Imagine you’re standing in a historic town square—it has brick buildings and cobblestone streets, plus a rich sense of significance. But what actually happened here? There may be a plaque or two on the edges to give you a sense of the square’s past, but if you’re looking for more information, you’ll be hard pressed to find it without a backpack full of pamphlets and guide books.
Unless, that is, you have HP Gloe, a geo-tagging experimental app that attaches web content to specific geographic locations. With HP Gloe, you can stand in the town square, pull out your phone, let it track your location and then be shown the online content that’s been deemed most relevant for your particular spot by users just like you. You might click on a historic essay, a Wikipedia entry or a list of public records about the square. Vote up your favorite bit of information or add new pages to your location for others to discover in the future.
Because of the plethora of GPS sensors in phones, slates and laptops today, users are seeking hyper-local, map-based information from their technological devices more and more. And with Gloe’s recommendation model, users know that they’re getting the data that’s most trusted by their peers—not ads or unreliable info.
Mobile web users can have Gloe find pages that are relevant to their location; filter pages by friends’ recommendations, popularity, distance, category (music, sports, tourist attractions, etc); automate searches by subscribing to feeds which serendipitously find new information; add new web pages relevant to a specific location; recommend pages that others have added to Gloe; create or vote in polls tagged to particular locations; and create new web pages tagged to specific locations (a “virtual post-it note” for other users). As a software engine, HP Gloe adds a critical layer of information—geographic relevance—to billions of web pages worldwide.
Each link that a user recommends is recorded as the URL, title, latitude-longitude coordinate and set of metatags submitted by the user. Gloe is designed to deliver results on the basis of physical proximity—so you’ll get the page attachments that are closest to you first, putting local search ahead of global search and getting relevant information to you that much faster.
To ensure high-quality, useful contributions, all users in the system are granted a recommendation budget that is finite. When the full budget has been expended, Gloe must refresh the users budget before another recommendation can be made.
This is a concept that depends on people populating it with information and relevant pages. The way that local content is growing, Gloe has a great shot at becoming a must-have App for anyone with an interest in his or her surroundings. Imagine being able to pin a web page to any location in the world for quick viewing by anyone who happens across that location.
Gloe is available on Android 1.5+ phones and the Blackberry Storm. There are also experimental clients for the i-phone and WebOs phones as well. It also supports all modern javascript-enabled web.
