Tag Archives: App Store

RateItAll’s new geolocation solution, Double Dutch, promises to be the Ning of location-based social networks

By Marissa Louie, March 25

RateItAll, a top consumer ratings site headquartered in San Francisco, recently launched its white label  location-based mobile social network platform, Double Dutch (http://doubledutch.me). It received noteworthy coverage and rave reviews at SXSW in Austin. And it’s a blast to test drive.

The premise: Imagine if you were to take an app like Foursquare or Gowalla and limit the audience to a specific niche, like pick-up basketball players or attendees of the World Cup. That’s what Double Dutch promises with its white label solution, specifically for B2B customers including conference and events organizers, companies that work in multiple locations, and more.

Essentially, it is the Ning of location-based social networks.

CEO of RateItAll, Lawrence Coburn, emphasizes, “Double Dutch is exciting because it allows any company, community, or organization to get up and running with a best in class geolocation app in a matter of weeks.”

RateItAll is wise to enter this space since it can augment the geolocation service with over 5 million consumer ratings native to RateItAll, collected over the past 10 years. Think of it as importing Yelp ratings into Foursquare.

This is powerful because it provides the extra edge of consumer validation for almost any given location – if you check in somewhere, you can see what RateItAll users have rated the site. With Foursquare and Gowalla, you cannot view historical reviews of a location.

Additionally, the lack of privacy on Foursquare and Gowalla have caused concerns and unwanted implications. Lawrence Coburn says, “Location data is very useful, but it’s also very personal. The private label nature of Double Dutch allows communities to enjoy this functionality, but within the safer confines of a smaller, more trusted group.”

Double Dutch offers both a standard app for the consumer market (non-customized) and a customizable white label application.

Some product feature candy that Double Dutch offers:

Non-customized features:

-Social check-in
-Friending
-Friends view
-Search and venue discovery
-Locals view
-Venue information
-Ratings/reviews
-Venue photos
-Rockstardom
-Achievement stickers
-Point system
-Leaderboards
-Facebook integration
-Twitter integration
-Push notifications

Customization options (white-label basis only):

-App Name
-Logo and iPhone artwork
-Venue data
-Custom tab
-Custom achievement stickers (coming soon)
-Color scheme (coming soon)

Given the heated tee-off between Foursquare and Gowalla at SXSW, Double Dutch has great market timing. Lawrence Coburn tells us, “As smartphone usage continues to spike, I expect to see more and more demand for location-based services. The timing for a customizable, white-label app like Double Dutch couldn’t be better.”

We agree wholeheartedly.

Get the free Double Dutch iPhone app at the App store: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/doubledutch/id336955484?mt=8

To request your own location-based network, contact CEO Lawrence Coburn at lawrence@doubledutch.me

About the Author:

Marissa is a contributor to Adotas and BusinessWeek. Follow her on Twitter: @malouie

Marissa Louie is the Founder and CEO of HeroEx, San Francisco’s affordable 1 hour delivery service.

Contact her at (510) 375-1941, or email marissa@heroex.com.

Earlier today, TechCrunch reported on what they termed TwitterSense, a logical offshoot for my6sense, an Israeli company with a big idea.

my6sense has released an iPhone app that offers “your digital intuition.” Basically, the app gets to know you and your habits and then starts bringing you the news that is actually relevant to you, as opposed to you sorting through countless RSS feeds and sites. You don’t have to do anything except be yourself.

Now, think of that relevancy as applied to Twitter. Twitter is filled with noise. Even with the filtering provided by apps like TweetDeck and Seesmic, there’s a lot of noise you still can’t escape. Imagine if suddenly the tweets that would mean the most to you are filtered to the top of your stream.

According to TechCrunch

TwitterSense in an extension of my6sense’s ranking technology and in this respect treats a user’s Twitter stream like an ordinary content source, much like an RSS feed. To begin with, my6sense has to differentiate between simple status updates/personal tweets and tweets which link to content. The differentiation is a must because its ranking algorithms require further optimization to be able to correctly float important simple/status tweets. In the short-term they have no plans to solve this particular challenge. Instead, the company is focusing on ranking tweets with links—and we all get quite a few of those. From my6sense’s perspective, your friends provide the first level of filtering. It then provides the second level by taking it upon itself to re-rank these Tweets so a users’ focus is directed to the information that is most important to them.

They’ve got a few issues to work through, such as scalability and ranking the content behind the links. Once they work these out, my6sense hopes to deploy in a few months.

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Everyone has an App Store now. It’s important though – as I was shopping for a new phone last week, that was one of my questions. “Can I buy new apps for the phone?”

Windows Mobile Marketplace is an app store for your Windows Mobile device. Microsoft is now running a contest for the best app submissions, and the prizes are pretty sweet.

• Prizes: 4 Microsoft Surface tables (Developer Edition), online marketing & promotion of your app and challenge trophies for the mantle.

• Applications will be judged on:
  • Most downloads of a free app
  • Most valuable app (downloads x price)
  • Most useful (as judged by Microsoft panel)
  • Most playful (as judged by Microsoft panel)
• Contest runs from launch to Dec 31, 2009.

You can learn more about the contest and submit those apps. Submissions are accepted from all 29 supported countries. If I could code my way out of a hat, I’d enter. I love those Microsoft Surface tables!

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Cheers!

Tweet Michelle @writetechnology, send her technology news at Michelle at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, visit her wine blog when you’re thirsty, and drop by her day job.

Antenna Audio, which provides audio and audio visual tours at museums, historic sites, exhibits, etc. around the world, has launched an iPhone application with the National Gallery in the UK, which is the first ever gallery to make its paintings accessible through a downloadable iPhone application.

Love Art features 250 paintings from the collection along with around 200 minutes of audio and video content – designed to appeal to art enthusiasts and fans of the Gallery, this application is the first of its kind to be released by a major gallery.

Their amusing tag line is This is your collection. Please touch the art. With this application, you can get up close and personal with the art in a way that’s not even possible in a museum. Yep, you can zoom in on a painting. And touch it. So for those of you that have always wanted to reach out and touch a piece of art, now is your chance.

The application allows you to select a theme (love, passion, death, beauty, hope, etc) and view related art with the stories behind each painting provided via audio and video commentary. You can also view paintings based on types, such as cityscapes, portraits, or religious.

This is a fairly innovative, well-designed app. I’m pretty impressed by it. The application is available for free through the iTunes store (iTunes link) for a limited time only.

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iCover (iTunes link) by Apalon is a good excuse to get silly on a Friday afternoon.

Our local amusement park used to have an overpriced booth where you could pick a magazine cover and then they’d take your photo and merge it all together. Ah, the early days of PhotoShop.

iCover has taken that same theory and applied it to their [currently free] iPhone app. You can choose from 25 different magazine covers and add photos from your camera or photo libraries on the iPhone. When you’re done, you can save it to your photo library and, if you want, mail it directly to your friends.

The magazine covers run from classy to silly (such as Morons Magazine). You can play with any photo in your library, of course, so maybe that ex-boyfriend ends up on Morons. It’ll make you feel better.

Have a great weekend!

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Email: michelle[at]writetech[dot]net
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