For you socially mobile people, knowing what your friends are doing tonight, or letting them know what you’re doing, is most important.  Now, rather than texting, tweeting or Facebooking, there’s Wendr.  As the website says, it “makes it easy to find out what your friends are doing and access nighttime events and activities.”  You not only control you plans, letting people know what you’re doing, but also who gets to know, based on a visibility setting.  And you color-code your “availability” to your friends; green you’re going out, red you’re staying in and orange means you are open to suggestions.

The New York City based co-founders, CEO Sam Zises and Chief Engineer & Creative Nick Kaye discuss their creation.  “We’re really about making the experience of finding your night as convenient as possible both from seeing what your friends are doing and seeing what other opportunities are available from local vendors or merchants to national movie chains…[it’s] sort of a ‘North Star’ and focuses on one thing.”  Both Founders have an advertising background, Sam on the business development side and Nick on the creative side.  Their revenue model is based on that and the ad business has noticed them.  In April’s “Ad Age Digital Conference,” they pitched against five other companies and won Budweiser’s opportunity to team up with them for a potential $25,000 partnership.  After years working as a freelancer for other agencies, Nick is excited to “…dedicate a year to building one thing and building it to last, and building it right.  And that’s an opportunity I did not have working with agencies building websites.”

When it comes to resources for a startup, the Founders recognize a “plethora of tools out there” but caution not to let the overhead of using them outweigh their utility; “balance” is the word Sam chooses.  But the right tools help you move fast, “the opportunity not to re-invent,” as Nick says.  And the company will need the right tools to tackle its biggest challenge, “Big Data,” as Nick states flatly with eyes rolling up.  “Web 3.0 [will be] really taking all the data that’s been thrown into the Internet and making it smarter,” Sam predicts.