DEMO: Foound simplifies organizing hangouts with friends

Foound is one of 70 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2010 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Foound aims to solve the age-old problem of wrangling friends together to hang out. Instead of relying on texts, people can use an iPhone app to organize hang-out sessions — making the process less like herding cats and more like chilling out.

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The Foound app, which the company is unveiling today at the DEMO conference, lets users display their location to friends and invite them to hang out in real-time. Instead of sending multiple text messages, a single Foound message can convey the address, time, and people invited to a hangout session. It also simplifies the process of sending and receiving updates from multiple users.

The app has been in testing on the Singapore iTunes store, and is now available for US iPhone users as well.

The biggest issue the company is facing in the U.S. is that many users are already relying on Facebook to do basically the same thing. Facebook also has the advantage of being platform-agnostic — you can organize an event on the Facebook website, mobile site, or any of the available mobile apps, and recipients can access the event across any of the above platforms. Foound lets users share their hangout sessions over Facebook and Twitter, so there’s at least some room for synergy between the service and Facebook. It’s also competing with other event sites like Plancast and Evite.

Foound is based in Singapore, and has thus far raised $500,000 in seed funding from Neoteny Labs, East Ventures, Varsha Rao, and Singapore’s National Research Foundation (NRF).

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