Place Spotting

Tagcrumbs is all about places and that's why we like sites like PlaceSpotting.com, the online map game. On their site you see a map clipping of some interesting places somewhere on earth and you have to find out where exactly it is by dragging and zooming an online map. You are also getting some short advice but still it is a pretty tough game. Try it out on your own.

I add an easy place and a hard place to find out... Add a comment if you know it. Sorry, nothing to win yet. Hint for the second, a lonely place in the Connemara region in Ireland.

Fáilte

Fáilte means welcome in Gaelic. I arrived yesterday in Galway, a beautiful Irish city directly at the Atlantic Ocean. The 3rd biggest in Ireland after Dublin and Cork. I am going to write my final thesis here to quickly finish my studies to work full time for Tagcrumbs. Don't worry, although two of us are finishing up there studies Tagcrumbs has still the focus and is making good progress. More and more important details to consider appear every day but nothing can stop us to go into a private test period soon. ;-)

In Galway I recognize the importance of getting access to local information, like recommendations for the most important places for travelers or new citizens. It is a perfect city to facilitate Tagcrumbs to make myself comfortable with the new environment.


A hostel where I stay currently, a new work place, a campus with many student bars, clubs and sport facilities, one pub after the other with regular live music, a bicycle shop that sells used bicycles, a coffee shop with free wifi access, a nice coast line with amazing views, trails to go running and many more interesting places that needs to be found and explored. It is always good to develop something that you actually use, in our case this is absolutely true.

By the way, I will work at the DERI Digital Enterprise Research Institute, a leading Semantic Web Research Cluster. The topic is about analysing huge amounts of sensor data in the fields of ecology, geology, hydrology or oceanography to make it more meaningful and usable.

Our First Office in Mannheim

Most of the previous and future work for Tagcrumbs was and will be done in a virtual environment, as we were and will be in different cities and countries, at least for the next couple of months. Working in such a small virtual team is great. We know that we can trust each other and that work is getting done, no matter where.

For our initial product discussions and development it has nevertheless been awesome to be in the same room together to share our thoughts. Cornelius arranged a shared incubator office for us at the University of Mannheim, which we used for three months. I was commuting weekly to Mannheim so that we could work together, and as Ben came back from Mexico we were able to work in Mannheim altogether.

As our ways are splitting and Cornelius is going to Ireland soon we had to give up the office.

It has been a great time in Mannheim. A big thank you goes to Dr. Claudia Rabe of the Institut für Mittelstandsforschung and the MAFINEX Gründerverbund Entrepreneur Rhein-Neckar e. V. for providing all the kind support.

Where the Hell is Matt?

We like creativity and we like it when people share their experiences and impressions of interesting destinations. Matt is a traveler who dances around the world and uploads his videos to YouTube and presents everything in a stylish way on his now famous website www.wherethehellismatt.com.

See Matt dancing around the world.



Matt giving an ignite talk at Gnomedex (with dancing of course).



Tagcrumbs will help travelers like Matt to share their experiences and their favorite places in a much more elegant and useful way. But don't worry if you are not a frequent traveler, Tagcrumbs is providing many more interesting use cases.

Crumbling in Berlin

The Tagcrumbs team is in Berlin this week! Apart from working we are spending time with friends we haven't seen in a long time, enjoying the city's atmosphere and working from cafés and friends' (and brothers') flats. Berlin keeps sucking me in every time I'm here. It's amazing how it keeps evolving and reinventing itself.



Another thing that is constantly evolving is our road map for the next months. The more the different parts of the application substantiate, the more detailed we can plan the next phases. During lunch we discussed our ideas and the pros and cons of different launch strategies.

We considered different approaches - everything from private and (closed) public beta phases to invite models, "big-bang" and phased public launches. Deciding between a longer closed beta or an early public launch some areas affected by this trade-off are:

• reaction potential - being able to efficiently scale the infrastructure, support users, implement suggestions and feedback and fix bugs
• media impact - get coverage by on-line and traditional media during an intense short period of time or over a couple of months (which is not mutually exclusive)
  
• copycats - it's nice if your approach is considered worth copying. A late(r) public launch (given that all goes well during private beta) might just give you a welcome head start though.

Consequently our current planning process is about effectiveness - choosing the right things to do so that we can then focus on efficiency - executing things in the right way.

Product development, a never ending story?

Working on a startup project means your to do list and the next steps are like a never ending story. On the one side it is hard to see a goal in your accomplished work and finding the long-term motivation that keeps all negative thoughts away from slowing you down. On the other side you try to work as efficient and effective as possible to finish up tasks to see progress. Seeing progress is important and over the last 2 months a lot evolved that had just been in our heads (and written down as some weird specs). Definitely a good feeling, especially considering the fact that everything we build is work-in-progress and so much can still be improved and extended later on. For now, focusing on the most important parts is the key and it is often sad to delay cool ideas in our minds for the sake of a first soon-to-be-released launch version.

There will be an extended beta testing period during which we will first invite close friends and some persons from our target groups to send us feedback. After looking for weeks on similar screens it is hard to distinguish between features that are easy to use and that provide a good usability and experience in comparison to the ones that are just unnecessary, too advanced or just plain stupid. So we are very much looking forward to your feedback and opinions.

Stay tuned!

Alpha Blog: Work in Progress

We are still working on the design for the Tagcrumbs application but we already want to be able to talk to you and give you some hints on what the application will be about (or as the horn-rims marketing guy would say: build up some buzz). That's why we launch this blog before the official (meaning public beta) design is ready.

Once our designer gives us the green light and we worked the feedback by the private beta users in we are also going to update our blog with the logo and the official colours. Let's see how long all that will take us...