The social media spotlight that brought attention to Twitter in 2009 has been captured by hot rookie, Four Square. The real-time, raw, stream-based approach of Twitter and the local, community-based approach of Four Square are the basis of the idea behind another digital startup, Sency. What is Sency, you ask? Sency is real-time, location-based search focused on user chatter. Fitting for the digital world of 2010, Sency is based on an API of Twitter data. Why should you care? Sency is representative of tomorrow’s startup that is based on scalable content from the digital community.
Yesterday’s media company was based on experts creating small volumes of high quality, specialized content at a very high editorial expense. Tomorrow’s media company is based on curating large volumes of content into a relevant stream at a low variable cost across a fixed cost platform. Think of BusinessWeek (firesale to Bloomberg) and Newsweek (currently for sale) as media companies whose scale doesn’t work in the digital era. Contrast that with Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Four Square which are empowering users to help in content creation. Sency is part of a growing cohort of startups that are focused on making sense of vast amounts of data. Consider that by leveraging Twitter data across millions of users, Sency can cover multiple topics in real-time without the burden of a large editorial staff.
You might argue that you want to read about the European debt crisis Bloomberg BusinessWeek rather than from a raw Sency feed. And we agree, but how about real-time chatter about your favorite sports team … for example the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team recently made history with their playoff win against Boston. Pumped up Flyers fans might want to follow the ongoing chatter of other Flyers fans on Sency. Add on Sency’s new development of “places” and you can get the community discussion from specific locations within your city. This “places” initiative will showcase popular places in a given city based on where people have visited of late. The selling point from Sency is that their algorithm filters out the spam and does a better job of organizing relevant chatter.
Evan Britton, Founder of Sency says, “Twitter has so much data that can be leveraged and displayed in new ways. The key to Sency is our ability to take useful, interesting real-time data and simplify it for better consumption by users. While we do have some plans to build our own data, our focus is more on compiling, archiving, and formatting data so that we can display in new ways.”
Sency is in a growing, but crowded field of real-time local search startups that includes Collecta, CrowdEye, OneRiot, and Topsy as covered by VentureBeat. Many of them are well funded with OneRiot securing $27 million. To date, Sency has bootstrapped its organization with a focus on product development and guerilla marketing. With its limited budget, odds are against Sency becoming the #1 player in the market. That said, Evan is betting that his passion will help bridge the financing gap. He has reached out to hundreds of bloggers and has successfully gained coverage by over 100 of them, including HuffingtonPost and VentureBeat. Evan is following Sparxoo’s “influencer marketing” rules perfectly in engaging influencers to help overcome limited resources.
With the buzz around Four Square, Sency has the opportunity to garner attention. Their next milestone is to reach 1 million unique users. As they attract more and more users, Sency will be challenged to evolve from “oh, that’s cool” to “wow, I plan to check back frequently.” Right now, real-time location based search of community chatter is a novelty: interesting, but not vital. There is potential for it to catch on, especially among early adopters. Sency is currently evaluating use-cases, such as sports, where there is an opportunity to build a more engaged passion-user. As they test and experiment, they will be part of an entrepreneurial community that is writing the new rules for building scalable platforms to leverage rapidly growing databanks.
Related posts:
Comments
Sency is an info wizard..if I want to know what JUST happened, instead of swifting through news channels to find a report, I go to Sency and instantly I know what others are saying about it (i.e. anyone just feel that earthquake in LA?)