In some local news, Sovi – who we spoke with at DIG SOUTH last year – has just launched version 2.0 of their application. Whats more, the company upped and moved from Greenville, SC to San Francisco to take part in Tumml’s 2014 Winter Cohort. Accelerators and incubators are popping up all over the place, and it is becoming quite a competitive industry. That said, Tumml existis in a very unique niche:

Tumml is an urban impact accelerator supporting early stage companies developing innovative consumer products and services that improve urban living.¹

Sovi’s product is a perfect fit for this sort of focused accelerator. Here is how we described the company last April:

Sovi is a collaborative session organizer. What does that mean? In a nutshell, Sovi pulls in all of the local events – from happy hours, to yoga classes, to concerts and sporting events – into one location.  You can easily sort all of the events based on date, location, and category, and get real time directions and alerts when event information changes.²

Sovi 2.0 brings even more tools to both event publishers and users. For the users, some of the new features include: the ability to follow places and event promoters; deeper and more informative interactions and sharing with friends; a more in-depth search feature for both events and event publishers (pictured at the bottom of the page); a brand new activity feed that shows users’ activity streams. The update represents a major shift for the company. Sovi goes from an event board – albeit a very detailed and informative event board – to more of a collaborative, more local, deeper event planning tool.

Event publishers were the main focus of the new update, a fact reflected in the new, more robust publisher features: the ability to seamlessly post events to Sovi, Facebook and Twitter in one place, at the same time; post single, recurring events on multiple dates; add YouTube videos to event details; a richer promotion tool allowing publishers to push notifications to their followers through SMS and various social media channels; and the ability upload and edit events straight from the iPhone.

Sovi Co-Founder, Trey Pringle, said of Sovi 2.0, “Our goal has always been to create a social media application that has the ability to connect individuals with their community through local events.” I would have to say that this goal has already been attained. Although Sovi is currently live in only 5 major markets – Atlanta, GA, Charleston and Greenville, SC Charlotte,NC and Nashville, TN – the company plans to launch if 5 new major markets by the end of Q1 2014. Sovi has seen steady and significant growth since their launch, and plan to use Tumml’s investment to ramp up marketing within the current markets.

Download Sovi on the iTunes Store.