We’ve been bullish about location-based social networks for quite awhile now, especially since Apple announced that it would open up the iPhone to developers. And with two significant developments in this space just this week (more on that below), we thought it would be a good time to take a step back and look at the options currently available through the Apple App Store.
What makes a “location-based” social network different than a normal one? At least as things stand today, location-based social networks run primarily on smartphones that have the ability to determine a user’s current location, usually by leveraging GPS or cellular tower triangulation. The social network then uses your location to reveal nearby friends and places of interest. See our Location Technologies Primer for additional information.
Currently there are six major location-based social networks available for the iPhone (click on the comparison chart to the right). All of them tell you how far away other members are from you, with most focused on helping you find your friends but some designed primarily for discovering strangers. A few of them chart the location of your friends’ on an interactive map (something I actually think all of them should do). They provide a wide range of privacy settings, but all will stop reporting your location when you simply close the application (Apple has yet to release its push notification system that will let these apps constantly report your location in the background). They also vary widely in how precisely they identify the locations of other members, although all but one of them work anywhere in the United States.
After testing this entire batch, I’ve come to the conclusion that none of them is quite ready to achieve mainstream usage. I believe most, if not all, of the following things must happen before location-based social networking becomes the new “killer app”:
- They need powerful notification systems that actively inform you when someone of interest is nearby. Such a system could be set up manually by individually indicating which friends are “of interest”. But it would be even better for the system to learn from your interactions (messages, pokes, wall posts, etc) and affiliations (profile information, common friends, groups) and automatically identify certain people you’d like to meet up with.
- These applications absolutely need to update your location while the phone is sitting in your pocket. Right now it demands too much from users to open the application whenever they want to inform friends where they are. Serendipitous encounters would be far more common with a fully foolproof and automated location-updating system.
- When inviting friends to a service, you need the ability to determine which of your friends actually have a supported phone. Otherwise you’re just spamming a large number of people who matter to you and with very little yield.
- These apps need to get more stable; they crash way too much.
- We need more hooks into web applications so we can share our location and location-based activities not only with other mobile users but with the web at large.
- Those apps that let you see and meet strangers nearby need to highlight both friends of friends and those who share common interests and affiliations.
These are weaknesses shared by all of the current iPhone location-based social networking apps, each of which we cover briefly below.
The Veteran – Loopt
Perhaps the most well-known of these companies, Loopt has been working for years to get its technology on a variety of phones (the iPhone being just the latest and most functional of them). It is also perhaps the most developed of the batch, and the most generic. Use it primarily to see on a map where your friends are located nearby. Restaurant and other local reviews are secondary, having been brought into the app through a partnership with Yelp. Get directions to other users, view their latest status updates (which are often accommodated with photos taken on-location), and ping them when they haven’t updated their location for awhile.
The Mountain View-based company has ventured into the matchmaking business this week by adding a new feature called “Mix” that shows you, for the first time on Loopt, strangers in your vicinity. You can see all of the people nearby who have turned on the Mix feature, and you can filter by types (age, gender, tags, dating status, community) as well. This is Loopt’s attempt to help people hook up at bars (an idea that gets thrown around by many entrepreneurs and has always puzzled me). But if it takes off, it may have even greater sociological effects than Loopt’s core friend-finding capabilities.
The New Kid On The Block – Moximity
Launching into private beta just this week, Moximity is a new location-based social network out of Austin, Texas that wants to help you find both your friends and local establishments. Taking Paul Bragiel’s marketing advice, Moximity is rolling out one geographical region at a time, starting with Austin itself. Everything is local – the restaurant listings, the users, and even the advertisements (yes, this is the only one of these networks actually monetizing on the iPhone right now).
One major quality that sets Moximity apart is the way it handles user accounts. When you join and start configuring, you don’t make “Moximity friends”. Rather, the service pulls in your contacts from Facebook (and later, other sites as well) and lets you track those of your existing friends who also use Moximity. When you post a status message, it also gets pushed out to your Facebook and Twitter accounts.
Moximity would benefit from an interactive map that uses pins to show where your friends are located. However, unlike Loopt, which gives you the precise street address of your friends, Moximity always matches you with particular places (restaurants, stores, etc) so individual pins for users might not be appropriate. Co-founder Bryan Jones says some breed of mapping functionality will be included in the next release.
If you live in Austin, you can get into the service immediately by emailing your name and zip code here.
The Bezos, T-Mobile and iFund-Backed Contender – Whrrl
The best-funded of the bunch is a Seattle startup named Pelago with an app called Whrrl that centers around identifying and reviewing nearby establishments of all types. Locating friends takes a bit of a back seat to the idea that you should share Yelp-like reviews with the people you know.
The information about places is comprehensive. You can find cuisine types, prices, hours, phone numbers, websites, street addresses, ratings and reviews. While you can view the (5-star) ratings and reviews from every member, you’re encouraged to focus on those of your friends. When you view a friend’s profile, for example, their reviews are displayed prominently. That said, you can “fan” strangers if you like their tastes (although apparently only through Whrrl’s thoroughly developed web app).
Whrrl also identifies events that are going on in your area. The combination of event and place information is great but I get the feeling that this app will have to depart a bit from its “reviews” roots to become a widely embraced service. More generic social features (such as walls and notifications) are needed to get me to use Whrll when not looking to share or gather opinions.
Pelago has raised its funds from the iFund, Jeff Bezos, and T-Mobile (among others).
The Schmorgesborg – uLocate’s “Where”
Where is an iPhone app developed by a Boston-based startup called uLocate that has received a considerable amount of funding (at least $15.5 million) over the last several years. It has everything but the kitchen sink. Along the bottom of the app is a dock-like menu that shows a variety of sub-applications, each meant to help you find something in your area:
- Buddy Beacon: find nearby friends
- GasBuddy: find nearby gas stations with low prices
- Starbucks: find nearby Starbucks franchises
- Quibblo: see location-based poll results in your area
- HeyWhatsThat: identify mountain peaks in your vicinity
- The Skymap: learn about the stars and constellations in the sky above you
- Zipcar: find pickup points for Zipcar rentals
- Yelp: find nearby places listed and reviewed on Yelp
- Eventful: learn about nearby events and their venues
The UI needs a bit of work (too many popups) but regardless, this app is handy for quickly finding the nearest of some particular thing on an interactive map (coffee, friendship, wheels, etc).
The Categorizer – Limbo
Limbo is provided by a company that seems to have undergone quite a few transformations over the years. We reviewed the company in May 2006 when it was a bizarre auction service based on text messaging. Back then it was located at 41414.com and you can still see that ancestry in the current logo (just look at the reflection).
The app is, at its heart, more focused on locating strangers and learning about what they’re doing than any of the aforementioned apps. All users are categorized by four types: Members, Contacts, Friends, and Faves. You can opt to share your location with each or all of them, with “Members” being everyone you don’t know, “Contacts” being people pulled in from your phone’s address book, “Friends” being people more important to you, and “Faves” being the most important people to you.
Users are further categorized based on their current “activity” (or status). They are either socializing, eating, playing, chilling, working, feeling, or enjoying a bit of “me time”. You can view users by their particular categories on a “What” page that displays the categories in a grid.
Limbo neither shows you your friends’ locations on a map nor gives you their exact locations (just their general regions, e.g. San Francisco). Both would make this app a lot more useful.
The Wall – Zintin
Zintin has gone even further in the direction of helping you communicate with strangers nearby, rather than helping you find your preexisting friends. Users in the vicinity are displayed in all-inclusive list along with their current status messages. When you select a particular user’s name, it takes you to their Wall, where short notes, photos, and scribbles can be posted by any user.
The Wall is the central, and pretty much only important, feature provided by Zintin (so-called “bulletin boards” are also provided but they’re essentially Walls for particular regions). If you find someone with particularly cool stuff on their Wall, you can request to exchange your contact information and meet them. But most people will just use the app to see what kind of juvenile stuff others around them have decided to share. If you’ve turned on the “allow mature content” setting, then that content is primarily explicit material, so be warned.
Zintin, which has been in development by a few Stanford CS grad students since late 2007, is mostly a curiosity at this point. However, the scribble feature, with which you can make quick doodles and post them for others, should make its way into other apps.
The Elephants In The Room – Facebook and MySpace
Neither of the big American social networks have added location-aware services yet, but they’re coming. Expect them to eclipse several if not all of these services after learning from them.
Location based services is a feature. The instant there is some serious demand for it, CMS style social networks like MySpace and Facebook will add it as a feature and there goes all 6 of the startups you listed.
Basing a service on a single feature is flimsy. LBS is a feature, not a complete package.
@Chris: you are absolutely right. Both social network powerhouses would do serious rampage if they were to enter that market. They wouldn’t necessarily be better, but they have the critical user mass to make location base social networking truly exciting.
I have money that the LBS modules to the MySpace and Facebook social CMS systems are already written and just waiting to be turned on at the flick of a switch.
VCs and spectators alike don’t know how powerful and well organized the industry is here.
It allows companies with feature based ideas to get financing anyway by way of ignorance, but when push comes to shove they lose. The space was permanently cast in 2005.
At any rate, investors caught on eventually because they stopped.(and got the scare of their lives)
Brad Greenspan is the only person who has a chance. Nobody has done 2nd life right yet. I think he has a shot. The other end of that is the Kick Apps, and CMS where you sell custom social solutions based off of your code base to enterprise.
Other than that the social scene is cordoned off. Sites based off of features do not stand a chance with the massive teams at the headliners. You’d need a pretty wicked patent to survive and win based on a feature.
you hit it on the head chris and nobody mentioned it in the weakness section.
google gears is wide open to everyone.
where is the myspace for business? is it linked in? lets hope not.
When you can combine a 1200 locator channel natural language network with LBS tech you create something truly unique. Custom strategic personalized location based offerings on a network of LBS natural language channels that users and businesses can navigate the internet and mobile seemlessly.
Mylocator is more than a feature, it is a package, a platform, a network, a channel, a location, a trend, a offering, a language, a destiny.
Appears none of these companies mentioned above will have a chance against the 1200+ MyLocator natural language network.
StateLocator.com
1200 domains that all redirect to one domain hosted on Ning is not a platform or anything other than a directory.
Where is the mylocator API?
@j
appreciate your thoughts. just lettin ya’all know whats coming. a heads up 7 up. giving you a cheat sheet of sorts. something to think about.
People should think hard and wide before they make judgement about MyLocator’s “potential” as a niche LBS start up. “Who” would put there one channel lbs startup app with a crumby domain name against MyLocator’s 1200+ family of niche locator channels? MyLocator is a multichannel natural language location social network that has the capacity to transend the internet and mobile seemlessly.
BroadcastLocator.com http://seesmic....deos/l5V4uSVcvF
@Chris-
I have to agree. I can’t get any of my friends to use any of these services or even Brightkite. If Facebook enters this arena (and they will), then there won’t be a need to convince my friends to use one of the above services anymore.
I think the best bet for these start-ups would be to try to sell themselves to Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo, or Google ASAP. I could easily see a Facebook-Loopt combination (doesn’t Loopt already have a Facebook app?), MySpace-Limbo, and a Yahoo-Brightkite combo.
Didn’t Nokia recently buy Plazes? Aren’t they in this market as well?
Chris,
That’s the real point. The Facebook and OpenSocial API’s let third party application developers bring LBS stuff into the Facebook environment without needing to either wait for FB to do it, nor having to negotiate terms. The “feature” of location is a simple application to slot into established communities.
I have to agree, Location Based Service with regards to communities has tremendous capaibilities but should be regarded as a feature. The challenge is to get users to sign-up to form a community at all and LBS is for sure a technology that will be provided to most of the existing online and mobile communities.
Christopher Magnani | CEO
The Mobile Life
http://www.themobilelife.com
It’d be an incredible thing to be able to meet others who have these kinds of programs turned on. For example, right now I’m sitting at a bar and don’t know anybody else here. It would be neat to strike up a conversation with somebody with whom I have something in common.
Exactly! Moot is that kind of service where the point is not absolute location but relative location. The service is presenting other people in your proximity and features socializing and file sharing. And the rumers says they’re going to launch an iPhone version in not a long time.
This space will ultimately be bigger then online, and with GEO, the advertising possibilities will be more profitable as well. I earlier blogged about what it would take to win this space, and who the players are that will be there;
It is important to note that, IM technology, Contact Management and LBS components can easily be licensed, not just built internally. This is important, because this is a market that needs to be hit prior to other larger players entering the space. So the concept is to be able to suck everyone of your business and/or personal contacts into a neutral IM client (should work ideally not just with AIM, but with all the messaging clients). Marry the IM client to Navigon’s or FireEagle SDK … And you have an immediate mobile social network unrivaled… Users would be able to determine who sees them and who does not, as well as “friends of friends “ (linked in).
So one day I happen to be at the airport, and my IM client would alert me that someone in my social network is nearby me…I would have the opportunity to “meet” / cloak / “reject” … Paid user business model for PRO features, as well as huge local advertising opportunity.
There are already many different companies in this space ie;
Appear
Ask Mobile GPS
Carmenta
Dodgeball (service)
Garmin
Ipoki
Loopt
Meetro
Mologogo
Navxs
Navizon
Skyhook Wireless
Smarter Agent
Socialight
Sprint Family Locator
Super Local
Swirl
Trackme
Trimble Outdoors
Trisent
WaveMarket
whereaboutz
Problem is as with most start-ups, they lack correct product management,business model and marketing. Carriers will always try and protect this via their “Walled Gardens”, charging a monthly fee. Why this ultimately fails to become the gorilla is because – Apps/Content just want to be free * Note how the multi-billion dollar MVNO/Ringtone business is constantly moving off-deck; http://www.tonethis.com Carriers loose because their models lock out all other carriers other then themselves (think the multi-year ongoing communication issue between Yahoo Messenger,MSN Messenger, AIM Messenger,etc) . Free + Cross Platform = Scale / Category Killer most quickly.
So who will be in this market?
Wireless carriers (Verizon,AT&T,Sprint,T-Mobile)… They will all leverage their existing users…they will not be the victors for the earlier aforementioned reasons.
Operating System guys (Microsoft via their windows mobile,Google via their android, Apple via Iphone)
Portal guys (Yahoo via their large userbase combined with their Yahoo IM userbase)
IM Clients (AOL IM,YahooIM,Microsoft Messenger,Meebo,Trillian)
Phone Guys (Nokia,Motorola,Apple,Sony/Ericson,RIMM)
GPS & Sat guys (TomTom,Mapquest (aol),Garmen)
http://www.twitter.com/A_F
Garmin needs to start integrating some of these features into their GPS units. I would find this way more useful than on an iPhone
@ Shannon
Garmin is including these features in the their next gen devices. They have incorporated Buddy Beacon the friend finding service from WHERE. http://mashable...garmin-ulocate/
This is the best article I’ve read on TC in quite some time! Great work! You encouraged me to reinstall Loopt onto my iPhone!
come on, you forgot ilighter
ha
Great summary of the current state of the market for location-based social networking. While Moximity is focused on just Austin right now, we are actually running a contest to determine which cities and phone platforms to go to next. If you want Moximity to come to your city or be on your type of phone, email us at Techcrunch-austin@moximity.com. Thanks, and hope to see you on Moximity soon!
Don’t forget brightkite too.
Brightkite doesnt have a native iPhone app
Brightkite doesn’t have a iPhone app available to the public yet – give it a little while, and what they’re working on will blow everyone away.
True, but I believe it is in the application process with Apple already. Also the iphone site works pretty well, I am looking forward to the native version though.
The article is correct though that all of them need the ability to get location while the app is backgrounded… something apple doesn’t currently allow.
yeah, puzzling that BK hasn’t unveiled an app yet. I expected to see one months ago.
wow alot of funding for apps just reading info off of apis such as yelp, city search. i dont see the need for such huge million dollar funding
Whrrl takes the cake imho. The only bad part about it is that you can only invite people via their email address, which makes it a pain when you don’t have a lot of emails attached to contacts in your phone.
Out of these, I only tried Loopt and it spammed my contacts. I also found it quite useless.
I don’t know… I just don’t find any value in knowing that XYZ is 4 blocks from me. If I wanted to see them, I’d give them a call or send them an SMS. These apps are great for stalking though… LOL.
you’re missing more fundamental social network mobile use using twitter and octothorpetags (otherwise known as hashtags).
e..g in atlanta there’s a bunch of people spotting open and closed gas stations and twittering details with the tag #atlgas .
if this isn’t location based social networking I don’t know what is; but note that it’s not about creepy always-on personal surveillance, but rather the model is location precise mobile reporting.
Full story about the #atlgas hashtag: http://www.driv...ow-to-find-gas/
Mark, your posting contains one error. You state that Apple’s forthcoming Push Notification Service for the iPhone will enable automatic updating of the iPhone’s location on a periodic interval. However, this is very unlikely to be the case and will not be a scenario enabled by the notifcation service.
That is correct Steve. The Push Notification Service will not be supporting automatic background reporting of Location to applications. The iPhone is crippled in this context and these companies are focusing on it not for its ability to deliver a compelling and “sticky” location experience but more because iPhone location applications are easy to develop and look good to investors and marketers.
“These applications absolutely need to update your location while the phone is sitting in your pocket. Right now it demands too much from users to open the application whenever they want to inform friends where they are. Serendipitous encounters would be far more common with a fully foolproof and automated location-updating system” – This idea is flawed at a technological level currently. GPS and triangulation are not powerful enough yet to determine exactly where a person is in terms of venue. If I’m downtown the difference between being in one bar vs another can be measured in feet. I like Moximity’s idea on mapping it to the venue. I hope they move out of Austin soon. Do they have any funding?
Arnold, we are planning on moving out of Austin pretty soon. Send us an email about which city you are in – it will impact where we go next. And, yes, right now we are angel funded. Thanks for your comment!
I think it is called geosocial networking…
99.99% of phone owners do not own or want an iPhone. Stop pretending it matters. It’s as relevant and interesting as dedicating 20% of TC’s posts to World of Warcraft… wait, no, there are more WoW players than iPhone owners.
Actually, far more than 0.01% (100%-99.99%) of people ALREADY own iPhones.
By my recollection, 14M iPhones were sold, and there about 3B cell phones worldwide: that makes 0.23% of phone iPhone. I think it is safe to assume that for every iPhone owner, about people are marginally interested.
So I’d say at LEAST 1% of phone owners are interested.
So you’re off by about two orders of magnitude.
It would interesting to watch what comes up in the future regarding the Real Estate and geosocial on a phone (iphone or not). I would love to be able to park in front of a home and find all details abt it from a phone. Or a open house..
And so would every other stalker on the planet, businesses included.
Don’t forget about GPSTwit.com the location based social network that doesn’t try to create it’s own new network but piggy backs on the existing popularity of twitter. GPSTwit is a very simple location based service but it works and already has thousands of people using it.
I’ve got mixed feelings on these apps. The only one I’ve used and had much success with is Whrrl. Mostly because where I’m located noone is interested in this and apparently don’t contribute making it kind of pointless. I’d like to see it take off here so I could get some use and be able to offer up some good data on our site. I’m going to post a review of these location based services from the perspective of a RURAL user. I think that is an important aspect to consider when mentioning MAINSTREAM usage.
Has any of these companies asked whether the actual users want this type of feature? I call it a feature because that is all it is. You cannot build an independent consumer facing business from LBS.
We run polls in our community to gauge potential new product developments and LBS features polled very unpopular. Basically users did not want to know (or be known) when a “virtual or real” friend was close by each other, they have SMS or voice for that.
I believe that LBS will gain far better traction as a commercial application vs. a consumer one.
Yes the brightkite iPhone app is in beta to 100 users. I like the new mix features with loopt but I believe that once the brightkite app becomes public it will be the clear winner.
I had a chance to interview Brightkite CTO Martin, see what he had to say about the upcoming iPhone app and the future of location based services here:
http://talksoci...d-applications/
peeping now keep up the podcast
[quote] “These applications absolutely need to update your location while the phone is sitting in your pocket.”
I think you just explained why it WON’T happen on the iPhone. You need an OS able to run multiple applications for this live “update” to happen, otherwise your phone is stuck with that application.
That is why it will happen, but on the ANDROID.
Funny, I though the exact same thing when I read that sentence.
But what is existing on the iPhone is still fairly interesting and given the large percentage of location based apps that won a prize for Android’s competition, I’m guessing similar apps will be on Android.
These new social GPS phone sites look like alot of fun!
You look like a douchebag
How do new servixces and social networking phone sites like these benefit web publishers and business bloggers?
As a side project two years ago we created a Blackberry application that continually updated your position and notified you when you were in proximity to one of your friends. We loved the dodgeball.com idea and thought of taking it the next step further. We built it and got a beta app running – now the downside – running the GPS and continually updating your position was a massive battery drain. Even if you dialed back the updates it still had to run in the background and still required too much juice to be practical. It is great when you are excited to use it and you don’t mind re-charging, but when the euphoria wears off you find it more of an annoyance because even if you do know where your friends are in relation to you – you still have to do your daily activities and the novelty goes away.
We have not built an app for the iPhone yet however my suspicion is if you continually make calls to the GPS or any internal location based system you will suck the life out of your battery. GPS requires triangulation and processing and that does not come cheap. The other hitch in the plan is critical mass and then virtual stalking. My dev team figured out that I could find out where they were at all times and if the were in fact heading into the office or were going to be late. I know that sounds kind of “Tin Foil Hat” of me to say but there is something kinda creepy when you know that others can figure out where you are all the time.
In any event I thin LBS is going to be massive – how it comes together will be really cool to watch.
Thanks for the great summary Mark.
Cheers – Eric
Both the 2G and 3G iPhones use Wi-Fi positioning technology from Skyhook Wireless. Wi-Fi positioning not only expands location availability ( indoors and in urban areas), but also reduces battery drain caused by eliminating the need to constantly run GPS.
That’s good to know – thanks for that. Quick question – is that the only GPS that is used on iPhones? Is there any secondary GPS onboard or is this all coming form cell tower and WiFi hotspot triangulation?
Thanks for that info though – the next part will be running apps in the background but I am sure that is coming as well.
Cheers – Eric
Battery life and data usage are two key limitations for mobile LBS. Data has become less of an issue with increased use of 3G and generous data plans, but data is still very expensive if you roam overseas.
Automating the updates is also important if you want to engage users beyond the first few days.
With the ekit Travel Journal, we took the approach of putting the location updates in the SIM and mobile network. This allows us to get cell level location information in around 100 countries and we can do it with a phone and SIM package that costs as little as $39.
Obviously a cheap handset doesn’t allow you to offer a rich experience on the mobile but I think that’s a reasonable trade-off when your battery doesn’t die three hours after you start wandering around Rome.
I dunno..I think that this stuff won’t become mainstream for a very very long time, until it becomes very useful and a necessity, unlike the apps developed right now. Check out our work in progress: schoolshift.com
kind of creepy if you ask me.
That’s $70M in venture capital that didn’t go to services that, er, aren’t completely useless or might actually have a future as business. What a bunch of cr@p.
There seem to be several new concepts that are coming up in the world of social networking. However, only those who understand the real-world networking will be able to get the most from virtual-world networking. And things seem to be changing really fast in the online world. The popularity of social networking sites has gone so high that niche content websites are now catering to this demand– e.g. the site (http://buypriva...abelcontent.com) that i have mentioned is covering social networking as one of their first-release topics
If and when this takes off, *please* make it global. I’m sick to death of LBS that are US only.
Locator social networks have huge potential {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/NFKaAi9zNo_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”Locator social networks have huge potential ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/uOE3lZPKfK”}}}
I like your terminology. “The locator” is that and App. This is the only “the locator” i know. http://www.wetv...om/the-locator/
most people say location as opposed to locator. you use of locator, location terminology i find very interesting.
“location” means more of just where you are.
“locator” means where you are plus a niche locator engine to help you find what your looking for.
Does’nt myspace have social groups? why does this social “group” option not satisfy a person looking for niche group socializers like yourself? I understand no gps but i think you can search by zip code and group on myspace.
Thanks for Coming our and sharing your insights.
GroupsLocator.com
As co-founder of a Dutch service for location based content & community – bliin.com – what fascinates me here is the lack of perspective on developments outside of the USA. Having said this, I would like to add a few points that make this type of service successful from our experience … not focussing only on iPhone support:
- Cross-platform, cross operator: not all your friends have iPhones, not all of them are with the same operator … your friends travel. A successful service must support world wide coverage, on any handset, with any operator.
- Unified user-experience across handsets: its great to have an iPhone app in the store, but what about your Blackberry, Nokia or Android phones. Reason why a year ago we choose the handset-browser as the platform for user interaction.
- Open: allow for integration with other existing services, open-id, open-auth, open-layers, openstreetmap, etc
- Cost transparency: when your users have a flat fee data plan, don’t charge them for meaningless SMS location updates.
- Severe price cuts on data-roaming: users with flat fee data plans are charged ridiculous amounts per MB abroad while minimum data packages are often set to 25k (while transmitting under 1k)
The new start-up Webmob-ad just came out in Beta . It is a pioneer in the automation of mobile and web advertsing by creating the only self serve and fully automated marketplace for CPC and CPM advertising . It supports all types text ads, banners and video ads.For publishers , it offers the highest split of earnings you can find out there and much more. It caters to web and mobile Publishers and Advertisers . Register is FREE. It offer pretty good geolocation targeting. Please check it out : http://www.webmob-ad.com.
Michael laid out some great points in his article. We saw the same problems. That’s why we created and launched Xtify, a development platform that brings the power of location to web applications.
With Xtify, if you have a web application, you can add location without needing to develop a mobile client. That’s because our client extracts location information from the mobile and sends that information to our servers for developers to access via a lightweight web service.
Xtify is a thin client that runs in the background of your cell phone so location updates are constant. In addition, the battery drain is less than ten percent. We currently have coverage on all Blackberry handsets. Come November, our coverage will include Android, Windows, and Symbian. The service is free.
Feel free to contact me at darren@xtify.com
With the http://www.rummble.com iphone app soon to come
You might be interested in a location-based social network called SeeMyWhere. Speaking to the weaknesses Mark identified in all of the above applications, SeeMyWhere updates your location continuously, in real time, until you tell it to stop. This unique feature allows you to stay connected to your friends and family in a more relevant way than any manual-update program allows.
SeeMyWhere also puts an emphasis on simplicity. You get a unique URL when you sign up that shows your location. Anyone you want to see it can see it. For instance, you can see my location at http://www.SeeM...here.com/Juston. No sign-up required.
We’re rolling out new features, including buddy lists and friend alerts, in the coming months.
I invite you to check it out – go to SeeMyWhere.com. It only works on Blackberry phones right now, but will be available on others soon.
Feel free to send me questions, comments, or feedback at juston@seemywhere.com.
The battery life issue from regularly powering the GPS module on the phone is a problem that is not going away. Processing is processing.
Take a look at this little location chip that works like GPS, yet doesn’t require satellite acquisition — means REALLY long battery life. A single camera battery can power this location chip for over two years. Plus, it can automatically updates the Net.
Doh…forgot to leave the URL for S5 Wireless.
http://www.s5w.com
At what point does being “bullish” start to look less prophetic, and look more like stubborn denial? I mean, if I keep my Members Only bomber jacket in the closet, hung in plastic and in mint condition, eventually it’ll come back in style. Does that make me a pundit? Hardly. It means I looked like an ass for the last 25 years.
Great article – appreciated the coverage, although I thought the most notable absence was “WhosHere”. I’ve been using that for a while – anyone else?
Also, I stumbled across http://www.buddy.com a couple days ago – anyone know anything about these guys? Are they funded?
stevepe
One thing I don’t understand is companies launching before they’re ready. There’s a host of US iphone apps that are downloadable here in the UK but, they dont have any UK content as of yet. You pay a couple of £ and think..hmm, how do I get my money back?
I just installed zintin and it appears to be a way of sharing random pictures of naked women with other random people nearby. Very strange.
Anyway, LBS *is* very exciting and Nokia buying Plazes demonstrates this arena may certainly have “legs”
Locle (http://www.locle.com) will add to the mix in October. Launching in partnership with Irish telco Eircom. The app will work globally, but sure you’ve got to start from somewhere.
Ronan
Dont forget blummi.com as they have native support for Symbian, Windows Mobile, Android and the IPhone
Can anyone point to a source that shows user adoption rates to these services?
Check out another player in the location-based service area: http://www.blummi.com
As a co-founder of http://www.bluemapia.com I believe general social networking is not enough when you move into location-based. So, although Facebook and the big ones will probably be successfull adding location-based features, there is a big space for those who will be able to aggregate communities and provide social networking around geo-contents and mashups. The community of sailors, bikers, riders, surfers, geologists, skiers, travelers. Real life communities of anything geo. There are thousands of them. It will be more fragmented and will require a mix of user generated geo-contents and editorial contents to successfully aggregate the communities.
Our idea is: start in one vertical, develop successfully and then clone the platform to start other verticals.
Also Open Source/Creative Commons platforms will be more trusted and preferred by the users. On one side this is a limitation for the iPhone against Windows Mobile, Symbian/Qt, and Android that are more “open” than the iPhone. On the other side the iPhone is a very good device for location-based services (a big display for the map) although here in Italy after an initial enthusiasm, the iPhone is not growing as expected.
lost my damn finesse metropcs phone how can i find were or who has it fast ,from my laptop windows ????? ? help