WASHINGTON — In real estate, the key to success is location, location, location -in mobile application development, Washington-based startup SocialRadar claims it’s in the right place to improve upon iOS and Android’s built-in location services.
SocialRadar says it can help mobile app developers provide a more personalized user experience.
“You have always been able to replace built-in apps such as the calendar app or contacts app with 3rd party mobile apps,” says Michael Chasen, CEO and founder of SocialRadar. “We have developed the very first replacement for the Apple iOS and Google core location services.”
Chasen says “developers can use our toolset instead of the built-in location manager service to access an array of enhanced location features and reporting for their mobile applications.”
The beta version of LocationKit was launched Tuesday at the Apps World developer conference in San Francisco.
Chasen says LocationKit offers higher accuracy than typical devices, which often place users between 10 and 100 meters from an actual location. Using a proprietary algorithm, he says the SocialRadar technology can be accurate up to 2 meters.
Typically, location managers are taxing on a mobile device’s battery.
Currently developers can choose between using always-on GPS, which drains a device’s battery, or the less-accurate significant distance method which only updates a location when a user changes cellphone towers.
“If you leave ‘Location’ on, all the time on the Apple iPhone, you can have battery drain as much as 6 to 14-percent per hour,” says Chasen. “We’ve reduced that to right around 1-percent per hour.”
The technology includes automatic venue recognition, combining a places database with leading event databases, containing over 130 million addresses, according to SocialRadar.
And, for the first time, using reporting and location analytics, Chasen says developers can learn the types of venues users frequent and gain insights about users’ preferences.
“Which means that you can now tell every time your users walk into a Starbucks, or a car dealership, and build apps that very specifically take advantage of the environment at which your users are,” says Chasen.
Initially, Chasen says the goal is to build-out an SDK that can be useful to every app that utilizes location services, which makes up almost half the apps in the App Store.
SocialRadar, based near Dupont Circle, launched in 2014, cross-referencing location beacons with information posted online to quickly identify people nearby and describe how a user knows them.
The developer tools are available for free.
