Chris Clark, 25, is running for a seat on Mountain View's city council. Clark works as a senior operations managers at Loopt, a wireless social-networking startup notable for its large number of gay employees — Clark included. Local techies are pushing to get him elected. We give him good odds, because he'll bring three underrepresented communities to the council — the youngs, the gays, and the nerds.
Earthcomber, a Chicago startup, filed suit against Loopt, a Mountain View startup, for allegedly infringing on a patent that lets "a system and method for locating and notifying a user of a person, place or thing having attributes matching the user’s stated preferences." Yawn. To spice things up, Earthcomber today added TechCrunch, the blog of blowhard Michael Arrington, to the lawsuit. Why? Ostensibly because Earthcomber's CEO couldn't find Arrington's phone number. So much for locating users. [TechCrunch]
The folks at Loopt managed to garner a heaping helping of positive publicity from Michael Arrington by releasing a tool allowing readers of Arrington's TechCrunch blog to stalk each other out in the real world. And not only will it help you raise all sorts of privacy concerns among perfect strangers, Arrington himself will tell you where he is in the world at all times. So it shouldn't be hard to find him when he ditches the plebes at the next TechCrunch event for a Scotch-fueled afterparty. (Photo by Andrew Mager)
Loopt has certainly gotten creative marketing the company's "social-mapping and communication service" — three-minute video advertisements on the touch-screen displays in New York City taxi cabs. Perfect for reaching the pink and green, double-popped-collar crowd. Care to help with the caption? Best offering in the comments is sacrificed to the new headline gods. The gods rewarded rwe112 for yesterday's winner, "Forgive me father, for I have sinned..."
Letting your friends know where you are is supposed to be the point of Loopt. The location-based app for the iPhone (and for some other mobile phones no one ever talks about) would work great, too, if you still have friends after you install the thing. After people who never signed up started getting "creepy" text messages inviting them to join, actual consenting users complained back that the app had sent unsolicited texts to their entire contact lists — and ohmigod, fanboy-favorite videoblonder iJustine was one of them! So what now, blog gang? How do you make Loopt's dirty poly-polo-shirted CEO pay?
The new iPhone will let you broadcast your location to people through a program called Loopt. And because this phone is now just 200 bucks, it'll finally become an industry standard instead of a fringe geek toy. So get ready for the biggest annoying shift in your social life since Facebook, because Loopt is about to do for the world what a little site called Dodgeball did for the Gawker crowd in 2004.
The Valley styles itself as gay-friendly. But how many queer venture capitalists can you think of? Here's a sign, in the month of gay pride, of change in the wind: NEA's Patrick Chung recently held a commitment ceremony with partner Matthew Burt, a church choir director. After the jump, more on Chung and Burt's Valley links, and a photo of the wedding party.Following a honeymoon in what Chung describes as "the Far East," the couple will be hard to ignore in Sand Hill society. Chung and Burt, known for throwing the occasional croquet party, are well-connected. Burt directs music at Christ Episcopal Church in Portola Valley, a hotbed of venture capitalists. Chung is on the board of wireless startup Loopt and is also involved with the NEA-backed 23andMe. 23andMe, of course, is the biotech startup founded by Anne Wojcicki, the wife of Google cofounder Sergey Brin. As a wedding gift, Castro Confidential recommends his-and-his iPhones. We suspect Brin, at least, can afford them.
