SocialRadar has bought fellow D.C. tech startup Gridskippr (actually based in Baltimore but with a long-time presence in the District), taking its mobile location and advertising technology for its social media app as well as turning it into a software package to sell to other app developers. The acquisition will add Gridskippr's three employees to SocialRadar's team, although the company hasn't revealed any financial details of the deal. The acquisition is really the cap to months of collaboration between the two companies as they worked on improving SocialRadar's location technology and cut down on battery draining, a recurring issue with the app.
"People think location technology is a lot more accurate than it really is," said SocialRadar co-founder and CEO Michael Chasen. "We now have a higher level of accuracy than Apple and with a lower battery drain."
SocialRadar has been keenly interested in both lowering the battery cost and improving the location technology since it first rolled out earlier this year. Chasen said that those issues kept the app as a "late-stage beta" for now, thought that may change soon. The app is down to taking just 2 percent or less of an iPhone battery's life every hour, compared to the between 6 and 14 percent of the standard Apple location tracker. And it brings the location tracking to within a few meters, instead of the sometimes dozens of meters uncertainty offered by other location-based apps. That took a lot of effort and time, much more than Chasen thought it would originally.
"When we started we knew we were at the leading edge," Chasen said. "We underappreciated how immature that technology was. It took several months longer than we had thought it would to reach this point."
The new software will be part of the next big update for the app. The company is developing other features for the app, including a possible API, and Chasen said it may be completely and totally out of beta by early next year.
"We haven't even started touching our marketing dollars yet," Chasen said.
Those improvements are something that Chasen is confident other developers will want to get their hands on, and the software development kit that SocialRadar can sell them will let them do just that. About half of all iPhone apps use location data in some way. Better data and information on users in that regard can be very valuable to advertisers, letting the app developers monetize the information they gather with help from the SDK.
"There are dozens of apps interested in our technology," Chasen said. "And now we can provide it to them."
