Voting for the winners of Guys Choice, which debuts Friday at 9 p.m. on Spike TV, was up 115 percent compared with last year, and the cable network credited an exclusive tab on its Facebook page for the bulk of the increase, at the same time announcing social initiatives related to the event with Facebook, Twitter, foursquare, Tumblr, GetGlue, GroupMe, Instagram, and Shazam.
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Investors continued to back group texting startup GroupMe this week to the tune of $10.6 million, despite the year-old startup’s lack of revenue plan.
Co-founder Jared Hecht announced on the company blog that GroupMe closed a second round of funding, with investments coming from Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst, First Round Capital, and several first-round partners this week.
The New York-based GroupMe, which is built on a mobile messaging platform from Twilio, a San Francisco-based startup, is focused entirely on building up its service, which is free for users. Hecht said the company wouldn’t be ready to figure out how to make money for at least another nine months, according to Venture Beat.
“We compressed our 18-month road map into 9 months and we’re still finishing that up before we even consider thinking about revenue,” said Hecht.
Twilio, which gives programmers easy access to phone-based services such as voice and texting, normally charges two cents to send or receive texts. Whatever bulk discount it offers is being eaten by GroupMe.
GroupMe has plenty of growing room. The company is less than a year old, having gotten its start back in May at a TechCrunch Hackathon. It gained $850,000 in investor support in August, and high praise from reviewers. The company also announced that it had hired three new staffers, and is actively looking for more.
Brightkite, one of the first players in the mobile check-in craze, has decided to abandon that business to the likes of Facebook and Foursquare. Instead, the company said Monday, that it would be focusing its attention toward group texting, a space also occupied by VC darling GroupMe and bootstrapped FastSociety.
Brightkite, which bills itself as a service for keeping tabs on what your friends are doing and discovering new places, introduced location-based check-ins for mobile phones in 2007. The service was simple, much like Google’s Dodgeball attempt a couple of years earlier, letting users share their favorite locations from their GPS-enabled smart phones. Brightkite also introduced badges, or small rewards for the people who checked in to certain places at certain times, just like rival Foursquare.
“These features were the defining element to our company 2 and 3 years ago, but we no longer believe they are sufficiently unique or defining to be our focus, so we are dropping them,” the Brightkite team said in a blog post.
Brightkite’s new ambition is to be the text messaging service of record for all mobile phones, complete with group texting abilities. Group texting is already proving to be a hit with venture investors. New York-based service GroupMe recently found itself in the middle of a VC bidding war, giving it a valuation of about $35 million. Brightkite’s new app for Android phones rolls out this week, and includes groups, photo, and location sharing.
Check-in services will start to disappear on Dec. 17 from Brightkite’s apps and Web sites. The company is allowing users to back up their old posts and check-ins until Dec. 31.
