This tutorial shows how a company can leverage PointAbout to extend to mobile.
PointAbout is a great way for companies to extend their business or brand to the mobile space with minimal effort and less cost than trying to code to each phone handset, operating system and carrier themselves– let alone the opportunity cost of having programmers working on a non-core project (like coding applications to various phones) vs. core businesses.
I’ve been getting asked this allot. Here is my standard email reply so far….
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/AppleApplications/Reference/SafariWebContent/Introduction/chapter_1_section_1.html
Is where you can learn about style guides as they pertain to safari within the iphone.
An even easier approach is to you popular toolkits out there that account for all those guides within their templates. All you have to do is apply them to your sites data sets.
1) http://code.google.com/p/iphone-universal/downloads/detail?name=UiUIKit-2.1.zip&can=2&q=
2) http://code.google.com/p/iui/downloads/list
Hope this helps…..
PointAbout is built on the Google App Engine platform. We love experimenting with new technologies and its free, so why not?
It has been a great learning experience for us. Just by usisng the platform we learned allot about database scalability, although it took some arm twisting and mostly by force. After taking the time to think about why they did some thing the way they did we realized what most people do, Google had a great reason and we succumbed to the logic.
The inability to export and back up our data has been frustrating. I know that Google is coming out with one “soon” which I’m sure will be bad ass but since I only could find rumors of the date for release and mere claims that someone has shared some code I figured I would post the one I had to make for us. (I’m not one to wait for perfection, get ‘er done). I know its not perfect, heck its not even that great but I was able to get out data from google datastore and list it in sql. Since PointAbout is a part of the ‘open initiative’ we figured we might as well make it public. Let us know if you have improvements (which I’m sure the far smarter developers out there will).
Datastore Export/DataDump (http://code.google.com/p/pointabout/downloads/detail?name=datadump.py&can=2&q=#makechanges)
PointAbout Beta Testers:
Thanks for your TREMENDOUS response to our beta testing program. We’ve had over 50 Realtors from across the US say they want to beta test PointAbout on their iPhones.
Since the demand is so much greater than we expected, we’ve decided to roll out a more formal beta testing program for everyone. Please visit www.PointAbout.com/download for details & to send us a screenshot of your device ID. We may not start you on the beta for 2 to 4 weeks, but we will respond confirming receipt of your information.
Here is a video of PointAbout in action. The user is able to find the nearest Metro station & next train using PointAbout. He also finds homes for sale around him, finds the nearest ATM machine, WiFi hotspots & more.
We just released a video describing what PointAbout is, what it does and how it works.
We’ve enabled our first website client to be location aware through PointAbout’s technology, a popular real estate MLS search tool called TheBestHomeSearchEver.
The mobile version allows users to find homes for sale around them, wherever they are. It’s currently open for beta testing for iPhone users. You can find details about it here.
Welcome everyone, this is Daniel Odio, the COO of PointAbout. This is my first post, and I’m very excited to begin the process of telling you all about some very innovative and exciting things we’re doing at PointAbout.
Let me start by telling you what our mission is – to give websites and web applications their vision.
Here’s what I mean by that: The web is currently blind. That has been OK because the entire web has been blind. It’s as if billions of people are walking around without eyesight. Nobody knows the difference. But PointAbout is changing that. We’re making web applications “location aware” which is akin to giving a website its eyesight.
With PointAbout, a website knows who its users are, and where they are physically located when interacting with the site. For the first time, a website knows if a user is standing on the corner of 5th Ave in NYC or the pier in San Francisco.
It takes a minute to digest the significance of this, since the whole web world has been blind to date. But the possibilities are absolutely astounding.
To date, websites have been charged with giving all their users one consistent message, and web infrastructure has been built this way. So for example, the Walmart.com site looks the same to a user in California or Virginia. PointAbout’s technology means that can change. We allow websites to customize their message based on the user’s location. So a user in San Francisco can see a Walmart site that’s specific to the Walmart stores nearest the user. And that too opens up many new channels through which brands, retailers and web applications can communicate with their users. Once the site knows where the user is, the site can load up specific information to help that user.
If the user is near Walmart store #253, Walmart could show the user a localized version of its inventory management system for that store, meaning the user could see if an item is in stock before going to the store.
But why stop there? We can also tell the website about the user – whatever demographic information the user has chosen to allow us to share with the brand. We can tell the brand if the user is male or female, what their age is, and what their shopping preferences are. So, not only can the brand customize its message to the user based on his or her location, but also based on these other characteristics. Imagine a brand being able to give two users two different messages based on where they are and what they want. Brands can entice users into their stores with messages like “Stop by in the next 15 minutes for 15% off” and much more.
Needless to say, we’re very excited about the possibilities. If you’d like to learn more, just contact us!
A few of us were sitting around and talking about what market we would invest in if we were to start a company…
In just a few clicks we found:
Cellular News reporting that Converged Mobile Device adoption will Reach 82 Million Units by 2011 (today there are 9.6m WW and 4m in US). IDC reporting that the mobile phone market surpassed a record one billion handsets in 2006 (shipped) and the worldwide phone market continuing to grow at a 2006–2011 CAGR of 6.9% to break 1.4 billion units shipped. IDC reporting that new handsets shipped into emerging markets and upgrade handsets in emerging markets and mature markets are driving growth. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster predicting that Apple will ship 45 million GPS enabled iPhones by 2009. Telematics Research Group reporting that 20 million navigation-enabled mobile phones were sold last year and estimating 500 million by 2015. Juniper Research reporting “Global mobile advertising will surpass $1 billion for the first time in 2008, reaching $1.3 billion by the end of the year and increasing to almost $7.6 billion by 2013”.
We also found it interesting that the Location Based Services (LBS) space was incredibly crowded yet no company had cracked the code on the phone…
The next day we were building PointAbout Inc…
