to you about this.”) Later, he asked again Conway was running. “Last time I checked 10 minutes ago, I was not running for mayor,” Conway said.

SocialStock Wants To Tu...

What good is a Foursquare check-in if it doesn’t lead to a coupon or freebie? Why bother tweeting about a brand you like if they don’t acknowledge your undying love and loyalty? With TechCrunch Disrupt finalist SocialStock , those types of actions may now be rewarded…or at least that’s the company’s vision. The service, founded by Subbu Rama, aims to be a stock market for people and places which assigns a point value to users’ social networking actions. Mimicking the framework of a real stock market, those actions become shares and then those shares can turn into real-world rewards from participating business or brands. What’s interesting about the concept behind SocialStock, is that it makes the idea of someone’s social capital – their “worth” in terms of their social networking actions, check-ins, Foursquare mayorships, tweets, etc. – portable. If you lose your Starbucks mayorship after moving away, for example, you could just turn around and buy “shares” of another local coffee shop that doles out rewards. All your hard work in being a loyal coffee-drinking local doesn’t have to go to waste. In addition to earning shares for your activity, users are assigned a share value of their own, too. The system is based on someone’s social capital, which is determined using algorithms that measure things like the number of friends and followers you have, your history of check-ins, as well as the influence and importance of those who you’re connected to. It’s a bit of a simpler computation than Klout’s Kscore , perhaps, which measures your reach and influence in more sophisticated ways, but then again, it’s a different system than Klout, too. Instead of handing out special “perks” only to those who have mastered gathering “influence,” SocialStock has users building up their virtual shares through their actions – a tweet, a Facebook post, or a check-in as related to a business or venue. Further down the road, other actions will be rewarded, too, like a Yelp review or even an Instagram photo. By aggregating the actions, businesses and brands would have better insight into who their most loyal customers really are. In other words, SocialStock is taking a more holistic view of the social networking ecosystem. There aren’t any launch partners teamed up with SocialStock for today’s debut – only the framework itself is going live. But, if the concept proves successful, participating brands could use the system to set the conversion rate on translating these stock market-like “shares” to real-world rewards. For example, 1,000 shares could be exchanged for a free latte or a free meal. And then, to earn the same reward again, the customer would have to remain loyal by tweeting, Facebooking and checking in some more. Based in Sunnyvale, SocialStock is basically in bootstrapping mode with under $100,000 in funding from a few friends. The website is launching today as is the mobile app, which lets you discover people and places nearby that have spikes in social activity. Disrupt Q&A Judges: Michael Abbott (KPCB), Soraya Darabi (Foodspotting), Patrick Gallagher (CrunchFund) & Charlie O’Donnell (Brooklyn Bridge Ventures) (Note that the questions reflect a somewhat confusing pitch) Q: Not sure I understand, is this loyalty thing? Why not pull up my Klout score? Who’s the target? A: If you move from NY to somewhere else, you lose your social capital. With Social Stock, you can transfer the social stock to the new place. Q: But aren’t you worth less because you can bring less people to that shop? A: More about your importance – it’s a bet on that person. Q: Do I get social capital dollars when I sign in? A: Everyone gets capital based on their influence on Twitter/Foursquare, etc. Buying and selling like stock market. Q: How are you picking social networks/how algorithm works? A: If person has a lot of activity on Facebook, their value is higher. On Twitter, it looks at followers. Existing social graph + frequency of visits to shops. Q: What’s the core reason for product? A: Goal is take social capital and make it a platform.

Hmmm Is A Split-Persona...

You’re crazy with your friends, serious with your co-workers, and sweet with your parents. Now you can share those distinct personalities with their matching audiences thanks to Hmmm , a mobile app launching today that aims to let you be yourself online, whoever that is. Facebook friend lists and Google Circles have proven too clumsy for selective sharing. They’ve led to the rise of Path, which eliminates the decision making by creating a social micronetwork of your closest friends, but all your favorite people aren’t there, and not every post is appropriate for everyone you love. Hmmm lets you create separate avatars for each of your identities, and publish to pre-made sets of Hmmm and Facebook friends. Plus, Hmmm will soon be able to notify a friend that says they’re bored when you post that you want to see a movie. Sol Studios just launched  Hmmm  at TechCrunch Disrupt New York, with an iOS app available now and an Android version coming in two weeks. Hmmm’s co-founder Archana Patchirajan tells me “I’m a daughter, I’m a student, I’m a co-founder. We all have nicknames and social groups. It’s unrealistic to have one profile. We wanted to give users a flexible platform to express themselves the way the do in real life.” Hmmm doesn’t just structure who you share to, but what you share as well. There’s categories like activities, emotions, places, music, and photos, but also tags like “happy” or “inspired” for emotions, or “working” or “celebrating” for activities. The next version of Hmmm will include its “inference engine” that can match people with complementary posts. Like two people who are shopping nearby each other, or someone doing something exciting with someone bored. You can also use Hmmm as a layer on top of Facebook. The app creates feeds of posts by Facebook and Hmmm friends of your avatars. You can like and comment from within Hmmm and that feedback will appear back on Facebook. The bootstrapped Sol Studios plans to monetize Hmmm with Sponsored Stories-style social ads, where small businesses, record companies, and consumer packaged goods companies pay to increase the presence of posts that mention them. It originally considered sponsored gamification, but I persuaded the team that would clutter the app and make it confusing, so they stripped it out. In the Disrupt Battlefield Q&A, Patchirajan explained that Hmmm won’t limit the number of connections you can have, the way Path caps you at 150. She said Hmmm would succeed because competitors’ approaches to micro-sharing are “very unnatural. Finally, she explained the confusing name of her product as…the sound you make when you’re confused who to say something with. Hmmm’s biggest challenge will be convincing users to endure the friction of choosing an audience, content type, and sub-tags just to publish something to friends. Path’s near decision-less publishing is a pleasure and I fear Hmmm could be a pain. But those who want to share their split-personality but are serious about privacy should give Hmmm some thought.

Startup Alley Day 2 — I...

Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt makes for a pretty grueling experience when so many companies are pitching every passer-by. But Jordan Crook and I went in feet first to check out some of the startups there. In scenes more reminiscent of tag-team pro-wrestling, or perhaps a sort of Startup relay race, we tag-teamed around and interviewed a bunch of them including Jaxx, Screach, Fanitics, Edaman, SnapCrowd, ColourDNA, Atticous and BuzzCard. Check all of Tuesday’s startups out here . We also took a trip over to the Israeli Pavilion to check out the likes of Drippler and Vodio among others. Enjoy!