Ambient Companion: Mobile App Combines Discovery with Location-Sharing
By David Goldhagen
August 14, 2012
August 14, 2012
- Seattle start-up A.R.O. has developed a new mobile companion that tracks your location 24/7 and reveals places you might like. The app focuses on three components: location-tracking, recommendations and gamification.
- “You can think of Saga as Siri’s little sister, perhaps. Instead of asking it questions or giving the app simple tasks (what’s the weather, add meeting calendar, e.g.), Saga is there, quietly tracking your behavior, your location and learning about your preferences, in order to make smarter recommendations about what you should do next,” explains TechCrunch.
- The post describes Saga as a combination of ambient location-sharing (similar to Highlight, Sonar, Banjo, INTRO) and local discovery and recommendation app Foursquare.
- “However, unlike Foursquare, which still relies on the manual check-in to record your location, Saga will automatically locate you — and you don’t have to open the app for this to happen,” notes the post. “But if you do open the app while at a venue, Saga will tell you things like how long you’ve been there, how many times you’ve visited and it will even guess at what you’re doing, which you can correct when wrong.”
- Saga can also provide users with a history of activity over time (day, week, month) including locations, distances traveled, most commonly visited places and more.
- Recommendations go beyond Foursqaure’s offerings, explains TechCrunch: “For example, Saga could learn your commute and warn you about traffic. It could remind you that it’s been three weeks since you took your dog to the dog park. It could recommend a whole day’s activity based on a theme.”
Is this too much information being collected?