Local-Social-Mobile is considered to be the future of consumer web and there are companies that are trying to capture this in some form or the other. Mixing all 3 and making a business out of it is still a challenge though. 
MateOnGO is a location aware recommendation engine. The app, as you must have expected, lets you do the usual stuff as location bookmarking, add suggestion and reviews, create social map of your friends and find point of interests. There are 3 questions the app looks to answer about a user: What does a person like? What is his/her Proximity? What he/she is up to? They have applied for a patent for their solution to understand people’s activity and proximity habit.
MateOnGo hasn’t launch any platform specific apps as yet and is banking on their HTML5 and Mobile JQuery based Mobile Web client for iPhone and Android (i.e. no installation required!). The business model is around local deals and ads. MateOnGo also wants to act like a platform and provide APIs for all things local.
The challenge I see here is driving adoption. Such apps are driven by peers and community trend at large, which Indian companies haven’t been able to control till date. Burrp was one such community driven forum but number of contributors were relatively small, which will do no good to apps like MateOnGO. FourSquare/Twitter or even Angry birds is being driven by great PR. That is the kind of stuff MateOnGo would require to survive in the market. In recent future, the startup is looking to tie-up with operators and OEMs for driving adoption.
The Startup is directly competing with MojoStreet, from the Indyarocks founders [demoed at UnPluggd3].
Do give MateOnGo a spin and let us know if it is interesting enough. Aside, what’s your take on their name?
[Naman is a startup enthusiast and has worked with couple of Indian startups as Product Manager. He is the founder of FindYogi]
