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The tools Geoloqi offers can be used to develop with any carrier and on any smartphone. These include geofencing, which allows an application to monitor a specified area and provide interactions to users based on whether they’re in that zone, “battery-safe trigger zones,” which tells an app to reduce its GPS monitoring based on whether a user is near a geofence, and “location-based messaging” which pings a user with information relevant to where they are.
Portland startup Geoloqi has been heralded as the one company to have finally cracked the code. It’s no accident. “We didn’t want to work on problems everyone is working on,” co-founder Amber Case told me. “We want to solve the hard ones.”
This afternoon at the South by Southwest festival here, Geoloqi founder and CEO Amber Case gave a keynote talking about the state of the art in geolocation, and how new tools like those from her company and others are changing the world.
“Imagine a world in which location-based applications were used less to merely identify location than to dynamically coordinate one’s personal data and agenda, making the accessing of information easier and more efficient.”
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."