Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Socialize Gives Mobile Content Apps a Social Layer (Video)

Socialize is a free set of tools to add social sharing, discovery and messaging features to content-based mobile apps.

It’s already been built into 1,400 apps, as part of the do-it-yourself mobile application creator called Appmakr, which has helped create some 3,200 content-based apps in the last year without requiring users to write code. Appmakr users include Newsweek and PBS Newshour.

Socialize CEO Daniel Odio said he estimates that 84 percent of iOS apps are centered on content. While games may get all the hype, there are far more apps built to create and deliver content.

His company, which was formerly known as PointAbout, a name left over from when it was a consulting business, this week renamed itself Socialize.

Odio described Socialize’s purpose as “unlocking the interest graph hiding in apps.” In a recent interview with All Things D, some of which was captured in the video embedded here, he said, “There are massive communities of users hiding inside each mobile app.”

Once an app incorporates Socialize, its users can plug in their Facebook and Twitter credentials and interact with people they already know who are also using the app. Or they can connect to people who simply have similar interests. And then developers benefit because users are more engaged.

Socialize is comparable to OpenFeint and Plus+, both social networks for mobile games, Odio said. Some features, like user profiles, are common across all apps running Socialize, so there is a sense of a larger community as well.

When it was known as PointAbout, Socialize last year raised $1 million from Mitch Kapor, Transmedia Capital, Charles River Ventures and other investors. It already has 15 employees and is now raising more funding.

A fun fact about Odio: he recently moved to San Francisco from Washington, D.C., following a path blazed by his kid brother, Sam Odio. Sam moved out for the Y Combinator program in 2009 and later sold his start-up Divvyshot to Facebook, where he is now product manager for Facebook Photos.

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik