Posted

Wed Dec 8 2010, 10:10am

By Aaron Parecki

Categories

Press

Wired.co.uk: TED Women day one: Where’s the ‘tech’?

Christine Ottery writes: “I caught up with Amber the day before the conference started. My head almost exploded. I think her project Geoloqi.com has the potential to be the next big thing after Facebook. It launches early next year. She told me that people who are self-mapping and self-tracking exist on the fringes of society — but they are bringing this to the mainstream”.

“This is self-actualisation cubed. For example, the essence of Geoloqi (although this is not all it can do) is “send messages to your future self”. When Amber was little, her dad taught her about space and time, wormholes, and she used to record tapes for her future self. Aaron (her business partner) did the same kind of thing but by mapping trips on his holidays (analogue style). Also, Geoloqi operates a very interesting business model: volunteer driven and crazily ambitious. So no multi-million dollar investments — just some properly passionate geeks in the US. Geoloqi differentiates itself massively from Foursquare and the rest by amping privacy to the max — it’s meant to be a seamless addition to our lives so it is time management driven rather then reward driven — but that doesn’t mean it’s not fun if you want it to be.”

Read the full article at wired.co.uk

Posted

Mon Nov 22 2010, 11:11am

By caseorganic

Categories

Events

Tagged

Building a Location-Based Science Trivia Game with Geoloqi at Science Hack Day, San Francisco

Last week, the Geoloqi team headed down to Palo Alto last week for Science Hack Day, a 48 hour hacking event that brought together scientists and technologist, artists and futurists, for a weekend of development, gaming and overall enjoyment. Many of us slept at the event, while some stayed up hacking into the night.

We arrived at Science Hack Day with the goal of making an experience that gets people to pay attention to the world around them. During gameplay, players walk around town and receive location-based questions via SMS related to education and science and their nearby location.

Location-based science trivia game at Science Hack Day

Each question was worth points, and more points are awarded for correct responses than incorrect responses. Those with the highest scores are listed on a leaderboard.

Science Notes Leaderboard

Players used a GPS Tracker made by Instamapper to play the game.

Science Hack Day Team Geoloqi

Thanks to all those who helped us with development and testing! Kevin Rohling, Liam Holt, Megan Mansell, Devin Drew, Pete Forsyth, Ashish Mahabal and Jennifer Monfrans.

Test Game Lat Long Markers

We left questions at a number of locations around the Institute for the Future, where the conference was being held.

Question Response

Questions and Responses

Questions were sent to a player’s phone by SMS, and they were given points based on their response. Most questions dealt with the area right around the user.

To respond, the player simply send a reply back to the SMS number and the database checked whether the response was correct or not and added points to the user’s id.

Application Architecture

Application Architecture

We used the Tropo API to send the SMS messages to users as they walked around town.

Geoloqi acted as the location-handler, determining where players were.

Finally, the trivia content was stored in a database built by Kevin Rohling.

Player ids and point tallies were handled there and displayed on the leaderboard.

Thank You!

Thanks again to everyone who joined in the game! It made Science Hack Day a blast. Thanks to Ariel Waldman for organizing it, and Jeremy Keith for coming up with the concept in the first place.

Posted

Sun Oct 3 2010, 10:22pm

By Aaron Parecki

Categories

Events

Tagged

Apps built at the Tropo + Geoloqi Open Gov Hackathon


Thanks to everyone who came out to the Open Gov Hackathon today! We’re proud to announce the winners! The best app using the Tropo API went home with a Sonos Wireless Music System, and the best app using the Geoloqi API went home with an iPad!

The judging began at 6:30Pm, and everyone stopped programming. After all of the presentations were done, we discussed each app with the Tropo team and Rick Nixon of CivicApps. It was a tough decision, as the entries were extremely creative and useful!

Thanks to everyone who watched, participated, and cheered on the developers. We owe the greatest thanks to Tropo and the City of Portland, who were great supporters of the event. This won’t be the last hackathon. We will be doing this again in the future as soon as possible. If you’re interested in partnering with us for another hackathon, let us know!

Heritage Tree Quest

Winner: Best use of Tropo by @trisimon

Like PacMan for heritage trees! You go around town finding trees and collecting points. You get bonus points for collecting all trees in a neighborhood. You receive your score via an SMS from Tropo. When you’re near a tree, you can call Tropo and it will quiz you to identify it, getting you even more points! It was this clever use of the voice recognition capabilities of Tropo that made this application stand out.

Don’t Eat That!

Winner: Best use of Geoloqi by @reidab

“Don’t Eat That!” pulls health inspections from the county web page. If you use Geoloqi, you can subscribe to notifications of scores under a certain threshold for restaurants within 100 meters of your current location. You’ll get an SMS that says “What ho! You might not want to eat at Backspace, their last inspection score was 93!” That way you can gawk at dirty restaurants near you! This app will also post links to the reports as tips on Foursquare!

BarBird

Honorable Mention. Finds all the bars in the business license dataset and matches them to Twitter feeds by searching Twitter lists. The map shows notification icons on the map and shows the latest tweets from every bar. A future mobile version could use the Geoloqi API to track your location and receive Geonotes for specials at bars near you.

Tweedopt.com

Honorable Mention. Finds pets available for adoption from the Multnomah County Animal Services database and petfinder.com. You can read the descriptions of the animals and send out a tweet for them. Using the Tropo API, the non-technical foster homes can call in and ask for a short update about the pet, so the shelters aren’t required to know how to use Twitter. On “Woof Wednesday” the dogs that are looking for homes will tweet their latest updates or a random pet.

We are thrilled that everyone was excited to come out and join us for a day of hacking! And special thanks to Tropo for co-sponsoring the event and to CivicApps for the great support.

Posted

Sun Oct 3 2010, 12:12pm

By Aaron Parecki

Categories

API
Tutorials

Tagged

Geoloqi API Example

To quickly write an application for your Geoloqi account, you can request a permanent access token through the “Connections” screen on your account.

Once you have this access token, you don’t need to deal with refreshing the token using the standard OAuth 2 spec. You can use this access token in all requests indefinitely.

Here is an example of retrieving your user profile using the API.


<?php
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://api.geoloqi.com/1/account/profile');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array('Authorization: OAuth ' . $oauth_token));
$response = json_decode(curl_exec($ch));
print_r($response);
?>

Alternatively, you can pass the oauth token in the query string.

<?php
print_r(json_decode(file_get_contents('https://api.geoloqi.com/1/account/profile?oauth_token=' . $oauth_token)));
?>

See more API methods on the API documentation.

Posted

Sat Oct 2 2010, 11:23pm

By caseorganic

Categories

API
Tutorials

Geoloqi API

If you’re looking to build an app that uses the Geoloqi API, you might find the following diagrams useful.

1. Your application can trigger an action when the user enters a location. To do this, you can simply instruct Geoloqi to notify your app when a user enters an area.

For example, your app can tell Geoloqi to let it know when the user is inside a region defined by a latitude, longitude and radius. Geoloqi will only give away the user’s location when his GPS enabled phone enters one of those areas, preserving privacy.

Your app sends Geoloqi a lat, long radius and callback URL, and Geoloqi stores the trigger, allowing your app to be notified of the user’s location without you having to track the user’s location yourself.

2. When the user runs Geoloqi or Instamapper, their phone continually reports its location to the Geoloqi API.

Geoloqi internally processes the user’s location and compares the location with your app’s location triggers.

If the user’s GPS enabled phone enters within one of the areas set as a trigger zone, the user gets a message or action.

3. When the user enters one of your triggers, Geoloqi sends an update to your callback URL.

You can instruct Tropo to send an SMS or make a phone call to the user’s phone, user’s friend’s phone , twitter or a variety of other sources.

Full image: click to enlarge.