Company Brightkite: (a DBA for no sleep media LLC).

• Author: Peterson, Eric
• Position: TECH STARTUP - Online social networks - Product/service evaluation

INITIAL LIGHT BULB: While working day jobs at Denver search and content provider Local Matters, Brightkite co-founders Brady Becker and Martin May started a second company--dubbed No Sleep Media because it precluded them from getting eight hours a night--and developed a mobile group-notification product called Loopnote. The company was accepted into the TechStars program last year, so Becker and May quit their day jobs to attend the summer-long startup boot camp in Denver.

At TechStars, Loopnote morphed into Brightkite, which May described as a "location-based social network," adding, "I don't know if that term existed before Brightkite." Now based in downtown Denver, Brightkite has three employees and was at press time in the process of hiring three or four more people.

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IN A NUTSHELL: Brightkite allows users to let friends know where they are in the real world, in real time, via their cell phone or Internet browser. Brightkiters can communicate with one another via test messaging and leave posts in the form of text and pictures that will be associated with that location in what May termed a "virtual layer."

The technology utilizes Google Maps and an in-house database to identify users' locations in the real world. For now, users check in to locations manually, but the company is primed to unveil a geospatial system based on GPS technology in cell phones.

Users can choose from three views on the Brightkite interface: "Me and My Friends" shows where your circle of friends are in the real world, "Around Me" reveals other Brightkite users in the vicinity, and "Brightkite Universe" keeps tabs on every Brightkite user on the planet.

"Just like in the real world, you don't want your acquaintances to know where you are every single second," Becker said.

May described multiple revenue streams. "The most obvious one is location-based advertising, because we know where the user is and where they've been in the past ... we can insert ads for stuff that's around you."

He also highlighted other potential revenue generators in selling "real world analytics" to businesses that illuminate their customers' behavior and fee-based registration of places in the Brightkite universe, but he stressed that the company's first steps are...