GeoComrade

Augmented reality is a trendy topic these days, and as it turns out, the trend is making its way to Russia. AR Door is the first Russian company building augmented reality applications and building up the market as a whole. The company got its start in 2009 as a development partner for Total Immersion and Layar but lately have been working on their own projects.

Their latest product is a multifunctional augmented reality guide for Moscow’s eastern administrative district. The app uses a phone’s location to pull in surrounding POI’s, photos and a ton of other information. Then, of course, the data is overlayed on a map or a “real view”. Best of all, the app supports both English and Russian languages and is available for download on the App Store (Android version is coming soon, I hear).

The original announcement is here. For other cool AR Door’s project demos watch their YouTube channel.

Russia’s AR market is still in its early stage which is pretty much true globally. Although AR applications are very cool there hasn’t been mass adoption nor even interesting business models…yet. I’m curious to see whether this will change o

Russia’s biggest social network Vkontakte (translated “In Contact”) added check-in capabilities to its mobile clients. The new “Places” feature makes it easy to discover trendy places, see where your friends are and append location to your status updates. The core functionality is very similar to Foursquare and Gowalla. Once checked in, your location is appended to all status updates and your friends know where you are.

I wasn’t able to test the application live since Vkontakte does not have a Places database for the US. As of right now, only Russia and Ukraine are supported. Here are some screenshots:

The release announcement is here, log-in required.

Vkontakte is often claimed to be a Facebook clone for its similar design, functionality and business model. It is indeed very similar, and therefore it is interesting to see Vkontakte release the location feature before Facebook. I wonder if Facebook’s recent investor and Vkontakte’s board member Yuri Milner had to do anything with this.

If you are a productivity junky then Epythia might be a perfect tool for you. The service lets you associate tasks with specific locations and then sends alerts once you are there. Although the idea is not exactly new (see David Allen’s Getting Things Done), the location-based notifications set it apart from the competition. Here is how it works. Say you want to buy some milk next time you are at a grocery store. You create a task on Epythia and associate it with a specific store or a general group of grocery stores and go about your day. Epythia monitors your location (via smartphone) and notifies you once you are at, or near the store and reminds you that you want to buy milk.

The startup itself is in the very early stages, and as far as I know the business model is not yet defined. That said, the team is hard at work getting the project off the ground and testing the concept. Currently Epythia is self-funded, but I’ve heard rumors about outside funding.

Personally I think this is a great concept, and I would love to see Epythia succeed. I know I’ll use it!

The concept behind Russian mobile social network Vstrecher (“meeting” in Russian with a funky ‘er’ ending) is quite simple: share your location, current status and upcoming plans with friends, and discover new places along the way. The application uses a phone’s GPS (tower triangulation or manual location update) to determine user’s location and alerts friends using group text messaging service. When running on a background, Vstrecher updates your location automatically and sends updates as you go.

Currently the application works only in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but they have plans to expand to the rest of Russia in the near future. The application itself is free, but you pay about $0.08 to update your status via SMS. Interestingly enough, there isn’t a version for IPhone or Android. Instead Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung and Motorola handsets are supported. I assume that this has to do with the low penetration of smartphones in Russia (thoughts?).

The company was founded in 2008 by Sergey Denisyuk as a side project, but it quickly grew into a full time job. Today Vstreher generates revenue through the sales of its white-label platform. In parallel to Vstrecher, Sergey founded a mobile coupon company Topskidka which recently generated its first ad revenue. Although both projects are currently self-funded, Sergey plans to raise funding and will be presenting at The VC Trip To Russia later this month.