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March 10, 2010
I've seen the future of the real time web, and it's GyPSii
During my recent trip to Barcelona to host #140conf Barcelona, I also had the opportunity to attend the 2010 Mobile World Congress. While there I had the chance to meet with an Internet pioneer in the real time web, Dan Harple.
Dan has been at the root of the real time web, and, he's been at it for over 18 years. His latest effort is a company called gypsii.com. He started gypsii upon moving from the US to Amsterdam, where, as he puts it, riding a bike changed his view on what the web should do for us: how it should be real time, more personal and relevant, more mobile, and more “here and now.”
In this quest, Harple's combined his team's experience with consumer apps with the big data search problem In other words, the realization of a real time web vision that puts real time interactive communications, and deep relevant location-based search, in your pocket on a mobile device. I received a demo of gypsii’s next-gen app Tweetsii in Barcelona, and discovered a product I think reveals a true post-Web 2.0 vision. It goes beyond mash-ups, website-based search, and delivers the app that to me, epitomizes the “State of Now.” I believe Tweetsii is the next big step in the real time web experience. Further, GyPSii has done this by quietly rolling out an API that has some of the largest mobile device manufacturers and telcos building gypsii apps as part of their platforms.
John Battelle has also identified this trend toward the State of Now, in his recent posting. GyPSii ties it all together by taking Battelle's model to the next logical step, beyond "Where I Am," with the result being the realtime web experience I saw in Tweetsii. This is why location alone isn't quite the next big thing and why I believe it is GyPSii.
Although many of the location-based apps like foursquare, gowalla, and brightkite have received a lot of buzz in the press, gypsii has quietly amassed a global user base dwarfing theirs, in the millions, based on their early foray into China. It's been a bold move, which I believe underscores the significance of its technology. Gypsii is now bundling on hundreds of millions of devices from Samsung, LG, HTC, Lenovo, Huawei, and others, and part of offerings with the largest mobile telcos globally, including Telefonica, China Mobile, China Unicom, and others. It's the leading app on the Apple iPhone in China. Gypsii is growing at a rate 5 times faster than Facebook did it in its first 18 months. The company has raised over 40 million dollars. If you've not seen it yet, you will.
So, what is Tweetsii Why does it epitomize the next big thing for the real time web?
Tweetsii is a new real time mobile app that connects people with places and events. Many have written “location is the next big thing.” (I have been writing about Location Based Services for over 10 years and I still stand behind the E911 Phase III Petition I filed after 9/11.) Location isn't the next big thing but part of something bigger. In fact Tweetsii places location as just one core element, together with social graph, twitter, media, etc. So, Tweetsii IS different. Tweetsii couples location with a deeper context. Tweetsii indexes the world with user created images, reviews, comments and more. It builds a user created, not corporate created index of the world. This, for me, defines the “State of Now.” In the process, all users are, day by day, building a new place-based index of the world that goes beyond what we today know as search. Real time content creation, coupled with real time exploration.
Tweetsii is inherently mobile and allows users to tweet, check-in, send alerts, create place-based photos and videos and to connect with the people and places around them. Want to know what is happening nearby? Just “shake it up” and Tweetsii shows hot happenings nearby that those in your social graph may also be checking out. It’s buzz without the privacy invasion, it’s location based services with social awareness. It combines your entire social graph, not just Facebook’s, with a user generated index of the planet and events. It then combines this with a twitter timeline to reveal what gypsii calls “place streams.” One of Harple’s comments is, “place streams are the ‘be here now’ of the real time internet. ”I call this the State of Now.
The DNA of this company is pretty impressive. Harple's committed his career to real time interactive communications and has been a seminal influence on VoIP, streaming media, and interactive screen sharing/shared whiteboards He was one of the very first people I interviewed in my early VoIP initiatives in the mid-90's at pulver.com He was the co-founder of InSoft, a company that merged with Netscape back in 1995. The deal brought the first commercial US based VoIP products, audio, video, streaming media servers, and standards for realtime media to the Internet, the first real time web platform, including RTSP (which is used daily by millions in web video) In other words, if you use Skype, GoToMeeting, or YouTube, among others, Harple's technology and its influence has touched your life.
After Netscape, besides collaborating with artist Todd Rundgren on real time interactive artist technologies, he formed another company that was acquired by Oracle, which formed the basis of Oracle's "big data" search which competes with Google Dan's been behind core technology and patents that are some of the most cited in patent documents for VoIP, media streaming, and real time web communications And you probably never heard of him Yet, he’s been written about widely, from the Wall Street Journal, to a book identifying the “new pioneers” in our marketplace I think gypsii and tweetsii will put him back on our radar
Dan Harple’s lack of self-promotion and forward vision is what inspired me to coin him the "peripheral visionary" of the real time web He's full of one-liners, such as “Don't search the Internet, search the planet,” “An app should do more than check-in, it should allow you to check it out,” and my favorite, “gypsii takes us beyond 'search engines' and shows what we need are real time place-based connection engines.”
Harple will be giving one of the keynotes in NYC at #140conf in April. Please check out the new gypsii app, tweetsii, which is rumored to be in the Apple app store.
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Note: GyPSii is one of the sponsors of the upcoming #140conf NYC taking place April 20-21.
Tags: 140conf, social media, Dan Harple, twitter, tweetsii, GyPSii, NYC, Jeff Keni Pulver
Posted by jeff on March 10, 2010 06:59 AM | Permalink
Additional resources: #140conf events | Watch the Jeff Pulver Show | Jeff's Qik Videos
Comments
Thanks Jeff. Can't wait to explore tweetsi & I have my ticket to 140confnyc already! cu there!
Posted by: Betsy Kent at March 11, 2010 07:45 AM
Wow! This post REALLY stands out from the crowd as something really ahead of the curve. Thanks for the heads up.
BTW I seem to be blocked from following you on Twitter - possibly because I was one of those who recently got their account hijacked by some idiot who then sent out obnoxious spam tweets - !
Anyway - I'd appreciate connecting back up with you Jeff.
Posted by: Ian Goldsmid at March 10, 2010 11:24 PM
wow ... i love this post + the thinking behind what the next big post-web 2.0 thing is ... and i agree ... its not about location, location, location but more about a certain point of intersection between our organic life + the cyberSpacial reality created by our use of the social web + mobile devices ... 'search the planet', what a fantastic quote + perhaps the direction we all seek when looking into the crystal ball monitor of all this progress we've amassed ... beyond the information + conversation we capture through our modern tools, there is wisdom to create ... an even more hybrid new reality that leads us to a higher consciousness
twitter me this, twitter me that ;]
Posted by: lou suSi at March 10, 2010 01:20 PM