Warning: Email Spammers Using The Rummble Name

There is an email we’ve seen recently prentending to come from Rummble, requesting you to open an attachment.

We will never send you an executable or ZIP attachment by email.

These are scam emails, which target you the consumer while claiming to come from a trusted community such as Rummble. Usually they get caught by your spam filter, but incase not, please delete it. Here is a spam email I received just yesterday, which prompted this post (the email below is NOT from Rummble):

The example above is SPAM, not a genuine email from us.

The key things to remember are:

• We will never send you a .ZIP, .COM, or .EXE attachment to open.
• All links will be back to http://www.rummble.com/ or a child page of that domain

We will only ever send you:

• Bi-weekly personalised community activity email with content from your trust network
• A monthly Rummble newsletter containing updates about functionality and featuring fun recommendations
• A password email reset if you request it (with a link which takes you back to http://www.rummble.com to rest your password)
• Notifications of messages, comments or a new friend connection, with a link back to the www.rummble.com/  domain

We’re all used to the viagra spam and invitations from your bank, credit card or paypal, to click a strange looking link and open up a website to donate your private details to a spammer, or to infect your computer with a strange .ZIP file attached.  I guess one of the perils of being a popular site is spammers targeting our community in the same way as other popular brands.

Please double check any emails which may look like they’re from us and if in doubt, please contact us.

Thanks!

Posted in Rummble Announcements, Social Software, Tips on Rummble | No Comments »

NextWeb 2010: Operation Quebec Romeo #TNW

It’s the third day of the Next Web conference. The weather has been gorgeous and that is good as half (that’s 3) of the Rummble team have been cycling around this historic and beautiful Dutch city distributing our new interactive stickers to all the most popular venues (and a few of the less well known ones too The Next Web kindly wrote up a piece about our adventures!

We were very happy to see the Rummble Team apartment was appropriately Apartment R !!

If you don’t know what a QR code is, it’s the funny 2D barcode square which you see people pointing their mobile phones at. It takes you to a URL. We’re printed unique QR codes for all the venues and after zapping one you can check-in or Rummble (review) the venue, but also find out who’s in the venue now, or recently.

We had fantastic food at Loup bar

In the future we’ll be adding  much more functionality around the Rummble points of interest we make QR codes for – including some tools for the venue owners themselves.

The Rummble QR code stickers proved popular!

Finally, we believe check-in  is just a commodity. The location of your social graph (where all your friends are) should be available to any start-up; perhaps Facebook will at some point make this happen – meanwhile, we’re happy to share location check-in information with any reputable start-up or “competitor” via our Rummble API, if you do the same (and of course respect your users privacy settings). Just contact us; and meanwhile lookout for a Rummble sicker near you!

..and after a long night enterrtaining the crowd back to some late night coding & operational planning!

We were very happy to see the Rummble Team apartment was appropriately Apartment R !!

Posted in Events, Random Stuff, Rummble Announcements, Rummble for Android, Rummble for Mobile, Rummble for iPhone, Social Software | 1 Comment »

Announcing Rummble for Twitter

Just in time for London’s Twestival Twitter users can now create Rummbles (recommendations for places in the physical world) and even checkin (announce your location at a specific venue) directly from Twitter.

Simply include #rummble in your tweet and Rummble will do its best to understand the place you’re talking about, do some simple sentiment analysis on it (to work out if you’re saying the place is good or bad) and if you say you’re hanging out there or having a drink there, we’ll check you in too!

Obviously the more information you give in the tweet, the better chance Rummble has of understanding e.g.

Hanging out in Joes Cafe, norfolk street Cambridge. Great coffee and free wifi. 7/10 #rummble

Tips on using Rummble for Twitter>

How accurate is Rummble for Twitter?

Computers reading natural language is always tricky; computers reading 140 characters is even trickier. The more info you include, the better the chance Rummble will guess where you’re talking about!

Happy tweeting!

Posted in News, Rummble Announcements, Social Software | 2 Comments »

Integration w/ Facebook & Twitter Makes Rummbling Even Easier

Here at Rummble, we’re always looking for new ways to make our service faster, easier to use, and more accessible.  This is why  we are are VERY excited to announce Twitter and Facebook Connect integration for Rummble. Look for the new sign-in buttons on the top right of our Rummble site to get going right now!

By plugging into Facebook Connect for Rummble, all of your ‘Rummbles’ and trips will be published simultaneously into your newsfeed for your friends to see and interact with.  Overall, this integration allows you to be even better connected with all your friends on the web and makes it a breeze for you to get started with Rummble if you are a first time user.

Also, true to Twitter form, we’ve discovered that Rummble and Twitter work together to do just one thing, simply and well… Through the new integration, when you create a Rummble it will also be posted as a tweet to your twitter page instantly.

In the meantime, don’t forget to become a Fan of Rummble on Facebook by clicking here.  By becoming a fan, you’ll gain access to the latest news going on in our office before everyone else on the web & can be the 1st to hear about unique user opportunities, such as our soon-to-launch Rummble Brand Ambassador Team and many others!

Posted in News, Rummble Announcements, Social Software | No Comments »

The Problem With Recommendations

Andrew (Rummbles CEO) has today written a post on his personal blog discussing the problems with recommendation services. Prompted by an article on the Telegraph website, perhaps not surprisingly Andrew is arguing that in the enthusiasm for getting recommendations from your peers, we’ve forgotten that it is not whether you know the person that defines a good recommendation, it is whether you trust understand their tastes or trust their opinion.

We’re quite glad he thinks that, because that is what Rummble is all about: not your social network, but your trust network!

Posted in Random Stuff, Social Software | No Comments »

FireEagle Beta Tests “Friends on Fire” for Facebook

Not a new way to inflict pain on your best mates, but yet another entrant into the already fraught and busy “who’s nearby” space. I’ve pontificated often about how this is no basis for a business, but with Tom and his gang at FireEagle it makes perfect sense as aggregation of location is their business.

I’m unconvinced of the UI they’ve built for this iteration – but who are we to talk when our Web UI still needs it new upgrade rolled out   and essentially this is a technology beta, so I’ve on doubt they will do some polishing.

The biggest complaint I have is that after choosing who to share my location with from my FB fiends list, I then had to go through the process again, to invite them to use it and of course hit the stupid Facebook 20 invites limit. I simply don’t have time to go back and do it all again with the invites (requiring me to do it 10 times to invite the 200 I wanted to of my circa 300 friends). The biggest annoyance is that this limit doesn’t seem to have affected the number of crappy notifications I get for rubbish apps … my personal profile currently sits at 262 requests since my last purge a few months ago; but I digress.

This can only be good to accelerate take up of location based services and therefore we’re all fully behind it at Rummble;  just those startups focusing on “whos nearby” as a core service, unless they have an existing big userbase (such as people like WAYN for whom its an obvious value add), should think carefully about where they are excerpting their efforts – but again, I’ve been preaching this for 3 years already and so I have little sympathy … a quick look at Loopts -lack- of progress, should give you any answer you need; and they have blown $15m+ up the wall trying to do so, with precious little traction to show for it. Still, we wish Loopt all the best and maybe they will yet rise from the ashes like a Phoenix … but then again, some other bods have a rather more appropriate name to achieve that particular feat…

• Rummble for Facebook
  Dont forget you can install the Rummble app to update and sync your status with Rummble (and SMS in from Rummble which changes your FB, Bebo and Twitter status) and will also publish your Trips and your new Rummbles to your newsfeed. Install here: apps.facebook.com/rummble or read more about our Rummble for Facebook here ..but dont read, install!
• Friends on Fire for Facebook, from FireEagle
  You can signup to the Friends on Fire beta here at: http://apps.new.facebook.com/on-fire/

Andrew, Founder, Rummble.

Posted in News, Random Stuff, Social Software | 2 Comments »

El Pais and Rummble

Spain’s leading newspaper, El Pais, in Madrid, published an article on Location Based Services and Mobile Social Networks, describing the overall environment and prospects within the space. Rummble, having presented at the Mobile 2.0 Europe event in July in Barcelona was discussed in the article.

The article is in Spanish but we have a translation below;

“ I was frustrated by the lack of information for good restaurants that I knew i’d like… ”

Hence Andrew Scott conceived the idea of creating Rummble, a UK company based in London, to offer personalised content to mobile devices by recommendation algorithms.

Each member in the Rummble network invites their friends from multiple social networks. Data is retrieved from a Web or mobile browser, in the form of personalised recommendations. The trusted algorithm provided by the Rummble service, enables trusted personalised recommendations to be sent to the user, which the user then gets access to through Google maps.

“ If I travel to Madrid, the service will know I’m there and will send me, from my trusted network recommendations, details of places and events which are sure to appeal to me.”

Most veteran US companies, such as the American companies Whrrl or Doplr, are playing with similar concepts. However the automatic combination of location, trust network and context is what everyone is aiming for.

“My mobile needs to know if I’m in the sun or at a work conference, and offer me different options depending on my situation. This will be the difference between traditional web and a smarter Web – contextual and intelligent forming, ” says Carlos Domingo, Director of Telefonica R+D.

The actual article in Spanish is here.

Posted in News, Press Coverage, Social Software | No Comments »

Gears from Google goes Live with Rummble.

Google Gears for Windows Mobile launches today and Rummble is excited to be a launch partner with Google. Gears represents and exciting next step in the evolution of the mobile internet. It will eventually give mobile developers access to all the really useful functionality of mobile handsets which cant currently be utilised from mobile phone web browsers – including camera, file system, address book, etc.

Gears launches on Windows Mobile with Googles superb Location API, which delivers Rummble users automated location detection on any modern Windows Mobile device – even if the handset itself doesn’t have GPS. Using the same magic which sits behind Googles really useful My Location maps service on mobile, the Location API uses CellID and other technology to detect where the user is and communicates that to Rummble.

Until now, there was no sensible way to get automated location updates from within the mobile browser. Gears solves that problem. As Google releases more APIs into the Gears platform, we’ll be adding these to the Rummble mobile website functionality.

Gears will be launched on other major mobile platforms in the future and Rummble will be supporting them, so watch this space!

• Find out more about Google Gears here
• The Rummble for Gears mobile website is here

NB: Rummble for Windows Mobile uses version 1.5 of our Rummble mobile site, which sports a brand new interface and UI, more along the lines of our soon to launch Rummble iphone application; we’ll be hoping to roll out this version to other versions of the mobile website, asap.

You can go to m.rummble.com and click on the “Update location with Gears” on the homepage to see the Rummbles nearest you.

Posted in Events, News, Press Coverage, Rummble Announcements, Social Software | 1 Comment »