Gypsii: Social networking meets location-based services on your mobile phone

Posted on March 6th, 2008
By Shane Lennon

Shane Lennon is SVP of Strategy and Marketing at GyPSii and secretly wants to be a chef. He and fellow Gypsii team members will be presenting at the March 19th Providence Geeks Dinner. All are welcome. Details and RSVP here .

Well, it has been quite a 12 months, and the last few weeks have just added another level of excitement for the team at GyPSii. The train has truly left the station. It was only a couple of years ago that the founders, RI-native Dan Harple and Sam Critchley, met in Amsterdam, conceived a joint vision, and rolled out a prototype. Then last year, Dan assembled a team of old acquaintances (from Insoft, Netscape, Context Media & Oracle) many living on the East Coast of the US and in RI in particular, got investment, rolled out a beta,and set up an office in Warwick. Last month went live on a global basis with major deals in China & India - see some of the recent news. And just yesterday, we added GyPSii onto the iPhone .

We firmly believe that GyPSii is the coming together of the right technologies, product and market opportunity, and of course people, at the right time. We are looking forward to expanding our team in the 4 main offices: Rhode Island, Salo (Finland), Shanghai (China) and Amsterdam (HQ in The Netherlands).

Gypssi Screenshot A recent focus group exercise, done here in New England, further enforced for us that the consumer (or as we geeky people say 'the end user") wants a compelling set of services on a mobile device that moves far beyond text messaging, basic WAP browsing and old fashioned voice communications! GyPSii brings to the consumer a mobile lifestyle application, rich in services, features, and capabilities. It fuses all of the phone's components, like the camera, location technologies, text, email, etc., into one easy-to-use interface. It turns the a user's mobile phone into a there own "personal digital life recorder." (For an overview, check out our intro video, produced by Providence-based TangoPix.)

We look forward to showcasing GyPSii at this month's Providence Geeks Dinner, sharing our experiences, and meeting all of you.

Gypsii is hiring:

Web 2.0 Developer (multiple positions)
Perl/PHP Web Developer (multiple positions)
Bookkeeper

11 comments

Comments

shane lennon

Submitted on March 6th, 2008 - 12:14pm link

A little update on GyPSii - we got covered in the New York Times this morning - Social Networking moves to the Cellphone - great news for a company with an RI location.

JackTemplin

Submitted on March 6th, 2008 - 12:55pm link

Awesome New York Times coverage, Shane - congratulations.

It's really impressive how big an opportunity Gypsii is going after. From the NYT's article:

[CEO] Harple predicted GyPSii “could have more users in one year than Facebook had in three.”

BTW, am I right in assuming that the iPhone version is browser-based (i.e. doesn't require a download)?

shane lennon

Submitted on March 6th, 2008 - 2:56pm link

We will have 2 versions for the iPhone - the current one is a web client and the next version will be native.

aktear

Submitted on March 7th, 2008 - 9:17am link

@Shane: if you aren't iPhone-ing it, what do you think is the best US handset for the Gypsii feature set?

@Jack: can you link the video overview directly?

Congratulations ! Would love to see RI become an East Coast mobile hub.

JackTemplin

Submitted on March 7th, 2008 - 10:43am link

@Allan - linked now - thanks.

bjepson

Submitted on March 7th, 2008 - 11:15am link

@aktear - I notice that they used an n95 in their video and the screenshot above is also from a series 60 3rd edition phone. I think you couldn't go far wrong with an N95 or an N82. Both are fine phones (N82 has a real camera flash). Amazon has a good price on an unlocked N82 right now.

shane lennon

Submitted on March 7th, 2008 - 1:07pm link

Another major pick up for GyPSii:

See GyPSii on the BBC, the Click Show on TV & Online in the first 5 minute segment

"What we are enabling people to do is generate user generated content with their mobile phone in real time", Dan Harpel, head of social networking service GyPSii

shane lennon

Submitted on March 7th, 2008 - 1:10pm link

Here are some of the best phones for GyPSii:

- N95 (fantastic camera & GPS)

- HTC TyTn for WM version

- iPhone (of course)

We are rolling out across multiple mobile devices - currently WM 5/6.0; RIM BB Curve; S60; iPhone and much more to come

Shane

Mark

Submitted on March 12th, 2008 - 10:29pm link

Hi Shane,

Are you able to make use of Google's "My Location" tool on phones which don't have GPS (like my Tmobile MDA)?

-Mark

shane lennon

Submitted on March 13th, 2008 - 10:06am link

Mark,

In the client we developed for the iPhone we used our own "set my location" feature - that allows you enter address, retrieve it & then use that as your current location.

With the native iPhone client we will be availing off the different ways the iPhone SDK will allow us use "location data".

We have a number of other ways of grabbing "location" without having a built in GPS chip - more details will be rolling out on this and future road map, in the coming weeks.

And we are looking at the Android platform to best leverage location based mobile social networking.

Shane

tgruber

Submitted on March 14th, 2008 - 1:57pm link

Congratulations! I saw the article in the NY Times last week and have been meaning to email you. Looking forward to hearing more at the dinner next week.