Locomatix helps a user out of a jam

We got this message from a very satisfied user, and she has given us permission to share it with you!

Here's my reason for being an ardent fan of Locomatix. Have you ever been in a situation when you are driving through wilderness at 7:30 in the evening and you are not sure of how to get home? Well, I happened to be in such a predicament this past spring in Cornelius Pass (Portland, Oregon). Mind you, I am from the Bay Area.

So here I am cruising along the Pass after a fun filled afternoon with my friend and then, I take one wrong turn. Very cautiously I was following the car GPS when I suddenly realized that I was on my way to an un-trodden territory. I knew I wasn’t lost yet but I surely did know that this wasn’t where I was supposed to be. I wasn’t ready to take any chances alone. Nervous but unwilling to giving in to panic and frustration, I told myself that I needed to stop. With fragile cell phone signal and given my challenged navigational skills during this trying time, my only option was to retrace my steps. I knew I had already come too far ahead that it would take at least a half hour to get back from where I started, provided I didn’t miss any turn. To top it all off, it was getting dark and solitary and the trees making the whole experience only more frightening.

Instinctively, I called my husband and let him know that I was disoriented and my cellphone signal was week. I got a quick reply: “Send out your location on Locomatix." I did that, and kept waiting impatiently to hear back from him and praying to get out before it was dark. Every minute seemed like a lifetime. The phone battery draining faster than I would have wanted it to, I finally got a call from my husband. Once I had sent out my location he knew where exactly I was stranded. I kept the application running so he could constantly track me on the GPS and could alert me if I strayed away from the radar. Finally Locomatix got me to the closest intersection to get to safer territory. In fifteen minutes the ordeal was over and I was out of the woods. Never before I had been so happy to be driving on I-405 as I was on that day.

Locomatix talk at University of Michigan, Friday Nov. 20

Locomatix has been invited to give a talk to the CSEG group at the University of Michigan, on Friday Nov. 20! We are very excited since many of us are UM grads. More information about the talk is at: http://www.locomatix.com/talk

Here is the basic information:

Mobility and Location Awareness

When: Friday Nov. 20th, 4:00-6:00pm

Where: Room 1690 CSE (Computer Science and Engineering building, on north campus)

Food: Free pizza will be provided!

Web Site: www.locomatix.com

Mobile Download: m.locomatix.com

Description:

Location-aware mobile devices are everywhere. Cellphones have GPS built in, laptops find their location from nearby wireless access points, buses publish their location, and tracking devices are cheaply available for just about everything. How can we manage this information efficiently and securely on a large scale, provide useful services and notifications, and still protect privacy? s what Locomatix was founded to explore.

Locomatix was founded in Ann Arbor in 2007 by Jignesh Patel and Karthik Ramasamy, and is staffed by a number of UM graduates. We work on server software to manage location information on a large scale, and on mobile clients to send this information and receive alerts and other services.

We will talk about the challenges of developing a large-scale location management infrastructure and mobile clients for a variety of architectures, including iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Android, and a Web browser. We will talk about our solutions for privacy management, and our vision for the future of mobile location awareness. We will demonstrate our system with an iPhone client, and take questions.

Presenter Information

	Aaron Elkiss develops the Locomatix iPhone client. He is a graduate of the University of Maryland and the University of Michigan.
	Scott Gifford Scott Gifford develops the Locomatix server. He is a University of Michigan graduate, and worked at the University running the Whereabouts location awareness project.

Locomatix for Blackberry is released!

We have put the finishing touches on our Blackberry client and are delighted to have it available for download now, on the Locomatix download page! From your mobile browser, you can visit m.locomatix.com.

Locomatix is a platform that lets you do lots of cool stuff with your location, and our Blackberry app opens it up to your mobile phone. The previous release was named My Aura, and since then we have incorporated feedback from our earliest users to streamline registration, move all functionality to the handset, and addmore bus systems.

On Blackberry, Locomatix can be run automatically in the background. It will keep your location up-to-date and share it according to your privacy rules. It will also instantly notify you of nearby information you are interested in, such as friends, Geo-messages, and buses, depending on your preferences.

We also have an iPhone version available, see our earlier post Locomatix for iPhone is released for details. For the convenience of our Blackberry users, we are posting the same feature list here with Blackberry screenshots.

Registration is now really fast and easy. You can register immediately in the app using your Facebook or supported Webmail account, or you can use any email address and click a link to confirm it.

When you have registered, you can search for friends who are already using Locomatix and add them as friends or family to share your location with them. If you have a friend who hasn't signed up for Locomatix yet, you can send them an invitation to join. Once your friends have signed up for Locomatix and chosen to share their location with you, you can check out where your crew is at, and even get alerts when friends are nearby.

You can also leave Geo-Messages for yourself and your friends. These are a unique feature of Locomatix that you can use to share favorite places with friends, leave reminders for yourself and others at particular locations, or just for fun. We have found tons of cool uses for geo-messages, and we'll go into more detail in another post.

We've also expanded our bus system support to Madison and Chicago, and made a lot of improvements to our Ann Arbor bus finder. You can get alerts when buses are nearby, check out the location of buses on a map, and remember your favorite routes. This is a fantastic tool for anybody who rides the bus, and we think it's cool enough to get more people riding buses! We'll go into more detail in another post.

If you haven't already, check out our Blackberry or iPhone app, give it a try, and let us know what you think! The app has a feedback feature, or leave your feedback here as comments. And please don't hesitate to tell your friends!

Locomatix for iPhone is released!

We are excited and proud to release our second version of Locomatix for iPhone! It is available from the iTunes store and the Locomatix download page.

Locomatix is a platform that lets you do lots of cool stuff with your location, and our iPhone app opens it up to your mobile phone. The previous release was named My Aura, and since then we have incorporated feedback from our earliest users to streamline registration, move all functionality to the handset, and add integration with Facebook.

Registration is now really fast and easy. You can register immediately in the app using your Facebook or supported Webmail account, or you can use any email address and click a link to confirm it.

When you have registered, you can search for friends who are already using Locomatix and add them as friends or family to share your location with them. If you have a friend who hasn't signed up for Locomatix yet, you can send them an invitation to join. Once your friends have signed up for Locomatix and chosen to share their location with you, you can check out where your crew is at, and even get alerts when friends are nearby.

You can also leave Geo-Messages for yourself and your friends. These are a unique feature of Locomatix that you can use to share favorite places with friends, leave reminders for yourself and others at particular locations, or just for fun. We have found tons of cool uses for geo-messages, and we'll go into more detail in another post.

We've also expanded our bus system support to Madison and Chicago, and made a lot of improvements to our Ann Arbor bus finder. You can get alerts when buses are nearby, check out the location of buses on a map, and remember your favorite routes. This is a fantastic tool for anybody who rides the bus, and we think it's cool enough to get more people riding buses! We'll go into more detail in another post.

If you haven't already, check out our iPhone app, give it a try, and let us know what you think! The app has a feedback feature, or leave your feedback here as comments. And please don't hesitate to give us a great rating in the App Store! :-)