Lost grocery lists. Late to work. Forgotten restaurant names. All things of the past when Geoloqi launches in the first weeks of January. Grocery lists will be texted to your mobile when you enter the Whole Foods. Your boss will be emailed when the clock strikes nine and you’re not in the office—letting him know your exact location and ETA. The name of the French bistro where you met your wife will be sent to you each time you enter the right neighborhood. Anniversary awkwardness cleverly avoided.
Forbes reader @KatelinPow suggested the soon-to-be-released Geoloqi as a Name To Know. “The new Foursquare,” she told us. This post is part of an ongoing effort to crowd-source a repeating feature in Forbes magazine entitled Names You Need to Know. We are looking for the people, places, products and ideas that will have significant impact in the near future. Join the ongoing conversation here.
And so, harboring a secret disdain for foursquare, I was intrigued.
Geoloqi is a fully customizable GPS-based application that lets you set your own reminders, rules and notes based on your geographic location. Think FourSquare without the exhibitionism. Geoloqi, the brainchild of cyborg anthropologist Amber Case and her partner Aaron Parecki, will use GPS technology to map users, but not broadcast their locations to the world—only those they choose to share it with and when.
“I’d like to share my location with a client if I’m meeting them somewhere, so they
can know when I’ll arrive,” writes co-founder Parecki in a web presentation on the faults of other location-mapping products including Foursquare, Dopplr and Gowalla. “But after our meeting, I absolutely don’t want them to access my location. This is often true even with friends. Friends’ location is not always relevant to me. Current location-sharing systems are currently all or nothing.”
The secret of Geoloqi is that it’s a completely customizable experience. Once the app is downloaded, a user can set geonotes (SMS notes that are received when you enter a specific location), create layers (be notified anytime an apartment listing meeting your criteria is nearby), subscribe to existing layers created by other users (“For example,” Parecki says, “I’m currently subscribed to the "USGS Earthquakes" layer which means I get a text any time an earthquake happens within 200km of my current location, wherever I go.”) and, most importantly, share locations and notes at the user’s discretion—for a specific period of time.
That information can be shared with other Geoloqi users, or a link emailed or posted to Twitter or Facebook, and anyone who has the link can see your location for a limited amount of time.
“This is a very different approach to sharing than most social networks take,” Parecki points out, “Since we don't limit to sharing with other Geoloqi users.”
The Portland-based pair of Parecki and Case has so far received no major financial backing, and Parecki says all design and development has been done by volunteers who are helping out because they are “very interested in project.” Pricing for the application, which will be released as a public beta in January and will be available at the app store has not been finalized.
With no millions of VC money to prop them up, I wondered to Parecki how Geoloqi hopes to be self-sustaining in the year to come, and his response was far from the advertising-based answer I expected. "We plan on licensing the iPhone software development kit to developers who want to integrate location into their own apps," he told me. "Also we will likely charge developers for heavy application programming interface access if they go over a certain threshold.”
What do you think, readers? Has Foursquare overshared its welcome? Is its new, and much more grown-up cousin Geoloqi the real Name To Know? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
