Anttenna Is 'Twitter With A Purpose'

At a concert last summer in New York City, Marcus Wandell had an entrepreneurial epiphany. The University of Washington grad--who was working in Microsoft's New York office at the time--wondered why he couldn't track the beer vendors from his mobile phone in order to find the best prices and selection.

"I thought to myself: Why don't I have an app on my iPhone that shows me all of the beer vendor offerings around me, so I could find the best price?" said Wandell, who started building out the concept shortly thereafter.

He quit his digital advertising gig at Microsoft a few weeks later, moved back to the Seattle area and formed Anttenna. Now, the 26-year-old entrepreneur is hoping to transform the way people buy, sell and trade items from their mobile phones at sporting events, concerts, neighborhood gatherings or other location specific events.

The Anttenna service -- available now as a free iPhone app in Seattle, San Diego, Las Vegas and Austin--is kind of like Twitter, Foursquare and Craigslist all rolled into one. The end goal is to create a new form of classified advertising, something that Wandell calls "mobile microlistings" that are targeted to a user's location.

For example, a person with extra tickets for a baseball game could post to the Anttenna app while standing outside the venue, and then engage with fans who were seeking extra tickets. Those seeking tickets also could peruse a map on their iPhone to see who might be selling tickets nearby.

"To sum it up, it is kind of Twitter with a purpose," said Wandell, who co-founded the company with Hunter Jensen four months ago. "Without doing Twitter an injustice since it is a revolutionary technology and we do love it."

Like Twitter, the listings flowing through Anttenna are limited to 140 characters. And the company has designed the service on the back of Twitter, so complete strangers who aren't following one another on the social networking site can interact with one another in order to facilitate a deal. The company calls this form of communication "Anttweeting."

Mobile phone users already employ services such as Twitter, Facebook, Loopt and Whrrl to informally engage in the sort of mobile commerce that Wandell is talking about. However, he said those services are not built with commerce in mind, and they don't address the problem of finding like-minded people that you don't already know who may have goods or services to buy or sell.

Perhaps the closest competitor is iList, which encourages users to post items that they want on Twitter under #iwant or items that they'd like to sell or get rid of under #ihave. Users can further segment the listings on iList by zip code or products.

"There's some smaller Twitter-based marketplaces, but no major competitive threat as of yet," said Wandell. "We are the category defining company of mobile microlistings."

Of course, the big challenge facing Anttenna is what Wandell correctly describes as the "classic chicken-egg scenario." At this time, only about 1,000 people have downloaded the iPhone app, so the likelihood that someone will share your similar interests in your same location and then have something to trade, buy or sell are relatively low.

Wandell said they are addressing that challenge through a widget that publishing partners are adding to their Web sites. That, he said, gives people who are posting classified listings on say a newspapers' Web site the option to add the mobile microlistings for free within the Anttenna app.

In addition, Anttenna is sealing deals with ticket vendors and other organizations affiliated with events in order to populate the mobile app with content.

The company plans to make money through a premium subscription service in which "power sellers" are able to predetermine the times that they want listings to automatically appear in the Anttenna marketplace. The basic plan is free, with a mid-tier offering costing $15 per month and a higher-tier offering costing $25 per month.

The company also is exploring a payment system, similar to eBay, and paid listing service where users could pay an extra fee to highlight their listing within the app.

There's certainly a lot of activity going on around location-based services, and that's not lost on Wandell.

"It is a very, very hot space. And we feel like we are at the sweet spot of it, because we are not using location really as a feature so much as building a business around location because we are creating a marketplace where people are using it as a utility," he said. "Foursquare is great. I love checking in, but people don't go in there to trade items, or to buy and sell, so it is really cracking the nut of hyperlocal advertising."

The service went live in San Diego a few weeks ago -- a location chosen because the company has developers working on the project there. It launched in Seattle last week, and the company is targeting a larger nationwide push in early May.

At the moment, the company is bootstrapped with capital from friends and family. But Wandell said they will likely go out and try to raise new cash in the coming weeks.

---

John Cook is executive editor of the Puget Sound Business Journal's TechFlash blog.