Mobile Portland: Ambient Location Apps and Geoloqi January 24, 2011

Named by JWT Intelligence as one of the 100 things to watch in 2011, Portland's Geoloqi has garnered national attention for being at the forefront of location-based services. Forbes recently asked if Geoloqi was "Foursquare's Biggest Threat?"

Why is there so much buzz for this small project in Portland? Because Geoloqi is on the cutting edge of taking location information and making it truly useful.

As Aaron Parecki, one of the co-founders of Geoloqi, explained to Forbes, "I’d like to share my location with a client if I’m meeting them somewhere, so they can know when I’ll arrive."

We're honored to have Aaron Parecki and Amber Case as our first presenters of 2011. They'll be talking about the next generation of location apps and the importance of ambient location services.

Presentation Description

Wouldn't it be nice if your colleague's phone could SMS its location to you? If you know position and velocity, you know when they'll arrive. The result: the interface disappears. No redundant actions or queries. The same software could turn your lights on as you approach the house. Or automatically "check in" to certain locations for you. Or leave a note for yourself the next time you're at the store.

Augmented reality and location were hot topics last year, but there is often a confusion between aesthetics vs. practicality, and fantasy vs. reality. This presentation will highlight the advantages and disadvantages of visual and non-visual augmented reality.

In the presentation, they will highlight why developers of apps should look at what users want to do now, as well as what users want to do in the future, why social apps should try to mirror real-world relationships, why sharing should be about who you share with as well as how long you’re sharing, and why developers should think about how to make apps "ambient” and require less user interaction.

They will cover the current players in the geolocation market, the location market itself, and why location is such a big deal. They will discuss real-time location sharing, geolocation triggers such as geonotes, proximal notification and automatic checkins, and privacy and security.

What Will Be Covered

* The location market. Where it is now and future projections.
* Why the market is here (timing, hardware, affordability, etc.).
* Some history (PARC research, etc.)
* The current players: What they’re doing and where they fall short
* What we’re passionate about and are trying to solve.
* Philosophy of interface evaporation.
* Other cool things you can do with ambient location and sensors (fun home automation tricks and pranks).

Aaron Parecki

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 2.5 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 with Amber Case in an effort to help people connect in the real world.

Aaron has 11 years experience in web app development, database design, graphic design and printing, and server administration. You can learn more about Aaron at aaronparecki.com, and you can follow him on twitter at @aaronpk.

Amber Case

Amber Case is a cyborg anthropologist and user experience designer from Portland, Oregon. Her main focus is mobile software, augmented reality and data visualization, as these reduce the amount of time and space it takes for people to connect with information. Case founded Geoloqi.com, a private location sharing application, out of a frustration with existing social protocols around text messaging and wayfinding.

Last year, Case was featured in Fast Company as one of their Most Influential Women in Technology and spoke at TED on technology and humans. She worked with Fortune 500 companies at Wieden+Kennedy and now works as a user experience designer at Vertigo Software in Portland, Oregon.

You can learn more about Case at caseorganic.com, cyborganthropology.com and on Twitter at @caseorganic.

Official Website: http://mobileportland.com/events/ambient-location-apps-and-geoloqi