After Jobs announced the new 3G iPhone, location based applications are all the rage. The coolest part of the iPhone is that the lat/long will be available to developers through the phone. You can literally build a location based application without the need to work with the big telecom carriers!

This is great news for Zoodango. We've been working on a location-based "geo-social" technology platform for the past 6 months now. This is the perfect opportunity that we've been waiting for. You will see our focus on building applications that help people make social decisions based on their location. We have some very cool products in our roadmap to leverage our location-based technology platform.

We had to build the platform first. This platform will be coming out in the next 2 months....this platform will allow you to find any restaurant or place through outside sources like Google. So basically, you'll be able to find any place that Google can find. With this venue platform, we will then put some valuable applications including our smart invite app and a mobile app that will help you make every day social decisions.

Thanks Apple for finally building a mobile platform for companies like us!

Thanks for all the feedback on this initial version of our launch. We are 100% focused on implementing your feedback to create the best consumer experience possible.

Smart Invite

We are building a redesign of the invite application to make it simpler to choose multiple venues and date/time options. We are incorporating more invitation and guest features. You will also have full management capabilities with edit features that will allow you to change options on the fly. Your guests will also be able to suggest additional options for "where" and "when" to meet up.

Homepage and Site Redesign

We are redesigning our homepage and subpages to make the navigation much easier to find places, people, and use our applications. We will be incorporating a softer and simpler look/feel to the current site.

Increasing the Number of Venues

We are working on a solution that will provide as many venues as Google can find. We currently have 700,000 venues, but we definitely want to provide more venues. We are working on an API solution through Google.

Map Search

I'm most excited about this brand new product. This application will allow you to conduct spatial search for venues and allow you to discover the places that your friends or other Zoodanglers like. It will be a rich and interactive experience of finding venues with a geo-social technology powering the results.

Thank you for all the feedback. We just released a feature that allows you to edit the date/time for all the location options that Zoodango finds for you.

For example, if you want to meet up with your friends for lunch....you simply enter the zipcode of the area and choose a radius of all the restaurants in that area for the "Smart Invite."

Zoodango will find you all the restaurants in that specific area with scores that are personalized to you and your friends. If you don't like the date/time choices that Zoodango calculates, then you can edit any of the options and Zoodango will automatically re-compute personalized scores based on the new date/times.

We also disabled the "things to do" tab. Many of our users were confused that their private invites using "Smart Invite" were going to be published on this tab. This tab was simply an area that users could make their invites public, however, we did not see a strong use case for this scenario.

We are still making many more improvements in anticipation of the phase 2 of our launch. Thanks and keep Zoodangling!

Launching a startup company is not for the faint of heart. There are always a million things to do every day. The code doesn't always comply. And we can always find more enhancements and features to pump out......watch out for feature creep, right? Well, we've managed to do all of this with a 4 person full-time team. In case you're wondering, yes, we are looking to hire more Ruby on Rails developers. If you are smart and know Rails, give us a call.

With our limited full-time staff, we decided to break up our launch in two sections....phase 1 and phase 2 (how original, right?). Phase 1 was to get the smart invite in the hands of our users. We wanted to hear feedback and see how we can improve the experience. Thank you for everyone who's given us critical feedback. Phase 2 will be coming around in week 1-2 of June. It's definitely right around the corner. We will add new features to the smart invite with full management capabilities. We will also be launching our geo-social search engine that will offer a new way to search for venues in your town.

We have not announced our PR release yet. We will be conducting our full marketing efforts when we launch Phase 2 of the Zoodango launch. In the meantime, use Zoodango to meet up with your friends...and tell us how we are doing!