LOCLE, THE mobile phone application that allows you share your location with friends without the need for GPS capability on your phone, has launched a new feature called Serendipity which will text users when friends are nearby.

Launched this week, the service is free, but Locle founders Ronan Higgins and Pieter Oonk have not ruled out charging customers a small fee to receive notifications.

Users run the application in the background on phones and are told when friends are about. “You can get a feel for when people are around but you are not being overloaded with information,” Mr Higgins said. While there are other mobile applications allowing users to share their location with friends, Locle’s unique selling point, he said, is that it locates people based on what cell masts they are using rather than using GPS – standard only on high-end phones. He estimated that about 70 per cent of GSM phones can run the Java application.

In urban areas Locle can pin-point location at street level, which is “good enough for social apps” said Mr Oonk, who added the application was sensitive enough to tell what corner of St Stephen’s Green a user was on. He believed a “small level of inaccuracy helps with some of the privacy and security concerns”.

Locle launched its application in October last year on the Eircom.net portal, having won a competition the telco sponsored to showcase new web technologies.

Mr Higgins said Locle realised about 20 other start-ups were adopting a similar approach to location services, and all of them were facing the challenge of building a user-base. As a result Locle became a founder of the Oslo Alliance, which will work to ensure members’ applications can share location information, thus increasing the potential user base.

Locle has been featured at the Facebook Garage event for developers of applications that work with the social network. Locle users can now share their location on Facebook, which their friends will see in their newsfeed provided they have logged into Locle using their Facebook credentials.

Although only launched two months ago, Mr Higgins said it was proving more “viral” than the mobile application, with the user-base doubling every month as people notice their friends using it.