As many of you know, we’ve spent an enormous amount of time at loopt working to make sure our service is safe and secure. In addition to all the time we’ve spent creating features that ensure that our customers have complete control over who can see them and when, we’ve reached out to numerous organizations to get their ideas about safety and privacy.

In the last few months we’ve spent time with everyone from the EFF and the Ponemon Organization (digital and privacy rights advocates), to WebWiseKids, BlogSafety.org, and ICAC (online child safety organizations). The good news is that they’ve all been very happy with all the safeguards we’ve put in place for loopt users, and they’ve had terrific ideas to contribute as well. With their help we believe we’ve built an exceptionally safe service, and one that privacy and safety advocates can love as much as our users do.

One of our latest efforts has been to reach out to legislators and regulators in both Washington, DC and Sacramento, CA (we’re a California-based company) to educate them about loopt. Because while we know that loopt is not only fun and useful but also safe and secure, we want to make sure policy makers do as well.

As a result Sam and I spent last Monday in Washington meeting with everyone from senior officials at the FCC to senior staff members of in the Administration and in Congress. In addition to being a fascinating day (neither of us had spent much time doing business in Washington) it was productive as well. And the good news is everyone was enthusiastic about loopt, and not just our privacy controls – many of the folks we spoke with were genuinely excited to use the service when it launches more broadly. Now if only someone would schedule an inexpensive non-stop from San Francisco to Reagan National….

We just found out that loopt was selected as a semifinalist in the 2007 Global LBS Challenge. We’re very excited and honored to be in the company of some really cool LBS apps.

The finalists are announced at CTIA next month so we’ll keep you posted.

Last Friday we had a company strategy session over at NEA’s beautiful offices on Sand Hill Road, which was a welcome change of scenery, and a great chance to step back and reflect on what we accomplished (and didn’t) in 2006 and where we want to go from here. While the last twelve months were very productive and exciting, and included our launch on Boost Mobile and registering our first 100,000 users, we’re even more excited about 2007. If hard work is the reward, than we’ve got a rewarding year ahead of us, and our top two priorities, not surprisingly, are going to be (1) making loopt available to more users and (2) making loopt even better.

Venture capitalists like to talk about the “potted plant test”; that is, if they walk into a startup and see any live potted plants in the lobby they know the company will fail because it’s spending its money in the wrong places.

loopt, it’s safe to say, passes the test, and while we’ve always tried to make our office as fun and productive as possible (big monitors, weekly poker, free lunch etc.), 3250 Ash is a pretty humble space.

More relevantly, it’s a pretty small space for the team so we’ve started looking for something new, preferably with good light and enough room for a ping pong table. It needs to be somewhere between Mountain View and San Mateo and have a little character, and it’s just fine if it needs a little work, as our very own Dr. Bell is pretty handy with the Power Screwdriver. We’ll let everyone know where we end up and will be sure to share pictures of the new digs.

We were happy to find out this morning that we’ve been named one of Business 2.0’s 25 companies to watch in 2007 along with our friends at AdMob and meebo.

loopt will be hosting meetings with wireless operators at the upcoming CTIA show in Orlando, Florida from March 26-28, 2007. Please click here to request a meeting with the loopt team.

Check it out. We’re pleased with how the reporter highlights the many safety and privacy safeguards we’ve put in place.

Yesterday the whole company got together to frag the latest developer build of loopt. We ordered some pizza, grabbed phones and hammered away on the latest and greatest. These frag sessions serve two purposes. They give the engineers an opportunity to share what they’ve been working on for the past couple weeks. They also provide a lot of immediate product feedback.

Our mobile guys have been working really hard, and it shows. The latest version looks great and it’s very fun. We can’t wait to share it with all of you. (We’ll detail the improvements in a future post, but if you must know we’ve added some hotkeys, slicker menus, a feature that lets you see your friends’ latest journal entries and whole lot of other cool stuff.)

Today we launched our new maps. We love the new look, and we hope you do too. We think they’re easier to read and simply better looking. The devil’s in the details, and as you can see from the screenshot below, even the features of an airport show up particularly well. (That’s Brian, our VP of Business Development. He just left Atlanta and is on a plane back to the loopt HQ.)

It’s more important that you like the new look so let us know what you think.

On Thursday, Nini and Evan spent a couple hours on the Stanford campus at a BASES-sponsored job fair. It wasn’t the largest job fair Stanford hosts, but because it was nestled right in the middle of the Stanford engineering quad it attracted a lot of talented and fun students. We were happy to see that many of them were interested in loopt; hopefully, we’ll add a few of them to our team soon.

If you aren’t able to meet us in person at a job fair, don’t fret. We’re hiring, and we don’t care where you went to school (or even *if* you went to school) as long as you’re a rock star, excited about loopt, and you play well with others. So especially if you’re a mobile/server/web engineer, UI designer or graphics designer, send your resume to jobs@loopt.com.