Interview: Sean Farrell Explains How Trapster Helps You Avoid Speeding Tickets

We recently sat down with Sean Farrell from Trapster, a location-based driving application. The service allows users to enter information about speed traps, red-light cameras, road hazards and more, and while driving the application will alert you if any of these things are approaching. The applciation is currently at 6.3 Million users, and averages between 15,000 and 50,0000 new users a day. According to Trapster, there are more Trapster users than popular social applications Gowalla, FourSquare, and Loopt combined. Read the interview after the break. Using location-based services creatively is definitely an important theme this year, and we're seeing games like foursquare get popular as well as utilitarian services like Trapster. These services will undoubtedly continue to grow, but the question is which platform will benefit most from their success? The Trapster service is available on iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, WebOS, Nokia, iPad, and unlocked J2ME devices. It's also available for Garmin and TomTom navigation units. With such broad support, it seems that location-based service companies like Trapster are best to be everywhere and ride the wave of more and more location-aware devices. Furthemore, the fact that it provides turn-by-turn directions, real-time traffic, gas stations, banks, rest stops, local search and more means that it's in fact a competitor to some services that Garmin already provides. Their goal seems to be the one stop shop for a driving application. 1) How long has Trapster been running and what was its initial goal? Trapster started in 2007. Trapster's goal: Making roads safer. If enough people get the alerts and slow down the roads will be safer to drive. A police officer's main goal while running a radar / laser gun is to get drivers to slow down. Trapster does the same thing, but on a much larger scale, when a user gets an alert from the app, their reaction will be to slow down. 2) What was the first platform that Trapster was released on? Trapster worked on BlackBerry, windows mobile, and Symbian before apple even had an iPhone, but our first massive wave of growth came with the introduction of the iPhone and the app store. 3) Do you consider Trapster to be a game? No, trapster is the worlds largest drivers social network. It has some game like elements, for example karma scores, and we do give away prizes from time to time, such as cameras and iPads. 4) What makes your service better than Gowalla or foursquare? Trapster is an application designed to solve a problem that everyday people are faced with. Gowalla or foursquare are games intended for high-tech early adopter types. The average person doesn't care about being mayor of Starbucks, but everybody understands avoiding a $500 speeding ticket. I don't know if one is better than the other, they are separate products designed for separate goals.

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Interview: Sean Farrell Explains How Trapster Helps You Avoid Speeding Tickets

Neil Vidyarthi

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Neil Vidyarthi