Our Imagination Labs

We spend our days working through the details of what’s possible, but sometimes it’s nice to just kick back and imagine what’s coming. That’s why we created PointAbout Labs and we’ve teamed up with leading designers like Nic DiPalma to showcase what the apps of the future could look like. If you’d like to join us in our imagination journey, just contact us at right.

If you have an app idea and you’d like us to tell you if it’s possible today, or might be possible tomorrow, or have us quote a price for an app, just contact us at right or cal us at 202.391.0347 and we’ll be happy to help!

Descend – by PointAbout, designed by Nic DiPalma Creative

What if your jacket could communicate with your phone?

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FindLove – by PointAbout, designed by Nic DiPalma Creative

What if you knew your future husband or wife was in the room?

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Get Workin’ – by PointAbout, designed by Nic DiPalma Creative

Find Jobs in Your Area, Send Your Resume, and Schedule The Interview

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$ave Big – by PointAbout, designed by Nic DiPalma Creative

Get Access to even bigger savings

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Invasion – by PointAbout, designed by Nic DiPalma Creative

What if you could play an Augmented Reality game right on your street?

Weekly Webinar: Making a Successful iPhone Application

Join PointAbout for a weekly two hour webinar, every Thursday at 2pm Eastern, in which we reveal everything you need to know to create a successful iPhone application.  We’ll cover the following topics:

• An introduction to Objective C – the software language in which iPhone applications are made
• How PointAbout allows you to create an iPhone application without having to learn Objective C
• What you’ll need to make a successful iPhone appliction, including a deep dive into the necessary data sources and transport protocols such as RSS feeds and API sources,
• How Apple Developer Account access works, and how we can handle that process on your behalf, at your option
• Submission details for application review by the Apple iTunes Store, including sizing requirements for the icon and splash screen, and language dos & don’ts for the iTunes Store
• How we navigate the Apple submission process, including the top 10 mistakes developers usually make which keep them from being able to successfully submit applications
• Post-submission reporting tools, including how to make sense of daily, weekly and monthly application download reports
• How we can integrate detailed and very valuable analytics into your application so you know when the application is opened, closed, how long users stay on each screen, whether they “pinch” certain items in the application, even how they orient the phone when using your application (these analytics allow you to make much better decisions when creating future revisions to your application)
• How to read the financial statements provided by Apple, and why they don’t match up with your download reports
• How to create a marketing strategy to successfully get your app noticed among the tens of thousands of apps already in the App Store, including tips & tricks to vastly increase your download numbers
• Pricing strategies for selling your app in the App Store (i.e., should you price it at 99 cents, or $9.99, etc.)
• Other ways to monetize your application, including leveraging ad networks such as AdMob or others, and how to get sponsorships for your application that will not only cover the cost of creating the application, but allow you to generate sponsorship revenue immediately
• How to create a fully featured application for under $10,000 (and often under $5,000) instead of paying $25,000+
• Our top 3 best-practices to keep your application fresh and generating downloads over time

The cost for this two hour webinar is $300, and it is held every Thursday from 2pm-4pm Eastern.  Space is limited to 15 participants per webinar.  The first  hour covers the topics above, and the last hour is reserved for answering your specific questions about your application.  If after the webinar you have specific questions that require us to sign a Non Disclosure Agreement (click here to download our mutual NDA) and speak in private, we are happy to schedule a one-on-one call to review your questions, at a rate of $250 per hour.

Ready to get started? Invest $300 now to save yourself countless headaches and dollars later as you navigate this process! Sign up for the webinar at right (provide us your full name and specify which Thursday you wish to attend in “mm/dd” format). Your space will be reserved once we have confirmed your payment. If for any reason you are dissatisfied with the experience, we will refund your payment in full (to date, we’ve never had to do this). First and Last Name Desired Webinar Date (mm/dd) Register above, or email us, or call us at 202.391.0347.

You will need a PC or Mac with a good internet connection and access to a phone to particpate in this webinar.

An intro to RSS and how you can use it to do awesome things with mobile

We often get clients who want to create mobile applications such as walking tours, location-sensitive audio tours, or the like.

We’re going to, in this post, show you how you can do this, and help you ensure you have the skills to be successful in the endeavor.

The first thing that clients typically forget is that the data has to come from somewhere. If you want to make a walking tour of a city, there has to be some data about that city for you to give the mobile user. Often, that data has rights attached to it, by the author or publisher, so you can’t just go out and take it. This is one of the most overlooked facets of creating an app – the data does not just magically appear. All of that content about what restaurants to go to, or what monuments to see, etc., was created by someone, and if you use it, they’re going to want you to get their permission first. Maybe you want to take content from your website and put it into an iPhone app.

Assuming you can get access to the data, the next step is to transfer the data to the phone in some manner. RSS is a great way to do this. If you’ve never heard of RSS, you can learn about it here. Think of RSS as the “telephone line” that’s going to transport your data from a computer server to the phone. It keeps you from having to cram your whole site into a tiny mobile browser by letting us extract all the relevant information.

Next, you have to create an RSS feed. If you’re a little more advanced and you want to manually create an RSS feed, here’s a good tutorial for doing it (you’ll at the very least need HTML skills to do this). However, the absolute easiest way to create an RSS feed is just to use Wordpress.com to get a free blog. When you write blog posts, Wordpress will automatically create the RSS feed for you. Then you can pull that information into a cohesive application that is neatly packaged.

Next, you’ll need to display the RSS feed on the phone. Luckily, PointAbout can help you here. We’ve developed an RSS reader template that we can customize to taste. We can even make the RSS feed location aware. If you’re building your own RSS feed you’ll want to make sure you format it correctly for us. You should end up with a simple-to-use app!

Here, each relevant section or article on your site is listed as an item of content which the user can browse at their own leisure. When you select one of the listed items, you’ll get more in-depth content, like a complete article. This will most closely resemble articles as viewed on your site when using a computer.

It’s that easy to translate a well-organized webpage to a fast, useful, versatile application. And, with AppMakr, you can build an app just like this one, on your own, in 27 seconds. From there, we can meet with you on a consulting basis to customize your application with fonts, colors, icons, and unique functions that extend and reinforce your brand identity.

And if RSS is still too confusing, just contact us at right and we’ll set up a consulting project to take care of the details for you!

GoMobo utilizes PointAbout for its “1-Touch Store Locator” service

GoMobo, working with PointAbout, is now offering a “1-Touch Store Locator” service to its customers. See slides 7-11 in the video presentation by GoMobo’s CEO below for details:

Going Offline with HTML5

Part of PointAbout’s HTML Springboard approach to native application building includes constant research into offline capabilities.  HTML 5 offers some exciting new capabilities in this area. Here’s a great article on how to take advantage of offline access to content in HTML 5.

Augmented / Enhanced Reality with the iPhone & Android

We’re big fans of using the iPhone’s and Android’s camera API to provide an augmented reality experience, by combining the analog world & the digital world.   We’re currently looking for a client that wants to dive into a project like this with us.  If you’re a big fan of what augmented reality can do, we’d love to apply it to your business.  An important note is that the camera functionality API is not yet approved by Apple for publishing to the iTunes App Store, but we expect it will be at some point in the near future.  This is a good opportunity to be among the first companies that have augmented reality applications in the AppStore!

Here are some examples of apps that use the powerful technology of augmented reality.

Augmenting Social Media

Augmented reality apps can go far beyond simply bringing subway maps to life. Check out TwittARound, a social media app for Twitter users that helps you locate the source of Tweets in your vicinity:

Augmented reality is extremely promising and will present even more possibilities as present hardware continues to evolve. If you’re interested in data-mashup applications, or want to extend your brand further than has ever been possible, we’d love to work with you!

Hopkinson Report: iPhone “no-substitute” status?

Here’s a great blog by Jim Hopkinson of WIRED magazine on the iPhone.  You can listen to the podcast here, or get it from iTunes here (opens iTunes), or read the transcript below:

0:06: You’re listening to the Hopkinson Report. And now here’s your host, Jim Hopkinson.

Hi! This is Jim Hopkinson, Wired’s Marketing Guy; and yes, they’ve given me my own Podcast. Welcome. Every week, I’m going to take a fresh, funny, and sometimes, frantic look at marketing trends in the Digital World.

Today I’m going to talk about whether the iPhone is reached of what I call ‘no-substitute status’. Are they at a point where it’s a matter of if you buy an iPhone, but when?

But first, let me you a quick story and talk a little bit about branding. When I was 24 years old, I had a 1990 Mitsubishi Eclipse Turbo. Man, that car was some kind of fun to drive. It was reliable; it was quick, sporty. It even fit my mountain bike in the back with the seat put down. But most importantly, it was a blast to drive. You’re hitting that on-ramp, shifting from second to third, the turbo kicks in, you feel your body pressed back against the seats. It was truly a rush.

But now for the past six years, I’ve been without a car, living in New York City, which is really tough for a guy that likes to drive cars, not simply ride in a car, but enjoy driving a car. There’s a difference; and it doesn’t come from renting a Chevy Malibu 4-door that I can get at Avis. So I have a dream, I want to own a Porsche. Now, I’m going to start and end this argument that it doesn’t make a lick of sense to own a Porsche. Forget that a car payment would be $500.00 a month, and insurance and gas would be $500.00 a month, the average cost of a parking space in my neighborhood would be $500.00 a month. Forget all that. Not to mention, that it’s going to get stolen in New York; it’s going to get dinged up in New York, that it snows all the time in New York; and that if I have to go to Boston, it’s $15.00 to take the bus, but forget about all that. Don’t quash my dream. But let’s say I magically come up with $20,000. What could I do with that? Take for example, that 2008 Chevy Malibu that Avis always hands me when I go in to rent. What is the marketing behind that vehicle? Now that car was just named the ‘2008 North American Car of the Year’. That’s a pretty compelling reason to get this car…right, the Car of the Year? What does the Chevy brand telling me? Well I pull up their website, and there’s a quote on the front on their page from John Davis at Motor Week that says; and I quote, “The Malibu was stylish, almost dynamic.” Are you kidding me? Almost dynamic, that’s the best you can come up with for the front of your Web page? Almost dynamic, it’s almost dynamic?

So then I zip over to cars.com, and I find a black 5-speed 1999 Porsche Boxster Convertible with less than 25,000 miles. Now, what does their brand tell me? Porsche: There is no substitute. So of course, if you’re married with two kids, you make lots of trips to Costco, you want a brand new car that won’t break the bank; of course the Chevy makes a much more logical choice. But for the market that Porsche is going after, their branding statement is very, very strong. And how’s that working out for them? Well, according to Mobile Magazine, Porsche is the most profitable auto maker. It makes more than $28,000.00 per car sold. Compare that to BMW, which clears $3,200.00. And for an American company like Chrysler, take a guess: $900.00. Now people tell me, just buy an old beat-up car or why not get a Honda S2000 Convertible; those are nice. Or what about one of those Mini Cooper’s that will be easy to park and drive around town?

But they’re all missing the point. I’m not buying something just to have a car. I want a different experience–’there is no substitute’. They’ve been able to plant a seed in my mind that none of these other things matter. For me right now, it’s not a choice between five different cars. It’s a choice between the experience I have now and the dramatically different, albeit, dramatically more expensive, second option. So through years of carefully crafting their brand, they’ve been able to set up a situation where users will pay a premium to get a better experience while discounting their competitors. There is no substitute, which brings me to Apple.

OK, let’s start with the iPod. Now I can speak from experience here because, like a lot of people out there, I actually own several MP3 players in the ’90’s before the iPod even came out in 2001. But, then came the iPod boom. All my friends were raving about the iPod. So if anyone, I could talk about alternatives. But once I bought one, and I saw all the things that went into it: the continual update of iTunes and how much easier their user interface was, the additional of video iPods, new models that are rolling out every eight months or so. And then the killer app, for me as a runner, the integration with the Nike iPod chip. So when I was ready for the new model, am I gonna to consider the Zoon? No. Not when with Apple controlling 70% of the MP3 market. It was either keep the old iPod or choose a new one. There was no substitute. Apple had set it up so there was no substitute.

Then came my computer. So, I have a Computer Science degree. I learned how to program on a Commodore 64. I once bonded with an IT guy because I was the only marketing person he’d met that knew what a skuzzy hard drive was; and basically, I’ve spent every day of my working life in front of a PC. So I’m really, really a difficult person to switch from a PC to a MAC platform. What got me to switch? Well, first of all I admit it. There was a cool factor. MAC seemed a lot cooler than PC’s. And I started spending time in a Apple retail store, and you can’t help but be impressed with that experience. Then they told me anything I could do on Windows could also be done on a Mac. So basically, over the through the years, Apple slowly addressed and then removed all the objections I have. But the killer app for me on the computer was a combination of two things. Number one, moving to a smaller apartment, I wanted to go from a PC to a laptop; and then, something with the competition. Microsoft released Vista, and the bad reviews that accompanied that. So Apple had played up their strengths with their marketing and exposed the weaknesses of the competition that I might have considered.

So now on to the iPhone. And I find myself in the same situation as the car, as the iPod, and the computer. Everything I have is now is fine. But what is that killer app out there that’s going to make me pull out my wallet and buy that iPhone. Has the iPhone yet positioned itself to ‘there is no substitute status’? But here is some things that Apple has done well with their marketing. Number one, the coolness factor. Again, like any Apple product, the design it has differentiates it from the rest of the competition. Next, surfing the Web. No doubt, the ability to find a movie, get directions, check a score, use Google on the fly is a huge selling point. Recent TV spots for marketing they’ve had show users bringing up ski maps, checking car prices, going to Facebook, checking the weather, stock on the fly. They’re doing this very well. But is it enough? But I remember some of the earlier commercials they ran for their visual voice mail. Do you remember that? They made a huge to-do about that. Can you believe it? You can listen the second voicemail you received before the first voicemail you got. Really, that’s breakthrough idea-worthy of an entire TV commercial? You know how I get from the first voicemail to the second voicemail on my current phone? I press the number nine. It skips you right from number one to number two. How can that be the most compelling thing on the iPhone; but to wrap things up, the question I pose originally was–has the iPhone reached ‘there is no substitute status’? When it does come time to upgrade my phone, will I look at my competitors from Samsung, Nokia, Motorola, and others. I was recently at a sales conference in New Orleans, and I came across three things in one day that leads me to say at least for now, “yes.”

First, from a marketing angle. I wake up in my hotel room; and there’s this full color, full page advertisement from Sprint in my USA Today. It touted their simply everything plan. Let me grab it here. Alright, for $99.99 you get: unlimited talking, unlimited Web surfing, unlimited emailing, unlimited texting, unlimited video messaging, picture sharing, unlimited GPS Navigation, unlimited push to talk,  unlimited Sprint TV, unlimited Sprint music, unlimited NFL Mobile, and unlimited Nascar Sprint Cup Mobile. So if I’m a happy Sprint user, which I am, shouldn’t I be the ideal customer for this? The answer is yes, but not on the current phone that I have. I’m going to need a new phone.

Next, from a business angle. Wireless Technology Director, Scott Lane, made the point in the presentation that the Apple software developer’s kit cost only $99.00 to publish an application, but the ifund that is set to reward developers for great applications is, insert your Dr. Evil voice here, $100,000,000. So in other words, you just have to spend $99.00 to build an application that could net you millions. Don’t you think that there’s going to be thousands of people making unbelievable applications that are going to be the killer app for you in there? I think so.

And lastly, to bring the point home. Why did a team building activity, what we did an amazing race-style event around the French Quarter of New Orleans. We had to visit various points around the city, answer trivia, collect certain items, and so on. Part of the thinking when they set up various teams…each team had to have at least one member that owned an iPhone. Now the reason for this is that even have a single team not have one, would be a tremendous disadvantage. And by using the iPhone in a real world scenario, my team came in first place. Yeah!!!  Now did I say the iPhone was much more valuable in helping quickly navigate the city than if we had a brand new Porsche.

Thank you for listening to the Hopkinson Report. Send me some feedback. Email me at MarketingGuy@wired.com. That’s MarketingGuy@wired.com. If you like reading about cars, check out the Autopia blog. The latest and greatest phone and gadget reviews, be sure to visit our Gadget Lab. Both at wired.com.

9:42

How to format your RSS feeds for PointAbout

Want it to look snazzier? See how we can customize the look & feel.

Setting multiple RSS feeds up in a PointAbout iPhone/Android application:

Each feed corresponds to the icon at the bottom of the application.  For example, this example is for the “Business” feed.  Each icon in the app corresponds to its own feed.  The more feeds you want to include in the app, the more icons we’ll have.  Here’s how to format a feed:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”iso-8859-1″?>
<?xml-stylesheet href=”/css/rss20.xsl” type=”text/xsl”?>
<rss xmlns:pheedo=”http://www.pheedo.com/namespace/pheedo” version=”2.0″ xmlns:dc=”http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/”>
<channel>
<title><![CDATA[Business]]></title> This corresponds to “Business” in the left image title bar, above
<!– title><![CDATA[Business News & Economic Policy]]></title –> (This is not used by PointAbout, but must be in the feed)
<link><![CDATA[http://www.samplesite.com/business/index.html]]></link> (This is also not used by PointAbout, but must be in feed)
<item> This tag is just duplicated for as many items as you have.
<title><![CDATA[ In the Chevy Malibu, GM's Pride and Its Challenge ]]></title> This is the first item in the list (just duplicate the item tag for other items)
<link>http://feeds.samplesite.com/click.phdo?i=53695</link>  This maps to the “Web Link” button on the 2nd image to the right, in the header bar.
<guid isPermaLink=”false”>company_name_12345</guid> Globally unique identifier for item (Must be globally unique among all RSS feeds worldwide.  Can also be an HTML link, since that would be unique)
<pubDate>Wed, 15 Jul 2009 10:19:55 EDT</pubDate> Publish date, displayed to right of Title on the image at left
<geo:lat>37.86885</geo:lat> If your item has a physical location, include the latitude here. Click here for more info on GeoRSS.
<geo:long>-122.27293</geo:long> If your item has a physical location, include the longitude here.
<description><![CDATA[
Consumer prices rose at a surprisingly steep rate in June and the nation's factories continued to pull back production, according to new data released today that affirm that the economy remains weak but is not entering a dangerous cycle of falling prices.
<br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/>
<br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/>
<a href="http://ads.samplesite.com/click.phdo?s=53695dc3777fd5113da50d3c72ca99a5&p=1"><img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://ads.samplesite.com/img.phdo?s=53695dc3777fd5113da50d3c72ca99a5&p=1"/></a>
]]></description>  This tag is the “meat” of the RSS feed.  The CDATA tag allows for this to be HTML and it can be as short or as long as you’d like.  Also, if you include an HTML link in this description tag, it will activate the web slide-in.  So you could, for example, include a link to a Google Map, as follows:  <a href =”http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=1600+Pennsylvania+Ave+NW,+Washington,+DC%E2%80%8E&sll=38.900251,-77.036562&sspn=0.035135,0.103254&ie=UTF8&ll=38.89935,-77.036626&spn=0.008784,0.025814&z=16&iwloc=A”>The White House</a> and it would display in the description area (right image above) as a link.  When clicked, it would open up a web slider with the Google Map, which could then be closed, and the user would be back in the description area.
</item>
</channel>
</rss>

Using GeoRSS in PointAbout apps

PointAbout utilizes GeoRSS to create location-aware RSS feeds.  You can find more detail on the GeoRSS spec here.

The best way to set a GeoRSS feed up is to have the mobile app (i.e., the iPhone app) send its lat + long coordinates to a server, and have the server crunch the data as follows:

Step 1: Have the server find all the data points near the user.  The way you do this is by incrementing the long & lat by 0.1 in each direction.  For example, if the phone sends you its location as “Latitude = 38.8977, Longitude = -77.0366″, then you can take plus/minus 0.1 on each of the values the phone gave you to give you about a 10 mile radius. (use something like where lat between currlat+.1, currlat-.1 and lon between currlon+.1, currlong-.1).

Step 2: Now that you have a ~10 mile radius bounded box, you want to take all the data points that fall within those lat & long values, and order them based on where the phone is.  You can calculate distance in a langauge, sql, script, or compiled serverside language:

var R = 6371; // km
var dLat = (lat2-lat1).toRad();
var dLon = (lon2-lon1).toRad();
var a = Math.sin(dLat/2) * Math.sin(dLat/2) +
Math.cos(lat1.toRad()) * Math.cos(lat2.toRad()) *
Math.sin(dLon/2) * Math.sin(dLon/2);
var c = 2 * Math.atan2(Math.sqrt(a), Math.sqrt(1-a));
var d = R * c;

Then you want to return an ordered list of RSS items to the phone based on the calculations above.  Every time the “update” button is pressed by the user, the location is re-sent to the server for a new list of RSS items to be passed back to the phone.

Here are some other resources for calculating distance and “nearest” items:

• How to calculate the distance between two points on the Earth
• SQL Server Zipcode Latitude/Longitude proximity distance search

Here’s what the finished app looks like (uses our new mashup product):

Fixed HTML

We’ve found a way to fix the HTML so it doesn’t scroll (just like a native app) based on these two excellent blogs, which pioneered the concept:

1. http://doctyper.com/archives/200808/fixed-positioning-on-mobile-safari/
2. http://cubiq.org/scrolling-div-on-iphone-ipod-touch/5

You can download this zip file which has the javascript and CSS to do this, which is based on the links above.

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