outWord Results Week 19
Sorry for the delay. We umm.. took a couple of weeks off. In truth, the feds shut us down but that’s another story for another time.
| TheGameTripleH | 46256 | Dunwoody, GA |
| Amy Sue | 37076 | Mount Pleasant, MI |
| judy dev | 17204 | Mount Pleasant, MI |
| Cyndi | 16980 | Montclair, VA |
| Hannah | 15812 | Hudson, MA |
| I get around | 15308 | Sparks, NV |
| Jim Dev | 11292 | Mount Pleasant, MI |
| Jeannie | 10876 | San Diego, CA |
| Lorna | 9048 | Nicosia, Cyprus |
| Vegaschapel | 8416 | Little Elm, TX |
Phonagle Presents to Ann Arbor Entrepreneurs
Phonagle got a chance to show off outWord at last night’s A2NewTech Meet-up, a monthly meeting of Ann Arbor Entrepreneurs. Check it out, as well as some of the other really cool projects on Dug Song’s Start-up Blog!
and now: we wait.
Sorry for the dead air, sports fans. We here at phonagle have mostly had our noses down, grinding out an app that we hope people will find engaging and interesting.
And we’ve just sent an early version to Apple. It’s still not perfect, so we’re gonna keep it free at first and hopefully get some good feedback as to how to fix it. It’s a word building game, like the popular board games Scrabble or Boggle, but it’s also location based.
“Wait. What??”
Yeah, we know. A bit strange. But we think it has potential. The idea is that instead of reaching into a bag or randomly being assigned letters, the letters are spread throughout your town. In order to pick them up and use them to make a word, you have to be near them. Which implies walking. For words.
Right now, we’re working up some user testing to further tweak the user interface, and waiting to hear back from Apple. Oh, also we’re negotiating some really interesting contract work to do as a sideline, but that’s a bit hush hush for the moment. Stay tuned, more at 11.
Phonagle in the Ann Arbor Chronicle!
http://annarborchronicle.com/2009/06/24/subterranean-start-ups/
TechArb & Phonagle on U of M homepage
http://www.ns.umich.edu/podcast/video.php?id=877 (direct link to video).
Phonagle: The Documentary (part 2)
Phonagle is happy to present “User Recruiting.” We hope you enjoy.
“Research”
Thursday’s main order of external business was an extremely helpful meeting with the creative team at Quantum Learning. They are a small but vibrant company founded on the principle that learning doesn’t have to be boring. They have a great set of games that apparently get kids reading faster than the schools can. Because they are essentially a game company (that just so happens to develop games which teach), they were able to really give us insightful suggestions fully relevant to our daily struggles. They gave us tons of really valuable advice and reassurance, one piece of which we decided to act on immediately: They reminded us to keep playing games, and not just for research (which we’d been doing) but for enjoyment.
At the end of the meeting, with this advice in hand, we headed up to the Video Game Archive to do some “research”. While the consoles there aren’t what we’re developing for, there are most definitely overlaps – fun games are fun games, regardless of the system they are on.
After struggling to get started in two of the games – the menus and set up required were precisely what we don’t want to force on our users, we settled on playing Left4Dead. I’d played it before, and shooting zombies sure is fun, but its not really the kind of game we’re trying to make. We want something more light hearted, more attuned to the casual gamer. Doug, who works there, proved indispensable. He pointed us to Little Big Planet and got us started. This game, though a console platformer (like Super Mario), is much, much more what we have in mind in terms of style and narrative. It features animated creatures that are cute, but not too cute, and a relatively intuitive world that you can start interacting with almost immediately. You can also start playing with the characters immediately, customizing them and slapping stickers on anything (including other players). Ben said: ”this is fun, but its not really much of a game,” not recognizing that we hadn’t actually gotten to the game part of it yet. That to me is success. If we can be half as creative and make something that is just fun to play with like that, right out of the box, we’ll be well on our way.
iPhones, the procurement saga
Earlier this week, our munificent overlords- ack. Let me try again.
Earlier this week, our platform vendors announced a shiny new upgrade to the lynch pin of our summer scheme. While not earth shattering, the iPhone announcement was, as you might imagine, pretty important to our aims. We were pretty happy about in-app payments, and also for the new digital compass and speedier processor and improved battery. We were even more pleased with the price drop on the old models – $99 for an iPhone means more people with iPhones. The thing that got us moving, however, was the release date. June 19 is our time to snag new hardware to test what we’ve built so far. Because, while 3/4 of us own Apple-made mobile devices, only one of those is an actual iPhone. So as soon as the announcement came out, we set about trying to reserve our dcvices.
First, we tried to through a very clearly overloaded Apple web store. Then our internet crashed (dear AT&T, we’re actually trying to give you money right now… little help?). After waiting impatiently for a few minutes for it to come back with no success, we decided that if the webstore couldn’t handle the load, it probably meant that demand was extremely high, likely outstripping supply. At this point, fear popped its head into our office and said: “hello!” If we weren’t able to reserve our phones in the first batch of iPhones, we might have to wait for the second batch, who knows how long that wait would be. Decisive action was needed. Fight or Flight! Fight or Flight!
We flew. Leaving two men to hold down the fort and handle the afternoon’s scheduled responsibilities, Ben and I scrambled to the nearest coffee shop, Primo Coffee on 5th. In what we couldn’t help but take as a sign, it was not only closed, but they were literally scraping the lettering off the windows as we arrived. So we headed to the trusty Ann Arbor District Library. We tried numerous times to register and reserve our development hardware, but were stymied. The wireless there at the AADL was also slow, and the webstore crashed repeatedly. Drastic action was called for. We called the closest physical Apple Store in the local mall, Briarwood, to be greeted by a message indicating that yes, there we could reserve iPhones! At last, a break! We walked (quickly) to my house, jumped in my little green Honda, and with requisite distaste of malls overwhelmed by the sense of doom in our guts, we headed to the mall.
Neither Ben nor I had been to a mall in quite a while, a fact we wore like badges of honor. But greater things were at stake now. Our pretensions had to be put aside, so put them aside we did. We fought our way through deliberately confusing symmetrical concourse, through dense clouds of pungent fresh baked diabetes and overwrought old-lady perfumes, all to a soundtrack professionally engineered to balance keeping the pesky young punks at bay and the monied boomers content to while away the hours. To the apple store, in all its brushed aluminum and clinical white glory. And: It wasn’t even that crowded.
We should’ve taken this as a hint. The sales staff seemed more confused than we were, and their advice to “just wait a couple days until they tell us what’s going on” ran in direct contradiction to the sense of growing doom in our bellies. After talking with no less than three staff members (who repeatedly ran back to query management), pleading the specialness of our cause (that we needed them for development purposes fell on deaf ears) we left, defeated.
Vowing to leave no rock unturned, we called the AT&T store, who, again, told us that yes, no problem, they could help us out. So we went to the AT&T store, which turned out to be hidden quite literally right next door to our downtown headquarters. They too failed us, having misinterpreted the question I phrased in several ways to avoid confusion.
The moral of the story, if there is one, is that you can’t trust telephones.
…and, perhaps, that the information network we have at our fingertips works faster than that of the actual companies purveying the information.
Today’s assignments
For a quick glance at the internal workings of a complex and efficient machine like Phonagle, here’s how we structured today’s work assignments: Jeremy and Sergio went to a crash course on accounting while Eric and I went to the Red Sox / Tigers game. Success was enjoyed by all except Eric, who watched his team get swept.
Do you tweet your frustration?
The latest issue of Information Week covers a new service that is coming out that will actually track frustrated customers’ comments on twitter and facebook and connect them with a customer representative from the product’s company. For example, if I post how much I hate the zune on twitter, a Microsoft rep may actually try to contact me! Cool? Creepy? I’d say both. It’s cool because it uses natural language processing to parse the user’s colorful phrase and rate how angry they are. Here at Phonagle, we’re huge fans of natural language processing. Personally I think this service is going to creep people out and perhaps further degrade their experience with the product. I’ll let you know what happens when they contact me.