Buzzd, a location-sensitive city guide and social network application for BlackBerry smartphones is now available in Canada.
It's one of the first apps delivered thanksa to the $150 million BlackBerry Partners Fund, a venture capital initiative formed to focus on applications and services for the BlackBerry and other mobile platforms.
“Since its inception this past May, the BlackBerry Partners Fund has had the opportunity to review thousands of business plans from companies focused on developing the next generation of business and consumer applications for BlackBerry and other smartphone platforms,” said John Albright, Co-Managing Partner of the BlackBerry Partners Fund.
BlackBerry Partners Fund made the following investments:
• buzzd, a location-sensitive city guide and social network for mobile devices, has raised $3.2 million in a Series A Preferred Stock financing with BlackBerry Partners Fund, Greycroft Partners, Monitor Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures.
• Digby, a leading mobile commerce service provider, has raised $5.5 million Series B Preferred Stock with the BlackBerry Partners Fund and existing shareholders.
• WorldMate, a company that has paved the way for mobile travel innovation and serves over one million frequent flyers and road warriors around the world, has raised $8 million in a Series C Preferred Stock financing with BlackBerry Partners Fund, Motorola Ventures and AMC Communications.
buzzd delivers editorially driven event and venue information, the developers describe, along with up-to-the-minute reviews and ratings from other members of the buzzd community. Users can browse and search continuously updated event feeds, which include pricing, location, and event details as well as the firsthand ratings and reviews posted from the event by other members in real-time.
Event and venue information is courtesy of Citysearch, Flavorpill, Time Out, MyOpenBar, last.fm, Upcoming.org and many other local content providers. User-generated feedback for “real-time” activity about venues and events is also layered at the top of event listings throughout the platform.
buzzd is also now optimized for Canadian locales and for the BlackBerry Storm smartphone, allowing even more users to partake in the interactive buzzd community via their slick new app. Complete compatibility for buzzd with the popular BlackBerry Storm touch-screen is important because 40% of the location based application's downloads to date have been by BlackBerry Storm users.
As the buzzd app has been among the top downloads since its launch last May, the buzzd community has seen explosive growth. During this time, there has been an increase of 220% in user-generated reviews or "buzzes". In fact, user-reviews are the most popular feature of the app.
buzzd partners with carriers and content providers such as Helio, Virgin Mobile, metroPCS, AT&T, Verizon, Flavorpill, Time Out, ZAGAT, Metromix, myOpenBar, last.fm, Citysearch and many more. The company is based in New York City and backed by Monitor Ventures, Greycroft Partners, Blackberry Partners Fund, and Qualcomm Ventures.
The company was founded by Nihal Mehta and Deepen Shah from ipsh!, the first mobile marketing agency in the U.S. which was acquired by Omnicom Group in 2005.