loopt:lbs "check-in" value of excavators

Samaltman YCS05 's popularity in the field of lbs, the investment community, Foursquare no doubt the most powerful.　　However, the Loopt, founded in 2005, is still the Foursquare's arch-rival in terms of user size alone (millions, or even more). "Samaltman is a very unusual person. In the three minutes he met, I thought, ' Ah! Bill Gates must have been like this when he was 19 years old.　　"Graham had described this as one of Loopt's founders, Samaltman. One day, Samaltman, a 21-year-old Stanford University student, wanted to have lunch with a friend at the end of his computer class. "I thought it would be nice to see everyone's position on the phone," he said. Samaltman began writing software to achieve this function.　　Just after finishing his sophomore year in college, he got a combinator investment. by Loopt, the phone sends specific instructions to a cell phone base station or satellite every 15 minutes to determine its exact location. Mobile owners can share location information with their friends ' phones or computers, paying only 2.99 of dollars a month.　　Loopt lucky to be the most early incubator of the Enterprise, a year later, it won the Sequoia Capital and NEA500 million dollar investment. However, the six-year millions of user accumulation seems to disappoint investors ' expectations of lbs applications.　　In the United States, this location-based service is not yet well known to the general public, according to a Pew Research Center, and only 4% of adult Internet users currently use such location-based social services. The reason is very simple, user "check-in" after, what can do? Founded in 2005, Loopt was the first company to provide geo-positioning network services. But it was only last year to set up a new Foursquare to seize the initiative, the latter first to change the geographical location of the "game", and then turned into a business marketing tool, that is, we are familiar with lbs "sign up to receive coupons" form,　　Businesses, including Pepsi, are tracking and rewarding their loyal customers through Foursquare.　　may be stimulated by Foursquare, after Samaltman to loopt in the expansion of application innovation began to gallop. Loopt first in 2009 with at&t cooperation through the base station positioning to provide permanent online positioning services.　　The implementation of this service is that as long as the user agrees to let friends see their location, the LOOPT server will stay connected to the AT&T server and update your location information in real time. This way, even if you don't start loopt software on your phone, your friends can see where you are now. Loopt's new model, which works with operators, bypasses the iphone background, relying purely on server-side background positioning to sweepClear the user to renew the enthusiasm the obstacle.　　Since then, Loopt acquired a website offering similar games Graffitigeo (YCOMBINATORS09 graduates), and then introduced Looptstar to make up for its own short board. Through innovative applications, Loopt apps running on Android and iphones can instantly alert users to the benefits and promotions available in his area. For example, if a restaurant has an empty seat, it can immediately post a 90 percent discount reminder.　　In the same scenario, it could happen in a pet store with too many purchases, and it quickly lets people in the area know that the cat can start selling 50 percent. This year, Loopt and Groupon took the lead in partnering, and Groupon doesn't have to wait for the user to sign in, so wherever you are, it will automatically send the local group now. At the same time, Loopt provides a question and answer function that lets you know what to do when you get to a place.　　Unlike a competitor, this is a real-time question-and-answer function that users can use to quickly get answers to questions. The prospect of lbs is good, but it should be an application that can provide more value, not just check-in. The daily activity on loopt has increased by 60% since the recent launch of Apple's IOS4 operating system.　　Its background position updates and proximity reminders (Proximityalert) become more handy. YCW10 search for Google-covered "gaps" in the YC2010 Winter class "graduates", the 19-Year-old boy from Israel Daniel (Danielgross) and his project Greplin, although not the most outstanding, but is definitely "the most ambitious",　　Because they point the opponent directly to Google. 2010 years, the original high school graduate, is ready to military service, gross with an E-commerce business plan to enter YC, but really let Paulgraham interested in, mainly gross this person. "If you could do something else, we'd be willing to invest in you," he said. In this way, Gross tried several projects, but were Paulgraham negative.　　He reminded Gross "to develop something that you feel is useful to you now, rather than what you think might be useful to others," and this reminder eventually spawned Greplin's ideas. In Gross's view, their generation has put all their personal information, social relationships in the "cloud", so that even if they lose the computer, there will be no loss of information, but at the same time, how to search this information has become a Google can not cover the "gap." Greplin's role is that, like the plug-ins we use in social networks, we can search for information that users have published or stored, as long as they have a simple user license, and they also support cross-platform search.　　After graduating from YC, Greplin first gained an angel investment of 780,000 dollars from Gmail author Paulbuchheit, chrisdixon,square author and Facebookctobrettaylor.　　At the end of last year, the U.S. Sequoia Capital of 4 million U.S. dollars a round of financing, the current number of active users nearly 600 million. YCW11 "Fax" that is not sent by fax is logically after the advent of new technologies such as e-mail and electronic signatures, the "antique" fax machine is a glorious retirement, but in fact, not only is it always with us, but many companies also see it as "standard" for everyday office, which gives Neo Omara (　　Nealo ' Mara and Joseph Vara (Josephwalla) have an opportunity for "micro-innovation" in this area. Although companies such as Efax and MyFax (who have been acquired by the former) have been able to technically support the use of computers to send faxes to each other's fax machines prior to the establishment of Hellofax, users still need to print the files if they want to attach text or signatures to them. The handwriting is added to the text and then scanned into the computer. Omara and Varah think this process is still too cumbersome, not really help users save equipment and consumables costs.　　As a result, when designing hellofax products, they thought about allowing the user to photograph the text or signature with a cell phone or other camera device and add it to the original fax, or sign it directly with the mouse. Moreover, after the user registers on the Hellofax website, does not need to download any client software, directly uploads the file on the Hellofax website, the picture (currently supports DOC, docx, PDF, TIF, TIFF, PPSX, PPT, pptx, TIF, TIFF, JPG , JPEG, PNG, XLS, xlsx, TXT, GIF and other formats), and then enter the other's fax number (such as input e-mail address is free to send) can be free to send 5 fax trial.　　Thereafter, hellofax charges 0.99 dollars for each fax sent.　　On this basis, Hellofax also launched 4.99 U.S. dollars, 9.99 U.S. dollars and 39.99 U.S. dollars three monthly package, select 9.99 Dollars and higher package users will also receive a dedicated Hellofax fax number to receive faxes.　　On line only a few months, currently, the number of registered users of Hellofax has been thousands of people. -S05-S11 exit and get the financing Project List Project founder number Product class status Memo Airbnb3 residential short Rent Service YCW09 active financing 107.8 million USD Cloudkick1 Cloud control Services YCW09 acquisition was Rackspace acquired in 2010, according to 50 million dollars Divvyshot1 picture sharing Service YCW09 acquired by Facebook in 2010, the amount was not disclosed REMAIL1 email service YCW09 acquisition was acquired in 2010 by Google, the amount was not disclosed Flightcaster3 real-time flight delay notice Service YCS09 acquisition 2010 was Nextjump acquisition, the amount was not disclosed GraffitiGeo2 mobile phone comments Software YCS09 Acquisition 2009 was Loopt acquisition, 750,000 U.S. dollars Lingt2 Online Chinese learning YCS09 acquisition 2010 was Dictionary.com acquired, the amount was not disclosed Listia2 idle goods online Trading services YCS09 active financing 2.15 million USD Mixpanel2 Real-time web Analytics services YCS09 Active financing 1.75 million USD RethinkDB2 Cloud computing YCS09 Live Leap financing 1.2 million U.S. dollars CHROMAOM3 color with the Community YCW10 active financing 1 million USD DataMarketplace2 network data Trading YCW10 acquired 2010 Infochimps acquisition Embedly2 freely embed content from any site YCW 10 active financing 700,000 USD Etacts2 e-mail contact management YCW10 acquired in 2010 by Salesforce.com acquisition Fabricly3 assists independent designer ecommerce platform YCW10 active financing 400,000 USD Greplin2 personal online life Search Primer Chi YCW10 Active financing 4.7 million U.S. dollars ZENCODER3 video Coding cloud Services YCW10 active financing 2 million U.S. dollars ADGROK3 Network advertising Platform YCS10 acquisition of the June this year, the acquisition of Twitter Adgrok, the acquisition amount is not higher than 10 million U.S. dollars Indin ERO2 provides accounting software for small companies YCS10 active financing 1.2 million USD READYFORZERO2 Personal liability Management System YCS10 active financing 4.76 million USD Chirply2 postcard design Network Platform YCW11 active financing 1.1 million USD Earbits1 let the band pay The Internet radio YCW11 active financing 605,000 dollars GrubWithUs2 Social dinner service YCW11 active financing 1.6 million USD HumbleBundle2 with your bid to buy games YCW11 active financing 4.7 million USD Inporia1 social e-commerce Services YCW 11 active financing 1.25 million USD Mailgun1 automatic mail address collection and mass mailing tools YCW11 Active Financing 1.1 million USD data source: TechGox, south of the editing and finishing