Geomium

» see geomium.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Geomium launched in one city and died before it reached a second. The city was London, the date was 29 September 2010, and the plan on day one said more cities and more platforms were coming. Neither arrived. That is most of the story of the location-app boom in a single product: the category had room for maybe two winners and something like fifty entrants, and the entrants had about a year each.

Ben Dowling and Michael Fergusson built it, with Fergusson as CEO. The company had been going since 2009 and the app showed up at the exact moment the British press was looking for a Foursquare challenger, which is how The Guardian and The Next Web both wrote it up inside a week of launch. The pitch was that everyone else in location had picked one slice: Foursquare and Gowalla did venues, Eventful did listings. Geomium put them on the same map and added the people.

The part that made it interesting was the position data. Check-in apps knew where you had been when you last told them. Geomium ran continuous location updates, so the map showed where your friends were standing rather than where they had announced themselves an hour earlier. It had a public layer too, called shouts, which were location-tagged notes other users could reply to. For the venue and event listings it did not build its own database at all, it aggregated other people's, Yelp and Qype among them. The homepage ran their logos along the bottom as credits, and one of the four is Yahoo's Fire Eagle, the location-sharing platform that is also dead and also has a grave here.

And it deliberately shipped with none of the game mechanics, so there was nothing to collect and nothing to become mayor of. The founders said in interviews that they wanted a useful app for ordinary people rather than a competition for early adopters, which was a defensible read of where the market was heading and also removed the single thing that made Foursquare sticky in 2010.

~ the record ~

~ the email ~

The shutdown is recorded by one of the founders rather than by the press. Ben Dowling's own account is that Geomium was discontinued in November 2011, and that the founders sent an open email to 50,000 users to say so. There is no shutdown post, no acquisition announcement and no trade coverage of the end, which is the normal shape for a startup this size: the launch got eight writeups and the closure got none.

Fifty thousand users for a free iPhone app in one city is not a failure on its own terms. It is simply nowhere near enough for a product whose whole value was the chance that someone you knew was two streets away and visible on the map.

~ where the founders went ~

Dowling kept working on location, just from the other end of it. In April 2013 he founded IPinfo, which sells IP address geolocation data to developers instead of selling a map to consumers. That company is still going, which is why geomium.com today is a redirect into ipinfo.io. The dead consumer app's domain now points at the infrastructure business its founder built next, and the live company does the one thing the dead one needed and could never get enough of: figuring out where someone is.

~ from where i was sitting ~

The check-in years did reach Turkey. Foursquare had real traction here, Istanbul showed up high in its own check-in counts, and for a stretch around 2011 and 2012 you could not open a cafe in Ankara without someone leaving a tip on it. Geomium is in the layer underneath that, the one made of the forty other apps doing the same thing in one country each. I was 26 and 27 across its whole lifespan, on an Android handset, in a city it never listed.

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