Barisma Connects People To Bars, Clubs And Cafes
Ever wanted to discover what clubs, cafes and bars your town has to offer and what kind of people hang out in those locations? On Barisma you can find those answers. The Finnish start-up has been developing the concept and the website since 2009 and now it has gone live. For users Barisma is a search engine for venues with social networking features. You can either casually search for venues, discounts and people without registering, or engage with a service further by creating a profile, uploading rich media, commenting on content and connecting with new friends. For venues the website offers a marketing channel where bars, clubs or cafes can create and maintain their profiles, interact with their guests online, promote their events and offer discounts for Barisma members.
At first glance Barisma's website looks very simple but if you want to explore it beyond finding venues you'd need to familiarise youself with quite a few features. For example, when you enter a keyword like 'terrace', the website gives you results of locations with that feature in your town. In addition, venue profiles will show any discounts that venue offers and upcoming gigs or events they are hosting. You can also 'like' a venue, request a discount or see other user's comments and photos connected to the venue. Barisma's team is also working on the mobile application to enable geo-tagging and mapping features.
At the moment the results are somewhat limited (most of the signed venues are in Helsinki) but the company has a global ambition that their service can support if executed well. 
With more information on the website, Barisma can definitely be a great resource for party-goers, tourists or coffee-drinkers alike.
Right now the company partnered with 15 venues and 3 university student unions in Helsinki. Their website lists 2700+ venues across the world (though for most of the countries outside of Finland the selection is small) and they attracted 670 registered users.
Thus, Barisma's community for the moment is fairly small and their success depends largerly on their ability to grow that crowd. Making the website a success heavily depends on virality of the service and personal networks of the people behind the company to be able to promote their product in the right circles. Communities of club-goers or cafe enthusiasts are dispersed and often intangible so mobilizing them can take a lot of time and effort.
Barisma was created by Walid O. El Cheikh and two other students from Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences and their current team consitst of 20 people with international background. The company has been supported by public funding and loans, altogether getting 55,000€ investment.
Image by maxine1313
As always you brought up a very interesting startup.
I noticed in these days that there is another startup on the otherside of the planet the Barisma founders have to compete with and it has almost the same name although they don't have the social part, but it looks very engaging.
http://www.barbird.com/
@Ereid Gjergji: Thank you for introducing Barbird.com, it seems interesting, we finally got a direct competitor worldwide.
Many thanks to Anna for writing the article.
You are welcome Will. Watch out anyways they are growing pretty fast.
Wish you all the best
@Ereid Gjergji I think it is only good for us if they grow, so I say, let it be. Thanks for the warning.
Hi from BarBird; we always try to work together before immediately competing with people; if you're interested in chatting before thinking of us as competitors, we'd love to talk. Drop me a line at p@barbird.com and we'll see if there's anyway we could help one another.
@plamb I believe there is a lot we could do together at this stage. I am curious to see where to start?