Tag, you’re it

No, we’re not talking about the action you take to catch someone in a game.  We’re talking about the feature in your Loopt Mix profile that helps you connect with your communities.  It’s a simple but powerful feature that is often overlooked or misunderstood.  You can make tags for broad interest categories (music, photography, etc.) but tags are even more effective when they are used to bring together your local groups/clubs. Make a tag to help people in your local communities find and connect with one another. 

The Chicago Scooter Club gets it.  They are using the “CSC” tag to help their members find one another on Loopt Mix.  We’ve also seen people use “UCLA”, “New Tech”, “Yankees”, etc.  Go here to submit a tag for your own community and find out what tags are already being used by others around you!: http://www.loopt.com/mix?t=1.  

Sharing is Caring

The Loopt experience on the iPhone has gotten a lot of attention lately because of the new commercial.  We’re super excited about the commercial and it provides us with a good opportunity to remind everyone that, in addition to the iPhone, Loopt is available on over 100 mobile devices, including BlackBerry (don’t worry, Loopt’s coming soon to Android too).  These mobile devices span across all the major U.S. carriers including Sprint, Verizon, Boost, MetroPCS, AT&T and T-Mobile – over 60% of Loopt’s invite traffic is delivered cross-carrier.  We don’t stop there though.  In addition to availability across all major devices and carriers, the Loopt Link feature (check out the new Loopt Journal Widget) allows you to easily share your location across many social networks and blogs such as Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook.  
 
Sharing, after all, was something we all learned to do back in kindergarten so we’ve provided you with functionality to share your location with all your friends. 

Nominate Loopt!

The Crunchies are like the Oscars for the start-up world and nominations for Crunchies 2008 just launched.  If you love Loopt, please nominate us for Best Mobile start-up by clicking the badge below!

 

Future of Privacy Forum

I’m honored to have been invited to participate in the recently announced Future of Privacy Forum (FPF).
 
The Future of Privacy Forum was established by Jules Polonetsky and Christopher Wolf to address emerging privacy issues brought about by the advancement of technology. The forum brings together thought leaders from business, government and the FPF Advisory board, to develop and advance best practices in privacy to give consumers greater control over their privacy online.
 
The 23-member advisory board includes privacy experts from top companies such as Dorothy Attwood, Senior Vice President, Public Policy and Chief Privacy Officer, AT&T, Chris Kelly, Chief Privacy Officer and Head of Global Public Policy, Facebook, and Peter Cullen, Chief Privacy Strategist, Microsoft.  These individuals joined FPF in support of transparency, user control and the advancement of trustworthy data practices.
 
In addition to participating in the newly formed Future of Privacy Forum, Loopt regularly works with organizations such as the Family Online Safety Institute, Connect Safely, Progress & Freedom Foundation's Center for Digital Media Freedom, and the Internet Safety Technical Task Force. It is the feedback and ideas generated from privacy and security organizations like the Future of Privacy Forum that has helped Loopt offer effective end user privacy controls and policies.  Cooperation among companies, government agencies, and non-governmental organizations is essential to developing online data best practices for the new generation of very valuable and compelling consumer services and applications. I’m eager to begin this important work with the Future of Privacy Forum.
 
Loopt offers intuitive and effective privacy controls and security features for its users.  The service is completely permission-based and users share location information only with their selected friends, communities and services.  Users can easily control location-sharing at any time, and even manage location sharing on a friend-by-friend basis.  I welcome you to learn more about Loopt’s efforts in establishing and promoting best practices in privacy and security on its own service and throughout the LBS industry.  Please visit our Privacy & Security page for more information.
 
-Brian
 
Brian is the Chief Privacy Officer at Loopt

Unit Test Tuesdays

The engineering team at Loopt is constantly working hard to come up with new ways to improve the Loopt application. One of the ways we ensure the quality of our product is to perform automated unit tests for new and existing features. A unit test is a method that verifies individual units of code. So even before our stellar Quality Assurance team gets their hands on a new product or feature, hundreds of unit tests have automatically helped us verify the basic functionality of our new features and products.

To help us improve in writing unit tests, we introduced a series called “Unit Test Tuesdays” where we had Misko Hevery from Google come in to give talks about writing testable code. We got much more out of the sessions than we expected and we highly recommend other engineering teams to learn from him as well. If you are interested, Misko's blog is a good place to start.

Now, having completed the sessions, we are bringing our newly acquired skills to practice and we are all confident that this will ensure an even higher quality product for you in the future.

- Heine

Heine is a software engineer at Loopt.

Top 25

We've been working hard here at Loopt and we're proud to see that we've made it to the Top 25 on the iPhone App Store.  Here's a cool graph, courtesy of Mybefia, that compares Loopt's rankings to other iPhone apps, Facebook and MySpace.  Sweet upward slope, huh?

Location, Location, Location

Location is one of most genuine parts of the mobile experience. And the mobile phone remains the most ubiquitous, always on device that is capable of knowing where you are automatically and delivering innovative, compelling location-based services. Loopt obviously feels location is a core part of the experience and continues to strive to deliver high frequency, high accuracy location to the Loopt mobile social mapping experience. However, there are still a number of barriers preventing broader adoption of LBS apps, such as API accessibility and the cost of location. We are excited to be working closely with Qualcomm and some of our carrier partners to be addressing these challenges. There are over 100M+ devices in the US alone that are capable of high-accuracy, rich LBS services. These location capabilities will continue to extend into more of the mobile web and mobile UI.

We are thrilled to make this announcement today with Qualcomm.  Stay tuned for additional news as we continue working to enhance the Loopt user experience and drive growth in the broader LBS market.
 
For more information, please contact Eric Carr, VP of location technologies, at eric@loopt.com.

iPhone Commercial

Check out the new Loopt iPhone Commercial!

Loopt for Campaigns

Election day is tomorrow and we keep saying that we believe Loopt is a powerful tool for organizing campaign efforts. Our very own Chris Clark is running for Mountain View City Council so some of us decided to lend a hand with the aid of Loopt.