June 26, 2008: Verizon Wireless launches loopt, finally
Remember back in March when Verizon Wireless announced plans to offer the LBS-enabled mobile social networking service, loopt? Well, that may explain the de ja vu we all felt this week when Verizon Wireless announced that loopt is now available to its subscribers. The announcement in March anticipated an April launch for the service, but according to Verizon Wireless spokesman Jeffrey Nelson, the delay was caused by "technical issues and pricing issues and running the application through some traps before launch," he said during a recent interview with Mobile Internet Trends. "[The delay was caused by] nothing too serious or out of the ordinary."
When I spoke with loopt's CEO Sam Altman last year he noted that privacy issues had been one of the biggest issues facing the uptake of location-based mobile social networking and that solving them is a key step toward achieving inter-carrier LBS services.
Nelson said that the nearly three month delay had nothing to do with privacy concerns or anything like that, since loopt had many of those concerns "locked and loaded" by the time the carrier announced the deal in March. "We've strengthened the privacy capabilities even further," Nelson said. "We will be pinging customers on a regular basis to let them know their loopt account is active and that they can be tracked."
Loopt has certainly enjoyed a lot of press coverage during the last few years--and not all of it was centered on the founder Sam Altman's age (he started loopt during his second year at Stanford), but the deal with Verizon Wireless and subsequent launch is definitely the social network's biggest news to date and a real harbinger of mobile social networking's future success.
Apparently our readers don't think too highly of loopt, however--in a recent poll the majority voted that Facebook would dominate mobile social networking, while no one championed loopt as the eventual winner. Last week we asked which mobile entertainment service would prove most profitable--42 percent said mobile music or radio, 32 percent said mobile TV or video, 21 percent voted for mobile gaming, while 5 percent said none of these would be successful. You are in the company of optimists. This week's poll: Which will be a bigger market in 5 years--the consumer side of the mobile Internet and related services or the enterprise side of it?
