Archive for Technology

PointAbout Extends iPhone Accelerometer to Web

December 1, 2008 at 9:14 pm · Filed under Development, Technology

PointAbout just announced today that it has extended the functionality of the iPhone’s accelerometer to the web.

This means that clients who use PointAbout to distribute their web applications as native iPhone applications will have access to the accelerometer functionality of the phone. (To learn more about private-labeling PointAbout’s springboard for your mobile website click here.)

This is quite significant because the accelerometer information is not typically accessible to websites. However, with PointAbout acting as the “bridge” between the phone itself and the web, clients are now able to do all types of innovative things, such as:

- determine where the user is physically standing (latitude & longitude, or we can reverse-geocode to the nearest physical mailing address)

- determine the unique device ID of the phone (so you’ll know when a phone is returning to your site after having been away; this can also be used as log-in credentials)

- phone vibration feature; allows you to make the phone vibrate when certain actions are taken by the user

- accelerometer functionality, as shown in the video above, from the user’s phone to your website, wrapped with PointAbout’s thin-client springboard!

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PointAbout Wins 11 Awards in AppsForDemocracy Contest

November 13, 2008 at 4:31 pm · Filed under News Flash, Technology ·Tagged , ,

PointAbout was just notified by the Office of the CTO of Washington, DC and Mayor Fenty that we have won the Silver medal + 10 others for our AppsForDemocracy submissions.  You can find all the medal winners here.

 
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Daniel R. Odio, COO of PointAbout above with Washington, DC Mayor Adrian M. Fenty

Here is a video of the entire awards ceremony:


(PointAbout mentioned in minute 14 of the video above)


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Our thoughts on why PointAbout is so needed

October 30, 2008 at 7:19 pm · Filed under LBS Thoughts, Technology ·Tagged ,

Our goal is to get our users to the “How did I live without this?” moment.  But that can be hard to see before-hand.  For example, people lived just fine without cellphones, but can you imagine living without one these days?  Our goal is to accomplish the same thing by overlaying the virtual world over the physical world.  

This video will explain what we mean with a specific example.  Daniel Odio, one of our co-founders, had to get the oil changed in his car.  Now, the real question is, when you’re driving down the street, why don’t you have immediate access to know:

  1. What oil change places are around you
  2. What each one of them would charge you for an oil change, and
  3. (most importantly) Which one of them wants your business the most?

Take a look at the video to see in more details how we’re planning on resolving this issue…

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PointAbout’s First Branded Application

October 24, 2008 at 4:03 pm · Filed under News Flash, PointAbout Applications, Technology ·Tagged , , ,

PointAbout just released its first private-labeled application, called “DC Alerts”.  This video shows the differences between the regular PointAbout application and the branded version.

The beauty of our branding approach is that it allows your business to quickly & easily “mobilize” your brand across multiple phone platforms, which right now include the iPhone, with BlackBerry and Android in testing, and WindowsMobile, Symbian and others to follow.  We will have BlackBerry released within 2 weeks with other phones rolling out over the next 90 days.

All your business has to do is code to HTML, just like you’ve been doing.  PointAbout takes care of the rest. All of the infrastructure investment you’ve put into your website or web application can be leveraged in the PointAbout application. We pass you the pertinent user information from the phone, including latitude & longitude, city, state & zip, the device ID, accelerometer information, etc.  You can then use this information in your website, which is now “location aware”, because you are sitting inside the PointAbout thin-client springboard.

You also get the added benefit of having the PointAbout Application Gallery included, which vastly increases the stickiness and usefulness of your private-labeled application.  You can filter which applications are included in the Gallery, so complimentary applications can be included to enhance the value of yours.

For more information or to discuss a specific implementation of PointAbout for your business, please Contact Daniel Odio at Daniel.Odio@PointAbout.com or 202.250.3846.

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PointAbout Coming for BlackBerry!!!

October 21, 2008 at 9:41 pm · Filed under Development, Technology ·Tagged , , ,

We’ve been busy porting the PointAbout Thin-Client Springboard to our 2nd device, the BlackBerry.  We’re almost done with it, and we already have several clients lined up who want to have us make them location-aware on the BlackBerry.  We’ll definitely have it out within 2 weeks but it might be even sooner.  If you have a BlackBerry and would like to be a beta tester, we’d love to hear from you at Feedback@PointAbout.com

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Daniel Odio speaks at Deloitte Tech Venture Center

October 21, 2008 at 8:24 pm · Filed under Technology ·Tagged

Listen to a complete audio transcript of the event here.  Note – the voice recorder was set to pause during silence so some parts were cut out (so sorry!).

Today Daniel Odio was on Deloitte’s Tech Venture Center panel on mobile marketing, along with Jon Jackson of Mobile Posse, Michael Avon of Columbia Capital, and Kevin Bertram of Distributive Networks.  The panel was kindly hosted by Carl Grant of Cooley Godward Kronish, LLP in lieu of Jason Siegel of Qorvis whose wife went into labor the night before!

Thanks to Ellen Mundell of Deloitte for setting this great panel up.

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Our first submission to the “Apps for Democracy” contest

October 17, 2008 at 3:47 am · Filed under Technology ·Tagged

*** PLEASE VOTE FOR OUR APP!!! *** INSTRUCTIONS BELOW.

Here’s a short video showcasing our first entry to iStrategyLabs‘ “Apps for Democracy” contest.  Our first submission is a Realtime, location-aware DC alerting tool for the iPhone, which includes crime reports, building permits and more.  This data is provided by Washington, DC and we’re making it “location aware,” meaning the crime alerts in your area, for example, show up first.

In fact, we can easily location-enable any RSS or XML feed that contains location data, and turn that into an application on the iPhone, and soon Blackberry, with many other phones coming.  If you have an RSS or XML feed you’d like to have behave as a location-aware application, complete with your own custom-branded icon, just let us know!

Click Here To Go Vote For Us!

 

VOTE FOR OUR APP!  IT JUST TAKES 1 SECOND

Our application is featured on the Apps for Democracy website.  

Visit the site and click on the word “VOTE” below the number of votes.  It’s that easy!  Then tell all your friends!  :)

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We’ve been busy – Safari browser now inside the native app

October 17, 2008 at 3:38 am · Filed under Technology ·Tagged

Here’s a 2 1/2 minute YouTube video showing what we’ve been up to.  Needless to say, we’ve been busy!  The PointAbout springboard now has a Safari browser integrated into the application, meaning we no longer have to close the native app and open Safari.  Everything happens inside our application now, which gives us much more control over the process of determining the user’s location and sending that data to the web.

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Where can I learn about UI standards for iphone web development?

September 23, 2008 at 9:32 pm · Filed under Development, Technology ·Tagged , , ,

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…..

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Export Datastore from Google App Engine to MySql

September 22, 2008 at 11:58 pm · Filed under Technology ·Tagged , , , , , ,

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)

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See PointAbout In Action

September 15, 2008 at 4:20 am · Filed under Technology

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.

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PointAbout – How It Works

September 15, 2008 at 4:17 am · Filed under News Flash, Technology ·Tagged

We just released a video describing what PointAbout is, what it does and how it works.

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