Pelago’s Social Networking and Discovery Service Available Today as Free Download

SEATTLE-- Whrrl, the new real-world social networking and discovery service from Pelago, Inc., will be available today from the new Apple App Store. Whrrl is the first service to give iPhone and iPod touch users a highly personalized view of the world around them. It identifies and continually surfaces the people, places and events that are interesting by combining personalization technology and social networking.

“Whrrl turns a real-time exchange of real-world activities among friends into an amazing new experience,” said Jeff Holden, Pelago CEO and co-founder. “Whrrl not only lets you see where your friends are and what they’re doing in real-time, it lights up your map with their activity history and combines that with deep factual data and a powerful recommendation engine to enable the user to discover cool places and events they otherwise would never have thought to try. The iPhone is the perfect device to realize Whrrl’s full potential with its potent combination of location-based services, 3G connectivity and touch-screen interface.”

Whether on a mobile device or the Web at whrrl.com, users can share their activities, including current location, the places or events they are visiting, opinions, notes and photos in real-time. This allows users to see what their friends are up to at a glance and join up with them. Whrrl further parlays all of this activity into a powerful new real-world discovery experience. Whrrl users regularly discover new restaurants, bars, stores, live music events, movies and more because high-relevance suggestions are constantly surfaced for them. Whrrl also provides powerful filtering capability leveraging rich factual data, like type of cuisine, hours of operation, whether a place has outdoor seating or is family-friendly and so on. Then, Whrrl allows users to easily communicate with friends and organize gatherings with a social calendar. Because Whrrl can determine a user’s location automatically, the entire experience is incredibly simple to use.

Whrrl can be downloaded free of charge from the Apple App Store at www.itunes.com/appstore/.

It will be available in the U.S. pre-populated with a database of millions of businesses and events, which is continually updated and extended by Whrrl users.

About Pelago

Pelago, Inc. is an early-stage company based in Seattle developing breakthrough products and services that allow consumers to discover, socialize and transact in the real world, including Whrrl, a new mobile and web-based service at the intersection of social networking and local discovery. Pelago was founded by former senior executives from Amazon.com and is backed by leading venture capital firms from the U.S., Europe and India. Pelago is the first company in Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’ $100 million iFund.