square_red_gray_clearbgToday marks the launch of CO Everywhere. This is not a totally new company, but a pivot for a company – BlockAvenue – that I’ve covered before here on Geek Estate.

What is CO Everywhere?

a new mobile platform that leverages social media to create a real-time local news feed of everything happening in the locations you care about most; where you live, work, go to school or your next vacation destination.

This is pegged as a tool to help people know what’s going on in the geographic areas they care about most. The main use case they think will emerge is home owners keeping tabs on the area around their homes or near their work. What events are happening? Conversations occurring? Promotions available? Photos taken? Reviews being left? All those activities are interesting to people in various contexts.

I know I’m an edge case, since I’ve largely been nomadic since 2010 — but I see an entirely different scenario that will take off.

Being the real time feed of photos (& activity) for any given geographic area or, specifically, any given event / place of interest.

Huge events, or protests are the first scenarios that come to mind. Tahrir Square, Syria, riots in South Africa. The Super Bowl. World Series. The World Cup final celebrations. What’s happening at those events? Who are the people involved?

You can of course watch Twitter hashtags for the real time conversations about a given topic, but that doesn’t aggregate conversations and photos from across the web in a single stream. Streams of photos based on location — aggregated from a variety of sources and in a beautiful format – is pretty damn interesting if you ask me.

So, while I don’t get extremely excited about the core use case of following the area where you live and care deeply about (since I don’t currently really “live” anywhere) — there is a massive, massive opportunity sitting in this product offering by being the definitive real time feed of photos (and to a lesser degree, activity) of every location on earth. THAT — is the big opportunity worth chasing by CO Everywhere in my mind.

The iOS app can be downloaded here.