Our Beliefs

Mobile location services can make your mobile phone far more useful than it is today. We believe that your phone should notify you of important events as and when they occur around you privately, securely, and in real time. For example, you should get be able to get a simple notification if a friend or potential date is close by. When you drive into a new town, your phone should just tell you if there is a Starbucks or Peets (or whichever coffee shop you prefer) at hand. Services promising you bargains and coupons should be able to tell you when you are close to a good deal. And all this should happen in real time, and not after the fact, or when you happen to think about it and bring up the service yourself.

It is not as if there aren't promising mobile location apps around. There are plenty of mobile couponing apps, buddy finders, friend and kid trackers, and mobile dating / social networks. Unfortunately these apps don’t work very well. For these apps to be useful, they need to be able to identify, track and report the position of multiple moving bodies, static points of interest, and location based services. Simultaneously they need to figure out the relative inter-relationships between them all in real time. Then, they need to be able to take some action based on these relationships e.g. notify me that my friend, or a bargain, or a date or a particular coffee shop is close to me. From a user perspective, knowing these events happened 20 minutes after the fact isn't very useful.

Unfortunately for most mobile location services today, location determination as has been traditionally deployed is expensive, not scalable in real time, and doesn't lead to useful proactive notifications of interesting events. There are three underlying reasons for this:

1. Traditional methods using GPS or other positioning technologies have an inherent conflict: if position updates are performed at the periodicity that makes them truly effective, they consume too much power and bandwidth, causing significant battery degradation and high cost for users and network operators. Additionally users perceive the device as being of low quality. If updates aren't performed often enough, the results aren't so meaningful, effectively neutering the application. The larger the number of users gets, the worse the problem – in effect traditional positioning methods suffer from diseconomies of scale.
    
2. User privacy hurdles have to be overcome not just from a social / marketing perspective but a technical one: Most location based solutions track, store and share user information across relevant services. For many users, the idea that a server always knows my location is scary. And we believe that such tracking isn't necessary. For instance, a dating application only needs to know a user’s precise location when a prospective date is nearby and the user has opted to be notified. Or if I am traveling in Europe, my favorite SF restaurants app has no need to be informed of my location until I return. We believe that for the most part, coarse grained accuracy is good enough and tracking of historical user location is unnecessary.
    
3. To be really useful, location based applications need to tell users when to use them. The phone is an interrupt driven device and most useful when the user knows they should use it e.g. when a call or an SMS alert comes in. In the case of email what made the Blackberry useful, (even addictive) was the fact that it scalably and cost effectively "pushed" email notifications to users. Mobile location applications today are passive – they don’t tell you when you are crossing a zone where you should launch them e.g. when a friend is close by or when a bargain is available. What will make such services relevant and useful is when they also "proactively notify" users either intrusively (such as through an SMS) or non-intrusively like a Blackberry email inbox that shows the number of unread emails.
    

Aloqa’s platform solves all three of these problems. We are determined to enrich people’s everyday lives by making mobile location based services private, real time, low cost, relevant, and useful