Archive for January, 2010
Locle Nominated for Mobile Premier Awards 2010
Locle has been put forward for the Mobile Premier Awards 2010 by Mobile Monday Dublin. The awards received over 600 nominations, of which 50 companies are nominated.
Thanks to everyone at MoMoDublin.
http://www.mobilepremierawards.com/blog/2010/01/18/mobile-premier-awards-in-innovation-nominees/
2010: year of the location-based mobile apps
At this time last year the Locle team put together a little list of 8 predictions for 2009. We were just having a laugh, but the last laugh was on us when two of them seem to have come to be:
- Steorn, the Dublin company that claims to have discovered a way to extract unlimted free energy from the Earth’s magnetic fields, actually launched their product publicly with a live demonstration on Dublin’s Grand Canal Basin. Wild.
- Google launched their own phone called Nexus One, named after the killer cyborgs who “call home” to their creator in Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner. Creepy.
This year we’re only going to make one prediction. And it’s going to come true too:
- 2010 is the year that location-based mobile social networking takes off
Locle was ahead of the zeitgeist when we started the company in February 2008 (before the launch of iPhone apps!). But the mood seems to have caught up with us.
New services such as Google Latitude, FourSquare, BrighKite and Gowalla are following early innovators such as Rummble, Belysio, Nulaz, Mobiluck and of course Locle to show the potential of location.
Om Malik from GigaOM Network wrote yesterday that “Today we “check in” to places, but soon it will become part of the platform, and when that happens we’ll shift focus to applications and services that build upon the concept of checking in”.
At Locle, we enter 2010 well positioned with not only a location platform (as launched at GigaOM’s Mobilize 09 in San Francisco) but also a suite of web, wap, sms, iPhone and native mobile apps and services that are suited to almost any use.
The London Evening Standard wrote “…location-based social networking, where people use laptop or cell phone applications to tell each other where they are physically located at any particular moment. It’s an idea that’s been around for years but never quite managed to take off — until now.”
There are many reasons why “geosocial” networking is about to take off: mobile app usage, social networking activity, low-cost geopositioning, better smartphones. But most important will be the irresistable delight of a little Serendipity in our every day.
We hope you will continue to follow us through the New Year. Literally 
