Xoogler Spotlight: Alohar Mobile, Putting A Bigger Spin On Siri

In a Keynote at the 2011 Google’s then CEO, Eric Schmidt described an experience where integrated mobile technology into commerce would mean you could walk down the street, close to your favorite clothing store and have a new pair of pants pulled off the shelves, bagged for you and waiting when you got to the store. This kind of technology is what ex-Googler Sam Liang is working on with his new start up Alohar Mobile.

Liang described the technology he and his co-founders are working on as “Siri after Siri” in a recent interview with Forbes’ magazines resident start up and entrepreneur guru Ryan Mac in an interview.

Liang has described scenarios like this one, you wake up one morning with a head cold, you miss your usual drive time and you haven’t found your way to the office. After confirming with your calendar that you didn’t have any other appointment in the place of work, your phone automatically makes an appointment at the doctor for you. This is the kind of smart computing that  phones will be able to do with a technology Liang dubs as “persistent sensing”.

More after the break


Persistent Sensing utilizes all of your phones sensory data from motion detection, wi-fi, temperature and more to gather information about the phones owner.

“My ultimate dream for Alohar is to build a really smart personal assistant,” says Liang told Mac.  He continued “It understands you so well, that it can make really good suggestions to make your life much better.”

Alohar created an Android showecase app called Place Me which can remember all the places that a user has been without the need for checking in. As technology progresses and NFC becomes a part of a person’s everyday phone life, Alohar’s software will be able to know the places you go to and what you spend there which is information that could be used by the phones owner for many purposes.  Imagine the app knows where the dry cleaner is and after learning your routine, realizes that when you spent $5.00 at the drycleaner in two days you need to pick up your drycleaning.

Or, Alohar’s technology would take note of your trips to your favorite Starbucks. It would know that when you get to the Starbucks your next action is using your Starbucks app to pay for a fresh mocha latte. Well if you forgot to reload your Starbucks prepaid app it could either remind you to do it or do it while you’re waiting in line.  Pretty nifty huh?

Liang was very careful not to use the word “tracking” when Mac was interviewing him for this article.  Liang and the Alohar team are trying to iron out the kinks in the privacy realm with their unchartered territory.  While Alohar has already started raising funds, the privacy issues have made some investors nervous. DFJ’s Dragon Fund managing director Bobby Chao and Tim Draper managing director of parent company Draper Fisher Jurvetson both invested $200,000 of their own personal money in Alohar.  Both Chao and Draper used their personal funds rather than the fund itself because the technology is still “controversial” when it comes to privacy.

While at Google Liang was instrumental in the blue dot location finder for early versions of Google Maps for iPhone.

source: Forbes

 

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