July 26th, 2011, No Comments »
My old friend Rob is behind the launch of Moby, a private location sharing app focused on personal safety and families. It’s a handy alternative to services like FourSquare if you want to share your location with a small group, or for a short time. Here’s the spiel:
Moby is a private location sharing service for you, and the people that matter to you. Unlike other location sharing services, Moby only shares your location with the people you choose and for the length of time you want. With Moby, you are in complete control of your privacy. With Moby you can also request help at the touch of a button, instantly notifying your chosen contacts where you are.
There is, it must be said, no relation to a certain tiny, vegan pop star.
One avid market for Moby is real estate agents. These are people (mostly women?) who spend a lot of time with strangers in private locations, so Moby is a natural fit.
Moby is available for free (as in beer) on iPhone, Blackberry and Android. Check it out.
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May 17th, 2011, 1 Comment »
Have I mentioned that I bought season tickets for the Vancouver Whitecaps inaugural season in Major League Soccer? Somebody also kindly bought me a membership in the Whitecap’s fan club, the Southsiders, for my birthday.
Because I’ve been traveling a lot this spring, I’ve only been able to get to one of the first six home games. And, unfortunately, I’ll be in Toronto tomorrow night when the Whitecaps play Toronto FC as part of, ahem, the Nutrilite Canadian Championship, a mid-season tournament featuring four Canadian teams. I am Fail Fan.
I have two tickets available for tomorrow night’s game, which starts at 7:00pm at Empire Field. They’re row Z, section 224. That’s about midway up, roughly parallel to the 18-yard line on the stadium’s west side. The seats are under cover, should it be raining. I’ve added their location to this too-small map of the stadium:
The seats are directly above a walkway, which means there’s nobody in front of you. That’s great, though there is a railing in front of you. This isn’t a problem for adults who can enjoy a good view over it, but may present an obstruction to little people. My nephews apparently didn’t mind, because they were free to stand up and weren’t intimidated by people standing all around them.
Also, the seats are on the aisle, so if you put the shorter person in the aisle seat, they have a decent view around the railing. Here’s a view from this seat. The railing is out of frame, to the viewer’s right. Cliquer pour agrandir:
I’m selling them for what I paid, $100, or (considering the Canucks are playing tomorrow night and it’s short notice) the best offer I receive in the next, say, eight hours.
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December 20th, 2010, 3 Comments »
The other night I was chatting with a friend of mine who’s been a long-term Canucks fan. He reminded me of how lucky recently-converted Canucks fans are.
If you became a fan of the Canucks in the 21st century, you’ve had an excellent run. The team has made the playoffs 8 out of 10 times (I’m projecting a playoff berth for this season), and been over .500 for every season.
Previous decades, however, haven’t been quite so excellent. The important line is the 0.5 one. When the blue line is above that one, it indicates that the team won more games than they lost (click to embiggen):
I often get grief from fans who want to know why I’m routinely skeptical about the team’s performance. This is why.
As you can see, excepting a brief bright period in the early nineties (culminating in the fabled 1993-94 playoff run), the Canucks have been historically lousy.
In fact, the team’s recent performance makes me a little uncomfortable. I’m accustomed to cheering for a sad-sack bunch of upstarts.
Liverpool and Blackpool
When I moved to Ireland, I rather randomly asked my coworkers which Premier League soccer team I should support. Someone recommended Liverpool, which, at the time, was one of the top performers in English football. I took their advice, but always felt a little uncomfortable cheering for the high-flying Reds.
In fact, lately I’ve been paying more attention to another ‘Pool–Blackpool. They are, in fact, a group of sad-sack upstarts just promoted to the Premier League and they’re playing quite well this season. Plus, their nickname is ‘The Tangerines’. For obvious reasons.
In any case, I do think this Canucks team is the best one we’ve ever watched. I’m optimistic that they’ll go deep into the playoffs. And that’s saying something.
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July 2nd, 2010, 7 Comments »
I run past this older, small, low-rise building on False Creek. It has five units listed for sale–I wonder what’s wrong with it?
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February 17th, 2010, 7 Comments »
In which I risk being a bit of a Debbie Downer.
Watching and reading coverage of the Olympics, I’ve observed a lot of projections and comparisons involving Canada’s medal haul for 2010 and previous years (the latest example was in a Slate piece by Dahlia Lithwick). I’ve a lot of graphics showing medal totals for the previous Olympics held in Canada.
It’s a rich vein for the media, and a natural one. After all, it’s a sports competitions, where achievements are measured empirically.
I got to thinking about whether those were fair comparisons to make. Surely the number of medals has grown over the past, say, 35 years. And surely the number of participating nations and athletes has grown as well. So, I did what I always do when I wonder about something. I made a chart (click for gold medal bigness):
It shows the number of medals up for grabs at each Olympics, and also the number of nations participating. Interestingly, since 1976, the number of available medals and nations attending have grown at similar rates–they’re at 175% what they were. As you can see, the rate of medals has, recent years, exceeded the growth of participating nations.
And then there’s the number of athletes participating. In 1976, there were roughly 30 athletes per event. In 2010, that’s still the case.
My analysis is pretty rudimentary, but it seems like the amount of competition has stayed consistent over the past 35 years. It’s no more or less difficult to win a medal at the Olympics than it was when I was born.
What do you know? I wasn’t a Debbie Downer after all. Media folks, compare medal counts until your graphic designer cramps up.
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January 21st, 2010, 4 Comments »
These are signs from a paint store near our apartment. Maybe I’m just a tree-hugging leftie, but I’m not sure I would have gone with this slogan or image for my signs in eco-friendly Vancouver:
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October 7th, 2009, 6 Comments »
About six months ago, I wrote about seeing the Google Street View camera car drive past. When Google’s street-level photo feature was implemented in Vancouver, I figured I might show up. Unfortunately, the patio tables out front at Subeez are empty (it’s clearly much earlier in the day), so I didn’t make the cut.
Of course, I immediately became interested in other familiar Vancouver spots:
- Here’s the viewpoint halfway up Cypress Mountain, where we tried to compromise our girlfriends good upbringing back in high school.
- The construction site where my childhood home used to stand.
- The parking lot at the Reifel Bird Sanctuary, one of my favourite, lesser-known spots in the city.
- Here’s the strange, charming little plane-spotting park near the Vancouver Airport.
- This seems to be the most remote point on the north-west part of the Street View coverage. It’s a banal stretch of road north of Whistler.
Though it seems a little gimmicky, Street View is actually a very useful tool. I often remember where a business or office is, but can’t remember the name. Or, alternatively, I think I might remember the name of the restaurant, but I want to see its exterior to confirm that’s it the right one. So, despite not featuring me anywhere in the Lower Mainland, it’s super handy.
What’s your favourite Vancouver spot on Street View?
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September 8th, 2009, 7 Comments »
We’ve been doing a lot of speaking and workshops lately. At these events, people inevitably ask us “what’s the Next Big Thing?” I’m incredibly poor at predictions, but my best guess lately has been Foursquare. The buzz for this location-based social network among the early adopters mimics that of Twitter, Flickr and other tools.
Here’s a great Mashable article on what Foursquare is, and why it’s more compelling than the other location-based social networks such as BrightKite and Google Latitude:
Now we’re starting to see the app get adopted by more and more of our friends, finding traction in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, San Diego, and several other hyperlocal metro hubs. These breeding grounds of Foursquare activity are creating quite a frenzy, and we thought it appropriate to take a step back and survey the surrounding location-based social networking space as it applies to mobile apps, look forward to the future, and break down the beauty of Foursquare.
As the article points out, the killer feature of Foursquare is the gaming component. In Foursquare, you earn points every time you ‘check in’ to a particular location. The point system is slightly more complex than that, but that’s the basic gist. If you check in frequently at a particular location, you can become ‘the mayor’ of that location. What does that imply? Nothing really, it’s just classic useless online cred, as old as arcade games. But I suspect that it’ll be highly addictive.
Foursquare strikes me as one of the first practical tools to have a powerful and direct connection between the web and the real world. It blends the real-time nature of something like Twitter with the physicality of the real world. It takes Twitter’s question of “what am I doing right now?” , adds “where am I doing it?” and turns the whole process into a game.
I also like that Foursquare reflects the social swarming behaviour that text-happy teens exhibit. It feels like a logical extension of this behaviour.
A Game-Changer for Local Businesses?
We’ve been mentioning Foursquare in some recent workshops, and I’ve been showing this photo from San Francisco’s Marsh Cafe (click to embiggen):
Talk about an enticement to frequent visit this cafe, eh? I’m not sure what they are yet, but I can imagine that there will be all sorts of creative applications for real-world businesses. Consider, for example, a restaurant where each subsequent check-in in the same week gets you an additional 10% off? It feels like a game-changer for local businesses who haven’t necessarily seen the point of having a robust web presence.
What About the Creep Factor?
Normal Humans tend to get seriously creeped out by location-based social networks. It’s not a surprising response, but I remind them of the fears they’ve probably already overcome as they adopted blogs, Facebook, Twitter and so forth. They may find that, in six months, Foursquare feels totally ordinary to them. Or not–I’m incredibly bad at predicting the success of these things.
In any case (thanks mostly to Chris Briekss, I gather), Foursquare has arrived in Vancouver–the first Canadian city. I won’t be able to try it out in person until I return from my pan-Canadian voyage next week, but here’s my account.
I’m not sure how (or even if) I’m going to use Foursquare. However, I’m going to try to only ‘friend’ Foursquare users who I know and have met in real life (and probably people who I’ve come to know well online). Sharing my physical location with strangers, even only occasionally, feels like a bridge too far.
UPDATE: Here’s another symptom of Foursquare’s real-world connectedness: there won’t be the same compulsive friend-counting that occurs in Facebook or Twitter. What’s the upside of having 1000 Foursquare friends? That doesn’t scale very well if you’re just trying to get some work done at Starbucks.
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