Name: Sonar
Quick Pitch: Sonar tells you who is in the room and how you’re connected.
Genius Idea: Leveraging social networks for real-world connections.
Some of us are naturally gifted networkers. We walk into a room of 50 strangers and giddily begin introducing ourselves to 50 new friends.
For those of us who are less outgoing, however, it helps to start with some sort of connection. However many degrees we are separated by, Sonar wants to map them out.
The iPhone app [iTunes link], which launched in May, shows you who is in the room by using data from social networks. After connecting accounts, you can see who e lse is checked in on Foursquare or Facebook Places, as well as which one of them shares your Twitter or Facebook friends. You can send a message to any of them with a click in order to make a connection in real life.
“Talking to someone on the street is harder than talking to someone in a bar,” says founder and CEO Brett Martin. “Talking to someone in a bar is harder than talking to someone at a house party. What we’re trying to do with Sonar is show people when the person on the street is the same person at the house party.”
Sonar works because “people have spent the last 25 years uploading their identities to the internet,” Martin says. It uses the profiles people have created elsewhere instead of being dependent on a critical mass of users. The app works whether or not other people in the room are using it. However, those people do need to check in with either Foursquare or Facebook Places. And that limit s Sonar’s scope....
