Company Offsite

Last Friday we had a company strategy session over at NEA’s beautiful offices on Sand Hill Road, which was a welcome change of scenery, and a great chance to step back and reflect on what we accomplished (and didn’t) in 2006 and where we want to go from here. While the last twelve months were very productive and exciting, and included our launch on Boost Mobile and registering our first 100,000 users, we’re even more excited about 2007. If hard work is the reward, than we’ve got a rewarding year ahead of us, and our top two priorities, not surprisingly, are going to be (1) making loopt available to more users and (2) making loopt even better.

Loopt location

Venture capitalists like to talk about the “potted plant test”; that is, if they walk into a startup and see any live potted plants in the lobby they know the company will fail because it’s spending its money in the wrong places.

loopt, it’s safe to say, passes the test, and while we’ve always tried to make our office as fun and productive as possible (big monitors, weekly poker, free lunch etc.), 3250 Ash is a pretty humble space.

More relevantly, it’s a pretty small space for the team so we’ve started looking for something new, preferably with good light and enough room for a ping pong table. It needs to be somewhere between Mountain View and San Mateo and have a little character, and it’s just fine if it needs a little work, as our very own Dr. Bell is pretty handy with the Power Screwdriver. We’ll let everyone know where we end up and will be sure to share pictures of the new digs.

Nice mention in Business 2.0

We were happy to find out this morning that we've been named one of Business 2.0's 25 companies to watch in 2007 along with our friends at AdMob and meebo.

CTIA here we come…

loopt will be hosting meetings with wireless operators at the upcoming CTIA show in Orlando, Florida from March 26-28, 2007. Please click here to request a meeting with the loopt team.

loopt on CNN!

Check it out. We're pleased with how the reporter highlights the many safety and privacy safeguards we've put in place.

Company Frags

Yesterday the whole company got together to frag the latest developer build of loopt. We ordered some pizza, grabbed phones and hammered away on the latest and greatest. These frag sessions serve two purposes. They give the engineers an opportunity to share what they’ve been working on for the past couple weeks. They also provide a lot of immediate product feedback.

Our mobile guys have been working really hard, and it shows. The latest version looks great and it’s very fun. We can’t wait to share it with all of you. (We’ll detail the improvements in a future post, but if you must know we’ve added some hotkeys, slicker menus, a feature that lets you see your friends’ latest journal entries and whole lot of other cool stuff.)