mPanion awarded 10th US patent by the USPTO.

mPanion’s story continues to be written. Today, June 27th, 2023, mPanion is being awarded our 10th US patent by the USPTO.

When we embarked on this journey in early 2007, we had a mission to build a privacy-first, trust-driven, mobile location based service that helped users in ways only a true companion can enhance their life. In pursuit of this mission, we went through many ups and downs in our early years and years to come.

As the world economy was brought to its knees during the financial crisis of 2008, we continued to stay steadfast in building our products. In the next few years, as the mobile industry went through an upheaval with new mobile platforms competing for prominence, we welcomed the challenge the new platforms posed. Even as the gold rush in the mobile application ecosystem drove everyone to jump on the mobile, location and social media bandwagon, and majority of mobile applications and even web applications became location aware, we believed the need for a privacy driven solution only grew greater. But unprecedented challenges also grew with the growth of the ecosystem.

While we anticipated a burgeoning mobile application ecosystem, large social media companies created a tsunami of user data streams by collecting and selling user data, which neither the industry nor the regulators did much to stop. The monetary forces benefiting large industry players from the data aggregation ecosystem kept growing and didn’t help build the framework and the trust we had hoped to build with a strong privacy driven location and mobile service.

As we all witnessed the evolution and growth of social media services and mobile device platforms over the last decade, the pitfalls of such services and platforms lacking privacy became evident to everyone, and not surprisingly, all major players adopted an increasingly privacy posture, often taking several pages from the mPanion story book, but often lacking the promise of trust and privacy our service had envisioned.

We’ve continued to believe that users will understand the forces at play in the industry, and demand better services. With this aim, we are hoping to bring new privacy friendly services to market in the near future.

As the tide turns, we look forward to fulfilling our users’ dreams and aspirations.