

Loopt (YC 2005) featured in iPhone TV ad - wayne
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teW0v-XpdVU

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dangrover
The icon for a game I wrote (Otis) appears briefly on the home screen in the
ad, before they start Loopt!

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ivankirigin
I was very excited for loopt, but it's actually pretty useless. There is no
backgrounding of processes on the iPhone, meaning there is no push status
updates.

That means a collection of what your friends are doing and where they are is
usually weeks out of date. I have 30 friends in Loopt, all early adopter geeks
with iphones. None have updated their status recently.

Add to this that it doesn't feed status in from twitter and facebook. You can
push your loopt status to twitter though, making it a slightly cynical
integration.

Part of the problem is the iphone and the walled garden. I'd love to see an
unlocked iphone run loopt to constantly push my location.

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mlinsey
When is the push-notification service that Apple talked about coming online?
They'd have to go through Apple (and I don't know if they'll be charging), but
it could work.

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ivankirigin
I think push/pull terms get confusing. Push often means servers can tell you
something. Like push email is a notification that you have email.

What this requires is a frequent and periodic push to the servers from a
background process. This means the app process setup needs to change, because
in my understanding, the apps can't have running processes when you're not
looking at them. They start fresh every time you open them.

Push email will probably come before persistent apps. It's also more
compelling to apple because it would mean they could take a bigger chunk out
of blackberry.

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jambarama
Wow, that's like twitter & facebook combined. And on steroids. That's a really
scary app.

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aneesh
Pretty cool. The ad was all about Loopt and they didn't even have to pay for
it!

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jkent
Can you justify that claim?

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arockwell
Considering how expensive national tv ads are I think its unlikely Loopt paid
apple anything for them. Loopt seems to have a prety good relationship with
Apple since they were featured at the Apple's developer conference keynote a
few months back.

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dc2k08
well done to those guys but that is one app i would never want to own. talk
about a tag!

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DaniFong
Loopt is strictly permissions based, and built to be secure from the ground
up. You could, for example install it, along with a couple friends, to help
locate each other at a concert or some big festival (this is really handy),
and shut off broadcasting, or just ditch it later. It doesn't need to violate
privacy; you have the ability to broadcast your location when you want to be
found, and only to whom you want to be found by.

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axod
Do you not realise just how much fun it is to stand at one end of a stadium
frantically waving for half an hour with your cellphone, trying to locate
other people you know?

Talk about taking the fun out of it!

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DaniFong
It's not one of my favorite games, I have to say. :-p

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omouse
The song, if anyone is interested, is by The Submarines, it's called "You Me
and the Bourgeoisie": <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYvt0boSRXQ>

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axod
How does loopt make money from this? Does the app cost?

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mlinsey
The app does not cost money.

I don't know what Loopt's business model is but I would imagine a location-
aware mobile ad platform would be pretty valuable.

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axod
If they can get people to use it, and get them to put up with ads, perhaps.

It's as if "location-aware" is some magic buzz word these days.

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mlinsey
You can call it a magic buzz word, but I think it's common sense. There's a
whole existing segment of the offline advertising market that is built around
marketing things close to you. Meanwhile, people routinely use their
smartphone to look for places to eat, things to do, places to buy things, etc.

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timr
Heh...just saw that on TV. They're running it every ten minutes on certain
cable channels.

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babul
That is a very cool way to have your product demoed (and reach the mainstream
masses).

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fallentimes
I still have yet to meet any East Coasters who use Loopt (how twitterish).
Hopefully this changes soon.

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johnrob
I think facebook status updating is the twitter for the masses.

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omouse
Which is unfortunate because Facebook is kind of a walled garden :-/

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kylec
Looks cool. I just wish it was available for the iPod touch as well.

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maryrosecook
No GPS on iPod Touch.

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ambition
They could use a Wifi hotspot database or allow users to manually specify
their location.

