Continuing on my tour of the New York city startup scene, I had the chance to chat Fraser Kelton the VP of Biz Dev at Adaptive Blue. They are creating a really cool service called GetGlue that is changing the way that we interact with popular brands on the web. Check out the conversation Fraser and I had.
BostInnovation: What is GetGlue and what does it do?
Fraser Kelton: We are a social network for entertainment. GetGlue connects you to friends and fans around the entertainment that you are consuming. Whether that be television shows or movies you are watching, music that you are listening to, or books that you are reading. We are trying to improve on the age old experience of talking around the water cooler. We are able to connect you in real time when the event is happening to friends and other fans.
Alex Iskold founded us with the vision of creating a better connection to one another through the items that we like. We launched the [GetGlue] website in November of last year and have launched iPhone, iPad, and android apps over the past 6 months. We also have a mobile site for all other platforms.
BostInno: How did you come up with the name GetGlue?
Kelton: Get Glue is the idea of ‘sticking’ you to the people that matter around the entertainment that you are consuming. We can glue you to all of those connections fairly easily.
BostInno: What are the stickers? Are they your equivalent of badges or rewards?
Kelton: Stickers are the light weight game mechanic on the service. We have partnered with 25 top entertainment companies to provide branded stickers for their shows or their movies. For example, Glee on Fox and True Blood on HBO have their own rewards programs. As fans interact with these items, they can level up and earn sticks from these brands.
We even mail out physical copies of the stickers. It starts to make these digital rewards tangible and is a very popular feature on the service. It has been great offline promotion for us and our partners, and is a great experience for our users because you get free stickers from brands that you love. Who doesn’t like stickers? We just partnered with HBO to offer fans real discounts connected to the level of sticker that is unlocked. For example, the first level of the True Blood fan stickers gets you 10 percent off at the store.
BostInno: Who are some of your other big entertainment partners?
Kelton: Like I said before, we have about 25 different partners involved ranging from Fox, HBO, Showtime, and Discovery for TV – Sony, Warner Bros, and Universal for movies – book publishers like Simon & Schuster and Random House – music groups like Maroon 5 and the Gorillaz
BostInno: Who are some of your competitors?
Kelton: We obviously watch fairly close what sites like Facebook and Twitter are doing because they are just massive players in any space. You have to keep an eye on them but overrall the key thing is not to get caught up on what other groups are doing. All that we have to do is continue to focus and innovate on our product.
BostInno: What is the New York City startup culture like?
Kelton: First and foremost there is no better city in the world than New York. It is the media, cultural, and commerce center of the world. So it is very natural that there would be a very fast growing and thriving startup ecosystem here. One of the big benfits is that there is so much other stuff going on other than startups here. You can see world class music and art, and surround yourself with culture and commerce unlike any other city in the world. This type of cross-pollination is really coming into play lately.
BostInno: Any thing else you want our readers to know from NYC?
Kelton: Yeah absolutely, Boston has stolen one key asset from the NYC startup scene that breaks our heart. You guys stole Andrew Parker, who is an associate at Spark Capital and was a great cornerstone of the NYC startup community.
To learn more about GetGlue follow them on Twitter.
