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March 28, 2008

Loopt Embraced by Verizon; Starts to Spread Its Mobile Wings

Mark Hendrickson

32 comments »

Loopt, a mobile social network that can be used to see where your friends are currently located, has partnered with Verizon to put its software on that carrier’s phones. It’s a big win for Loopt since Verizon has more location-aware handsets than any other carrier.

If you don’t know anyone who uses Loopt yet, that’s because the company is still working on getting its technology into more phones across more carriers. Loopt’s primary capability, which the company prefers to call “location sharing” (not user tracking), requires the ability to run location detection software, preferably in the background of a phone so it works while in your pocket. Since location detection is a privileged feature for most carriers, Loopt has needed to work with them one-by-one to reach their users.

Verizon joins Sprint Nextel and its subsidiary Boost Mobile in the lineup of carriers who officially support Loopt. Verizon provides not only more handsets that can run Loopt but a better development environment based on BREW as well. This will allow Loopt to integrate its software more closely into the carrier’s 20 supported phones, which include the LG Chocolate, MOTORIZR, Z6tv, and G’zOne Type-S. As a side note, the BlackBerry and iPhone are still not supported on any carrier.

Loopt will cost Verizon users $4/mo. They will be able to find it in the carrier’s “Get It Now” virtual store starting sometime in April.

The Mountain View-based company has raised $17M total over three rounds, including a seed round from Y Combinator. Competitors include uLocate and MapMyTracks, which use GPS instead of cell-tower triangulation.

CrunchBase Information
Loopt
MapMyTracks
uLocate
Information provided by CrunchBase
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Comments

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  1. Michael

    March 28th, 2008 at 6:05 am

    Congrats !

  2. DealerDrop

    March 28th, 2008 at 7:25 am

    Wasn’t there a YC company out of Stanford that was doing this a couple years ago? I remember seeing one of the founders on CNBC or something.

  3. Erica

    March 28th, 2008 at 7:37 am

    that’s Loopt- the YC company that was on CNBC w/the young founder out of Stanford!

  4. Jof Arnold

    March 28th, 2008 at 7:44 am

    Their founder is a long-running Paul Graham anecdote on the subject of “hard-working”! Sounds like a cool guy, and Loopt is panning-out to be a pretty awesome company. Good luck!

  5. andrian

    March 28th, 2008 at 7:48 am

    http://www.geocities.com/poi243

  6. Raskin

    March 28th, 2008 at 8:02 am

    $4/mo! I thought web 2.0 products were free!

  7. DaveS

    March 28th, 2008 at 8:28 am

    They’ll be killed once Android/iPhone SDK apps stat coming out…. facebook, mysapce etc will have apps like that… for free!

  8. Sundar

    March 28th, 2008 at 8:29 am

    @Raskin: Mobile 1.0 products aren’t!

  9. TommyBoy

    March 28th, 2008 at 8:43 am

    @DaveS, What you dont seem to understand is that BREW (which Mark seems to think is great) is a proprietary OS, and Verizon doesn’t just let anyone add whatever they want to their phone. My guess is Loopt is not the one mandating payment here, it is Verizon.

  10. Web20Guy

    March 28th, 2008 at 9:14 am

    I read somewhere “location tracking” with a monthly subscription model wasn’t sticky in Asia and Europe. Disney abandoned Loopt. I wonder what will make Verizon sticky. This is very expansive for Loopt (a startup) to educate Verizon customers, not to mention the $ Loopt already spent to pursue the deal, integration and testing. I guess @Sundar and @Raskin on the right track. Yet another Mobile 1.0 play by the “walled garden” carriers. I bet you Verizon has not spent a dime on this deal. Like most, Mobile 1.0 deal, Loopt will has to advertise to acquire customers.

    Once the consumers are educated, the free solution will be available on Android/iPhone. Even without GPS or AGPS, a developer can easily get the lat/lon from FireEagle (Yahoo) to do what they do for free. Fon11 already has location sharing on iPhone plus a lot more. I think they are working on iPhone SDK version and other native apps.

  11. FakeSamAltman

    March 28th, 2008 at 9:22 am

    You guys all act like Loopt is incapable of writing a free iPhone or Android version that plugs into Facebook and MySpace.

  12. Web20Guy

    March 28th, 2008 at 9:58 am

    @FakeSamAltman - you missed the point. It’s about NOT playing to the walled garden strategy.

  13. What a Joke

    March 28th, 2008 at 10:37 am

    Ok, this is what will happen…..

    All these start ups will knock themselves out trying to provide some kind of really cool service.

    They will run out of funding, since they really don’t make any real revenue and the VCs who backed them are mostly idiots with very little skin in the game.

    Verizon will still be in business next year and will capture the $4/month/user.

    Google’s Android will flop and Google investors will begin to realize that Google doesn’t have a second act. Little text ads was all they got and that business is slowing.

    Tech Crunch readers will move on to reading about really, really, really cool Web3.0 apps.

  14. GPS GUY

    March 28th, 2008 at 11:12 am

    How can you make such a broad claim? “It’s a big win for Loopt since Verizon has more location-aware handsets than any other carrier.” This is totally false. Sprint is the leader in and Nextel has been the leader for years. V hardly even understands location. How can you make such a broad claim? March 5, Frost & Sullivan, presented Sprint with two 2008 Mobility Awards for location-based-services. This is the third year in a row for Sprint Nextel. http://newsreleases.sprint.com.....ID=1115704 - Can we keep the broad claims to factual statements?

  15. Paul

    March 28th, 2008 at 12:13 pm

    Didn’t AT&T try to offer a similar service 5 years ago? It was withdrawn for poor demand and concerns about user privacy. Can’t see how today would be much different, unless it became part of a larger social project.

  16. fortunecookienotes

    March 28th, 2008 at 2:10 pm

    Combine this with the likes of twitter, and you’ll have a pretty cool mobile social networking app!

  17. jsmillandfriends

    March 28th, 2008 at 4:32 pm

    I’m surprised ULocate is still around. I remember seeing Gen. Tommy Franks on TV in Nov 2004 pitching ‘Teens Arrive Alive’. Nice marketing ploy to get parents to keep tabs on their kids’ locations but I don’t think it worked. I was in Shanghai at the time working with a Chinese location services provider listed on the NASDAQ. They ran a good strategy providing services to TNCs salesforces but ended up in the pink sheets a couple of years ago. Tough market.

  18. Sam

    March 28th, 2008 at 4:56 pm

    GPS Guy–

    Sprint has pushed GPS services more agressively, but VZ has the most aGPS handset in consumer’s hands.

  19. alan p

    March 29th, 2008 at 4:41 am

    Sadly, Location based services have been the Next Big Thing in mobile for as long as “Next Year will be the Year of Mobile Internet” has been around. More thoughts here

    http://broadstuff.com/archives.....ation.html

  20. ES

    March 29th, 2008 at 9:20 am

    Location Based services are the future but the problem with this service is the a $4 fee, read the review about it:
    in itsnearme.com

  21. Robin Chan

    March 29th, 2008 at 9:58 am

    Congratulations, Sam Altman and the Loopt team!

  22. amay

    March 29th, 2008 at 7:36 pm

    Can’t see how today would be much different, unless it became part of a larger social project.

  23. amay

    March 29th, 2008 at 9:08 pm

    Next Year will be the Year of Mobile Internet

  24. Saurabh Kaushik

    March 31st, 2008 at 9:20 pm

    “.. Why everybody is developing their Location Aware Applications? If I have to install 10 softwares on my mobile, I am sure all of them will be reading my GPS info constantly from mobile and sending to their respective servers. First of all, it is sheer wastage of processing power of my tiny mobile and also the bandwidth (because applications may use their own protocol to transmit Location Coordinate) . It can be easily done if HTTP request has this parameter for Location Coordinate…”
    http://www.nanosaka.com

  25. chigdon

    April 4th, 2008 at 11:25 am

    Can we call it Web 3X instead of Web 3.0? Web 3.0 is just too obvious.

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