Location Labs’ Safely, which provides mobile services that help parents ensure the personal security kids’ mobile phones, is revealing that its Safely Family Locator has enabled more than one billion family safety location checks since inception. These “locates” have been initiated by Family Locator subscribers across millions of child phones on carriers such as T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T.

Location Labs is also debuting Family Check-In, the newest offering in the Safely suite of digital parenting tools. While the locate service simply locates a child, the Family Check-In expands lets kids show parents that they arrived at the library or a friend’s house with a location-verified map.

The service is first launching in partnership with T-Mobile, under the name “FamilyWhere Check In” and is available as a free download in the Android Market.

Location Labs also offers DriveSmart Plus, which uses the phone’s GPS to determine when a subscriber is likely in a car and then disables the ability to read or send text messaging while driving and transfers all calls to voicemail or hands free Bluetooth.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

You just shouldn’t text while you drive, even if you are a dextrous teen used to multitasking all day long. Yet people still do text (and Skype and email) while they drive, and not just teens (cough, Michael). There’s not too much you can do about it. But Location Labs is coming out with an Android app for T-Mobile called DriveSmart Plus which plays on the fear of parents everywhere that their kid is going to wreck the car or worse while texting.

DriveSmart Plus uses the phone’s GPS to determine when a subscriber is in motion and likely in a car. It then disables the ability to read or send text messaging while driving and transfers all calls to voicemail or handsfree Bluetooth. The app is $4.99 and they are going to sell a ton of these, but it is not going to stop any teens who want to keep texting. The app has a big override button, which teens will be using a lot, even if they have to explain to their parents why they were overriding the controls. Parents get notified when the app is overridden, but I can already hear the excuses: “That wasn’t me, Mom. It was Rufus. I was giving him a ride home and he grabbed my phone.”

Building on the parental surveillance theme, Location Labs is also launching another geo app that work son all T-Mobile phones called FamilyWhere. This one allows parents to locate any family member on the family phone plan. They can also set up location alerts to make sure their child is at school or home before a certain hour. I’m sure it works great on spouses too, although it is not being marketed as a way to spy on adults. It’s all about safety, folks.

Location Labs, formerly WaveMarket, creates geo-fencing apps for carriers and also offers its platform to developers. DriveSmart and FamilyWhere are examples of the types of apps that can be create don its platform.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

On May 22 this year 300 hackers converged in New York at TechCrunch Disrupt for a day and half long hack day before the conference itself started. At least one of the projects created at the hack day has now become an actual business, and has raised an angel round of funding from top tier investors.

GroupMe launches today. What is it? It’s a dead simple way to create a private SMS group with your friends. Just go to the site and type in your mobile number (U.S. phones only at this point). You’ll then get a text message from a unique phone number assigned to your new group that says “You just created a new group on GroupMe! Now add some friends by replying #add with your friends’ names and numbers.”

To add another person just add them via text message and they’re part of the group. Any text messages any member send go to all other members. And there are a variety of commands to mute groups, change topics, list other members, etc.

And the fun doesn’t stop there. Members can also initiate a group conference call to all members at any time. Just call the group number and everyone’s phone will ring.

GroupMe is working with Twilio, who was a sponsor of the hack day, to power the SMS and calling. And they are also working with Location Labs to integrate location/presence features in the future.

The company was founded by Jared Hecht (previously Tumblr) and Steve Martocci (previously Gilt Groupe).

GroupMe is pretty interesting from the start, but the founders have plans for a lot more. Says Hecht: “We think we’ve got a great direction for GroupMe as a group communication platform. We’re pursuing some very interesting data in/data out plays (eg, think about what happens when you invite Madison Square Garden into your group with a #MSG command). We plan on taking our hack day demo of contextual group advertising to help drive decision making and building it out, too. There are also some neat app-to-app and group buying plays.”

Hecht and Martocci caught the eyes of investors fairly quickly. They’ve closed an $850,000 round of financing from Betaworks, SV Angel, First Round Capital, Lerer Ventures and a number of prominent angels.

We’ve got a guest post coming up from the founders talking about their experience at Hack Day.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Text-message advertising startup Placecast is partnering with Location Labs to potentially extend the reach of Placecast’s ShopAlerts service to over 180 million potential consumers in the US. Location Labs offers developers an API that gathers location data from carriers such as AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile.

Location Labs’ API will be used for Placecast’s ShopAlerts, which are location-triggered mobile text messages sent from brands to consumers. Consumers can opt-in to receiving text messages in a variety of ways—at the store, online, via text-message, mobile websites or on Facebook.

Once the technology has been activated, consumers will be alerted when they are near a location that they are interested in or when the brand is offering sales and specials. ShopAlerts’ technology uses “geo-fences,” which are virtual boundaries that can be targeted via location-based marketing. Retailers can customize alerts to fit their brand and strategy.

Location Labs’ APIs will allow Placecast access carrier location for both feature and smartphones of opted-in users. Placecast will source location data is from Location Labs’ wireless carrier partners. Of course, access to Lovation Labs’ APIs come at a price, but Placecast declined to reveal the financial terms of the agreement.

Placecast says that North Face, which was a pilot partner of ShopAlerts, is already using the new service. While Placecast is betting big on SMS as an effective marketing campaign for stores and brands, other startups, such as recently launched Shopkick, are using location-based mobile apps to help consumers find deals in retail stores, including Best Buy.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A mobile app that doesn’t take advantage of your location information is becoming a rare breed. But developers must create different geo apps for each different phone—Android, iPhone, Blackberry, you name it. And that ignores all of the dumb phone out there (sorry, feature phones). So far, the main way to make a geo app is to tap into the GPS or other location data on the phone itself. But WaveMarket, which today is renaming itself Location Labs, is offering developers a new way to gather location data from phones: directly from the carriers themselves.

The mobile carriers obviously can collect location data on any phone on their networks. But it is not easy for developers to work with the carriers to access that data, and the carriers charge money for it. Location Labs already works with AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile in the U.S. (but not yet with Verizon) and is offering geo-location APIs which tap directly into their cellular network infrastructure. “This platform can locate 180 million phones with a remote API, no download required,” says CEO Tasso Roumeliotis. Instead, the location data is all server-based.

What that means is that location based apps can be built for feature phones as well as smartphones, and delivered via SMS or the mobile Web. Location Labs is also launching a second geo-fencing API which can be triggered whenever a user is near a certain location, or a friend is nearby. Developers can sign up here for the the APIs (the first 200 to enter the code “TECHCRUNCH” will be accepted).

The APIs are not free. Developers will be charged anywhere from a tenth of a penny to 3.5 cents per data call, but Location Labs is trying to get the carriers to shift to more of a freemium model where they only start charging once an app becomes popular. The big benefit of getting the geo data from the carriers themselves is that it can be applied across many different types of phones. Location Labs manages the connection to the carriers, as well as a privacy portal for users which tells them which apps have access to their location data and gives them controls to change permissions.

As WaveMarket, it’s been around since 2002 and powers paid apps distributed by carrier partners such as the AT&T Family Map and Sprint’s Family Locator. Nokia also uses the technology for geo-fencing services overseas. The company is already doing double-digit millions of dollars in revenue through its own apps and OEM deals, says Roumeliotis, and is profitable. With the beta launch of its geo APIs and its rebranding, Location Labs is trying to reposition itself as a platform for mobile app developers. He even hints it might file to go public within the next 18 months.

The Location Labs API extracts longitude and latitude from the carriers it works with and then delivers that to the app developer. So Foursquare or Gowalla could create SMS or mobile Web versions of their apps allowing people to check in via text message or old-school WAP browsers, for example. The downside, of course, is that they would have to pay for each check-in. For apps like roadside assistance, teenage monitoring, or fraud detection where people are willing to pay or there are cost savings involved in knowing someone’s exact location immediately, it might be worth it.

For smartphone app developers, the geo-fencing API might be worth a look. It helps reduce the battery drain for geo apps running in the background. On Android and Blackberry, for instance, not a lot geo apps take advantage of the background processing because it kills the battery in a few hours. Location Labs looks at the RF signals to figure out when to request new geo-information instead of asking all the time. If you are a mobile app developer who tries out these APIs, please let others know your thoughts below in comments.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch