Geolover.com blog

Today we released the first web version of Geolover. Please help us test it.

Any feedback or suggestions are welcome. You can send us an email to hi at geolover com.

After about 400 hours of development we finally published our android application. If you have an android powered phone you can download it from android market.
If you click here you can learn more about our application.

Did you know that there is a Google service called web history . If it’s enabled you can see all your searches that you made in the past. It can be a bit frustrating if you you look at this list and think about that Google knows all those information about you. And not just that if you use other services like gmail, maps, news, etc. Google even knows more about you. Sometimes I feel that they know more about me then my own mother.  Is this right?

When you start a social website the hardest part is to build a community. You need users who come back and spread the world about your service or product. They’re the leaders type.  It’s really rare. But If you can find few leaders they can boost up your site users really fast. Here is a video which shows a real world example:

Back in 1998 I started to work in a small gsm repair shop.  At that time mobile phones were pretty expensive so it worth to repair them.  I started repairing Hagenuk MT-2000 . In 1994 when they introduce it was really cool because there was built in tetris game.  Today Hagenuk is still selling cellphones but they’re not the most innovative company.

Then later I started to repair Nokia,  Ericsson,  Alcatel, Motorola and other popular phones.  I loved mobile technology so much I almost spent all my time hacking and learning how these phones work. I had a new phone every month and was hungry for the new innovations.

Then after about 2 years I burned out.  I started to hate mobile phones. I realized that due to the small screen and lack of qwerty keyboard the only things you can do with a cellphone  are calling and search phone book.
So in 2002 I bought a Nokia 3510i.  I was using it until last month when I got a new Google G1. Now I realized that something changed in this industry.

Apple started this change about a year ago when they introduced iphone sdk. From this time everybody could add an application to there platform. That’s why these phones are more valuable then others. Not the touchscreen or built in GPS or “cool design”. It’s really funny that Apple never made a phone before and now they have a pretty large market share.

This revolution  it just started. If Google will keep up with the development of the Android platform I think they can rule almost the whole market.  Why? Because it’s “opensource” and “free”.  So one more year and all big and small Asian mobile manufacturers will come out with a phone running Android. Just image what would happen with Hagenuk if they came out with a sdk in 1998.

App ideas

Here are 2 of my ideas that I don’t have time to implement. So I share it with the world. If you think they can be killer apps please feel free to develop it and let me know. I can be your first beta tester.

Plant a tree and save our planet

This can be a killer because you can easily build a viral marketing on it. Also most of  pepole want to do something to save our planet so they will install it.
The main purpose of this app is to encourage users to plant a tree. When they install this app they read about how to and where to plant a tree. They can create a profile and when they plant a tree they take a photo and store tree’s gps coordinate.  They can upload there tree to a social website.  On this website you can see trees on google maps, users, countries.  To motivate users you can give them badges and create a competition between countries.

Where is my phone

This is a simple application. But it can be a killer app if somebody steal your phone or you just lose it. Here is how it works:  You just downloads this app.  Install it as a service or it can be a game which does a little bit more in the background. Everytime when phone starts a connection to the internet it pings an auth server. If you lost your phone you can set a flag on this server through a webbased client. If flag is set phone can send you it’s location or just stop working and showing a message that you can set. Something like: “This is Peter’s phone. Please call xxx to and you can get $50″. You can charge a small amount to users using your auth server.

Update: On WWDC Apple introduced “Find My iPhone“. Which does almost the same thing as my app idea. I think this is just another clever move from Apple to boost up mobileme users.

On last Friday I was on wherecamp2009 where we had lot of great sessions. One of my favorite was “What sort of tools travelers really want?”. Lonley planet is working to create a usefull tool for travelers who are using the internet when planing and traveling. I really like the lonley planet offline version but online is boring. I think the problem is that when you visit the site you just get a long list what to see and what to do. I have an idea how to improve there site. So here it is:

• geocode list and add tags to each post.
• create the ability for users to rate them. It would be nice if users could enter there age,gender,etc. So later posts can be searchable by these params
• Add a geo search. So when I visit a place I just enter where am I then it shows me the closest places. Then I can filter by tags or and age,etc.
• If online version is working then do a simple mobile version

I think these few changes could be a first step to social web. They shouldn’t do more advanced development.

Update: Now Lonley planet has a android mobile version. Which is finaly location based. It will show you nearby POIs.  It’s almost as Wikitude. Maybe the same company bulit the app. They have apps for every city. It cost about $5. Do they have the right business model by selling it? We will see.

I was in Las Vegas last weekend. It`s amazing how this small town turned into a mega tourist cash cow. About a 100 years ago there was only an oasis. First hotel and casino was built in beginning of the 20th century. Then about 40 years later they started to build “The Strip“. In now days Nineteen of the world’s twenty-five largest hotels by room count are on the Strip, with a total of over 67,000 rooms.

They have a simple business modell. For your money hotels and casinos will do anything to entertain you. They even built famous tourist places. So you don’t have to travel for example to Paris to see the Eiffel tower.  You just go into Paris hotel on the strip and for a small fee you can go up on top of the “plastic version” of the tower. And best part is that after this new experience you will find yourself in the casino where you can continue spending your money.

Las Vegas can teach you an easy lesson: Make your costumers happy create them new experinces and they willing to pay money.  I think that every startup should think the same way. Create a product which will make costumers happy and charge for it. And it dosen’t have to be a direct charge. It can be indirect by selling products or services.  Most of the startups fail because they don’t have income becuase in the beginnig they didn’t plan how they will make money. So if you want to make money after product lunch you should start charging as soon as you can. At the begining if you make only $1 a day can be a very good motivation to continue working on your product. Also it can be a proof that you built something useful.

I’m writing this post from Narita Airport Tokyo. I spent six days in Japan. I loved it. All Japanese people all so polite and they thinking a little bit different. I love there culture. They love everything which makes noise and flashes. They collect lot of things like cards, gadgets and everything which is colorful. Maybe that’s the reason that they are so innovative. They make really good cars and consumer electronics products.

Maybe this is the way how Japanese start to create a product:

Actually I think every big company has a brainstorming session before product design. This should be the most important part before starting. Usually end product won’t be the same as the idea but it’s more easier to modify at beginning stage. As product heads to final stages it costs lot of resource to modify anything on it. And worst thing is that at the end stage it cost doubles or even more.
This theory is also true for web services. It’s a good idea that before you start you organize your idea by writing it down and draw some mockups. Show it to other people then start it over again. Do this until you don’t have an almost perfect plan. If you have resource try to show it as many people you can. After all this work now we are ready to start building our first prototype.

Hello! I’m Peter founder of geolover.com. In past 3 years I been working on developing location based services. I helped lot of startups on Google maps integration and other development. I also have a startup in Hungary called Geospace which is a location based social network. I’m addicted to internet since 98 and also love to travel. I know that there are lot of traveling site out there but I think most of them are not really usable so I decided to start my own. I really hope that I can make a usable service for pepole like me who loves to travel. If you’re interesed please bookmark my blog or sign up to my rss feed.