Mobile social network Loopt is making a big push this summer.
CEO Sam Altman already took stage at last week’s Stevenote prior to the unveiling of iPhone 3G. He was there to present the friend tracking software Loopt has been developing in time for the iPhone App Store launch on July 11th.
But while Altman describes Loopt’s iPhone version as the company’s best ever, he’s not overlooking the fact that many smartphone consumers still prefer the BlackBerry (and may even go for the BlackBerry Bold over the new iPhone). So Loopt is releasing software for BlackBerry devices as well, available here.
As with the iPhone, the BlackBerry software is free of charge. But unlike the iPhone, it will work on a variety of networks: Sprint, Alltel, T-Mobile, and AT&T.
As Apple gears up for the launch of its 3G iPhone, outside developers and startups are finally going to get to sell or give away their own applications that run natively on the phone (as opposed to being optimized for the Safari browser, as are most legal, third-party apps today). These apps, which are built on the iPhone SDK announced last March, will be distributed through the upcoming iPhone App Store (which apparently won’t launch for a few weeks). These apps will have some limitations (you can only run one app at a time and VOIP services only work via WiFi, for instance), but they will also bring a lot of innovation to the iPhone.
We’ve been tracking some of these announcements as companies prepare to unveil their new iPhone apps. They are listed below. There is a good chance more will be announced on stage during Steve Jobs’ keynote today. We will update as we learn more. Please let us know which ones we missed in comments.
Zenbe Lists: Webmail service Zenbe (reviewed here) is testing the iPhone development environment with a to-do list application that can be used to keep track of your chores and collaborate with friends and coworkers. Create task lists, check off items, and sync them with your contacts. Lists can be sent to your friends via email and accessed through the browser when sitting at a desktop computer. The Lists application won’t be integrated with Zenbe’s main email app, at least to start.
Super Monkey Ball: It took Sega two weeks to create a version of its popular video game for the iPhone. It will cost $9.99 at the iPhone App Store. Players use the built-in accelerometer to move the character.
The Associated Press: New app will retrieve local news based on your location. Also links every iPhone with the app to the AP so citizen journalists can send in photos taken on their iPhones of breaking events, as well as text commentary.
Six Apart (TypePad): Blogging from you iPhone? An iPhone announcement from Six Apart is expected today. More details as we get them. Update: Six Apart’s iPhone app lets you blog from your iPhone and add photos taken with the phone’s camera. It makes it easy to create micro-blog posts around a photo by adding a title, category and text. This app will be free for Typepad users. See how Six Apart CEO Chris Alden tried valiantly not to answer Mike’s questions on video when he was cornered right before the Apple keynote:
Pangea Software (Enigmo and Croman Rally): Two games for the iPhone that will cost $9.99 each. Enigmo is a touch-based puzzle game where you move drops of water around with your finger. Croman Rally is a race game with Flinstone-style cars that players control with the iPhone’s accelerometer.
Cow Music: Built by a single developer, Mark terry, in his time, the app is called Band. It lets you play virtual instruments on the iphone and create music. Instruments include piano, drums, guitars. You play the instruments by banging (lightly) on the iPhone.
MLB.com’s At Bat: Shows stats and video highlights of baseball games.
Modality: An anatomy app for medical students. The app is filled with anatomy drawings and images linked to Google and Wikipedia for more detailed information.
MIMvista: Another tool for doctors to view CT scans and PET scans on their iPhones.
Digital Legends Entertainment: Another game that took two days to port to the iPhone. Will be available in September.
SlingPlayer Mobile: You will soon be able to watch TV on your iPhone. Just like a Slingbox that let’s you access your TV from anywhere around the world, Sling Media is creating a version of its SlingPlayer Mobile app for the iPhone. That means theoretically you could watch all the channels you have at home on your iPhone, as long as the Internet connection is strong enough to stream the video.
Loopt: The social mobile network is expected to announce an iPhone version of its app. Loopt shows you where your friends are based on GPS and other location-tracking technologies. Loopt is already available on many Sprint and Verizon phones. With the iPhone, it will add AT&T to its roster.
Phanfare: Take pictures on your iPhone, add captions, and share them as slideshows on the Web. Phanfare is launching its iPhone version today.
Whrrl: Another mobile social network geared at sharing opinions and reviews of local establishments with your friends. The company behind Whrrl, Pelago, was is part of Kleiner Perkins’ iFund. (Read our review here).
Citysense: Nightlife tracker. Let’s you see the city’s hot spots by showing heat maps of where people are via their cell phones and other signal-emitting mobile devices. Only available in San Francisco for now. A demo app for Sense Networks.
eBay: We’re not sure what eBay has up its sleeve either, but Mike caught up with an eBay executive at the Moscone center who sounded like had something to hide:
Update: Turns out eBay developed an auctions app for the iPhone. From Mike’s liveblog notes: “They’re showing home screen with search, avatar and a number of navigation items.”
Kooaba: Point your iPhone camera at a movie poster and get movie details and show times Cool visual-recognition app
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.
Weplug is a new social networking site out of France that aims to combine the best parts of Twitter, Facebook, and geo-location. The site has just entered public beta, and is available on the iPhone at the same URL.
Weplug has a clean interface and full featured (if somewhat generic) social networking functionality. Users can add their current status and location to a “lifestream” (basically a list of recent activity), which is syndicated to others through “friendstreams”. It’s all pretty familiar stuff for anyone that’s used Facebook for any length of time, but there are a few key differences.
For one, Weplug promises to release an API that will make its micro-blogging platform accessible to outside programs and devices (think Twitter). Weplug also plans to include auto-location features on its iPhone version of the site. Auto-location doesn’t work yet, but Weplug’s developers intend to use the iPhone’s triangulation feature (and eventually GPS, when it becomes available).
The site is still very much a work in progress. The basic social networking functionality works well enough, but the promised autolocation feature and Twitter-esque API are still a ways off. It’s hard to gauge how well Weplug will do abroad, but to stand a chance stateside its going to need to implement these features soon. As it stands now, Weplug is a nice looking site that few people have a reason to use.
Weplug sprawls a number of well-established spaces. Their competition includes Loopt in the social GPS market, Twitter in micro-blogging, and a plethora of social networking sites.
Anyone who’s been reading this blog for more than a few months knows I’m bullish on mobile social networking.
The space is wide open at this point - no one has created an application that has gotten enough traction to go mainstream. That’s partly because of tech limitations - browser based networks don’t leverage the power of the mobile device, and client based applications are blocked by service providers and handset limitations.
But it’s coming. A few years from now we’ll use our mobile devices to help us remember details of people we know, but not well. And it will help us meet new people for dating, business and friendship. Imagine walking into a meeting, classroom, party, bar, subway station, airplane, etc. and seeing profile information about other people in the area, depending on privacy settings. Picture, name, dating status, resume information, etc. The information that is available would be relevant to the setting - quick LinkedIn-type information for a business meeting v. Facebook dating status for a bar.
That requires a social network that has presence, location and contextual information about you. It needs to know where you are (via GPS or triangulation), if you are in business or personal mode, and similar information for the people around you. It also needs, at a basic level, the ability to sort and browse the people around you based on their picture and name, and what they are looking for (dating, investments, job, friendship). Once this network is established, you’ll know everyone’s name who’s around you (if they choose to share it), and enough basic information to jog your memory if you know them, or meet them if there’s mutual interest. Poking someone on Facebook is great, but “poking” them when you’re in the same bar as them can result in much more immediate social gratification.
The mobile social network that wins will go way beyond, say, Facebook’s iPhone site, which doesn’t leverage location information, or help you meet people around you.
So when mobile social network startups reach out to us, we give them a lot of attention. I waded through a bunch of them in September 2007, and followed up with a look at LimeJuice in December.
Frankly, MySpace and Facebook could lock up this space simply by focusing on it, but as far as I can tell from discussions with execs at both companies, they’re more focused on each other than in dominating the mobile space. That creates an incredible vacuum for a startup.
Start With The iPhone
In February I wrote a post called “Will There Be A (Successful) iPhone-Only Social Network?” and presented an argument that the iPhone SDK presented a compelling opportunity to launch a mobile social network while avoiding the chicken and egg problem that any new network, and particularly a mobile network, would encounter. iPhone penetration in Silicon Valley, and among early adopters, is so high that the application could spread virally among those communities. As the network gains traction, it could expand to Google’s Android platform and grow from there.
iPhone users are the perfect group to launch the network to. They’re passionate and elitist, and will like the idea of being in an iPhone-only club. Go to a party and see a picture and first name of everyone there who’s holding an iPhone - then meet them and add them as friends. Then, once mutual friendship is established, see those people wherever they are in the world, along with presence information telling you what they’re thinking, or up to.
I believe in the idea so much that I explored putting together a team to build a basic network on top of the iPhone SDK. But I abandoned that idea last week when I saw a live demo, on the iPhone, of an upcoming social network that does everything I called for in that February post.
It’s Coming
The startup behind the new application won’t let me disclose their name yet. But the application is awesome. It shows you everyone around you who has it installed on an iPhone (default privacy is set to off, but can be changed). Users can scroll through nearby users, and set filters for men, women or age ranges. If you find someone interesting you can pull up their profile and ping them. If they respond you can start a chat, on the phone or in person. Of course, they can also choose to block you.
Location is based on the triangulation feature of the iPhone, which is accurate enough to get this going. And the startup thinks they’ve found a way around the fact that third party iPhone applications can’t run in the background (meaning you’d have to have the application open, and not use any other iPhone features, to run the social network and see others). They explained the work around in general terms to me, but asked that it remain confidential for now.
As I said, I saw the app running on an iPhone and even the early prototype left me speechless. It will, I believe, prove to be very popular, and very valuable.
The image shows a mockup of the functionality I saw working live on the phone (I should be able to show a photo or video of it running in the next week or two as well). Look for a launch when the iPhone app store opens this summer.
Credit for that awesome image at top of post is to Hank Grebe at MediaSpin.
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.
Loopt has the most tightly integrated and feature rich mobile social networking service we’ve seen, and we’ve seen a bunch.
Loopt’s mobile application lets you broadcast your location even while your phone is closed and send messages or photos between you and your friends. It can do this to a greater degree because of their deal with Sprint/Nextel, which recently went un-exclusive. But a social application isn’t all that useful unless your friends are using it too, and so far Loopt has been limited to the Sprint network. That is, until now.
Loopt is launching a beta program for developers on a new mobile social networking platform. The platform will free user’s data from the network and let developers incorporate it into new SMS, WAP, or mobile location based applications using Loopt’s APIs. Loopt’s API’s will feed geographical data from users who opt into the applications to a developers program. Yahoo’s Brickhouse has been working on a similar GPS platform as well (Fire Eagle), but relies on the programmer to feed the location data into the service. Another location based service, Plazes, doesn’t use GPS, but solves the problem by letting users “bookmark” their location to make broadcasting their movements easier. Loopt says their API will solve the compatibility problems between phones and networks for developers so they only have to worry about building the application.
To participate in the beta, go here and tell them how you’d use the service. They’re working with a group of 15 to 20 developers on designing the first applications already and will be supporting some more carriers as well, although the details hush hush.
However, you can imagine what kinds of services will develop. With location data, you could make smarter search queries, trigger location related messages, or more easily post photos or messages related to your location.
Loopt says their deal with Sprint and related carriers gives them potential exposure to over 50 million users, although they haven’t released any user numbers. Boost, which they originally launched with, has last reported they had 100,000 users and not updated that number in some time.
We’ve been tracking a few emerging mobile-only social networks. All of these services are downloadable applications that run on your mobile phone.
Mobile social network Loopt’s deal with Sprint, however, has given it the distinction of being one of two with automated location updates and deep integration with a U.S. carrier (Helio is the other). This opens up a lot of possibilities for location based services. The deal gave them a lot of advantages over other networks. They could easily relay location information — what we call the “Holy Grail” — and came pre-installed on phones. But the deal also meant only your Sprint friends could join and you need a GPS enabled phone. However, Loopt’s exclusivity agreement is up and they’re looking to expand the service across more carriers and services (even Android).
As part of expanding their reach, Loopt has released a new version of their program that integrates with your address book (like Zyb) and sends status updates to your non-Sprint friends over SMS or AIM. The messages can also attach a link to a map online, so texting “let’s meet for coffee” can also say where you are. As before, it still has the geotagging, messaging, and privacy features we already reported on. I’m sure they’re learning a lot from services like Twitter and the recent Jaiku acquisition.
Loopt has remained tight lipped about who they’re talking to, but the pitch is pretty clear. Competition is driving down mobile voice revenues which Loopt says they can help offset by driving new profits in data plans people pay for to use the program. Currently they make money through $2.99/month subscription plans or by being bundled in with a phone data plan. Location based services and advertising are also other key revenue sources. Loopt says that 51% of all mobile application revenue already comes from location based services.
But it’s not all smooth sailing ahead. While Loopt owns its section of the network, other mobile networks with lower barriers to entry have gained a lot of traction. Twitter has kept a high profile (with funding) and Mig33 has claimed over 7 million registered users. Loopt could learn a great deal from following the lead of these lower friction services.
The DEMO conference is wrapping up here in San Diego and unlike when it began 16 years ago the conference wasn’t dominated by mobile launches. None the less, there were some very interesting mobile services here like ScanR and Realeyes3D image scanning by mobile photo, Flurry’s simple email and RSS on Java phones and Grand Central (which I’ve written about at length).
3Jam and Pinger both launched multiperson SMS services at DEMO. Probably first popularized by Dodgeball, multiperson SMS is a feature (or a company - your call!) that quite a few people are coming out with all at once lately. The following are some short descriptions of eight companies offering multiperson SMS and a table displaying which services offer particular features.
3Jam is funded, relatively straight forward and launched here at DEMO.
Pinger lets users quickly respond to messages by voice and received $3 million from Kleiner Perkins in 2005.
Swarmteams does a whole lot of things, though we weren’t able to get it to work well in testing for our original review. You might have better luck, and if so then this Irish service could well be worth using.
Dodgeball is old school and was acquired by Google in 2005.
Twitter is for groups of friends who want varying levels of instant, automatic updates on each others’ activities. It’s a product of podcasting company Odeo.
Moblabber is a mobile social network that users can receive topical messages from automatically.
There are undoubtedly more companies that offer multi-person SMS, or at least there will be by the time I click publish on this post - but I hope that comparing these seven company’s by feature set will help flesh out a vision of the landscape and where we stand today.
The Features
Mobile presence application Loopt has launched its service tonight. Loopt uses GPS and related data to display the location of a user’s friends along with their presence status (available, away, etc) on maps and lists. Users will be able to request alerts when friends are within a certain distance, send messages to groups of friends within a certain distance and soon will be able to tag and blog physical locations in a way that’s accesible to friends through Loopt. The service is initially available only to Boost Mobile customers.
The company received early funding from Paul Graham’s YCombinator and $5 million in series A from NEA and Sequoia. It has been known previously as Radiate and Flipt.
The future of computing is definitely going to be heavily impacted by hand held mobile devices, so show me something that resembles IM, mobile blogging and group SMS mashed up and I’m interested. I can definitely imagine going downtown to work at a coffee shop, requesting notification if any of my friends came within a few miles of me and having all the more access to the people I know and want to spend time with. There may well come a day when passing near someone important to us, both of us carrying a GPS enabled device in our pockets, and not being aware of each other’s proximity seems absurd.
Loopt includes a Java mobile client and an ajax access point for non-mobile browser use. The company has formed a partnership with youth targeted Boost Mobile, a pay-as-you-go Sprint/Nextel subsidiary, to offer a service called Boost Loopt free for the rest of this year and as a $2.99 monthly add-on service beginning in January. Loopt hopes to expand to more networks soon.
The difference between Loopt and the now Google owned Dodgeball is that Dodgeball is text-message based and seems far less smooth an experience. Another player to watch in this space is Jaiku, which appears to be limited for now to Nokia Series 60 Second Edition phones.
Do I want other people to know where I am by tracking my phone? Too late. Do I want to be able to use that information for my own purposes? You’d better believe it. Do I have any faith that such information would be protected from intrusion by unwelcome parties? Not today and not with the launch of Loopt; it’s just a (smart) UI making the data that’s already available functional for my friends and I. SMS has been a global force for years now, mobile presence could well be the next stage.
In semi-related mobile news, PaidContent is reporting that Newscorp has bought 51% of Verisign’s mobile content network Jamba for $187.5 million.
Super Monkey Ball: It took Sega two weeks to create a version of its popular video game for the iPhone. It will cost $9.99 at the iPhone App Store. Players use the built-in accelerometer to move the character.
Six Apart (TypePad): Blogging from you iPhone? An iPhone announcement from Six Apart is expected today. More details as we get them. Update: Six Apart’s iPhone app lets you blog from your iPhone and add photos taken with the phone’s camera. It makes it easy to create micro-blog posts around a photo by adding a title, category and text. This app will be free for Typepad users. See how Six Apart CEO Chris Alden tried valiantly not to answer Mike’s questions on video when he was cornered right before the Apple keynote:
Cow Music: Built by a single developer, Mark terry, in his time, the app is called Band. It lets you play virtual instruments on the iphone and create music. Instruments include piano, drums, guitars. You play the instruments by banging (lightly) on the iPhone. 
SlingPlayer Mobile: You will soon be able to 
Phanfare: Take pictures on your iPhone, add captions, and share them as slideshows on the Web. 
As part of expanding their reach, Loopt has released a new version of their program that integrates with your address book (like 
Loopt includes a Java mobile client and an ajax access point for non-mobile browser use. The company has formed a partnership with youth targeted Boost Mobile, a pay-as-you-go Sprint/Nextel subsidiary, to offer a service called Boost Loopt free for the rest of this year and as a $2.99 monthly add-on service beginning in January. Loopt hopes to expand to more networks soon.
