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

So, what’s up?

I spent some time working and playing in the United States – including my first Thanksgiving with my girlfriend’s family in sunny Florida. Throughout I’ve been hard at work developing the next phase of Total Hotspots. It’s been both a busy and fun month!

What’s new?

I can only reveal the general direction of developments at this stage and will provide details on specific features in the next couple of weeks.

To help explain the rationale for these changes, let’s briefly step back to when Total Hotspots launched in 2004. To a time when mass adoption and acceptance of social media was at an early stage. I recall a Total Hotspots requirements session in which we questioned how motivated members of the community would be to contribute feedback about their experiences with pubic wi-fi. The goal of the first version was to make it simple to for individuals for find hotspots. In 2005 MyHotspots was launched, enabling favourite searches and locations to be saved in member profiles; along with location ratings and reviews.

We underestimated the level to which people would be comfortable sharing information. For example, when you add a location to your favourites, it shouldn’t just remain in your profile as a personal bookmark – it should be visible and available for the benefit of others in the community.

Improving the presentation of user generated content has been the motivation behind the majority of design decisions. There’s less point in writing comments about hotspot locations (or anything for that matter), whilst these comments are buried three stacks deep in one of over 150k records. THS has been restructured to ensure user generated content flows higher up the stack, and that quality user contributions get the exposure it deserve.

My vision is for the Total Hotspots community to benefit from interacting with each other in new ways, making it easier to find the best hotspots by connecting with people just like you.

The user interface has also been catapulted into 2009, including improved mapping and shiny ajax goodness!

API coming shortly after…

Finally, shortly after the new totalhotspots.com goes live, a new Total Hotspots API will also be available; enabling a whole host of new applications to integrate hotspot search features! In the past, third parties that integrated Total Hotspots data with their services usually received monthly updates. Using the API, updates should be available as soon as the website is updated, making it simpler for third parties to gain access to the most recent data without the hassle of managing a manual feed.

I’m really excited by the creative opportunity the API provides for creating mash-ups with other useful services. At this stage, I can’t confirm any commercial details, however if you’re involved in a service that could benefit from the hotspots API, or have any cool ideas, then let’s talk!

New mobile hotspot locator.

Back in 2004 Total Hotspots launched a location-aware SMS hotspot locator. The main issue with creating location-based services had always been the cost charged by the network operators for performing a location lookup using cell ID (a unique number assigned to each cell tower), leading to an expensive per-request fee for the end user – especially considering the limited capabilities of SMS and WAP. Despite arousing media interest, there wasn’t enough usage, leading to the mobile service being pulled about a year later.

Fortunately the world has now changed and we’ve gone back to the drawing board. Location is now pretty much a commodity, with new handsets usually providing free access to location information derived from a number of different location provides, including GPS, Cell ID, WPS (Wi-Fi Positioning System) and good old fashioned IP address. I can’t go into further detail at this stage, but can say that I’m really excited that we’ll be launching a new mobile app early in 2009! Watch this space.

The five default Cutline header images were also replaced with some of my own, including:

• a special place in St Andrews…
• the harbour wall next to an incredible lobster hut in Crail, a sleepy fishing village also in the East Neuk.
• peering down the River Coln behind Bibury Court next to the family home in the Cotswolds – some incredible prehistoric vegetation in this shot!
• a stunning sunflower that lives in front of my girlfriend’s parents’ house in Gignese
• a mountainous view over Lago Maggiore from Stresa

With blog design now 99% sorted, content is again King – there are some exciting topics that I plan to write about over the next week.

What do you think of the new design? Please let me know why by clicking the comment button below (no login is required and CommentLuv will automatically link back to your latest blog post if you provide a URL).

Back in July I blogged about the much anticipated soft launch of Facebook’s redesign. The general feedback from Facebook users appears to have been positive and it’s still possible to switch between the new and old design. This gives early adopters the chance to explore new features and report bugs, whilst developers benefit from a valuable insight into how features are actually used; so that informed tweaks can be made throughout the agile development process. According to Mark, over 15 million users have already tried the new design and AV analysis also played an important role in testing.

As an added bonus, the interview is filmed at the Facebook’s office based in Palo Alto, giving a rare insight into a World of snake boarding developers, cinema screen monitors and a what looks to be relaxed but productive working environment. Enjoy the video, courtesy of scobleizer.tv, and please feel free to leave your comments below.

UPDATE 15/09/08 : Feedback may have been positive during the first beta phase, however the scale of the backlash against the new design has been grown significantly since the new design draws closer to becoming the default! The group “1,000,000 AGAINST THE NEW FACEBOOK LAYOUT!” has over 1.7 million members! Crazy.

Mozilla Labs and Adaptive Path have teamed up on a project to create a concept browser called Aurora, which seeks to define new HCI paradigms that could shape the future of how we use the Internet.

The project is still at an early stage, having produced some excellent are conceptual videos but no functional prototypes yet. The first of four videos focuses upon contextual awareness, and despite bearing some hallmarks of a Minority Report design splurge; a great deal of rational design appears to have gone into the forward-thinking user interface. Future videos will cover other design themes including natural interaction, continuity and multi-user applications – followed by a movie!

I’m excited to see how this project develops and expect the combination of great minds at Mozilla and Adaptive Path to give us ample food for thought. If some of these innovative concepts become second nature to millions people over the next few years then the ideas behind them will seem so simple. I find this is usually the way – the simple ideas are often the biggest.

Do you think any of the innovations in the Aurora project have legs, or is this the browsing experience from hell? Please feel free to hit me with your thoughts.

Thanks to Digg Founder Kevin Rose for Tweeting about Aurora.