Seeing Forests

Thought I’d get my Latin on with that title. As usual, Greg is spot-on with his take on all the SXSW Local/Social/Mobile apps. The unending fascination this generation’s entrepreneurs have with finding out where their friends are never ceases to amaze. I could care where my friends are and even less where they eat. (Not really, but, hey). I’d say some of these sentiments are echoed in a R/W Web post as well. Coming up with the idea of having an app that recognizes when someone else using the same app is within 50 feet of you is jaw-dropping - in kind of a contracting tetanus kind of jaw-dropping way. Any of those apps that get closer to showing MY TARGET DEMOGRAPHIC in a completely anonymous and preferably historical manner (people like you go to THIS restaurant and avoid THAT restaurant with all the people running all of these other apps) is going to win in my mind. Of course, that’s not enough for an app but it’s a start.

But Greg goes on to discuss GeoLoqi. It seems to me that most location-based services default to what I’d call “point-based” solutions - what is someone’s specific coordinates on the planet right now. GeoLoqi is providing what I’d call “area-based” solutions - what is someone’s specific coordinates relative to some specific geographic area over a period of time (the geek in my really wants to call these “manifold” solutions - what’s my vector relative to the four-dimensional space-time manifold - but I won’t allow him to clutter-up the conversation). I think the point is that out of everything that I can hear echoing from SXSW (which technically is south-by-southeast to me) GeoLoqi seems to have the most substance.

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