Aaron Parecki

Geoloqi is a fully customizable GPS-based application that lets you set your own reminders, rules and notes based on your geographic location. Think FourSquare without the exhibitionism. Geoloqi, the brainchild of cyborg anthropologist Amber Case and her partner Aaron Parecki, will use GPS technology to map users, but not broadcast their locations to the world—only those they choose to share it with and when.

The app lets you decide how long to share your location. "I'd like to share my location with a client if I’m meeting them somewhere, so they can know when I'll arrive," writes co-founder Parecki in a web presentation on the faults of other location-mapping products including Foursquare, Dopplr and Gowalla. "But after our meeting, I absolutely don't want them to access my location. This is often true even with friends. Friends' location is not always relevant to me. Current location-sharing systems are currently all or nothing."

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"This is a very different approach to sharing than most social networks take," Parecki points out, "Since we don’t limit to sharing with other Geoloqi users."

The Portland-based pair of Parecki and Case has so far received no major financial backing, and Parecki says all design and development has been done by volunteers who are helping out because they are "very interested in the project." Pricing for the application, which will be released as a public beta in January and will be available at the app store has not been finalized.

With no millions of VC money to prop them up, I wondered to Parecki how Geoloqi hopes to be self-sustaining in the year to come, and his response was far from the advertising-based answer I expected. "We plan on licensing the iPhone software development kit to developers who want to integrate location into their own apps," he told me. "Also we will likely charge developers for heavy application programming interface access if they go over a certain threshold."