#RefreshCA – GeoSocial Showdown
Be sure to join the Central Arkansas Refresh on February 23rd for our GeoSocial Showdown to discuss several of today’s top applications. After a lot of discussion we have decided to have a little bit different format for this month’s meeting. As opposed to having one speaker offer a presentation and then have group questions, we are going to have a moderator and 5 representatives from within the group to represent the top 5 services. Each presenter will give a short overview of the app they represent (approximately 3 minutes long) and then the group will be invited to interact with the panel and ask questions. It should be an awesome time. The volunteer representatives and applications represented will be:
- BrightKite – Anthony Valley
- Foursquare – Amy Bradley Hole
- Loopt – Bryan Jones
- Gowalla – Khara Cavaness
- Waze – Keith Crawford
If you have never attended one of our meetings, we invite you to attend this one. Our meetings are held in the basement of The Flying Saucer in downtown Little Rock at 6:00pm on the last Tuesday of each month. For additional information please join our Facebook Group and follow @RefreshCA on Twitter. Our meetings are open to the public and free! Below you will find a map to The Flying Saucer…
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EP:006 – The Cotton Club Podcast
In this Episode…
My co-host Keith Crawford and I discussed a very popular topic this evening, and that’s the rollout of Google Buzz. In this episode we both give our first impressions of this new social network / aggregator based on our initial 3 or 4 days of testing. Keith has been an authority on FriendFeed for some time now so given the similarities between what Google is trying to accomplish with Buzz and what FriendFeed already does, he provided some excellent commentary.
Also, anytime Keith and I get together for a show we always like to close out w/ a few iPhone application recommendations. This week we discussed Siri™, Waze, SleepCycle, and My6Sense. Keith also discussed Appolicious, which is a resource that no iPhone app junkie is going to want to live without. I also mentioned a story I saw today on CNN where several companies like AT&T and Verizon are getting together to open a competing APP store, you can find that CNN story here…
Since Keith and I are both avid NASCAR fans we dedicated a few minutes at the end of our show to discussing Jamie McMurray’s victory at the Daytona 500. Stay tuned for another post on this blog dedicated to the race.
Win Dinner for 2 on Cotton & Keith’s ‘Name That Podcast Promotion’!
As some of you might already be aware, Keith and I are looking for a new name for our podcast that we host together. We are looking for something unique and innovative that best describes our show. If you are unfamiliar w/ our show, be sure to listen to this weeks episode by clicking on the play button below to get an idea. We typically discuss social media, web services, and iPhone applications. You can enter our ‘Name that Podcast’ promotion by leaving a comment below w/ your suggestions or by posting your suggestion on twitter to @tsudo and @cottonr using the #NameThatPodcast hash tag. Keith and I will go over each entry and select the one that we like the best. If we chose the name you suggested, you will win dinner for two at The Market Place grill here in Conway, Arkansas. You can enter as many times as you like.
Listen to This Episode / Subscribe to The Cotton Club…
Click on the play button below to play this episode on your computer, or you may subscribe to The Cotton Club in iTunes or using Microsoft Zune. For step-by-step instructions for subscribing to this podcast, click here…
EP:004 – The Cotton Club Podcast
In the first episode of ‘The Social Radar’ podcast Cotton Rohrscheib and Keith Crawford discuss a wide variety of topics related to social media, from desktop applications to wireless and mobile apps. Some of the applications discussed in this episode include Twazzup, Posterous, PicPosterous, Ustream U Recorder, Bambuser, TweetMic, My6Sense, Newsstand, Google Wave, Waveboard, Waze, Seesmic (Look, Desktop, Twhirl), Delicious, Diigo, and Toodledo.
In addition to social media applications we also debate the hot “Re-Tweets” versus “mentions” or “via’s” topic on Twitter as well as how trends play an important role in how we receive our news. Keith also discusses his adoption of lists and how he uses them to manage his stream.
Applications & Products Featured:
- Twazzup Beta web client for Twitter
- PicPosterous iPhone App: $Free, share pics and video instantly
- Ustream iPhone App
- Bambuser iPhone App: $Free, stream live video
- TweetMic Lite iPhone App: $Free, post audio clips to twitter
- my6sense iPhone App: $Free, read and share “relevant” content
- Newsstand iPhone App: $4.99, full featured RSS reader
- Waveboard iPhone App: $1.99 Googe wave client
- Seesmic Look Desktop App: Visualize twitter trends & updates
- Seesmic Web Twitter Client
- Toodledo iPhone App: $2.99 To do list app with Outlook syncing
Programming Note: My guest host, Keith Crawford, and I have decided to no longer use the name, The Social Radar, for our podcast. I am publishing our previously recorded episodes to The Cotton Club Podcast for those of you who have requested them.
#RefreshCA GeoSocial Showdown (Update)
Recently I did a blog post asking for feedback regarding the format for our upcoming February Central Arkansas Refresh meeting on GeoSocial Applications. I think for the most part we all agreed that there needs to be some sort of “intro” to each of the applications we are going to showcase.
Daniel Spillers brought up a good point in the comments from my last post that these presentations need to be pretty brief and concise laying out the specifics and differences between each app. Keith Crawford also agreed that he thought a short overview for each application regarding their implications and differentiations would be wise. My thoughts all along have been that this meeting in particular might have the same kind of response from the community that our Google Wave meeting had back in November where we had a lot of people attend that usually don’t attend. Based on our November meeting attendance I walked away thinking that we had actually given something back to the community, which was pretty cool. That’s not to say that our meetings where it’s just us nerds aren’t fun, because they are!
One thing that we accomplished in my initial blog post was setting up our panel of representatives for this meeting as well as the apps that we are going to discuss, here’s how things have shaped up:
- BrightKite – Anthony Valley
- Foursquare – Amy Bradley Hole
- Loopt – Bryan Jones
- Gowalla – Khara Cavaness
- Waze – Keith Crawford
I will probably act as the moderator for the meeting to kind of kick things off and introduce each panelist. Each panelist will have about 2-3 minutes to give a brief rundown of their application and tell how it’s different from the others and it’s implications.
I think the consensus from those that I have heard from was that after the presentations for each app were complete we could then open up the room for discussion, questions, etc. regarding each application. I think that if we all hustle we can knock out the presentations in about 20 minutes or so and leave the remainder of the evening open for discussion. I guess my question is,
How Does This Sound?? Leave a comment if you want to add something or if I forgot anything…
By the way, our meeting is scheduled for February 23, 2010 at 6pm at our normal location, The Flying Saucer. If you are a member of Facebook Group you should get an event notification. Also, be sure to follow @RefreshCA on Twitter for news and updates. If you have never attended a #RefreshCA meeting, here’s a map to The Flying Saucer, we meet in the basement…
Be sure to tell your friends and co-workers about this meeting, I think it has the potential to be one of our best ones yet given the popularity of geosocial apps.
Waze Brings Back Treasure Chests for Valentines
A few days ago Daniel from Waze sent me an email to let me know that Waze is bringing back their Treasure Chests in a Valentine’s Day themed promotion. This promotion is pretty cool, let’s say you are driving along and you open up a treasure chest, it might be filled with tickets to the movies for 2 or a heart shaped box of chocolates. How cool is that? The themed goodies are also going to look like cupids arrows and love balloons.
If you are unfamiliar with the Waze app for the iPhone, I strongly recommend you check them out. I have reviewed this app twice on my blog and talked about it extensively on my podcast, The Cotton Club. If you missed those posts you can find them here and here…
Here’s a press release from the company about this new promotion:
Palo Alto, Calif. — February 8, 2009 — Waze, the first free provider of driver-generated maps and real-time road information geared towards everyday driving, today announced a Valentine’s Day treasure hunt to help save the day for techies who might have forgotten to consider their sweethearts this February 14th.
Waze’s ‘Valentine’s Treasure Hunt’ will feature ‘road goodies’ as well as virtual treasure chests that, when driven over, have the potential to reward users with a real-world prizes – Valentine’s ‘movie night for two’ gift cards or heart-shaped boxes of chocolate. From February 8 to February 14, 2010, users in the US and Canada, should start looking for treasure chests along their daily commute for their chance to win. More details can be found on the waze blog.
Waze’s holiday-themed ‘road goodies’ – small icons worth bonus points – will be implemented on the map, internationally. The Valentine’s ‘road goodies’ include a cupid’s arrow, worth 15 points, as well as heart-shaped love balloons, worth 10 points, scattered all over the map. Users can use these road goodies to increase their point totals, in prep for waze’s next version which will include a scoreboard, allowing users to check out where they stand among their local driving communities.
I am hoping to have a representative on my podcast from Waze in the very near future so stay tuned for that. Also, Daniel sent along some screengrabs that I thought I would share:
#RefreshCA Geo-Social Showdown
If you missed out on the January meeting of the Central Arkansas Refresh group where Nick Brewer from CJRW did a presentation on PODS CMS for Wordpress, you missed out on an awesome presentation. Nick did an awesome job presenting PODS, hopefully we will have his presentation slides and audio online for you to download in the very near future, he is working on them now.
When we opened the meeting I asked the group what they wanted to do for the next months meeting, since the conversations prior to opening the meeting that night were primarily about all of the Geo-Social apps that are on the market right now such as Gowalla, Foursquare, loopt, Brightkite, and Waze, I proposed that we have some sort of broad scope group discussion on these apps to discuss where we all see these apps going. I think we all agreed that this is the next wave of social media.
The idea that we came up with was that we could have different representatives from within our group kind of give a 5 minute overview of their favorite Geo-Social app and then we could open the floor to discuss these apps and how we can leverage them to meet our clients needs as well as our own moving forward from an industry perspective.
Now, here’s where I need some feedback:
- What does everyone think of this meeting layout?
- Do you have any format suggestions?
- If this is cool, then we will need volunteers to do 5 minute overviews of each product, here’s what we have so far in terms of volunteers: * Cotton Rohrscheib (Gowalla), Khara Cavaness (Yelp), ** Amy Bradley Hole (Foursquare), and Bryan Jones (Loopt). I guess that leaves us needing someone to do an overview of Brightkite and Waze, any takers?? @AkValley, @tsudo, @brantc ???
The meeting is scheduled for the last Tuesday in February, that falls on February 23, 2010, I think given the popularity of this topic we stand a chance of having another really good turnout, possibly rivaling our Google Wave discussion. The location will still be The Flying Saucer in Downtown Little Rock and will kick off around 6-6:30pm.
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* = I can easily speak on Waze too if someone wants to take Gowalla
** = She is awesome and was volunteered by the group. Hopefully we can convince her!!! 
Road Trip Using Waze (Updated)
Okay, so this past weekend my wife and I went on a road trip to see Bill Engvall in Texas with some friends. I blogged before we headed out that I was going to use Waze the entire trip, you can read that post here… For the most part I was extremely, extremely impressed w/ Waze during this trip. I did run into a few things that I wanted to mention though about the software.
Before I go into a lot of detail I want to reiterate again that for a free software app, Waze is probably the most impressive thing I have downloaded since owning my iPhone. This whole Geo-Social thing is just getting fired up with apps like Gowalla, Foursquare, and Loopt on the market, and each one getting stronger, I think we are all going to witness some amazing things in 2010 related to Geo-Social applications. Being that these apps are all new, it’s obvious that there are going to be some kinks, or bugs, here and there. In addition to bugs, there are some items of functionality that we might also want right now that are just going to take the developers a little bit of time to put in place, I am a software guy, I totally get it.
Initially I noticed that Waze allowed users to check in using Foursquare but not Gowalla. I would LOVE to see Gowalla added to the mix since it’s my primary Geo-Social app. I am sure that it’s just a matter of time before Gowalla support is added, it’s growing in popularity every day…
Trips Over 200 Miles…
When programming in our trip, we learned that presently Waze will only accommodate for trips under 200 miles. Since our trip was about 300 miles, we just picked a center location and programmed that in and hit the road. I am not for sure if I expected the audible turn by turn directions from a free application but it was certainly nice. I am not for certain but I think the voice on the app telling me which way to turn was a little bit easier to understand than the one on our Garmin. My wife and I debated the voices a few minutes, we had gotten used to our directions girl on the Garmin.
Outside 3G Coverage Areas…
I could hear the audible directions being cued or downloaded to my phone before they actually spoke. While we were in 3G areas it seemed that we got our turn by turn directions in a very timely manner, enough time to make our turns. Outside the 3G central Arkansas area, near the Texas line was a little bit different story however, we almost missed a turn for our off ramp because the audio came in at the last second and I had to cross two lanes of traffic.
Recalculating Routes after Detours…
Once I got into Texas I programmed in our final destination. As soon as our route was calculated I started driving. About halfway into the metro Tyler area we missed a turn and it took a little while for it to recalculate our route, and this was in 3G service area. I am not for sure if this was a fluke or not but I had to pull over and allow it a few minutes to get us back on track. The other times that I ventured off the pre-determined route I noticed that the recalculation time lagged here as well. I am sure that there is a lot involved with downloading, etc., but I bet that the folks at Waze improve this as time goes on. As far as outside the 3G area goes, I am not for sure if there is anything they can do on their end as programmers to adjust for that… and it’s understandable.
Reporting Traffic Jams and Speed Traps…
On more than one occasion we were able to locate speed traps before we happened upon them. We also in turn posted speed traps that we encountered a long the way, 6 of them to be exact. I really like this feature. We also reported some slower traffic areas on our way back.
Directions Near Louisiana…
We decided on our way back to detour through Shreveport, LA to visit some friends and watch the Saints game and enjoy a bowl of Duck Gumbo. As we got close to Shreveport we noticed that some of the turns the app was telling us to make simply weren’t there. This happened a few times, I am not for sure why this was the case, it could have been that the interstate system there is stacked one on top of the other, about 4 high, and maybe it saw us on one of the other roads, but it sure made for some confusion.
Once we got onto flat roads and made our exit everything started functioning normally again.
Reporting Wildlife on the Highway…
On our return trip, we traveled back roads into Hope, AR. On these back roads and even once we got on the Interstate we saw at least 100 deer grazing on the side of the road. Now, anyone that has traveled Arkansas for any length of time knows that this can be extremely hazardous. I think it would be cool if Waze added a section to their Report area that allowed you to report Wildlife hazards in the area so you could keep your eyes open.
In closing, I am still very impressed with this App and i hope to have Diann from Waze on The Cotton Club podcast one of these days very soon…
Road Trip Using Waze
I am going on a road trip this weekend w/ some friends to the bottom of the Earth (South Texas). Normally I am not that big of a fan of road trips, I guess I outgrew that a few years back. I guess for the most part I am just not that much fun anymore. However, something about this trip has me a little excited.
As someone who sits behind a desk for the most part of everyday, I don’t do a lot of commuting, and the only time I travel is when I am heading to and from meetings. There is a social application called Waze that I have been wanting to test out for a while now.
Waze is a free social mobile app that enables drivers to build and use live maps, real-time traffic updates and turn-by-turn navigation for an optimal commute. Waze is 100% powered by users and the more you drive the better it gets. I have played w/ the app a little bit just driving around town and have been able to report speed traps, backed up traffic, and even accidents just by having their app open.
I recently learned that Waze also acts as a turn by turn navigation system, I am looking forward to testing their service versus the GPS navigation system that we presently have. I was talking w/ Keith Crawford last night on our podcast, The Social Radar, about the Waze app and he and I both agreed that they have probably one of the coolest applications going right now. I look forward to reporting back how my weekend road trip went w/ Waze.
Now, here’s the only thing. My wife complains that I spend too much time Twittering and all of that, I am sure that some of you have caught heat about this before too. Well, I am going to have to try to use Waze covertly on this trip so that I am not accused of spending too much time on my iPhone. It’s going to be tough, wish me luck… If you want to know more about Waze, here’s a guided tour I pulled from their website. (also, I have been in communication w/ Daniel from Waze about someone from their group being a guest on one of our upcoming podcasts, stay tuned)
