Posted Mar. 31, 2008
Imagine going on vacation and sharing the experience, in real time, with friends and family, sending pictures, audio and video, complete with a GPS tag, right to their mobile phones.
Or you discover a great new restaurant, snap a picture, and send it to all your friends within a half-mile radius, with directions, a review, and the message “Meet me here at 8.”
That is the promise of GyPSii, a new application developed in Amsterdam by Rhode Islander Dan Harple – founder of Context Media Inc., which was acquired by Oracle Corp. in 2005 – and Scotsman Sam Critchley and first made available last year.
GyPSii pulls all of a phone’s capabilities into a single interface, making it easier to produce and share content and to quickly find information about a specific place. Its creators see it being of great use to travelers, but also hugely appealing to young adults worldwide.
Shane Lennon, senior vice president for strategy and marketing for GyPSii and based in the company’s U.S. headquarters in Warwick, was the featured speaker at a recent Providence Geeks dinner and spoke to Providence Business News last week.
PBN: How does this work? You install the software in your phone?
LENNON: Yes. ... It currently can be used on Symbian S60 devices, which come from Nokia and Samsung. It can run on the iPhone, on the BlackBerry, and on Windows Mobile for smartphones. And we are adding more devices all the time, going out toward the mass market. The application can be downloaded over the air… or through the Internet … and it will also start to come embedded in certain devices in different regions. We’re actually working with device manufacturers … [and] telephone operators so they will have it embedded in their devices as well. The idea is to make it as easy as possible for users to install and get up and running from day one.
PBN: And what it does is leverage your phone’s own capabilities?
LENNON: Yes. Every phone pretty much these days has a camera, and an ever-increasing percentage will have built-in GPS, though we’re not dependent on that; we work with a number of other location-based technologies. They have the ability to do text messaging. They have Web browsers. But it’s all separate and … a little clunky. … What we’ve done is create one integrated user experience with GyPSii.
PBN: You say it’s all location-based. What does that mean?
LENNON: Say I’m in Providence, I want to meet up with the family and have dinner, and I find a restaurant, I can take a photograph within GyPSii, it automatically will grab the location data and attach that to the photograph, we upload it to GyPSii, where it sits on a database. And I can share it with my friends or family, and by e-mail, or text messaging and they can get it instantly, and what they will get is a link to that place and they’ll be able to see that place with the location data but also see it on a map, and look up directions. … We also have information on third-party points of interest through a company called NAVTEQ, one of the largest map providers in the world … ATMs, restaurants, gas stations … and we’ll build more over time. So users will be able to go in and search for third-party points of interest or places created by any GyPSii users, or by their friends.
PBN: You can also locate your friends?
LENNON: You can set your own preferences for privacy, but you have the ability to see your friends in your network on a map in a linear fashion and be able to contact them. So I’m out in Providence on a Friday night, I click on the “Space Me” button, and I see 10 of my friends are within a mile. Let’s see if we can meet up somewhere. Maybe I created a place, say Olive’s, I can share it with them, they all get it instantaneously, and we can all meet up.
PBN: How long has this been under development?
LENNON: Sam and Dan met about two years ago, and they worked in what we’d call the “garage mode” for about a year, with three or four other developers, a couple here in Rhode Island and some in Amsterdam. They built a prototype, and we ramped up the company as of last May, with the sales and marketing functions… and [started launching the product] in September. … We did a big launch at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February, which is the major event in the wireless industry worldwide. … At Barcelona, we announced deals with Dopod China, which has about 5-million subscribers in China and are HTC’s direct-to-consumer brand, and we announced a deal with China Unicom, which is one of the top four operators in China, to be the location-based social networking platform for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing … and we announced a deal with a company named Broadway in India. … They are working with two of the largest mobile operators in India to target their users.
PBN: Clearly you see a lot of potential in Asia, and also in Europe. How do you see GyPSii doing in the U.S. market, though?
LENNON: In the U.S. we’ve got a mobile-user base that’s kind of had the same operators for about 20 years now, and what they’re struggling with is how do I change some of my business models, to get into ad-supported applications, as ours is, as opposed to charging monthly fees, and if they do charge a monthly fee, how does it figure in? The user base here is definitely the younger demographic; we’ve done some focus group testing. The 18-to-25 group, we asked them, which would you give up first, your mobile phone or your computer, and almost 65, 70 percent said they’d give up the computer. … They’re clearly using social networks already; they’re clearly comfortable on a mobile phone. … We tested a group that was 26 to 35, and what was interesting is, they are very strong users of at least two or more social networks online, and they would like to be able to do this on a mobile phone, because they’re not at the computer all day … so there’s an indication that they would want to use this.
PBN: MySpace and Facebook have both launched mobile versions, but you say you don’t see them as direct competition. Who’s your closest competition?
LENNON: We have competitors in each of the three core areas: There [are] people that have search applications, there [are] people that have the ability to create photographs and share them, and you’ve got friend finders. … With the ability to do all-in-one user experience, and to have the platform behind it that supports both the advertising and subscription model, we’re not currently aware of anybody doing the whole stack. •
