Geoloqi Targets 'Missing Piece' in Geo-Location

Amber Case is obsessed with location. She co-founded Geoloqi last year because she saw a "missing piece" in the geo-location space: a simple method to have apps send messages or trigger events based on location. It sounds simple enough, but it speaks to a years-long (and largely failed, thus far) quest for what many consider the Holy Grail of mobile marketing: consumer walks by a Starbucks and instantly gets a digital coupon or special offer pushed to their mobile device. 

Virtually everyone who follows the mobile industry has heard this "use case example" more times than they can count. Case included. The CEO of Geoloqi explains it to Mobile Marketing Magazine in no uncertain terms: she wants to finally crack open these functions that people have been talking about for decades.

To make that dream a reality, Case spent the last few years testing the Geoloqi platform on bicycle and car in Portland, Ore. She triggered geo-fences, measured battery life and learned that a lot of developers have geo-location on their roadmap, but most either don't know how to do it or don't want to setup the required infrastructure. The company is trying to bridge those gaps through developer partnerships and wider availability of of the Geoloqi platform. One such recent deal put Geoloqi on Appcelerator's Titatium 2.0 platform. Appcelerator's 1.6m iOS and Android developers can now try out Geoloqi for a two-month free trial.

There are some key attributes of geo-location that are particularly pertinent to mobile marketers, Case tells Mobile Marketing Magazine. 

Take "the invisible interface," for example: the ability to receive contextual notifications without thinking about the app or remembering to query for that data. "I think that's a good filter as we look toward mobile marketing apps. Location becomes a really important contextual trigger that makes things more relevant," Case says.

"Marketers and brands need to be open to experimentation," she continues. "There needs to be a lot of mistakes. In industries when people make lots of mistakes, it means the industry is moving forward."