Press Releases

Lisbon, 8 August 2011 – Vodafone Portugal today launched Vodafone Radar, an innovative service that responds in a fun and intuitive way to the question posed in the title. This is a free app for smartphones that shows the places that the user’s friends visit on Facebook and Foursquare in a visually appealing way in terms of time and distance.

The application shows the places visited by the user’s friends where they check-in on Facebook or Foursquare. Users can therefore find out at any time which of their friends are close by, send them an SMS with their own location or communicate via Facebook wall posts or direct messages. So, when a user arrives in a new city or visits a new place, it is very easy to socialise with friends who are close by, based on their check-ins.

Users of this application can also see the various places of interest around them (e.g. restaurants, bars, hotels, cinemas, etc), read the tips that their network of contacts have already left about them and find friends who have checked in there at some time. So when a user goes to a certain city for the first time, for example, he or she can easily find the ‘in’ restaurant or one that their best friend recommends.

So that they always know who’s on their Radar, users can also receive SMS alerts when a named friend has checked-in nearby at a particular place or in the user’s city of preference.

At the moment Vodafone Radar connects to Facebook, through Facebook Places, and to Foursquare, the two major global geo-socialisation networks. The service will shortly be expanded to other important social networks in this context.

The Vodafone Radar app, already launched for Android phones, will soon be available for the iPhone and tablets.

To use this service customers simply need to send a free SMS with the message “RADAR” to 12345 and download the app to their mobile phone or download it directly from the Android Market or, shortly, from the App Store.