Some ideas sink without a trace. Others seem determined to take on a life of their own, gaining momentum, gathering interest, accumulating work, effort and results.
As the expression goes, ideas are a dime a dozen. Almost everyone has many ideas throughout their life. Some people have great business ideas every day before breakfast. That’s a good thing, because these ideas have been a fuel for progress, all around the world, for millenia.
Our new Facebook embedded player is now live!
When we launched in March, we did a very quick and dirty integration into Facebook. One line of text, a link to audioboo.fm and that was it. Not great.
Get that popcorn popping...
We're very glad to have got through to the final round of the Vodafone Mobile Clicks 2009 awards. It's very exciting, and we're looking forward to the finals at PICNIC.
In the meantime, we're developing a beta version of Woobius Eye. It's a lot of fun (for technology geeks like us) to see the pieces coming together as a whole, from the real-time protocols to the delicious looking iPhone and Android interfaces or the Flex client.
We're excited to update you all on some really cool stuff going on at Rummble here in our London office!
Let's face it, we all love consumer devices, applications, etc. That's because we're all consumers. Business software has traditionally seemed a lot less sexy. Office vs personal life, colleagues vs friends, work vs play - business always gets the short end of the stick, in terms of perception.
Once upon a time, Facebook released an application platform. There followed a gold rush, a frantic summer where everyone tried to release Facebook applications. Some hit it big, going from zero to millions of users in a matter of weeks. Soon, the number of applications became so large (and Facebook became so good at plugging every spammy hole which applications used and abused to spread) that the rate of success of new apps approached zero. The golden age was over. Some hailed the end of toy apps and hoped that soon, Facebook applications would turn business-like and herald a new era of social-network-enabled productivity.
But it never happened.
The Guidebox service is all about making buildings accessible to those with a visual impairment... using technologies that are readily available to these users. The key word for us at Guidebox is Accessibility, that is improving accessibility to buildings for the users, while making the service itself as easily accessible to the end user as possible. Guidebox doesn't use any fancy GPS trackers or near field communications, it uses technologies which the majority its potential users will already have with them, right there in their pocket.
Guidebox is a joint venture between Chris Ryan, who has just graduated from Bournemouth University and We Love Mobile, a London based creative mobile agency. The aim; to provide access information to blind and partially sighted people via the mobile internet.
A wise man once said: "If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know?"
Our answer is below...
Yesterday, 40 years ago, man landed on the moon for the first time. 20% of the world's population tuned in to watch grainy images of Neil Armstrong and listen to those famous words 'just one step for man, one giant leap for mankind.'
Why has information technology had such an impact on our world? The one-word summary would be "automation". Information technology has enabled us to automate many tasks which previously took a long time. It started with basic things like calculations, but progressively has evolved to encompass every area of human activity, whether personal, like making and keeping up with friends (via social networks), or business-related, like keeping track of accounts and logistics. At first, the benefits of automation seem obvious - it used to take an hour to perform task X, and now it takes a fraction of a second. But this obvious benefit masks a deeper, more transformative quality of automation.
So a quick introduction to concept of Bedrock.
First of all unlike many of other other entries we are not an application designed for consumer, but instead our product consists of enabling technology to be used by other developers.
So why is Bedrock needed?
Well if you have a cool idea for mobile, you want to be able to allow all mobile users to use it.
Unfortunately the first thing that a developer has to do is decide which mobile platform to develop for - J2ME, Blackberry, Symbian, iPhone, BREW, Windows Mobile, Android - where do I start? Not only are the operating systems different, but the development languages change from Java to C++ to Objective C. Not only is there the logistical pain of having multiple teams working on these all these platforms, but the costs involved often mean that the project can be unviable.
The solution to this problem is Bedrock. With our technology you can write your application in Java, utilising the standard J2ME libraries. We ease the porting process to other J2ME handsets and in addition we translate your java code into commented C++ source. This is then compiled on each target platform with our native library implementations giving the developer a fully native version of their application on virtually any smartphone on the market!
Fundamentally we allow the developer to focus on creating really cool applications rather than having to spend all their time fixing issues with different handsets.
"There are nine-and-sixty ways to construct a tribal lay. And every single one of them is right," says Kipling. When it comes to start-ups, nine-and-sixty is an extremely conservative number. There are millions of ideas out there, and many more ways to implement them. Sadly, unlike stories, not all approaches are right when building a company. Still, start-ups share a striking similarity with fictional stories: the result is what matters. Do readers enjoy your story? Do users love your product? How exactly an idea has been implemented does matter very much, but only in-so-far as it influences the end result.
So, this is our first blog post to introduce "Little Spender", an app that we've been working on since December last year. Born out of the need to scratch an itch - namely, where had all our money gone by the end of each month!? I could count all my month's big expenses on two hands, but this sum fell greatly short of the actual amount I was spending. A hole in my pocket? Expensive girlfriend? Or just too many coffees? Either way, I had to find out!
Hello to all start-ups, followers and those responsible for Mobile Clicks. The team at VouChaCha looks forward to meeting you all at the next round. For those we have not yet met us VouChaCha do location based mobile discount vouchers / coupons.
I first came across John Berger as a teenager when reading "A Fortunate Man", a remarkable book about the social role of a country doctor. Later on, when studying photography, his "Ways of Seeing" was already required reading.
So it was already of interest to me to hear from The Guardian that he had agreed to donate, at the age of 82, his entire lifetime archive to The British Library. With one caveat. They would have to come to his home high in the French Alps to both sort the papers and transport them back. So Jamie Andrews, the Library's head of modern manuscripts, has set off equipped with the perfect tool for the job: Audioboo.
You can access the recordings he's already done on audio. I also thought it would be nice to take the RSS feed from their account and visualise it on Google Maps. Since every audioboo feed has geolocation data in it as standard, it's a quick copy and paste job to get a live, auto updated visual like the one below.
View Larger Map
Well, this is our first blog post for Vodafone. Audioboo is excited to be through to the next round of the competition and we'll be using this blog to keep everyone updated about our progress from now till August. We only launched in March 2009 and have been amazed by the interest people have shown in our platform.
Audioboo is a platform for creating & distributing audio content created on mobile phones. Launched on the iPhone but built using a full API that will shortly be released so that mobile developers can easily use it to create their own mobile applications on the platform of their choice.
Our aim is to reinvigorate the use of the spoken word in the digital space and make it as easy as possible for anyone to both create audio and distribute it wherever they need to get it.
