Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Tasso Roumeliotis, CEO of Safely (Part 1)

No matter how old they get, parents never stop worrying about their children. They always want to know where their children are, what they’re doing and who they’re with. Safely seeks to alleviate some those concerns through modern technology. For example, with Safely Drive, parents can disable texting and talking while driving, with Safely Locate, they can create alerts that let them know when their children leave specified areas, or they can use Sparkle to get on-demand location information. Safely is a division of Location Labs, a location-based services company that, according to Inc.com, boasted $17 million in revenue in 2010.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Tasso. Let’s talk a little bit about your background. Would you give us some context so the audience knows who you are?

Tasso Roumeliotis: I’m the founder of Location Labs and Safely. Safely is the consumer division of the company. I’ve been an entrepreneur since I was about 14 years old, and I started a variety of companies all throughout college. Even when I was in business school, I started a medical device company. I looked to make a new business around the start of 2001. My passion was mobile, which was still a nascent technology. It was mostly text messaging. There weren’t browsers or those kinds of things. In the pursuit of mobile, I determined from my perspective that the key differentiator of a mobile phone is that it’s always with you, and you can access location products. That location beacon became what I thought would be the key, the anchor to build services in the mobile ecosystem. I started the company focusing on location. We’ve migrated the company into something pretty different from the original vision.

SM: When was the company founded?

TR: We raised our first dollar of capital in late 2001. We raised our series A in 2002, just after the technology nuclear winter. It was challenging, but we got lucky.

SM: You’ve been in business for a long time. How big is the company today?

TR: We’re about 150 people right now.

SM: And what is your revenue?

TR: Revenue we don’t disclose, but I will tell you that we’re 150 and cash flow positive.

SM: Can you give us a range?

TR: We don’t give revenue ranges, either.

SM:  OK. That’s a bit of a problem, because we need to set some context about the size of the company. So, let’s start with an overview of the location-based services business. Right now there is a much higher level of adoption in location-based services, but it’s a space that has seen many, many attempts for many, many years, probably for at least 10 or 12 years. You have a lot of depth of expertise in location-based services. If you could take us through what, in your opinion, are some of the major milestone case studies – so to speak – whether successes or failures, in the location-based services area, both in the mobile dimension and the social dimension, that would be great.

TR: The location-based services industry, from my perspective, took its biggest step forward here in the United States when the FCC mandated that 911 phone calls made from mobile phones needed to have some level of location precision. At the time, there were no such things as smart phones or operating systems that could extract location from phones, so the investment made by the Sprints, the T-Mobiles, the AT&Ts, and the Verizons of this world in location became significant. The result was that companies like ours, and a bunch of companies that are no longer around, built off that ecosystem. That was the first milestone, where people started to invest in location. Now, the location APIs on those carriers were not opened up. So, companies like ours went to what I call the second milestone of location, which were the true location-based services launches. That happened in Asia, particularly Japan and Korea.

When we started the company, we did it with the view that U.S. carriers would be opening up location, and there would be a whole bunch of incredible services you could build around locations. We wrote a white paper on location-based services in 2001 that had many scenarios like the ones you now see being deployed on iPhones and Androids. When that fell apart, we went to Asia, particularly, Korea. The first deal we did was with SK Telecom, absolute pioneers in location on two fronts. One is, they were the first ones to aggressively deploy GPS on their phones. In 2003 and 2004, you started to have a significant number of phones in Korea with GPS on them. A lot of that was aided by technology that Qualcomm had invented and purchased the IP on to get on the CDMA standard of mobile phones, obviously different from GSM and GPS technology on those phones.

SK Telecom, and the other Korean carriers as well, did a great job in deploying those phones and then offering services on top of them. In 2004, in Korea, you could buy a service where the location was advanced, and platforms were in place where you could do things like geofencing. So, friends could receive notifications when they were near each other. You could receive an alert if somebody matched your dating profile and was near you. These are real-life services that we saw and in some cases, helped to be deployed in Korea. That was, in my opinion, a milestone in the location-based services industry. In the meantime, we’d also explored the European market.

We had a business development team over there. What we saw happen in Europe – Europe and Asia were always, at that juncture, the leaders in mobile: mobile services, ringtones, all that stuff was happening there first. So, in Europe, because they didn’t have the GPS built into their phones, the accuracy was low. You started to have wack browsers, and SMS being another interface didn’t accommodate a low-accuracy location fix for applications. The services that were launched were cumbersome, difficult to use, and because of the location infrastructure that a Vodaphone or a European carrier had, because it was expensive, they’d have to charge you a lot for the location, and the results of the revolving services were weak. The European location industry definitely flattened out.

Moving on to what I call phase three is when the U.S. operators start to open up – U.S. and North American. The next one to bring up was Bell Mobility up in Canada. They were the next ones to start launching location and from there, we got Sprint. From Sprint, Verizon came. So, you started to move from GPS services being deployed in Asia to now in America, but on a limited scale, under walled gardens, with operators and still very restrictive. Location has privacy implications. The carriers were in some cases, maligned [because] they were not exposing location as fast as they could. But there were also concerns about if you open up location. How do I confirm that that location isn’t being misused? Then fast forward to 2008. With the iPhone and then Android, smart phones, BlackBerrys, you start to get a very rich platform to consume. Applications become a wonderful user experience rather than a miserable one, and you start to get location built on all these phones. That’s when the explosion happens.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Tasso Roumeliotis, CEO of Safely
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