First look: Loopt provides more incentives to try location-based services with Loopt Star

So who are you?

I'm Sam Altman. I'm the co founder and CEO of Looped.

Yeah, what is luked and what are you guys coming out with?

So we're all about, by the way.

We'Re here at Trade amigo, which is our favorite Mexican place.

We're all about location based apps on cell phones, helping you find your friends, places and now cool new deals. So we're coming out with this new app, it's called loopstar, it's based entirely on Facebook connect and it is all about helping you find your friends and also find specials. We started doing advertising last December and we started with banners and text ads, sort of very traditional mobile advertising. And as we talked to our advertisers what they wanted, they sort of realized this wasn't quite it, it was okay. But they were really interested in getting foot traffic in their store or in their restaurant. And once they did that, they were pretty good about getting the money out of your pocket. And so they said a, can we pay you for people that come in the store instead of for clicker for impression and B, can we offer incentives to get users to come in more often? And people had different types of incentives they wanted to offer and different sorts of behavior they wanted. Some brands were focused on getting you to bring your friends, some wanted you to come at certain times of day, some wanted you to come 10 times. But it all sort of fit in this generic approach and then give the user a coupon or a free something and then handle the redemption. So we built this, you know, we built this new ad unit, this ability to get special deals. And the response has been tremendous. Everyone that we've shown it to has been very excited about it. We're going to launch about seven partners and we'll roll on new ones every week after that. And it's a way that instead of seeing ads in my face all the time, I just see special offers in my normal course of action.

So this is a new app on the iPhone.

It's a new app on the iPhone, iPhone only at launch, coming Friday today.

Well, the video will show up on Friday and, and it's sort of, it's a location based service, right?

So you use it, you check in, you see where your friends are and you, you get cool stuff.

Okay.

It says on the splash screen, go places, find friends, get stuff. That's pretty much what it does.

And can you show it to me?

Yeah, sure.

And we got a Coke there. We're not Coke didn't get paid for the ad.

It's Mexican coke. It's really good.

We're just keeping it there just for fun.

So it's loading up right now. So we see. There we are. We can see that trace Amigot's restaurant, which, where we are right now is the nearest place. I could check in there and, you know, I could then get points. I'm the boss of this place now, so I can see what I can do. We also will show you the specials near you, so you can see all of these cool offers nearby. And then I can see the rewards that I'm working on. So I just this morning got free music for checking into a bar with three of my friends. I can see where my friends are. And you don't have to set any of this up. You log in once with Facebook and then a list of your friends show up and we can pull in their location even from other sources.

Oh, that's cool. So this is really cool because it hooks into Facebook and I assume that you'll upgrade to use the Facebook location.

We all use the open graph, and when they release an open. When they release the location API, we'll pull that right in. And that's. I think that's one of the big reasons for facing this on Facebook is that as they become sort of a default location, how much we expect them to do by being built on that, we can pull that in and just sort of suck that in immediately.

So I have 1300 Facebook friends. How does it tell which ones are customary?

Does it use the location we calculated based on their last check in order, last location or some other service. Okay, so if you have 1300 friends, 1,300 friends will show up in there if they all have a location. But they'll be sorted by the ones nearest to you first as well. Yeah, I just kicked off them, so no problem.

So tell me about the Facebook integration and a little bit about what it does.

So Facebook Connect has been a big deal on the web for a while. It has not been a big deal on mobile, but one of the things they announced at their recent conference was that you can now cache data forever. And that, for the first time, makes it usable for mobile apps, which we're really excited about. We can now cache data locally. We can get your friends list and store that information, which lets us do this in a way that really wasn't possible to do in a mobile world before because you couldn't have any data resources on the device. And so now that we can do that, we can, you know, you can launch the App. You can type in your Facebook credentials or just push that connect button if you're already logged in and then you're off to the races. Your friend list is there. We don't set anything else up. We're pulling in location from your friends if they have something exposed via the Open Graph API. One of the things they announced about the Open Graph API is you can push with a latitude and longitude. So people can push that and we can pull it in and just share a lot of data and then we become focused on what we're really good at, which is the best customer content, the best special deals. But the social graph, the location layer and everything else that's already taken care of.

Very cool. Very cool. This is a free app.

It's going to be free app. Yeah.

And tell me a little bit about the offers that we get. So the first seven partners, what kinds of things are they going to.

I'm have to send you that list separately. We are still organizing it, still in negotiations about who's going to make the launch partner. It's one per category, but there's a few categories where we're not yet. I don't know who it's going to be. Okay.

But give me a sense of the kinds of offers that you.

The kinds of offers would be like check in three times at a fast food restaurant and get a free large coffee with a purchase of anything. Or check in with two friends at a clothing store and get a 30% off coupon.

Oh, very cool.

Or check in at an airport and get a discount on airline tickets.

I like the fact that you're including friends in this because like last night I ate at a place and I had 16 people there. Why didn't that count as 16 check ins for me? Because I brought 16 people to that restaurant.

Funny you say that. That is the category that retailers have most embraced. They really want to reward you for bringing your, bringing new customers, bringing your friends. They love that model. And yeah, that was kind of a surprise for us. It was one of the last things we added and it's been one of the most adopted units.

Where do you think looped is going and where do you think this space is going? Because it sure is a white hot space. Four square and go out and you hooked into four square too, right?

We will be able to do that via Facebook because with the Open Graph API, if they push up, push with a location, we can pull that in. It is a white hotspot space. I think that the, you know, we've crossed over this point where now the value perceived of sharing my location outweighs the privacy concerns of doing so. And so I think now that's happened, people understand how great it is to share their location and all the benefits of that. And so I think it's just going to continue to explode and then in another few years it'll be the norm to share your location and it'll be weird when you don't, not the other way around. And in terms of this specific kind of marketing, I think this is going to be a lot of the future of location based ads. I think this is a better. People always think about location based ads as search results because Google works well on the web and they assume it will work well on the phone. But if you think about how just you going through your life you probably go to places you don't more often than new places. You're not searching to discover a new place, you're deciding which of the places you've been in the past will you go again. And offering incentives to a good way to do that and rewarding people for coming is something that these guys love. So you know, I think because of the way people behave, this is a model for location based has it's going to work really well. Yeah.

Although like here in Half Moon Bay, I've visited about, I don't know, 20 different restaurants and I've four squared them, I've yelped them, I've reviewed them and everything. Now if a new restaurant opened or if one I hadn't been to before, but all my other friends go there, it could warn me. It could say, hey, you know, we know your fingerprint and there's another place that all your friends are coming.

So we're doing a lot of stuff like that. We get a lot of interest from advertisers about can I show my special to people that have gone to similar restaurants or if I'm Coffee Shop X, can I show my special to people that frequent Coffee Shop Y? So I think that's going to be a great way to help you discover new specials and new restaurants.

Very cool. What else is going on in this space that's interesting to know about what.

Else is going on? I think the OS 4.0 is going to have background location and that's going to be a huge deal. The model that we're excited about is sort of a hybrid model. Turning it on all the time I think will freak a lot of people out. But people also hate having to pull out their phone and check in every time they move. The model that we really like is.

By the way, why doesn't anybody have a checkout? You know, you check in.

Hang on, hang on. We're. The model we really like is the hybrid where you say there's two check in buttons. There's one that just says check in and there's one that says check in and then continue to update my location for the next four hours. So if you're going out on a Friday night, you can just do it and then start it going. And then if you want to stop, there'll be a checkout button and you can say, I'm done.

This is going to be really cool next year at south by Southwest because I have 7,000 friends on Foursquare, which is a thousand times more than the average user. But I was able to see when parties were breaking up because the hottest people at that party would check in somewhere else. And I would have loved to have seen them move in real time.

It's gonna be a really big deal and Apple's done such a nice job of how they implemented it. It's gonna be very real time. We don't have to wait and just try and check your location every 15 minutes. As soon as you move and change cell colors, we're notified. And so it's gonna be incredibly real time. And you will, you'll see this sort of moving pulse of a city. And I think that's, you know, now that people are more comfortable with this concept of location sharing, I think people are going to embrace that. It's going to be a big deal.

You mentioned you put much stronger constraints on where people can check in. And you're watching the wi fi towers inside malls and inside restaurants, right?

Yeah. One of the focuses of retailers was that a feeling that everybody cheats on services like Foursquare and that I can check in wherever I want or far away. And for people that are giving real value and many of our partners are giving things that are worth like 20 bucks, 25 bucks. And to be doing that to thousands or tens of thousands of people that are going to earn that specific reward, they really want to make sure that they got the value they were in for. And so a big part of this is our ability to verify where you are.

It looks like insertion.

Oh, he does, huh?

I don't think it was, I don't.

Think so either, but it looked a lot like him.

Sorry.

So that's been, you know, ability to actually have verified check ins. Because in a way this is, you know, the check in is Your punch on the sandwich card. You're not purchasing the sandwich, you get the punch. You're just going to the place. So we need to make sure you're actually in the place.

Yeah. And so this is really interesting because in a mall, we haven't been able to track people inside a mall very well, but retailers really want to know that.

Yeah, WI fi actually I think is a pretty good approach for that. There are a few companies doing interesting sort of inside of a mall targeting and as far as I know, they all use WI fi. There's been more of a push to rfid, but I still think that's a waste of way.

Yeah, most people carry an iPhone or.

An Android phone with no chip in it.

Yeah, you guys are only going to be available for iPhone at launch.

We'll only be on the iPhone.

What else is going on?

What's happening?

What's been happening to Loop during the last couple years?

Yeah. So we launched an iPad application called Loop Pulse, trying to help people find cool places in events. Events are something that we added a few months ago that people have really liked. There's not a great. You can't type on Google and say cool concerts tonight in Half Moon Bay. And so making that work has been something that users have really embraced.

This is something that's interesting is why can't I tell systems, location based systems, where I want to check in, where I want to be tomorrow for lunch or, you know, or bring in my Google Calendar and say, yeah, you know, these are the places that I'm going to be tomorrow.

I'm also interested in that concept. Mark Hendrickson at Plancast, I think has done a nice job with that. The issue there is laziness of users, I think, and getting users to update what they're going to do, you know, is a challenge once.

I know. But once you start ranking offers from.

From businesses, we think that'll be enough.

I think that'll be an incentive for me to say, hey, tomorrow I'm gonna go here. Yeah, I'm gonna be in downtown San Francisco. My plan is to eat lunch at.

You know, tempt me with a better offer.

Yeah, somewhere and yeah, tempt me with a better offer in that neighborhood. And yeah, that might be an interesting thing, I think.

So Our belief is that incentives will really motivate users here in a way they haven't been so far. And that if I get something of real value for checking in, I'll do it more often and maybe I'll be willing to say where I'm gonna Check in tomorrow. So plans, concept, what's your experience like for international users?

Because like I was just in Israel.

We have. No, we're not. We don't support international. We're us, only us.

Even if I go to Israel, it doesn't.

You can take it with you, but it won't if you've already registered in the US but it won't work very well. We don't have good place cover.

Yeah, that's what Fourscore was actually getting pretty good. But it's interesting that here in San Francisco it's a lot more popular than in Tel Aviv. Yeah, you know, only the best place to check ins in Tel Aviv. So that's an interesting thing that I'm watching all of these systems, you know, which countries are they going to carve out and which, you know, are you making a deal with Feed Me over in Israel to take over Israel or something like that?

I mean, our feeling, and I say this based on no insight or special knowledge whatsoever, is that Facebook is going to be the company that develops a comprehensive list of places worldwide and you know, also yes, location associated with a lot of users. Now, they could mess up, they could decide they don't want to do this, but they certainly are well positioned to do that as well as sort of take over the rest of the Internet. And you know, I think that my guess is that that's how it will happen.

Are you adding reviews and ability to upload pictures?

So, yeah, ability for check in to add a text and a photo is something we're doing. We haven't decided about reviews yet. They're at least not in the first version.

Yeah, because that's one thing I liked about Feed Me Gowalla let me put pictures and a comment, but it wasn't really based around reviews. And Yelp is offering me to check in, but it's not as nice.

It's not as nice. One of the things for a check in service is you have to make it so simple and so few clicks because you're asking the user to change their behavior to something else. And if you can't sort of open the app, check in and close the app in eight or nine seconds and check in in the middle of that, you're just not going to do it. Yeah.

And you're going to use Foursquare's API to check in on Foursquare as well.

That's something we've considered. Certainly. We never, we never specifically confirm future product plans.

Anything else that you want to tell me about this?

Check it out and let me know.

What you think and where do we find it?

On the App Store. It'll be in the App Store. It's called Loot Star.

Loot Star.

Yeah. Okay.

Thank you so much.

Thank you very much.

Fun chat.

Sam.