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 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