Staying in touch with friends when you're out and about

We met Jeremy Krantz and Nigel Shardlow, founders of Zygo last week. Zygo is another great London based start-up focussing on helping groups of friends.







The guys at Zygo have come up with a very simple but effective group text messaging service. It lets you set up a number for your group and when you text that number, the message goes to all of your friends. When they text back to that number, again it goes to everyone. It effectively lets you instant message a whole group of friends via your phone. Great for banter or sorting out the last minute logistics of a trip or just keeping track of everyone whilst you're away.

We can see it being brilliant for anything from stag or hen parties to ski trips to festivals. When you're sorting out your Wigadoo event, it's definitely worth trying Zygo at the same time!

Being Digital

Last week saw the Mashup Being Digital Conference in London and I went along on behalf of Wigadoo. It was a great event for getting a sense of what's top of mind for people in the web space and there were two words that seemed to dominate the day. They were...

Location and Mobile

(Perhaps this isn't surprising several days after Apple announced the launch of the new 3G iphone with GPS.)

"Location" here refers to the fact that within long all phones should be gps enabled so mobile operators will be able to track where you are (and consequently you can track where your friends/family are). There are obviously issues with permission and privacy here but there are also huge opportunities to come up with cool, new ideas that can revolutionise your life. Hence the excitement.

The mobile bit here is what you might expect. The internet is becoming much more accessible from mobile phones (as new technology like the iphone mark a great leap forward in the ability to use the internet on your phone). This is like a new frontier for internet companies.

Anyway, I thought we should share what all of this might mean for Wigadoo.

In terms of location, we'll probably look to partner up with another start-up to enable you to track where your friends are on an event. For instance, imagine it's midnight, you're in Barcelona with 20 friends on a stag or hen do and you're having a great time ... except it's all gone a bit wrong and you've no idea where any of your friends are. Now imagine how cool it could be if you could then pull up a map on your mobile showing where they were and directing you to them?! This is where we want to get to.

In terms of mobile there are lots of things that we plan on doing. In the coming year you should expect to see:

• An iphone app that allows iphone users to quickly create Wigadoo invites and to send them out to their friends.


• SMS replying - so that friends can sign up and pledge by simply texting a response to an SMS that they receive inviting them to an event. This would mean friend's don't need to be online to sign up and will make the whole thing incredibly easy for invitees.
  


• Group SMSing - so you have one phone number for your group that you can text and that forwards rgar text to all members of the group. This will be great for agreeing where to meet for lunch on the ski slopes or letting people know of a last minute change of plan.


• A Facebook app, accessible from mobiles, that gives you Wigadoo's full functionality from your mobile.

There's no doubt that the internet world is evolving ... and we at Wigadoo look forward to evolving with it!