Rummble’s New Home

Last week Rummble finally became established in its new offices in Hoxton Street just off fasionable Hoxton Square (London N1). We’ve also been reunited with the giant RUMMBLE letters which have been stored after their european tour to Barcelona and London. So now everything that Rummble owns in our own self-contained space though there’s still some accumulated trash that needs chucking out. I’ve never seen so many spare cables but as Andrew says ‘you never know when you may need one’.
It’s going to be a tough job rummbling the tonnes of bars and restaurants in the area, but we’ll manage.

New! The Tremors Experiment

At Rummble we’re desperate to help you find the best places to go, wherever you are in the world – and it’s a big problem. The irony is, all the information we need is out there – the challenge is harvesting it in a meaningful way. So we’ve launched an experiment, nicknamed Tremors.

A good example is we’d noticed that people often Tweet not only where they are but whether that location or venue is good or bad. It didn’t take a genius to realise that if you could match the tweets to the venues AND understand the meaning of the tweets, you could do a couple of really useful things: Firstly you can use this information (which is essentially a mini-recommendation) to rate the venue. Secondly, we could begin to build a trust network for each twitter user, which over time would build trust relationships of taste between the users who like the same venues.

Being massively under-resourced like all good start-ups, we hesitated to divert time away from the core Rummble product (especially as we know there is so much to improve with Rummble) but eventually we gave in and bunch of very long days and a manic weekend later, our new experiment “Tremors” is live.

Currently it works for London, New York and Austin and tries to match tweets to venues, based upon fuzzy word matching, the general location the tweet came from and then tries to work out if it was a positive or negative comment. It’s far from perfect but for a few days work we’re pretty proud of it!

It turns out that its actually a very challenging problem to solve; the majority of tweets do not have a location, those that do its usually very general. People spell places wrong or don’t give a full name. Writing styles and short hand or text-speak is hard to decipher, and there’s also the sheer number of tweets to analyse – throwing away most of them because they’re nothing to do with a venue at all!

So don’t expect it to get everything right – it’s a very early alpha experiment and as we can find time or have more resources in the coming months, we’ll hope to improve the accuracy and expand the coverage.

Please have a play and let us know what you think! You don’t need a Rummble account to use Tremors, but if you login with your Twitter account (or you can use an existing Rummble account) we’ll follow you and we’ll start building a trust network for you, so in the future you can see who else on Twitter you share the same tastes with and trust the recommendations of. Please give us feedback.

Next up: support for San Francisco.

Rummble for Android

Its not always possible to everything you want to do in-house. We’re a big believer at Rummble that in order to understand your product and service fully you should get your hands dirty and build it yourself. That is what we have done with Rummble for iPhone; but the reality is we are a startup and have a very small team.

Thankfully there are lots of talented developers out there and the Beta version of Rummble for Android is close to launch thanks to Droiders, a pure Android-only mobile development company based in Spain.

Thanks to the Rummble API, anyone can produce an app which takes advantage of Rummble technology - and if its good enough for others, its good enough for us. So it makes sense that our own applications use our own API!  This makes using a third party a lot easier, especially when they are based in sunny Madrid.

Julian, Founder of Droiders, has been great to work with and we’d certainly recommend him if you need an Android app built - thats ALL they do!

Rummble for Android will be available in the Android store in July 2009, free!

Rummble Wins Microsoft Mobile Innovation Week Award

We’re incredibly happy to announce that on Friday, Rummble won the “Most Improved Application” category during Microsofts Mobile Innovation week. Rummble partnered again with Total Hotspots and joined forces and resources to build a working app in just 4 days.

Microsoft helped all the startups by providing access to 4 days of developer time from Muranosoft - a Microsoft partner. To our delight, Dimiri of Microsoft described Tamer, Bens and Alexs hard work as a near “miracle” pulling together a decent working version of the application within the week through.

You can read more about our win on Microsofts own blog and it was also covered by The Telegraph.

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• Microsoft EMEA Mobile Incubation Week: A midweek sneak peek (telegraph.co.uk)

Rummble is selected by Microsoft for its Mobile Innovation Week

The Rummble team are encamped at Microsoft HQ in London this weeks for Microsofts first Mobile Innovation week EMEA.
Hand picked by Microsoft along with seven other European startups (including our friends at Wubud) the week is designed to assist us in polishing the native version of our Rummble for Windows Mobile 6.5 .

Bindi and her team have put together a fantastic week of support and insight into their plans for Windows Mobile and the Windows Mobile Marketplace - set to launch in the near future.

The Rummble team at work at Microsoft London HQ (Left to right: Ben, Tamer, and Alex - Total Hotspots)

We’re working closely again with TotalHotspots and look forward to launching a couple of exciting applications in the not very distant future!

Pocket GPS covered Rummble at Mobile World Congress

The boys from Pocket GPS World came by to visit us at our stand this year at Mobile World Congress, which we generously allowed TeleAtlas to share with us … OK so it was there stand and we were the ones taking temporary asylum after having scooped the first prize in their Innovator Awards.

Thanks for the coverage Pocket GPS - full video is here and congratulations of course to our colleauges at Nulaz too. Checkout Pocket GPS World for all things location based, mobile and -you guess it- GPS related.

Apologies for the delay in this post, it got lost in our wordpress drafts!

Rummble Wins TeleAtlas Awards Final

We were incredibly excited at Mobile World Congress to able to announce that Rummble won first place in the Tele Atlas LBS Innovators Series.

It takes time and resources to enter a competition which is run in such a professional way as the Tele Atlas innovators series, so it was even better news that the prize included 28,000 euros PLUS a pod on the Tele Atlas stand at Mobile World Congress this year - we certainly could not have attended with such a prescence otherwise and presenting ourselves under the umbrella of TeleAtlas was a real boon. The Tele Atlas staff were fantastically helpful and we had a great week; despite some less luck outside the conference venue - but more about that in another post!

We were judged based on commercial viability and innovative use of maps in the application in two categories: Market Ready, which includes commercially-ready LBS applications targeted at consumers (which our friends at Nulaz entered an won) and Disruption Innovation, for location-enhanced solutions designed to push the boundaries in the LBS market, which Rummble won.  The judges particularly liked our “Neighborhood View” functionality, which not only gives the distance of relevent content, but also the general direction - and then tracks you to the destination. For us, maps like anything else are important but should be leveraged to make life easier for users - not to just display flat data.

Semi-finalists Commandro, MobGeo, Texperts and Webwag were awarded prizes of €8,000 in cash.

Overall, if you have an innovative mapping application or are thinking of building one in 2009, we’d highly recommend you enter the competition this year.

Rummble Upgrades Fire Eagle support & releases Open Source Java library

We’ve recently upgrade our Fire Eagle support to enable full sycronisation with Yahoo Fire Eagles recently released XMPP Location Stream. In layman’s terms, this means that your location is now updated automatically in Rummble whenever you update your location in any other service you have also connected to your Fire Eagle account. Before, you would have to manually poll Fire Eagle to update the location, although Rummble location updates have always syndicated automatically out-bound to Fire Eagle.

Rummble Releases Open Source Java Location-consumer for Fire Eagle

If you’re writing an app to support Fire Eagle, Rummble has released the Java location consumer library for Yahoo’s Fire Eagle’s XMPP location stream as open source. This allow services who have Fire Eagle users, to subscribe (and unsubscribe) their users to Fireeagle’s location stream and receive instant location updates.

When a user updates their location on Fire Eagle the XMPP location stream pushes out their new location to all listening XMPP clients. The library is already being used at Rummble to update our users’ locations if they have a Fire Eagle account.

How do I use the Fire Eagle Java location-consumer library?

To use the library you will need to have a Fire Eagle application and access to an XMPP server for which you have a user that has fireeagle.com added to its roster. You will then be able to subscribe to location updates for users of your Fire Eagle application.

Written by Rummble’s CTO, Clive Cox, the Java Fire Eagle XMPP location stream library is published under the Apache open source license, to share the Java Fire Eagle XMPP love.

Finding anywhere

The keen-eyed among you will have noticed a few changes on rummble.com over the last week or so - we’ve been working on improving a few key features to make the site more useful (and nice to look at!). Here’s a quick rundown, in case you want to go and play with all the new toys we’ve added.

Find Rummbles anywhere!

We added search. Yes, finally. To many people, this seems like such a no-brainer - but for us it was a really hard decision to make. There are a million search engines out there - dedicated to places, experiences, venues - and we’re not trying to compete with these huge directories at all. One of the nicest things about Rummble is that you very often don’t need to search - you just tell Rummble where you are, and it gives you a seemingly hand-picked list of things you’ll like nearby. There doesn’t need to be a hundred results in the list, because the things that aren’t there are the things you’re not going to be interested in anyway.

Admittedly, this philosophy started on, and works best with, our mobile platforms. It’s different on the web - you’re much more likely to be looking for stuff somewhere other than the spot you’re sitting; if you’re planning a trip or a night out, or you’re hunting for spots to share with your mates in another town. For this sort of thing, ‘Find xxx near yyy‘ is indispensible.

So, we built it, and it’s working really well. The new search has two key parts:

1. What are you looking for?

The tag search includes some clever interpretation behind the scenes - so you can search for ‘restaurant’ without missing out on things tagged with ‘bistro’ or ‘bar and grill’. Tags are grouped together by theme, which matches what most people expect when they start searching.

2. Where are you looking?

The location search is where it gets really clever - it searches a variety of sources, from country and region names, through cities and towns, right down to databases of local businesses. Depending on what you enter, the search results are filtered intelligently - if you enter the name of a country, you’re unlikely to want local business results included in your results.

When your search could match more than one location, you’re given the choice to pick the one you want. If your search only matches one place, we center the map directly on that spot, and start showing you what’s nearby immediately.

Testing this was tricky - the search is so good that whenever I typed ’svshbsa’ to try to trigger the ‘we couldn’t find this place‘ response, I discovered tiny towns in Iceland and Mongolia!

Sexy new masthead and navigation:

We’ve replaced the old masthead with a streamlined new version. Much of the functionality remains the same - we know a lot of Rummble users really like the quick access to all the parts of the site - but the new design keeps visual clutter down, and stops those big yellow buttons screaming at you from the top of the page.

Bigger Rummble Explore view

The ‘Explore’ page now has a big Rummble map and the new ‘find’ box, and that’s it. Great for browsing around to discover new stuff.

What’s next?

As ever, we’ve got a whole lot of stuff in the works - the next big thing is the launch of our new mobile site. Those of you who frequent m.rummble.com are in for a real treat! More on that in a couple of days!

We’re all ears for your reactions to the new changes - either hit the comments form, or drop me an email at ben [dot] hull [at] rummble [dot] com.

Total Hotspots & Rummble Give £1 to Twestival for Every Download

To celebrate the enormous success of Twestival, today Rummble and Total Hotspots are donating £1 from the purchase of every Total Hotspots iPhone App to charity: water - a non-profit organization bringing clean, safe drinking water to people in developing nations. The Total Hotspots iPhone app is the easiest way to find and discover nearby free or paid wifi hotspots, saving time and money. Thanks to the good people taking part in Twestival, we hope the app will also save some lives