Boost Mobile are to trial a new mobile phone tracking service in Times Square this week. Boost, owned by Sprint Nextel, are using technology from Loopt, a tech company startup founded by two Stanford students.
Loopt allows people to view a map of a friend’s location on their cell phone in real time. For years people have talked about mobile phone location systems and recently services to keep kids secure have become commercially viable.
Mark Jacobstein, executive vice president of corporate development for Loopt, said:
The most common text message that people send is, ’Where are you?’ So the ability to automate that becomes a really valuable service.
Analysts predict that over half of cell phone users in the US will be using location based systems by 2010 so there could be a great market for these products. In 2006, location-based services generated $150 million in revenue. According to these predictions this could rise to $3.1 billion by 2010.
Scott Ellison, vice president of wireless and mobile communications at IDC, said:
We’re still very much in the early stages of adoption, for the past five years, our research has indicated that end users have understood how they want to use these services, but the industry as a whole has been reluctant to offer it as a commercial service.
Loopt offers a tracking service to allow subscribers to share location details in real time as well as swap messages, photos and other information. A map of each users friends can be displayed on the handset in real time with alerts sent whenever your friends are close by.
40,000 subscribers have signed up in the last few weeks and a multimillion dollar advertising campaign will no doubt increase those figures in the next few weeks.
The service has already been available on a limited basis for the past six weeks. Already, 40,000 subscribers have signed up, with about 5,000 new subscribers being added every week, said Sam Altman, the 21-year-old CEO of Loopt. Boost plans to pump up those numbers with a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign starting Monday.
