Developers: Create a personal channel using Aloqa

Today let’s geek out a bit and combine old-school web history with current mobile tech trends.

Since Tim Berners-Lee’s first stab at mapping out the ’semantic’ web (circa 1998), entrepreneurs and engineers have been trying to harness the power of connecting social networks, disparate info sources, and applications built on a Tower of Babel-esque compendium of programming languages.

Aloqa, one of the startups presenting at Under the Radar next month, is solving this problem two ways.

First, the startup released a nifty, simple mobile ‘context-aware’ app that connects what I want with whom I interact.

Second, Aloqa opened up an API for developers to build in a ‘device agnostic’ fashion on the Aloqa platform that doesn’t require them to learn Objective C, C++, and Java to deploy across multiple handsets. You just create a ‘channel’ and publish it to the Aloqa ‘Channel Store’ (think a personalized developer-driven FourSquare or Hot Potato on uppers).

To test the platform concept, Aloqa’s done what a bunch of other mobile startups are doing – they built their own app as a demo, which launched for the iPhone this week. The Aloqa app grabs my preferences and combines them with my ’social graph’ aka friends, tweets, etc, then it mixes in a little geolocation (my current whereabouts) for good measure.

Let’s jump back out of the shop-talk for a minute and take a 50,000 look at the mobile location-aware market, which is getting crowded.

Aloqa’s got, at minimum, the semantics right…they’re calling their new application ‘context-aware,’ and it’s a good term I think we’ll hear more of in the next year or two.

Mobile startups need to find ways to reflect individual relevance that I can proactively program as a user or go the way of the woolly mammoth. At the most basic level that means ’smart apps’ should capture where I am, who I talk to (online and offline) and what I generally want when I’m in that place at that time.

Also, I think we’ll see ‘task’ or ‘activity’ context awareness being developed for mobile apps – i.e. am I in ’shopping’ mode? On my way to work?
Next generation ‘context-aware’ mobile applications will monitor, measure, and manage data flow by asking questions about my behavioral patterns: Do I buy goods and services differently on a Sunday morning in Blacksburg, VA with @kbluey than I do when I’m walking home from work @dealmakermedia in SoMa?

Unfortunately, Aloqa doesn’t help me answer any of these questions (or use that data to drive recommendations) nor do any of the other location-aware startup apps I use, including FourSquare (although I can leave a status update of sorts in the ‘tips’ section when I check in), and this is a marked weakness.

It’ll also be interesting to see if the early lead Aloqa is taking here in personalizing ‘context programming’ will attract developers who help build on top of the company’s API.

As mentioned on GigaOm, they’ve got significant competition from Layar, Geodelic, the aforementioned FourSquare, BrightKite, and a host of other location-based apps.

Here’s where I think Aloqa may have a niche market on lock IF we see them at every Super Happy Dev House and tech user group over the next quarter…

My engineer friends love to recommend events, geek tee-shirts, and smart friends’ blog posts/code to each other, so being able to build a mobile application that highlights what we like to do and buy may be an attractive hackathon project, but it remains to be seen if the platform code will be attractive enough for indie developers to build anything bigger than personal ‘me-tric’ channels.

Letting me define location relevance by building a personal ‘channel’ on the Aloqa platform may indeed be enough of a carrot, but many of the startup teams I know are having problems with geolocation (lack of GPS specificity in pinpointing where I am at any given moment within ‘arms length’ radius, especially when I’m in motion). It’ll be interesting to hear how Aloqa stacks up here.

Take a peek at the API here: http://dev.aloqa.com.

You can also download the iPhone app free here: http://www.aloqa.com/myAloqa/download.

Check out Aloqa at Under the Radar – see you November 19th!