Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Find your friends on a cell phone: Pelago introduces Whrrl

Whrrl is a new service that allows mobile phone users to chronicle every social activity in their lives -- writing reviews of movies or restaurants or uploading photos from concerts and sporting events. It then plots that information on a map and combines it with similar content from friends, creating a personal mobile city guide. It also provides the real-time locations of people as they wander from place to place in a city, tracking chosen friends as dots on a map.

Whrrl -- not to be confused with a competing service called Whirrl -- is the first offering from Pelago, a Seattle startup that scored $7.4 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and Trilogy Equity Partners last year.

Led by Jeff Holden and Darren Erik Vengroff, both of whom previously held high-ranking positions at Amazon.com, Pelago is one of a number of companies trying to tap the emerging arena of location-based services. The idea is that mobile phone users will want to locate friends -- who may be at a nearby restaurant -- or at the very least get a review that a friend wrote of the restaurant from a few weeks ago. The service is also accessible on a PC.
 

No comments: