Dabble lets you keep a “social journal” with geo-tagged photos

With Facebook’s buy of Instagram last week, photo-sharing apps are about to come under a lot of scrutiny. Dabble, which adds photo-sharing and location to create a “social journal,” might well be one of them.

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Dabble’s goal is to help iPhone owners create “postcards,” pictures taken on your phone that include geographic data to better document your memories. People use all these postcards to create a location-based journal. All of the memories are accessible via a map and make it easy to see where you were when you jumped off that cliff and nearly killed yourself.

“With smartphones, we’ve started to share experiences at the point of capture,” Dabble co-founder Santosh Jayaram told VentureBeat via e-mail. “In other words, we’ve shifted from ‘point-and-shoot’ behavior to becoming ‘point, shoot, and share.’ This makes sense because most, if not all, experiences are tied to a location.”

Dabble will compete with Caterina Fake’s controversial Pinwheel project and Trover, an iPhone app for documenting experiences with pictures and location. Jayaram suggests these competitors don’t stand up next to Dabble. First, he says his company has a head start on Pinwheel, which doesn’t have a mobile app yet. And he says Trover is “more picture centric in the way location-based experiences are presented and consumed,” where “Dabble places equal importance on the context of these experiences.”

“Photo sharing applications are still stuck in the point-and-shoot phase,” Jayaram said. “All of them contextualize pictures by time. In doing so, they miss an important dimension, one that can revolutionize how people share experiences and relate to the world around them.”

Personally, I’m not sure consumers will see the nuances between Dabble and Trover, which look a lot alike. But Dabble at least has pedigree: co-founder and CEO Pete Goettner is a General Partner at Worldview Venture Partners; Jayaram used to be VP of Business Operations at Twitter; and co-founder Antonio Altamirano used to work for Accenture and Sun Microsystems. Those are pretty impressive resumes for a photo-and-location documenting app.

Dabble’s parent company, Daemonic Labs, was founded in 2011 and has attracted $2.2 million in funding to date from Granite Ventures and unnamed angel investors. The company is based in San Francisco and has 11 employees.

You can see photos of the Dabble app below:

Daemonic Labs is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

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