Geomium - an ECS graduate's answer to finding the best in town

ECS graduate Ben Dowling recently co-launched a new company, Geomium, which aims to give users complete awareness of their surroundings, allowing them to find nearby bars, restaurants and cafes, events, local deals, and even other users in the neighbourhood.

Geomium – ‘Live Local.Live Social’, is a location-based service which has already been praised by The Guardian, and has attracted positive reviews from the tech media. It adds a real-time social element to data from established location review services like Yelp and Qype to create something new.

‘We aimed to make this social,’ says Ben, ‘so users can see the events their friends are attending, meet new people at the bar they happen to be in, and see what people are saying about the latest bar in town.’

Ben graduated in 2006 with an MEng Software Engineering degree. ‘The experience was invaluable,’ he says, ‘and contained so much that has been of practical use.’ He also worked in ECS as a research intern for two summers, which he says was a great opportunity to apply some of the things he learned in a working environment.

After graduating Ben worked for Mendeley for a few years as a Lead Developer before leaving to launch Geomium, which he co-founded with Michael Ferguson, an MBA graduate from Oxford University. Geomium was placed third in the TechCruch European summer battle, before launching officially in early October.

Geomium is the first location-based service to combine real-time functionality with unrivalled local content. For example, Ben and Michael told The Guardian on launch day: ‘If you get off the tube at say Oxford Circus, you can see which of your mates are in Soho and which bars have 2-for-1 deals that night.’

Geomium is available worldwide, but the team are currently focusing their efforts on the UK. It is currently available online and on iPhone, and Android and Blackberry support will be added soon.

For further information contact Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 5453.