« Meetic acquires Dutch dating site | Main | VNU Buys Silicon.fr »
February 26, 2006
Locate-me startup, Plazes, popular with techies, gets funded
Plazes is being hailed as the next big European Web 2.0 development in the German press these days and it has attracted a lot of attention from VCs, alpha geeks, web wizards, and certain parts of the blogosphere.
We held off on reporting about it until a) we could confirm that there was a startup called Plazes and that it is not just a side project from Berlin’s Gate5 anymore, and b) we could interview its founder, which we did on Friday.
We can now report that Plazes is a Swiss company, founded in December 2005. Its R&D is in Berlin. It employs 5 and it has tapped Swiss business angels for seed funding. "We are fully funded until the end of the year," said Plazes' co-founder Felix Petersen.
If you haven’t heard of Plazes, it is a website that users exploit to locate friends, colleagues, and wireless hotspots.
The user downloads a client which sends the users' location back to the Plazes database and that spot or location can then be searched, mapped and located by other registered users. It can also be edited with photo, text descriptions, and other bits of info.
There is no business model to talk about for the time being. But Petersen told us that the management team has a few ideas and he’s not disclosing them yet, particularly to journalists.
Who can blame him, with this type of application being relatively easy copy, the moment the firm states a business model, it will likely find itself with some new competitors. One thing it won’t be is an ads-based sales model, said Petersen.
Plazes traffic is on a growth curve, according to Alexa, but the founder is not looking to monetize eyeballs and clicks.
Besides, even if Plazes wanted to generate sales via targeted ads based on location of users, none of the major ads networks, Adsense or Overture, are supporting local search with kind of granualrity Petersen believes would work well with an application like Plazes.
In meantime, the firm’s five employees are working on much-needed improvements of the user interface, adding mobile location ID, and establishing business partnerships with other social networking type companies, mobile network operators, and city guide publishers.
Plazes is mainly used by techie types inside R&D and technology companies in the US, according to Peteresen. Your a:c euro had a hard time getting her client software to identify here location, had to do it manually, and also found the workflow difficult to understand, but then again your reporter is a long way from being an alpha anything let alone an alpha geek.
Plazes fits into the location-based software and services market, which so far has proven to be an elusive one to exploit. A lot of companies have tried to offer the underlying technology as well as applications that sit on top, but so far none have been terribly successful. The only well established businesses that we can think of in this market niche are those that support in-car navigation using geodata and satellite positioning.
In other words, it is way too early in the Plazes development to predict whether or not its special take on this untapped market will be successful, but we’ll be keeping an eye on it.
Posted on February 26, 2006 03:10 PM | Posted to Venture Capital | Web 2.0 | Permalink
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.thealarmclock.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/543
