You know, as soon as I heard this news a few hours ago, I thought to myself: gee, I gotta look out more. As I have stated in earlier posts, I’m truly a startup fan, and particularly those which come from Universities — whichever it may be. Well Dodgeball is one of those, and Google has just bought it.
The idea Dodgeball carries is I think incredible (well I guess any idea seems to me ‘incredible’) but truly, if I have ever lied about an idea seeming incredible, this is not it. Dodgeball, as stated in the title, is run from cell phones. The idea is neat. You SMS the Dodgeball service stating where in the 22 available cities you are, and you get a reply back with all your friends and friends of friends who are upto 10 blocks away. Not only that, it allows you to communicate with your friends, tell them if you have a crush on them, and if you do, Dodgeball will alert you when they’re near by to remind you to have a Tic Tac.
I’m very glad Google, this time, has acquired a startup with a unique idea, and I’m getting quite of few ideas of what Google maybe able to do with it. One of them is integrate Google Maps with Dodgeball so that you don’t have to SMS them to let them know where you are — they know where you are before you can get out your cell phone! Another thing they can do is in someway integrate the Google RideFinder service so that when you SMS Dodgeball, you get a reply with the nearest taxis that are less than 10 blocks away from you. Now that would be much simpler than you logging on to the Google Labs website, finding the Google Ridefinder link, typing your city, etc.
I’m eagerly waiting to see what Google will do with it, and even though the service isn’t for NZ and in no way at all can I try it out unless I make a trip to the US, I’m still happy for both of the companies and perhaps if it becomes a large-scale phenomenon, they might think of really expanding the service and letting in the kiwis to play Dodgeball 
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