• There are over 100 million Facebook mobile users.
• Facebook mobile users are twice as engaged as web site only users.
• Facebook have SMS deals with 220 mobile operators!
• Facebook have two versions of their mobile websites, one designed to support touch and another traditional WAP input.
• Some of the most active countries include Indonesia, Kenya and South Africa.
• Hints that the next wave of development comes from deep integration with manufactures – i.e. on home screen, address book. Android developers should look at using “Intents” to hook into other OS or app events (i.e. post photo to Facebook from phone gallery).

• First, the Rummble API isn’t just about putting dots on a maps and retrieving local reviews and ratings. Not only is there a tonne of data at your disposal, but there’s also far more happening under the bonnet. It exposes a powerful trust profile algorithm, which is the product of years of research and coordination with founders in the field of subjective logic and reputation theory, giving developers the flexibility to seamlessly embed personalised relevant content.
• Rummble loves Twitter! Earlier this year we began an experiment called Tremors which scans the Twittersphere for content about locations. We’re now parsing over half a millions tweets per week, with a 90% match rate where a location has been established. Tremors data now forms part of our own core services and API. You can even sort results by tweetiness!
• Rummble recognises that ratings and reviews doesn’t fit into every mobile LBS use case. Users are also free to check-in to locations, and we handle the optional sharing the location updates via Twitter, Facebook and Fire Eagle without further API integrations.
• There are infinite cool new possibilities with the Rummble API and we want you to be creative. We’re a small and dynamic geek-friendly team based in London who have wide open door to developers. Come and visit us for a chat over coffee about your requirements. There are no support charges, and if parts of the API need tweaking then (in most cases) we can add new features upon request.
• You won’t get stiffed with API fees! Be confident that Rummble aren’t cruising for developers to send regular invoices to – we want to work with the most creative technical minds to create engaging social location-based apps and games. Founding members of the Rummble Developer Program will receive numerous benefits in the long term.
• Example code for Java, PHP and C# is currently available to help you breeze through OAuth and start rocking! Get instant access to Rummble’s registered users. Auth via Twitter and Facebook is also supported, which is a much bigger number

I’ll be talking more about the Rummble API at openMIC Mobile Innovation Camp in Guildford on 4th November, and hope to see you there!

The exciting news is that Layar recently announced an API, which cleverly enables third parties to create custom layers (overlays) with their own content, populating Layar (the app!) with a wealth of quality local information.

I’m really excited about the potential for augmented reality. Watch this space!

This made my day and motivated me to make the extra effort to either record future presentations live or from the comfort of the office. Despite having only created a single slidecast, I’m convinced that they have much more value than a silent shared presentation, and would encourage anyone to read the SlideShare slidecasting FAQ and give it a go.

If you haven’t already, please do watch the slidecast and read the related blog post. Feel free to share your feedback, add to your SlideShare favourites and embed the presentation in your blog.

Mashup*

My positive subjective view on the location-based market opportunity were backed up some research stats in Gary Gale’s presentation:

“The (User Location Market) … will nearly triple in revenue this year, to $1.3 billion from $485 million in 2007, and will reach $8 billion in 2011.” – Gartner Research

Here’s a slidecast of my talk (note that this post continues below):Being Location Aware

I sacrificed my slides about privacy to stay within the 5 minute slot, to avoid friendly fire a friendly reminder from Tony Fish. However location privacy emerged as one of the main topics of the evening.

Steven Feldman raised some valid concerns about the current lack of consumer awareness regarding location privacy, and the possible implications of openly geo-tagging data. For example, a geo-tagged photo of your neighbours new Ferrari is posted online and a few days later it vanishes. Will there be a high-profile divorce case based upon evidence obtained from a locaton-aware service? (Maybe location isn’t the real problem in the latter?)

There is now an immense potential to openly share information, and it might not be immediately obvious why and how to be selective about the level of information to share openly. Among the benefits of sharing “private” location information are more dynamic social and contextually relevant services.

Sharing doesn’t always occur across completely open channels. Here are some ways in which location privacy is/should be managed:

• Gary Gale and Ed Parsons explained that Yahoo! Fire Eagle and Google Latitude both work on an opt-in basis. In other words, by default your location isn’t shared with everyone. Most traditional holders of private information instead require you to opt-out.
• Granular privacy controls should be easy to use and tightly integrated with leading location provider services. Per application, this should include:
  • who – which groups or individuals (similar to Facebook friend groups).
  • location accuracy – exact location, current town/city or hide location.
  • time – colleagues can find you within working hours, but not on evenings and weekends.
• Information about places you’ve been is usually less sensitive than your current location. A location “trail” is however quite sensitive, but could be the key to more contextually relevant services and hyper-local advertising.
• Rummble CEO, Andrew Scott, pointed out that the location-based service industry should avoid fuelling (often inaccurate) tabloid horror stories by continuing to develop a solid privacy foundation while focusing upon the benefits of sharing information with location-aware services and how to use them effectively.

Thanks to the entire mashup* team including Tony Fish, Simon Grice, Emma Jell; and to Robert Jones from Bluefire Consultancy for taking photos of the event.

The event has also been blogged by Gary Gale, Ed Parsons, Steven Feldman and mashup* event.

And finally, here’s Mr T’s view on mobile (unfortunately embedded video isn’t yet supported by SlideShare):

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

Whatever happens at MacWorld, you know the hype machine is working in overdrive when sites such as hastheapplekeynotestartedyet.com exist (via @JofArnold)!

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

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.

This is by no means a rushed attempt at embracing yet another technology or social media channel, such as Twitter, Facebook or MySpace. This iPhone app contains a number of advanced features designed to streamline the flow of relevant information and services to Obama supporters.

The local events and get involved features leverage the iPhone’s location awareness (using either GPS, WPS or Cell ID) to find nearby campaign events and offices. Unfortunately no results were returned over here in London, but that isn’t much of a suprise… 

Another highly innovative feature enables you to call friends directly from the application in order to canvess their vote. If you get suck on key issues during a conversaion then of can simply refer to the issues feature that lists Obama’s views on key points such as healthcare, education or defence. This is almost perfectly executed, to the point that contacts are ordered by state so that swing states can be prioritised. However, unfortunately my friend list wasn’t populated until I added a US state to a contact in my address book. So, if your contacts don’t all have full addresses then the feature is very limited. It would be excellent if the entire address book could be displayed and updated as you assign people to states – further populating the contacts that the same time… 

Aside from the above killer features, the app includes news and media updates with links straight to YouTube performances.

To ensure the Obama iPhone app is even more widely distributed, I think it should also provide viral features to help spread the applications amongst connected iPhone users. For example, allow the user to select known iPhone users from their contacts lists and email them with an link formatted for the app store. 

Functionality aside, the Obama iPhone app is a great example of mobile interface design that provides a consistent experience with a supporting website, whilst maintaining the polished interface elements to which iPhone users are now accustomed.

There was no room from disappointment however, since literally just a couple of hours prior to the Lets Rock event I received a call from a cheerful Apple representative who informed me that the Total Hotspots application has been approved. This post is a follow up to my previous observations about the iPhone Developer Program application process. At that point I was slightly concerned about the prospect of waiting a long time for an answer. Despite the overwhelming popularity of the iPhone Developer Program, it only took a little over 6 weeks to hear the result of our application. If you recently submitted an application or are planning to do so, then there shouldn’t be any cause for concern – Apple do seem to have it under control.

Today is was also announced that 100,000,000 iPhone apps have already been downloaded from the App Store, surly making it among the fertile ground for mobile developers right now.

Fortunately we can now proceed with the bulk of the development process. More details will follow soon and a selection of registered Total Hotspots members will be given the first chance to preview what should be an extremely useful new tool for mobile computing.