I am really looking forward to what Sam has up his sleeves now that he is free.
Everyone seems to forget that before iPhone, and later Android, you had no choice but to partner with carriers - there was no other way to distribute your application.
Even in Europe, where the phone ecosystem is different, access to location required carrier support, and nearly no handsets had the ability to locate themselves without network assistance.
Loopt made mistakes, many of which were mine, but that wasn't one of them.
Which is a perfectly valid option. Just because someone has an idea a good idea doesn't mean that it will make a good business.
The cell phone software market pre-iPhone simply wasn't a good place to be starting a business, no matter what the idea.
There were successes though, even back then. It was a long shot, yes, but not a proven dead end.
I was in the UK 2008-2010 and you could only get Loopt through American carriers. BTW, far back early 2000s, you could get mobile software from getjar.
It took all our effort on both the business and engineering side to do what we did. And then iPhone came out, the world changed quickly, and in retrospect, we were reluctant and missed some opportunities. I would play that part and things after differently if I had another chance - but nothing before.
Things were more complicated then. I could go into boring details, but here's one example - MapKit on iPhone wasn't released until mid May in 2009. We had to maintain our own tile generation and geocoding infrastructure even after that for non-iPhones.
In the end though, international availability didn't matter because the product didn't resonate the way it needed to. Users in the US who weren't using it weren't simply waiting for their foreign friends to join. International availability would have brought more users, yes, but not success.
From outside,it was obvious what was wrong. From outside,it always is.
I just shrugged and closed the tab.