Whrrl Wind a nice Spin on Location
By Azam on May 27, 2008 
KCPB reclassified investment in Pelago with a mapping service named whrrl with friends; KCPB is placing the investment as the first invest for recently announced iPhone fund. The company has targeted the project on the RIMM blackberry pearl and curve. The service focuses on the mobile user and enables users to write reviews and upload media. Common examples are movies and restaurant reviews, and the ability to upload pictures on to a map. Whrrl recently announced further applications for location based application like real time friends tracker. The description of used to describe whrrl the service is yelp and twitter combined.
The Seattle based start up initially raised $7.4 million from KCPB, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and Trilogy Equity Partners. The company recently raised an additional round $15 million from Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile Venture Fund, Reliance, and DAG Ventures.
The company clearly looking to focus on international markets based on investors. The iPhone looks likely to play a major role in the firm with the roll out on the upcoming roll out of 3G iPhone in the international markets.
Currently, only subscribers to AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile and available in certain phones are able to download Whrrl. Whrrl offers a portion of the service for free, though, and Pelago plans to charge less than $3 a month for the location-based service.
The main competitors to Whrrl will be applications like yelp, loopt, Jaiku (Google), uLocate, and LightPole
Categories : WirelessTags : DAG Ventures, Google, iPhone, Jaiku, KPCB, LightPole, Loopt, Pelago, Reliance, RIMM, TMobile Ventures, twitter, uLocate, whrrl, Yelp