Guest author Tasso Roumeliotis is founder and CEO of Location Labs./p>

I’ve spent more than a decade building a business around creating mobile apps that help families stay safe and connected. Though my livelihood depends on everyone’s continued use of mobile phones, several recent statistics about our relationships with phones have alarmed me.

• 58% of kids 13-17 have smartphones
• More than 60% of teens text during class and after bedtime
• Most students can stay on task for only three minutes before “needing” to interact with technology.

Giving up phones completely isn’t the answer, of course. But the alarm these issues raise in me is insistent. I began to understand it better one recent evening when I noticed how nuts it made me to see my 12-year-old daughter hunched over her smartphone, texting like crazy. I wanted to grab it and say, “Go outside! Read a book! Climb a tree!” And then I realized: all this had gone through my mind during a brief moment… when I’d looked up from my own phone.

The Parental Gut-Check

The surest gut-check I know for whether or not something is a good idea is if I’d want my kids to do it — or to see me doing it. For instance, should I tell a lie, even a little one? Maybe not. Or indulge in dessert every day? Nope. So when I justify my own constant phone use as being “necessary to my work” or “just part of life today,” I have to admit I’m being a hypocrite.

The thing is, I truly believe that mobile technology offers a lot of good — safety, global community, boundary-pushing forms of entertainment. So why can’t I shake that feeling that it’s using me more than I’m using it?

Maybe because it is.

A lot of what goes on a mobile phone is built to be addictive. And that’s where I’ve had to draw a line — for myself, first.

This has meant being honest with myself about my own habits. How can I possibly raise my children to have a healthy relationship with technology unless I can show them what that actually looks like? I have to walk the walk.

5 Mobile Phone Rules

So here are a few ways I’m getting started on my own habits, before I work with my wife to institute real—and honest—guidelines for the whole family:

1. Getting online is grounded. I travel often. My rule for myself? No connecting on planes. No Wi-Fi, no phone. This is my time to think, to read (a book made of paper!), to just be. To sit and be absolutely amazed that we’re 30,000 feet in the air, looking down at clouds. Something will be lost in my life if I ever fail to appreciate the wonder of that.
2. The best part of waking up is… waking up. I have vowed to leave my phone and computer alone until I’ve had my morning run, greeted my wife and children, finished a pot of green tea, looked out our kitchen window, and eaten breakfast. Then, and only then, will I check in online. There’s nothing happening first thing in the morning that can’t wait an hour or two (or three!). If it’s an absolute emergency, someone will call. And starting the day in that peaceful state pays dividends, many times over, for every aspect of my health.
3. Keep track of time. I have begun setting the timer on my phone when I check in on social media. For example, I will usually set the timer at 10 minutes to check for birthdays on Facebook or to scan what articles are trending. The maximum time I allow myself at any one social media session is 20 minutes (if I want to reconnect with someone or do some deeper reading). If I don’t set this boundary, it’s down the rabbit hole I go, wondering where the time went. And using a phone’s built-in timer function is a really satisfying way to use its “power of good” to combat its “darker side.”
4. Arriving home is sacred. I work a lot. When I come home at the end of the day (which doesn’t even happen every day), I may not have seen my kids for as long as 12 hours. So the moment I arrive, the phone goes away. So far, that’s meant I’ve spent a couple minutes furiously emailing on the front porch, but only so I could stick to my promise to leave my phone on the table by the door, with my keys and wallet. When I get home, I want to be there. For real. Answering emails can wait.
5. The phone is a camera — just a camera. Like most parents, I love to take pictures of my kids, especially when we choose pumpkins at Halloween or a tree at Christmas. And like most parents, I love to share those pictures. But I realized that pausing for a moment to snap a photo is a lot different than taking a photo, saving it, going to Facebook, sharing it, tagging everyone, noting the location and then responding to comments. That can wait until later. So these days, when I enjoy the fact that a phone is also a camera (which, by the way, is really cool), I treat it like it’s only a camera. All the other stuff can come later, when my kids are in bed.

How about you? Is there anything you don’t like about your relationship with your phone? What are your plans for taking the reins? Please share your own tips — I’d love to hear about them and give them a try.

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Where:Las Vegas, NV

Details: http://www.cesweb.org/

Location Labs will be attending the 2013 International CES in Las Vegas. Please get in touch with us, at contact@locationlabs.com, if you’d like to meet with a member of the Location Labs team during the conference.

Where:Las Vegas, NV

Details: https://www.2013devsummit.com/Registration/

Location Labs will be attending the 2013 AT&T Developer Conference in Las Vegas, just prior to CES. Please get in touch with us, at contact@locationlabs.com, if you’d like to meet with a member of the Location Labs team during the conference.

“We are honored to be recognized by the San Francisco Business Times on their prestigious list, particularly in a region that is home to so many innovative companies,” said Tasso Roumeliotis, Founder & CEO of Location Labs. “We are seeing increasing global demand from consumers and wireless carriers for apps and services that both enhance mobile phones’ benefits and combat their drawbacks. We look forward to driving further innovation in the coming year.”

Leading LBS and MDM Platform Provider and Mobile Family Safety Innovator Recognized for Explosive Growth

EMERYVILLE, CA (PRWEB) — November 1, 2012 — Location Labs, worldwide pioneer in mobile location and device management technologies, today announced the company has been named to the San Francisco Business Times’s “Fast 100” list of the Bay Area’s fastest-growing private companies. Location Labs ranked #32 on the list, on which it also appeared in 2010 and 2011, based on its 286 per cent revenue growth from 2009 to 2011.

“We are honored to be recognized by the San Francisco Business Times on their prestigious list, particularly in a region that is home to so many innovative companies,” said Tasso Roumeliotis, Founder & CEO of Location Labs. “We are seeing increasing global demand from consumers and wireless carriers for apps and services that both enhance mobile phones’ benefits and combat their drawbacks. We look forward to driving further innovation in the coming year.”

The San Francisco Business Times partners with PricewaterhouseCoopers to conduct research and annually compile the Top 100 Fastest-growing Private Companies. The Fast 100 ranks privately held companies in the Bay Area on percentage of revenue growth during the three most recent fiscal years.

About Location Labs

Established in 2002, Location Labs is the worldwide pioneer in mobile location and device management technologies. Its Sparkle® LBS and MDM platform is licensed by Tier 1 global wireless carriers and is today pre-loaded on tens of millions of mobile devices. Sparkle powers essential value-added services that increase ARPU and reduce churn for wireless carriers.

The company’s Safely consumer division, launched in 2011, employs these innovative technologies to create mobile safety solutions for families. In partnership with Tier 1 global wireless carriers like AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Telefónica, Safely builds and provides subscription-based services that make it easy for parents to keep tabs on their kids, set limits on phone use and instill healthy digital habits for life. Safely services include: Family Locator, available today as AT&T FamilyMap, Sprint Family Locator and T-Mobile FamilyWhere in the US and in Spain as Aquí estoy de Movistar; Drive Safe, available today as Sprint DriveFirst, T-Mobile DriveSmart Plus and Safely Go; and Phone Controls, available today as Sprint Mobile Controls.

Location Labs has raised $26MM in venture financing from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, BlueRun Ventures (formerly Nokia Venture Partners), QUALCOMM Ventures, Intel Capital, and Mitsui Ventures and was named to Inc. Magazine’s 500|5000 list of America’s fastest-growing private companies and to the San Francisco Business Times’s list of the Bay Area’s fastest-growing private companies in 2010, 2011 and 2012. The company is headquartered in Emeryville, California, and operates in the US, Europe and India. Visit http://www.LocationLabs.com and http://www.Safely.com for more information.

Where: Hong Kong

Details: http://3gltesummit.qualcomm.com/

Location Labs will be participating in Qualcomm’s 3G/LTE Summit this December in Hong Kong. Please get in touch with us, at contact@locationlabs.com, if you’d like to meet with a member of the Location Labs team during the conference.

When: November 14-15, 2012

Where: Where: Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium, Washington, DC

Details:http://www.fosi.org/fosi-events/fosi-2012-annual-conference.html

Location Labs is looking forward to participating in the Family Online Safety Institute’s sixth annual conference. Our Founder & CEO, Tasso Roumeliotis, will be participating in a Location Labs-proposed panel, “Digital Wellness in a Mobile World,” 1:15 PM on Thursday, November 15th, bringing specific focus to how mobile devices affect our online habits. Please email contact@locationlabs.com if you’d like to set up a meeting with a member of the Location Labs team during the conference.

Where: McCormick Place, Chicago, IL

Details:http://www.4gworld.com/chicago/

The Location Labs team looks forward to attending 4G World, in particular the Best of 4G Awards Ceremony, on Monday, October 29th, at 5:15 PM in the Keynote Room, for which our Sparkle® mobile cloud platform has been announced as a finalist. Please send an email to contact@locationlabs.com if you’d like to arrange to meet up with members of the Location Labs team while we’re in Chicago for the conference.

EMERYVILLE, CA—October 23, 2012 — Location Labs, worldwide pioneer in mobile location and device management technologies, is pleased to announce that it has recently joined The Telecom Council of Silicon Valley. The company looks forward to contributing to the conversations and forums that provide opportunities for wireless and fixed telecom companies, researchers, developers, and innovators to network, collaborate and build the future of telecom communications. For more information about The Telecom Council, please visit www.telecomcouncil.com/about.php. For more information about Location Labs, please visit www.locationlabs.com.

EMERYVILLE, CA—October 15, 2012 —Location Labs, worldwide pioneer in mobile location and device management technologies, today announced that its Sparkle® mobile cloud platform has been named a finalist in the Best of 4G Awards. The awards “recognize leaders in the development and deployment of 4G technologies” and will be presented at a reception being held at the end of the first day of 4G World Conference and Expo, Monday, October 29th, 5:15 PM, in the Keynote Room. For the official announcement from 4G World Conference and Expo, please visit http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/finalists-announced-for-2012-best-of-4g-awards-174176351.html. For more information about Location Labs, please visit www.locationlabs.com.

“Imagine if a 911 operator could see a caller’s most recent locations, contacts and social media interactions,” Roumeliotis says. “These data points could provide powerful clues to what happened, particularly if the person needing assistance is incapacitated.”

Posted on October 11, 2012 by Andrew Berg of Wireless Week, for CTIA MobileCON Show Daily

Location Labs offers direct-to-consumer MDM products like its Safely suite of applications that were announced at CTIA Wireless in May as part of Sprint’s Guardian program. The Safely tools bring together mobile controls for families, a distracted driving inhibitor, and a family locator.

Tasso Roumeliotis, CEO of Location Labs, says the response from Sprint customers has been very positive and the company has now moved on to developing a more effective 911 option for mobile subscribers.

“Imagine if a 911 operator could see a caller’s most recent locations, contacts and social media interactions,” Roumeliotis says. “These data points could provide powerful clues to what happened, particularly if the person needing assistance is incapacitated.”

Creating these kinds of offerings isn’t easy. Roumeliotis platform unpredictability in the mobile space is a major challenge right now for app developers.

“On the web, we can build whatever service we want and run it on a browser, but a mobile OS like Apple’s can actually prevent launches of services,” Roumeliotis says, adding that managing mobile’s range of requirements, not to mention adapting to them, is incredibly challenging

And while mobile platforms may be fragmented and to some extent relatively immature compared to PC operating systems, Roumeliotis sees a lot of opportunity in safety as a consumer service, particularly in relation to parents and families

“We know a phone can be a safety net for kids, but it’s also a dangerous distraction, which leaves parents feeling stuck between protecting their kids with phones or from them,” he says.

Location Labs is attempting to meet that challenge with a host of solutions that minimize the risks and distractions, while capitalizing on the very real safety value of mobile devices in today’s world.

Roumeliotis says shows like MobileCON are a good place for companies like Location Labs to better understand what their most recent opportunities and challenges are, and in particular to see what’s new in MDM.