Loopt was the first location-based iPhone app to get a lot of buzz. It’s a social network that lets you keep track of where your friends are with the help of the iPhone’s GPS. Since it launched in the App Store on day 1 in July of last year, several other competitors have come along including Google with its Latitude service (though it’s not yet available on the iPhone). Now Loopt appears ready to strike back with Loopt 2.0.
The screenshot we received appears to show what Loopt is going for with this new version. The second button in the toolbar is now “Places,” something which didn’t exist before. A source close to the company says this is a big part of the new version. We hear this could help the company offer more monetizable features, such as coupons.
In the nascent world of mobile social networking, there are the big dogs (Facebook and MySpace) and everyone who wants to be a big dog. Two of the puppies just got bigger. Limbo is buying Brightkite, which all the tech kids are raving about, in a nearly all-stock transaction. It will change its name to Brightkite in a re-branding move, and gain Brightkite’s engineering team and product smarts. Limbo CEO Jonathon Linner will remain as CEO, while Brightkite founders Martin May and Brady Becker will take over product management and design.
Meanwhile, Limbo brings a lot of cash to the table, having just raised a previously undisclosed $9 million round of financing in January, 2009. Nexit Ventrures was the lead, and existing investors Azure Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and New Enterprise Associates also participated. Brightkite, meanwhile, started out as a TechStars startup and was funded with just $1 million in angel money.
Just a housekeeping item: the ridiculous patent infringement lawsuit brought against us and mobile social network Loopt (details here and here) by Earthcomber is history. The company walked away from the lawsuit.
We criticized being included in the lawsuit because we are nothing more than a search filter on Loopt. And the Earthcomber founder appeared to include us out of spite for not giving them as much press as they wanted. From my earlier post:
I called Earthcomber President Jim Brady this morning to verify the lawsuit. At first he wouldn’t answer - all he did was try to explain how he’s been wronged by Loopt. When pressed he did confirm that the lawsuit was filed, but quickly added that he didn’t really mean to press it with us. He wants to go to court with Loopt, but is willing to quickly work something out with us to make this go away, he told me, hinting that he’d like to partner with us. He also said he’s been desperately trying to get me on the phone but hasn’t been able to, so he decided to sue us instead.
Mobile social network Loopt goes live on three AT&T phones today, which was the last major carrier holdout. Loopt is now available in the U.S. on Sprint, Verizon, Metro PCS, T-Mobile and Boost. The service is free for a year and then a $4/month fee kicks in.
You can get Loopt for free on the iPhone (and there is a TechCrunch version), the Blackberry and Android as well.
A big reason they’re hesitant - privacy concerns. Both companies have had their run ins with the press and state attorneys general. Mobile social network is all about location, and finding people around you. That’s not where Facebook and MySpace want to go right now.
Loopt is in the news today. In addition to getting a nice surge in iPhone downloads after being featured in an Apple TV commercial, we’ve heard that they’ve hired investment bank Allen & Co. to represent them in a sale or financing transaction.
A sale in this economic environment is extremely unlikely, so we’re guessing they’re looking to add to the $13.3 million they’ve already raised from Sequoia Capital and New Enterprise Associates. The valuation on this round is likely to be north of $250 million.
Allen & Co. Managing Director Dave Wehner is the guy pitching the deal, say our sources. He’s tends to get results - representing Bebo in their $850 million sale to AOL, Powerset in their $100 millionish sale to Microsoft and (we believe) Ning in their half billion dollar valuation financing round. Among others.
Facebook and MySpace have great mobile apps. At least, they’re great if you’re satisfied with a subset of the features you get on their normal websites. But they don’t yet take advantage of location/presence features on the iPhone and other platforms. We said this summer that they ignore location at their peril, and we still believe it.
Loopt, one of a handful of location-aware iPhone social networks (and the one we are partnered with), is currently (meaning over the recent period, undefined by Apple) the 20th most popular free iPhone application, and is being downloaded more often than both Facebook and MySpace. Facebook is no. 25, and MySpace is no. 43. This is despite the fact that MySpace and Facebook heavily promote their iPhone apps to their 100 million plus users. Loopt doesn’t have that deep base of existing users to market to. All time, Loopt is the fourth most popular iPhone social networks after Facebook, MySpace and AIM.
We’ve had serious legal threats five times in the past, from YouTube, Marvel, Rivals, Mediascrape and my personal favorite, Richard Figueroa. None of those threats went to court because all of them were absurd, and we don’t back down under any circumstances (unless we’re in the wrong, which we never were).
But today, based on the calls I’ve received from CNET and the San Jose Mercury News, we’ve actually been sued. Earthcomber, the holder of a very shaky mobile patent, first sued Loopt last week, and yesterday added us in an amended complaint. They didn’t even bother with making nasty threats before they filed the complaint. They just sent it into the court and started making calls to the press.
A scantly known startup out of Chicago called Earthcomber has filed a rather absurd patent infringement suit against Loopt, a location-based social network with a substantially higher profile in the Valley and elsewhere.
The suit claims that Loopt has infringed an Earthcomber patent, filed in June 2003 and issued in July 2006, that outlines “a system and method for locating and notifying a user of a person, place or thing having attributes matching the user’s stated preferences.”
Here at TechCrunch we’re big believers in mobile social networks. In February I wrote about how the iPhone is the perfect ecosystem to have it’s own social network (awesome device and software, location aware, elitist users). And in April I showed a teaser of an upcoming social network from Loopt that did everything I had asked for: iPhone only to start, location aware so that you could meet new people around you.
Loopt has now launched all of those features, and they’ve built a special version of the service just for TechCrunch. Once you’ve added the application to your iPhone you can see where your friends are and what they are up to. And you can also meet TechCrunch Loopt members who are near you even if they aren’t your friend yet.
Sign up here, or do a search for LooptTC on iTunes (links to iTunes apps currently don’t work).
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 (see our comparison chart). 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”:
Facebook and MySpace, the two largest social networks, eagerly launched new iPhone applications last Friday. Both quickly shot up the top apps list. Apple has since turned off the download count feature, but Facebook is no. 7 on the free list, MySpace is no. 11. But while both applications are useful for heavy users, they won’t drive new users to the services because they failed to leverage the killer iPhone feature - location awareness.
The applications are pretty good mobile versions of the standard experience. MySpace, which we reviewed last week, provides users with most key features of the service, and they’ve added some nice touches like the ability to upload photos from the iPhone camera. You can download the application here (and add me as a friend).
Facebook’s iPhone app is clearly better. They had a bit of a head start with their web app last year that was at the time the finest example of an iPhone-specific website. The new iPhone app was created by the same guy - Joe Hewitt - and includes deeper integration with the phone. Tap on a friend’s name and call them. Or use the included Facebook chat application and skip those text messages. One big problem with Facebook on the iPhone - it takes forever to load and the application crawls, just like the web version.
Location? Hello?
But both MySpace and Facebook miss the real opportunity to drive usage growth on the iPhone - location awareness. The reason? Privacy concerns. The lost opportunity? Huge potential user growth and connections.
Social networks today rely on friends of friends or real world connections to drive growth. But a handful of iPhone-only social networks actually help drive new connections in the real world. And the backbone of those applications is location awareness.
I’ve written about this opportunity repeatedly in the last year. In February I speculated on the demand for an iPhone-only social network to drive real world social interactions: “I think an iPhone-only social network…would be a huge hit…if it had presence awareness and was able to tell you both where your friends are and what they are up to. And also let you meet new people around you who were open to it.”
In April I saw a demo of the new product Loopt was building for the iPhone. It had all the features I suggested, and more.
Users of these new social networks can choose to notify other users when they are physically close to them, and show a picture, first or full name, and basic profile information. If you’re both in the same bar or at the same conference, you can browse and filter other users to find a date or do a business deal.
And you know how awkward it is when you run into someone that you sort of know but have forgotten their name or what they do? Your phone can see them coming and alert you. That means you can have richer conversations with people you are acquainted with but don’t know very well.
These new social networks can help you meet new people, remember details of the people you already know, and find your friends when they’re nearby.
MySpace and Facebook are sitting on the sidelines while these new networks try to get a foothold. And it’s all because of privacy concerns and fear of litigation.
Privacy (and those pesky Attorneys General)
The media loves nothing more than to talk about sexual predators lurking around the big social networks. Both MySpace and Facebook have had to make big changes to their privacy policies, particularly how they set up accounts for minors. So when the product guys say “hey, let’s add a feature so that any MySpace user can see the basic profiles of any other MySpace users near them,” the lawyers freak out.
Certainly privacy rights need to be considered, and Loopt has already had some problems with unintended invites going out (although this hasn’t happened to me and I’ve been using it since launch). But they can be addressed by allowing users to opt out of showing others their location, or only showing it to certain types of people (by age range, sex, friends of friends, etc.). And minors can be permanently segmented from older age groups as well.
To be fair, both MySpace and Facebook have said they will eventually roll out location based services to help users meet each other. It’s unlikely any of the early networks will get an insurmountable lead on the new platform anytime soon, so they can take their time with their lawyers to make them comfortable. But if they wait too long, or release overly-restrictive products, that may change.
We’ll have more to say on this shortly - our goal is to have iPhone users at our meetups and conferences be able to network with each other, swap contact information, and meet new people. Hopefully by our big August Capital party on July 25, TechCrunch readers will be using their iPhones for a little social networking.
All of us iPhone fanatics are just getting our hands on the new apps, but I’ve already found one that I’m sure to consider indispensable within the next few months: Facebook’s new app.
Why is it so compelling? Because it almost eliminates the need to maintain a separate contacts list on my phone. While Facebook’s web app for the iPhone was cool enough, the native app basically transforms Facebook into a mobile directory with rich information about your friends.
If you’re even semi-serious about using Facebook to keep track of your friends, you may never have to click the “Phone” icon to dial them up. Just hit the Facebook icon and move over to the “Friends” tab. You’ll see all of your Facebook friends laid out, and when you click on their names, their contact info appears in the iPhone’s customary user interface.
Tap a friend’s phone number to call them (or hit their email address to write). The only time this method falls through is when a friend has decided not to enter the requisite contact info into their profile (something unnecessarily cautious, in my opinion, if you’ve set up your privacy settings correctly).
This application has the potential to eliminate the need for two other native iPhone features as well: SMS and Email. The app comes with Facebook Chat baked right in so you can send instant messages to friends who are currently online (either at their computers or on their phones). As soon as Facebook figures out a way to keep you “online” and available for chat even when the app is closed - and hooks Chat to the new push notification service so you’re aware of messages as they come in - I’ll be one step closer to saving that extra $10 per month I pay AT&T to let me send ludicrously overpriced text messages. Facebook should be working on a Chat-to-SMS (or Message-to-SMS) conversion feature that can be used to message with my friends who don’t own iPhones, or any other email-equipped smartphone.
As for email, Facebook’s messaging system is also built right into the app making it unnecessary to send lengthy messages through email (who wants to keep track of friends’ email addresses anyway when you can look them up by name?).
Joe Hewitt has also suggested on Facebook’s blog that the application will also become location-aware within the next few months:
The first version of Facebook for iPhone is just a glimpse of the future. For instance, the iPhone has the ability to find where you are located, and we are looking for ways to let you opt-in to share your location and discover nearby friends. We’re developing this and several other exciting new features that we’ll release in the coming months.
Looks like Loopt and all of the other location-based social networks are going to get a run for their money by the biggest player in town.
I have no fear that Facebook will thrive in the iPhone 2.0 world given this strong start. It’ll just need to find a way to get its developers involved since the platform is noticeably absent from the first version of this app.
Learn how to install the new iPhone software (which works on both the old and new models) here. Cross your fingers that you won’t lose any data during the update (I had no problems, however). Also check out the new MySpace iPhone app which, while quite functional, doesn’t replace the contacts list or provide chat.
Update: If you want to take a screenshot of an iPhone app, follow the instructions here.
Update 2: It looks like Facebook’s iPhone app doesn’t know how to properly render messages with quotations in them. Hopefully such obvious bugs will be worked out over the next few days.
It’s not official quite yet, but the iPhone App Store is live and you can download version 2.0 of the iPhone software - which is all you need to run the 552 applications currently available.
We’ve been gathering videos and overviews of many of the applications and have held them until now. We received demo vidoes for dozens of applications, ranging from basic games to complex GPS-enabled social networking applications. Below are some of our favorites.
Among the apps that we didn’t include below (primarily because of their simplicity) are Recorder (a voice recorder), Movies (movie showtimes), and iMaze (a basic maze game).
Social Networking On The iPhone:
The iPhone, with cult-like users and location aware technology, is the perfect social networking device. Earlier this year we speculated that someone would emerge with a killer social networking app for the iPhone. It turns out that there are lots of contenders.
Loopt
Loopt - We’ve been tracking Loopt’s efforts around their iPhone application for months now. In April we posted early screen shots of the app without saying who had built it. Think of Loopt as a simple social network to find local businesses, message friends and send status updates with where you are (using the iPhones location technology). And a key difference with Loopt and many of the other networks below: you can meet new people who are nearby, if they choose to share that information. If everyone used this, you could see who’s single in a bar before you approach them (and flirt with them by phone first), and know the first name and job of everyone at that cocktail hour at the tech conference. We’re big fans of Loopt, and will have more news on them later today. For now, download the free application here.
Limbo
Limbo - Limbo is another geo-aware social network that behaves like a mashup of Twitter, Loopt, and Whrrl. One of the app’s most compelling features is its grid-like diagram that visually groups your friends according to what they’re doing (for example, all of your friends that are Out Drinking will be lumped together, even if they aren’t necessarily drinking in the same place). The app accomplishes this feat by forcing users to select from a predefined hierarchal list of activities (while this might sound restrictive, the list is pretty comprehensive). This categorization allows users to see what they’re friends are up to without having to sift through each of their messages.
On the geo-positioning front, Limbo allows users to interact users who are within a close radius (about a quarter mile), in a manner that is similar to Loopt. You can download the app here for free.
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.
Loopt was the first location-based iPhone app to get a lot of buzz. It’s a social network that lets you keep track of where your friends are with the help of the iPhone’s GPS. Since it launched in the App Store on day 1 in July of last year, several other competitors have come along including Google with its Latitude service (though it’s not yet available on the iPhone). Now Loopt appears ready to strike back with Loopt 2.0.
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