Location-based service Loopt has been allowed its first patent, and it could be a big one.
The patent, as described, seems relevant to numerous existing products, including Google’s Latitude. In layman’s terms, it describes using your location to display relevant ads and offers on top of a map, as an interstitial, or as a text ad — another claim also discusses displaying where your friends are on the same map. The patent was first filed in 2007, with Loopt founder Sam Altman listed as the primary inventor (Loopt got its start long before the likes of Foursquare and Google Latitude).
The patent, which is listed as Application Number 11/931,113 by the US Patent and Trademark Office, still hasn’t technically been granted. But it has been “allowed,” which is a precursor to being granted. At this point, it could still be a few months before the patent is granted, assuming that Loopt pays all the proper fees and files the proper paperwork.
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Location-based service Loopt is getting some nice promotion for the next three months, courtesy of San Francisco’s International Airport and Virgin America. And it might make your trip to the airport a bit less expensive.
Beginning this week, travelers going through SFO’s new Terminal 2 will be able to check-in on Loopt to receive an offer from one of six businesses located within the terminal, including Kiehl’s and Natalie’s Candy Jar — as well as hefty discounts from Virgin America itself. The difference between this and most other check-in based offers is that the deal you receive is chosen randomly from one of these merchants (you just need to check-in at Terminal 2).
The promotion is being coordinated by Virgin America and Loopt, but travelers flying on American (which is also based in Terminal 2 at SFO) will be able to score the check-in deals as well. → Read More
It was almost exactly one year ago that Facebook launched Places, their location-based offering. Reading the press at the time, you would have thought it was going to be the Foursquare-killer, the Gowalla-strangler, the Loopt-beheader, etc. Nevermind that Facebook partnered with all of them for the launch — those guys were done.
Fast forward to today: Foursquare recently raised a large round of funding valuing them at $600 million. And Facebook is killing off Places.
To be clear, Facebook is not ducking out of the location game itself. In fact, you could say that they’re doubling-down on it. But they are moving away from the game that the “check-in” services have been playing. And a result of that is Places being killed off and being replaced by new “Nearby” area, as Jason outlined along with the bigger privacy changes today. → Read More
Loopt has gone through quite a few incarnations, and this morning that tradition continued as the mobile social network announced it was entering the daily deals space with a service called U-Deals. In essence, U-Deals lets users request their own deals. After submitting an idea for a deal, users can then drum up interest by way of social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, etc. → Read More
Mobile social network Loopt is turning on the revenue streams by going after the daily deal space. It already partnered with Groupon to show users nearby Groupon Now deals via notifications, but today it is launching its own twist on daily deals. Loopt is calling them U-Deals.
Instead of going out and getting a large inventory of deals at local merchants, U-Deals lets users request their own deals. Once a deal hits a tipping point, then Loopt will contact the business and request the deal. This will require a sales force, but not one as big as a traditional daily deal provider. “One of the things we like about this is that it’s neither self-serve nor a pure sales force model,” says Loopt CEO Sam Altman. “In our beta testings, businesses respond well to a phone call like ‘we have a check for $2000 and 100 new customers for you if you agree to this deal.’” → Read More
Loopt a checkin app that seems to be pulling out all the stops, has now integrated with Groupon Now! in Chicago in order to provide users withlocationally relevant realtime deals around them, notifying them when they are near a deal.
While the plan is to notify users of deals when the app isn’t even open, the time sensitive deals will also appear on place pages within Loopt, so users can see and share with friends their favorite relevant deals in the vicinity. → Read More
With a little over a week until SXSW begins in Austin, Texas, our inboxes have been hemorrhaging with seemingly every startup under the sun attempting to launch something in time for the festival. Many of these are app-related. And specifically, many are iPhone app-related, which means they need extra time to get approved by Apple. And that means getting things out there this week, just in case. And so it begins.
Today, the location-based service Loopt is launching a new feature which will definitely entice users to check out the app at SXSW: Push Deals.
Yes, the Loopt Android and iPhone apps will now be able to send you deals in realtime based on your location by way of push notifications. This means that if you’re walking by a restaurant and it’s a slow night, they can hit a button to send out a notification to give you a deal to come in. This works on a network like Loopt (as opposed to Foursquare) because the app uses background location to keep track of you. → Read More
It was almost exactly two years ago that Google launched Latitude, their location-based service. Two years may not seem like a long time, but it’s “the equivalent of a decade in location services,” Latitude PM Ken Norton jokes. Most importantly, it was just before Foursquare launched to the world at SXSW in 2009. That changed the entire game, literally, as Google CEO Eric Schmidt likes to say. You see, it brought the idea of the “check-in” into play. And that ended up being the idea that launched a thousand location-based services. Today, finally, Google is getting on board with that idea.
Yes, the check-in is coming to Latitude — finally.
Latitude at its core has always been about sharing your best available location with people on a continuous basis. In other words, it was a service that relied on location updates running constantly in the background. “It has been good for seeing where you are, but not seeing where you ARE,” is now Norton puts it. In other words, you could see that a friend was at a place on a map, but not that they were at a Starbucks. To find that out for sure, you’d still have to send them a text. → Read More
Much has already been written about how Loopt was perhaps a bit too early to the location game for their own good. But that doesn’t mean they’re not out there still trying new things to keep their over 4 million users and entice new ones to join. The latest such effort is Loopt 4.0, their latest mobile app.
The first thing you’ll notice about Loopt 4.0 is that it has been entirely redesigned. More importantly, the app has been significantly simplified, to clean up the user experience. On the main screen you can now quickly jump to five areas: Me, Settings, Places, Friends, and Map. The last three are the most important because that’s where you will check-in and see where your friends are. → Read More
Google is bleeding talent. As companies mature, that tends to happen. But the fact that a large number are defecting to rival Facebook clearly has Google worried — enough to offer massive retention bonuses and across-the-board salary increases. But it’s not totally stopping the talent drain, as another Director of Engineering has left. But Google can relax a bit as at least he’s not going to Facebook.
Location-based service Loopt has hired Aditya Palande to be their new Vice President of Engineering. He’s leaving Google after just about three and a half years there. Most recently, he was in charge of the entire portfolio of applications in the CRM space for the search giant. In total, he has about 20 years of engineering experience at various companies. → Read More
When Facebook launched Places, their entry into the location space, the headlines made it seem as if every startup player in the field was about to go extinct. Obviously, that didn’t happen. Instead, the playing field has largely stayed the same — though slowly, but surely, those startups are now integrating with Facebook Places in order to get access to Facebook’s massive social graph. The latest is Loopt, and they’re going deep.
With a lot of these location startups, you check-in and you can push that check-in to Facebook. This technically checks you in to Facebook Places as well, but what it really does is create a new object for the place you’re at on the other service within Facebook’s graph. With Loopt’s new integration, you’ll check-in to a place and it will find that place on Facebook Places, and check you in there. → Read More
Sometimes the titles just write themselves. On Tuesday Virgin America and Loopt partnered to offer people two-for-one tickets to Cancun or Los Cabos from California. All you had to do was check in on Loopt at SFO, LAX or one of a variety of taco trucks in San Francisco and Los Angeles in a four hour window.
So how did it go? Loopt says 1,300 people checked in to a single taco truck in San Francisco, and 80% of those people have already bought tickets on Virgin America for flights. It was Virgin’s fifth highest revenue day ever, says Loopt (we’re confirming with Virgin). → Read More
Heavy Foursquare users, you have a new app to get immediately. Future Checkin is an app that allows you to check-in to your favorite Foursquare venues automatically when you’re near them. You don’t have to do a thing besides simply have your phone on you and this app will check you in while running in the background with iOS 4.
Developer Tim Sears says he was actually inspired to make this app by our posts about iOS 4 background location and check-in fatigue. Check-in fatigue in particular is a growing problem. A number of heavy users of Foursquare that I know (myself included) have been complaining in recent months that it’s getting a bit tedious to have to pull out your phone each time to check-in to a venue. Particularly venues that you frequent. Future Checkin absolutely solves that. → Read More
At Google I/O in May, the search giant indicated that they were about to take their commitment to location to the next level. Sure, Latitude had been around for a while, but everyone knew that Google could do more in the space. The announcement of some new location APIs seemed to a big part of the solution. And now comes the fun part.
Today on their Geo blog, Google is announcing that they’re beginning to open the Places API for business. The first developers getting access? Those working on check-in services. → Read More
“Location Check in is so 2010,” Mark Cuban writes today on his blog. His thought is that facial recognition hardware/software installed in public venues is going to replace the need for users to actually check-in to a place.
I absolutely agree. But I think we’re ten years away from that happening. And maybe more.
If you’ve seen the Steven Spielberg movie Minority Report, it has a similar technology to what Cuban envisions. At a few points, main character John Anderton (Tom Cruise) is walking through a public place and a retina scanner picks up his unique eye signature and offers up customized advertisements and specials for him. “John Anderton, you could use a Guinness right about now!” American Express recognizes that Anderton has been a card member since 2037. → Read More
“Foursquare gets all the hype.” It’s something I hear just about every day from just about every other location-based startup. And it’s true, though I would argue that it’s warranted — and investors seem to agree. But it’s also important to keep some perspective. While Foursquare is just shy of 2 million users, other services like MyTown have quickly surpassed that number. Same with Google Latitude, which is at 3 million. And you can put Loopt on that list as well, as today they’ve hit 4 million total users.
Loopt was one of the first location-based services to get a lot of hype — even getting on stage at the Apple event first talking about the App Store way back when. But as we’ve noted numerous times, they started out at a disadvantage because the iPhone didn’t allow third-party apps to run in the background. And that was Loopt’s model, continuous location updates. But with iOS 4, the iPhone does finally allow for that functionality — and specially for background location. And Loopt is benefiting from it. → Read More
As iPhone apps push out their updates to be compatible with the new iOS 4, most are focusing on adding simple fast app switching capabilities. Many are also giving their apps a quick new coat of polish to make them look a bit nicer on the new Retina display found on the iPhone 4. The location-based service Gowalla is focusing heavily on the latter.
Version 2.2 of Gowalla, which just went live in the App Store, is the first version of the app that is iOS 4 and iPhone 4-compatible. In the update notes, Gowalla, which has always been more design-oriented compared to its competitors, remarks on their excitement for the new Retina display: → Read More
As you’ve undoubtedly heard by now, iOS 4 is out and spreading across iPhones like wildfire. With it, comes the ability for third-party apps to run certain tasks in the background. One of those tasks is background location — an awesome feature which we previewed in our review of Loopt 3.0 earlier today. But Loopt has been in the location game for a long time — what about startups that want to get into location right now and support the newest functionality? SimpleGeo has you covered.
The location infrastructure startup is today adding to its array of options, iOS 4 location support. With it, companies will be able to implement background location services for iOS 4 with a few simple code tweaks. How easy is it to implement with SimpleGeo? Geofencing, the ability to track when a user crosses a certain location-based plane, will take about six lines of code, co-founder Joe Stump tells us. Background Tracking will take about 30 lines of code. From what I hear, this is much, much simpler than trying to write this stuff yourself. And this is all done in SimpleGeo’s cloud. → Read More
When Loopt first launched on the iPhone alongside the App Store in 2008, it looked to be an awesome new location-based service. Apple clearly agreed, as they gave the app plenty of face time: demo slots on stage at major events, appearances in commercials, promotion in the App Store, etc. But the early version of Loopt had a fatal flaw: to work properly, the app had to be running all the time. Now, this wasn’t really Loopt’s flaw, since the iPhone did not allow third-party applications to run in the background — but it was still a flaw. Today, that flaw gets corrected — sort of.
The new version of Loopt, 3.0, which is set to appear in the App Store at some point today, is built to use Apple’s new iOS 4 software (formerly known as iPhone OS 4). The biggest new addition to the software is the ability for third-party apps to run processes in the background. Yes, this is somewhat limited, but included in what you can do is location-updating in the background. And Loopt 3.0 takes full advantage of that. But at the same time, it also still offers the functionality that proved to be more popular on the iPhone: check-ins. → Read More
Yesterday, Robert Scoble wrote a post about “Foursquare’s Yelp problem.” It’s an interesting read, with some good thoughts about how Foursquare can withstand feature-copying from a much larger rival. He asked for my thoughts, so I figured I’d jot some down here. Most importantly, his post got me thinking about the next phase of location, which I think we’re just about to enter.
First, Scoble’s thought that Foursquare might be in trouble because Yelp copied its check-in badge idea seems a bit premature to me. It was a much bigger deal when they added the whole check-in concept back in January, but the fact that Foursquare has started growing faster than ever since that point shows they have an advantage over Yelp in the realm. That advantage is that they have a social graph built for location, Yelp does not (yet). → Read More
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