Well, are we excited or are we excited! Locomi is inching towards where we want to be - the one stop place for information on local events and businesses from within your favorite social networks and mobile (soon!). We have partnered with Buzzintown, the most comprehensive portal on local events in India, to bring their data to our applications on Facebook & Orkut. So what does this mean? Well quite simply, you can now access the best and most varied events happening in your city, from within Facebook or Orkut. Well of course, you can invite friends to go to that event with you, write your reviews about it and a whole lot of other things. So go on, check it out and add more zing to your life. Happy discovering folks!

Scoble’s posts usually evoke a lot of debate. His latest post is no different. This time round though, I agree with him - at least most of what he’s saying. The basic premise of Scoble’s post is that Facebook is  the new white pages - what it really needs to make money is  to involve local businesses and enable them to better target the folks on its service.

Which one made AT&T tons of money? Hint: the Yellow Pages. I paid thousands of dollars a month to have our camera store advertisement in there. It generally paid off by bringing us tons of customers. After all, when you needed a camera store, or a dentist, plumber, lawyer, or a variety of other things, you’d look in the yellow pages and the one with the best looking ad got our business.

Now, let’s go back to Facebook. What’s the equivilent of the “best looking ad?” The business who has the best reviews. That’s a shift. A major one. Up to today Facebook has built the equivilent of the white pages: a site of people, but not of businesses. Soon Facebook will have tons of businesses on the social graph, but it needs to grab as much of that space as absolutely possible before others, like Twitter, get into the game.

I would tend to agree with his assessment. The potential for Facebook to help local businesses run targeted, localized marketing campaigns is huge. But the question is, does it really need Yelp for this? Yelp is big only in the US - that too primarily San Fran. Outside of the US, there’s Qype in Europe? Why Yelp and not Qype then? Facebook has 150 million plus users, the world over. How then do you involve local businesses from the many countries that Facebook has its users in? And will paying the 500 million odd that  Facebook would need to pay for Yelp, really add that much value to them?

We at Locomi, started off with a similar premise - that local businesses + Facebook was a huge opportunity - which is primarily why we decided on it as our first platform of choice. Our focus was and is primarily - Asia. We already seeing a number of people interacting, discussing the businesses in their city. Like a restaurant you have been to in your locality recently? Review it on our app and all your friends who have added the app would know. The viral nature of the platform allows for huge exposure to local businesses in a manner that’s unprecedented.

We are still figuring our way out, but Scoble tells us we are on the right track. And that’s reassuring.

Evolution in a design is but natural. When we started working on Locomi, issues like scalability were secondary to speed of execution. We soon learnt about the pitfalls with this approach and with this design we hope to have taken care of that. A quick run through the changes..

 A shift from accordion to tabs: The most noticeable change. The navigation for the listings area is a two tier system with tabs on top and shortcuts (we don’t like to call them sublinks) in the tab title bar. 

Latest Reviews: This tab compiles all the latest reviews in your city by date. You can see them in any other order, just use the filter drop down at the bottom.

Explore City: This is the tab that you go to when you are exploring a city, whether by simply moving the map around, or looking for a restaurant in a particular area, or close to a landmark - you can do it here. Finding things around your home is again a breeze thanks to a shortcut that takes you directly to your home location no matter where you might be. 

Events: This one I am quite proud of. It has a few nifty features. Take chain events for example. Imagine you want toplan an evening out with your friends, and your friends are too busy with their work schedules to discuss it together. What do you do? Simple! Go to the events tab in Locomi and create a new event. This allows you to very easily plan an event in a series of places.

Say you want to start with coffee at 5 followed by a movie at 6 and then dinner at 9. This can all be very easily done with the new interface on Locomi. You can select your location for coffee and choose the movie (the movie bit is coming soon, we promise). Your friends will instantly get the details of the event, know the location and RSVPing is a cinch! No more fussing about where to go for an evening of fun! 

Looking forward to hear what you folks have to say about the design. We love hearing from you - good, bad or ugly. So keep the feedback coming! And hey lots more to talk about… you’ll hear from us soon! 

One of the aspects of a startup that make it exciting and frustrating at the same time, is that you are always doing things you haven’t done or experienced before. You make mistakes along the way, learn from them and try to make amends.  As proud as we were of Locomi in its first avatar, it had its issues.

For one, there were so many features that we wanted to add, but couldn’t because the applications design didn’t allow it. The accordion design, isn’t exactly scalable one. What’s more users got back to us saying that, it took quite some time to load, especially on the kind of connections that we have in India. Thus the change to a tabbed interface.

There have obviously been quite a few apparent cosmetic changes to the design. Its a lot sexier (in our very biased opinion) and credit   for this should be given to Sid (our VP, User Experience) and Sukanto (our lead developer). The redesign has taken a long time coming but we are happy with the way its come about. There are tons of new features that our users can look forward to in the near future.

We would appreciate any feedback on whether you like or dislike the  redesign and how we can make it better. You will be hearing more from us soon. Till then, happy discovering folks!

Fred Wilson is an astute man. As smart as they come. And when someone really smart, validates your idea it does one’s confidence a world of good. Before you jump to conclusions, no - he probably doesn’t know of our existence. But in a blog post today he talks about how their portfolio company Zygna is leveraging on multiple platforms. He says:

Live Poker is the first first application to leverage Facebook Connect to allow iPhone users to play with their real friends and access social information such as real player photos. Just think about that for a second. We’ve now got apps on open mobile phones connecting with apps on open social nets. It’s only a matter of time until we see more of these live mobile apps running on iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian, and connecting to Facebook, MySpace, and other social nets.

The social web is going mobile quickly with popular mobile apps like Loopt and Twitterific. Now we are seeing popular social apps going mobile. When we sat down at the beginning of the year to identify the biggest investable trends in web apps, we put down words like open, social, playful, and mobile. Live Poker leverages all of them and is a glimpse into our future.

This is exactly what we want to do with Locomi - take it to multiple platforms and bring all of it together on a single central repository at Locomi.com. Give the user access where he wants it, when he wants it. Allow data flow between the social nets and Locomi.com using Facebook connect, Google Friend Connect etc. Yeah, that’s where we want to be!

Fred Wilson it seems, agrees.

Locomi was covered by Daniel Goh, one of Singapore’s most well known tech bloggers. If ever there was an article that succinctly explains our vision for Locomi and how it started, its this. You can read the article, here.

Pranav from StartupDunia tells us why..

Our first signs of life. Our first introduction to the world. Call it what you will, this blog represents all that and more. It is our way of reaching out to you - our users, our detractors, our friends. Its where we inform you of the latest developments about Locomi. Its where we share our successes and dissapointments, our challenges and our triumphs. So stay tuned. Here’s hoping this is the beginning of a successful journey..