Investing in Eastern European startups via SMOK Ventures. Previously co-founder of Filmaster (acquired by Samba TV), co-founder of ReaktorX accelerator and Startup Poland foundation.
So, Foursquare introduced event check-ins, including movie theater check-ins. Now you can not only check in to a cinema like to any other building but also check-in to a specific movie in that cinema. The listings are provided by MovieTickets.com.
VentureBeat dooms GetGlue and Miso, popular media check-in apps. As a founder of the first cinema check-in app, Filmaster Mobile, my first reaction was obviously fear. How are we going to compete against that monster?? Then came pride. After all, we did it first and I guess the fact that Foursquare is copying means we did something right. Eventually, I started thinking: how do we benefit from this move? This is what I came up with.
Foursquare cinema check-in
1. Different goals
Foursquare is a location-centered app. Its competitors are Gowalla, Bizzy or Whatser, not necessarily GetGlue, Miso or Filmaster.
Those are two different markets with different business models. Foursquare wants to give users on the go the best recommendations what to do on the go. So the use case is – you are somewhere downtown and you are wondering what to do, you check the app and it tells you – go to that restaurant behind the corner or go to opera or watch that movie. As one of the choices.
Filmaster, on the other hand, is a movie discovery service. We started with “Foursquare for film” slogan (picked up by the press) but what we really focus on is providing our users most relevant, personalized movie recommendations in all available channels. Cinemas came first, but in next edition of our app (currently in beta), TV recommendations and Netflix suggestions are coming, to give the user a full picture.
Foursquare will never want to recommend you to stay home and watch TV as this is against their business model and general vision.
2. Different use cases
Foursquare is general, Filmaster is specific Just as Twitter did not become a competitor to Foursquare and Instagram by applying location and pictures, Foursquare will not endanger Filmaster for applying showtimes. It’s a matter of perception. When people want to share their current location or see what’s around, they launch Foursquare. When they want to comment on something, they do it on Twitter. When they wanna share a picture, they do in on Instagram. Similarly, when they want to learn what to watch, they launch Filmaster as it’s the app fully focused on movie recommendations, with a community of movie-lovers, not random people sharing stuff.
Filmaster cinema check-in
3. Quality of recommendations
Even though I don’t believe this is their goal, let’s assume for one minute that Foursquare will actually start providing specific domain recommendations, i.e. recommending books, whisky (btw, do you know of a good single malt recommender service? I need it desperately!), or movies. Are these recommendations going to be of good quality? I very much doubt it. On Filmaster an average user rates 100 movies. Yes, one hundred. This is a good number on which we can base when preparing personalized suggestions. On Foursquare, on the other hand, people are going to check into movies only when they go out to a cinema. Even if that happens once a week (hardcore cinema-goers), it will take 2 years for the most dedicated users to generate a similar dataset. Sure, overall, the number of movie check-ins may be bigger, but that’s irrelevant if we don’t know the tastes of individual users.
For same reason, Filmaster provides much more precise recommendations than GetGlue, as our algorithm is specifically written to recommend movies, not restaurants, celebrities or wine.
So, summing up, a day passed and my attitute to the new Foursquare feature has changed completely. I see it now as a chance, not a threat. The more people learn that you can actually check-in to single screenings, the harder they will look for alternatives. And this is where Filmaster comes in handy. If you haven’t tried it, yet, here’s a link for you: http://filmaster.com/mobile/ 🙂
I’m looking forward to your comments either here or on Twitter.
It was June 2011. I’ve been running Filmaster.com from home for over half a year by that time. And I felt I’m getting less productive each day. Something had to change. I decided I need a separate place to work with my whole team. So I started searching.
A five people company is a pain when looking for a headquarter in Warsaw. You can take a room or two in a huge office space downtown but it feels corporate – you don’t necessarily want to work on your startup next to an estate agent. Another option is to take a small flat. Really small. Like a studio. The problem is – it’s way too expensive if you want it in a well-commuted area, and it’s way too obscure if you want it cheap. Sounds like mission impossible… so I gave up.
I gave up searching alone and started talking to fellow startupers. It quickly turned out a few of them were actually looking for a new place at the same time as well. So we decided to team up with HumanWay.com (great HR platform) and Homplex.pl (which helps set up your flat). That’s three small companies and some 15 people in total – a much better starting point to look for a cool location. So, we started looking together. We saw a few nice flats. I mean, nice places where you could live with your wife or have a rich-looking notary office. But not exactly a place we imagined our startups would fit in. We also saw some office spaces… which all looked like all other office spaces. And a few houses, mostly in a very bad state, requiring a lot of work to put back on track. So… we were stuck again. We haven’t found anything that we’d feel comfortable in and the few cool locations were simply too expensive. So then… a crazy idea came up!
Why not get something that we cannot afford?! Sounds stupid and irresponsible? Sure! But This is what we did 🙂
Taking risks is something I got used to. It got me into huge debts before but it also allows me to do what I love. So, it didn’t take long to make the decision: we’re renting the best house we’ve seen during these 2 weeks Of search and we’re starting something that could be best described as a startup commune. We invite all cool startups to work with us together, charging a minimal price for a desk, so that we could gather a bunch of most exciting, innovative and awesome Warsaw startups in one place. The vision was big, so how did it go? Well, lots of cool people replied at first when we announced our plans. Then some of them changed their mind for different reasons and we got worried. We needed at least 6 additional people in there so that we wouldn’t end up paying a ridiculous rent ourselves. Instead, we got… 18 in a month! The response outgrew our expectations! Now we have startups like MyGuidie.com (city guide network), LinkFndr.com (a klout lookalike), Citilia.pl (Polish opentable), sejmometr.pl (government monitoring service), DI.com.pl (Polish arsTechnica), mediafun (famous blogger, Polish Scobleizer) with his crew, walldate.com (Facebook dating) and some amazing freelancers like Janek (portfolio: http://sirjanshomestead.com) working in one place, that we called ReaktorWarsaw.
#OpenReaktor & more!
Reaktor is not just a place to work, it’s also, or maybe first of all, a place to network. Over 100 people arrived at our house-warming party (sponsored by Ballantine’s!) on June 15th and tonight, first #OpenReaktor event takes place, with John Biggs of TechCrunch.com and Marcin Kaszynski of SetJam.com as speakers – details here: OpenReaktor #1.
I can’t say exactly where we’re going, yet, as there is no plan, just a spontaneous series of events taking place because all of us what them to happen. I’m pretty sure, however, that it’s the best place to work and run a startup ever so if you arrive in Warsaw, Poland, don’t even think of NOT visiting Reaktor.net!