Chattp (Chatup) is a new service straight out Harmonypark's Sandpark lab that lets you add realtime chat to the sites you are viewing through your browser.
To use Chattp you just type in a url and Chattp will chattify your page by augmenting your browser window to add in a realtime chat panel to the left hand side of the window.
Anyone you share a Chattp link with for a specific page or website will be able to participate in that chat, and each link is unique, so multiple chats can take place on any particular url.
Have a play and feel free to share it around. No login is required to use Chattp.
We gave a presentation at The Hospital Club on How We Make Apps And Services as part of their "And Then The World Presents " event, a monthly talk exploring the latest innovations in the creative industry.
The audience was a mix of creative/technical types, planners from the advertising industry and brand managers. We hope they now have an interest (if they didn't already) in how an agile/lean approach can also benefit those outside of the startup community.
This slideshare deck tries to capture some of the ad-libbed stuff into a readable online format.
If you're not familiar with the concept of the Minimum Viable Product made famous by Eric Ries, or the simplicity and benefits of introducing A/B Testing, this will hopefully serve as a simple to understand introduction.
As a company we have definitely benefitted from bringing these principles to bare on what we do, be it making apps, web services, product ideation or creating online x offline type installations and experiences.
The main takeout is that testing can actually be a lot of fun when instead of just coming up with ideas you are also tasked with playing around with different variations and putting them out there and comparing efficacy, which happens a lot with startups, but not enough with agencies that market more established businesses.
It's been a big undertaking, but today we have launched Thrive, our new online tool for managing tasks, teams and time.
Businesses make and lose money in the present, not the past. Thrive helps you to estimate, schedule and manage work across your team via personalised daily todo lists that allow you to track tasks & time against budgets, scopes & deadlines in realtime.
We've got a 60 second video above to help explain it all.
There are already some really cool companies working across different creative disciplines who are using Thrive, and we're now looking for more companies to come on board and try it out.
Thrive is based upon the premise that no matter what business you are in, time is the window through which you experience the world, and as a business asset it is perishable.
Thrive will help you to plan how you use the time you have available across your team with a view to improve the way you spend it to achieve the goals of your business.
If you are a professional service firm and treat time as billable this is of fundamental importance to pay attention to. If you make products then you have to manage how you leverage the time you have to make the best products possible.
Thrive creates a personalised daily todo list for each user which is called a 'Today List'. When you manage a project with Thrive you schedule tasks to your users and these tasks appear on each persons Today List based on what deadlines are coming up and what jobs they are assigned to work on.
Work is scheduled using a Liquid Time philosophy to visualise how to allocate tasks across your team based on what time they have available. This helps you answer the often murky "when can we do something by?" question.
As a Thrive user completes tasks on their Today List new tasks are added to the list based on the remaining time in each working day. As tasks are completed your project plans are updated automatically and in realtime to reflect the amount of work that has been done and what is still to go. This means that your project plans are always in sync with reality, and not a dangerously out of date sketch of it.
In a business sense Time = Money and in a scientific sense if you can't measure something you can't hope to control it. This is where Thrive steps up and gives you the tools to take control of the business you work in and to better focus the way you spend your day to achieve the goals and deliverables you have in your sights.
Thrive helps you migrate from the reporting paradigm of looking back at what happened to being able to see what is about to happen across your projects and your business. Armed with this insight you are better able to determine how to best spend the time you have to make sure that potential profits never become definite loses.
You can use it within your company as well as with freelancers and external partners who can log in regardless of their timezone or location. This helps to integrate and streamline the way you work, no matter who you choose to work with. You can also control how much or how little each user can see or do.
We feel that simplicity is important too so with Thrive you enter a task only once and we help you manage it from estimating time and cost through to building scopes of work that can be scheduled to create a timing plan of work that is then assigned to a users, tracked for progress and profit margin and then analysed for improving future process and performance.
We all hate filling out time sheets too and that is why with Thrive they become a by-product of ticking off items on your Today List instead of silly forms that you have to fill out long after you have forgotten what it was you were working on.
We're also hard at work on our roadmap of where we see the app heading over the next 12 months, and we'd like to get your feedback on board to help inform how we progress.
Calling our app famous is an exaggeration, but if you are reading this post because of the headline you have just learnt a valuable lesson about getting your own app noticed.
Chatterbucks has however been posted to the App Store homepages of iTunes US, UK, Across Continental Europe, Latin America, India and more, so it has bubbled up to the surface from a sea of other apps.
Now for the actual lessons/tips for improving your odds of creating an iPhone App success
Lesson 1 - Simplicity stands out in a crowd
The common predicament of the app maker is that they have loads of great features that they want to show off, but there are only a few pixels initially available to achieve this.
Think of a billboard on the side of a motorway with people wizzing past in their cars. If you try to sell all of your benefits in the handful of seconds available you will clutter the message to the point of incomprehension (in a semiotic sense saying everything at once is equal to saying nothing at all).
We tried to reduce our idea (and its icon) to the essence: Money + Talking +Playful.
We also looked at the colour-rich and vector-dense icons we had to compete with and designed something that was the opposite. As you can see on the above App Store screenshot, our icon really stands out in a group of icons by visually saying less.
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Lesson 2 - Give people something to be curious about
Colonel Sanders had his secret herbs and spices. Coca-Cola have their secret recipe ingredient known as 'X'. What have you got?
In our case we have Natural Feature Tracking AR which allows you to augment 2D images (logos, illustrations, pictures, packaging etc) without needing a barcode/glyph/marker, so we wanted to let people know that our app has a special ingredient in the mix too.
There isn't a standard icon for the kind of advanced computer vision technology we put into a users fingertips, so we made our own. People kind of know what AR means, so we went for a simple 'AR+'. The text then sits in between two colour ribbons which symbolise the layer it augments between you and reality.
The important thing is that you signify somewhere within your promo material that your app has something new/different going on that will tap a potential user's curiosity.
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Lesson 3 - Create promotional content that others can leverage for mutual benefit
When we launched we posted a video on Youtube and within a few minutes an AR Blog had picked it up and added the video to a post. This lead to a mention and video embed in Die Zeit (The New York Times of Germany). We also had a mention on THE NEXT WEB with our video included (after we contacted them). This started the ball rolling.
By creating promotional tools (like videos) that bloggers and other press can spice up their content with you are greatly increasing your chances of receiving a writeup.
If you write a press release, keep the tone informal. Journalists like dealing directly with the creators and developers of apps, so share your new invention as you would with a friend in a bar and not in what you perceive to be the correct PR speak.
Another thing to think about is that mainstream press look to more obscure niche sites and sources to see what trends are bubbling up, so target the niche sites and try to get mentioned there, rather than hitting the reception desk of a big media entity where you are unlikely to get a call back or an email opened unless you are previously known to someone on the inside.
The thing to remember is that somewhere out there, someone is responsible for discovering and sharing the new new thing with their audience. Seek these people out. Look for who has recently posted on a topic that relates to you, and try starting with them.
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Lesson 4 - Invest some time to make your App Store images look enticing
When we first released Chatterbucks to the iTunes App Store the last thing we got onto was making the screenshots look good.
It wasn't that we didn't care how our app was presented, but like anyone making an app, it takes so much work to create the initial product that you are a little burnt out by the time it comes to add the polish to make your app look enticing in-store.
Our first round of promo images sucked. They were basically random screenshots from within the app that gave a potential customer no idea of how the app worked in the real world (Chatterbucks is an AR app, so context is crucial).
When we swapped in some glossier app promo images that gave more context to a potential customer of how the app worked (in our case this meant showing the app whilst someone was using it in real life) our sales immediately jumped by 300%!!.
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Lesson 5 - You need to help Apple/iTunes discover you
A few days after we launched Chatterbucks there was an in-store feature on AR apps, but we weren't on the list. We obviously wanted to be added because not only did we tick the Augmented Reality box, we went way further with our markerless tracking powers.
We contacted iTunes and asked how we could flag our app as being AR enabled, but we heard nothing back. A few weeks later we received a mail asking us to provide some promo assets. We made them and sent them over, but nothing came of it. A few weeks after this we turned up one day on the UK iTunes homepage as a New & Noteworthy app. From there Chatterbucks has spread pretty quickly to other iTunes App Store homepages around the world as a Staff Favourite.
We are under no false assumptions that this part of the equation was truly ours to influence, but if we hadn't followed up on a genuine app-related question, we might not have made it onto the radar of someone whose responsibility it was to help innovative new apps bubble up from obscurity.
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Everybody will have a different experience. Hopefully by sharing ours you might be in a better postion to improve your own. If you have any other useful tips/lessons learned based on your own experience feel free to post them as a comment below.
London tech startup Specle have just signed a deal with Associated Newspapers that allows any of their classified readers to upload and prepare content for press free of charge.
The deal will enable classified customers to upload files for publication in the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday and Mail on Sunday 2, via Specle's online ad spec database specle.net.
The Specle deal with Associated Newspapers has created a 'self service' classified portal where the sender can upload, preflight, colour convert, store and manage all their ads and in this case it's completely free for the classified sender.
The advantage for publishers outsourcing classified production is that they no longer have fixed costs in their business to handle all variety and types of PDF that come in from senders.
A publisher can now outsource to Specle, who will handle the process to ensure that only perfect files come to the publisher – with GWG job tickets – that can go straight into the flat plan.
Money talks, as the old saying goes, but with Chatterbucks it really does.
Chatterbucks brings true, high-quality, Markerless Augmented Reality to the phone and the notes in your pocket. Just point your iPhone 4 or 3GS camera at the Queen's portrait on any £5 or £10 banknote and see what Her Majesty has to say.
Chatterbucks comes pre-loaded with tongue-in-cheek quotes, ironic witticisms, fun facts, and makes for the perfect conversation ice-breaker.
You can even surprise your friends by entering your own personalised messages for Her Majesty to proclaim.
[US dollar and Japanese yen currency support coming soon]
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Markerless Augmented Reality technology for the iPhone.
Chatterbucks was developed by Harmonypark + Sam Hare and involves our own cutting-edge, mobile Markerless (natural feature tracking) Augmented Reality technology, allowing Chatterbucks to work on normal English pound sterling banknotes, with no special marker image required.
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Some of the Key points about our Markerless AR technology for iPhone are:
1. Our Markerless Augmented Reality, can work on any image. No more ugly markers, it can even work with existing marketing material/packaging. Currently only 1 other company with apps in the App Store are doing this on the iPhone.
2. We have high framerate tracking, significantly faster than existing iPhone Markerless AR approaches. The result is a smoother and more compelling AR experience.
3. We have unparalleled responsiveness and stable 3D pose estimation, meaning augmented graphics stay tightly locked to the physical object during motion, and don’t jitter when stationary. Again, the result is a more compelling AR experience (though our Chatterbucks demo video isn’t a great illustration of this as it involves someone who has drunk way to much coffee holding the tracked object!).
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If you would like to find out more about this platform or how you might use it for your own company, campaign or content please get in touch.
We've just put our Spanish Video Phrasebook for iPhone on an end of summer sale. The app helps you learn a new language with Text, Audio and Video teaching methods, making it far superior to other language apps out there.
It is normally USD$5.99, but for a short period you can buy it for just USD$0.99c.
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Lingobabes Spanish Video Phrasebook demo
It has been proven that a new language is more likely to be memorable if you're enjoying the process, and your mind is having multiple senses stimulated as you learn each phrase.
We've taken these concepts and added some extra spice to evolve the tedious task of language translation and memorisation into something fun and playful to learn (Senor Chang would definitely support this).
All phrases are in Spanish with English Translations, but like any language, it is as much about how you say somehting as what you say. With video, learning non-verbal Spanish is now made possible
All of the tutorial clips are loaded to your device so you don't need to use data or wifi to access them when travelling.
Yesterday, we were really excited to see Travelstormer launch - it is co-owned by Harmonypark, and developed by us (mostly by Ebony), and we're pretty excited to see it go live. I really think Travelstormer sums up what we do best as a company, and also as an industry as a whole - taking tangible, real life problems like organising a holiday with friends, and using technology to make them easier.
From what I can see, this attitude is one shared by Google (ignoring Wave for the sake of argument). Their acquisition of ITA, as announced today, seems like a pretty exciting turn of events for those of us with an interest in online applications related to travel. Obviously, it's pretty vindicating to see the most successful technology company in the world take an interest in the same sector we're betting on with our little app. However, I'd also bet that in the future, there might also be some fairly solid positive externalities to come out of this for those of us involved in the online travel sector.
Google's mission statement - "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible
and useful" is exactly what's at play here - as Marissa Mayer, VP Search and User Experience says on their blog:
While online flight search is rapidly evolving, we think there is room for more competition and greater innovation. Google has already come up with new ways to organize hard-to-find information like images, newspaper archives, scholarly papers, books and geographic data. Once we’ve completed our acquisition of ITA, we’ll work on creating new flight search tools that will make it easier for you to search for flights, compare flight options and prices and get you quickly to a site where you can buy your ticket.
This is really exciting stuff for anyone who uses air travel at all, but I also think it's going to be great for technologists and entrepreneurs working in the same space. To see why, it's worth looking at Google's history of acquisitions, and seeing how they have been informed by this broad strategy of facilitating universal access to information.
I think the list of companies acquired by Google can be split up into a few distinct categories. There's the companies (mostly startups) who have a going concern in a field in which Google does not currently have a presence who are bought up, and essentially carry on providing that same service, sometimes under a Google logo, sometimes not. Here, I'm thinking of sites such as Youtube, Blogger, as well as things like Google Docs and Google Analytics (originally Writely and Urchin stats, respectively). These acquisitions tend to diversify Google's interests - giving them a stake in a market in which they didn't previously have an interest.
Secondly, there's the acquisitions of competitors, or companies that have technology or IP that is of use to a current active business interest of Google's. This includes most of their purchases of search and advertising companies, and serves to entrench their positions within these markets.
However, there's a third category that I think spans these two, which I think the ITA purchase fits into quite nicely - This consists of those companies with a large base of information and knowledge which would constitute a massive public good if only the public had access to it. Ultimately this strengthens Google's core business - Search - as well as benefiting the public through all the externalities that unfettered (and easy, thanks to Google's existing search technology) access to this information brings. It's a win-win for Google and us as consumers (modulo the obvious privacy issues with some types of data), with only those with an interest in restricting access to that information losing out. The best example of this to my mind is Google maps (along with Earth and Streetview), which has revolutionised the way we access geographical information.
This revolution happened in two ways - The fact that Google made the physical world as searchable as the online world with their own maps application (which even shared the familiar interface of their web search tool) is undoubtedly a massively important feat. However, beyond this, Google maps created value from that sort of information by providing APIs for other people to build upon the service it offers, allowing developers and businesses to build a geographical component into their own applications. As a result we've seen massive growth in location-based web services, and a surge in interest in GPS and related technologies, as evinced by Wired UK's excitement over services such as Foursquare and Gowalla last month.
A similar strategy informed Google's forays into indexing public data in the US, and challenging the hegemony of Westlaw and Lexis Nexis by indexing legal decisions as part of its Scholar service. If I'm correct, and Google's acquisition of ITA is a reflection of the same strategy, that of profiting through encouraging access, I'm confident that we'll start seeing Google providing APIs to access flight and travel data, something that provides loads of exciting opportunities for those of us who are building travel-related online services.
The excitement of going somewhere new and spending quality time with friends and family shouldn't be dull and boring to plan. It should be social and fun.
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Travel pains/problems come from mixed opinions on where to go/what to do, group confusion about who's available or not, and indecision once some initial ideas are on the table (not to mention hundreds of emails with links and incomplete conversations split across email, Skype, Facebook etc).
Wouldn't it be amazing if you could brainstorm travel ideas with your friends, seek input on where to go and what to do from your social connections on Twitter and Facebook, and then smoothen the decisions/bookings process with a single app?
Travelstormer has stepped up to do just this. Travelstormer helps people Unravel Group Travel with online brainstorms to generate travel options and ideas, the ability to crowd source travel tips and suggestions via Twitter and Facebook and a group decision-making process to help you avoid the problem of too many travel options and not enough clarity on which ones to choose.
