spoonfed @ geomob
Spoonfed is about 2 things : helping people find events and helping event organisers market their event.
Making it really easy to find events and advertise events. Publishing high quality event data is REALLY difficult.
- incentive structure for UGC is non-existent
- finite shelf life
- insane amount of fragementation
- editors are expensive
answer : We buolt a publication platform designed for this job
- aggregates direct from event owners
- employs techniques from SAS project management tools
- provides editors with polishing tools reduces research
Got the data, now what ?
- www.spoonfed.co.uk/london
- mobile : what’s on around me right now ?
- content partners
Revenue
- Bullsyeye-SAS
- digital marketing platform for event owners
- mobile & email meet CRM meet social media
- What does it do ?
- email and mobile marketing
- manage your customers
- social media integration
- disseminates your events around the web
- Subscription model launching soon
What we find exciting :
- Yahoo Placemaker
- Flickr’s geotagged photo’s
Location is entrenched on this site. Not just on search but also for setting up email alerts etc. Services like upcoming are potentially competitors but Spoonfed founder feels (as do others) that are not competitors. But what about Eventful and other’s who are location based event advertising platforms. Spoonfed founder feels they wont last long… He must know something I do not. 
location based advertising
CTo of location based advertising startup adphonic presenting.
Previous options
- Lots of location-relevant services and apps Consumer interest in location sharing.
- Lots of market buzz.
- Expensive operators-based solutions.
- Limited mass market options
iPhone, iPhone, iPhone
The iPhone is the breakthrough location-aware device. Evolution of iPhone geolocation/GPS APIs. iPhone 4.0 enables true open LBS development as it enables user location access into the browser. Providing instance access to exact location (or somewhat exact) of user at the time of the page being loaded.
Locatable, an Jailbroken iPhone app, developed by the CTO of adphonic provided location based OSM maps.
The gelocation API for advertising is here.
- sites and apps on equal footing
- no intermediary storage system required
- the starbucks example
What do advertisers want ?
- If not where you are, where you’re at
- Technographics != mindset
- Location is a piece of an integrated context, not just GPS coordinates
- home or work
- business or pleasure
- on the move / having a coffee
- location + behaviour -> offer selection
- say you are a few blocks from tesco, and at this point in time consistently you have headed in and bought a bunch of things, say in preperation for dinner, allows advertisers to send you a sweet deal to entice you into the Tesco and buy some goods using the special offer just for you.
So what is adPhonic doing ?
- self-service mobile advertising network
- public launch tomorrrow, 1 july
- HQ in London, staff in Paris & San Francisco
- state of the art feature set
- comprehensive targetting
- advanced reporting & analytics
- open publisher integration API
- intuitive user interface
- seeking location-based ad trial partner
How are they capturing my behaviour?
geomob – june 09
geomob london meetup is tonight at the British computer society where a host of neo geo lumniaries are set to speak on various neo geo topics. I believe a few places are still available so do come along if you are free, in london and interested.
scrum training
I have worked in Waterfall mode for most of my career but at expedia I have been involved in Scrum based development. Finally got a chance to attend some training today and tomorrow on Scrum and Agile development.
I will try to put up summary on the training here in the next day or two.
dopplr and tripit
For those who are not aware, dopplr is (in their own words) “a service for smart travellers. Dopplr members share personal and business travel plans privately with their networks, and exchange tips on places to stay, eat and explore in cities around the world and tripit is (weird, their about page does not have a one liner that describes their service, so in my words) a service that allows you to combine all aspects of a trip into one single itinerary.
I think these two services need to merge. Before I provide my reasons let me talk a little bit about how I use the two services.
dopplr
It provides me the ability to track where I have been in the past and where I am going to in the future. It provides a nice visualisation using a map of locations I have visited and visiting. They have added features about where I could eat and what I could do when visiting a place but I have never used that yet. I also have the ability to know what my friends are doing and if I know anyone who is travelling to a city same as the one I am travelling to.
Given that there is so much location information here, they also update my fireeagle (which in turn tells many other services) with my location whenever I head on a trip. This is great, LBS is the way of the future. If my location can be auto updated (based on my privacy settings) from the one source to myriad of services I use then the data I get access to can be more relevant to my needs at a give point in time.
The only problem I have, and I only realised this today, is that it has no concept around when my trip starts and end. It knows the date but not the time. I am heading to Zurich today, I land in Zurich in the evening but it has already told fire-eagle that I am in Zurich (when I am sitting in London typing this rant).
tripit
Let me first say I LOVE TripIt.
Planing a trip generally involves booking flights/trains, cars, hotels, attractions, tours etc etc. We tend to use many vendors for these needs and each vendor provides an itinerary in some format (mostly via email). Once you have all these booked, you look for maps , weather etc etc.
If you get a TripIt account, you can forward all your itineraries to plans@tripit.com and they will parse the text and collate all the information automaitcally for you. They keep adding support for different vendors, but as far as I am aware most of the major vendors are supported. Allowing you to print ONE itinerary which contains all your travel details. AWESOME!!!
Given there is so much location information here the do not do much with it at all (at least I am not aware of any LBS services around my trips).
Why should they merge?
Firstly, I am not affiliated with either organisation. I have no vested interests in either organisation.
There are clear synergies here on the services they offer and lots of wins for both organisations as each lack features that the other has. I would love for dopplr to be able to understand when I start my trip and when I end it. I would love TripIt to start visualising my trips better.
I would love for either/both of them to provide me the ability to say I am going to do a road trip while I am in Bordeaux from A to B and have it plotted so I can start generating a map of all the places I have been to and driven around or walked around without having to carry a GPS, collect tracks and upload them etc etc etc.
Lets face it, most non-tech savy users do not want to deal with GPS devices, nor dot hey know how to. I am geek and a developer and my geo-tagging of photo’s sux because there are to many steps involved. There is only ONE SLR out there which can tag my photo’s as I take them and even that is not with a integrated GPS device.
[Ok, that was slightly off topic, but the point about making things easy to increase adoption is important.]
Of course, they don’t have to merge to provide these features. I know dopplr does have an email facility and also a twitter facility for adding trips that I don’t use much. TripIt could easily add fire eagle integration.
In my head though, having one service that does it all would be so much beneficial (for all concerned) then multiple one’s that do a little bit of this but not that etc.
ps: Yes that was a rant!
fresh content on spotify
Spotify is a online on-demand radio service (atleast thats how I perceive it) that allows you to listen pretty much whatever music you want whenever you want, where ever you want to listen.
A cool new service (web app if you like) has started up to provide everybody an email alert service everytime Spotify adds new music to their library that you are interested in. Your interest can be registered by either adding artists manually or importing all your top scrobelled artists on last.fm
Oh right, what’s this app you ask and how can I access it?
The site can be found here (http://www.freshspotify.com/) and the blog is here (http://freshspotify.wordpress.com/) and you can follow their progress on twitter.
In their own words
I gather it is built on top of Google app engine as it is using your Google Account to store your alert preferences. Levraging an existing authentication system, especially one so widely used, is a very smart idea for such a simple (yet useful) service. Kudos to its creator.
iPhone password detection bug
Over the last few weeks I had managed to get my iPhone to reject my password randomly, or at least what seemed like random events. Pretty soon I noticed a pattern that it was only triggered when I had accidently hit the Emergency Call button on the bottom right hand corner of the number keypad.
Doing a restart, switch off and back on, resolves the problem and it recognizes my password again. I am unsure if apple knows about this bug or not and can only hope they fix it with the next firmware release.
p.s.: As far as I know this only works if you have an exchange account enabled on your iPhone, but let me know if you can prove otherwise.
Cloud Made – building better maps
Nick Black now launching the cloud made story. Finally!!
The first feature of the Cloudmade developer program is custom map styles. Cloudmade area launching three different map styles. The original, fine line and tourist. These are all available via the Cloudmade developer program for use on web and mobile.
Partnered with Stamen Designs. Fresh, Pale Dawn and *Midnight Commander*. Midnight Commander looks like something straight out of matrix.
The next feature to be launched is the style editor. Allowing everyone to create their own map style. Available for use via the API instantaneously.
The first API to be talked about is the Custom Image Tiles allowing developers to build custom map tiles for their applications. Mapme.at is launching a new application using this API both on web and mobile.
The Geocoding API allows access to all underlying data in a geocoded object. ie: the vector data. Allowing for street level searches (ie: without a street number) to have access to the entire road segment and hence highlight the result using more then just a pin.
Geosearch API, similar to the Geocoding API, also provides access to the entire vector that spans your search results.
Routing API being adopted by TrackMyJourney to provide the ability to create realtime routing and tracking applications. The speed of route calculations is reportedly lightning fast. [Wonder if they are caching routes as well as pre-creating some]
Location Management APIs allowing your location and geo-tagged data/media to flow between web and mobile.
All of these APIs available in Ruby, Python, Java, J2ME, Objective-C (for iPhone).
Steve Coast – Keynote
An amazing video as a precursor to Steve Coasts Keynote. It showed a year in edits. [insert link here].
OSM started at UCL with a need for playing with mapping data of the local area. This was not possible due to licensing restrictions. Once I make an area of my map and you make an map of your area, and we put it together we have something that can be used. This growth has been exponential ever since.
OSM community does not just map, the community provide software, services, hardware management and maintenance. OSM collects mapping data using mapping parties. These provide information on how to collect mapping data. Using a varied collection of devices people collect GPS traces, these are nothing but breadcrumbs of lat and lon co-ordinates of the path you walk, drive, ride etc. Also collecting metadata as you go along. Street names, parks, hospitals, schools, *pubs*, foot paths etc etc. All *volunteers*!!!
The US effort started with the import of Tiger Data. This is public domain data created by the US Census Beurau. Add OSM to this mix and now the US OSM Maps are as good as any other source and in many cases more POI rich.
Germany now has a *complete* map in the space of two years. OSM there started in 2006 and at the end of 2008 was feature complete. Ongoing efforts now continue to fix errors and add features.
The main reason why OSM is POI and Feature rich is due to the mapping technology used. The likes of Tele Atlas use trucks with equipment to capture data rapidly. This model does not scale to collecting Foot Paths and Parks and the like.
[The thing I find strange here, there is still NOT ONE SINGLE MENTION of cloudmade by Steve Coast. This was supposed to be a Cloud Made developer program launch, not a OSM sales pitch.]
cloudmade developer program launch
Cloudmade Mapping API and Services launch in London.
Craig Nealson talking about the night and launching the evening.
