Archive for the ‘News’ Category
Locle Joins OSLO Alliance to Share 30 million users
Locle met up with founders of companies similar to Locle at the GSMA Mobile World Congress 2009 in Barcelona last week.
The 13 companies agreed to form an alliance to enable our users to share their location with friends on different networks. The alliance is named OSLO (Open Sharing of Location Objects) and attempts to create a standard for location-based social software to share user location information securely and with privacy.
Locle pushed to create this alliance to avoid a situation emerging similar to the Instant Messaging world, where users on different networks (MSN, Yahoo! Messenger, AOL IM, Gtalk) cannot chat to each other. Our hope is that OSLO will enable location-based social software companies to expand the overall market for location services and create a level playing-field as the 800 pound gorillas of the Internet enter the space.
Google Latitude, Yahoo! FireEagle and Vodafone are already looking at entering the OSLO Alliance.
Silicon Republic compares Locle to Latitude
John Kennedy of Silicon Reporter and Irish Independent interviews Pieter about Google Latitude, the new “friend finder” add-on to Google Maps for Mobile.
“Latitude [not] a threat because it’s not that sociable.”
Google Validates Locle with Latitude
Google today announced the release of Google Latitude, their effort at a location-based mobile “friend-finder”. Google’s entry into the space validates Locle’s business model, that location-based advertising will have a significantly higher CPM value than traditional online advertising.
Google’s launch version of Latitude does not bring anything significantly new to the mobile friend-finder space, with well-established players such as Locle, Nulaz, Belysio, Rummble, Aka-Aki, BrightKite and Loopt (http://bdnooz.com/lbsn-location-based-social-networking-links/).
Google seems to be forgetting their own message, that location is a commodity (thanks to their own geoLocation API). A compelling mobile friend-finder application needs more than to show where friends are.
Google’s announced mobile platform support will cover about 30% of the mobile phones in the market today. They have some catching up to do with Locle’s 70% market support.
Google Latitude is being released as YASN (yet another social network) with no support of external social networks and communities.
However, Googles established install base of Google Maps for Mobile will give everyone a run for their money.
But should Google be getting into the “buddy finder” software business. Their mission is to sell more advertising. They should be focused on providing the tools and technologies to established companies to drive more location-based, mobile and social traffic that can be monitized with Google’s AdWords machine.
http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2009/02/locate-your-friends-in-real-time-with.html
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/see-where-your-friends-are-with-google.html
New Eircom Campaign for Locle
Eircom have launched a new online marketing campaign for the white-label Locle for Eircom.net application. It looks slick and is hitting the spot with significant increase in user registrations from the Irish market.
Locle viral marketing with Facebook Mobile
“…Another viral mechanism that the web guys have been using recently is integrating with Facebook, mainly through developing a facebook application which can be promoted within the newsfeeds or through mass invites. Again, this isn’t something mobile services have made much use of – until now! Locle – a fantastic Irish mobile LBS startup has managed to integrate its service with the facebook mobile extension of the developer platform – allowing them to promote their mobile app and site through the social network. This is the first time I’ve seen anyone doing this on mobile and it’s potentially incredibly powerful.”
