Logitech Squeeze Remote for Android

Not a lot of people seem to know that Logitech support an awesome streaming audio server open source project called Squeeze Center. It nicely brings together audio from various sources and make it available to players on your local network. I've been especially liking the ease at which I can switch from my own media collection, to some streaming radio from anywhere on the globe, and then over to music from last.fm. All from a piece of consumer hardware.

Since I always have my Android phone on me (and don't want to carry around a logitech remote), it seemed only natural to start working on a remote client for Android. Last week we released the finished product called Squeeze Remote for Android. Similar to the hardware remote, it will auto-discover all your Squeeze players and allow you to fully control them. You can select tracks from your music library or select a streaming radio source. Download it now from the Android market place.

Shoutmob goes ahead!

In March the management team at jTribe was away to plan our future activities. The session was pretty much 3 guys away and drinking wine in the country side.

One of the things we decided at jTribe was that we want to progress with shoutmob. Shoutmob is our offering for developers to support any mobile app with service-side building blocks and services like high-score persistence, push-messages to the app and app error submission back to the developer.

jTribe is currenly beta testing heavily and we use shoutmob in all our apps for iPhone and Android. I love it and cannot wait to open it up to the public soon.

Twitter Trends with Google Mashup

My RSS feeds are great but these days I get the latest information via twitter before I see it in my feeds reader. Twitter has released Twitter Top 10 Trends and I have to admit I spend much too much time browsing the current trends. I like to see and learn new stuff. But sometimes the hashtags in twitter just throw me or some topic that I do not know what it actually is.

Hey, how about using Google to find out about a particular trend.

That is the basic idea of Twit Trends. Twit Trends is a new iPhone utility app that mashes up Twitter's top 10 Trends with Google search. Now I can be wherever and quickly find out about latest trends and what their background is.

Twit Trends is US $0.99 and available on the AppStore. http://itunes.com/apps/twittrends

Twitter Trends browser:Twit Tuner now on AppStore

Twit Tuner - a tiny utility app for the iPhone that opens the window into the Twitter Universe.

We have release a tiny app that allows to browse the latest top ten twitter trends. It's a little radio style utility app that lets you see the current twitter trends and "tune into" each trend. See what is happening "right now".

It's quite addictive to check out the latest trends. See the bizarre and dynamically changing trends.

The idea for the app came from my last blog entry "What's happening now and where - Twitter knows"

Twitter has now the critical mass to be a real trend barometer. Twitter propagates news faster than any news media.

Twit Tuner is not a twitter client like Tweety, TwitterFon or Twitteriffic. You can't add your account details. It's a tool for anyone and therefore no twitter account is required.

I use Twit Tuner just to have a quick peek into the Twitter'verse. It takes me 10 seconds to check out the trends. If I would also see all the new tweets from my friends then it would take me 5 min. So I though it would be a good idea to have a dedicated Twitter Trend app - and here it is. Get Twit Tuner for free here.

What is happening Now and Where? - Twitter knows

The last couple of weeks made me realise the journey twitter went through and the value it offers to us in times where information needs to travel fast. In times where we ask the questions "What is happening Now and Where?"

Twitter 1.0 - What are you doing

twitter as a platforms is very generic and it gets more and more shaped by the way people are using.

In the early days of twitter they had a huge problem explaining what it is. What are you doing? was a good attempt to explain it. 

Twitter 2.0 - What is happening now

With the introduction of the @user and #tag twitter made a huge leap. Re-tweeting (RT) and via are another etiquette that emerged in twitter. All these concepts were organically introduced by the users. Twitter just provides the platform and infrastructure and, above all, came up with the awesome concept of twitter.

Since the #bushfires in Australia I really did realise the power of twitter. One of the problems and one of the reasons so many people died was that information could not travel fast enough to the people in the effected areas. The official channels like radio, television did fail. The fire just travelled too fast. I live close to the area that was destroyed by the bushfires and we were very nervous looking for information about the situation. Unfortunately, I lost trust in the official channels very soon. No reliable info anywhere. Actually, the best quality information was provided by twitter. 

Last night we had an #earthquake in Melbourne, Australia. And I did not notice it myself because we just left a concert venue and walked on the streets. However, I checked my twitter account (while walking on the street on my iPhone - I know that's sick) and 4 seconds after it happened people twittered about it already. People 10,000 km away knew it seconds later (@scobleizer). It took the radio stations 15 - 20 minutes to send out the news. The government website that reports on earthquakes (http://www.ga.gov.au/urban/projects/20011024_35.jsp) was down 2 minutes after the event (as @bootload said, it was slashdotted). So we cannot rely on governments (web) services to give us information. We start to rely on twitter. But how reliable is twitter infrastructure?

Hey, that is impressive. News travels so fast on twitter (seconds after the event happened). And the whole following approach ensures that in most cases "noteworthy" information is passed through twitter. 

As good as twitter is to propagate crucial news as unreliable it is. Search works very unreliably. The service must improve because twitter is now becoming an "essential service" a service we all will rely on to get information fast. Such a service must be reliable. It must be as realiable as service from Google or Amazon I dare to say it must be even more reliable than Google and Amazon. Because it can save lives. In the bushfire situation the fire travelled with up to 120 km/h - on twitter information can travel faster. I definitely used twitter during the bushfires to get high quality, up to date information. And users like @bushfires did an awesome job in consolidating the information (a service whipped up by @BeauGiles)

Twitter 2.1 - "What is happening now and Where"

Last week I did write an iPhone app that integrates Geo location with twitter and brighkite. But I think I need to go back to the drawing board. Twitter 2.0 - hmm. There must be a way to extend that with the help of geo-enabled mobile phones. A way to say

"What is happening Now and Where"

Beta Testers Required for iPhone Geo App

We are currently developing a Geo app for the iPhone called GeoPeep. As part of the development process we would like to invite Beta users who are interested in Geo aware apps and live in US, Brazil, Germany or Australia.

GeoPeep is a personal location broadcaster for social mobile users.

It integrates with multiple social networks like Twitter and Brightkite. The location will be determined via the location services on the phone Cell tower, Skyhook or GPS.  We then turn the geo code into a human readable address which can be sent to various websites. Broadcasting a location via twitter and brightkite is not always what a user wants to do. Sometimes sending an Email or  Text/SMS with the location is more appropriate. Email will be included from day one. TXT/SMS capability will come later.

The long-term goal is to build a tool for sharing and updating  a location from anywhere to any social network or web site from the iPhone or an Android phone. 

A user should be able to quickly add context information around the location that is specific for the social network site (e.g. when the location is tweeted the user wants to add a note what they are doing at that location). 

We are currently focusing on usability tests to make it very easy and efficient for the user to update a location on the go. 

If you want to take part in the Beta for GeoPeep just leave a comment of email support [at] firepin.com

Tools for iPhone Campaigns

This week I really, really appreciated some of the tools we developed in the last 2 month to support our iPhone apps. These server-side tools helped me so much with this week's mission:

This Week's Mission:

The bushfires in Victoria / Australia made me think what we could do to help. We decided to donated all money made with the sales of our iPhone apps to charity. 

This was a great non-commercial driver to convince people to buy our apps . I have to say I am much more motivated to use marketing tactics when it is for a good cause.

What I wanted 

We have in average 500 daily users using our paid app GeoUpdater for iPhone and 1000 daily users using our free app Firepin Trip Tracker. It would be great to tell all these users about our mission.

Here are some key functions I used for marketing of the iPhone app

1. Sending push messages to users via our paid apps to let them know that they can donate money to the red cross in Australia.
   
2. Sending messages to user via our free apps to ask them to buy our paid app.
3. Tracking in realtime how many people have actually bought the app so I can donate every night the right amount.
4. Tracking in realtime how many people are actually using the app.

How can I get what I want?

Unfortunately, Apple does not provide realtime download data or even usage analytics, not to mention push messages. The trend reports are 10 hrs delayed. Not very useful for a short-term campaign. 

Fortunately, jTribe did build a server-side infrastructure that we already use for all our iPhone and Android apps. These services can send information from the apps to a central server and vice versa. All these tools and services will soon be available to other iPhone, Android and S60 developers via ShoutMob 

So, how did the Campaign go?

Actually, the campaign is still going and it is going OK.  So far we raised around $400 in 4 days from one app.

The Tools I used

They key tool was our push message tool. 

The Firepin and GeoUpdater iPhone apps display a message to the users each time they are using the app. The message comes directly from our server and is displayed in a very subtle and non-intrusive manner. The push message mechanism gives us all analytical information about number of unique users and usage. This is similar to what the ad networks like admob are doing but with the difference that we are in complete control of what gets displayed to the users.

The push messages can be controlled from a web page and each app can have a different message. Actually, we can send different messages based on device type, app version or language. 

So I have configured a message for the Firepin app (our free GPS tracker) to tell users about our campaign and our other iPhone app (Latitude) that raises money for charity.

Then I configured a message for Latitude (paid app that raises money) to tell people that they can donate money at the red cross website. 

I can now check in realtime how the campaign is going. Let me do it right now... nice, just raised another $10 since I started writing this blog. 

Other Thing to consider in a Mini-Campaign

1. I updated the text in the AppStore to let "new" buyers know that we will donate the money. 
2. I updated the picture with a slogan that about our mission. Honestly, I think that did not attract more people. I even think it might have turned some people off. Not sure whether I would do that again. 
3. I twittered and blogged about it

So, did it work?

Yes, yes, yes. We did make it to #4 of paid apps in the Navigation category in Australia and #16 in US. I cannot describe how happy I am to have the shoutmob tools available to use. Currently, the shoutmob tools are still in private beta (actually, we use it only internally at jTribe) but we work hard to make them available to the public soon.