down2night.com

Here are some updates from three startups we have covered in the past:

Geezeo

• Bigtime updates to the transactions module - auto-tagging, cleaner interface, etc.
• We’ve added Safari support
• OFX data uploads to get your historical transactions
• Simple analytics with graphs for credit card accounts
• More internal security checks and balances
• Database clustering for more data reliability

Read their blog entry for more details and our previous Geezeo coverage.

down2night

Mark Michael, down2night founder sent over the following quote about their planned expansion, "by end of summer we will be national (with your city, town, college or university) with some international cities including London, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Sydney and Frankfurt."

Additional new features include:

• Nightlife based social networking (your friends, messaging)
• Heat-map of the hottest spots
• Nightlife venue based search
• Search for the mood you’re in: after-work, happy-hour, swanky, chill
• See who’s going to a venue that night (i.e. tonight’s rally)
• Able to create a night invite, select the spots (one or multiple) you want to go, and then invite your friends you go out with to join you (evite style)
• Add your house or apartment as "your pad" which only your friends can see. Then you can then add this to your night invites
• Yahoo Maps Mash up (thermal heat map). you can see what spots are going to be hot tonight in your city with a thermal map style overlay
• Upload your pictures going out tag them to a venue's page
• Now in 22 cities
• Over 30,000 events across the US and Canada
• Mobile alerts for your favorite spots

Check the down2night blog for the latest news and our previous down2night coverage.

SaneBull

SaneBull has launched two new plugins for their stock tracking service. It's pretty neat. One is for Wordpress and the other is for everyone else. The Wordpress plugin is very easy as anytime you add a stock quote to your blog entry, it will automatically convert it to a SaneBull optimized quote. You put your mouse over the stock symbol and a small window appears with the latest quote and volume. A click on the quote gets you even more information. It's very cool and almost like intellitxt for stock quotes!

Check out the installation details and screenshots on the SaneBull blog and also check out our previous SaneBull coverage.

down2night, the nightlife planning tool has launched 20 more cities yesterday. The blog notes, "Cities currently on the d2n platform include: New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Seattle, Las Vegas, Miami, Atlanta, Toronto, Vancouver, Houston, Washington, DC, Honolulu, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, San Diego, San Jose, Austin, and Denver."

They also have a feature that is new to me - the heatmap. I guess this shows you where the hot areas are in a city. Here is a heatmap (shrunk) of lower Manhattan.

Two other general comments:

• I wish they would include Yelp reviews on the location pages
• It sure seems like they have a large number of "hot" women on their member pages. I sure hope this is not a fake just to get more men to register!

down2night, a service that launched about a week ago has just introduced their service to the San Francisco area. Here are the updates they released today:

• Added San Francisco with 150 spots
• New Badges showing how many people are subscribed, number of upcoming events, and number of messages
• Add messages, reviews, discussion to Spots on down2night
• Get "My Spots" flash widget of your favorite spots to put on your Myspace profile, personal blog, or website
• View your spots on a Google map to plan your night
• Upload your profile image that shows up when you add messages
• Added simple date chooser when adding events to a spot
• Mashup and integration page added with XML feeds for down2night spots for developer use

I would still like to see integration with a service like Yelp - I think this integration could help the service because they already have thousands of reviews of local spots. These new updates should help the service grow as well. I look forward to testing it next time I am in SF.

A pretty interesting new site has launched tonight. Called down2night, it allows you to receive SMS messages about events at your favorite local bars, clubs, restaurants, theaters and other social functions. What I like about this is that you can be notified about last minute type events using this service. And it can also help you learn about new events in a city you are visiting. Currently the only city online during their alpha launch is Seattle but the site shows plans on adding about twenty other major cities in the U.S. in the coming weeks. Check out the information about the launch on their blog.

"down2night's primary users will inevitably be in the 18 to 35 year old professional crowd," says Mark Michael, Synapse's CEO. "This market segment is the most mobile-savvy group having SMS messaging experience, while also being the individuals that spend the most time and money attending musical events, and visiting clubs, lounges, and other nightlife establishments. Since mobile social networking was officially introduced in 2001, it has exploded into a surprising $3.45 billion dollar industry in the US alone," Mark goes on to say. "It has become the fastest-growing launch of a new industry ever, and with the introduction of new and more feature rich wireless phone devices this trend is expected to continue."

Rather than hiring people to go out and find the events, down2night appears to use the idea of social networking whereby users will post from their cell phones to the site and then others will receive the information. This appears to be another good use of SMS. Might even work well with a tie into a service like Meetmoi. And what about mashing reviews from Yelp? Ooh!