(Image Credit: Radar)
New startup Radar has decided location is a long-overlooked problem and requires a solution to unlock its full potential.
There are tried-and-trusted solutions for most developer problems today. If you want communications in your app, Twilio can put you in touch. If you need to handle payments, Swipe can put that through for you. For location, Radar’s CEO argues, there’s not been such a solution.
“We’re ten years into the smartphone era, but building products and services with location is still too hard. We’re building Radar to change this,” says Nick Patrick, CEO and co-founder of Radar. “Radar is the location platform for mobile apps. Our mission is to help companies collect, analyze, and act on location data.”
Patrick is a former employee of Foursquare, so he’s got some experience with the benefits and challenges of building location-based apps. Along with fellow co-founder Coby Berman, also a previous Foursquare employee, the pair took notice of the difficult and tedious process of building the back-end infrastructure for location services and pledged to solve it.
By integrating with the Radar SDK, developers can just get started with setting up geofences, tracking entry and exit events, and using the data to enhance the experience for users.
You can get started with just three steps:
- Track users. Add the SDK to your iOS and Android apps to start tracking user locations with fewer than 10 lines of code.
- Create geofences. Create unlimited geofences, representing places or regions, via the dashboard, bulk import, or the API.
- Receive events. Receive geofence entry and exit events client-side or server-side via webhooks. Or, export events for analysis.
Radar launches officially today but has signed up several customers pre-launch including Raise, Wine n Dine, and Via. A free tier is available for those looking to give the service a go, while a paid enterprise tier is priced based on usage and provides hands-on support.
Providing some peace-of-mind to those of us concerned about privacy, all identifiable information is kept separate from the location data to increase safety.
You can find out more information about Radar and how to get started with it here.
Have you built apps with location-based services? Share your experience in the comments.
