Geo-messaging startup BlockChalk raised $1 million in seed financing from an impressive group of investors, including Delicious founder Joshua Schachter, Lotus founder Mitch Kapor, the Founder Collective, Battery Ventures, Harrison Metal, Josh Stylman, Tom McInerney, and David Liu. Schachter, in particular, has been investing heavily in geo startups (he is also an investor in Foursquare, SimpleGeo, Square, and Plancast).
BlockChalk makes an iPhone app that lets you leave notes around your neighborhood. They can be anonymous to report things like crimes, or a public shout-out to great neighbor. It uses a geo-fencing approach to revealing messages. Each message is pinned to a specific location, block or neighborhood, which other people using the app can see when they are nearby. As MG wrote in January:
You load up the application on your mobile device, it locates you, and you leave a message. This can be whatever you want: A note about a good cafe, a tip of something in the neighborhood to watch out for, a request to borrow something that someone else may have in the neighborhood, etc. When other people also using the app come upon the area that you’ve pinned your “Chalk” (their word for message) to, they’ll see it on their screen in a stream of Chalks.
The founders are Stephen Hood, who used to head up the product team at Delicious, Dave Baggeroer of Stanford’s Institute of Design, and Josh Whiting, a former senior engineer at Delicious and Craigslist.
