New iPhone App Version Lets Users Send ‘Where are you?’ Notifications to Friends, Takes Meeting Up Beyond Text Messages

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – August 9, 2010 – Loopt (www.loopt.com), the leading location-based social mapping service, today announced a new version of its popular iPhone application. The new version of Loopt expands the product’s Friend features, with new capabilities to connect and meet up with friends around town.

Loopt’s ability to make real world connections between existing friends is the most popular feature in the application. The Ping feature takes this one step further, allowing users to find and meet up with their friends in one click. Users can access the feature from the Home Grid, the application’s main page, and can Ping friends individually from the Friends or Map tabs.

The feature lets you start a real-time location sharing session by pushing a notification to your friends that you want to know where they are. Friends then open up the Loopt app, which will update their location and send a “pong” back. The user’s map will light up with friends’ locations and updates. In less than a minute, you find out where your closest friends are, and you can arrange to get together.

“The ability to communicate with your friends specifically about their location is really important,” said Sam Altman, CEO of Loopt. “Loopt friends tend to be a closer, more intimate group than most have on Facebook or Twitter, mostly people you’d hang out with regularly. This feature shows how location sharing can elevate our everyday mobile interactions.”

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The feature will only send messages to those who don’t have a recent location in Loopt. It’s voluntary for the friend to respond with their location; nothing is shared unless they open Loopt to “pong” back. Additionally, the feature won’t send messages to anyone who has turned Ping alerts off, or who has chosen not to share their location.

Loopt also added the following features today:

• Background Location settings on the Home Grid – Responding to the popularity of this feature, launched on the iPhone on June 24, the Background Location switch is moving to the Home Grid, the main screen on Loopt. With Background Location settings activated, users are able to receive alerts when friends are nearby (you can select which friends to share with and for how much time), even if Loopt isn’t running in the foreground. You can receive those updates via push notifications. 72 percent of Loopt users share background location with some or all of their friends.
• Advanced search/filter functionality from the map – This feature will allow users to “filter by location” (such as restaurants, bars, coffee shops, family oriented locations) when searching on the Loopt map.

Loopt v3.1 improves the user experience on the app that more than 4 million users on more than 100 different mobile devices in the United States use to find location-based content and make connections between friends. The free iPhone app also runs on the iPod Touch and is available through the Apple App Store and at www.loopt.com/iphone or www.loopt.com/ipod.

About Loopt

Loopt is the leading location-based mobile social mapping company. Loopt produces a suite of mobile applications including Loopt, Loopt Pulse for iPad, and Loopt Mix, to allow users to discover the world around them. Loopt products use location on mobile phones, iPad and iPod touch devices to help their users find and enjoy the friends, places, and events around them right now. The Loopt services have more than 4 million registered users and partnerships with every major U.S. mobile phone carrier. Loopt is available on over 100 phones, including iPhone. (See www.loopt.com/phones for the full range of supported handsets.) Loopt was designed with privacy considerations at its core and offers a variety of effective and intuitive privacy controls. Find Loopt on twitter.com/loopt and facebook.com/loopt

Contact:
Sharon Howell
Loopt, Inc.
press@loopt.com
650.230.6069