Whrrl is a new service that allows mobile phone users to chronicle every social activity in their lives -- writing reviews of movies or restaurants or uploading photos from concerts and sporting events. It then plots that information on a map and combines it with similar content from friends, creating a personal mobile city guide. It also provides the real-time locations of people as they wander from place to place in a city, tracking chosen friends as dots on a map.
Whrrl -- not to be confused with a competing service called Whirrl -- is the first offering from Pelago, a Seattle startup that scored $7.4 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and Trilogy Equity Partners last year.
Led by Jeff Holden and Darren Erik Vengroff, both of whom previously held high-ranking positions at Amazon.com, Pelago is one of a number of companies trying to tap the emerging arena of location-based services. The idea is that mobile phone users will want to locate friends -- who may be at a nearby restaurant -- or at the very least get a review that a friend wrote of the restaurant from a few weeks ago. The service is also accessible on a PC.
For businesses, the concept holds much promise -- potentially allowing them to target coupons or advertisements to people as they shop in a book store or buy a cup of coffee.
Of course, plotting the location of people on a mobile map in real time opens up dozens of potential privacy issues. That's especially the case since Pelago is targeting teenagers and those in their 20s. Eventually, the company wants to combine the power of GPS phones with a patent-pending technology it dubs "Passive Visitation" to automatically record the locations of users as they move around a city.
Holden, a former senior vice president at Amazon.com, said Whrrl was built so that location information doesn't get into the wrong hands. For example, users can set different privacy levels in order to allow or disallow specific people from seeing the location. They also can "cloak" themselves -- essentially switching off the location feature, Holden said.
Despite the potential privacy bottlenecks, Holden believes that people will find value in disclosing their locations to selected friends or family members.
And, he said, the ability to search for restaurant reviews or other information based on one's location is a compelling idea that hasn't been addressed by other players in the market.
"The real power of this thing is that you can combine social data with factual data that we have gathered," said Holden. "And so you can say: 'I want to see only the places that my foodie friends think are great restaurants and are within a half mile of here, have outdoor seating, and are open now.' That is a trivial query in our product." Such a query would take just four clicks, Vengroff added.
The search functionality allows users to quickly "mine tribal knowledge" from friends, which Holden says is a much more powerful recommendation than reading some anonymous review.
Of course, the concept will only work if people start using it. To attract users, Pelago has entered into a marketing agreement with American Eagle Outfitters in which customers of the retailer will be exposed to the Whrrl service through in-store and Web site promotions.
It also is working to create services so people can add reviews from their mobile devices to social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.
Other potential competitors include online city guides such as Yelp and Citysearch, both of which have mobile products, and Loopt, a two-year-old Silicon Valley startup that also allows users to find friends on a map on a mobile phone. Backed with $5 million from Sequoia Capital and New Enterprise Associates, Loopt's service is available on about two dozen Sprint phones for $2.99 per month.
Google also is moving into the arena with the purchase of Jaiku, a company that allows mobile phone users to create a running Web log of events, recommendations and other information. Jaiku describes its mobile product as "a live phonebook that displays the activity streams, availability, and location of your Jaiku contacts right in your phone contact list." Twitter, which also allows people to share small tidbits of information with friends, also is a potential threat.
Holden said he likes the concept of Jaiku and Twitter because they offer an "always-on connection to your network." But he said Whrrl is different because the content has more long-lasting value than the quick posts on Twitter and Jaiku.
"People post something and it is not that interesting like five minutes later, whereas in our world when you post something it is almost always in the context of some thing in the physical world," said Holden, adding that restaurant reviews or concert photos can be recycled for others to use.
Though it is launching today, Whrrl is not available to all mobile phone users. Only subscribers to AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile -- on about eight to 10 phone models -- can download Whrrl. A portion of the service is free, though Pelago plans to charge less than $3 per month for the location-based service. Pelago, which plans to go out for more funding early next year, employs 34 people.
For more on location-based services on mobile devices, check out The New York Times today which reports on offerings from Loopt and Buddy Beacon. It also notes some of the privacy concerns, quoting an analyst who says there "is a Big Brother component" to the services.
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