Mobile Location Startup Glympse Is ‘Solution’ to Privacy Perils, Founder Says
SEATTLE -- As federal and state regulators harp on privacy red flags at tech companies big and small, Seattle mobile location startup Glympse is confident in its strategy, founder and CEO Bryan Trussel told a TechCafe gathering Friday. “Initially we were very concerned” that a service that lets users share their real-time location with anybody would draw intense regulatory scrutiny, but the company decided that “we're actually the solution to that problem,” said the Microsoft and Xbox Live veteran. Having crossed 3 million users over Memorial Day and recently announced an in-car dash partnership with Mercedes-Benz, Glympse’s next phase is focused on partnerships with carriers and OEMs, he said.
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Glympse users who download its smartphone application choose whom to share their location with for a preset period, such as 20 minutes. The recipient doesn’t need the application -- they get sent a link to a browser page that tracks the sender’s location, even a car driving down the highway, Trussel said.
When it was working on a deal to bring Glympse to Verizon devices, the startup answered “doesn’t apply” to every question on Verizon’s “checklist” for location apps, such as what notification it gives users and how they turn it off, Trussel said: It’s not a “background” location app like Google’s Latitude. “Nobody wants to be tracked in their car where they're going all the time,” and it’s easy to forget a location app is still running until a friend asks, for example, “'I see you're downtown meeting Google, what’s up with that?'” he said. Trussel said he’s spoken at a handful of privacy events and found that privacy advocates “actually really like us because of the model we've got."
Startups work by “swinging from a vine, and as you're swinging from your apogee, you'd better have another vine” to grab, Trussel said, guessing that Glympse has made “about four connections on the vine” and has another dozen to go: It’s “not a success story yet.” The idea for Glympse came when Windows phones were dominant, before the launch of iOS, but the prototype was built on Android after that platform debuted, he said. The initial version used a “sonar"-type beeping to alert users to their friends’ locations on a map, he said.
The company decided early to focus on users and not “trying to wow somebody in the tech world” or “money guys,” Trussel said. The prototype app “did a lot of cool things” but Glympse decided to emphasize “simplicity” over bells and whistles, so the team made the debut version work without requiring signups, logins or a friend network, he said: The mantra was “'how do we get rid of all these steps and all these confusions.'"
Glympse grew steadily from about 200,000 users in July 2010 at perhaps 25,000 new users a month, Trussel said, surprised that it was drawing users in Europe and Asia. Despite competition from bigger names like Loopt, or the threat of competition from “800-pound gorillas” like Google and Facebook, the company rarely changed strategy and it paid off, he said. “Microsoft did a [mobile location] thing called … ?” Trussel said, trailing off. Google’s debut of Latitude drew predictions from observers that “you're dead,” and others encouraged the company to copy Foursquare at its height, Trussel said: “Check-ins” and “badges” of the sort Foursquare pioneered were “the biggest temptations we had,” with even Glympse investors piling on.
"It look us a long time to get to a million users” but it’s been simpler since then, Trussel said, adding Glympse has never spent money on marketing. It benefited from delaying a launch, giving a “polished” app to tech writers before the general public got it, he said. It’s overhauling the user interface and wants to do a locally focused user beta, said Darren Austin, vice president of products, inviting Seattle-area users to sign up at beta.glympse.com. The new version will have a physical timer screen and make location-sharing easier in a group. It has APIs to add Glympse functionality to any hardware or platform, and is working with partners on deeper integration, Trussel said. Monetization will come from licensing fees alone, not end-user subscriptions, he said.
The Mercedes-Benz deal, announced June 7 at the Detroit Telematics Conference, puts the Glympse logo on the new A-Class’s Digital DriveStyle application set to launch in September. Trussel showed a demo of the app that features a driver clicking through a touchscreen to select a contact with whom to share the car’s location and time duration. “In this next generation, we want to ‘glympse’ where you're at,” just as people use Google’s brand as a verb for generic Internet search, he said. Glympse is also working on “really cool stuff” with BMW in Europe and has more partnerships with Samsung and Verizon in the works, as well as “future-looking stuff” with AT&T, he said.