Maps are Everywhere; Make Them Useful

So many top consumer and business apps use maps extensively. Think about Yelp (local listings and reviews), Zillow (residential real estate), Loopnet (commercial real estate), Waze (navigation), Foursquare (social), Uber (taxi service) and others.

Mostly these companies are using the Google Maps API or the Bing Maps API to draw maps and put "pins" on various locations.

That's basically it. Two huge providers (Google and Microsoft) are the "default" go-to sources for maps for all startups and tech products.  And there's been little to no innovation here. Maps can be more useful and can be dynamically rendered based on the exact needs of the user (at that moment in time):

 

  • unnamed-3-They can be skewed, morphed, and distorted.  Think about the iconic Disneyland Map. See this incredible map of Queenstown New Zealand that shows the slope of the streets. See these maps by The Atlantic that visualize the world's population.While, historically, a cartographer's life's work might have been to perfectly map, say, the coastlines of South America, today, for most consumer and business applications, nobody cares. The geography isn't sacred.
  • Information can be hidden or shown. See this Google map for "tacos" in San Francisco.  And here it is on Yelp. In both cases, the amount of data being displayed is incredible. And how does it serve the user? Does the user really need to see all of those street names, all of those streets, all of that detail?
  • Typography, landmarks, and roads can be promoted or demoted in visual priority. Bigger or smaller. More black or more gray. The actionable data can be brought to the forefront.

Now, all that said, you wouldn't possibly dare to draw your own maps, from scratch. That would, for most dev groups, be an insane technical challenge and probably a wee bit outside of your company's core focus and competency (I assume you're busy tackling some consumer or business application).

Meet our client, MapSense, a killer-team of Computer Scientists, that is just starting to build mapping technology from scratch. Creating beautiful, actionable, user-centered maps.

For the first time ever, because of advances in technology and crowdsourced map data, it has become economically feasible for a modestly funded startup to do so.

Want to re-imagine how Maps serve your users? Contact us (or Mapsense directly) and get early-access to their product and API.

by Iteration Group

DeviceReady: Test Your Android App Across 25+ Devices

I keep hearing from lots of folks that Android fragmentation is a big problem. When developing apps for Android, you have to consider the various devices, versions of operating system, form factors, etc. Sounds like a nightmare.

I've been thinking lately about one possible partial solution:

A service that enables Android app developers to submit their app and get screenshots of how the app looks and performs across the most popular Android devices.  Not an emulator.  Your app running on each of those devices.

Like Selenium + Browsershots for Android.

To test the concept, I quickly came up with a name (DeviceReady), threw together a landing page using Unbounce, shared the idea on Hacker News, and purchased about $75 worth of Google Adwords.  The results after 3 days:

Pretty good, right?

I think this is a winning idea because:

  • A company serious about their android app really should test it across dozens of devices.
  • Presumably they are spending a lot of money building and testing their app.
  • The cost of the service, at, say $100 per month (5 submissions) or $25 per submission would be negligible.
  • It is unreasonable to think that a small or mid size android dev shop (most of them) would buy dozens of handsets and manually test on each.

by Iteration Group

Idea: Building a Better World Meeting Planner

I'm often having meetings (phone calls, really) with folks on the other side of the planet (Europe, Asia, Australia, etc.). Rather than thinking too much and trying to convert time zones in my head (and inevitably screwing things up), I turn to sites like The World Clock Meeting Planner.

There, I enter my location (Los Angeles), the location of the person with whom I'm meeting (say, Sydney), and it shows me a really useful grid:

Results from The World Clock Meeting Planner.

The green indicates the "safe zone" for scheduling a meeting (the typical working hours, 8AM to 5PM, for each location). So, at a glance, I can see that, say, 3PM to 5PM Los Angeles time would likely work for me and the person I'm meeting with that's in Sydney.

Really useful, but not great.  I'd like something that's better.  Specifically:

  1. Remember my location! Every time I visit World Meeting Planner, I have to re-enter my city (Los Angeles). It should fill this in by default.
  2. Remember my history. While it's I might meet with folks across hundreds of different cities and time zones, it's unlikely. Remember the locations that I've used in the past, and suggest them to me (like a sidebar that allow me to choose a location I've previously used with one-click).
  3. Autocomplete. Allow me to type the first few characters of "Sydney" or "Auckland", and complete it for me. Don't make me scroll through a big ugly list of possible locations!
  4. Be flexible with location names. Let me type "Sydney" or "Auckland" or even just "New Zealand". If it matters (it may or may not depending on the timezones and time of year), force me to choose a specific city or time zone.
  5. Ideally, integrate with Google Calendar. Create a Google Calendar plug-in* or browser extension extension that improves the UI when creating a new calendar item. Allow me to choose a number of locations and see the "safe zones" for meeting. As above, remember the locations that I've used in the past.
Adding an event in Google Calendar. Aside from the fact that this UI could use a lot of work, it would be great to have an integrated world meeting planner.
* Does Google allow plug-ins to Calendar or Google Apps? Does such an infrastructure exist? If so, any good options for monetization? I'm sure something like this could be created and monetized for mobile devices, but what about the desktop?

by Iteration Group

Idea: Screenshot Archive of Home and Landing Pages

Learning about MOAT ad search today (via TechCrunch), I was reminded of a company called Who's Mailing What! that I stumbled into while doing some Zumbox R&D.

Who's Mailing What! is a really simple and useful low-tech idea: scan the direct mail (paper) that's sent to folks around the country.  Make this database browseable and searchable to anyone who might want to see, say, exactly how Geico markets its products to consumers.  Really useful to other direct marketers.

Why not offer something similar for web pages?

Take screenshots, at regular intervals, of home pages and landing pages of leading web companies.

Not just archive.org (too coarse: Spreedly vs. Recurly vs. Chargify)*.  I don't care about links or preserving functionality, I just care about layout, wording, button design, calls-to-action, etc, which have presumably been refined over time by these companies.  Most modern web companies respect that home page and landing page design is "a process of ongoing improvement," and employ analytics and A/B testing tools (like unbounce, which is awesome BTW) to track and increase conversion rates.

I suspect that enlightened web marketers (folks who design home pages, landing pages, manage search engine marketing campaigns, display ad campaigns, e-mail marketing campaigns, etc) would pay for a subscription service that showed them how (and when!) their competitors designs have evolved (again, changes to layout, wording, buttons, calls-to-action, etc.).

* P.S. Any way to link to multiple web pages?  One link opens n pages?  Like how Hipmunk enables you to open multiple tabs on their site?

by Iteration Group

Idea: Recording top web content (plain text) into podcasts

Thinking out loud:

What if you took popular news articles and blog posts and "automatically" converted them into podcasts (using real human beings)?

For example, see this article (popular on TechCrunch and on LinkedIn Today):
Original blog post:
The City By The Meh: Thoughts On Falling Out Of Love With The Valley

Podcast I recorded - click the play button:

Check this out on Chirbit

Create a content factory (using some simple workflow software) whereby a handful of dictators (with great speaking ability) get fed the text content - their job is to speak the text out loud.  Their speech gets recorded and is instantly made available for download to iPods, web browsers, and whatever other devices.  Maybe even other distribution channels like XM satellite radio and Pandora (folks who might want to passively hear the news in the car, at home, at work, etc.)

To start, the task of recording, say, a few hundred podcasts per day would be trivial.  Considering that there would be no "transformation" (that is, the dictator just reads the content aloud; doesn't summarize or anything), each podcast would only take a few minutes to record.

I wonder how this could be monetized and also how the original writers could be compensated?

Works for any country in any language.

by Iteration Group

Haptic Interfaces for the Permanently or Temporarily Blind

Thinking out loud:

We're all aware of mobile phones that vibrate to tell us about a call or a message.  What about other really useful haptic interfaces?  Those that utilize our sense of touch?

 

It seems to me like there should be lots of lots of ways to utilize our sense of touch in situations where folks are temporarily or permanently blind.

Simple case: imagine a person driving a car and turning on his left-turn-signal to indicate a lane change. A camera embedded in the car notices another vehicle that's possibly in the drivers "blind spot."  The car reacts by delivering a short vibrating “buzz” to the drivers lower back (on his left side).  A useful, passive indicator for short-term blindness (doesn't even interrupt his conversation with the passenger!).

 

More extreme case: imagine a blind person approximating sightedness with the use of a simple device. Like the kids toy that is made up of hundreds of tiny silver pins (fun to create a rendering of your hand), a thin device with a large number of “pins” would be placed across the back of a blind person (or whatever part of the human body that is both large and sensitive enough). Paired with a modified GPS device and simple camera, a blind person could walk down the street and have a simplified rendering of his surroundings – there is a street there, another street there, a car is moving along here, a person is walking towards me here (a “scratching” feeling would move from his lower back to his upper back), etc. Given our ability to learn by repetition, I would imagine these haptic cues would slowly become second nature to the blind person and would help inform their behavior and movements.

by Iteration Group

vCard utility for Gmail / Google Apps that auto-imports?

Wondering out loud:

Does anyone know if there is a vCard utility for Gmail / Google Apps?

For those who don't know, vCard (.vcf) is a file format standard for business cards used in lots of apps, both desktop and web-based.

For example, if you're using LinkedIn, you'll see an an icon that lets you easily download a vCard for the contact that you're looking at:

 

If you click on the icon, the vCard file downloads to your computer:

 

In the olden-days when I used Outlook (RIP), I'd double-click to open this file, click Save, and the contact would be added to my Address Book.

These days I use Gmail (well, to be precise, "Google Apps for Business"), and this vCard is basically useless to me.  The only way I can see to get a vCard into my Gmail contacts is to use the Gmail "import" feature:

  1. Download the vCard
  2. Go to Gmail Contacts
  3. Click Import
  4. Locate the file
  5. Click OK

Has someone created a utility to make this easier?  Has someone created a simple Windows app that creates an association between .VCF files and Gmail so that I can just click on a vCard file and, voila, it is automatically added to my contacts in Gmail?

OR, a Browser plugin/extension (Chrome please!) that does something similar?

While I believe that this would be useful to lots of folks out there, I would expect that a utility like this would be especially valuable to all of the corporate customers that are moving to Gmail (from Outlook/Exchange, Lotus Notes, and other "legacy" e-mail systems where vCards are first-class citizens).

by Iteration Group