In December I hinted of plans for Total Hotspots to build an slick new mobile app, but couldn’t reveal any details about the platform or planned integration. Since then I’ve been busier than ever making these plans a reality with the help of some extremely talented individuals.

The big news is that Rummble and Total Hotspots have entered into a strategic partnership,  to release a hotspot finder for iPhone that’s based upon a combination of the Rummble’s LBS platform, Rummble API and The Global Wi-Fi Hotspots Directory.

The Concept

There’s no other mobile device on the market that’s caused such an enormous impact as iPhone. The platform enables developers to go wild with a blank canvas at their disposal to create dynamic new interfaces and applications that harness to power of the iPhone SDK, with commoditisation of location and “all you can eat” data. The App Store also presented a unique new distribution platform for mobile apps.

Gioel Molinari

During one of the most exquisite lunches of my life at The Fat Duck, courtesy of Micol’s techno-finance wizard brother, Gioel Molinari; we discussed the idea of creating Total Hotspots for iPhone. Our conclusion: that it would be massively useful if the the entire Total Hotspots database could be made available to millions of worldwide iPhone users, in an app that leveraged some of iPhone’s unique new capabilities. The challenge was turning this great concept into reality as quickly as possible without forming a black hole around the company finances.

Making It Happen

Total Hotspots isn’t a big business and unfortunately doesn’t have a bulging R&D budget waiting to throw at the next “blue sky” project. It never received VC funding when bootstrapped in 2004, by me, and a small but experienced team of mentors/advisors, whilst I finished my degree in Business Computing at City University. Consequently Total Hotspots has been forced to remain profitable year-on-year in order to survive.

We could afford to outsource the development of an iPhone app, but certainly couldn’t afford for the project to fail. Raising extra finance really wasn’t an appealing route considering the looming economic crisis.

Whilst in the middle of writing specifications and exploring a variety of outsourcing options, I had a chance encounter with Andrew Scott – Rummble’s cracking CEO – aboard the all signing, all dancing, beer-swilling MySpace bus at FOWA London. (I wonder how many other new start-ups/partnerships emerged from this bus? We should start a Facebook group! )

There isn’t much to separate the large number of local search start-ups, however there are certain unique things about Rummble that really blew me away. With Rummble the focus is upon far more than the quantity of ratings and reviews, and more upon building a solid “trust profile” that taps into your social network; which becomes more accurate as you “feed” it more information. The output is a set of results that better fits your personal taste. Why receive a rating of  9/10 for The Ivy when I only eat at Dallas Chicken? Relevancy is a great way of rewarding users for taking the time to share their opinions.

Intelligent social data filtering is especially important in the mobile world. Even the iPhone, with all its visual funk, shouldn’t have to relay an untamed information “spray hose”. It should intelligently find the best nearby places for you, not a list of top rated aggregate scores from the masses. I had been dreaming of this kind of functionality but thought it would be overkill for Total Hotspots, but  certainly fascinating PhD topic if I were ever to venuture back into academia.

Not long after sitting down with Andrew, and agreeing to push forward with the project, we all went home for Christmas. On the 5th January, probably the most lethargic Monday of the year, I tried getting in touch with the person who had promised to feature the app on the Gadget Show. The program was originally scheduled to film on 19th January and broadcast at the start of the new series in March. They were already in Scotland shooting short sequences – suddenly our deadline seemed to be a ghost!

Rummble are one of the few teams that I’ve come across who have the right combination of talent, agility and motivation; to shuffle everything at the start of a new year and dive head first into a new project with such an outrageous deadline. Our plan was intelligently restructured, quick technical decisions were made and the “things you can’t do” book torn up. Everyone involved worked overtime to have a prototype ready for filming in Edinburgh on 12th January.

Since then the app has been thoroughly tested to make it launch stable, and the Rummble API is being more tightly integrated at Total Hotspots. It’s been very exciting being the first third party to explore the Rummble API over the past few weeks.  What started as a limited set of requirements to support the iPhone app has turned into a much deeper service integration plan that will continue over the next few weeks and months.

The Total Hotspots application has now been rebuilt from the ground up using the latest version of the excellent Agavi PHP Framework, so the development cycles can be cut down to rapidly roll out exciting new features that Total Hotspots users want. To avoid writing War and Peace, I’m going to save the details of for my next post. What I can announce is that our plan (although still not finalised) is to release the PHP REST client that was developed to interact with the Rummble API on an open and non-restrictive license. This should make it much quicker for future projects to harness the power of Rummble’s API with PHP.

The Launch (work in progress)

I will follow up with another post that covers the launch in more depth. We still have some tricks up our sleeve and Andrew also saved me the effort by beating me to the chase on the Rummble blog. The highlights are:

• Apple approved the app less than 48 hours before the Gadget Show broadcast, but reviewed it faster than usually reported. Thanks Apple!
• Within minutes of entering the App Store, various website had automatically listed the app and tweeted a link using an XML/RSS feed from Apple. At this point we wanted to keep the news quiet for a few more hours and hoped that nobody would chance upon these feeds too soon.
• The news was first leaked on Twitter.
• TechCrunched on Friday evening – a big thanks to Mike Butcher for responding quickly to the late breaking news.
• Gadget Show appearance – now available on the FiveFWD website. Total Hotspots helped Wi-Fi to win in a head-to-head vs. 3G at Hadrian’s Wall.
• After 72 hours the app is the 4th most popular iPhone utility! Well, at least it is over here in the UK.
• Plenty of related activity on the website, via email and all over Twitter. A new Facebook Page and UserVoice Community were created.

I’d like to extend another huge thanks to the entire Rummble team. It’s going to be an exciting few weeks and months ahead! I will post all major developments and ideas right here on this blog, and on Twitter. If you’d like to get in touch to discuss the iPhone app and/or Total Hotspots then please don’t hesitate to email or skype me. Your comments are also welcome below. Thanks for reading.

Click here to get Total Hotspots for iPhone from iTunes