Startup Spotlight: Swarmly

Each Friday Startup Spotlight highlights a Scottish tech startup. Giving a brief overview of the company, what they do, where they are and who they are. The aim is to, as the name suggests, put the spotlight on Scotland’s best startups. This week Glasgow based Swarmly.

Founded in November 2011 and based in the Entrepreneurial Spark incubator; Swarmly is an iOS app which can be view as social satnav. It’s an easy way to quickly find social hotspots and areas of interest in real time. The aim being to help you decide where to go by helping you find out where people are congregating and what they’re doing.

Founded by Marco De Nichilo and David McNabb based on a frustration with current location apps. They found them useful for finding places nearby or finding places friends had been to but lacking in information for where is busy that instant. Marco says “There was nothing to just tell me where was busy right now. I know where my friends are, but where is everyone else going?”.

Additionally the Swarmly team felt check-in services only tell you where a place is and maybe some high level user generated information (like Foursquare tips). These services lack fine grain information such as the average age of people in a location or the busiest day of the week for a particular venue. Basically the kind of information that would help you make a decision on whether to go to a venue or not.

Long term the aim is for Swarmly to become a real time map of activity and swarms of people.

Swarmly has thus far been bootstrapped by the founding team however they are planning to seek investment in the near future. In regards to business model Swarmly are introducing an instant offers platform and plan to build value into the data they can provide to business such as sentiment analysis and anonymous foot fall monitoring.

Swarmly is currently available for download from the iOS App Store with versions for other mobile platforms such as Android in the pipeline. Marco and his team are looking for feedback and ways to improve the product; if you have an iPhone get it downloaded and let the guys know what you think about it.