Irish startup, Locle: Brilliantly simple LBS social networking

Yesterday I published a post about Nokia’s Calling All Innovators contest and ended the editorial by suggesting that anyone entering should also drop me a note and do a post.

I’m willing to bet that you will be reaching for the download button in a few moments.

First off all, the obligatory screenshot:

Let’s hear from one of the founders, Pieter:

Hi Ewan,

Thanks for posting about the Nokia competition on MIR this morning. It reminded me to not just submit to the Calling All Innovators but also the Apps on Map competition.

Let me briefly introduce:

I am one of the founders of Locle, based in Dublin, one of last year’s winners of the Eircom Web innovation awards. We are live on http://m.locle.com and www.locle.com. Locle is a platform and device agnostic LBS platform that lets users find out who’s near based on our proprietary cell-ID apps (works on 70% of handsets in Europe).

Locle works with FB Connect and Netlog gadgets to create an integrated experience for social network users that want to bring the experience to a mobile and find out if their friends on Netlog or Facebook are nearby rather than a standalone LBS service .

We have just launched live SMS updates as a new service and we’ve called it Serendipity. Below is the 100 word submission for the Apps on Maps competition if you were so inclined to post about it:

“Serendipity is a Locle-powered SMS service that updates users of Facebook and Netlog users in their extended network that are within proximity. People add the Locle application on Facebook or Netlog and install the client appication on their handset (only a 14K download). Locle uses Facebook Connect to see who your friends are and who they know and then sends users SMS updates when someone they know or might know is nearby.”

Find Locle here:

http://m.locle.com, here: http://www.locle.com or here: http://apps.facebook.com/locle_wap

I will also send our submission to the Calling All Innovators competition as soon as we’ve done it.

Thanks,

Pieter

I saw the N95 8GB and thought ‘nice, they support Nokia’. I wasn’t quite ready for the ‘shit, wow’ reaction when I clicked on the list of supported devices. They’re on almost everything. Sony, Blackberry, Symbian, UIQ, WinMo, Palm OS — and you can get the iPhone/iPod Touch app from this link. Very impressive.

If you’d like to play with it, look me up — I’m username ‘ew4n’.

I’m particularly impressed that roughly 70% of available European mobile handsets are capable of using Locle at the moment. Since it doesn’t strictly rely on GPS — falling back to Cell-ID for most handsets — it means that, theoretically, if you were wanting to deploy a location based social networking service in, say, India (for example), the first thing you should do is call up Pieter at Locle and do a deal with them.

Likewise any mobile operators or dotcoms looking to do interesting things with their users should give Pieter a call.