Geodelic Enables Location Based Services For Venue Owners

This geek met serial entrepreneur and CEO of Geodelic Rahul Sonnad in San Francisco last month and understood that they may be expanding to South East Asia soon, although details are not announced at this point as discussions are ongoing.

Geodelic’s product GeoGuides beta which was introduced for smart phones last month is an interesting geolocation app where you can instantly turn your venue into an online and mobile app and people can check in, discover interesting services, as well as find friends. Their customers include Clear Channel, with their FLYsmart Airport Guides, and the Santa Monica Convention & Visitors Bureau to engage with consumers in and around their location.

Not your typical startup entrepreneur

Rahul is not your typical undergrad garage startup dude as he has sold his previous startup “thePlatform” to Comcast and Geodelic has raised more than US$10 million funding from Clearstone Ventures, Shasta Ventures, MK Capital, and just completed their Series B round from Verizon Communications Inc.’s Verizon Ventures group. Geodelic already has existing relationships with Korea Telecom so South East Asia is not far from their reach.

“We feel GeoGuides are at the forefront of an inexorable trend, every business with retail location will need an engaging mobile Internet presence at that physical site. Our GeoGuides platform allows brands to directly connect with consumers—at specific locations, when it is most relevant to them… The race is on to engage and provide value for consumers on location, and Geodelic is offering brands a direct mobile channel to reach their customers.” Geodelic CEO, Rahul Sonnad.

Just in time for the LBS heat

Although location-based services startups have been around for a while, they are only really gaining traction with the proliferation of smart phones with built-in GPS, more notably the iPhone. Geodelic’s business model looks interesting, getting venue owners and managers to launch their location based services for smart phones easily. This geek think their challenge will be to get fast traction with venue owners to have enough good content which will attract users and keep them coming back.

Watch out for more from this startup, especially when they land in this part of the world.