SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 11 -- Macworld Expo attendees and other iPhone owners in San Francisco January 15-17, 2008, can "pling for treasure" with iPling -- the fun, free, easy-to-use mobile social expansion service for the iPhone. The company has announced a Treasure Hunt in which many valuable prizes will be awarded to its beta users over three days.

Prizes include iPod Touch and Shuffle models, as well as gift certificates to popular online retailers such as the Apple Store, Amazon.com, StubHub, Fandango, and iTunes. New prizes will be released throughout the day for each of the three days of the Treasure Hunt.

To receive details on starting times and prizes, contestants need to navigate to http://www.ipling.com/ on their iPhone's Safari browser and key in TREASURE as a General Tag on their iPling Settings page. To win, they simply need to use iPling to find the mystery "plingers" giving away the prizes. The process is engaging and fun, it involves activating quick profiles by keying in tags associated with the prizes and sending anonymous SMS messages called "plings" to others with matching tags whose colorful icons will appear on the iPhone's screen. A contestant that guesses the right tag associated with a prize (e.g. "green day" might match an iTunes gift card) and is first at contacting the mystery plinger giving it away will become an instant winner!

It's free and easy to play and there are lots of prizes, so set up an iPling profile today and, at noon on January 15, start plinging for treasure!

iPling has been created to empower people to discover and communicate with others nearby who share their interests and needs, in real time, without the usual social networking obstacles of invitation systems or security concerns (iPling's service is safe, anonymous and allows its subscribers to be in complete control of their experience). As founder and CEO Manuel Monroy explains, "Until now, there has simply been no way to connect with others based on their proximity and interests unless they are already friends or friends of friends. We believe a large number of us are ready for a change, so we created a set of tools that will inspire confidence and encourage folks to open up and get together. iPling is all about openness."

"You'd be surprised by all the amazing people that you pass by every day who could enrich your life," Monroy adds. "As the world goes mobile we feel the time is right to introduce our services, and we couldn't ask for a better platform than the iPhone."

For details about iPling's Treasure Hunt visit http://www.ipling.com/treasurehunt.html

ABOUT iPLING: Based in San Francisco, iPling Inc. offers a fun, free, easy-to-use new real-time, location-based mobile social expansion service that has been named one of the "Top 25 Web Apps for iPhone" (rev2.org). The company was launched in January 2007 by entrepreneurs with a track record of innovation from leading companies including Andersen, Apple, Oracle and Yahoo.