Location-based service Loopt has been allowed its first patent, and it could be a big one.

The patent, as described, seems relevant to numerous existing products, including Google’s Latitude. In layman’s terms, it describes using your location to display relevant ads and offers on top of a map, as an interstitial, or as a text ad — another claim also discusses displaying where your friends are on the same map. The patent was first filed in 2007, with Loopt founder Sam Altman listed as the primary inventor (Loopt got its start long before the likes of Foursquare and Google Latitude).

The patent, which is listed as Application Number 11/931,113 by the US Patent and Trademark Office, still hasn’t technically been granted. But it has been “allowed,” which is a precursor to being granted. At this point, it could still be a few months before the patent is granted, assuming that Loopt pays all the proper fees and files the proper paperwork.

Here’s one relevant claim:

“17. A method comprising: providing, by a server, an advertising campaign including a plurality of advertising messages for transmitting to users of mobile devices at different times or locations; receiving, by the server, the geographic location of a mobile communication device operated by a user within an area; and transmitting to the mobile communication device for display, at least one of the plurality of advertising messages, wherein the advertising message includes content relevant to a characteristic of the user or activity performed by the user and is in the form of a text advertising message, coupon and/or graphic element that is superimposed over a map representation of the area around the mobile communication device displayed on a graphical user interface of the mobile communication device of the user, displayed in an interstitial display page of the graphic user interface, or displayed as a text-based message, and wherein the ad message is transmitted in response to the location of the user.”

It’s unclear what this means for Loopt (the company isn’t commenting). Loopt has sworn to the Patent Pledge, which states that they won’t offensively use their patents against any company with fewer than 25 people. Of course, most of the location-based companies you’ve heard of have more than that. Even if they never use it offensively (which would be nice), this may be a good defensive patent for Loopt going forward.

Part of me feels like the notion of putting a layer of ads on top of a map, alongside where your friends are, is an obvious use-case for smartphones. This was filed in 2007, so the assumption may be that it was less obvious back then.

Location-based service Loopt is getting some nice promotion for the next three months, courtesy of San Francisco’s International Airport and Virgin America. And it might make your trip to the airport a bit less expensive.

Beginning this week, travelers going through SFO’s new Terminal 2 will be able to check-in on Loopt to receive an offer from one of six businesses located within the terminal, including Kiehl’s and Natalie’s Candy Jar — as well as hefty discounts from Virgin America itself. The difference between this and most other check-in based offers is that the deal you receive is chosen randomly from one of these merchants (you just need to check-in at Terminal 2).

The promotion is being coordinated by Virgin America and Loopt, but travelers flying on American (which is also based in Terminal 2 at SFO) will be able to score the check-in deals as well. Each of the participating merchants is deciding what they want to give away, and while some merchants in the terminal aren’t participating, Loopt says that they may well jump on board in the coming weeks.

The catch? After installing and signing up for Loopt, you’ll need to watch a clip called ‘A Day in the Life of SFO’s T2′ before you can see which offer you’ve received. It runs nearly three minutes long (which seems pretty hefty) and you have to watch the whole thing. But the video itself is well done, so it’s not a painful experience… provided you aren’t late for a flight. If nothing else, it’s the first time I’ve ever watched a commercial for an airport terminal.

Loopt is going to be promoted to travelers through a variety of ways in the terminals: each of the businesses giving out deals will feature a sign, and the terminal itself will feature screens telling people to install the app and check-in.

Android: While daily deal sites like Groupon present some attractive offers, if there's a particular local business you'd like to score a deal from, you may be able to request it via Loopt u-Deals. The app is currently available for the San Francisco Bay Area, but is headed to more locations and mobile platforms soon. More »

Loopt has gone through quite a few incarnations, and this morning that tradition continued as the mobile social network announced it was entering the daily deals space with a service called U-Deals. In essence, U-Deals lets users request their own deals. After submitting an idea for a deal, users can then drum up interest by way of social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, etc. If the deal receives enough support, Loopt will contact the business and request that they help turn the deal dream into a deal reality.

Of course, as my colleague Erick Schonfeld pointed out, for this to work, Loopt needs to get enough deals requested and turned on for this to become a viable model for Loopt. Not to mention there’s some friction when considering that not many people have heard about Loopt, let alone think of it as a daily deals provider. And then there’s the issue of building a sizable salesforce.

There was some skepticism in the comment section at the end of Erick’s post over Loopt’s new direction, and some made the good point that user-generated deals have been tried before, without a lot of success — not to mention that it remains to be seen whether or not users will be willing to wait for deals to be approved. We do love our instant gratification. There’s certainly something to be said for the growing interest in the combination of location-based-services and daily deals, even if the LBS space is brimming.

Today, mere hours after announcing U-Deals, Loopt took the first step towards silencing its critics (though admittedly it still has a long way to go before that silence is permanent), as its first U-Deal sold out in under an hour. 48 minutes, to be precise. The first U-Deal, made in partnership with Virgin America, offered $35 for a Virgin America ticket voucher valued at $100. 500 deals were offered, and 500 deals sold in 48 minutes. Not too shabby.

Discounts on airfare are definitely in demand with the high price of tickets today, so this was no doubt a great place to start. Especially with Virgin America. But it will be interesting to see if U-Deals can sustain relevant deals of this kind when the names aren’t quite as big. If so, there could be great things ahead for Loopt’s new service. We’ll have to wait and see.

But for now, it’s probably fair for Loopt to say, “How do you like ‘dem apples?”

For now.

Mobile social network Loopt is turning on the revenue streams by going after the daily deal space. It already partnered with Groupon to show users nearby Groupon Now deals via notifications, but today it is launching its own twist on daily deals. Loopt is calling them U-Deals.

Instead of going out and getting a large inventory of deals at local merchants, U-Deals lets users request their own deals. And they try to rally their friends and other people to support the deal as well through Facebook, Twitter, email, and whatnot. Once a deal hits a tipping point, then Loopt will contact the business and request the deal. This will require a sales force, but not one as big as a traditional daily deal provider. “One of the things we like about this is that it’s neither self-serve nor a pure sales force model,” says Loopt CEO Sam Altman. “In our beta testings, businesses respond well to a phone call like ‘we have a check for $2000 and 100 new customers for you if you agree to this deal.’”

Loopt is working in partnership with ChompOn, a white-label daily deals platform that launched at TechCrunch Disrupt last year. A New York City-based startup called Ringleadr that is about to launch is also targeting the reverse-deals concept.

In order for this to work, Loopt needs to get enough deals requested and then turned on. “Liquidity is certainly the key issue,” admits Altman. Also, local commerce is a hard nut to crack. U-Deals has the advantage of being an easy sell, as Altman says. Loopt is basically coming these small businesses with pre-qualified sales. But many of them have probably never heard of Loopt. (“Is that like Groupon?”) My guess is he will need a larger salesforce than he expects, and that’s if he’s successful. Are people even looking for deals inside Loopt?

Here is the big issue with this model. The people who say they want a deal at a restaurant or store are probably already customers of that merchant. The appeal of daily deals for local merchants is to get new customers in the door. It’s customer acquisition. Where Loopt can make this work is if the people who initially request the deals can convince other people who aren’t already existing customers to buy in.

Loopt a checkin app that seems to be pulling out all the stops in order to survive in a saturated space, has now partnered up with Groupon Now! in Chicago in order to provide Loopt users with locationally relevant realtime deals around them, push notifying them when they are near a deal.

While the plan is to notify users of deals when the app isn’t even open, and the time sensitive Groupon Now! deals will also appear on place pages within Loopt, so users can see and share with friends their favorite relevant deals in the vicinity.

Loopt has basically beat Groupon to bringing this LBS/realtime technology to its own app, where you still have to type in your zip code to get more granular locational deal notifications. But Groupon recently acquired Pelago, so I wouldn’t be surprised if a similar functionality is on its way.

Currently the specific Loopt service is only available in Chicago, and users who are interested can go into their Loopt settings, turn Reward Alerts on and start receiving their once a day, location specific Groupon Now! deal well, now!.

As 14% of subscribers interact with daily deal push notifications, this is a mutually beneficial and strategic partnership between the two companies. But one can help but wonder when Groupon will apply this same technology to its own mobile app and what exactly that will mean for Loopt long term.

Loopt is planning on expanding the Groupon Now feature nationwide, and it should be available on both Android and iPhones in each market.

Loopt, a location-based checkins app along the lines of Foursquare, is announcing the launch of Loopt Qs today at Where 2.0 Conference.

Loopt Qs are “micro reviews” or polls that the Loopt community team will create around a place (like “What’s the best thing to order if you’re a vegetarian?” or “What’s the price range of this restaurant?”), Users can share their answers with Loopt users and with friends on Facebook and Twitter, in order to get more answers to a question or to share a specific answer.

By pressing the Qs button on the Loopt app’s homescreen, Loopt users can see a realtime stream of Qs around them or contribute answers to the Qs . They can also flip through the Qs results on each place page. Loopt founder Sam Altman tells me that the Qs are designed to give the user quick bursts of information (“in less than three seconds), in order to save them the time of scrolling through endless and sometimes irrelevant reviews on Yelp.

“We hope that this actually reflects the way users search on mobile and the kind of information users want,” Altman tells me. “We want to answer the queries that users are making on search.” He emphasizes that 20% of all Google searches are local, and is targeting Qs to that market.

While apps like Foursquare and Yelp offer users recommendations, the actual polling format is nascent. Startups like GoPollGo are making inroads on the web, but we’ve yet to see a successful mobile foray. It’ll be interesting to see how users take to this new micro-review format, especially when they’re out at a restaurant or bar. But I’m pretty sure Loopt will have to let people contribute their own Q in order to make this a more sticky features.

Loopt Qs will be rolling out in San Francisco in the coming weeks, and to the service’s 5 million registered users (1 million of which are active) in the coming months. The app is currently available on iPhone, iPod Touch and Android.

With a little over a week until SXSW begins in Austin, Texas, our inboxes have been hemorrhaging with seemingly every startup under the sun attempting to launch something in time for the festival. Many of these are app-related. And specifically, many are iPhone app-related, which means they need extra time to get approved by Apple. And that means getting things out there this week, just in case. And so it begins.

Today, the location-based service Loopt is launching a new feature which will definitely entice users to check out the app at SXSW: Push Deals.

Yes, the Loopt Android and iPhone apps will now be able to send you deals in realtime based on your location by way of push notifications. This means that if you’re walking by a restaurant and it’s a slow night, they can hit a button to send out a notification to give you a deal to come in. This works on a network like Loopt (as opposed to Foursquare) because the app uses background location to keep track of you.

Obviously, all of these push settings can be controlled by the user in the app, so you’re not getting spammed by deals as you walk around a city. You’ll be able to see the deals that you want, founder Sam Altman says.

And the first test of the system will be at SXSW with some pretty killer deals — Loopt will be giving away over $50,000 worth of merchandise to those using the app in Austin. What kinds of stuff? This kind:

• TiVo is giving away TiVo premiere packages
• Microsoft is giving away Kinects
• Jawbone is doing Jamboxes
• Southwest is giving away free roundtrip tickets
• Altec Lansing is giving away Mix Boomboxes
• Yurbuds is doing Ironman Yurbuds
• Tony Hsieh and Guy Kawasaki are giving away signed books
• And a lot more from people like Fox, Gilt City, OkCupid, and more

“These will all be ‘flash deals’–users get a message with the location at the same time if they’re near the rewards wagon, and there are limited supplies,” Altman says. He also notes that there’s no limit on how often you can win — you just have to be first to get to the wagon mentioned in the message.

Once SXSW is over, Loopt will begin rolling these Push Deals out to select cities.

It was almost exactly two years ago that Google launched Latitude, their location-based service. Two years may not seem like a long time, but it’s “the equivalent of a decade in location services,” Latitude PM Ken Norton jokes. Most importantly, it was just before Foursquare launched to the world at SXSW in 2009. That changed the entire game, literally, as Google CEO Eric Schmidt likes to say. You see, it brought the idea of the “check-in” into play. And that ended up being the idea that launched a thousand location-based services. Today, finally, Google is getting on board with that idea.

Yes, the check-in is coming to Latitude — finally.

Latitude at its core has always been about sharing your best available location with people on a continuous basis. In other words, it was a service that relied on location updates running constantly in the background. “It has been good for seeing where you are, but not seeing where you ARE,” is now Norton puts it. In other words, you could see that a friend was at a place on a map, but not that they were at a Starbucks. To find that out for sure, you’d still have to send them a text.

But now Latitude will have a check-in feature that will use Google Places’ place database. “Users have been asking for this for a while, but we realized we could do this differently. Check-ins are great, but let’s combine them with continuous location,” Norton says.

And so there will be three key features of the new product. First, there will be check-in notifications. These will pop up on your phone when you go somewhere and forget to check-in (if you turn them on, of course). Because your location is still being constantly updated in the background, when you stop at a certain location for long enough, Google can tell that you’re at a particular place and can alert you to check-in there. “This is a little more convenient than pulling out the app to hunt and search for your location each time,” Norton says.

Second, Latitude is doing automatic check-ins. Again, if you opt-in to this, Latitude will be able to register the places you go to often and will know to automatically tell your friends you’re there without you having to do anything. Norton notes that this is useful for work, which perhaps is the place you’re at most often, but get sick of manually checking-in at all the time.

Third, Latitude will have a check-out feature as well. While subtle, this is very useful. Again, thanks to the background location element, Google can tell if you’ve left a place that you’ve checked-in and will effectively “check you out” of that location so friends don’t show up looking for you after you’ve left.

The downside, sadly, is that this check-in feature will be available only on Android devices at first. While Norton says they’re working as quickly as they can to bring it to their iPhone app, since that app is so new, they’re still not as quick when it comes to updates yet. So instead, this will be a part of Google Maps 5.1 for Android starting today.

Norton notes that Latitude has 10 million active users now — making it one of the largest (if not the largest) location-based service out there. He’s quick to note that they measure this by monthly active users, not overall registration. That number will surprise a lot of people as Latitude doesn’t get anywhere near the hype that Foursquare, Gowalla, and others get. Clearly, Google hopes that will change with the check-in feature. It certainly will bring more utility to the app for many of those users.

Of course, the location game is also much different than it was two years ago. Not only has Foursquare caught on with a lot of mainstream media, but Facebook is now in the space with Places.

In terms of competing places databases, Norton jokes that “we help by not creating yet another one.” Again, Latitude will use Google Places to populate the venues that users can check-in to. He also notes that they have a Places API and that others are welcome to use elements of it for their own location services. And he says that going forward, the Latitude team is open to exploring any features users want, such as the ability to update the place database manually.

In terms of the all-important deals, Norton says that they have nothing to announce at this time. Deals have proven to be a key part of Foursquare and will be a key part of Facebook Places. They’re also a part of Google Places, so you have to imagine that eventually, Latitude will get these too.

Now the most important question: what about the mayor? Norton says that there are “loyalty levels” built in. The three he mentions are “Regular”, “Guru”, and “VIP”. Of those, Guru is the big one, then VIP, then regular. But how you obtain each title will vary from place to place — since people visit coffee shops more than the dentist, for example. And there can be multiple recipients of each distinction at each location, he says.

Right now, Latitude will allow you to share your check-ins in two ways: to your friends within Latitude, and with the ability to post to your public Google Profile. That’s right, you can’t send your location to Twitter or Facebook — at least not yet. Norton says they’re considering other services to send your location information to. But it’s a bit trick since Latitude has a history of being a more contained network with tighter social controls.

He does think the check-in may completely change the way people use Latitude, as they could be more open to accepting more friends now, but only sharing their city-level location with them and/or their explicit check-ins. They could then allow true friends to see their constantly updating location, he says.

It will be interesting to see how this changes Latitude. The continuous location plus check-ins is a smart play (albeit one Loopt has been doing for some time), but it brings up both potentially privacy and battery life issues. In terms of the latter, Norton says his team has spent a lot of time worry about battery issues over the past two years. And they’ve gotten so good, he says, that the battery hit for background location is now “negligible”. That’s good news.

Now bring the check-in to the iPhone, please.

It appears that Facebook has pulled the updates, for now. This was apparently a mistake on the part of someone at Facebook. Please see our post explaining the details.

For a split second, we saw a new feature on our Facebook profiles. It was on the right hand side under “Photos” titled, “Memories.”

After I clicked, it showed options for jumping to photos grouped by years: 2010, 2009, 2008, etc. with complementing information like status dated status updates, the number of friends added per year, events attended and Facebook places check-ins.

We’ve literally been dumping this information into Facebook as if it were a landfill for the past 6 years. It’s a wonder it took them this long to organize and curate it into something useful, maybe even meaningful. Now with the introduction of a Memories feature, we can see our lives laid out Facebook style, year-by-year.

The Memories feature may be gone for now (it seems like Facebook may have released several features prematurely), but as frightening as this sounds, it looks like Facebook may have found a way to preserve them forever.

Here is a screen shot of what the feature’s toolbar looks like:

Big thanks to @patrozoo