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AUSTIN, Texas -- Your smartphone sucks. It's not the shoddy apps or your awful carrier. It's the most annoying, persistent problem plaguing the modern mobile device -- battery life, or lack thereof.
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Cellular phones have matured from a means of making calls to self-contained mobile computers, yet battery technology has remained relatively stagnant, and we're still limited by the effects of power-hungry features on our lithium-ion cells.
The most noteworthy offender? Apps, software and services that take advantage of location-based features -- the Foursquares, the Paths, the Google Maps of the world. Anything and everything that depends on tracking you continuously means sucking down a hell of a lot of power.
"It's a simple story to tell," says Amber Case, CEO and co-founder of Geoloqi, a location-based services startup based in Portland, Oregon. "When you walk by a Starbucks, you get a text message. The problem is, it's hard to pull off." For this to work for an app, it must enable a background location function, which passively pings cellular towers to continuously update your location. "And unless you architect an efficient backend, that background location function sucks your battery dry."
That efficient backend? That's where Geoloqi plans to come in and save the day -- or at least, save your battery to last a full day despite all those location-hungry apps.
Take, for example, applications like Kismet, LoKast or Highlight, this year's breakaway hit at South by Southwest. Highlight keeps track of your location continuously, as well as the locations of other Highlight users around you. When two Highlighters cross paths in the real world, the app notifies them that the other user is nearby. It's a play on the notion of serendipity; two people who by all means should meet, based on common interests or friends, actually get the opportunity to do so when Highlight notifies them.
Battery drain is one of the big issues holding Highlight, and services like it, from ubiquitous, mainstream use. If an app sucks down too much battery life, users are inclined to disable certain functions like GPS, or sometimes delete the app entirely.
There are software-side solutions. "Our app looks at population density in specific areas, how many devices are using GPS, and adjusts accordingly," Highlight CEO Paul Davison told Wired. "And when battery life is low, users can pause GPS from within the Highlight interface."
Still, disabling crucial functions in Highlight or apps like it seems to defeat the purpose of having the app in the first place. Enter Geoloqi, as Case and her team aim to fix the battery problem for the industry from the back end. The service uses contextual cues to enable persistent background location awareness, intelligently managing your battery usage by switching between different forms of location-tracking sources, including Wi-Fi, GPS and carrier signals.
"If you're doing an app like Foursquare, you need a development team that understands trial-and-error intricacies of location."It isn't a novel technique in and of itself. Google's Android and Apple's iOS both have software-side solutions that perform functions similarly. But Geoloqi's intelligent algorithms are the moneymaker, determining which type of source is best in each situation, thereby minimizing the power drain by switching to the most power-efficient solutions.
Then there's the problem of geo-fences. Essentially an invisible perimeter surrounding a real-world place, a geo-fence can be used for any number of purposes, especially by brands and retailers. When your phone crosses Starbucks' geo-fence, for example, you might be served up a coupon for a Frappuccino freebie. According to Case, geo-fence triggering is wildly inaccurate, sometimes triggering fences up to a mile and a half away from a user's actual location.
With Geoloqi co-founder and CTO Aaron Parecki's extensive background in location-tracking analysis -- Parecki tracked his every movement in data point intervals of every five seconds for a period of five years -- Case says Geoloqi has a much better handle on accuracy. That means fewer erroneous geo-fence triggers, and reduced battery drain.
Take the company's preliminary benchmark test, for example. Geoloqi reduced battery drain caused by Apple's Notes app -- a notoriously inefficient program that uses geo-fence triggers to push pop-up reminders to your phone -- by a whopping 29 percent, all through more precise geo-fence trigger recognition. If the efficiency is consistent across other developers' apps, it's a potential battery-saving boon to consumers.
Battery-saving implications aside, Geoloqi's real value-add for third-party developers is its simplicity.
"It's notoriously annoying to handle all of this as a developer," independent mobile security researcher Ashkan Soltani told Wired. "Geoloqi wraps everything together for third-party developers in a streamlined package, while also adding analytics services to sweeten the deal." In effect, it's a customizable version available for any developer to institute in their apps easily.
For small developer outfits in varying degrees of infancy, there's some financial and logistical incentive in working with Geoloqi. The company sells its intelligent toolkit so companies can integrate the services into the products themselves, saving valuable developer time, resources and money by outsourcing that particular area of the business. "If you're doing an all-location app, you have to have a development team that understands location, and the trial-and-error intricacies of it," Case says.
There remains, however, a giant elephant in the middle of the location-based services room: privacy. Apple got crucified last summer when two security researchers discovered that iOS was storing users' location data on iPhones. Social networking application Path suffered a similar fate in February, after it came out that address book data taken from users' phones was being uploaded to Path's servers without users' knowledge.
As the very nature of Geoloqi's service involves tracking your every move, the company toes the line between offering users everything they've always wanted from a location-based service, and far more than they bargained for in terms of sharing their personal data.
Geoloqi's privacy policy, for example, says the company may share users' data with the government "if required to do so by law," or in the good-faith agreement of complying with state and federal laws. And what's more, Geoloqi can sell its collected aggregate data to third parties -- from marketers to governments -- who can use that information in any number of ways. Just last year, satellite-based car navigation systems company TomTom landed in a heap of trouble for selling its aggregate traffic data to police in the Netherlands, who then used that data to set up speed traps in areas where drivers tended to exceed the speed limit. It did not go over well with the public.
"Anyone who collects data like this is playing a difficult balancing act," Soltani says. "On the one hand, you're providing a useful service to your users. But on the other hand, you're collecting monetizable data for secondary use, and you can sell that to anyone willing to pay."
Still, Case and her team members say they aren't worried. "Any time new technology enters, there's a new set of fears that people have -- until they realize it's useful," CTO Parecki says. Then it's about the value exchange. "As long as it provides enough value, users are OK with sharing more," he says.
The team is sensitive to privacy issues on the whole. Shared data is anonymized and provided in aggregate with partner companies, and is protected via SSL encryption. "We're about being transparent to users in what we're doing," says VP of sales Bernie Albers. "And it's about the value exchange. If I'm a consumer and I'm not getting the value I want, I turn it off."
Which, for annoyed, low-battery-toting smartphone owners, seems to be an easy value proposition to figure out. In a poll conducted by SwiftKey of more than 30,000 consumer respondents, battery life was found to be the third most important aspect for prospective smartphone owners.
When can we expect to see our battery life improve? Right now, Geoloqi is still a scrappy, 10-person startup, backed by a few hundred thousand in seed investments. The company plans to raise more money in an investment round to come, and announced partnerships with three major companies Sunday at SXSW, including Appcelerator, which gives more than a million app developers instant, turnkey access to Geoloqi's services.
So hang onto your Mophies; the days of endless power aren't here just yet. But if Case and her team have their way, you could see a boost in your juice sooner than you think.
