I spoke briefly yesterday in a post regarding the emphasis on location apps at SXSWi, and one in particular that has a lot of potential is Brightkite’s “Check.In” multi check-in app for services such as Gowalla, Foursquare, Yelp and others. TechCrunch’s Jay Donovan had a chance to sit down with Brightkite founders Brady Becker and Martin May to demo the yet-to-be-released app and talk a little bit more about its future plans.
Starting as a pet-project internally at Brightkite, based on frustration in checking-in via multiple services, Check.In was created to solve the growing problem that many face as more and more services integrate check-ins. While basic in nature, the app allows you to log-in, choose your location or recognize via GPS and use it to check-in to all integrated services.
For the time-being, Gowalla, Foursquare and Brightkite are included, though some mention of Gowalla being removed at launch was made due to the fact that Gowalla has yet to release formal APIs to allow for such integration. For testing purposes, Brightkite was able to get around the lack of APIs from Gowalla, but has been asked not to include such integration on launch for some reason.
