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… → Read More
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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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. → 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. → 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. → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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. → 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… → Read More
Over the past several months I’ve moderated or been on a number of panels with many of the top players in the location space. A common theme keeps recurring. When someone brings up rivalries between any of the companies, it is always downplayed in favor of an “everyone wins” message. I’ve been skeptical of that since day one, but as the space has exploded, there have been signs that a lot of… → Read More
Back in January, we noted that Loopt was sending around a deck to advertisers showing off a new product. The product was focused on check-in specials (the kind popularized by Foursquare) and was entirely built on top of Facebook’s social graph. Finally, nearly 6 months later, that app is here.
Loopt Star is in some ways a simplified version of Loopt’s regular location-based service. Rather than… → Read More
Last month, Erick wrote a post calling for the creation of an open database of places. As location-based services continue to gain popularity, each of them is building up these massive databases of places themselves, and this is going to become an issue as services like Twitter and potentially Facebook attempt to federate all this data. And Erick is hardly alone in thinking about this — nearly… → Read More
Yesterday, AdAge ran a story that Facebook was preparing to roll out its first true location-based service (beyond its for-fun Presence thing). The story said that the social network was partnering with McDonald’s for a special Facebook app that would allow people to check-in to restaurants and get deals. But apps that use location to emulate Foursquare on Facebook have limited appeal. Much more… → Read More
Location-based social network Loopt has just updated its iPhone and BlackBerry applications, adding a hybrid map feature that allows you to view a single map (seen at right) that plots nearby points of interest, friends, and events all at once. The new update also brings LooptPulse, which the company has already launched for the iPhone and iPad, to the BlackBerry.
LooptPulse, which was first … → Read More
Location is all the rage right now. The iPad is all the rage right now. So it makes sense that when you combine the two, you’re going to get something awesome. But there’s just one little problem. The iPad, with its 9.7 inch screen is way too big to fit in your pocket. To take it with you, you’ll have to carry it in a bag of some sort. And you’re probably not going to whip it out in the middle of… → Read More
I didn’t have the same problems at SXSW this year that some people did. Was it too crowded at some events? Sure. But there were plenty of alternative things to do. Did some of the keynotes bomb? Yes. But there were plenty of other things to listen to. Did AT&T fail? No. Actually, they did an awesome job keeping the network up. Instead, I had a problem of a different kind: check-in… → Read More
Editor’s note: This post was written by Joe Stump, the co-founder of SimpleGeo, a geolocation infrastructure company. While much of the focus in location these days is on the front-end side of things, SimpleGeo focuses on the backend, allowing startups to very easily get started with geolocation. We asked Stump to weigh-in with his thoughts on the front-end side of things, and the general state of… → Read More
The last of the four location based social networks I had a chance speak with at SXSW Interactive 2010 was actually one of the early services into the space. You may remember seeing Loopt on one of the many iPhone television commercials to dominate the airwaves in the last year or so. Loopt’s original broadcast model was a bit different than the more pervasive check in model we see… → Read More
SXSW Interactive is now over. While a clear winner in the “Location War” has yet to be determined, the truth is that many of the location-based services won, as all of them got a huge amount of exposure over the past week. And look for that trend to continue in a big way, as Apple is now highlighting several of them in the App Store.
As you can see in the images in this post, Apple is… → Read More
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