Screen shot of Glympse showing location of founder Bryan Trussel this morning

These are tough times to launch a tech startup. But one Microsoft veteran is taking the plunge.

Bryan Trussel, the former head of Microsoft's casual games division, is working on a new online venture called Glympse.

The website uses GPS technology to follow people's movements online via their cell phone signal. People can follow their friends, family or colleagues in real time on Google satellite or street maps.

That sounds a lot like what two other startups, Pelago and Loopt, are doing.

Seattle-based Pelago has a service called Whrrl that lets people pinpoint the location of friends and get their recommendations on cool places to visit in a particular city. Loopt, out of Silicon Valley, alerts users when friends are nearby and also includes recommendations.

Trussel, a 16-year veteran of Microsoft, said his company is taking a different approach from Pelago and Loopt, but said he wasn't ready to reveal details yet.

Glympse is being developed for GPS-enabled devices like the iPhone and BlackBerry as well as Windows Mobile and Google's Android mobile platform.

People can send an email or text message from their mobile phone inviting others to "Glympse" their location. Trussel demonstrated with me during our phone conversation, sending me a link that let me follow him driving around Redmond.

The plan is to make the base application free, but he's looking at a number of business models, including charging for premium features, placing online ads on the website, and forming commercial partnerships with mobile phone carriers, handset manufacturers, and others.

About 40 people are using the Glympse service in private beta. But Trussel is aiming to boost that number by getting it on an internal Microsoft employee site for downloading and testing Windows Mobile applications.

"They're very hypercritical and discerning folks so it will be interesting to get their feedback," Trussel said of his former Microsoft colleagues. "That’s one of the advantages of coming from the mother ship, you have connections over there."

Trussel and two of his Microsoft co-workers, Stephen Miller and Jeremy Mercer, left the software giant early this year to found Glympse. They launched the beta website in mid-October.

Trussel admitted this is a rough time to be starting a new venture. The co-founders bootstrapped the company initially and had commitments from angel investors when the stock market started taking huge hits.

He said he was concerned that the money wouldn't come through, but said he received the checks from all nine angels in the last month.

"One of them said, 'This is a hard check to write after I just lost 25 percent of my net worth,'" Trussel said. "But they really liked the progress that we made."

Trussel declined to identify the angels or the amount of investment, but said the investors include an uncle, former Microsoft colleagues, business school buddies, and some Silicon Valley angels.

He said it was important to include investors that he didn't know previously.

"I wanted people who would be cold-hearted angels who would look at this as a business deal, people who would look at this completely abstractly," Trussel said. "I wanted people asking the tough questions. It made me refine my pitch."

Despite the cash infusion, the three-person Glympse team is trying to keep costs down. They've put off getting office space and are working out of Miller's basement in Redmond. They plan to do low-cost viral marketing through email and large social networks Myspace and Facebook.

A public beta version is coming soon, but Trussel did not give a date.

The other startups in the cell-phone tracking space have some big name venture capital backers. Pelago's investors include Bezos Expeditions, the personal investment vehicle of Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, Trilogy Equity Partners of Bellevue, and Silicon Valley giant Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Loopt is backed by Silicon Valley firms Sequoia Capital and New Enterprise Associates.