Posts Tagged ‘location’

Posted

Mon Aug 19 2013, 10:10am

By Aaron Parecki

Categories

API

Tagged

Changes to Location History Storage for Geoloqi developers

Geoloqi is all about the real-time location data that supports the Geotrigger service, but we’ve been filling up cloud after cloud with extra data we realized our customers don’t really use.

Going forward, we will stop storing the raw location data points, and instead store the trigger history only – that is, the timestamp and latitude/longitude when a trigger is fired. New Geoloqi apps created after August 13, 2013 will not store location history, and in 30 days we will stop storing new location history for existing Geoloqi apps.

How will this affect my app(s)?

Odds are, it won’t. Unless your app needs to retrieve more than the last known location of a device, you shouldn’t notice a thing. Nothing besides location history is changing.

What if historical location data is important to me?

Do you currently use or plan on using your app’s historical location data? We can turn it on/leave it on for an additional charge/fee (as our normal pricing is just for our Geotrigger Service). Just let us know!

Exceptions

One of our customers uses Geoloqi to track where their app users are located currently, to send them Geotriggered messages, and to look at historical data on where they went, so we will continue storing historical location data for them and others on a case by case basis. The vast majority of our customers only need Geoloqi’s core technologies for their apps: Geotriggers, real-time location tracking, and geocoding.

What’s next?

We’re currently working on an updated version of the Geoloqi platform and an entire re-haul of the API. We aim to make the API easier to use, easier to get started, and require fewer API calls to run. In addition, we’re improving battery life, accuracy and stability of the platform as the number of devices, customers and users of our system grows. Over time, we’ll also be releasing special Geotrigger tools for ArcGIS users and customers, too! We’ll let you know when we’re ready to launch! Once the new API and SDKs are launched, we’ll be publishing a migration and update guide for existing customers, and will begin a wind-down of of the original service. We will provide at least one year (if not more) for all apps to update their SDKs to the new service.

Thanks!

Thanks so much for being a Geoloqi customer or considering using Geoloqi for your apps! We’re here to serve you, so if you have any questions, just let us know!

Posted

Wed May 15 2013, 12:12pm

By Aaron Parecki

Categories

News

Tagged

Here’s why we’re excited about the new Android Location APIs

The ArcGIS Geotrigger Service leverages the latest Android and iPhone technology, when these services improve, our technology improves. Our goal is to make the best cross-platform location services for developers, leveraging the best capabilities of the native location services available for existing consumer devices.

On the iPhone, we’ve leveraged the native geofencing APIs to offer improved battery life compared to using the GPS directly. On Android, there have been minimal location services available from the SDK, essentially limited to turning the raw GPS device on or off.

Three new location APIs were announced today at Google I/O. This is great news for anyone building location-based applications. We’ve been eager for Google to improve the Android location services.

Fused Location Provider

The Fused Location Provider utilizes all of the communication sensors in the phone including wifi, GPS, and cell network, while using only 1% of the battery that previous APIs used.

This is a new service that will greatly improve any application that uses location services. We will improve the ArcGIS Geotrigger SDK for Android significantly by taking advantage of the new Location Provider. Expect to see much better battery life on the Android Geotrigger SDK in the future!

Geofencing

The new Google Geofencing APIs allow apps to respond to the user entering or exiting a configured geofence. The API allows each app to define 100 geofences simultaneously.

This is great news for the ArcGIS Geotrigger SDK, since we will be able to leverage this service to provide better battery life and performance in the SDK. Previously we were limited to turning on and off the GPS device. Now we will be able to use the geofencing API in combination with our optimization algorithms to better provide our Geotrigger service.

Activity Recognition

The new Activity Recognition API uses machine learning classifiers to determine whether the user is walking, cycling or driving. Apps will be able to adjust their behavior depending on the user’s mode of transport. This is done in a very battery efficient way, no GPS is required.

We will leverage this new API to make further improvements to managing the native location services, and it should open up possibilities for some interesting new apps to be built.

The ArcGIS Geotrigger Service

The ArcGIS Geotrigger Service allows developers to easily manage Geotrigger rules with a simple cloud-based API, while also supporting geofences defined as polygons. You can configure an essentially unlimited number of Geotrigger rules in the API, and only the nearby ones will be synced to the phone, making it easy to handle the limitations of the native APIs.

Many of the battery life issues people experience are due to poor implementations of using the Apple and Android location services. It’s easy for a developer to leave the GPS on all the time, but that drains battery quickly. The Geotrigger SDK efficiently manages the native location services and optimizes the server communication required to send location data, saving battery life wherever possible.

The improvements to the Android location APIs are fantastic news and will result in improved Geotrigger services and a better experience for developers!


Aaron Parecki
CTO, Esri R&D Center, Portland

Amber Case
Director, Esri R&D Center, Portland

Posted

Wed May 23 2012, 11:11am

By caseorganic

Categories

Press

Tagged

Geoloqi Named one of Entrepreneur Magazine’s 100 Brilliant Companies

Geoloqi Named one of Entrepreneur Magazine's 100 Brilliant Companies

Geoloqi is honored to have been featured as one of Entrepreneur Magazine’s 100 Brilliant companies! Below is an excerpt of the article, and you can read more here

“During her keynote speech at the 2012 South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, Texas, Geoloqi CEO Amber Case proclaimed that the next generation of location-based apps and analytics would transform the mobile phone into a “remote control for reality,” with people as the metaphorical buttons. The problem with the current state of things, she lamented, is that you “miss a lot of life looking at the screen all the time.” …more

Geoloqi Named one of Entrepreneur Magazine's 100 Brilliant Companies

“With Geoloqi, you can make apps to fix that–apps that work in the background, alerting you only if something needs to be done. The Portland, Ore.-based company provides a turnkey platform that makes it easy to add next-generation geolocation functionality to apps and mobile devices. The company demonstrates its capabilities to potential clients and partners with its own app, which has features like “Don’t Eat There” (it pings you if you’re near a restaurant that has gotten too many bad reviews). Case and co-founder Aaron Parecki programmed a set of location-based features that automatically turn lights on or off when they enter or leave their houses.” …more

“Ambient-location technology, as Case describes geolocation, “has incredible implications for the end-user.” Other developers, she hopes, will take the technology and run with it, since her main focus is on big organizations. Already, Geoloqi has partnerships with app-development platforms like Appcelerator and a project with personnel recovery firm TATE to help track the global staffs of clients such as the Peace Corps, pushing emergency alerts upon entry to dangerous areas.” …more

Geoloqi named Entrepreneur Magazines 100 Brilliant Companies

Thanks again to everyone that’s worked with, worked on and supported Geoloqi as we’ve grown from a small project to an emerging company. Check out the other Entrepreneur Magazine featured companies here.

Geoloqi for Titanium Launches, Covered by VentureBeat, DigitalTrends, TechCrunch, GigaOm and more

Geoloqi Titanium Partnership
Today we launched the Geoloqi module for the Titanium platform, an easy way to add location to Titanium applications. This is a great step forward for location services. For the first time, Appcelerator’s 1.6 million developers have access to advanced geolocation tools and services right from their home base. Below is a sample of the press coverage we received today.

Venturebeat: Better location tools for more apps: Geoloqi is now on Appcelerator Titanium

“The two companies have been cozied up for a few months already. Now, they’re giving devs a two-month trial to test drive Geoloqi on Appcelerator’s Titanium 2.0 platform. In a word, this means better location tools will be available for more kinds of apps, and they’ll be easier to use for a wider range of developers.” – Jolie O’Dell

GigaOM: Geoloqi’s location tracking now available to Appcelerator devs

“The partnership has the potential to kickstart a lot more location-aware apps. Appcelerator has 1.6 million iOS and Android developers, who use Titanium to create apps. Now, they can drop in Appcelerator’s tool kit into their apps to enable geo-triggered events.” – Ryan Kim

ProgrammableWeb: Geoloqi Adds Powerful Location Module to Appcelerator

“Writing a location based mobile application is not easy. Often people think it is about getting a latitude / longitude and providing some context aware data/action based on the retrieved location. One of the frequent complaints from users of location based applications is their high battery consumption and also lack of accurate contextual data. With Geoloqi taking care of this in their module, developers can hope to focus on their application functionality.” – Romin Irani

TechCrunch: Appcelerator Partners With Geoloqi To Bring Location Services To Its 1.6 Million Developers

“Thanks to the new Geoloqi module, developers can now create geo-triggered events in their applications. This, says Appcelerator, will allow its developers to create apps that make use of geofencing and can, for example, send users a push notification when they cross the border into or out of a geofenced zone.” – Frederic Lardinois

DigitalTrends: Geoloqi and Appcelerator join forces for location app development – minus the battery suck

“If you take one look at the state of location apps, you should see that there’s a distinct need for something like this. The last year is littered with the remains of location apps that didn’t work, drained battery, pushed too many notifications, or too few. “While it’s not impossible to get good accuracy and battery life, it’s like doing your taxes – nobody wants to do their taxes,” says Case. Founders and developers (often one in the same) get caught up promoting and designing an app, sometimes failing to do the dirty work — and Geoloqi is more than happy to lay a foundation for them.” – Molly McHugh

SiliconAngle: Geoloqi API and Dev Kit Launching on Titanium

“Geoloqi is an embedded solution that lays down the ground work for just about any location-based service, whether it’s a Foursquare clone or an enterprise app. And today the platform reached a very significant milestone – it’s now an add-on in Titanium 2.0.” – Maria Deutscher

GeoPlace: Geoloqi Now Available on Appcelerator Titanium with a Two-month Free Trial

“”Appcelerator customers have been asking for a true, dependable geolocation solution and location-based analytics platform, and we found one in Geoloqi,” said Jeff Haynie, CEO of Appcelerator. “It’s the first geolocation platform that enables individualized geo-triggered events within an application. This powerful toolkit is an essential addition to our app development marketplace, and we’re excited to offer Geoloqi technology to our customers.” –

Inside Mobile Apps: Advanced location-based services come to Titanium 2.0 with Geoloqi partnership

“Although Appcelerator already offered some basic location-based services like check-ins through the company’s new Appcelerator Cloud Services, developers using Geoloqi’s API can set up pre-determined location zones called geofences and enable location-triggered events in their Titanium-built apps. This enable apps to perform more sophisticated location-based tasks, such as sending a registered customer a push notification with a coupon attached as soon as they enter a store.” – Kathleen De Vere

SiliconFlorist: Make mine Titanium: Geoloqi powers battery efficient geolocation for Appcelerator Titanium

“What’s Appcelerator? Well, it is the “first mobile platform to combine the flexibility of open source development technologies with the power of cloud services.” Pretty cool right? Well, now it’s even cooler. Because it’s been Geoloqized.” – Rick Turoczy

Press Release

PORTLAND, OR – May 22, 2012 – Geoloqi, a powerful platform for next-generation location-based services, today announced the availability of the Geoloqi module for Appcelerator’s Titanium 2.0 platform. Geoloqi’s API and complete toolkit enable persistent location awareness with very minimal impact to battery consumption, so applications can truly behave in a context-aware manner. Its robust geolocation capabilities are now available to Appcelerator’s global network of over 1.6 million Titanium iOS and Android developers.

Additionally, Geoloqi has made customizable geo-triggered events possible for the first time ever, which allow push messages and events to be directed to a single end-user at the moment that they cross into a geofence (a location zone that triggers a push notification or other action), dwell within it or depart the zone for a host of next-generation uses. Geoloqi also enables persistent/ambient background location tracking, and transitions smoothly between location sources such as carrier signals, GPS, Wifi and indoor tracking systems. The platform also provides rich location and dwell-time analytics, giving customers the ability to analyze location data for the first time. Its advanced security settings with easy opt-in and opt-out features ensure safety and privacy practices are automatically updated at any time.
Geoloqi's Visual Trigger Editor

“Appcelerator customers have been asking for a true, dependable geolocation solution and location-based analytics platform, and we found one in Geoloqi,” said Jeff Haynie, CEO of Appcelerator. “It’s the first geolocation platform that enables individualized geo-triggered events within an application. This powerful toolkit is an essential addition to our app development marketplace, and we’re excited to offer Geoloqi technology to our customers.”

“Appcelerator has been a fantastic partner, with a very impressive set of tools. We are thrilled to be enabling their developer base with the power of next-generation location services for their applications and look forward to unleashing the power of the creative commons with powerful, easy-to-use location features,” said Amber Case, Geoloqi CEO and co-founder.

Appcelerator is sponsoring a two-month free trial for all Titanium developers that register and download the Geoloqi Titanium module between now and June 30, 2012. To begin your free trial today, visit http://loqi.me/titanium.

Geoloqi's Visual Trigger Editor

About Geoloqi

Geoloqi is a powerful platform for real-time location based services, and makes 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 2011, Geoloqi is based in Portland, OR and backed by the Portland Seed Fund and TIE. For more information on Geoloqi, please visit http://www.geoloqi.com or follow Geoloqi on Twitter.

About Appcelerator

Appcelerator’s Titanium is the leading mobile platform of choice for thousands of companies seizing the mobile opportunity. With more than 40,000 applications deployed on 50 million devices, Appcelerator’s award-winning Titanium Platform leverages over 5,000 mobile device and operating system APIs to create native iOS, Android, and 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. Open and fully extensible, Titanium 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. Appcelerator’s worldwide ecosystem includes 300,000 mobile developers and hundreds of ISVs and integration partners. To learn more visit www.appcelerator.com.

Geoloqi-Powered Apps Win 1st & 3rd Place at the AT&T Hackathon in Miami!

Over 100 developers participated in the AT&T Mobile App Hackathon in Miami this May. Developers teamed up to produce 11 applications in less than 24 hours. Teams that built apps powered by the Geoloqi platform took home the 1st and 3rd place prizes!

The event was produced by the AT&T Developer Program, Geoloqi, Apigee and others. It was designed for attendees to build apps/mobile apps and compete for prizes across different categories.

Developers with knowledge of many languages competed to finish a working app by the deadline, and Kyle Drake, Geoloqi’s platform engineer, was onsite to help developers with their projects. Everyone had a great time. The AT&T hackathon winners are below!

Geoloqi and AT&T Hackathon Award Winners Miami

First Place Winner

Gorillacab - General Hackathon 1st Place Winner – Gorillacab is a social location-aware application that quickly and affordably gets riders from A to B. Gorillacab used Geoloqi to power the location-based aspects of their application!

Gorilla Cab - 1st Prize Winners at the AT&T Geoloqi Hackathon in Miami

Third Place Winner

Do It 10 Times - General Hackathon 3rd Place Winner - Do It 10 Times is a next generation loyalty card application that helps users get discounts without the effort. Do It 10 Times helps companies get repeat customers without the hassle of advertising campaigns. Visit a location ten times and get coupons in your email, it’s that simple! Do It 10 Times used the Geoloqi platform to detect when visitors entered places of interest and then automatically checked them into those places.

Do t Ten Times - Geoloqi AT&T Hackathon Award Winner Miami

Other apps built on the Geoloqi Platform

Transit Layer - Transit Layer is an app built on the Geoloqi platform that notifies the user when the next bus will be coming. The app uses the user’s location to detect when they have entered a region and sends a callback sent to Geoloqi to lookup when the next bus will be coming, then sends the message to user.

Check check out AT&T’s full recap of the hackathon and the full list of winners!

Thanks to AT&T, Apigee and Kyle Drake for putting together a great hackathon! Thanks to everyone who built their app on the Geoloqi platform as well!

About Geoloqi

Geoloqi is a next generation location platform allowing developers and businesses to easily add advanced location capabilities to their mobile apps. Real-time location, geofencing and location-based push notifications are some of the features that one can add to an existing or new application in a matter of minutes. Geoloqi handles the hard part of geo so you don’t have to. You can sign up as a developer at http://developers.geoloqi.com or use the Geoloqi module for Titanium to easily deploy advanced geolocation apps for both iPhone and Android with ease! You can follow Geoloqi on Twitter here.

About Kyle Drake

Kyle Drake is a many-hats web developer and entrepreneur that speaks multiple languages, and has worked with numerous startups to build their core infrastructure. Kyle Drake is currently Geoloqi’s lead platform engineer. You can follow Kyle Drake on Twitter here.