Archive for February, 2009
Friday, February 27th, 2009
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.
Posted in Awards, Rummble Announcements | 1 Comment »
Thursday, February 26th, 2009
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.
Posted in Functionality, News, Rummble Announcements, Rummble Developer Blog | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009
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.
Posted in Functionality, Rummble Developer Blog | 2 Comments »
Thursday, February 12th, 2009
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 
WHY WATER?
Right now, 1.1 billion people on the planet don’t have access to safe, clean drinking water. That’s one in six of us. Water gives 100% of the money raised to direct project costs, funding sustainable clean water solutions in areas of greatest need. Just $20 can give one person in a developing nation clean water for 20 years.
Twestival brings together Twitter communities for an evening of fun and to raise money and awareness for charity: water.
DOWNLOAD IT TODAY!
Want to be able to find wifi easily in over 100 countries? Then what are you waiting for? Download Total Hotspots: Find Nearby Wi-Fi from the App Store for just £2.99 AND donate to a great cause.
We will be donating £1 from download revenue between 0900 Thursday 12th February and 0900 Friday 13th February 2009 (GMT). Please help spread the word and enjoy Twestival
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, February 4th, 2009
Just a quickie to let the Rummblers know that our servers will be having a massage and some extra memory installed this afternoon, which will mean that the site and service will be unavailable for a few minutes. If you find yourself without your vital Rummble feed, just give it a moment and we’ll be back up before you know it.
Sorry for the inconvenience!
Update: All done! Thanks Chris!
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Monday, February 2nd, 2009
Total Hotspots, one of the leading providers of wifi hotspots data globally has launched its mobile application with Rummble.
Total Hotspots wanted to be able to provide its premium database to iphone users to help them to find pay for or free hotspots anywhere in the world. Normally, they would have had to build an entire application themselves including all the associated location based functionality. Instead, after a chat over beers in the MySpace Bus at FOWA London 2008, THS decided to utilise Rummbles LBS platform and API to rapidly roll out an App.
The wifi finding iphone app launched on Friday 30th January 2009 and was briefly featured on The Gadget Show on C5 that same evening. Since launch, in just 4 days it is now no.4 in the appstore for utilities which is fantastic news!
The Total Hotspots app is the first official use of the Rummble API which will be available for publicly very soon. Meanwhile, if you want to get started using the Rummble API please contact us.
The Total Hotspots app is a branded version of the base Rummble App, with added functionality specifically appropriate for the Total Hotspots use case. Alex Housley (Founder and CEO at Total Hotspots) paid tribute to the Rummble team, including our Design guru Ben Hull saying: “He [Ben] attacks front end visuals with the ferocity of a wild buzzard.” ..thats the sort of impassioned feedback we at Rummble treasure!
You can download the Total Hotspots app from the app store today for just £2.99.
We also had coverage of the launch courteous of the TechCrunch UK, Mike Butcher and the team.
Posted in Press Coverage, Rummble Announcements | 2 Comments »
