Today’s a big day for Aloqa, a fledgling mobile search and information services company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. The startup will be announcing at Venturebeat’s MobileBeat 2009 conference that they have just raised $1.5 million in Series A funding from multiple angel investors and VC firm Wellington Partners.
Aloqa will seize the opportunity to present its context-aware mobile application for Android – currently in beta and available on Android Market for a limited time – on stage and boast about its newly appointed CEO: Sanjeev Agrawal, former Global Head of Google Product Marketing and subsequently VP Products at TellMe Networks (acquired by Microsoft) will take the helm.
Aloqa is one of many startups betting big on location-aware search and information provision services for mobile phones. The app proactively notifies users about interesting places, services, events, and (Facebook) friends in their immediate neighborhood. All users need to do is look at their phone and the service will display live information about interesting things in their vicinity. Aloqa refreshes itself automatically when users change locations, which comes in handy when you’re mobile.
Aloqa also provides an API for easy development of location-based services, especially for proactive and community oriented applications. Examples: detecting the proximity of two mobile targets (such as Facebook friends) automatically, sorting a buddy list by current distance and automatically updating the list as well as clique observation (”show me when 3 out of 5 of my myspace girlfriends are nearby”).
According to Aloqa, the application will be made fully available on “most major mobile platforms” through the fall of 2009, and will work on both GPS- and non-GPS enabled handsets and on any carrier network.
Looks like a great platform, but they’re entering a very crowded space.
You can see a demo video from the startup’s homepage.
Wherever these ex-Googlers go, they give a royal treatment to the company!
Anyways, Congrats ALOQA!
Sounds like the LB search space is getting very crowded indeed. Although not many great services are on offer, I think we will see a lot of improvements.
Advantage Aloga! Google has created a great opportunity for managers to become even more successful after they leave. The group will be even bigger than the x Microsoft alumni that have run or started businesses.
Wondering how easy it will be for these apps to compete with Google … with them running similar services at the browser prevent additional softwares (paid/free) to be installed.
you raise a good question. it will be interesting to see how this pans out. It should not be to difficult though since most SEs are geared towards desktop browser support so Aloqa should find it a little easier to compete in the mobile realm.
Nice timing! Ex-googlers are doing pretty well, for sure!
Nice and clean.. looks like this is going to be interesting.
Another ex-googler to try his luck
I talked to aloqa co-Founder Johannes Martens one year ago, while I was searchung for LB services to interact with a mobile browser. They showed up with a pretty neat idea and perhaps its nice to know that the German background is a spinoff from LM University in Munich.
If things go like they are planning especially in collaboration with telco providers they’ll soon have a big lead in Germanys LBS market, I think.
These type of apps that use GPS offer excellent services. I am thinking of developing an app that uses GPS.
There are no shortage of apps that use GPS nowadays, I upload many GPS type apps on a daily basis to my site http://www.appgiveaway.com
I also like the idea that Aloqa app refreshes itself as you move about. I can see myself making good use of this app.
Like it too much…Bank ATM’s, restaurants, movie theaters, all pushed to and based upon my present mobile location.
A great opportunity to replace existing automated telephone/speech applications…
just one further thought…offer it in both subscription and ad funded models. I think this would be classified under content quite a few would be willing to pay for…
Congratulations, guys, from your friends at EyeView.
We had a great time making the video for your homepage and we think it looks great.
We look forward to only good news from you in the future.
Cheers.
Nice and use full app.
Just about every ex-googler you hear that leaves the company starts their own company
I really like this app. It makes finding things easier, plus I don’t need to type to find what I am looking for. Great job Sanjeev!
For me the registration popup has been hung at “registering…” for 15 mins now. Hopefully the app won’t be this way!
might i add, that this is about the worst named startup i’ve seen in years. makes me throw up every time i say it. looks like these guys chose option number 3 in onthebutton’s “10 ways to name a company.” haha (here’s the link: http://onthebut...ompany-product/)
I used to work for Sanjeev and I have no doubt that he will be great for Aloqa. Congrats on the funding!
“Looks like a great platform, but they’re entering a very crowded space.”
Exactly.
Looks like Loopt might be in trouble if Aloqa picks up!
Not sure how good or bad this app is, but they can always leverage the “Ex Googleer” tag
I actually tried the app – its quite good
Also heard they won the MobileBeat 2009 award – cant happen just because of a tag. http://ventureb...t-tesla-awards/
I’m tired of these location review apps that just steal review content from other sites. We don’t need another middle man making it more cumbersome for people to supply good reviews. The app that does this right will CONTRIBUTE and organize the best reviews. Ideally, like Citysearch, they would even have staff organizing and supplying content.
It still annoys me that Google is not prioritizing this need. They seem to understand the importance of mobile reviews and location pics but have yet to put together a cohesive application. I think it is ridiculous that their Places Directory application for Android was one of their 20% free time side projects. It works ok but has no way to contribute back to the reviews or supply location pictures. Yahoo at some point seemed to understand the importance of local. Why doesn’t Google?
Hopefully someone will partner with Citysearch or Yelp so we can get a GPS smart, review and picture contribution friendly, mobile application.
Actually, if Facebook were smart it could completely dominate this arena by making it easy to search and separate public reviews and friend’s reviews. This would be a great way to commercialize Facebook content. People are for the most part happy to make their consumer reviews and product discussions public. Maybe then FB would stop trying to mine everyone’s personal conversations and photos. Facebook Local – I’d use it.
If the solution is out there already then color me uninformed.
This app is very strange. Local search is a channel that goes to a google web page. Why would a local search app use a web page version of google local for local search? That’s not much value add. Most channels don’t launch for me.