Kate Russell did a very thorough and insightful roundup of echoecho on today’s BBC Click. She hit some key talking points and understood a lot of what we’re trying to convey with simplicity, utility and elegance in using the app.
Check out the video directly on the bbc website here or look at the embedded clip below:
Excellent stuff Kate.
A big hat tip to Dominika, one our first beta-testers and an awesome actress who suggested us to Kate. Here’s a link to her FB
NextWeb has a nice writeup on last night’s echoecho win at AppCircus in London
Congrats to @echoaewo – despite being a part of the echoecho vision from the beginning this was among his first public outings presenting the app in a competitive judged environment….and dude won the day ;)
Barcelona here we come…
So we’ve been hard at work doing a super-secret port of echoecho to WP7 – but now we sort of outed ourselves…(or maybe Microsoft outed us ;) – either way – it’s not a secret anymore since Wired wrote about it we can say:
Hey….we’re doing a Mango WP7 echoecho app.
It’s actually really cool and takes advantage of virtually every new feature Mango offers. Here’s the same screenshot Wired magazine used – but there will be pleny more shortly as it goes live in (hopefully) a week or so.
A few months back there were endless posts (here’s one of many) on how your iphone tracks your location without your permission etc etc…
Sure – the wording was a little bombastic and overblown in parts – but nonetheless it was eye-opening for many people.
In iOS 5 this feature seems to be one step forward and two steps back. Taking a leaf out of Facebook’s playbook – Apple seems to opt for the “let’s put the setting in there for users to turn this off – but let’s make it so obscure no-one ever will”
I noticed this by total accident. Go to your (remember this is iOS 5 only) Settings screen. It looks something like this:
So far – so good. Now click on Location Services – and you will see something like this:
Again. Not so bad. A little different to what you used to see in iOS 4 but close enough. But this is where it gets interesting. It’s not at all clear that there is another button below the fold. If you scroll down you’ll see it:
If you click on this button – then you get deeper into Apple’s geo-tracking features.
When I first saw this I was pleasantly surprised – because I thought it was interesting that Apple allows you to turn these features off.
What I found a little distubing was what happens when you scroll THIS screen down:
Yep. It’s off by default. For EVERYBODY. It just doesn’t seem like an Apple thing to do.
Expose all the guts of the geo-tracking functionality – but bury it deep so no normal user finds it – and then bury the “visibility” of it even deeper.
I’m not saying there’s anything surreptitious going on here – after all many people willingly submit to all kinds of tracking/geosharing – but it’s just seemed a bit shifty to me.
Well yeah – stitched leather just isn’t our thing ;)
There’s a blog post coming about Apple’s early friend finding efforts – in the meantime I’ll just say
Looks better because it works better. Works better because it is better.
Thassit…
phew. today was a big day for echoecho Nokia news.
We had a brand new video release – it’s all part of the fact that many people on the Nokia team love how we built echoecho – so it’s now being used as a showcase for the entire QT platform.
Here’s the video – shot mostly in Hermosa Beach
There’s also a QT success story here which talks about how we pushed the QT tools to their limits.
Oh and there’s more – the video is a spotlight on the Nokia Developer home page
Last but not least – Nokia Conversations – a nice profile about what echoecho is and how it works on Nokia/QT
Sarah Vizard (@sarahvse) did a great profile of echoecho for Strategy Eye.
Nick: I believe that everyone’s just scratching the surface of what you can do with location. People are extremely uncomfortable with anything they perceive to be Big Brother tracking-type solutions, so making people comfortable with sharing their locations with their friends in certain ways will actually allow us to build things we haven’t even thought of yet.
Discussion includes a lively summary of current issues aswell as some discussions of the future. Original article appears in full here
Here’s a cute picture we found amongst Nokia’s QT partner materials.
Some solid company here, WordPress, CNN, Foursquare, AP…it looks like Shazam is having a bit of a go at us in the top left corner there…
But we’ll sort them out ;)
It’s always nice to see other people agreeing with what we set out to do.
Alex Kauffmann says in the Business Insider:
“echoecho uses technology to address a need – answering the question, ‘Where are you, friend?’— rather than retrofitting a justification into a technology.”
thanks Alex. Indeed we do. Solving real problems in real situations is something that we always set out to do – it’s great to continue to get recognition for this.
So Apple have announced a new app allowing users to find their friends and family – or have they?
We’re fans of Apple here at echoecho. They make great products that look and feel great and are a joy to use. So we took it as a big compliment that Apple decided to include what was billed as a simple friend finding service in their latest iOS announcements.
This move validates the gap we identified with echoecho a while ago – finding people using mobile phones has been unnecessarily difficult. echoecho was designed to make it easy – solving the problem of finding anyone in your address book – with one click.
There are no complicated privacy or permission settings. And we don’t offer continuous tracking – because we’ve met very very few users who want to be tracked and few people who really need to track others at all times. And for that matter, very few phone batteries that want to waste all their precious energy polling GPS unnecessarily to inform that your colleague is still sitting at the desk next to yours.
The exact functionality of Apple’s release is not yet clear – but judging from some of the screenshots on display during the keynote – well, let’s just say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. It’s nice to see that Apple probably agree that echoecho is the easiest and most user friendly method of finding your friends.
But for “Find My Friends,” as with all apps, the devil is in the details . How useful is a “find my friends” app that’s not cross platform? Sure, there are plenty of apps that aren’t cross-platform, but sharing your favourite Charlie Sheen quote is probably less of a recurring everyday need than finding your close ones. In echoecho’s world you can find anybody in your address book – regardless of which smartphone they have. In many cases, you can ask and answer the question “where are you?” with friends who don’t even have the app. In Apple’s world you can find your friends only as long as they too are on an iPhone, and using iOS 5.
Do you even know what phone all your friends use? Is the answer iPhone? If the answer is no (which it is for most people) consider that the time of “siloed single vendor communication solutions” (to quote ReadWriteWeb was supposed to be over in 1997. Back then, if you were on AT&T you couldn’t text message someone on Sprint. So Apple wants to travel back in time. Well – we’re not sure users are gonna like that – especially not with solutions like echoecho around.