Location-based applications have been all the rage these days. However, most of those applications are only aware of the physical location of the user in terms longitude and latitude. A big piece of missing information is the context of the location. For instance, someone who is close to a starbucks could be driving by, walking by, walking into, or sitting inside the coffee shop. Each of these states could mean very different information the app should present to the user. To have truly great user experience, the app must detect those location contexts and act appropriately. Of course, the modern smartphone platforms already have the capacity to detect context, but to put them together requires a lot more work on the developer's side than, say, just to retrieve the geo coordinate of the location.
Enter a new startup called Alohar Mobile. According to this article on TechCrunch, Alohar Mobile provides SDKs that combines multiple sensor information from the phone into a single context suggestion for the application developer. I have not tried it extensively. But if it works as advertised, it will bring mobile app user experience to a whole new level.
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