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AT&T is offering a new service that allows parents--or potentially jealous spouses/boyfriends/girlfriends--to track loved ones using their phones.

(Credit: AT&T)

AT&T's service, called FamilyMaps, allows people to track the location of any cell phone on AT&T's network from a mobile phone or PC. The person being tracked receives a text message informing him or her that he or she is being watched. The service periodically informs the tracked individual that he or she is being watched, just in case one text message reminder wasn't enough.

Users can either track someone in real time by viewing the location on a map or they can set up the service to send them text message alerts or e-mails with location information. For example, a parent may get an alert each day that his child made it home from school. Or perhaps a jealous girlfriend looking to keep tabs on her boyfriend could set up the service to notify her if her boyfriend happens to wander into a bar or over to his ex-girlfriend's apartment after work.

Users can only track phones that are part of their family plans. This means that stalkers looking to keep tabs on their old flames won't simply be able to type in their ex-lover's phone numbers and start tracking. (I suppose those people will just have to settle for stalking via Facebook and Twitter updates.)

The service uses satellite GPS technology and cell tower triangulation to pin-point the location of the phone. The service is not supported on prepaid or AT&T Go Phones. And the service costs $9.99 for two phones and $14.99 for up to five phones.

Location-based services are nothing new. They've been around for years and are expected to generate a lot of money for carriers in the future. Already, most major mobile operators are offering some kind of location-based service, such as GPS-enabled navigation or tracking.

Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel, and Alltel have each been offering "tracking" services for more than a year. Sprint Nextel has even lowered the price of its service from about $10 a month to $5 a month.

The social-networking company Loopt also offers a "friend finding" application that can be downloaded on certain phones. Loopt is offered as a free application on Apple's iPhone, which operates over AT&T's network. It's also offered on some Verizon and Sprint Nextel phones.

There are several other social-networking services that use location information to track or find friends or share information via a cell phone. Google also offers a tracking/friend finding application it calls Latitude. There are also other services, such as FourSquare, Whrrl, and Brightkite.

What's different about these social-networking location services from the service AT&T is offering is that these other services often require those being "tracked" to also run the application on their phones. These services also typically have privacy settings controlled by the person being tracked that allows him or her to turn off their "friend-finding beacon" and to hide from certain individuals.

Here's to FourSquare! Former Dodgeball loyalists gather poolside at SXSWi to celebrate the new app.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET)

AUSTIN, Texas--"I couldn't be any more psyched for how it's taken off," FourSquare founder Dennis Crowley said of his brand-new mobile social-networking application, which made its public debut here at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival. "It's been, like, 5,000 times better than I expected."

We were wearing bathing suits. A fellow hardcore FourSquare user, media consultant Rex Sorgatz, had used the service to announce a "bikini flash mob" at the rooftop pool of the Omni Hotel on Monday afternoon. When about 20 people had showed up, Sorgatz--in a cowboy hat, Texas-flag swim trunks, and his trademark hipster glasses--raised a drink and said, "Here's to FourSquare!"

I'm biased. We all were. The iPhone-centric FourSquare has been a project near and dear to our hearts in the New York tech scene, as many of us were loyal users of Dodgeball, the service that Crowley built as a graduate-school thesis and sold to Google in 2005. In January, Google announced that it would be shutting the service down amid budget cuts, and Crowley (along with co-developer Naveen Selvadurai) got cranking on its successor so that they could debut it in time for SXSWi. I was an alpha tester, as were most of those at the impromptu pool party.

If the number of FourSquare friend requests in my in-box are any indication, it's been a hit this week. While it hasn't been as buzzworthy as the then-new Twitter was at SXSWi '07, it's undoubtedly one of the things that people will be talking about when they return home from Austin later this week. And if it goes as Crowley and Selvadurai hope, they'll keep using it, too.

Like Dodgeball (and other location-based mobile applications like Whrrl, Brightkite, and Loopt), FourSquare lets you broadcast your location to your friends. Unlike Dodgeball, FourSquare uses GPS on the iPhone (an SMS code and a mobile Web site is available for other devices, but apps for Android, BlackBerry and the like are down the pipeline) and lets users rack up points and badges for awarding nightlife habits and accomplishments.

"Naveen and I had been kicking around these ideas for a while, since last summer, and then nothing was seriously built until, I guess, that night that we were all at Lock's (that'd be Curbed founder and prolific Dodgeball user Lockhart Steele) birthday party and the rumor started spreading that Dodgeball was getting shut down," Crowley said. "We started to talk (about how) we've really got to build this thing because it's going to be turned off."

FourSquare was built in a matter of weeks, because Crowley and Selvadurai wanted to be able to roll it out in time for SXSWi. "It is, admittedly a little bit sloppy, and it's buggy, and people call us out and say we launched too soon," Crowley said of the occasional slip-ups and outages for FourSquare, which went live in the iTunes App Store less than 24 hours before SXSWi kicked off.. "The goal was to launch here and have people take it back to wherever they live."

Now, they're literally building the application in the SXSWi petri dish, a massive gathering of digital-media's early adopters and innovators who are all eager to socialize and navigate the labyrinthine Austin party scene. Special "badges" have been created for SXSWi. On Monday morning, I earned my "Panel Nerd" badge for spending what FourSquare deems to be too much time at the Austin Convention Center. (Message to my editors: Take note of this!)

He said that while user interest has been through the roof, investors--FourSquare is currently self-funded and run out of Crowley's apartment as well as a number of East Village coffee shops--have been quieter. "I haven't really seen any investors here, to be honest," he said. I've been getting e-mails from a few people, but I haven't run into anyone in the halls or anything." He'll probably need that if FourSquare gets much bigger just to keep its servers afloat. But with penny-pinching the inevitable VC habit du jour, it could take some work.

Crowley also laughed off a Gawker report that Google's lawyers were about to start breathing down his neck over the similarities between Dodgeball and FourSquare--even though Google has launched its own location-aware platform, Latitude.

When Crowley and Selvadurai return to New York later this week, they'll have a lot to do. FourSquare users at SXSWi have been blunt, sending out Twitter messages pointing out bugs and asking when there will be better features to find their friends, like an address-book import function. They'll have to figure out some way to control users attempting to game the system, something that Crowley says has already popped up, and work on building a FourSquare presence in other cities. Right now there are 12, including Boston, Denver, and Minneapolis.

Plus, location-based mobile networking is a hot space. Competitors like Brightkite and Whrrl are better-established, bolstered by investor money, and have already worked in features like Facebook Connect integration. Crowley and Selvadurai have some catching up to do.

They'll also have to deal with what happens when they use FourSquare to "check in" to downtown pizzerias and I show up to steal their food. Just sayin'.

Loopt a la Android. (Click for larger image.)

(Credit: PRNewsFoto/Loopt)

Location-based networking service Loopt has now gone live in Google's Android marketplace, and is compatible with "select phones" that run the open-source operating system.

As with other handsets' versions of Loopt, the app lets you track your Loopt-using friends on a map and find other members in the area. They can also share their location with social-networking and messaging services like Facebook and Twitter.

Prior to launching its iPhone and then Android apps, Loopt was restricted to carriers with which it had signed contracts, like Verizon and Boost Mobile. Typically, it was a subscription service that cost a few extra dollars per month.

"From the start, our goal has been to build a ubiquitous interoperable network in which customers don't have to worry about who has what provider or mobile device," Loopt CEO Sam Altman said in a release. Well, with the iPhone and now Android, it looks like they're getting there.

For the most part, the only person you can socialize with on a handheld GPS navigator is the chick who tells you to turn left after 100 yards.

Garmin wants to change that. The device manufacturer has partnered with location-based app company ULocate to bring its Where.com software, previously available only on compatible cell phones and carriers, to some of its devices. (It hasn't said which ones specifically.) This will give Garmin owners access to Where's own Buddy Beacon software, which shares users' current locations with friends. It can be hooked up to Where's Facebook application, too, so you can tell your friends where you are.

Personally, sharing my location isn't exactly what first comes to mind when I use an in-car GPS navigator, but some of Where's other services sound helpful: Yelp reviews, gas price comparisons from GasBuddy, and a handful of others. Unfortunately, a Where representative told me on Tuesday, those aren't encompassed in the Garmin deal.

Location-sharing has been met with some skepticism. Many people thought that location-based social-networking and friend-finding applications would explode after the launch of the iPhone 3G, but we still haven't seen an epidemic of location-sharing take off. Many cell phone owners seem to be perfectly OK not having everyone on their Facebook friends list know where they are.

I might be sold if Where makes its gas price widget available to Garmin. That's something that Ms. "After 1.1 miles, take the exit right" hasn't yet been able to offer me.

This post was updated at 6:22 a.m. PT on Tuesday to clarify that only the Buddy Beacon widget will be available on select Garmin devices.

Skyhook Wireless announced Monday that it is integrating GPS into its geolocation service to get an even more accurate fix for location-based services.

Up until now, Skyhook's geolocation service, which is used on Apple's iPhone, among other services and devices, has used Wi-Fi hot spots to get a fix on location. The service works very well in densely populated areas where there are a lot of Wi-Fi radios transmitting signals. And it's great for locating places indoors or in cities with a lot of tall buildings, all places where satellite-based GPS, or Global Positioning System, technology has difficulty getting a location fix.

But for all of the benefits of Wi-Fi, it doesn't work in rural areas where hot spots are few and far between. This is where the GPS technology comes in.

"Our technology works great in populated areas," said Ted Morgan, co-founder and CEO of Skyhook. "But on the open road it's more difficult. Now with GPS integrated, iPhone users, for example, can get turn-by-turn navigation anywhere they go."

The way the Skyhook service originally worked is that it would triangulate and get a fix on location-based data on known Wi-Fi hot spots. The company has a database of where Wi-Fi hot spots all over the country are located. Specifically, it uses the Mac address, a unique identifier that every piece of hardware on the Internet must have, to identify the router, and it matches that identifier with the location. Using multiple signals in the same geographic location, the Skyhook technology is able to pinpoint a location.

Now Skyhook has integrated GPS into its technology, which it is putting in chipsets that go into mobile phones and other devices that also have GPS recievers. GPS will allow Skyhook to cover more ground with its geolocation technology. The Wi-Fi/GPS technology should also help services that used GPS only to get information about location more quickly. Because GPS uses three or four low-orbiting satellites to pinpoint a location, it can take a few seconds before it's able to calculate a location. Skyhook's Wi-Fi technology can get location information much faster.

So where might we see this new technology? The original Wi-Fi-based Skyhook technology is already on the iPhone. Morgan couldn't say for sure that the new "hybrid" Wi-Fi/GPS technology will be used on the iPhone 3G that comes out next week. But one of the upgrades in the new iPhone 3G is the addition of a GPS chip, so it would make sense that the Skyhook technology would be used on it. Morgan did say that Apple has access to all of its technology.

Buzzd, a mobile service focused on "real-time" reviews of bars and restaurants, says it's making some inroads in the tough, crowded location-based networking market.

The New York-based start-up is set to release numbers on Thursday announcing that 1.2 million venues are now listed in its directory, 10 percent of which were added by users. As for demographics, about 80 percent of Buzzd's users (it doesn't provide specifics on active users) are in the U.S., concentrated around cities like New York and Los Angeles, with another 10 percent in Europe and 10 percent in India.

Like many "geo" services, Buzzd lets members tell their friends where they are; rival Brightkite also lets members post "notes" on those venues, but doesn't turn them into a real-time lookup service. Buzzd has partnered with event and venue listing services like Time Out, Flavorpill, MyOpenBar, and Zagat. You can also use Facebook's newly extended API to hook it up with your profile credentials.

While it's a mobile Web site that doesn't require a download or subscription service, Buzzd has nevertheless worked on forming carrier deals--and says that more are on the way--to improve visibility in exchange for ad revenue sharing.

So what's next? Founder Nihal Mehta told CNET News.com that the all-important iPhone application is on the way, as well as a "strategic investment" on behalf of a major player in the mobile market. He's not saying who that is, but one can guess it's likely a handset manufacturer (though probably not Nokia, because it just bought competitor Plazes) or a carrier.

With more GPS-enabled handsets on the way--iPhone 3G, I'm looking at you--there are few Web 2.0 niches that are more hyped-up than location-based services.

The latest evidence: Nokia announced Monday that it plans to acquire Plazes, a start-up still in private beta.

Financial terms of the deal, which is expected to close in the third quarter of 2008, were not disclosed. Plazes, which is based in Zurich, Switzerland, but works primarily out of Berlin, will become part of Nokia's Software and Services division. Plazes' technology will likely be worked into future mobile apps.

It's good news for Plazes, which has 13 employees. The track-your-friends-on-a-map application was in a tight market that kept growing tighter, with no clear winner emerging.

"When we started in 2005 the potential of that space might have been obvious, but it was an uphill battle nevertheless, with so many concepts gone sour before," a posting Monday on the Plazes blog explained.

Indeed, the first breakout start-up in the space, Dodgeball, was quickly acquired by Google. And instead of gaining mass-market success, it faded away.

Since then, start-ups like Loopt (which had some prominent stage time at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference this month), Whrrl, and Brightkite--many of which do more or less exactly the same thing--have popped up and gained minor to moderate buzz. By getting acquired, Plazes has pulled itself out of the fray and, in effect, has ensured that it won't go under like some of its location-aware start-up brethren surely will.

"If all goes well, in the near future Plazes will be made available to millions of Nokia customers both online and on millions of mobile devices," the Plazes blog post read. It will still be available as a standalone service, and its iPhone application is still on track.

What if your nightlife agenda was dictated not by text messages, phone calls, or your city edition of Time Out, but by a shifting pattern of dots on a Google Map?

As absurd as it may sound, a New York company called Sense Networks thinks that's the solution. On Monday, the company emerged from stealth mode and simultaneously released an "experimental" product called CitySense, an urban navigation product that puts a new spin on the hot market of location-based mobile networking.

A Citysense map of San Francisco.

(Credit: Sense Networks)

Backed by hedge funds rather than the venture firms that typically fuel tech start-ups, Sense Networks wants to do a whole lot more than just tell you where your friends are. Rather, the company plans to use its database of location-based information--sourced not only from people who download its mobile client but also from previously untapped resources like taxicab GPS logs--to create both consumer- and enterprise-oriented products. It's calling that mapping technology "Macrosense."

CEO and co-founder Greg Skibiski described Macrosense to me as a platform for crunching and analyzing location-based data in real time. That has major implications for the retail and financial services industries, he told me. If it's accurate, it could be a huge asset for predictive markets--as well as possibilities for some cool consumer applications.

The first of those, Citysense, has been unveiled along with its more corporate sibling. Currently available as a free download for BlackBerry and iPhone handsets, Citysense displays what look like heat maps to show where the most human activity is going on at that moment, down to the street intersection; future releases of the product may make those locations even more detailed, but Skibiski said that's not yet decided due to the important issue of privacy concerns.

In its initial alpha phase, it's limited to San Francisco. Other cities, including New York, are in development.

Citysense can also show you where, based on historic data, the most "unusual" levels of activity are going on. You then have the option of looking up nearby businesses on Yelp and Google Maps, or bookmarking locations on Socialight, thanks to external APIs built in.

Then, using the location-aware technology built into the handset, Citysense eventually begins to "learn" where you spend most of your time, and as the product grows beyond San Francisco, eventually it'll be able to suggest nightlife options to you in cities around the country--all this without taking any kind of user registration information.

That's a crucial talking point, considering some people are inevitably going to find Citysense and its brethren more than a little bit Big Brother-ish. Skibiski stressed to me that it's not for meeting people, it's for "meeting" places: No personal information is mined, users have the option to completely erase their past navigation histories if they wish, and there's no way to track other users in the system, he said.

Citysense, with its focus on "unusual activity" and machine learning, might be a bit too wacky for the average BlackBerry user, but that's not a big deal for Sense Networks. The company plans to profit primarily from business clients purchasing deeper data from the Macrosense platform; Citysense and all future consumer applications are intended to be strictly icing on the cake.

For something so focused on navigation and geography, it's a bit ironic that location-based social networks have to work their way through such a jungle: carrier partnerships, handset compatibility, creepy privacy concerns, and what-have-you. But one small New York start-up, Socialight, says it's found a route: developers, developers, developers.

Socialight, which focuses on user-created city maps and whose founders insist that location-based mobile services can have functions other than stalking your friends, announced Wednesday that it has opened its application program interface (API). This will let developers mesh Socialight into applications for mobile platforms like Apple's iPhone, Google's Android software, and other devices and operating systems equipped with location-aware technology like GPS and cell tower triangulation. The start-up is also open-sourcing its mobile Java application along with the API.

"There are other APIs out there for tracking where your friends and family are," co-founder Dan Melinger said in a statement Wednesday. "But no one we know of has released an API that lets you publish, manage, and distribute local content, media, and information. This is far more useful and we are excited to see what develops."

For Socialight, this means convenience: an API can lead to more reach with fewer formal partnerships. At launch, Socialight has announced that Dash Navigation is using its API to send Socialight maps to its in-car GPS devices.

"We're making it much simpler to create your own apps for location-aware devices like the iPhone," Melinger told CNET News.com. "We expect a lot of developers to design apps that show content about the places around you--whether its a vintage-eyewear-shop-finder for the iPhone or something for your in-car GPS that helps track down the Shochu bars of L.A."

For the industry, still dealing with how to figure out location-based networking and mobile social networks, and the potential snafus involved with those, Socialight is something to watch: APIs and developer platforms were what made PC-based social networks really skyrocket. This could be an indicator of whether the same will hold true for the mobile space.