| Boost Mobile launches 'first-of-a-kind' cellphone friend finder |
|
| by Stuart Corner | |
| Wednesday, 15 November 2006 | |
|
Page 1 of 2   
Featured Whitepaper
5 Best Practices for Smartphone Support
Boost Mobile is offering Boost loopt to its customers with java-enabled handsets for free through the remainder of 2006. Starting January 2007, Boost loopt will be offered on a pay-as-you-go basis for $US2.99 per month with the first 30 days free. From November 20, Boost customers can Boost loopt onto their Java-enabled Boost Mobile phone. The Optus service, Friend FindA, started with a price of 55 cents per friend location (what a dumb idea that was), or $4.95 per month (that is now unlimited subject to fair usage, but was originally for 100 requests). However the Optus service offers little more than enabling users to find friends, or see who has been trying to find them. Boostloopt on the other hand comes with a gamut of 'socialising' features including, tagging and sharing favourite places, accepting invitation and managing your social calendar, making available a profile which you can update with our current activity, automatically receiving alerts when friends are nearby. As Craig Thole, director of value added services, Boost Mobile, noted: "Fourteen to 25-year-olds are committed to their social circles and constantly want to know where their friends are at." Seems to me there'd be a good market for this in Australia, so I would expect Optus does not upgrade is service, and/or at least one of the other carriers to come up with something. However it is also possible that users get disillusioned because the service does not perform as they expect. There's lots of information at the loopt website, http://www.loopt.com but there is one thing it does not tell you amongst all the pretty pictures of peoples' locations pinpointed at street intersections on maps: How accurate is it really? |
| < Next story in category | Previous story in the category > |
|---|
