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 of the restaurant that a friend wrote a few weeks ago. The service is also accessible on a PC.
Google also is moving into the arena with the purchase of Jaiku, a company that allows mobile-phone users to create a running Web log of events, recommendations and other information. Jaiku describes its mobile product as “a live phone book that displays the activity streams, availability, and location of your Jaiku contacts right in your phone contact list.” Twitter, which also allows people to share small tidbits of information with friends, also is a potential threat.
Whrrl is not available to all mobile phone users. Only subscribers to AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile — on about eight to 10 phone models — can download Whrrl. A portion of the service is free, though Pelago plans to charge less than $3 a month for the location-based service. Pelago, which plans to pursue more funding early next year, employs 34 people.
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