iCloseBy.com of Missoula, Montana announces iFob(tm) – The World’s First Real-Space Wi-Fi Social Networking Software.

I’ve been writing software most of my life, starting
when I was a kid, and have been privileged enough over
the years to have worked with a few brilliant people
and on some great ideas. I’ve also been part of
projects that have gone bust in rather spectacular
ways. As a result, over the past decade I’ve become a
tad bit cynical and a shade jaded in regards to
listening to experts or trusting the business side of
technology. Since the WorldCom bankruptcy, I focused
on just working hard being a contributing half in a
two person company (Remote Scan http://www.remote-scan.com/ ) that created a niche product to
solve a boring, problem: connecting document scanners
to networks.

In the past few years by avoiding
investors and experts — essentially staying away from
anyone who wasn’t part of the hands-on creating
process — Glenn Kreisel (my long time business
partner) and I have managed to build a financial
success — relative to who we are of course ("I want
to live as a poor person with a lot of money, " is the
way Picasso best described it) — bringing in over
four million dollars of profit while quietly working
on cheap laptops from our homes. This has had a
positive effect on the lives of the people around us,
as both Glenn and I give away more than we spend on
ourselves, and some of you may have seen or heard of
our tongue-in-cheek entity called Cynical and Jaded
Software Entrepreneurs, which exists to help fund
things like school projects, radio stations, and
community events.

So with that as an introduction of where I’ve been for
the last ten years, I’d like to share an announcement
of the world-wide release of software that Glenn and
I have been secretly working on: iFob at
http://www.iCloseBy.com

Ever since I first realized that computers were
becoming communication devices (when we patented our
FreeMail software most people didn’t even use email),
I’ve been fascinated by the weirdness of what is now
called, "Social Networking." Me, I like real things
and I love Montana because there is nothing better
than walking up high with the wind and the rocks, far
away from the un-reality of technology. But that is
me, and this is Montana, and maybe it has taken living
in a place where there is still such good solitude to
be found close by, that it has helped me understand
how crowded and lonely most of the world must be, and
why there are millions of young people now clicking
into FaceBook and MySpace and the online dating sites,
trying to connect.

Glenn and I have built software that installs onto the
new Apple iPhone and iPods, as well as onto laptops,
which we hope will cut through some of this virtual
loneliness that now cloaks the Net. Instead of
building a social networking site, we have created
software which only works with people who are
physically close together. The software uses the
built-in Wi-Fi communication of iPhone, iPods and
laptops, and turns these devices into homing beacons,
broadcasting, or just listening, for other devices
with the same software installed. Instead of logging
onto a site and then searching through lists of far
away strangers who may be living in a virtual fantasy
land, our software will only find other people who are
in the exact same location, at the exact same time, as
each other. The software is called iFob, and if you
install iFob onto your iPhone/iPod touch or your
laptop and then go to any public hotspot — a coffee
house, a restaurant, etc. — your copy of iFob will
light up and show you when anyone else with iFob walks
in. And where social networking sites are ridged,
requiring account creation and committing definitions
of who you are, iFob is simple and fun. iFob is like a
game, like real life, where you can just broadcast a
single line about who you are, something as simple as
"Here to ski", and then change what you broadcast and
share depending on what your mood is like or whom the
other people with iFob say they are, in the same why
we all describe of ourselves slightly differently
depending on where, and with whom, we are.

What we hope we’ve done with iFob is to have built the
world’s first real-time-real-space social networking
tool. With iFob, anyone you might chance into who
seems interesting will be close enough to look up and
smile at you. We hope that iFob will be the icebreaker
to many real conversations.

There’s tons more information about iFob on the
http://www.iCloseBy.com web site. We’ve released free
versions of iFob for the iPhone and iPod touch. We
also have a version of iFob for the PC, and will soon
have a version for Mac laptops as well. If you have a
laptop let me know and I will send you a login to
download however many copies you might want for you
and for anyone who you think might be interested in
this latest, fun idea of ours.

Steve Saroff, President of iCloseBy.com

http://www.iCloseBy.com

[email protected]