geoloqi - Geoloqi Blog

Posted

Wed Apr 11 2012, 4:16pm

By kyledrake

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Geoloqi Now Detects Nearby Pinball Machines

Geoloqi Pinball Layer Geolocation

Geoloqi has a new layer that is going to make your coin jars a lot more empty.

When we’re not working (which we love to do), we also love to play pinball. It turns out (we only recently found this out) that the city we live and work in is one of the top pinball cities in America). There’s a great website called the Pinball Map that (using crowdsourcing) keeps track of the pinball machines in cities all over the country. They also have a a great iPhone and Android app so you can update and find machines (Scott Wainstock and Ryan Gratzer worked on the apps and the Pinball Map site, and did a great job with them).

We wanted to see if we could use Geoloqi to automatically let us know when we were near a bar with pinball machines. So we combined the Pinball Map data with Geoloqi, and the result is the Geoloqi Pinball Machine Detector!

How it works: When you walk by a venue that has a pinball machine, Geoloqi automatically detects it and sends you a message, which has the name of the venue, and the names of all the pinball machines. We tried it out recently, and it was great. We first found a bar with CSI and the new Batman pinball machine, both of which were only a week old (the Pinball Map data is remarkably up-to-date).

Next we walked by the Shanghai Tunnel, a bar in downtown Portland, which had five machines in the basement. The machines weren’t visible from the road, so I would have never known about them without the Pinball layer. I’ve found a lot of great new places to stop in and visit since I started using it. It’s surprising how many hidden gems you can find, even in the neighborhood you live in.

We also found a really odd Elton John pinball machine (Captain Fantastic) in the shoe store across from Powell’s (a big bookstore in downtown Portland). We’ve walked by it hundreds of times, and still had no idea it was there.

Pinball Map Site

The layer only took a few hours to build, and it was very easy to implement. It’s my favorite layer for Geoloqi right now (the Dinosaur Fossils layer is a close second). I was able to use our visual Layer Editor to track and view progress while the script was importing. It’s a lot of data, but our front-end designer/developer (Patrick Arlt) was able to use our Javascript SDK to make direct calls to the API from our editor, which improves performance a lot, so even with a lot of data, the layer editor works great. It makes a big difference to be able to see the data you’re working with!

Anything with geo-location can be made into a layer like this. We’ve been having a lot of fun implementing these, and we’re always looking for more ideas and datasets to import in the future. If you have any ideas in mind, you should send them to us (or better yet, make your own layer!).

Where does it work?

If you’re in any of the following cities, you can use this layer to get Pinball notifications!
Austin, San Francisco, Boston, British Columbia, Chicago, Colorado, Dallas, Jacksonville, Los Angeles, New York City, Pittsburgh, Portland, Sacramento, San Diego, Seattle, Spokane

Try it Out!

Download the Geoloqi app and subscribe to the Pinball layer! It’s free.. unlike the pinball machines.

Top photo credit: Creative Commons by Flickr User BeerNotBombs

Posted

Sun Mar 11 2012, 10:10am

By caseorganic

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News
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Geoloqi Extends Platform with Appcelerator, Factual and Locaid Partnerships

Geoloqi Extends its Reach to 350 Million Mobile Devices, 1.6 Million Mobile Developers, and a Database of 60 Million Places Globally, Giving Carriers and OEMs a Location-Based Platform Like Never Before

Austin, TX (SXSW Interactive) – March 11, 2012 – Geoloqi, a powerful platform for next-generation location-based services, today announced strategic new partnerships with Appcelerator, a leading cross-platform mobile development platform; Factual, a large-scale data aggregation platform with a Global Places API; and Locaid, the world’s largest carrier location platform. Through these partnerships, Geoloqi is significantly enhancing its location data and analytics offering while expanding its reach to millions of new developers and end users through Locaid and Appcelerators’ customer bases.

Geoloqi is a complete cross-platform location solution that is device, language and carrier agnostic allowing developers to easily layer geolocation onto any IP connected device or application. Geoloqi is creating a one-stop shop for the enterprise and developers to unlock the full potential of real-time location-based services. These strategic partnerships not only give Geoloqi a distinct advantage in location data and application development services, but also give carriers and handset manufacturers new technology for true real-time location tracking, for the first time. The platform also enables persistent background location tracking, real-time location tracking, intelligent battery management and geofencing, rich location and dwell-time analytics, and location messaging.

“These partnerships greatly enhance location technology for our collective customers and provide new opportunities for the enterprise,” said Amber Case, CEO and co-founder of Geoloqi. “We are building the future of location services – key functionality for layering next-generation location technology onto any application or device. We’re confident that these partnerships will drive open new markets and accelerate location technology more rapidly into the future.”

Learn More about the Partners

Appcelerator

Winner of the 2012 GSMA Global Mobile Award for “Best Cloud-Based Technology,” Appcelerator’s Titanium is the leading mobile platform that powers more than 35,000 applications deployed on 40 million devices worldwide. Through the partnership, the Geoloqi API and complete toolkit is now available in Appcelerator’s marketplace, giving its customers access to rich, real-time location technology while giving Geoloqi access to Appcelerator’s global network of over 1.6 million developers.

“Appcelerator customers have been asking for a true, turnkey geolocation solution and location-based analytics platform for some time now, and we finally found one in Geoloqi that can meet the needs of our enterprise customers,” said Jeff Haynie, CEO of Appcelerator. “Its powerful toolkit is an essential addition to our app development marketplace, and we’re excited to begin offering Geoloqi technology to our customers next quarter.”

Factual

Factual has created the definitive global location database of local businesses and points of interest, and currently offers access to 60 million entities in 50 countries. Geoloqi’s partnership with Factual gives customers access to Factual’s immense location database and significantly extends Geoloqi’s data and storage capabilities.

“We are really thrilled to be part of Geoloqi’s rich SDK for developers,” said Eva Ho, VP of Marketing & Operations at Factual. “Adding our more than 60 million US businesses and POIs to their suite of tracking, geofencing and messaging tools will give developers everything they need to quickly build the next amazing app. Definitely a nice marriage of our strengths.”

Locaid

Locaid is the world’s largest location-as-a-service company. The partnership gives Geoloqi access to its over 350 million mobile devices in North America, and gives Locaid’s enterprise customers real-time handset-based location technology, greatly enhancing the carrier-only location services previously available.

“Mobile developers want the best of both worlds from location companies: the whiz-bang tools from device-based location and the massive footprint and no battery-drain from network location. Together, Locaid and Geoloqi give developers a one-two punch, the first such partnership in the history of location-based services,” said Rip Gerber, Locaid president and CEO. “Now, companies large and small can combine Geoloqi’s check-ins, location-based messaging, geofence alerts and real-time maps with Locaid’s 350 million device footprint and privacy services to create amazing capabilities and apps for any device, anywhere, locatable anytime. Personally, I’m also delighted to be working with world’s foremost cyborg anthropologist.”

About Geoloqi

Geoloqi is a powerful platform for real-time location based services, making it simple for enterprise partners, OEMs and mobile developers to quickly add rich geolocation functionality to apps and devices. It provides a complete, real-time toolkit for tracking, messaging, battery management, geofencing, storage and actionable analytics, with a language agnostic SDK and proprietary API. Founded in 2010, Geoloqi is based in Portland, Oregon and backed by Portland Seed Fund and TIE. For more information on Geoloqi, please visit geoloqi.com.

About Appcelerator

Appcelerator’s Titanium is the leading mobile platform of choice for thousands of companies who are seizing the mobile opportunity. With more than 35,000 applications deployed on 40 million devices, Appcelerator’s Titanium Platform leverages over 5,000 mobile device and operating system APIs to create native iOS and Android apps as well as HTML5 mobile web apps. Customers who standardize on the Titanium Platform get to market 70% faster and can quickly optimize business results with analytics–driven insights into user behavior and app performance. The open and fully extensible Titanium Platform makes it easy to integrate data, content and services from a variety of sources into mobile applications to leverage best–of–breed capabilities. Appcelerator Cloud Services (ACS) provides instant social, location, communication and content features for user-centric mobility. ACS is pre-integrated into the Titanium Platform and is also separately available for all mobile developers and publishers. Appcelerator’s worldwide ecosystem includes 1.6M developers and hundreds of ISVs and integration partners. Please visit appcelerator.com.

About Factual

Factual is a large-scale data aggregation platform that provides high value data and services to developers, publishers and enterprises. The sources of data come from premium partners, developers, user communities and the web. Its core offering is a powerful set of open APIs around Global Place data which includes more than 60 million businesses and points of interest in 50 countries. Factual was founded in 2007 by Gil Elbaz, co-founder of Applied Semantics which originally developed ASI AdSense. Factual is funded by Andreessen Horowitz and Index Ventures. For more information on Factual, go to www.factual.com.

About Locaid

Locaid is the world’s largest Location-as-a-Service (LaaS) company. We operate a location privacy platform that allows mobile developers to locate over 350 million devices for enterprise authentication, fraud management, consumer location services and opt-in mobile marketing. Locaid locates smartphones, feature phones, tablets and any mobile device on leading wireless carriers, including América Móvil, AT&T, Rogers, Sprint, T-Mobile, TELUS, and Verizon Wireless. Locaid also helps shape and enforce location privacy policies via leadership roles on governing associations, including the CTIA, MMA and IAPP. The largest financial institutions, mobile marketers, M2M platforms and mobile service providers get network location from Locaid. Location Matters.™ You can locate us at www.loc-aid.com.

Media Contact

If you are press attending SXSW Interactive and would like to speak with Amber Case, CEO of Geoloqi please reach out to:
Vanessa Camones or Jennifer Lankford
theMIX agency for Geoloqi
415-412-2856 or [email protected]

Posted

Wed Mar 7 2012, 3:15pm

By caseorganic

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Events
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Geoloqi at SXSW 2012 – Dinosaur USB Drives, Keynote Speech, Partnership Announcements and More!

Will you be at SXSW this year? We’re looking forward to seeing you there! There’s a lot to talk about. Look for a big announcement from us from the main stage of the conference on the 11th of March!

First thing’s first: Dinosaur USB Drives!

We’ll be handing out 400 Dinosaur USB drives with the Geoloqi SDKs for iPhone and Android on them. If you see any of us at a party or at the conference, ask us for one!

Meet the Geoloqi Team at SXSW!

Half the Geoloqi team will be with us at SXSW! If you see any of us, ask for a Loqisaur USB drive, or talk to us about location. We’re all quite friendly!

Amber Case, Co-Founder and CEO

I’ll be giving a keynote speech at this year’s SXSW conference in Austin, Texas! I’ll be doing an extended version of a talk on cyborg anthropology and the future of the interface, and will then go into what we’ve been doing at Geoloqi, and well as some major partnership announcements.

If you’re interested in the future of humans and technology, and the future of location, it should be an interesting speech! Lots of new things to talk about. Hope to see you there!

When and Where?
Keynote on Location and the Future of Humans and Technology
March 11th, 2012 from 2:00pm–3:00pm CST
Exhibit Hall 5, Austin Convention Center
You can learn more about the speech here.

Interested in meeting up during SXSW? I’ll be on Twitter @caseorganic. Feel free to @ or DM me anytime, or if you’re press, see the press contact below!

Aaron Parecki, Co-Founder and Platform Engineer

Aaron Parecki is a Portland-based iPhone and PHP developer interested in solving practical problems with technology. In his free time, he enjoys geolocation, linguistics, and building home automation systems and IRC bots with a sense of humor. For the past 2½ years, he has been tracking and visualizing his location every 6 seconds, making him a frequent presenter at the Portland data visualization group. His fascination with location sharing and GPS began at the age of 6, when he traced the routes of family road trips on a map with a highlighter.

He combined these interests and created Geoloqi.com, a private, real-time mobile and web platform for secure location sharing with Amber Case in an effort to help people connect in the real world. He has 11 years experience in web app development, database design, graphic design and printing, and server administration.

Aaron will be speaking on a panel on Engineering Serendipity to Instigate and Delight!

When and Where?
Engineering Serendipity to Instigate and Delight
Saturday, March 10, 2012 from 5:00PM – 6:00PM
Hilton Austin Downtown, Salon J
You can learn more about Aaron’s panel here!.

Bernie Albers, VP of Sales

As Vice President of Sales, Bernie brings more than a decade of experience working with enterprise marketers to leverage the power of technology and digital media to create and maintain meaningful relationships with customers. He excels at translating the needs of enterprise marketers into successful revenue strategies for early and mid-stage technology and media organizations.

Before joining Geoloqi, Bernie served as Regional VP Sales for thismoment where he brought to market DEC 3.0, an innovative Social Content Management System enabling brand marketers to effectively manage audience engagement across mutliple social channels. Prior to thismoment, Bernie served as Vice President of Sales for Six Apart where he was responsible for optimizing the sales organization toward a media-centric growth strategy. He was responsible for building the sales team and managing the go-to-market strategy and rollout of a new suite of media solutions. Six Apart was acquired by ad network VideoEgg resulting in the formation of SAY Media.

You can find Bernie Albers on Twitter @berniealbers! He’s your best bet for anything sales related.

Kyle Drake, Platform Engineer

Kyle Drake is a many-hats web developer and entrepreneur that speaks multiple languages, and has worked with numerous startups to build their infrastructure. As a software engineer for Geoloqi, he is helping to build their geolocation platform and real-time location-streaming API. He previously developed some of the top Facebook applications as a senior Facebook app developer for Dachis Group.

In his free time, Kyle likes writing more code, working on web site ideas, riding his bicycle around Portland, hiking in the mountains, skiing, reading anthropology and tech books, and he’s fairly good at playing the Star Trek pinball machine at Ground Kontrol.

You can find Kyle Drake on Twitter @kyledrake and on Github.

Sound Good?

We’re really excited for this year’s conference and are looking forward to all of the breakfast tacos, events and great people. See you soon!

If you are press attending SXSW Interactive and would like to schedule an interview, contact
Jennifer Lankford
theMIX agency for Geoloqi
415-412-2856
[email protected].

Posted

Tue Mar 6 2012, 1:13pm

By Aaron Parecki

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Gallery

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Everywhere I’ve Been: Data Portraits Powered by 3.5 years of data and 2.5 million GPS Points

About the These Maps

These are images of map generated entirely from GPS logs gathered by various versions of the Geoloqi sample application for iPhone and Android for the past 3.5 years. Once gathered, the data was run through a custom script that projects the GPS logs onto a 2D image plane. There is a little bit of logic to smooth out the lines and remove some (but not all) GPS noise.

How Many Data Points?

Approximately one GPS point was recorded every 2-6 seconds when I was moving, and these images represent about 2.5 million total GPS points. Collectively, they represent a data portrait of my life: everywhere I’ve been and the places I’ve been most frequently. The map is colored by year, so you can see how my footprint changes over the years, depending on where I live.

This is a map of everywhere I’ve been in Portland from 2008 to March 2012.

The long diagonal lines are airplane flights in and out of PDX. Some of the flights loop over the city when they take off.

Methods

To get data at this resolution, I had to bring back-up batteries with me and charge my phone whenever I could. I would manually turn the tracker on when I moved, and turn it off when I was at an indoor location for a long period of time. To get this level of accuracy results in a great deal of battery drain.

One of the reasons why I started Geoloqi is to be able to make tracking this kind of data easier for myself, and to improve battery life (along the way we took some of my manual methods for battery management and bundled it up into a set of mobile SDKs for iPhone and Android for adding location to applications without the intensive battery drain).

Below is an image of the script while it is running to produce the GPS maps. You can see a video of it processing a couple million GPS points here.

Use in Media

Some of the earlier images of the GPS maps started appearing in Wired online starting last year.

History

My fascination with GPS and data logging began at a relatively early age (around 10-12 years old, from 4th-6th grade). I recently found my stack of notepads from 3/29/1995 through 6/9/1997 where I logged my commute to school. I have mostly complete logs for the entire date range, including start time, end time, time traveled, who drove, and in what car. In addition, I used to take a highlighter

Why do This?

I’ve always found it interesting to take raw data and make it visible. Before GPS chips were available in smartphones, it was very difficult to get high resolution data like this. Ubiquitous provides a way to see over time what was formerly invisible data. It allows one to see over time. In each of these cases, I’ve been able to process the raw data to answer personal questions like “what time is best to leave the house in the morning for work?”. Best of all, it is private data that I own and can do with what I like.

More Images

If you’d like to see all of the images I’ve recorded over the past 3.5 years, there’s a GPS Logs set on Flickr here.

About

This article was written by Aaron Parecki, Co-Founder of Geoloqi, a powerful platform for real-time location. You can follow him on Twitter @aaronpk.

Posted

Fri Feb 24 2012, 8:08am

By caseorganic

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Press

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Geoloqi SDK Launch Covered by Forbes, TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, GigaOM, VentureBeat

On Feb 23rd, Geoloqi launched to the world the next generation location platform aimed at revolutionizing location. We’ve been overwhelmed by the positive response we’ve received. We’re excited to share some of the great coverage below:

The Holy Grail of Rich Location Data Made Easy with new SDKs from Geoloqi
“The holy grail of mobile geo-location services is persistent, aware, real-time data delivered straight to your device…Portland-based startup Geoloqi thinks it can pull it off.” – ReadWriteWeb

Geolocation Heats Up With Geoloqi’s Battery Saving Tech
“One of the primary problems with location-tracking apps today is that they have a tendency to drain smartphones’ batteries by always running the GPS in the background, or constantly pinging cell towers. With the Geoloqi SDK, however, Case explains that algorithms know when to turn the GPS on and off. For example, if an app is using geofences, it knows that the GPS doesn’t have to constantly be running unless you’re near those geofences, she says.” – TechCrunch

Checking in with Geoloqi: Amber Case of Next-Gen Geo-Tracking and Keeping (some stuff) Free “As of this morning, Geoloqi has opened the floodgates to new users and customers to build upon their platform in what seems to be any direction imaginable. “If it’s a company looking at a mobile strategy that deals with location,” Case says, “We can handle it.”” – Forbes

Geoloqi Helps Location Based Services Take Flight
“Geoloqi offers a cross platform SDK for iOS and Android that can be ported to Windows and other devices and can work on any carrier network. Developers can enable geofencing, automatic check-ins and location-based messaging, which is one of the most promising opportunities for marketers to target consumers. There’s also rich analytics for tracking users, dwell time, visitors and geofencing.” – GigaOM

Cyborg anthropologist’s startup brings people & computers closer together
“The startup has been the buzz of the Internet for a couple months, but today marks its official launch as well as the availability of its fully agnostic SDK for iOS and Android, as well as its proprietary API.” – Venturebeat

Geoloqi Offers Up Tools so Location Apps can Finally Realize Their Potential
“The Geoloqi SDK enables accurate, customizable geofencing, auto check-ins, and automatically manages a device’s battery life while using location, so users can run the app all day without significant battery daring.” And that fact that it plans to offer up this technology for other developers means that a fleet of battery-saving, more immersive location apps could hit in the foreseeable future.” – Digital Trends

Geoloqi Launches Platform for White Label Geolocation Apps
“With Geoloqi, we’re able to track our personnel in real-time, anywhere in the world, on any device, ultimately saving lives in the process,” said David Ayres, of TATE, Inc.” – SiliconAngle

Geoloqi exits beta, reveals geolocation tools for enterprise developers
“Geolocation has the potential to become an indispensable part of our lives,” said Amber Case, CEO and founder of Geoloqi, in an interview with FierceMobileContent. “But in order for geolocation to be a valuable service to end users, the technology needs to be invisible yet opted into, private, and secure.” – Fierce Developer

Real-Time Location Platform Heats up on iPhone, Android
“We want to bridge the first generation of location services to the next generation of location services. Not just point based. Not just carrier based. Not just one aspect of location services,” said Geoloqi’s Amber Case.” – ProgrammableWeb

Portland’s Geoloqi Launches its Next-Generation Location Tracking Platform
“Geoloqi’s technology runs in the background of smartphones, passively tracking their location. It handles the information instead of working through a third party. That’s a change from today’s standard location apps, which require effort on part of the user.” – Oregonian

Geolocation Takes Off
“Geoloqi features a language agnostic SDK for iOS and Android, with a complete stack of geolocation tools, including geo-fencing, messaging, security and analytics. Their secret sauce is in the algorithms that conserve battery life, minimizing GPS, WiFi and cellular pings, while delivering 20 ft accuracy with “opt-in” control.” – Daily Wireless

Press Resources

For more press resources and coverage, visit the Press Page, and you can follow Geoloqi on Twitter as well!

Posts Tagged ‘geoloqi’

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Where does it work?

Try it Out!

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Learn More about the Partners

Appcelerator

Factual

Locaid

About Geoloqi

About Appcelerator

About Factual

About Locaid

Media Contact

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First thing’s first: Dinosaur USB Drives!

Meet the Geoloqi Team at SXSW!

Amber Case, Co-Founder and CEO

Aaron Parecki, Co-Founder and Platform Engineer

Bernie Albers, VP of Sales

Kyle Drake, Platform Engineer

Sound Good?

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About the These Maps

How Many Data Points?

Methods

Use in Media

History

Why do This?

More Images

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