GeoWorld: Could you start with giving me a brief history of Abaq.us and MyGeoDiary?

Jain: We started the company about two years ago in October 2007. The founders, myself and John Schneider, are heavily software platform and consumer-electronics device guys. So one of the things we were noticing was the heavy trend toward GPS devices coming out, and mobile phones were at the forefront of this.

You also have consumer-appliance devices that are coming out with embedded positioning capability. But how do you solve or address the issue of how consumers take all of this emerging capability and start to inject that into their day-to-day social activities on the Web?

So that was the starting point, and we built an application called MyGeoDiary, but soon realized that the strength of this is the platform that enables any type of geo-social applications built and hosted and deployed for brands and publishers and device manufacturers to have their own social apps for their own consumer base.

So we built the platform with the ability to support many consumer-electronics positioning devices, visualize data that has been produced by these devices, and then enable typical Web 2.0 publishing capabilities on top of it.

So the first manifestation of this is MyGeoDiary, where you take those building blocks and start to see how consumers can take all their recordings--the recordings could be lifestyle, fitness, travel-type activities to being as ambitious as recording to your entire lifestream. You just keep the phone and application on and record what you are doing.

So that service is live, and we support many handsets and PNDs and consumer-electronic devices. On the visualization side, it could be right on top of existing GIS infrastructure, from Google for example. But we are neutral from the visualization point of view.

On top of that, it provides some personal analytics. It could be as simple as giving my fitness metrics to “what I just did” or “sales data” and “give me my mileage for a better expense-reporting structure.”

There also is the social capability around the geodata that obviously have publishing capabilities--how do I publish my stream of location data back into Facebook or MySpace, or how do I get widgets that I can embed into my own blog or Web site.

We allow people to search for things in recordings of their lifestream data that can then be searched for patterns and intelligence. Then you can use that data to tag a bunch of objects--you can tag photos and videos and HTML pages with that location data.

So we do some intelligence pattern matching and photo placement services on top of this, and all of this is available with APIs and some widgets. So we can graphically launch MyGeoDiary on your Web site, or you could tailor your own custom app.

GeoWorld: Do you require GPS devices on everything, or can people use triangulation services?

Jain: The application relies on the device in terms of what it does. We have an app that calls the native capability and says give “me your location.” Now that call itself may, if it’s an iPhone for example, have GPS and triangulation and Wi-Fi. In some cases, you only get GPS; in some cases, you only get Wi-Fi. So we leave it to the device itself to give us the location.

GeoWorld: Can you walk me through how someone would do a generic application?

Jain: As a consumer, you would come to our site and download an Android app or a Blackberry app or soon-to-be-launched iPhone app, and you will then have the ability to just record your track or a point of interest, and the duration of that recording will be at the mercy of the batter power of the phone.

GeoWorld: Does it record into the memory of the phone?

Jain: Yes, but the different phones have a little variation in the storage model.

So then you create an account for yourself on MyGeoDiary, and then record and upload your data. Once you have uploaded it, you can do a couple more things. You can organize it based on tags--typical organization mechanisms and “folksonomy” mechanisms whereby you tell us “it’s a bike ride” or whatever.

That sort of organization metalayer starts to then be imposed on your data and in the MyGeoDiary service. So when you do log in, you can say “show me my bike rides.”

While you are uploading, you can also ask the service to immediately post it to a blog or send your photos to flickr. Then the user comes to the Web site, can find the track, and then there are some analytics you can do--you can search for things based on reverse geocoding to tell where you might have been. So if you were in Boulder and traveling around, and then you come back to MyGeoDiary, you would see the Boulder tags automatically done.

Then you will see the whole mechanism of sharing. The sharing can be “keep this track” or “send it to my friend” or “take the track publish it to Facebook” or “take this data and embed it in a blog.” In some cases, that data is already live and shared, meaning the moment you upload, it goes immediately to your blog if you want. Otherwise, it stays in the diary until you publish it yourself.

GeoWorld: What about a business customer use?

Jain: For a business customer, we typically go to brands in travel or fitness or social sites and then suggest that they co-brand with MyGeoDiary for themselves. So they could come in and say “for our own audience and consumers, we want this social service,” but they want it to be seamlessly branded for themselves.

GeoWorld: So businesses would want to add a value-added service to their existing sites?

Jain: Right. Our business model ultimately is to help brands have additional interaction on their own sites.