trizk

For privacy purposes, we do not traditionally track the location of the client. Your location is used anonymously in requests to determine what is around you and provide you with relevant data. When you attach to a Presence (a user controlled location/object) then your location at the time you interact with that Presence is shared, while still anonymizing your PI, to provide proximity information to the Presence owner. This is helpful to Presence service providers in that they may want to discriminate services based on proximity to their location. Stay tuned for an update on both the web site and application.

I appreciate your candor. There are a couple of doctors who joined the beta, presumably with ideas on how this tool can help them. Our thoughts are that when a patient walks in they can check themselves in, and their check in can easily be integrated into the clinics scheduling software via the API. Furthermore, new patients can automatically fill out the (insurance/patient info) form and submit it electronically on their phone. This would reduce paperwork burden on the office manager and result in higher efficiencies. The clinic can schedule appointments and personalize the users page with their next appointment data, history and doctors notes, again seamlessly via integration with their practice management software. We have not yet integrated push notifications, but it is in the pipeline and I am sure you can see the implications. We transmit everything over SSL and do not store this kind of data on our servers so I would presume it would be HIPAA compliant. The larger vision is that these types of applications become developed for a wide array of verticals, and perhaps even monetized by their developers.

Based on feedback from a large minority of beta users we feel that the software needs some tweaking to make it easier to leverage beyond posting comments to your Presence. We are currently working on it and expect a new release very soon. We agree that the examples in the FAQ (such as "How can I use Presence?") may be too broad and we may need to provide much more detailed use-cases. Once again, thank you for your comments, there is no need for apologies, they were much appreciated.

Thanks for the feedback

Yes, to a great extent. Store/home/mall/restaurant/doctor's office/etc. The idea is that if these places are enabled with some kind of management of who is accessing their services (and how), as well as proximity information/control, it will open up a realm of possibilities for business/human workflow efficiency and consumer experience.

Anyone can create a Presence with the Publisher app and add Presence managers who can also manage the Presence using the Publisher app. User's can access the Presence using the Explorer app and interact with it. Out of the box Presence functionality includes the ability to submit and manage posts, users and Presence parameters. The Publisher may define two gadgets/web (public and internal facing) apps that users have access to via the interface button. The Publisher is provided with non-personally identifying information on the exploring user in order to tailor the user experience accordingly. Furthermore, the Publisher is enabled with the ability to suspend abusive users and the users are enabled with the ability to complain about presences.

Just out of curiosity, but did you feel that the video gave insufficient use cases?

From a technical standpoint Presence lets you slap a web application on top of a physical location/object in order to enable that location with virtual services. There are some examples in the FAQ, however we were thinking it would help to be a bit broad in order to see what users will do with it, instead of suggesting what they can do with it. For example if we say that a restaurant may use it to remotely alert you when your table is ready, people may at the very worst think this is targeted to restaurants and at the very best think its targeted only to businesses.

Being so heavily involved in development for the past months it did not occur to us that people would not be able to figure out what the app does. We will have to find a good way to provide some examples without making the examples restrictive. Thank you.

Awesome thanks!

I have said this before. Mobility is such a disruptive shift in computing, I am also surprised that the best that is being offered to consumers are check in games and promos. Looking back at the wired internet I think that its widespread adoption was due mostly to its utility. Sure there are distracting fun and games, but people use it because it is inherently useful.

That is the driving principle behind our startup, Presence. http://www.presence.co

We enable physical locations with virtual services, and make them accessible to both businesses and consumers, in an attempt to make mobile useful. If you have some time please visit our website to see what we are up to. I would sincerely appreciate the perspective of the HN community.

Ask them to assess when they think the startup will be profitable, considering everything invested to date, then reproportion your equity accordingly. So if each of you have 25%, the consensus is 2 years to profitability, and you spent 2 years there already, then you should agree to reduce your share to 12.5%, splitting the other 12.5% between the remaining 3 founders. You can also offer to play an advisory role for a bit more.