A team of developers from a garage in France launched a location-based question and answer site today called Gootip. The service uses Google Places API tied with its own algorithm to specify where a question is being asked and tries to increase the relevance of the answer with users IP location from Foursquare and the Facebook Graph.
Gootip emerged in beta today without having any buzz ahead of time and no funding from any venture capitalists. It has been bootstrapped by three founders who worked at e-merchant Price Minister – Mathieu Bidart, Eric Gagnaire and Thierry Sebba – who claim to have shut themselves in a garage with bottles of wine for the last six months to push out the product.
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The results are interesting. Think of a cross between Quora and Yelp, tie it to the social graph and you have Gootip. To ask a question you first need to search Gootip for similar items, tag the question with a category (arts, food etc.) and then set a time limit on it, from one hour to unlimited.
Is Gootip a Hipster clone? Well, it is hard to clone something people know very little about. Hipster is a stealth startup that has gotten a lot of buzz from the tech community but little is known about how it actually works or what it does except that it is a location-based question and answer platform. It rolled out at SXSW this year for questions and answers about the conference and the Austin area but has gone back into hiding and not much has been heard since.
Gootip has been created through a smart mashup of APIs. Twitter and Facebook Connect for registration, rich location from Facebook and Foursquare, Google Maps, Place and Translate for exact location and language. Gootip launched in English and French.
A location-based question and answer platform would not be complete without being mobile. Gootip says it has an iPhone app in development coming in June and an Android app “forecast for the next few months.”
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