I've been a fan of Geoloqi technology for awhile. The simplicity of the API, support for low-level primitives like places, layers, triggers, and history coupled with mobile OS agnosticism and cross-OS push-notifications offers developers a nice set of tools from which to build simple geoalerting & messaging applications for Smartphones.

Esri apparently agrees, and through a 'merger' (much warmer word than 'acquisition') the plan appears to add Geoloqi's tools to the larger ArcGIS tool chest. "The first new product offering to come from the merger is a Geocoding enhancement to the Geoloqi API that allows developers to create triggers based off of physical addresses, rather than map coordinates, as well as reserve geocoding and a powerful alternative to current iOS maps." Nice focus for an initial integration, but hey it's just a press release eluding to a broader future of possibilities. Longer term I suspect we could see a variety of interesting offers from the new Esri Portland R&D office and Redlands.

For example, with geodata-in-a-geodatabase in place at thousands of existing customer sites around the world, the combined capabilities of Geoloqi could eventually help Esri business & government customer-developers use their own geodata for geofencing to trigger not only mobile communications & messaging exchanges, but also other programmatic processes like updating a database or publishing a work item into a queue. The technology addition to the ArcGIS family could equally help Esri customers capture mobile location data histories of employees, customers, and citizens using Geoloqi-powered Smartphone Apps, whereby Esri's classical GIS analytics have the potential to add significant value to a variety of research & application Mobility scenarios. I'm looking forward to seeing what the duo comes up with over time. Congratulations to them both.