World Cup coming to a close!
One more big game left (and a completely meaningless one too), and we’re looking forward to it! It’s been great to check out the Mappr leaderboard and see how different teams have been supported through Mappr checkins. We’re not exactly at Foursquare’s usage levels, but seeing some activity is fantastic! Overall, there’s not much surprise that the USA leads the pack in team checkins. As the home of Foursquare, Twitter, and the biggest hub of social media, Team USA benefited from this active user base. And...
read moreNow Post your Mappr Checkins to Facebook & Twitter
We have a new version of Mappr for iPhone in the App store now. With this release, you can now post your checkins to Facebook and Twitter. If you are checking in with a team, you get a nice icon on a map: And when you check out a place on the iPhone, you can see how many individual and team checkins a place has. We also have a nice World Cup easter egg, who will be the first to find it? Let us know what you find in the...
read moreLeaderboard now live
We have just added a cool new feature to both the iPhone and our website, map.pr. Our leaderboard shows the top team checkins, on both a global basis, and for any specific area. No surprise that team USA is leading the way, with England not far behind. With the highest density of Foursquare / Twitter users, makes sense we see most usage from these nationalities. But with both these teams now out, can anyone make up the difference? The Germany Argentina showdown should be a good chance for these teams to make up ground, as they are currently 3...
read moreLaunch Countdown
A few bits of news! We’ll let you now know about the name of our product. We are very excited to have the name Mappr, with the great URL http://map.pr. No URL shortening will be needed here! Our new iPhone app is about ready to ship to the App Store, and we are in final testing now. If you are interested in helping test, or just want a sneak peak, let us know! http://beta.map.pr/ We will have our new map.pr website up next week as well, will let you know all about it once it’s ready. In the meantime, expect some more here on what...
read moreSoon Hiring!
We have been pretty quiet here, but not for lack of anything to say. Rather, we’ve been busy getting our ideas working, and our plans in shape. Now that we have just about finished this, we want to get ready for the next steps. Sometimes, it takes a long time to do great things. And hiring is certainly one of those. One of the first things you learn at Google is how important it is to find the very best people. So we want to start now to make sure we can get the very best on board. So what roles are we looking for? Well, I don’t...
read moreLots of Buzz
Lots of thoughts of course on the location-based parts of Google’s Buzz, but need to keep most of them to myself for now (for both competitive reasons and need for keeping Google’s confidential stuff quiet. I had played with the gmail-based bits for a while in Google, and still was not sure what to make of it. The best parts were coming across random status messages that proved to be useful. The worst parts was coming across random status messages that were not. Hard wheat/chaff problem to solve, methinks. Finally, tweeted about it...
read more