GyPSii signs deal to try and crack India's vast mobile market. It won't.

Gypsii
Europe: Netherlands-based mobile startup GyPSii, a geo-location and social networking service provider for mobile phones, has signed an agreement with Broadway Pvt. Ltd, to offer GyPSii in India. This is a market with 233 million mobile subscribers which grows at a monthly rate of over 8 million. Broadway provides direct access to the content and advertising reach of ISP India Online Netcom, so it sounds like a distribution and marketing deal. GyPSii is owned by GeoSentric, a developer of GPS-linked social networking technology, which secured $13.1 million in an round led by Horizon Group and Schroders Private Bank late last year. GeoSentric is headed up by CEO Dan Harple a veteran in Internet space who, aside from several startups in recent years, was once Senior Vice President at Netscape. There are lots of startups trying to crack mobile, location-based social networking and I go into some of them here, here and here. Frankly, the vast majority of them will fail because without distribution and scale no-one will start to use them in the first place.