By Allan Maurer
WASHINGTON, DC – If you’re always looking for the next great read, another band you might like, or even a new beer to try, DC-based LivingSocial can hook you up with recommendations from people who have similar or different tastes.

Founded in the summer of 2007, LivingSocial is a social discovery and cataloging network that allows people to review and share their favorite movies, books, games, music, restaurants and beer.

The site helps more than 6.4 million users catalogue their interests, seamlessly integrating with Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, hi5, and Orkut. The site’s tools already enticed us to try them out.

The company is one of 40 presenting at the third annual Southeast Venture Conference (SEVC) March 11-12 at the Intercontinental Buckhead in Atlanta. Fewer than 75 seats remain for the event (for more information or registration see: www.seventure.org).

LivingSocial raised a $5 million round from Grotech Ventures and Steve and Jean Case in June 2008.

CEO and co-founder Tim O’Shaughnessy tells TechJournal South the 12-employee company started when he and two other founders saw an opportunity when Facebook opened up its platform to outside applications.

“We saw an opportunity for people to leverage recommendations from friends when trying to discover new content. It can help people make better decisions on what book to read next and show off the books you’ve read and list ones you want to read.

“We saw as a way to provide a new experience and overall found the formula worked, so we expanded it to a lot of things, such as restaurants, music and beer.”

O’Shaughnessy says he views “A little of what we do as filling some of the gaps newspapers used to. They traditionally had sections on books, movies and music.”

Even though he’s in a demographic that has fled daily newspapers (he’s in his late 20s), O’Shaughnessy says one of his simple pleasures is reading a newspaper over his morning coffee daily, but he notes the industry is a rapidly changing business.

The LivingSocial site does offer a great deal more interaction than newspapers ever did. It has over 7 million users. “If you poke around on the site, you’ll see that users are participatory,” O’Shaughnessy says. “We post more reviews daily than Amazon does. We created a platform where users are engaged and create a lot of content.”

The business model includes both advertising and affiliate relationships with sites such as Amazon.

In terms of advertising, O’Shaughnessy says, “It can help move the needle for brands trying to reach the right users. If Random House is coming out with a new John Grisham book, we know the users who like Grisham books and can help the publisher target those readers.”

O’Shaughnessy says the site has worked with a couple of large publishers such as St. Martin’s Press on campaigns and will have others ongoing shortly. He says the site will also expand into other interest areas. “We cover about eight areas now, but we know they’re only a subset of things people are interested in.”

Online: www.livingsocial.com

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