BlockChalk Blog

Entrepreneur Magazine's 100 Brilliant Ideas...

Thu, 01 Jul 2010 14:47:00 -0700

It’s an honor to have BlockChalk listed as one of Entrepreneur Magazine’s 100 Brilliant Ideas of 2010!

We’re listed alongside some super impressive entrepreneurs in the mobile technology section including Dennis Crowley of Foursquare, Jack Dorsey of Square, the Bump Technologies team and a host of others. Many thanks to the entire Entrepreneur Magazine staff.

“Entrepreneurs 100 Brilliant Ideas of 2010: A bold concept perfectly in sync with the moment: It’s what great companies are built on.” http://bit.ly/a6cuNw

Lessons from raising a seed round

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 11:19:00 -0700

by dixieroadrash on Flickr As TechCrunch, VentureBeat, and ReadWriteWeb recently reported (and as we confirmed on our blog), BlockChalk has just closed a round of seed financing and is now hiring.

We thought it might be useful for other entrepreneurs if we shared the story of how we raised this round and some of the lessons we learned along the way.

Update: VentureHacks has just written about AngelList’s role in our funding process. Check it out!

Find those early supporters

Everything starts somewhere. For us, things truly began to roll when we secured the early support of two key investors.

Our first supporter and advocate was Joshua Schachter, founder of del.icio.us, inventor of tagging, and an active angel investor. Joshua has a unique talent for recognizing non-obvious problems and opportunities. He immediately grokked the big picture behind BlockChalk and lent us invaluable support in the form of investor referrals, product advice, and pitch feedback. His involvement served as critical social proof that helped us in winning over nearly every other investor who followed. Someday we will name a BlockChalk neighborhood after Joshua. We have that power, you know.

Another key early supporter was Satya Patel of Battery Ventures. Like Joshua, Satya quickly grasped the opportunity we were working towards. But he wasn’t just looking for a solid product strategy; he was looking for a team of entrepreneurs he thought could get the job done, adjusting course as necessary to reach the larger goal. Satya’s perspective was a breath of fresh air, so we were thrilled when Battery decided not only to invest but also to lead the round. Satya also made numerous introductions on our behalf, including to angel David Liu who chose to sign on. It’s been a pleasure working with Satya; he is definitely one of the good guys.

AngelList pwns

You know about VentureHacks, right? It’s the place to go for the best startup advice, period. If you’re an entrepreneur and you’re not reading it, you need to start now. Go ahead, we’ll wait. Back now? Cool.

Babak Nivi and Naval Ravikant run VentureHacks. When we first met them they had recently started AngelList, a service that sends pre-screened startup pitches to angel investors who sign up to receive them. We wrote up a version of our pitch that matched AngelList’s requested format (an exercise that in itself was very useful) and submitted it. They sent it out to the list and within a day we had received ten quality angel inquiries. In just a few days, we had our first new commitment — Tom McInerney.

After Battery Ventures signed on to lead our round, Nivi and Naval sent BlockChalk out to AngelList once again. With this new added social proof, the response was even stronger than the first time around. We literally received dozens of new angel inquiries and things began to rapidly come together. In the span of a few days we had a commitment from the legendarily awesome Mitch Kapor. We also met Josh Stylman who signed on and also introduced us to Chris Dixon and Eric Paley of Founder Collective (who themselves signed on).

AngelList is a remarkable experiment that is redefining the way entrepreneurs connect with angels. It’s something you want to be a part of.

The team is key

We found that the makeup of our founding team contributed directly and measurably to our ability to raise funds. Stephen’s background with del.icio.us showed that we could design, build and manage successful web-scale businesses. Dave’s relationships at Stanford’s d.school led directly to a number of important connections, most notably Michael Dearing of Harrison Metal who ultimately signed on as an investor. And Josh’s engineering experience at both del.icio.us and Craigslist provided clear evidence that we had the technical chops required to meet the challenges ahead.

It’s hard to go it alone. It’s probably also not smart in most cases. A powerful team is greater than the sum of its parts, and investors know that.

Always be tweaking

We never stopped tweaking our pitch. Every meeting we had was an opportunity to both audition our latest pitch and to gather feedback for the next iteration.

The simple fact of the matter is that you probably don’t know the best way to pitch your idea… yet. We certainly didn’t. Like a stand-up comic testing out a new act, you will need to test your pitch over and over again, continually refining it until it is as focused and brief as possible. You’ll probably never reach the ideal, but that’s kind of the point.

This shouldn’t be just a surface exercise. Your pitch is an extension of your product and your business, and any learnings should flow in both directions.

Prototypes will love you and leave you

There is no substitute for real feedback from real users. With that in mind, BlockChalk started as an idea and a functional prototype. We chose to “soft launch” that prototype in order to get early user feedback. It worked and we learned invaluable lessons that we applied to a new and improved product strategy.

But there was a side effect we didn’t expect. Some prospective investors saw this early prototype and instead of digging deeper assumed it represented the sum total of our efforts. Consequently some of them didn’t give us the chance to explain our real strategy.

If we could do it again we might have launched our prototype under a different brand. Or perhaps emblazoned it with the word “beta”, or even “alpha”. But at some level this is the price you pay for having a “product” before you have funding. Prototyping is a double-edged sword. Be prepared for both blades!

Conclusions

We’ll be writing more on these issues in the future, but for now that’s a good overview. Raising this round was a challenging, at times frustrating, but ultimately rewarding experience. We ended up with a roster of investors we truly respect. We found a lead investor who shares our perspectives on the marketplace and the entrepreneurial process. And we now have the resources to hire a stellar team and prove the value of BlockChalk. There isn’t much more we could ask for!

Stephen, Dave, and Josh

BlockChalk's new San Francisco office

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 14:33:00 -0700

The epic view from BlockChalk HQ (click for full size)
Up until now, BlockChalk has been a scrappy “virtual team” without an official headquarters. We have instead relied on a wide range of technologies for communication and collaboration — from email and phone to IM, Yammer, Skype, and Google Docs. This has worked great and we’ll keep using these tools, but now that we’re funded and hiring it’s time to have a permanent physical space as well.

We wanted to base our operations in a place that reflected BlockChalk’s community focus. We also wanted a workspace that would inspire and energize us on a daily basis. We were lucky enough to find all of this in one place.

Our new office will be located at 153 Townsend Street in San Francisco. This is a new co-working space being set up by the same people who created the successful workspace at Pier 38. It’s a modern, bright, and roomy building in a great part of town. Even better, we on the BlockChalk team will have an epic view of one of the cities we’re going to transform!

We’re psyched to be in the urban heart of San Francisco. We’re going to have a blast working here. And if you’re a mobile or back-end engineer, hopefully we’ve just given you one more reason to check out our job postings!

We're Hiring

Thu, 27 May 2010 13:31:00 -0700

There are lots of reasons to celebrate this morning’s announcement of our seed funding round, but perhaps the single most important one is that we can start growing our team.

For me, building a great team is one of the most powerful and rewarding things I can do as a technologist - even more so than writing good code - because the leverage is that much higher. It’s something that makes an impact on the lives of people who you trust and consider your friends, and it is the key to our company’s success. I’m really looking forward to doing it again, and this time under some incredibly awesome circumstances: as a newly-funded startup in an explosive new technology space.

The search is on for some very good engineers to come aboard and own our iPhone and back-end development. Details of the openings and more about our company can be found on our jobs page.

I’ll conclude with a reminder that it’s a unique opportunity to join a company at this stage. The challenges are different, there are no clear answers to the big problems, the blend of risk and reward is very attractive, and the chance exists to make a big impact. Is any of this resonating? If so, this may be the gig for you.

Cheers,

- Josh, Co-Founder and chief engineer

BlockChalk is now a venture-backed startup

Thu, 27 May 2010 09:39:00 -0700

UPDATE: we’re hiring and we’ve posted details about our open positions on our blog; check them out!

We’re very pleased to announce that we’ve just raised a significant round of seed financing from an outstanding group of investors who share our vision for BlockChalk and our excitement about the rapidly evolving LBS space.

Our investors include Battery Ventures, Mitch Kapor, Harrison Metal, Founder Collective, Joshua Schachter, Josh Stylman, Tom McInerney, and David Liu. We’re thrilled to have each of them on our team and we truly appreciate their support.

We’ll be using this funding to build the next generation of BlockChalk and accelerate our vision, which is to help people connect with their neighbors and mobilize their local communities. We can’t share details yet, but we have some very big things planned. To reach our goals we’re hiring a team of talented engineers who are as excited about this vision as we are. First up, we’re looking for experienced iPhone developers and server-side engineers; details will follow shortly in a subsequent post.

Our job is to make your neighborhood a little bit better, one block at a time. We hope you’ll join us.

Stephen, Dave, and Josh

Living local: reduce, recycle, and reuse with BlockChalk

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 17:54:00 -0700

Perhaps not surprisingly, here at BlockChalk we’re big proponents of “living local”. Buying your food and other products closer to home is good for the local economy and good for the planet we all share. Better yet, reusing and re-purposing old and unwanted items within your community — instead of buying brand new stuff — is an easy way we can all cut down on waste.

On this Earth Day we wanted to point out that using BlockChalk is a great way to do all of these things!

It only takes seconds to write a chalk and let your neighbors know about that old couch you’re trying to get rid of. Or those books you want to give away. Or those fresh lemons you’d like to trade for someone else’s backyard crop.

BlockChalk is the perfect way to share, trade, sell, or simply give away the things you don’t want or need any more. And since it works in any neighborhood anywhere in the world, that means it works where you live, too!

Download our iPhone app and give it a shot. Together we can help the planet and our neighbors at the same time.

Borrow, buy, sell, trade, report, praise, complain, connect and more...

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:34:00 -0800

Over the last several weeks we’ve watched people all over the world post to BlockChalk for all sorts of reasons. Neighbors are using BlockChalk to borrow, buy, sell, trade, report, praise, complain, connect and more. As we keep building BlockChalk to be the world’s neighborhood bulletin board we want to make sure posting remains dead simple and super fast.

With that goal in mind we’re introducing chalk categories. We’re testing them out first on our HTML5 webapp and they’ll be available on our native iPhone and Palm apps very soon.

We’ll be adding more functionality to each individual category in the coming weeks but for now we’d love to know what categories might be missing. What do you want to post to your neighborhood? Let us know and we’ll find a way to incorporate it into future releases.

Send your feedback through Twitter, Facebook, Email or leave a comment below. Thanks for building BlockChalk where you live!

A Little More Conversation

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 14:46:00 -0800

BlockChalk keeps growing in cities, towns and neighborhoods all over the world. We love seeing all this new use but it’s starting to make it difficult to keep track of nearby neighborhood conversations. Today we’re introducing a better way to follow the conversations where you live.

Point your iPhone or Android browser to http://blockchalk.com and take a look. Our mobile webapp now aggregates all comments with their original chalk. On the Nearby and Home views a small counter hints at the activity below. Drill-down to see the comments and their associated locations all in one place.

This new view is only available on our nifty HTML5 mobile webpp. We release new features here first since we can respond to feedback, thoughts and ideas from our global crew of dedicated chalkers and iterate at ludicrous speed. If you ever want to see a sneak preview of what’s next for BlockChalk just take a look at our webapp!

Let us know what you think about this new release. With your help, we’ll be rolling them out to our native apps soon. Send your feedback through Twitter, Facebook, Email or leave a comment below. Thanks for helping us build BlockChalk where you live!

Introducing Myself To The Neighborhood

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 10:53:39 -0800

Hello Chalkers, Josh here, the new guy!

It’s great to be speaking directly to you for the first time. I’m a big fan of being personal and up-front with our users and hope you will all get to know me well moving forward. And I couldn’t be more excited to be working with Stephen and Dave, two very trusted and talented allies.

As the technical co-founder on the team, I’m all about making this rig run. Sure, that’s going to include not-so-glamorous things like scaling, uptime, security, and abuse mitigation. But it also includes the really interesting stuff of building-out new products: fast and slick feature development, wide platform support, third party developer tools, and last but not least, listening closely to you - our rock star users - for what’s working and what’s not.

I come to BlockChalk from past gigs at Craigslist and Delicious, services to which I feel deeply honored to have been able to contribute. My experiences there will certainly inform my work here, but I’m also really looking forward to the new, uncharted technical and product innovation challenges BlockChalk brings to bear. And in many ways, we’re all going to be exploring that together. It’s gonna be a great 2010.

Cheers,
Josh

Craigslist Alum Josh Whiting Joins BlockChalk

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 11:48:29 -0800

Today is a huge day for the BlockChalk team. We’re proud to announce that Josh Whiting has joined us as chief engineer and co-founder.

Josh comes to us from Craigslist, a company we greatly respect and which has been the source of much inspiration. Prior to Craigslist, Josh and Stephen worked together at del.icio.us, where Josh was lead engineer and played a key role in many of the innovative features and trends that we pioneered there.

Josh brings to BlockChalk a whole new level of engineering capability, as well as battle-tested experience in building and scaling two of the world’s most successful consumer web products. So watch closely, because we’re about to kick it up a notch. Bam, etc.

Welcome to the team, Josh!

Chalking up the Twittersphere

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:40:19 -0800

Now that Twitter has a geo-enabled API, we think there are a number of interesting ways that BlockChalk can interact with the Twittersphere to everyone’s benefit.

We’ve just started our first experiment, which is to collect chalks from two U.S. metropolitan areas (New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area) and then send them to Twitter in real time. In addition to geographic coordinates, these tweets include hashtags representing the neighborhood and city where the chalk was written, and a link enabling you to read the entire message over at BlockChalk.

You can find these tweets at @BC_BayArea and @BC_NewYorkCity, with more cities coming soon. And since they’re geotagged in Twitter, you’ll also see these tweets when you use your favorite geo-enabled Twitter client in these two areas!

BlockChalk in the News...

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 13:41:00 -0800

Since we launched our native iPhone app a little over a week ago BlockChalk has been getting some great media coverage and some fantastic reviews. Huge thanks to the writers and bloggers for taking the time to explore BlockChalk! Check out a few highlights below:

The Next Challenges for Mobile phones: Find Me and Tell Me Who I Am
Use BlockChalk, FourSquare and Google’s Near Me Now to “…leave location-based messages at the end of your road or in a cafe, as kind of green graffiti that doesn’t despoil the streets.”

BlockChalk: A Free Location-based Bulletin Board for iPhone/Palm Pre/Android
“…. BlockChalk acts a lot more like a community message board for the 21st century.”

BlockChalk Is Location-Based Sidewalk Chalk For Your Mobile Device
“BlockChalk works because they keep it simple.”

BlockChalk Lets You Leave Geo-tagged Notes for the Neighborhood
“Fostering a sense of local community in the age of the Internet and globalization is no easy task.”…BlockChalk is trying to do just that.

BlockChalk: An Anonymous Message Board for Your Neighborhood
BlockChalk “wants to enable neighbors to interact with each other while protecting everybody’s privacy.” “The design is simple, to the point and doesn’t get in the way of the product’s features.”

Have You Heard of BlockChalk?
BlockChalk works great w/ hyperlocal blogging. Use it to connect with potential neighborhood readers, find blogworthy content in chalks, and promote your blog posts with a new chalk in your neighborhood.

BlockChalk Introduces Super Simple Location Based Annotation of Real World
“You’re stuck in a stall with a clever response to that scribble on the wall, only problem, you’re a Sharpie short. With BlockChalk, mobile users can now annotate the real world through a digital space.”

Blockchalk Offers Location-based Commenting
“There’s something new in the social stream worth checking out: Blockchalk. “

BlockChalk arrives in the App Store!

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 11:47:00 -0800

Hey, guess what? BlockChalk for iPhone is now available in the App Store!

For those of you who are new to BlockChalk, we’re a location-based messaging service for your neighborhood. You can leave messages (“chalks”) on your block, your street, at the coffee shop, or anywhere you happen to be. Other BlockChalk users nearby can reply to you publicly or privately.

People are already chalking for all sorts of reasons: to share honest opinions and observations about their neighborhood, to praise or gripe about local businesses, to borrow and trade with their neighbors, to complain about city services, and much more. And people are using BlockChalk all over the world, with activity in over 90 countries, 6600 cities, and 10,000 neighborhoods!

Our new iPhone app lets you set your “home neighborhood” so you can keep up-to-date with the latest chalks near home. It also adds support for Apple’s push notifications. This means you can now be notified when there are new chalks in your home neighborhood or when someone replies to something you’ve written.

And don’t forget you can also use BlockChalk on Android and iPhone simply by pointing your phone’s browser to http://blockchalk.com. There’s also an excellent app for the Palm Pre and Pixi.

Now get out there and chalk up your neighborhood!

Stephen and Dave

City Neighborhood Posters by Ork

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 13:29:00 -0800

Where we live is a large part of our identity. We take great pride in our hometown or neighborhood because it often reflects some aspect of who we are and how we see ourselves. At the same time, the spirit of a neighborhood or city comes directly from its residents. BlockChalk helps us celebrate our pride in place and we’re always looking for products that do the same.

These posters by Ork offer a unique way to celebrate cities and neighborhoods with an elegant combination of typography and cartography. Each poster represents a different city and all of its neighborhoods. The names of the neighborhoods define the boundaries and create the more familiar city shape.

The complete series is available online: http://www.orkposters.com. They make a great gift for any of the city dwellers in your life. I own the Seattle poster and have given a couple of the Boston versions to my Beantown family and friends.

After you’ve found your neighborhood on one of the posters, go find it in BlockChalk! Set it as your Home-Sweet-Home and start giving your home ‘hood its voice.

Bonus Trivia Question: Which neighborhood is missing in the San Francisco poster? It’s a gem and a popular location on BlockChalk.

-Dave

Coming to an iPhone near you

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 10:11:55 -0800

At BlockChalk HQ we’re working feverishly to get BlockChalk into as many neighborhoods as possible. This week we took a big step towards that goal and submitted our native iPhone app to Apple. We expect it to be available in the App Store soon.

BlockChalk on the iPhone is still super easy to use, but for your chalking pleasure we’ve added a couple of new features that make it even easier to chat with your neighbors.

Home Neighborhood: You can now stake a claim to your home neighborhood. We all have a certain pride in where we live and call home. Set your home neighborhood in Blockchalk and keep track of what’s happening where you live. Chalkback to your neighbors or send them a private reply. See a chalk that you don’t want hanging around your ‘hood? Use the “Bury” feature and help make it disappear.

Push Notifications: Stay updated on what’s happening in BlockChalk. You can set the new BlockChalk app to remind you with a push notification when someone chalks in your home neighborhood, chalks you back or replies privately.

We hope you like the new app and can’t wait to have you join the conversation where you live. As always, let us know what you think.

Behold our shiny new mobile web app

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 10:56:16 -0800

We’ve just launched a completely redesigned mobile experience for BlockChalk. Just visit http://blockchalk.com with the browser on your iPhone or Android phone to witness the new hotness. Through the magic of HTML5 we deliver the full BlockChalk experience entirely inside the browser and with nothing to download or install. This includes:

Using GPS to post messages anywhere in the world and see what people are saying near you
Setting your “home neighborhood” and interacting with your neighbors, even when you’re not there
Using the new “Replies” tab to track when people reply to you, so you can keep the conversation going no matter where you are

Because web-based applications are so much faster to develop and deploy, it’s always been the plan to use ours as a “proving ground” for new features and designs that will eventually make their way into our native applications. That’s how BlockChalk originally started, and that’s how we plan to keep rocking it.

You can expect to see similar looks and functionality in our upcoming iPhone app (which we expect to be available soon) and the already-available Palm Pre app, with native apps to follow for other major smartphone platforms. Check out the new web app and start chalking up your block!

The Reviews Are In...

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 10:02:00 -0800

BlockChalk has been in the Palm App Store for over a week now and the chalk keeps appearing in cities all over the world. The app is lucky to have some great reviews from the people that matter the most: the folks actually using it in their neighborhood.

The app has received some great praise and lots of helpful suggestions for future releases. It’s currently rated between 4 and 5 stars in the store. Thanks to all the BlockChalkers for letting us know what you think! Keep the feedback coming and keep chalkin’ up your block!

The Palm App Store isn’t currently accessible from a desktop or laptop. You have to have a Palm device to check it out (we hear this is changing shortly). In the meantime, we collected a few of the reviews and included them below.

PS - Thanks to the rock stars at Palm for getting BlockChalk through the app approval process! Really appreciate all your help and support.

5 STARS ***** Awesome app, very responsive no lag like lots of other apps out there. And! No sign up! Couldn’t ask for something better. Update: I sold 3 effect guitar pedals to some dude i linked from blockchalk. Good stuff

4 STARS **** Honestly think it needs to be a multi-OS app if it isn’t already. Smart phone dumb phone compatibility would make this great, Maybe even an main page like twitter n facebook 2 use on the pac at home. Five star app potential. I give it 4 3/4 stars.

5 STARS ***** This is a very impressive little app. So much potential once it starts getting lots of other folks on board. Can’t wait until my neighborhood is full of chalk.

4 STARS **** Really cool app, would give it five stars but I haven’t realized the full potential of it yet. So far there are only two other people who have chalked in my area and I live in a decent size city. Hope more people get on the band wagon and start using this app.

5 STARS ***** It’s gonna be great when more people get it downloaded. Come on people join and and start chalkin it up. It’s pretty sweet

5 STARS ***** Pretty awesome, you can talk with neighbors you don’t even know and find out about some cool stuff happening around you.

4 STARS **** It’s handy for public/local issues, events, achievements, solutions or general comments. I don’t think it was intended for personal networking (e.g. Twitter, Facebook)

4 STARS **** Very useful when situation permits. Also could be used as a “neighborhood watch” or anything that would benefit your block.

4 STARS **** I think this could revolutionize the way we do things and communicate. This wold be great for auctions to screw the auctioneer. this rawks.

4 STARS **** This is a cool app! I wold give it 5* if i was able to chalk @ areas outside of mine.

4 STARS **** Very interesting idea. Can see some fun with this one. Threading of replies would be good.

5 STARS **** I really like this a lot. Needs more people but that comes with time. Great app!

5 STARS ***** Very cool. Needs more people but they will come. It is awesome in larger cities

Living in the bubble (or, why the future of location is even bigger than you think)

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:08:00 -0800

Last Friday I attended TechCrunch’s excellent Real Time CrunchUp in San Francisco. Real time web services are all the rage these days of course, and this conference brought together entrepreneurs, engineers, investors, and others to discuss the field and debate where it’s going.

Much of the focus was on location-based services and information “streams”. Since this is the area in which BlockChalk plays, the discussion was of personal interest to me. Companies like Twitter and Foursquare were in the spotlight, although newcomers like SimpleGeo, GeoAPI, and HotPotato attracted their share of well-deserved attention. Great products, smart people.

As I listened I heard some exciting predictions for the future: how one day soon we would all know where everyone is all the time; that people everywhere would share such information willingly and benefit from it greatly; and how this would fundamentally alter the way we interact as a society.

But something about all this didn’t feel quite right. There seemed to be an underlying assumption at play: that today’s location-based services show us the shape of things to come. And so it was that about halfway through the day I finally realized what was bothering me.

credit: h.koppdelaney on Flickr

Everyone in the room was living in the geo bubble.

What’s the geo bubble? It’s a land populated by the early adopters of today’s location-based services. Inside the bubble, people’s online actions are primarily driven by social activity and personal reputation. This has many implications, but the one I want to address here is privacy: bubble-dwellers have a reduced expectation of it, because it gets in the way of the things they want to do.

Now, the bubble is a great place to live, and bubble-dwellers are perfectly nice folks. It’s not my intent to besmirch them (hell, I frequently visit the bubble myself). Instead, my intent is to point out that, by definition, there is a world outside the bubble. That’s where most people live, and yet as an industry we’ve barely scratched the surface of what can be done there.

Today’s hottest services are pitched directly at bubble-dwellers, and by all accounts they are popular, useful, and fun. But by linking your identity to your location and sharing this information broadly, many of these services largely ignore issues of personal privacy and security. As a result, there are a wide range of everyday social interactions and transactions to which they are ill suited — buying and selling goods and services, lodging anonymous complaints, reporting crimes, the list goes on. It also means that a large portion of the population may never feel comfortable using them.

Dave and I created BlockChalk in part because we believe that the world outside the bubble is every bit as interesting as (and larger than) the world inside. Bubble-based apps will undoubtedly continue to grow dramatically, and the bubble itself will grow as early adopter behavior trickles down to a broader audience. But in order for location-based services to truly reach the mainstream, we as product designers will need to get even smarter about the social assumptions that we are harnessing — or in some cases, undermining.

For BlockChalk, that means a focus on personal privacy. We’re building it from the ground up to be a location-based service for everyone, where the user is always in control of how much identity and location information they share. We’ve also made it aggressively hyper-local, with a strong focus on what’s going on in your neighborhood. We think this will encourage people to use BlockChalk for completely different purposes than systems like Twitter and Foursquare. We also think it will attract entirely new types of users to this space. And we’re already seeing both happening.

The world of location-based services is moving faster than ever, and the hottest products out there today are innovative and fun to use. But it would be a mistake for us to assume that today’s users are representative of the overall population, and that today’s products necessarily represent the shape of things to come.

The future is going to be different — and even bigger — than we expect.

Stephen Hood

Now available in the Palm app store

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 09:32:21 -0800

We’re happy to announce that BlockChalk is now available for the Palm Pre and Pixi, via Palm’s official app store. This is a native webOS application that gives you full access to BlockChalk with a slick interface that makes the most of your Palm phone. Best of all, it’s free!

To get BlockChalk on your Pre or Pixi, just visit the Palm app store and search for “blockchalk”.

We’d like to thank Les Orchard, independent developer extraordinaire and author of this app. Les used our open API to build a great experience for Palm users. We love it and we think you will too.

Now get out there and chalk up your neighborhood!

Home sweet home

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:02:00 -0800

BlockChalk now makes it easier than ever to keep track of what’s going on in your neighborhood. You can now set a “home neighborhood” and jump to it any time, from anywhere. You can set your home neighborhood to be the spot where you’re standing right now. Or, if you’re somewhere else, simply hit “browse elsewhere”, key in the address you want, and tap “set as home neighborhood”.

After you’ve set your home neighborhood, you can always jump back to it by tapping the “home” button.

Home neighborhoods are available right now via the BlockChalk web app (http://blockchalk.com) on iPhone and Android, and are coming soon to the Palm Pre. We’re also working on native applications for iPhone, BlackBerry, and other popular smartphones, so stay tuned!