Geoloqi

» see geoloqi.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Around 2012 geofencing was a word that had started turning up in mobile SDK changelogs, and the honest answer to what it meant at the time was: your app polls GPS until the battery dies. i was writing software in Ankara in those years and never touched Geoloqi's API. This is a grave for a developer tool, which is a category that dies quietly because nobody outside the docs ever knew the name.

Geoloqi was founded in Portland in 2010 by Aaron Parecki and Amber Case, who is the person who made the phrase cyborg anthropologist stick. the Portland Seed Fund put money in. The product was a hosted platform for location-aware apps: you drew a shape on a map and registered it, and the platform called your server back when a device crossed it.

The clever part was the battery. the platform shipped what it called battery-safe trigger zones, which told the SDK to back off GPS polling when the device was nowhere near a fence and to sharpen up when it got close. In 2012 that was the difference between a feature and a phone that died at three in the afternoon. really though, the operating systems did not do this properly yet, and the whole business was standing in that gap.

~ the dossier ~

~ the inheritance ~

Esri, which is the company behind ArcGIS and has been the default in professional mapping for decades, acquired Geoloqi in october 2012. back then, the Portland office became an Esri R&D center with Case running it. That is the good version of an acquisition, the one where the team stays put and the work continues under a bigger roof.

The work did continue. in fairness, it continued as a different product. In march 2014 Esri launched the Geotrigger Service, and on the 3rd of that month a post went up on the Geoloqi blog explaining what current customers should know. It says the original Geoloqi service will be retired on August 19, 2015, and then puts the arithmetic in brackets: eighteen months from the time the Esri Geotrigger Service launched. Migration tools were promised for anyone still there at the end of 2014.

~ the funny part ~

geoloqi.com answers today. close enough. it is not a parking page and it is not a squatter. It is the actual 2014 marketing site, unchanged, with a banner across the top reading Esri's Geotrigger Service is replacing Geoloqi and a link inviting you to learn more. Underneath that there is still a Get A Demo Account button and a pricing page.

The link goes to Esri's developer documentation. what the documentation says now, under a heading titled Important Information for Geotrigger Service Users, is that Esri has officially ceased development and technical support for the Geotrigger Service to both trial and production users.

so the sign is still up, pointing carefully at a door that was also removed. Eleven years of a website patiently redirecting people toward something that is not there. Nobody switched off the host because nobody was paying enough attention to the host to remember it existed, which is how most of these things actually end.

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