At the intersection of search, mobile, social and travel, Boston-based Goby helps you find things to do when traveling or locally on the weekend. The company announced a Series A round of funding from Boston-area Flybridge Capital and Kepha Partners this past October, bringing their total money raised to $7.5 million.
Having originally launched Goby on the web, this most recent funding was to help drive the company’s mobile presence. Goby apps are now available on Android, iPhone and iPad devices on top of a mobile website. And this week, we were excited to hear from CEO Mark Watkins that the company has already passed the big mobile milestone of 500,000 app downloads.
While the iPhone app was released before Android, Watkins said Goby is now seeing slightly higher use from Android phones. And with a half a million downloads, the company is also noticing interesting behavioral differences between the iPhone and Android platforms. Watkins shared some of the insights with us below:
— Goby iPhone users search for family activities almost twice as often as Android users
— Goby Android users use full text search capabilities (vs. Goby’s pre-defined categories) more than 3 times as often as iPhone users
— Android has huge popularity in Texas (Dallas in particular), all out of proportion to population
— New York City is the most popular city for the iPhone
In tandem with reaching mobile milestone, Goby’s team has also been working to grow its base of results. “Our content base has grown by more than 50 percent in the last six months, and we now have over 6 million things to do across over 350 different categories,” Watkins shared
In line with the content base growth, I asked Watkins about popular Goby searches made here around Boston.
He shared, “First, music is huge. Queries on concerts are 5x the national average on Goby. Which makes sense in a way, because Boston is such a great music town.” (Watkins writes weekly about upcoming concerts in Boston for the Goby blog.) “Yoga is also very popular in Boston, coming in at twice the national average,” Watkins said. Overall yoga is apparently a popular search query for Goby, which he remarked being surprised by.
As for other apparent search differences by geography, Watkins shared, “Separately, let’s say, NSFW queries (which are queries we are not trying to address!), population-adjusted, come in about twice as often from NYC — and at even higher rates from Montana.”
The Goby team’s most recent feature release is the service’s bookmarking and sharing system over Facebook and Twitter to extend the service beyond a users initial search. “Our goal is for Goby to be the best place to find, save and share things to do, whether it’s a local concert or comedy event or a place to go snowshoeing,” replied Watkins.
Congrats to the Goby team for passing the 500,000 milestone. Learn more about Goby and download their app here.
