In January 2004, I co-founded Socialight. Socialight began at ITP within the Microsoft Design Expo class which charged us to find a solution for people, communities and technology.

Problem: Tasked with finding a design idea that focused on communicating “people-to-people” and privacy, our team wanted to provide people with awareness of friends around them and enable them to get in touch in ways that reflect natural modes of communication. To do so, we set out to take advantage of the most ubioqitious tool available at that time: the mobile phone.

Solution: socialight is a location-aware mobile social networking platform that allows people to connect with their friends and friends of friends in new, expressive ways. Using the current or past location of friends, the socialight platform provides a number of subtle and overt tools and mobile phones as an interface which enable unique modes of real-time and time-shifted communication.

After placing second within our class, we transitioned Socialight into a company and began development of our platform, website and mobile application. Created with Karen Bonna, Michael Sharon and Dan Melinger. Since the initial research stages in 2004, socialight has since become a successful startup company.

Read more: Socialight