Friday, March 13, 2009

Google poses location-aware mobile tech challenges, legitimization

By Galen Moore

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What do you do when a gorilla comes to play in your sandbox?

That’s a question Mahmoud Arram and others in the location-based applications market had to think about last month. Sponty Inc., a mobile location-sharing application developed by Arram and a business partner, is still in private beta. On Feb. 4, Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG) announced Latitude, the search giant’s location-sharing service for mobile phones.

Arram says he isn’t worried about whether Sponty can compete. Latitude broadcasts a user’s current location to friends and contacts, is automated, GPS-enabled, and already drawing on Google’s huge user base. But Sponty lets you tell people where you’re going, he said. In this way, Sponty allows you to make meeting plans spontaneously, he said — and it doesn’t have the creepy GPS big-brother feeling that scares some users away from Latitude.

“One of the biggest uses of Sponty is people who want to play pickup basketball or racquetball or squash,” said Arram, who plays racquetball. “You say, ‘Yo, I’m going to be at the MIT gym today playing squash. Who wants to join me?’”

In some ways, Sponty’s straightforward and simple application resembles Dodgeball.com, a location-based service beloved by New York and San Francisco hackers. Google bought Dodgeball in 2005 for an undisclosed sum. On March 6, after a long period of holding it in maintenance mode, Google pulled the plug on that service.

Stephen Vinter, the head of Google’s Boston-area engineering, said Google isn’t interested in stifling competition. On the contrary, it benefits from web innovation, and that’s why it builds platforms like the Android mobile operating system, he said.

One company taking advantage of that platform is uLocate Communications Inc. Two weeks ago, the Framingham-based startup made an unannounced beta launch of a new location-based landing page application for mobile phones. The new feature, called Where Wall, works on G1 phones running Google’s Android platform and works like a Twitter feed for a particular city or neighborhood, broadcasting what users are doing nearby.

For users of uLocate’s GPS-enabled Where location service, Where Wall helps find things to do in a real-time way that’s different from map-based search, said Dan Gilmartin, vice president of marketing at the company.

In an increasingly fast-changing technology marketplace, Google’s advantage in numbers and recognition can erode quickly if other companies are more innovative, Vinter said. “There’s more opportunity for new players,” he said. “It’s easier to build valuable things faster, and people are more willing to try things because things are changing so often.”

And for at least one Boston-area firm, competing head-to-head with a Google application actually provided a major boost.

At the 2007 Where 2.0 Conference in San Jose, EveryScape Inc. announced a web application providing map-based video and still images of streetscapes and building interiors. At the same conference, Google launched Google Street View.

“That was the proverbial ‘Oh, (expletive)’ moment for us,” said company founder and CTO Mok Oh.

When the dust settled, EveryScape found that every blog post and news article about Google Street View also mentioned EveryScape. “We were a small company with no PR, and we were able to get great exposure,” he said.

Now, the company has 40 or so employees, said CEO Jim Schoonmaker. EveryScape differentiates itself by providing better high-resolution streetscape images and allowing retailers, restaurants and hotels to show off their interiors in a map-based, searchable application, Oh said.

Gilmartin said the competition from Google Latitude legitimizes the market for GPS-based search and friend finding, which uLocate has been doing since it launched Where in March 2007. The company expects to take on more big players in the future, he said.

“We’re actually pretty excited to see that happen,” he said. “We believe that MySpace and Facebook are right behind Google. I’d be surprised if they didn’t come in with a mobile-location app of their own.”