Tired of hearing your airline seatmates blab on their cellphones just to tell people “I’m on the plane,” or “I’ve just landed”? Sick of texting “Where are you?” when you’re trying to meet up with friends, or when a family member is stuck in traffic? Then Bryan Trussel, an ex-Microsoft veteran turned entrepreneur, has a service for you.
It’s called Glympse, and it debuts today as a downloadable application on T-Mobile G1 phones with the Google Android operating system—with iPhone, BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile versions to come soon. The mobile software lets you share your location automatically with whoever you want (as long as they have Internet access on their phone or laptop), for however long you want. You click on an e-mail or phone number in your contact list, and that person can then click on a URL to open up a dynamic map that traces your location in real-time and gives your speed and estimated arrival time, if you specify a destination. The person on the receiving end does not need to sign up for Glympse (though the service is enhanced if they do), and can view the map on their phone, laptop, or desktop.
Trussel, the startup’s co-founder and CEO, says Glympse is meant to help business associates and acquaintances meet up, as well as friends and families—so it has a potentially huge user base. Not surprisingly, the location-based services field is pretty crowded, with competition from big players like Google Latitude and overlap with location-aware startups like Seattle-based Pelago (maker of Whrrl), Silicon Valley-based Loopt and Brightkite, and Boston-based uLocate. But Janis Machala of UW Tech Transfer, who watches the mobile space, says Glympse is “much more user-friendly” than its closest competitors.
I’ve talked with Trussel at length a couple of times in the past few months, while his Redmond, WA-based startup has been in stealth mode. Trussel previously spent 16 years at Microsoft, working on everything from the Windows operating system to interactive TV to casual games. He was most recently the manager of Xbox Live Arcade, Microsoft’s game distribution network that is popular among gamers and developers alike. He left in March 2008 and decided to start a company with two other Microsoft friends, Steve Miller and Jeremy Mercer.
“We wanted to take advantage of something we saw as an integration point of a lot of new things: smarter cellphones, GPS technology, and flat-rate data plans,” Trussel told me. What this seemed to open up was “location sharing between cellphones—something we see being ubiquitous,” he said.
At first, people laughed at their goal. Their primary competition was text messaging and phone calls, after all, and who’s going to stop texting or calling? Also, the Glympse team didn’t have much direct experience in the mobile space. (Perhaps to make up for this, Trussel says he owns six different phones.) “People were saying you can’t do a consumer mobile app without deep carrier relationships,” Trussel says. “It used to be that carriers were the only distribution channel.” But now there are ways around
