John Peattie was worried that some of his friends would be late for a 7:30 p.m. movie so he turned to his cellphone to track their whereabouts.
With one click, the 22-year-old chemical engineer pulled up an electronic map of the San Francisco area with his friends' locations pinpointed. From the map, he could tell that some were as much as 45 minutes away. "We basically knew they weren't going to make it," he said.
The new buddy-tracking tool is from Loopt Inc. and is available from wireless operator Boost Mobile, owned by Sprint Nextel Corp., Reston, Va. Loopt is one of a host of companies putting a fresh spin on social-networking services by adding in a new element: phones equipped with Global Positioning System receivers. GPS is used to determine an object's location based on how long it takes for a signal to reach the object from satellites. Loopt alone has roughly 100,000 users since it kicked off last fall. [Cellphone]
Many young people are obsessed with two things: social networking and their mobile phones. Companies have been trying to cash in on combining them, but up until now, nobody has found an approach that has really caught on. News Corp.'s MySpace and Facebook Inc. recently launched offerings that help people connect to their Web sites from their phones but the services don't allow users to do much more than they could do online.
Now, GPS technology is adding a new dimension to wireless social-networking services, letting cellphone users find each others' locations -- just as GPS-equipped phones are becoming more prevalent, partly in response to federal rules that require carriers to make it easier for emergency officials to locate cellphone users. An estimated 63% of mobile phones sold in North America in 2007 will have GPS or assisted GPS functions, up from 55% of phones sold in 2006, according to market researcher Gartner Research.
"The race is just beginning in this area," says Clint Wheelock, vice president of research for ABI Research.
Indeed, Sprint Nextel has launched "Family Locator," a $9.99-a-month service that lets users track the locations of family members -- or at least their cellphones. (The company is marketing the service as a way to provide "peace of mind" for parents.) And a host of start-up businesses and wireless companies, including Helio, jointly owned by South Korea's SK Telecom Co. and EarthLink Inc., of Atlanta, are turning to the technology to tap the social-networking trend, helping users find their friends on the screen using a combination of GPS technology and cell-tower triangulation.
GPS-equipped services like Loopt that help users find their friends' mobile phones generally work anywhere in the U.S. and can zoom in to show a city or zoom out to show the country. For now, the appeal of the services seems largely limited to urban areas or college campuses -- places where users are more likely to meet up with friends on the fly.
Services that broadcast a user's location to other people do raise some serious privacy and security questions. A number of parents and privacy advocates worry that some people could sign up for, or hack into, the new services and employ them to stalk users. FRIEND SPOTTING • The News: Wireless providers launch services that help customers find friends' locations in near-real time. • The Background: It is happening due to the spread of GPS-equipped phones. • What's Next: To succeed, services must ward off privacy concerns and strike deals with more carriers.
Some privacy advocates also are worried that the government could use location information to spy on people. "Accurate location information can reveal many things about people's lifestyle they may wish to keep quiet," says Kevin Bankston, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy-rights group based in San Francisco. "And young people may be likely to freely advertise their location without considering the implications."
"Location services do raise some special privacy concerns," says Jeffrey Nelson, a spokesman for Verizon Wireless, which is jointly owned by Verizon Communications Inc. of New York and Vodafone Group PLC of the U.K. In response, Verizon Wireless has implemented a host of privacy measures. For instance, to sign up for a location-based service like "VZ Navigator," an application that uses GPS to tell users where they are, what is around them and give them driving directions, a user must accept the service's terms and conditions, which includes allowing Verizon Wireless to gather information about the location of their device. The company says it doesn't store any GPS information after users close out the session.
The GPS feature, which is built into the phone, isn't always active. It generally starts tracking when the user launches location-based service. Even when applications like Loopt are running, users can elect not to have their information shared with other users by pressing a button.
Sam Altman, 21, hatched the idea for Loopt two years ago while a sophomore at Stanford University, where he is currently taking a leave of absence. He was looking for two friends he wanted to have lunch with and wondered: wouldn't it be cool if I could look at my cellphone and see whether they were already nearby?
At the time, he turned to his classmate Nick Sivo, now Loopt's chief technology officer, who told him the system he envisioned was impossible because GPS phones weren't widely available. That has changed.
Once users download the Loopt application to their cellphones, and invite and verify their friends, they can click on the application icon to view a map that will display their friends' locations as green dots. (Their friends also must have Boost and be members of Loopt.) They also can go to another screen to look at messages, or photos, the user's friends have tagged to their locations.
There are other players in the field. Rave Wireless Inc., a New York mobile services and applications provider, is using GPS technology to power a new service called "Entourage" that allows users to make their location available to friends in their Rave address book. Kamida Inc.'s Socialight service requires you to tell it where you are by sending it a text-message with your location. Once you "check-in" by doing so, it allows users to leave text-messages for other people who have checked into the vicinity.
Write to Jessica E. Vascellaro at jessica.vascellaro@wsj.com
No comments:
Post a Comment