Posts Tagged ‘portland’

Posted

Thu Jun 3 2010, 10:10am

By Aaron Parecki

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Press

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Willamette Week on Open Source Bridge and Geoloqi

Excerpt: “To hear Case and Parecki describe it, as they did yesterday at the Open Source Bridge conference, the uses for Geoloqi are multifold. Sure, you can tell a client when you’re stuck in traffic and running late to a meeting. But you can also tell friends when you’re on your way to the bar, sending an automated SMS message to their phones when you get within a certain range; automatically “check in,” Foursquare-style, when you show up at a certain place; if you have the right adapter, you can turn you lights off and on when you leave and return to your home—no switch required. And so on.

Plus, the application can communicate with you—the future you. If you need the future you to remember to pick up eggs at the store, you can leave yourself a geo-tagged note on a desktop map. Then, the next time you show up to the store, you’ll get a text message: Pick up eggs. If the future you will be traveling to a city you don’t know very well, leave the future you notes about what bus route to take, what the building your going to looks like, which restaurant to eat at. And of course, whoever you’re planning on meeting in this city can know when you show up. All in real time.

Knowing where someone is in real time can have real benefits, beyond just the coolness of knowing. Instead of waiting patiently for someone to show up, you can carry on with whatever else you’d rather be doing—playing Google Pac-Man or whatever—until a text message tells you they’re right outside. And rather than standing on some random street corner staring at your phone hunting for directions, texts with embedded maps will pop up on your phone, showing you exactly where to go without you having to search for it.

Of course, having others know where you are can be problematic, privacy-wise. You don’t want your boss to see that you’re at the Beavers game when you’re supposed to be sick in bed. You don’t want your ex to know where you are—ever.

Parecki says that’s exactly why the application has two ways to hide your information—according to both who you want to see it, and how long you want it shown for. For your friends, you can, in a sense, turn off your signal. Most of your friends don’t care to see where your are at all hours of the day, and vice-versa. For other people, like business for example, you can simply send out a link with to a map of your GPS data that expires whenever you want it to—in a half-hour, and hour and so on.

Read the full article at Willamette Week – June 3rd, 2010 – Geoloqi Will Let Everyone Know Where You Are—If You Want