The new version of Highlight, the people discovery app, which went live today, offers a wider set of tools for sharing personal information and connecting with other users of the service.
It's hard to listen to Paul Davison and not get swept up in his enthusiasm, hard not to want to buy into his grand vision for the app his small company built.
Davison is the high-energy CEO of Highlight, a people discovery app for iPhone that came out last January, and that was widely predicted to start its world domination tour at the 2012 South by Southwest Interactive festival in much the same way that Twitter did in 2007 and Foursquare did in 2009.
Looking back, it's clear that much of the reason so many people expected so much of Highlight heading into SXSW was because of Davison's intensity, because he believes so passionately in what he's doing. But in fact, while a whole lot of people tried Highlight at SXSW, the app -- which at its core automatically alerts users to the nearby presence of others with similar connections and interests, via their Facebook profiles -- didn't move the needle all that much.
Still, eight months later, Highlight keeps humming along. It's now a seven-person San Francisco startup instead of a two-person San Francisco startup, and Davison continues to believe that the app has the very real potential to change the world as we know it. All you have to do is come along for the ride.
New Highlight
The next step in Highlight's evolution starts today, with the release of an all-new version, this time forAndroid as well as iPhone. Geared this time around to offer four times the battery life as it did during SXSW, the new Highlight was built, Davison said, to give users new ways to share, consume content, and interact with others on the service.
Highlight, like competing apps, such as Glancee (which was acquired by Facebook) and Kismet, was built to help users connect with people around them. Davison described the user profile as an all-important element that's "floating above your head," filled with metadata that lets you see things about people nearby that you haven't been able to see before.
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