Kakiloc, started by Martin Dufort and then Alain Lavoie, was to offer a mobile presence service. You could for instance know via your cell phone if you had friends nearby. Now, Martin Dufort has “closed the experiment”, although he will continue to blog at location-based.blogspot.com. He also plans to reuse the location-based technology for future applications in vertical markets.
This is sad, because they were working on the project since I first met them, 9 months ago.
I think though that the market is not ready yet to use geo-localized services. This is a marketer’s and an entrepreneur’s dream come true, but it’s slowed down in Canada by data rates, and also by the capabilities of devices currently avalaible. Furthermore, Kakiloc users had to get their friends to use the service to make it useful, making the adoption even more difficult. Google’s android might ease things, but this is not even something I would bet on.
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stephdau November 15, 2007
Paying Lip Service to Failure Is Not Enough : Instigator Blog December 03, 2007
[...] here’s hoping it all fails. But when I think about Phil (and others like Martin Dufort with Kakiloc), it’s clear these guys are honest dreamers, that tried to make a go of something they truly [...]