Montreal Tech Watch

After 4 months of development, Groupmo is launching today, with a focus on movies and on Montréal. It aims to leverage Facebook’s social graph to help you find movies you would like, and then has a neat invitation feature to reach friends on Facebook.

Without Groupmo, most people use email lists, with messages going back and forth about the best movie to watch, and then deciding the location. As anyone who’s been to the movies with friends or coworkers know, it’s a time-consuming process, and most of the time, everyone finishes to agree on the most popular movie (which is not necessarily the best), to make sure it accommodates everyone’s taste. So, instead of this long manual process, Groupmo offers to do it in one dedicated interface. You can either go directly to a movie listing and suggest that movie there, or do it from the home page.

Of course, we’re in the Facebook age, where you’re asked kindly to list your favorite movies, and where the majority of your friends are in the same city, so Groupmo uses that to enhance the user experience. As a matter of fact, the user is required to login with Facebook, and after a while, invite Friends to create groups. It’s a bit surprising to see no other login options, since this is not a Facebook application, but I guess the less options the groupmo offers, the easier it will be for adoption.

I toured the application, and apart from a few buttons and interface hooks that needs to better explained and streamlined, it’s a breeze and should be quite useful to anyone who is going regularly to the movies with friends, on tuesdays or weekends. It should be also interesting to movies operators, since it gets them additional customers.

Groupmo also offers a HTML5 interface for mobile phones. In terms of product, what’s most interesting though is the plans behind groupmo. Warren Davis, the web entrepreneur behind groupmo, aims to capture as much users as possible, and when possible, offer different experiences and different outings to users, such as music shows, performances, museums, effectively answering the good old question: what should we do tonight?

Check out Groupmo