Houston, we have lift off…

Yep, the time has come. Loopnote.com Beta just launched tonight! We’re all very excited about this moment. The last several days leading up to the actual launch have been extremely busy, especially for our engineer, who’s been working around the clock. We’re checking the site, making sure every little thing is as good as it can be for launch. We’re also getting feedback on a daily basis from several of our private beta users and clarifying parts of the site that need better explanation or thinking through some usage scenarios to make sure we’ve chosen the best user path. Friday, we did a demo for Natali Del Conte from Techcrunch and the article was posted tonight. At this point we’re all really happy about where the product is.

The product itself has really evolved over the past 13 months but it has remained true to its original vision– to let people create alerts for each other. If anything, I think we all agree that while it’s taken longer to get a product out than we thought it would, the product is much better because of it. We’ve watched a lot of new sites launch recently and have kind of been holding our breath, hoping we’d still have something original. It’s a good feeling to say that to this day there’s really nothing else like it out there. We’ve kept doing our homework on other sites, especially a lot of the new group SMS services and I think we’ve learned a few things. We’ve learned that what makes loopnote stand out is that it lets all sorts of people connect, not just friends. It connects people who have a common interest. Group SMS services are really useful for groups of friends or small organizations where every individual in the group needs to communicate with everyone else. They feel a lot like mobile chat, and I guess that’s pretty much what they’re supposed to be. Loopnote isn’t really about a dialogue and we built it that way. It’s more about one-way broadcasts. It’s much more useful for people who want to “stay in the loop” about certain things but who don’t need to go as far as create a traditional group around that thing.

For example, the entertainment writer for Westword magazine in Denver could create a loop telling people what events she recommends on any given weekend. Or, an art critic out on First Friday could communicate which galleries have the best shows that night, from the gallery itself! I’d love to get an alert (notes as we call them) but I don’t necessarily want to join a group, a newsletter, nor do I need to communicate with others getting these alerts. And I doubt the person creating the loop would really appreciate getting 100 replies all delivered to her cell phone. The idea behind loopnote is really simple and I think it works. It’s really about creating a place where people can say “hey, this is what I know about, subscribe to my loop and check it out”.

Like I said, I think group SMS services are really valuable and I think we’re going to be seeing a lot more mobile group communication services appear in the mainstream. A friend of mine recently showed me his new Sony Ericsson phone. I know phones today can do everything but I was still pretty impressed to see how good the video quality was on his phone. Now, his carrier’s network can’t quite handle video yet so he doesn’t really have anyone to talk with using video but that’s definitely coming and it’s coming a lot sooner than we think. It reminds of Verizon’s recent deal with YouTube. Vcast customers will be able to watch YouTube videos on their phones (cool) and will be able to upload their mobile phone videos and share them with others (really cool). I think group SMS where friends can text each other as if they were all in a chat room is the precursor to group video chat. It’s already possible to use these group SMS services to take a video from my phone and share it with my ‘mobile group’. Now, I think it would be really cool to share that same video with a larger group, say maybe ‘folks on the lookout for spy videos of new cars’. Hmm… come to think of it, I bet I could do that with the loopnote API…