Web 3.0 – SoLoMo… Here I am!

My buddy in Beijing called. He mentioned that one of the hottest topic in GMIC (4/27 ~4/28 @ Beijing) this year was SoLoMo.  SoLoMo stands for Social, Local, and Mobile, a concept developed by John Doerr early this year.

Is SoLoMO really something new?  I think not.  When I acquire the domain www.here.im back in 2007, I had the pretty much the same concept and at the time, both IPhone and Blackberry were not GPS ready.  I just searched all the idea emails I wrote to myself and found the several emails related to Here.Im, the earliest one, shown below was dated back on 6/11/2007:

Main functions of [Here I'm] Project.
[Here I'm] Website
– Instant Photos
– Personal Portal
– My Travel
– Instant Photos
– My Friends
– Here I’m Pocket Download

[Here I'm] Pocket
– GPS Function
– Photo Sharing
– My Travel

And I even prototyped a FlickrVision-like Google Map mashup in 2007.

I couldn’t continue develop the idea and the domain in 2007 because: 1. lack of funding (I spent 200K on diy.net domain acquisition that year as well) and 2. my focus on the English (for Taiwanese students) social networking sites: http://English.tw & http://English.com.tw.

I have been monitoring the mobile trend, seeing LBS taking off and wanting to get back on the project.  I set aside some fund and planned to restart the project last year but I had to cancel it because of a major internet initiative at work.  I put the project on hold again this year because of my new job.  I will start to focus on Here.IM soon.  Can’t afford to waste a catchy and LBS specific domain like Here.IM…

Some potential slogans for Here.IM -

• Where are you?   Here.IM
• Here.IM – Show yourself in real-place, real-time.
• Here.IM – real-person, real-time, real-place and real-update