Last November, we reviewed the first product from Seattle-based startup Pelago - a mobile mapping service called Whrrl meant for sharing reviews of places and events with friends.
Whrrl feels very much like a dormant technology that, like other mobile apps, has the potential to explode after the new iPhone - both in terms of software and hardware - gets unleashed next month.
In its current form, Whrrl works only on the BlackBerry Pearl and Curve. It therefore struggles to foster the social network it so dearly needs to become useful to more than a small group of early adopters. But it’s clear that Pelago has placed its future in the hands of RIM’s rude archenemy, Apple, which has much greater appeal to the consumer market. When Kleiner Perkins launched its so-called “iFund” for the financing of iPhone apps in March, the venture capital firm reclassified its previous $5.6 million investment in Pelago as the first iFund investment.
Now Pelago has raised an additional $15 million from Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile Venture Fund, Reliance, and DAG Ventures (among former investors) in preparation for international expansion once the iPhone’s second coming arrives. According to CEO Jeff Holden, Pelago will unveil some major functionality in the next couple of months (including Loopt-like friend tracking). And he says that the iPhone is “extremely important” to its plans, suggesting that this functionality will center around that device (despite upcoming support for a variety of feature phones as well).
The startup wants to position itself internationally before foreign companies take the big ideas behind its new functionality and run with them. An alliance with Deustsche Telekom is meant to help Pelago lockdown Europe, and Reliance should help in India.
Holden says he wants ultimately for Whrrl to become the “indispensable mobile companion”. That’s a high hope and one surely shared by other mobile developers who are clammoring to build ontop the iPhone platform. This sizable round of strategic funding will at least give Pelago the reserves it needs to establish itself as a major next-gen mobile developer.
In its current form,iphone is growth quickly,Mr.Jobs is happy to see it!~~:)
Location of your Friends in real Time?
Make sure you know who you friends are before you add them to your location sharing!
Feels like Brightkite belongs in this list
Two major hurdles for mobile apps are service providers and the number of devices. Imagine if yelp initially only worked for linux boxes and comcast internet users. Yelp would be a fraction of what it is today. Plego seems to have both money and connections.. but will that be enough to solve these problems? I don’t know. Google has x times the money and connection, it ended up building its own mobile platform :(.
Sometimes it feels like these stand-alone apps are just mini-collections of what 3 or so major brands already have going. So Google is moving fast on the “where”, i.e. the mapping, (despite MSFT’s go at it), FB, MySpace, and the micro-blogs, (and a million others), have the “what” friends are doing. You can link all these things together now. So are companies like Pelago thinking they will replace these larger established brands on certain devices? Users get attached to the familiar, so it seems unlikely they would want to change unless there was a very compelling reason… And the major brands have the funding to scale to any media. Or is there something else these apps offer?
How many accounts will a user have to have, to link all their social-media together? Or are these little mash-ups trying to become the overseers for users? Or, is this kind of development just proof of concept, in hopes that a larger brand like Google will buy them for the tiny bit of new functionality?
Placing your friends on a map, and logging it, seems like the new thing here, and this seems very interesting, as your human network becomes distributed in space, and you can observe them from a distance. They become abstracted geometric points. This will be useful for all sorts of other applications…(But isn’t this already being developled by Google and MSFT?)
nice move
whrrl has just received investment from an indian conglomerate Reliance .
http://www.pluggd.in/2008/05/r.....l-whrrlcom
I heard its a Majority stake . can you confirm that ?
>Location of your Friends in real Time?
Make sure you know who you friends are before you add them to your location sharing!
you better know it before=)
I hope their iPhone application is more compelling then their website (whrrl.com). It’s got too much stuff going on…. too many features, and none particularly useful. Maybe that’s because I don’t have any friends using it, but unless it works without many friends, its not going to be viral enough to take off.
i have some friends who work there. word is turnover is unusually high due to some brutal personalities (even for a startup). there’s lots of internal hope that this new round of investment will come with some improvements at the top.
looking forward for more ….