Social location based company Banjo launched today out of Palo Alto, California, aiming to bring calm to the fragmented space of services and apps used to check-in and share status updates.
Founder and CEO Damien Patton is no stranger to Boston, though. We have heard rumblings that he has considered building a team here, meaning in the future we may be welcoming another consumer facing company to the startup and mobile scene in Boston. We have reached out to Patton to confirm, and are waiting to hear back.
We first met Patton at a Lean Startup meetup here in Boston this past fall. At the time he told us about a new idea he was working on in the mobile social discovery space, and since has been operating in stealth mode building his product out of Palo Alto. The app officially hit Android and Apple app stores this morning, with press across outlets like All Things D (featuring a video interview with Patton), Read Write Web and Fast Company.
Patton joins founders of companies like Sonar, Color and LoKast in the proximity internet and mobile social discovery space. Banjo is unique, however, in its focus on pulling in and aggregating updates and check-ins from the services you, your friends, and people around you already use — like Foursquare, Facebook Places, Twitter (via geotagged Tweets), Gowalla, and soon Instagram and more. This means no recreating social graphs and re-friending people through the service. As soon as you authenticate with your current networks, you authenticate in a jiffy.
One thing that certainly stands out about Banjo is its simplicity, arguably providing an advantage in onboarding more mainstream consumers. The core value proposition is clear: Banjo aggregates all the updates coming from friends across disparate social networks and services in one, easy to navigate space. It also lets you check-in and update these service right from within the Banjo app. Not interested in checking in or providing status updates? You can still use the service to monitor what’s happening around you. The app also offers customization features, such as the ability to filter to see only your friends vs. all those around you, the ability to check out what’s happening in other cities, and the ability to favorite and hide people.
Looking to learn more about the app? Download it for iPhone and Android (a Web-based version leveraging HTML5 is on it’s way, as well as apps built specifically for Android and iPad tablets), and check out this video demo:
