I had a note in from Simon Tennant, one of the top chaps at mobile social services, Buddycloud. They’ve been innovating at a tremendous pace and Simon emailed with this update:
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Ewan,
We don’t really do press releases but I wanted to ping you about what have been beavering away on here in Buddycloud Towers. We’re terrible at blowing our own trumpet but I figured that if we are going to talk about ourselves, then we’d rather tell you first.
This morning Ross received a newly signed build back from Symbian that rolls up all our development build goodness. Things like pushing status message to Twitter and Facebook and place syncing. eg: “Ross Savage met with Helge Timenes at Buddycloud Towers.” The chat and find-people-nearby stuff is also now looking good.
Helge has also been hard at work on our location engine, tweaking it to get even better, more accurate place bookmarks using just Cell Towers for location. And now, when a user is not at one of their place bookmarks, we share your general location with your friends (eg Ewan is on-the-road in Shorditch or Ewan is near to MIR Towers).
Helge has also been fixing some strange problems with using cellid for positioning (we discovered that all Starbucks use the same ethernet address!) The Wifi lets you be hyper-accurate but for the most part Cell Towers is “good enough”.
And I’m currently working with a university team in Munich and one in Vienna that are using our backend and handset code to develop a
carpooling and mobile dating service respectively. I’m also working with some of the standard boards to find a nice way to share location and find people nearby. Eventually we want Buddycloud, Brightkite, Fireeagle, Nokia Friendfinder etc all working together.
Some progress: A protocol we put together is now in the experimental phase
(http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0255.html)
A couple of weeks back we asked them to help us translate the Buddycloud application to more than just English. Within 5 days we were supporting 11 languages. (Thanks gang.)
I also updated our product description page if MIR readers would like to know more about us:
http://www.buddycloud.com/cms/node/56
(trumpt blowing over) If you would like something a bit more press-releasey ping me back and I could jot something down for you.
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STEP AWAY FROM THE PRESS RELEASE, Simon. I much prefer an email update from the chaps who’re doing it. I’m pretty sure the rest of the readers here on Mobile Industry Review prefer that too.
I’m off to go and put Buddycloud on my handset…
Here’s the link you need to download.