The Future is Now - Ambient Location and the Future of the Interface

Aaron Parecki is a Portland-based iPhone and PHP developer interested in solving practical problems with technology. In his free time, he enjoys geolocation, linguistics, and building home automation systems and IRC bots with a sense of humor. For the past 2½ years, he has been tracking and visualizing his location every 6 seconds, making him a frequent presenter at the Portland data visualization group. His fascination with location sharing and GPS began at the age of 6, when he traced the routes of family road trips on a map with a highlighter. He combined these interests and created Geoloqi.com, a private, real-time mobile and web platform for secure location sharing with Amber Case in an effort to help people connect in the real world. He has 11 years experience in web app development, database design, graphic design and printing, and server administration.

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Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and User Experience Designer from Portland, Oregon. She studies the interaction between humans and computers and how our relationship with information is changing the way cultures think, act, and understand their worlds. Her main focus is on mobile software, augmented reality and data visualization, as these reduce the amount of time and space it takes for people to connect with information. Case founded Geoloqi.com, a private location sharing application, out of a frustration with existing social protocols around text messaging and wayfinding.

Case has spoken at various industry conferences including MIT’s Futures of Entertainment and Inverge: The Interactive Convergence Conference, Ignite Portland and Ignite Boulder. She presented an Introduction to Cyborg Anthropology at Webvisions 2009 and Keynoted Portland’s Open Source Bridge with a speech on Cyborg Citizens. She’s been a guest lecturer at Pacific Northwest College of Art, Lewis & Clark College and Oregon State University’s School of Continuing Education. In 2010 she was named one of Fast Company’s Most Influential Women in Tech. She formerly worked at Wieden+Kennedy, a global advertising agency based in Portland, Oregon. She currently works as a User Experience Designer at Vertigo Software.

In 2008, Case founded CyborgCamp, an unconference on the future of humans and computers. To attend, visit portland.cyborgcamp.com.

You can learn more about Cyborg Anthropology at www.cyborganthropology.com, and on Twitter at @caseorganic.

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