Diving with Tagcrumbs

In German, 'tauchen' does not only mean diving - it is also the name of Germany's most-read diving magazine, reaching a quarter of a million readers each month.

We have teamed up with tauchen and starting with the new magazine, which goes on sale tomorrow, you will find a Tagcrumbs icon and shortURL next to the diving spots they present (the short URL makes it easier to type in the info...: tagcrumbs.com/p/NDdiNDd)

Their readers will be able to access more information related to the spot on the site, add their comments and - by favoriting spots they like - build up their very own digital diving logbook and planning tool.

There's a vast number of diving spots, scattered in all the oceans. Divers need to choose their spots according to their skills (a heavy drift dive when you just started is not recommended), the conditions (when is the best time to see whale sharks in Mexico?) and sights ('I'd like to dive with manta rays'). On Tagcrumbs, tauchen and the readers can share their discoveries and experiences, recommend their favorites and easily organise diving spots according to these criteria.

tauchen created a profile and below are some of the places they already added to Tagcrumbs:

We are looking forward to working with tauchen, let's welcome the diving enthusiasts very warmly in the community. We hope to see some interesting conversations around the world's most beautiful diving spots.

Tagcrumbs Pitch at Next09

The video footage of the start-up track at Next09 was just released and we have prepared Sascha's presentation for you. It's a condensed 9 minute talk where we try to illuminate some of the company's  aspects.

Starting off with the explanation of the value proposition (the problem and how we solve it), Sascha then diggs deeper into how we are different from our competition (for an in-depth comparison to Qype check out the blog post here), continues with the explanation of the components of the platform that Tagcrumbs represents and heads on to explain how we are planning to build the community and make money. At the end Sascha talks about the team - our 'fit' and how we complement each others' skills.

The slides are a bit hard to read in the video so feel free to open them in another tab for more detail.



Thanks again to Björn Negelmann and the Next09 team for making this possible!

Back from next09 - A roundup

next09 is over. It has been a great conference, I enjoyed being there and meeting a lot of people. Thank you next09!

Most of the talks were good, I was especially excited to hear Chris Messina and Rudy de Waele speak about the Open Web and Mobile.

I presented Tagcrumbs in the start-up track. I think it went fairly well even though I was a bit excited :). Here are the slides of my presentation. A video will follow. Any comments, any feedback?

Tagcrumbs Start-up Presentation - next09

View more presentations from tagcrumbs.

P. S.
A tip for next year's conference, marketing Next as an international conference is good but it should be clear which tracks are in German and which not, there has been a lot of confusion and international attendees had to wander around to find an English session.

Tagcrumbs at next09

We have been selected to present Tagcrumbs at the start-up track of the next conference in Hamburg. The next conference put on by SinnerSchrader is one of the most important networking and trend conferences within the European web industry.

Share Economy is this year's theme of next09. This term is shaped by the economy theorist Martin Weitzman. His basic idea: The more we share our success with others, the more we profit ourselves.

We think this term fits perfectly for Tagcrumbs, due the collective creation of places and our openness.

We are very much looking forward to the event. If you want to meet, drop us a line on twitter (@tagcrumbs).

How Tagcrumbs approaches local reviews in comparison to Qype

We are often asked how Tagcrumbs is different from popular review sites like Qype or Yelp and why you should favor the one over the other. Yes, there are obvious overlapping use cases but let's do a quick comparison to show in which areas Tagcrumbs is suited best.

Qype is a user-generated local review site where users add reviews about local businesses like shops, bars or restaurants.

With Tagcrumbs you and your friends can add stories, opinions or reviews about any arbitrary place that you discover while on the go or while surfing the Web.

First, this sounds similar, with both services you can read and write interesting reviews for places you have been. The difference is that Tagcrumbs has no thematic focus on reviews and thus supports a higher diversity of user-generated content. It's about all the little local discoveries and the insider knowledge around us, for example:

• a picturesque viewpoint on top of a building
  
• a photographer's favorite motives
• a collection of architectural highlights in a city
• interesting diving spots
• travel experiences
• places for extreme sports
• airplane spotting

Tagcrumbs creates a virtual layer on top of the physical world, where every place can be attached with virtual post-it notes. The good thing, it's not mandatory that you have been at this place, you can also use Tagcrumbs to plan your travels or to plan which restaurants you want to visit while on a city trip.

So what are the advantages of using Tagcrumbs?

• Ease of use and the fastest way to share places of your interests with friends and others
• Powerful mechanisms to discover new content by tags, keyword searches, places or friends. E. g. "Show me all my friends' places around me for the topic architecture."
• We support the author, whenever you add a new place to Tagcrumbs it becomes it's own page with a focus on exactly this content. I.e., it's not one out of many reviews on a local business page.
• Sharing, recommending and adding favorites is well-integrated into the system so the user-generated content can be part of everyone's conversation.
• Support for the geo community with standards like KML or GeoRSS

To conclude, there is a demand for more than just review sites, the world is more diverse and with Tagcrumbs we help all the heterogeneous interest groups to share their insider knowledge.

By the way, here you can see all my Tagcrumbs in the center of Galway visualized with Google Earth. I marked, shared and recommended meeting spots, free wifi cafes, reviewed restaurants, reported about a fire, complained about the bicycle situation and participated in local events. Although very diverse local content, Tagcrumbs as a one-stop 'place book' makes every place stand out on its own.

Update: Comments

Thanks to the ongoing feedback of our users who, over the course of the last couple of weeks were asking for more possibilities to exchange opinions, discover other members and add to the stories and descriptions of individual Tagcrumbs we have now integrated comments.

One detail that I like a lot is the possibility to follow a conversation: if you add a comment to someone's Tagcrumb you can choose to be notified via e-mail if someone else joins the conversation and leaves a comment herself.
This is just one of the things on our agenda which in the future will result in an increasingly detailed and colourful impression of every place tagged on Tagcrumbs. Stay tuned for more!

One question that you could help us answer is the following: should comments have a subject line (which e.g. would make it easier to scan through them if there are already a couple)? Have a look and let us know what you think. We are as always looking forward to hearing your feedback.

Update: Favourites and Recommendations

We have updated two integral parts of Tagcrumbs that should make the service faster and easier to use. Here is an overview of what's different:

1. Favourites
Our members can now show that they like a place (and maybe even more importantly easily remember where it is and what it's about) by adding it as a favourite. Wherever the star symbol () appears, clicking on it lets you choose which tags you'd like to use and adds the Tagcrumb to your list. What's great about favourites: it's easy to see who else and how many people in total liked the place you discovered.

To be able to better distinguish your own Tagcrumbs from the ones you favourited, we have chosen to show them in two different formats. The upper one is Cornelius' Tagcrumb which I favourited and below that is mine (story on a public park created on an old train track in New York). As you can see, both have been favourited once.

2. Recommendations
It's now possible to add a short note (Twitter style, 140 characters) to recommendations and send it off to friends on Tagcrumbs or via e-mail. Recommending it to someone who's already on Tagcrumbs has the advantage that the friend will see the note directly in his list of places. Great to personalize a recommendation :)!

Here's an example. Cornelius recommends me The Berg (a fake mountain imagined by some inhabitants of Berlin):

We hope you like the changes - please do check them out. And if you have any comments or feedback we would love to hear from you! Also stay tuned for the next updates, there's more to come!