The Power of Mobile

This year I was lucky enough to find my way into a presentation given by Andrew Weinrich at the Wharton School, thanks to the guidance of a brilliant VC named Baris Aksoy. Weinrich is one of the pioneers of social networking, having co-founded Six Degrees in the mid-nineties. He was giving a lecture on the power of the mobile phone as an enabling technology and its potential applications by talking about his latest tech venture MeetMoi.

For the longest time I’d been trying to figure out why there was such hype about moving social media to the mobile platform. The presentation proved to be very enlightening in this respect. MeetMoi is a dating service, much like eharmony.com and chemistry.com, but with a twist. The idea is that they can use your mobile phone to determine where you and all of your matches are at any time, and alert you when you are within an X mile radius of each other. It also gives you the freedom to change your service preferences at any time, so you can activate the service on the way home from the office or when you’re out at a bar with friends and deactivate it while at work or asleep.

Now I won’t go into some of the clear issues that are associated with the service itself (people in the room thought of all kinds of situations where this idea could get you into trouble as the user) but it definitely highlights the potential of mobile: the power to not only match your interests with a cataloged set of services but to also match you geographically. Say you’re looking for a new apartment; there’s a good chance that you walk by half a dozen great apartments on the way to work each day without knowing it. Imagine that a service knows of this and sends you a message saying (“Apartment 411, 12 Barclay’s Street, $3500 a month, resident accepting inquiries now) on your way to the red line in downtown New York- now there’s an interesting start up that I would love to be a part of.