Spontu, formerly known as “Attention”, is the winner of this year’s Excitera Innovation Challenge, Sweden’s leading entrepreneurship competition. This year’s competition saw the participation of 90 teams with a great diversity of ideas.
The Product
The Spontu mobile application lets you see which of your MSN, Yahoo, or Google Talk friends are nearby. You can use it to see who is around for lunch, meet up with a friend who happens to be in the bar next door, and keep in touch with those couch potato friends of yours who are always at their computer.
Background
The project came out of the observation that more and more phones are shipping with the ability to know where they are. This is due in in part to the decreasing cost of GPS chips, the increasing number of phones that can tell you which base station they’re connected to, and new government regulations requiring cellphone operators to deploy technology that can geographically locate a cell phone emergency call.
In addition, there is an increasing availibility of internet-ready smartphones, phones that enable users to install applications and connect to the internet over the cellphone networks or over wifi.
Will Spontu Work on My Cellphone?
The first version of Spontu will work on Symbian smartphones like the Nokia N-Series and the SonyEricsson M600i.
