By Chris O’Brien
Los Angeles Times.
When it came to officially launching her latest service, Findery, Caterina Fake decided that she wasn’t going to be rushed.
“With apps, it’s really important to get it right the first time,” Fake said. “You don’t get a second chance like you do on the Web.”
As one of tech’s more notable entrepreneurs, Fake is someone who would know.
She was co-founder of Flickr, which Yahoo bought in 2005 for $35 million. In 2009, she co-founded Hunch, which EBay bought in
2011 for a reported $80 million.
It didn’t take her long to get started on her next start-up, initially called Pinwheel, in early 2012. The name changed to Findery later that year, and the service began an extended private beta that would slowly expand over the next two years.
The company has raised more than $11 million in venture capital, which gave it time to tweak and evolve the service.
Findery mixes social and location-based elements. Users leave notes that are geo-tagged to specific locations. They can be personal observations, little bits of history or trivia. The notes can also include audio, video and photos.
The slow rollout has given Findery time to build up a large base of notes.
On Thursday, Findery announced that the beta was over and that the app was now available to the public through the Apple App Store.
The official launch comes as the mobile space is exploding and everyone from Facebook to Google is trying to figure out how to adapt their business.
Despite their size and resources, Fake said, no one has come to completely dominate social on mobile devices.
That leaves a big opening for people to try fresh approaches, like Findery, she said.
“There’s this social aspect of mobile that has not been established or settled,” she said. “The winner hasn’t taken all. It’s a very competitive field.”
