Don’t call it an LBS service,” Sanjeev Agrawal, CEO of Aloqa, told me when I spoke to him a couple weeks ago. He prefers the term “context-aware.” Aloqa officially launched yesterday on the Android platform and announced $1.5 million in funding. Other smartphone platforms are coming soon. Aloqa currently works in the US and Germany.
Agrawal, preparing for his presentation at yesterday’s Mobile Beat conference, was trying to come up with a quick way to describe Aloqa. The metaphor he often uses is cable TV channels or an “app store within an app store.” I didn’t stay to see his presentation, but it must have been successful because the company won the “people’s choice” award at the show.
Aloqa has a menu of content modules or channels, which can be “owned” or developed third parties. (There will be an SDK soon.) This is almost identical to what MapQuest has done on the PC with its Local site.
The rest of this post is over at LMS.
