Get to know your neighbours, via the Web

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 29 May 2007 12:39

Your IT - Home IT

US company Fatdoor is exploiting the power of Microsoft's Virtual Earth and Web 2.0 technologies to facilitate contact between people living in the same neighbourhood, initially the Bay Area of San Francisco.
Fatdoor brings together familiar social networking elements such as personal profiles, intra-personal connections, group networking and information sharing. It uses the Microsoft Virtual Earth online mapping platform to enable users to identify their area of interest and the location of other users.

The company says an alpha site is initially available (www.fatdoor.com) as an invitation-only trial and will be rolled-out in additional cities throughout the US over the coming months.

It promises to kick off with rich maps and pre-populated data for more than 100 million households in the US. People will be able to "get to know their neighbours by exploring local profiles and interests, and discover new friends in the neighbourhood." Using the Fatdoor mail service, they will be able to contact their neighbours "in a non-invasive, non-threatening way."

The Palo Alto based company is led by a number of technology industry veterans. Co-founder and CEO is Raj Abhyanker, a patent attorney, electrical engineer and former CEO of numerous Internet startups in the mid 1990s. These included AOL Classifieds.com (sold to AOL), MacInsider, Clay Pixel Studios, and Raj Abhyanker LLP (a patent law firm).

Co-founder and CTO Chandu Thota previously worked at Microsoft where he was a central figure in building the Microsoft Virtual Earth online mapping platform and Live Search Maps. He has recently authored "Programming MapPoint" and "Virtual Earth in .Net" by O'Reilly publishing. He is listed as an inventor on more than 14 patent applications for Microsoft related to geo-spatial mapping and technology.

Jan Jannink, the Community Architect of Fatdoor, was a founder of imeem, a popular social network with more than one million members. He invented the database architecture and the data model for imeem. Chairman Bill Harris was formerly CEO of Intuit and PayPal.

Fatdoor also has technology relationships with Amazon.com, Google Inc., and Yahoo! but has not revealed details of these. And while its service may be only in its infancy, its merchandising is well developed with an extensive range of Fatdoor branded merchandise on offer at http://www.cafepress.com/Fatdoor