A new method of finding places and objects has been launched at a secret location in Sydney with Geepers – an Australian-designed geolocation technology with global application and potential for business and individual users.
The brainchild of serial entrepreneur David Whitfield, and backed by Internode founder Simon Hackett and incubator firm Bluechilli, Geepers uses a unique system to label and locate people, places and things.
Attendees were given a sneak peek of the technology at the GeoNext conference, held in February this year, as part of its Startup Showcase.
Combining the traditional rules of longitude and latitude with the speed and reach of the Internet, Geepers works on the notion that every person and thing on earth has a global name address that can be mapped to within centimetres.
“We are to the real world what domain names are to the Internet,” said Mr. Whitfield, who was inspired to create Geepers whilst travelling for business around China and envisages that no other application will be able to find someone, somewhere or something as easily as Geepers, a sentiment shared by Simon Hackett.
“Geepers has the potential to become the most popular way that Internet users will dynamically and accurately locate the people, places and things that matter to them, anywhere in the world,” said Mr. Hackett.
As the world gets more populated, traditional forms of labelling such as street addresses are becoming increasingly confusing. Geepers aims to solve this by enabling Geepers’ users to create a unique user-name and then adding multiple locations using latitude and longitude co-ordinates, such as home, work, or current ‘on the move’ locations (with their smartphone or Internet enabled device as the ‘destination’).
Geepers addresses are prefixed by the ‘!’ symbol. A search of !David_White will show all of David White’s addresses while !David_White.home will show David’s home location and !David_White.now will show David’s precise mobile location – if he has selected you as a friend. Clicking on a desired location will then accurately navigate the searcher to that location.
National courier company Fastway Couriers will shortly become the first Australian company to run a pilot trial of Geepers in the Sydney metro area. Fastway Couriers operates more than 700 franchisees in 25 metropolitan and regional locations across Australia and prides itself on using the latest technology to offer a cost effective, reliable, timetable courier service for small to medium sized businesses.
As the Geepers technology matures, Mr. Hackett believes that the data structures behind the Geepers database could enable it to become a universal cross platform for ‘dynamic’ contact databases.
“The Geepers system is capable of scaling to hold hundreds of millions of entries,” said Mr. Hackett. “I for one would love to be able to keep all my contacts appraised of changes in my life, by simply having my Geepers identity represent a dynamic link of personal information beyond physical position.”
