After posting the article regarding GYPsii, I received a number of emails from other social location networking services, including ZKOUT. It seems GYPsii and Loopt are not the only companies seeking interest in having myself and my friends share their whereabouts and travel experiences online.
Being old enough to have survived the original dotcom bust and perhaps a bit wiser because of it, I question how these companies will survive without a visible source of revenue. Surely they all can’t expect to be swept up by Google, simply for the eyes they might bring?
During my tenure as CEO at Air-Trak, we sold GPS based location tracking services to enterprise customers for a monthly service fee. It was certainly not as viral as the experiences that GYPsii, Loopt or ZKOUT might be delivering, but the business was self sustaining and when I left, profitable.
One application segment we sold into was referred to in law enforcement as situational awareness. For incident commanders having the right knowledge about people and places at the right time is essential to perform missions safely and effectively. These new consumer services have interesting parallels and share common technical underpinnings with tracking applications; they are just not equipped with the more secure and demanding capabilities required for law enforcement or technical surveillance requirements.
Loopt and others would need to reinvent themselves to address these markets, but it’s interesting to ponder how their innovative features, such as their geotagged photo capture with online sharing, might benefit law enforcement and other B2B markets.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
You’re spot on — I’m also a believer in that LBS Social Apps would add a lot of value for Police/Security/Military markets. Do you know if anyone has tried this yet?