Crowdbeacon is a location-based service focused on providing relevant, localized communication and information to users based on what they need and where they are.

Crowdbeacon was incubated at Squeaky Wheel Media in NYC, and was founded by Robert Boyle, Luca Columbu and the Squeaky Wheel team.

Crowdbeacon was created with one goal in mind: to create a location-based application that helped people.

At Crowdbeacon we are much more worried about our product, consumer adoption and adding value to the lives of people and businesses than we are about monetization at this point in time. That said, we’ve got a plan, just not one that matters right now.

Because previously, it would have been impossible to build and deploy Crowdbeacon. The rise of smartphones, adoption of location-based services and the overall trend of APIs being open all make Crowdbeacon possible today. Two years ago? Not so much.

Crowdbeacon is different because it is focused on communication that is supported by localized information. Other apps (see below) incorporate certain elements of our platform, but none of them are focused on helping people find more information about what’s happening around them through communication.

Excellent question (and one we get all the time)! First off, we should point out that every location-based service out there now should send a giant basket of fruit to the Foursquare team for paving the way and commoditizing the check-in. That said, the Foursquare app is focused on venues, discovery and planning, and is supported by a social gaming dynamic. Our platform is about communicating and information that is localized, not about checking-in or social gaming. We think of ourselves as a utility -- Foursquare considers themselves a game of discovery.

As the leader in local, Yelp is the 800lb gorilla in the room. That said, we are quite different from them. Our service is most helpful in situations where you need real-time information about what’s happening nearby – Yelp is best used when planning a night out. And where our service is focused on communication, Yelp is a one-way portal for users to search (but not engage). Lastly, Yelp is all about local information driven by venues, which is an important part of our system... that is powered by Yelp! In short, we are different from Yelp because of communication and we are actually using their results to help our users (along with others).

Put simply: Twitter is a platform for communicating. This is something built into our system, but our system is focused on communicating based on topic and geographic location which is not similar to Twitter at all. Also, we provide users results based on their question, a service Twitter does not provide. Although to be honest, we would love to be considered the next Twitter if you’d like. :)

You answer their question. It sounds simple, but it’s true. To test this answer we ran a program on Twitter where we helped people in NYC with anything they needed; with items ranging from restaurant and hotel recommendations to the best way to get to the airport. The results of this program were astonishing: over 70% of people contacted responded positively to our interaction. This led us to believe that the value is in an answer in and of itself -- not one from a specific source or individual.

When users sign-up for Crowdbeacon, they choose one category that they are willing to help people in their home city with (i.e, nightlife, shopping, restaurants). This self-identified choice powers our notification system, which lets the user know that someone in their city has a question about the category they chose. For businesses that sign-up for Crowdbeacon the process is the same, except for the fact that they can choose keywords as well that they would like to be notified about (i.e, a flower shop might choose “roses”, “peonies” and “free delivery”). Currently, notifications are delivered in the form of email, push (iphone), sms and voice.

You incentivize answering. For local businesses this incentive is clear: lead generation. Think of it as AdWords for location. For users, we developed an algorithm to rank each user by influence in their city, neighborhood and category. This algorithm is displayed through our “Top User” ranking and is available to all users, which in turns lets us find and display the real influencers in a given city.

If no one nearby has registered for that category, the Crowdbeacon response team will work to answer your question. Think of us as a down and dirty KGB (the sms service, not the Russians) who are working to help you as quickly and efficiently as possible. Your own concierge team if you will. In short, we can’t guarantee anyone will respond but we can try!

You are probably really asking this, “until you have a bajillion users who will respond, how do you really add value?” Well, our response is simple: again, you answer the user’s question. However, in this case you take the user’s question and through API integration pull relevant info from other location-based services. At launch, this means Yelp, Foursquare and Wishpond. Moving forward this will mean a bunch of others including Google Places, Twitter, CitySearch and Facebook (to name a few). Further, since our platform is driven by location and keywords we know when a user asks a question similar to a previous user question, and we serve all positive responses that the previous user received as well. The whole idea is to add as much value as possible for the user no matter what.

API stands for “Application Programming Interface”… which probably doesn’t really clear it up for you. In the simplest terms you can think of it like this: if internet services (e.g., Foursquare) are islands made up of users and information, an API is a bridge from their island to your own. APIs let you pull the information from one service (Foursquare) to another (Crowdbeacon) and show it to a different user group. It’s a way programmers get other people to use data in interesting ways, which in turn spreads the word about a given service. But thinking of it as a bridge is probably easiest. AND APIs are important to Crowdbeacon because they let us plug into other location-based services and deliver the relevant information to our users. In turn, this allows us to help people -- which is our ultimate goal.

The best question yet. If you are interested in working with us, for us, talking about us or just want to learn more let us know! We’re here and can always use more hands.

Email info@crowdbeacon.com today. Just let us know what you're looking for and how we can help and we're there!