Rummble: Find Good Folks And Good Places Nearby!

Location based mobile services are going to be an enormous boon to the growth of mobile in the US and abroad. And a UK service called Rummble is being widely lauded as a great platform in this space.

In a nutshell, Rummble uses GPS and a bunch of social media functionality to make it easy to find people and places that you would like:

Here's how they describe what they do:

Rummble is a location based social search and discovery tool, enabling users find recommended content for a location more easily, without a traditional keyword search. Instead, Rummble’s algorithm provides personalised results based upon a trust profile it builds for you and the content in your social network.

We’ve chosen to build our first service around location based content:

- Discover content for any location (e.g. cool bars, local knowledge and the secret hangouts)
- Give friends automatic warning when you will be in their area
- Share location based content - reviews, photos, videos and blogs
- Explore with Rummble on your mobile or on the web
- Meet new people nearby
- Publish your Rummbles and your location to Facebook and other social software
- It works anywhere - you can use it at home or on the move via your mobile.

Rummble works globally and has been in closed Beta since September 2007. In April 2008 the Rummble service went into limited open Beta.

Your Rummble reviews and status updates don't just stay on phones, or indeed within Rummble. In fact, the service is connected to many of the big social nets, including FaceBook, Bebo, Flickr, Twitter, Google Gears, and Fire Eagle. So you can send your info directly to profiles in less time than it takes to say "Buckingham Palace."



As I said at the beginning, many of the loudest and best opinions online have heralded Rummble as a marvelous example of what place based mobile services should be. A friend of mine in the UK is almost ready to jump in front of a bus for the sake of the service 0- that's how strong user love quickly becomes. Now that they are in limited public beta, I would expect that their presence in the US will get big rather rapidly.

The ad opps in place based are enormous -- both for national retailers, service providers, and even local businesses looking for ways to attract new and lapsed users to their doors. That makes the potential revenue and profitability for services like Rummble very promising, indeed.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.