Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
>> MATT GROSS: Hi, I’m Matt Gross and I work at uLocate Communications, and I manage
the WHERE product line. So, WHERE is an application that we built, it goes across platforms, and
we specifically built our Android version as a native application. So to give you a
little bit of a background on that, we’ve been building location-based services on mobile
phones for many years, and we could fairly easily imported our existing J2ME version
over to Android. But as we really took a look at it, at all the capabilities of the device
and the way that the UI worked, we decided to start from scratch and essentially build
the new WHERE application from the ground up. I have to say that we’re very happy
with having made that decision because the app performs really well. We’ve been getting
great reviews and a lot of downloads. So, the way we constructed that application is
essentially taking all of the various content feeds that we have through partnerships and
also through our own user base, and assembled those on the--on the server side, created
a set of JSON APIs that then get fed down into the Android client itself. We use quite
a bit of native functionality in terms of the native APIs. Chief among those would be
location because that’s really the core of what we do in our name, WHERE, does represent
location. So, in terms of location management, actually the Android platform makes things
extremely easy and that it provides that obstruction layer so you don’t need to know everything
about GPS and all the ins and outs of the system. But there’s still some important
tips for developers to keep in mind. I would say that--one of those things is to not--to
query the device as rarely as you can possibly get away with. And that’s just not GPS but
also cell ID location. What you don’t want the user to do is have to wait as you’re
spending dial as the phone finds--tries to find the location. So what we always do is
we prompt the user when they first enter into the app. If they have a--if they were in the
app before, we’ll prompt them with the recently used location. We’ll also prompt them if
they want to manually enter the address, and that gives us a little bit of time that we
can do those network calls in the background in a parallel process. And by the time the
user actually comes into the app and gets to the home screen, ideally, we have a location
ready and waiting for them. We’ve also done quite a bit of integration into Google Maps.
Another advantage to the Android platform is that you have this beautiful ready made
mapping component that you can just plug right in. That makes things a lot easier. We are--as
a location-focused company, we have built many different mapping solutions where we
had to do it as a customized thing. And it’s very nice for Android to have that capability
just all wrapped up. So we’re very excited to have the launch of cupcake just rolling
out where even our users right now are telling us that the T-Mobile users are getting the
upgrade down to their phone, and we’ve created some special features for them. First of all,
we have a set of widgets. The first widget is live and we’ve got a few others coming
down very shortly that we integrated into Google Voice. So, it’s essentially you push
a button on the phone and prompts to enter a search term, and then it takes you straight
into the WHERE application, picks up your location, and we’ll do a search for that
term. It can go across different types of content, so you can do it across Yellow Page
content or a Yelp preview using Yahoo as a data source and ultimately you’ll be able
to search within any content source within WHERE. We’ve also integrated live folders
so that if you are a user of the WHERE Wall, which is our online forum and message board,
you can basically see that from one click from your home screen. You tap on the icon
and you’ll see all the most recent wall posts.