Running late for a meeting a couple weeks ago, I picked up my mobile phone to let people in the office know where I was. Rather than making a call or sending a regular email, I used a service called Glympse to transmit a message that linked them to a dynamic online map displaying my route and location, in real time, as I went downtown on the bus.
The mobile application used my phone's GPS technology to find my location. It was then visible through standard browsers on the computers or phones of the people that the application alerted via email or text message -- but only for the amount of time I designated when I sent the alert.
Glympse is the namesake service of a Redmond company founded by three Microsoft veterans. It's launching Tuesday as a public beta for T-Mobile G1 phones running Google's Android OS, with the application expected to be available in the Android Market. That will be followed by public betas for devices including iPhone, BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile.
We first wrote about the startup's plans last fall. It's part of a boom in location-based services, including Google Latitude, loopt, GyPSii and Pelago's Whrrl.
Glympse is designed to be more accessible by letting people send messages not just to friends or followers but to anyone with an email address or mobile Internet access. In addition, people who receive the messages don't need to sign up for the service or install software.
"You can share your location with anybody," said Bryan Trussel, Glympse CEO. "I'm not faced with this dilemma of, 'OK, I'm going to create yet another social network, now who do I know well enough that I'm going to share my location?' You can use it with anybody. Business situations, a one-time meeting, somebody you've never met before."
Other potential uses cited by the company include teenagers notifying parents of their location; delivery drivers letting customers know where they are on the route; and travelers alerting people to their progress.
The technology worked well in my tests of the private beta, using the Glympse application on Apple's iPhone. The biggest challenge came not from the Glympse application but from a current limitation of the iPhone -- the inability to run third-party applications in the background of the phone. That meant I had to leave Glympse active for my location to be visible to the people I had alerted. It wasn't possible, for example, to check my email on my phone without exiting the service.
That isn't a problem on Windows Mobile and other platforms. Trussel said Glympse hopes Apple will upgrade the iPhone to allow apps to run in the background, which appears possible based on recent reports.
Another obstacle was simply getting my friends and colleagues to open the Glympse emails or click on the links in the text messages to view the online map. Later, people would say something like, "Oh, yeah, what was that thing you sent me?"
Maybe they just weren't all that interested in my whereabouts. But the collective shrug points to one potential challenge that Glympse and similar services could face in their quest for widespread adoption. As with many things, the underlying technology probably won't be as interesting as what people ultimately build on top of it.
Along those lines, the Glympse service could eventually become a platform for use by other software developers, Trussel said.
That's one potential source of revenue for Glympse as a company. Others may include contextual advertising, with ads for nearby businesses and services showing up on the dynamic map as people drive around. Microsoft veterans Trussel, Jeremy Mercer, and Steve Miller founded Glympse in March 2008, initially bootstrapping the venture before taking an undisclosed amount of angel funding.
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