Keeping Track

Where are you? Inquiring minds want to know, and Glympse wants to share the information.

Sarah Dewey | March 2012 | FROM THE PRINT EDITION

Credit: Adam Reitano

Glympse CEO Bryan Trussel, left, with chief architect Steve Miller (and friend).

Scene 1: You’re expecting eight people at an important meeting. Three of them are late. Should you wait or get started?

Scene 2: You’re making a gourmet meal that has to be timed just right but you’re not sure when your guests will arrive. Wouldn’t it be nice to know how far away they really are?

In either case, Glympse can help. Its app for GPS-enabled smartphones allows users to broadcast their locations to the people in their lives. Use Glympse on the way home from work to let family know you’re stuck in traffic. Use it to coordinate a morning car pool. Use it to keep track of the kids as they trick-or-treat. Bryan Trussel, cofounder and CEO of the Redmond-based company, invites the 2.5 million users of his location-sharing app to employ their smartphones’ GPS capabilities creatively to “Glympse” each other. “We want to become a verb,” he says.

Brought to market in 2009, Glympse works on all smartphone platforms: Android, iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows. The app, which the company relies solely on word-of-mouth to propagate, allows users to send a timed “Glympse” tracking their locations. When a smartphone user sends a Glympse, the recipient receives a web link through which he or she can track the sender in real time. No need to download an app.

“The simplicity angle is really important for us,” says Trussel. Glympse users simply hit “send” and their friends can track them—enabling users to remain hands-free while driving.

To address privacy concerns, each Glympse is timed to expire. The expiration can be user defined, from minutes to hours. All Glympses expire after four hours, after which they are no longer visible to the recipients.

Trussel and cofounder Steve Miller left Microsoft in 2008 to transition into an emerging market at the confluence of several major technologies. At the time, smartphones were only just coming into use, and social networks hovered at the brink of explosion. “GPS hadn’t been available on a phone up to that point; we saw a brand new opportunity for something to happen that wasn’t even possible when we started the company,” says Trussel.

With such players as Apple, Facebook and Google also entering the location-sharing frenzy, Trussel is confident that Glympse’s strength—its ability to perform across all platforms—will pay off handsomely.