mobile – Tech Blog

I know. I’ve been silent for too long.

The reason is, as most of you know already, I’ve been developing and launching a mobile app. LiveRugby, inspired by the awesome work made by Colm on his TotalFootball and StatsZone apps, promises to be the definitive way to generate and share graphical analysis and statistics for the data-centric rugby fan during the next World Cup. I chose an app about rugby because is something I understand and I’m passionate about. I wanted to learn more about rugby, and more about mobile applications, and this seemed the best opportunity.

I still can’t say much as many information are, in a way, “secret” until and I need to get some clearance from one of the suppliers. But, I promise, I’ll be writing soon about it.
For the moment, let me just give you a list of what I wanted to experiment with this venture:

Planning the application
Dealing with the supplier of data, OptaSports
Being able to project manage myself
Research what kind of statistics might be useful in a sport like rugby and how to display them in a way that is easy to understand to the average fan
Develop a full application on my own
Being able to outsource part of the artwork to a graphic designer
Launch the app on the market
Start a marketing campaign on my own getting in touch with press and media
Communicating and satisfying customers-users

At the moment the app is launched on the Android market, although I’m already working for an iPhone version for the RBS 6 Nations. Of course, a business venture like this is successful when a profit is made out of it.
However, there are several other measures of success that I need to take in account, roughly at every point of this list.

Whether this project has been a success or not will be subject to analysis and to a more detailed blog post when it will be time to make a balance. For the moment, I’m totally enjoying the learning experience it has been so far, and the constant challenge posed by launching your own enterprise.

I’d like to know what my readers think 🙂

Hey folks, long time I haven’t blogged – been very busy at work and home! Let me resume my techie stuff by summarising some of my thoughts after the #GeoMob night at the British Computer Society, last 30 July.
The #GeoMob is the London Geo/Mobile Developers Meetup Group, and it organises meeting of developers interested in the geo/social/mobile field, usually with participation from industry leaders (Yahoo!/Google), businesses, startups.

This are my thoughts about the night, grouped by talk:

Wes Biggs, CTO Adfonic

AdFonic is a mobile advertisement provider that launched 1/7/09 (their home page doesn’t work, though. You need to go to http://adfonic.com/home)
what about user interaction and privacy? if I don’t get it completely wrong (reading here it seems I haven’t), the actual user experience is to have some kind of advertisement bar on your mobile application. If it’s just this, it’s simply the porting of an old desktop idea to the mobile environment. The problem is that it was not a hugely successful idea. Here the user is rewarded even less compared to the desktop bars (I guess by getting the app for free?). I’m not sure this can be a really successful venture unless the ads are smartly disguised as “useful information” – but, hey, I’m here to be refuted 😛
getting contextual information is difficult, even if you know the location of the user you don’t know what he/she’s doing. Good motto from the talk “advertisers are not interested in where you are, but in where you’re at“. But how to get and use these contextual information was not really clear from the talk. From their website’s FAQ, I read:
- You can target by country or region.
- You can target by mobile operator.
- You can define the days of the week and the time of day you wish your ad to be displayed in the local market.
- You can choose to target by demographics by selecting gender and age range profiles.
- You can choose devices by platform, brand, features and individual models.
- You can also choose to assign descriptive words for your campaign using tags. We compare these tags to sites and apps in the Adfonic network where your ad could be displayed, improving your ad’s probability of being shown on a contextually relevant site.
This raises a couple of privacy concerns, as well as technical ones 😉
I would say this talk raised more questions than those answered – nonetheless it was, at least for me, good for brainstorming about mobile targeting
some of the issues with this service – which I’m really interested in watching to know where it heads to – are interestingly the same of a paper about leisure mobile recommender systems that I reviewed for MobBlog

Henry Erskine Crum, @henryec, Co-founder of Spoonfed

Spoonfed is a London based web startup (Sep. 2008) that focuses on location-based event listings
12 people work there – which makes it interestingly big to be a startup
very similar to an old idea of mine (geo-events but in a more social networking fashion) – which prompts me to realize I need to act fast, when I have such ideas 🙂
I would have liked the talk to dig deeper into details about user base, mobile apps and HCI issues, but it was not a bad talk and it provided a very operational and yet open minded view of how the service works and evolves
oh, and Henry was congratulated as the only guy in a suit (:P lolcredits to Christopher Osborne)

Gary Gale, @vicchi, Director of Engineering at Yahoo! Geo Technologies, with a talk about Yahoo! Placemaker

get here the slides for this talk
Yahoo! Placemaker is a useful service to extract location data from virtually any document – also known as Geoparsing. As the website says: Provided with free-form text, the service identifies places mentioned in text, disambiguates those places, and returns unique identifiers for each, as well as information about how many times the place was found in the text, and where in the text it was found.
I see it very interesting especially as it is usable with Tweets and blog posts, and it can help creating very interesting mashups
only issue: its granularity is up to the neighbourhood – which is perfectly good for some applications, but I’m not sure it is also for real-time-location-intensive mobile apps

Steve Coast, @SteveC, founder of OpenStreetMap and CloudMade, with a talk about Ubiquitous GeoContext

OpenStreetMap can be somewhat considered the community response to Google Maps: free maps, community-created and maintained, freely usable – CloudMade being a company focusing on using map data to let developers go geo
the motto from this talk is “map, please get me to the next penguin in this zoo” – that is, extreme geolocation and contextual information
success of a geo app – but according to me also applicable to many Internet startups – summarized in 3 points:
- low cost to start
- no licensing problems
- openness / community driven effort
it was an absolute delight to listen to this talk, as it was fun but also rich of content – the highly visual presentation was extremely cool, I hope Steve is going to put it online!

Oh, and many thanks to Christopher Osborne, @osbornec, for organising an amazing night!