CO Everywhere, a new app for hyperlocal data about neighborhoods, launched last week. Co-founders Tony Longo and Dan Adams are leveraging $1 million in private seed money to bring the app to market.
Initially called BlockAvenue, Longo says that the company pivoted "about three or four months ago. We started to use the app [in the office] for different reasons, and the product just got broader."
CO Everywhere allows users to draw a designated area on a geographic map and give it a title. The area can be as large as a city or as small as a rooftop. Once chosen and named ("home," "work" etc.), the app pulls information from different online sources to create a picture of what has happened, is happening and will happen at that location. Initially, CO Everywhere pulled data from Yelp, Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter; now, Longo says, the app can pull data from 1,400 different sources to create a "daily digest flow about a particular area."
Users can filter the data by social conversation, which shows only Facebook, Twitter, Yelp and Foursquare posts; events and deals. "We've integrated with more than 850 daily deal sites," Longo explains.
Longo anticipates CO Everywhere will be employed by a variety of users—college students wanting to know what's going on on campus, people moving to an area, people looking to check out areas to visit on vacation and the like. He also thinks that small business owners will appreciate CO Everywhere. "This is also a platform for store locations," Longo says. "Ninety percent of what's being said about a restaurant or a small business isn't findable." CO Everywhere pulls content from tagged posts on Twitter and Facebook, but "we're also pulling content from triangulation or from geo data."
"If you want something private," he explains, "you have to make it private on your [social media] profile. We want to bring awareness [about that] to the public."
CO Everywhere is currently based in Boston at PayPal's tech incubator. Longo explains that D.C. is a "key market" for CO Everywhere and that the company is currently working on some financing logistics. If that all works out, he plans to double his current staff of seven by the year's end.
"I wouldn't be surprised if there was a local key rep on the ground for us in D.C. by the end of year," he says.