App Review: Moby Brings Privacy to Location Sharing
Ever had times when you wanted to check into a location, but only tell a few, really close people where you are? How about asking your kids to check-in when they are hanging out with friends in town, without “alerting the media?” Maybe it’s time you checked out Moby.
Moby is much more than a simple location-based check-in app; it’s a private, secure, real-time location alert system, constant feeding the user’s location to a hand-selected group of family, friends, or colleagues. You can perform typical location-based check-ins, replete with messages, just to say “I’m at the coffee shop - who wants to join me,” and after a flat tire you can see if any of your real friends will step up to the plate and lend a hand.
App creator Contigo has been in this business for some time, creating software based enterprise level GPS solutions since 2002. According to Rob Goehring, co-founder of the Vancouver, BC based company, the creation of Moby harks back to the early days of Contigo. “We’ve always wanted to create a family locating system, but the technology just was not in place at that time,” said Goehring in an exclusive interview with Technorati. “With the rise of smart phones, we thought we could get back to our origins. This makes sense, because everyone is getting a smart phone, even kids as young as 7 or 8 years old.”
When I asked Goehring about the name, I was prepared to hear a comparison to Ishmael’s timeless attempts to locate his arch-nemesis Moby Dick, but discovered that Moby was largely a shortening of the world ‘mobile.’ “Moby felt warm, and over time we could put a life into the word and personify it,” said Goehring. “Moby is easy to say, and has become more of a verb - I’ll Moby you...” Only after the name was chosen, did employees at Contigo realize the seeking comparison to the classic Herman Melville novel plot line.
How it Works
After downloading the iPhone/iPod/iPad or Blackberry-based app, Moby allows you to dig into your smart phone’s contacts list and create a Friends list of whom you want to share your locations with, as well as whether the share notification can be done via email and/or mobile phone number. Each time you share, you can decide from your Moby Friends list the people you want to connect with.
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