Hangchillparty is an online application that allows you to tell your friends if you’re down to hang out, down to chill or unavailable. You can tell your friends where you will be later and find out where your friends are right now and at a later time. The online application launched on 20 July 2010. The founders are Drew Sing and Eric DeBusschere based in Berkeley, California. I did a Q&A with Drew via email.

How do you describe Hangchillparty and why is it different from anything already out there?

In the old days, friends constantly texted to keep each other updated on when they would hang, chill, and party. Now, Hangchillparty is the easiest way to let all your friends know when you’re free to socialize. Simply signal your socializing status with a green, yellow, or red light. That’s all. If you want, let friends know who you’re with and what you’re doing. Join social signals to create real time social groups. Facebook, Twitter, or group text your friends with Hcp. When friends hang out, they Hangchillparty.

What inspired you to launch Hangchillparty?

We are two college students who are too lazy to constantly call and text friends. Instead of having to call and text friends individually, we wanted a more casual form of communication that allowed us to simply signal when we were free to socialize. We were inspired by how little friends actually hang out, and how much they spend sitting in front of a screen by themselves. We hope people are still interested in hanging out in real life.

How are you making money (or how will you make money in the future)?

Some sort of group coupon service since we organize spontaneous groups of any size. Collaborations with companies and brands that can benefit from our site and image.

Where do you see Hangchillparty within a year?

We see it as integral part of all college socializing. When friends want to hang out, they will simply signal instead of weave through their contacts, pick who to text, and wait for a response.

Are you self-funded?

Yes, we are self-funded by part-time on campus jobs and cheap living!

www.hangchillparty.com

Go to: FaceCash: a simple, elegant mobile payment application

You download the application from the iTunes Store, set up an account (takes a few seconds), upload a photo, type in a few words about yourself. Using WiFi and Bluetooth, the EZChat iPhone app detects your location and sniffs around for other EZChat users in the area. You enter into a live chat with someone sitting a few tables away from you and hopefully, you will connect physically. The goal of the application is to help you break the ice through a virtual chat. I admit it could be a bit creepy if the guy trying to chat with me is, in fact, a creep, but I could always terminate the chat by pretending my iPhone ran out of battery life. This application also works on an iPod Touch. You don’t need a cellular connection.

Download the free EZChat application from the iTunes Apple Store here.

Q&A with founder, Ronnie Zohar

What inspired you to create EZChat?
I was waiting at JFK airport one night when I noticed a man and a woman looking straight at each other, glancing and it seemed inevitable that something would happen. Yet at the end, the woman got up, took her things and went one direction, while the man then also got up, took his things and went the other. I immediately thought of a popular song by a famous Israeli singer called “Everyday I lose a beautiful man on the street”. Something about that incident touched me and I set out to find a tool that would enable these events to run more smoothly, enabling shy people the luxury of “breaking the ice” in a cool and smooth manner.

What is the name of the company that created EZChat and when was it founded?
The name of the company is  SMART HANDS LTD. It was founded in 1989 and deals with completely different things.

Who are the founders?
Ronnie Zohar

Where is it based?
Rehovot, Israel.

How will you make money? The app is free so will you have a paid version?
The application currently does not make money. Not yet. First we need to reach a critical mass of users.

Download the EZChat application now from the iTunes Store.

Speedtext is an iPhone application that allows you to handwrite text into your iPhone. It is popular in Japan where text entry using Kanji characters is difficult. I suspect it is handy for people who write in other languages as well (e.g. Arabic). For people who find the iPhone’s virtual keyboard challenging, it is also a handy tool. It works with applications such as Evernote.

The developer is Kazuya Hirobe, who I met at the Evernote event in San Francisco last week. Kazuya is getting his Ph.D in computer science at the University of Nagoya in Japan. He told me that when it launched on the Japanese iPhone app store last summer, it became one of the top 10 applications. He is planning an iPad app.

Check out Speedtext. It costs $1.99.

Mobile Monday Silicon Valley is holding a seminar in San Francisco on 8 February 2010 featuring companies who are addressing the challenges of discovery so they can share their lessons with you.  Topics will range from Advertising, Cross-selling, Social Media Marketing, Free Trial, and more. Come and learn best practices from developers and other commerce enablers who have tested and identified what drives effective discovery in the App Store.  Learn, mingle and enjoy a hosted bar!

The format will be a series of rapid fire presentations from developers including Flixster, Booyah and TripIt.

Sign up information: http://momosvfeb10.eventbrite.com/

Date: 8 February 2010, Monday

Time: 18:30 – 22:00

Price: Free

Parc 55
55 Cyril Magnin Street
San Francisco, CA 94102

Companies that use ZapMe utilize SMS and mobile applications for their advertising campaigns and manage them through the ZapMe distribution platform. The platform has modules for user management, content management, security and reporting. ZapMe clients get real-time information about the people who receive their ads: age, gender, geographic location, brand preference, type of mobile device, and brand patterns. Recipients of advertising from ZapMe clients can choose from among the brands represented by ZapMe, i.e. tell ZapMe from whom they would like to receive offers.

Q&A with Cameron Wall, founder of ZapMe

When did you launch ZapMe?

January 2007.

What inspired you to start ZapMe?

I wanted to solve the following problem: how does a brand and/or information service use traditional media (newspaper, magazine, TV, Outdoor, radio etc.) to engage people via the mobile channel? There are so many different handsets, platforms, operating systems, versions of firmware etc. when it comes to mobile devices that it’s difficult to make the user experience enjoyable. Moreover, it costs companies too much time and money managing their ad campaigns across a variety of mobile devices. ZapMe is a platform that can distribute content to any device at anytime on the fly, usually via simple SMS which is a standard communication method available on all handsets globally.

Where do you see ZapMe in a year?

Most powerful platform in the mobile marketing industry.

www.zapme.com.au

FaceCash is not yet available to the public; it is still in the private beta stage is now open to the public.

What’s in it for merchants?

For merchants, FaceCash acts as web-based point of sale (POS) system. No expensive software installations required. Several merchants in Palo Alto (e.g. Red Mango) are using FaceCash on a trial basis. The advantage of using FaceCash is that it is not part of the VISA/Mastercard network and charges much lower fees. For example, merchants typically pay 2.5 to 4 percent to a credit card network, while FaceCash charges 1.5 percent. Moreover, FaceCash does not impose authorization or monthly fees.

Merchants need a barcode scanner, an Internet connection and a computer with a screen that displays a browser. FaceCash is targeting small- to medium-sized retailers. It incorporates a POS system with a full accounting suite in the back-end. The web-based software coupled with a clean, simple interface makes it much easier for small merchants (who don’t have a huge staff). It’s unlikely that a large retailer such as Target, which has its own POS system and thousands of cash registers and computers to upgrade, will move to FaceCash overnight. But for Mom-and-Pop stores, this could be a huge time and money saver. FaceCash is in private beta with several merchants in Palo Alto and they are getting Stanford University students to try it out.

Challenges confronting FaceCash

(1) Adoption by merchants: FaceCash needs to get more merchants on board otherwise, even if I have it on my iPhone, if I can’t find enough places to use it, I won’t transfer money from my bank account to my FaceCash account.

(2) Adoption by individuals: Many people in the US are still accustomed to paying for things using credit cards. However, as Michael Anderson (business development manager for FaceCash, who I interviewed for this article) pointed out, debit card payments in the US exceeded credit card payments in Q4 2009 for the first time in history. Because people are more careful with their money, and many credit card companies have canceled or lowered people’s credit, paying with a debit card, or with a mobile virtual debit card like FaceCash,  has become more acceptable.

Who is behind FaceCash?

FaceCash is developed by Think Computer Corporation, which is owned by Aaron Greenspan, based in Palo Alto. Aaron has worked on finance and accounting software for many years. He created FaceCash because of his frustrations with existing POS and back-end accounting systems for merchants. Think Computer Corporation has other products for enterprises (SaaS) and developers, e.g. Lampshade – a web-based programming environment that uses LAMP (Linux / Apache / MySQL / PHP).

When you join Apptizr, you specifiy your interests and hobbies, then it recommends applications from the Apple App store which fit those interests.

You give apps the thumbs up or thumbs down, and tell it which apps you already have, so that it learns and delivers even more relevant search results.

Q&A with David Li

Who are the founders of Apptizr?

Apptizr was created by Third Avenue Labs, a company that Aren Sandersen and I, jointly founded. Aren and I have worked in the mobile/wireless space; I was at Paypal and later Ebay, while Aren worked at Danger.

Where are you based?

Mountain View, CA.

When did you launch Apptizr?

2009.

What motivated you to create Apptizr?

We were frustrated trying to find high-quality iPhone applications for the variety of interests that we had. It took too much time to wade through the ITunes App store. The problem is only getting worse as more and more applications developers throw their apps into the store.

Where is Apptizr most popular?

We have served more than 2.5 million recommendations but mostly in the US. Ten percent of our users are not from the US.

Are you self funded?

Yes.

How do you make money from Apptizr?

We have an affiliate shopping deal with the iTunes App store. We receive a 5% referral fee for purchases from the store. Later we plan to integrate sponsored searches and ads, but we want to make sure that the ads do not compromise the search/filtering results that we provide to our users.

Where do you see Apptizr at the end of 2010?

We plan to expand to iTunes App stores outside the US and to offer Apptizr for other mobile platforms like Android which also has an app store. We want to improve the core service so that the filtered results are ever more relevant and helpful.

Here’s what Freerunr says: “How does Freerunner give you really, really free wireless broadband? The fact is, lots of people want you to get on the Internet, and they are happy to pay for you to do so. When you are out and about, locations want you to stop in their coffee shop or their bar to get online – because while you are there you might just buy a drink or a snack. A mobile phone company wants you to buy their latest model, and will make access to the Internet free and easy so you can do cool things like watch YouTube. Social networks and broadcasters want you online using their stuff so they can show you some advertising. So here is the deal. You get free wireless broadband, in return the people paying for you, want to show the odd advert or get you to buy a cup of coffee. Simple.”

Q&A with Owen Geddes, founder of Freerunr

(1) What is Freerunner and why is it different from any of the failed free WiFi initiatives we’ve seen over the years?

Freerunner is different for two reasons: our technology and our commercial aims

Our OpenSource technology uses a completely different architecture, which gives us a number of advantages over our competitors. We have a distributed architecture which means all the intelligence and hard work is done at the edge of the network, in the venue you access our service. The service is faster because your traffic goes directly to the internet when it leaves your device – no hops in and out of remote data centres, and no restrictions. Its also more reliable, with no central core to go down. But most importantly its cheaper to run, by a long way. In fact it costs less than 5% of the cost to run our service per month than our main competitors, and our equipment also costs a fraction of other operators.

Our technology in turn allows us to take a different approach to doing business. Its more cost effective for our commercial customers – and in the current climate this has enabled Freerunner to grow rapidly – in less than 9 months we have become the UK’s largest operator. Our low costs also allow us to make use of other revenue streams such as advertising, which are unattractive to other operators due to their higher relative costs. We also firmly believe that its not just about big brand locations. Internet access is a right for everybody and our economics mean we can make our service available where others cant. In communities that really need it.

But in summary its a combination of cost effective technology that works and an open, honest commercial approach with a business model that works

(2) How does Freerunner make enough money to sustain its business, given that large scale free WiFi projects have had a difficult time?

It comes down to the technology that we use – it costs a fraction of many other projects. We also operate with a much smaller team because; we have simple technology, not charging for access means no expensive charging telephone lines have to be manned and reliability means our overall support overhead is low.

(3) Does Freerunner offer both paid and free subscriptions?

No. We firmly believe in free Internet access. At this point access is completely free in all the countries we operate at the moment.

(4) How it is different from other wireless ISPs?

We are fully consumer oriented. We tailor our service to the devices people want to use. Our service will detect whether you have a laptop, iPhone, Nokia or a Blackberry and serve up an appropriate experience.

(5) What are Freerunner’s plans for international expansion?

Freerunner is currently operating in UK, Netherlands, Serbia, Bosnia, Montenegro and Croatia. We are launching our business in Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey in February. South Africa is just getting established. You can expect to see Freerunner in Brazil Nigeria, Kenya, China and India this year – along with some others. We expand internationally in two ways. We establish our own owned entity in each region, and then franchise our network, technology and brand into surrounding countries.

www.freerunr.com