This evening at our Disrupt Beijing conference, Startup Battlefield competitor Gulu had some fightin’ words for the reigning Disrupt Champs, Shaker.
“Shaker wants to take something you do, the act of hanging out, and make it something you can do in your pajamas from the comfort of your own home. This. Is. Disturbing. We are the co-founders of Gulu.com, and we want you to hang out.”
Gulu wants to fill the gap between services like Facebook Events/Plancast and those like Foursquare. Where the former let you plan far ahead and Foursquare lets you broadcast where you’re at when you’re there, Gulu focuses on spur-of-the-moment event planning with what they call “intention broadcasting”.
The idea is pretty simple: you say what you want to do, and your friends tap the button that reads “Me too!”. All willing/hopeful participants are automatically wrangled up into a chat group, allowing the event to be planned on the fly.
And if none of your friends are up to do what you want to do right this second? All of your pending “I want to”s are added to a ToDo list, which your friends can peruse at their leisure. Once you’ve got a satisfactory number of attendees onboard, you can get your event underway.
Is it a strikingly new idea? Eh, perhaps not — a Facebook status update may work just as well. Of course, you could say the same thing about most social planning services, so we look forward to watching how this one grows.