Buddycloud Blog

I recently got my hands on a OLPC XO (a second hand G1G1). It's a cutie! And the best of all: A display that is usable in the sun. Hello office in the park!

The sugar UI i found a bit strange at first so I decided to set it up to boot Ubuntu from a USB stick, but after having gone through that hassle, I had kind of gotten used to the almost naiive simplicity of the Sugar interface. I rarely boot it to Ubuntu at all anymore...

So now I am sitting in the bus, doing my semi-daily cattle-commute to work (the one that pays my bills). This used to be 1 hr 20 min (each way) either wasted, or at best spent sleeping. But now i can do lots of things on my little green toy. Write blog entries for once.

Oh and I got it all online by setting up my Nokia N95 as an ad-hoc wifi access point using JoikuSpot. Awesome!

My phone is really getting some exercise, currently running JoikuSpot (GPRS, Wifi), Buddycloud (GPRS, Bluetooth, GPS) and PuTTY (GPRS) at the same time. It's a new level of connectivity, at least for me...

Update: It's 09:15 and my phone needs a chargin'. New battery drainage record!

I was in Berlin on Thursday afternoon and all day Friday. (Apologies to those I should of seen but didn't. Time was short.) Since then Chris has been beavering away at the new design changes and made good progress. We think that you will like it when it gets rolled out. -Simon

I just started reading "The Cloudspotters's Guide" by Gavin Prector-Pinney. This will doubtlessly give me valuable insight to what we're doing here at buddycloud. Or, failing that, it should at least be a good source of server names: Cirrus, Cumulus, Cumulonimbus, Stratus, Stradivarius, Nimbostratus...

PS: I allways thought a certain violin maker's name fits the cloud naming scheme rather well, phonetically at least. Did you even notice?

Helge

We are now 75% percent on our way to our goal of having a Quad-Sensor location back-end (see pretty greenery below).

A short while ago we decided our beacon patterning system works quite ok with GSM/CDMA/3G cell towers, so we opened up the floodgates to let it have a go at WIFI access points (man are there lots of those about). A few tweaks were necessary, some still needs to be made, but it seems to behave quite nicely already.

And while we were wearing our mad genius overcoats we decided to throw in Bluetooth MACs as well. Unlike Cell and WIFI beacons however, they are not used to recognise places, but rather to recognise other people at the same place so that a "place synch" can be performed: If our butler (the location server, don't ask...) can't figure out where you are, but he knows where someone else within Bluetooth range are, he will deduce that you are there too. Yay!

The remaining 25%? GPS! We save the easy stuff for last :-)

- Helge -

We're currently testing an iphone 'lojacking' tool - the official buddycloud iphone client.

It'll be available to everyone who has a jailbroken iphone and has the apptapp installer on their phone. We do note the irony of releasing this tool in the same week that the official appstore comes online. However, there are a few benefits of using the buddycloud iphone client:

It runs in the background! It isn't possible (yet) to have your iphone record where you go - without the user manually 'checking in' to each place you go with your iphone. GPS or not - there's no backgroundable way to record where you go with the iphone 2.0.

We support the iphone 1.0. We don't rely on gps or known wifi points, or known celltower locations to record your 'place history'. We do it using our very own magical formula, that let you record a very cool location history. I (ben) have been using it on and off for about a month now - and it's very cool having a record of places you have been.

Watch this space...

I (ben) am largely responsible for the design and typogreaphy of the buddycloud website. You may notice that the buddycloud site in fact looks quite similair to my personal site.

I have to admit that I'm a huge fan of squares, greys and regularity. (I also dress in squares, plain colours and with regularity). There's been some discussion recently about why you don't need to use photoshop, and instead can just design straight in the browser. Myself - I design right in the browser, using a text editor and plain old css (markup language for webdesigners). The squarey behemoth that is the buddycloud site is the result!

That's why it's a good thing that there are designers like the good people at Yellow Too in Berlin. Here's some of their mockups which are nice and colourful and have nice human edges.

Our new logo?

How your place history will be displayed in the future.

The Google Maps product really is amazing. I'm not sure if it taps into some latent voyeuristic instinct or whether it's like travelling without the security lines and lack of legroom, but I love browsing places that I remember. I find it very interesting to look up places of my childhood and compare their real shapes with my memories of them. The mind has a way of collapsing the non-interesting places in between the places one used to visit often.

This evening I found myself browsing Hilton College in South Africa. This was my High School which, although out in the middle of nowhere has finally been mapped by Google to a decent resolution. I'm sure not much has changed, except that everything looks smaller and a couple of the buildings are not where I remember them.

This is one of the reasons that we use place names in Buddycloud, rather than trying to put people on maps. Maps confuse because they don't match with our memory of a place and the proportions are "wrong".

Yahoo put out some encouraging words today about instant messaging using XMPP. This is great and validates our strategy to use it as a transport for location, messages and status updates. The days of proprietary messaging are drawing near.

Zimbra, like Google and some other non-incumbent powers in the world of instant messaging, has used the open XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) standard for instant messaging. It's this standard that Dietzen apparently sees playing a broader role at Yahoo.

More at CNET.

We're really excited about this after hearing of AOL's moves in the same direction.

We're blessed with some great help. Marta (above) and her team have been helping with our design. She runs a great company in Berlin called Yellow-too. They have been helping with our design and some of our data visualisation problems. Although I had reservations about working with a company on the other end of the country, they have been very helpful and have a great team of staff. Plus they have a cool office with a tunnel!

Katja's lifestyle has been very has been helping us test all the Munich bar locations. She uses buddycloud mainly to chat and show people where she is going next.

Picture this.

You're in a beer garden in a different part of town, finishing your maß of beer, and the garden has to close down because it's getting on towards midnight. None of your drinking buddies of the evening know a good bar nearby.

Well - in our last bit of experimentation, we may have come across a solution to this problem!

The above screenshot is a mockup of how we can display where you currently are (the big white blob), and show links to places nearby that are related to this one.

How do we work out good places to go next? Well - we measure by how far a person could reasonably walk, then combine it with all the places that your friends have gone after leaving the beer garden you're currently in.

Note for Americans: Feel free to exchange beer garden with club, metal bar or steakhouse!

Part of what makes buddycloud so exciting is all the data we get to gather on ourselves (yup we're kind of nerdy, databases excite us) - and different things you can draw with that data.

One of our recent experiments was with drawing me and my friends travels as a subway map.

Different colored lines are my different friends, along the left side are the places they visited - and when the two lines are parallel and adjacent, it means that two or more of my friends met up.

This isn't in buddycloud yet - but might put the code for this graph on the blog so that you could use it to see what your own bus timetable looks like.

Ciao!
The Cloudies

It's possible to use your desktop IM client with Buddycloud. And easy to setup to. IM nirvana can be achieved by setting the Desktop client to hand-off to your phone when you are on the road.

James Body, speaks about companies opening Kimonos to reveal their bit's. We'll we are gently brushing ours aside to reveal parts of our API. We've got more that we would like to release but for the moment are putting out our location management bits for hacking on.

Head over to the API pages to see what's under our kimono.