Updates and news about ekit’s products
A couple of months ago I wrote about Fire Eagle, the location brokerage service from Yahoo!. Well it’s now been opened up to the public so you don’t need an invitation to join up.
What is exciting about this is that it will now become much easier for people to link together applications that use location information. So hopefully soon there will be lots of interesting services that can use the location information from your travel journal to provide useful information and functions.
We haven’t just been working on the Travel Journal for our global roaming mobile service for the past few months, we have also been assembling our new United States service.
Our aim is to provide affordable international roaming (and with rates from US 29c a minute we think we’re saving lots of people plenty of money). However we haven’t been able to keep our rates low in the U.S. because the carriers there charge us a fortune when our customers roam there.
So we’ve built a new service for the U.S. (it will work in Canada as well shortly) which offers much better rates. All the other online features of our global roaming services are available as well – recharge, with optional automatic recharge when you balance falls low, instant access to billing records – and family and friends in six countries can call a toll-free number to call you at no cost to them.
The Travel Journal is available with this new service, but with more limited mobile features. Over the next few months we will be adding automatic tracking but for now you can post from the phone and you can send posts like “L: Boston” to set your location
One of the changes mentioned in the last post was the simplification of the settings page. We want to make sure that people can control who has access to their journal content, particularly as there is location information in there. However one risk you always face when you make security settings very customizable is that no one bothers to use it, or doesn’t understand what the effect of the settings are.
As we discussed how to make things simpler, we realised that there are actually two main types of information in peoples’ journals – user posted content and automatic tracking information. When you post a message, either through the web, or from your phone, you choose the privacy level you want. On the web there are check buttons to choose between public, family and friends, or private. From the phone you can send to 8555 for public, 8888 for friends and family and 8000 for private.
As you get to decide what you are posting about and who should see it there isn’t any need to have other settings to control the access. If you want to say in your post that you are in London and you set it to public, there’s not much point in the journal only showing your location as “United Kingdom” as anyone reading the post can see that you’re in London.
On the other hand, the automatic tracking entries get posted by the system, so you do need a way to specify who gets to see them and how detailed they should be. So now there is one check box to let you turn tracking on or off, and one setting to make your tracked entries public, friends and family, or private. There are advanced settings if you do want finer control but these are now mostly to control what things people can do on your journal, such as posting a comment, calling you, or sending you a text message.
Another month has passed and we’ve rolled out a new release. This release we have mainly focussed on improving usability, but also added a few bells and whistles to improve the look and content of your journal.
One area we have spent some time trying to improve is the settings page, and in particular managing the privacy settings. I’ll write another post about this, but we hope we have made this area a lot easier to understand and manage.
The journal page now clearly labels whether posts have been sent from the phone or the web, or if it is an automatic tracking entry. If there are several automatic entries in a row from the same place, we now only show one entry. We’ve also made it a lot clearer whether you’re looking at the public view of a journal, or the friends and family view, or your private view.
The entry editing page now lets you chose a place from a map as well as being able to just enter a name. There are also a lot more photos available for many more places to add to your post.
Our database that maps cell towers to places is getting better, but we don’t always get a city level location and can only identify the country you’re in. To make this clearer, when you view an entry for a country we show the whole country and highlight it. We have some big enhancements in the pipeline that will allow us to track to city level a lot more often.
As well as many more photos we have started to add links to information about places so the people reading your journal can learn a little more about the places you are visiting (and maybe you’ll find it interesting too).
To help you keep in touch with your friends and family, we’ve also added a ’share your travel journal’ link to the settings page so you can quickly send an email with your journal details to make sure people at home know what a great holiday you’re having.
These days everyone has different ways of sharing their information. You used to share your travel news by postcard, expensive international phone calls and maybe a slide night when you got home. OK it’s probably been a while since you’ve been to a slide night, but these days you’re more like to send an email, call with a phonecard or mobile phone, or send a text message. You may even have online places you use to share information with friends and family.
We hope that we’re building something that’s a great way to share your trip, but we don’t want to lock you into having to use our site. We are planning to enable different ways to share the information from your Travel Journal. We have plans for a Facebook application to allow you to share your trip with your friends on Facebook, but initially we have added support for a service from Yahoo! called Fire Eagle.
Fire Eagle is a location broker, which means that it acts as an intermediary between different services that want to share location information. The big advantage for users is that you can control it all in one place. If you want to disable access by an application you just log into Fire Eagle and turn it off.
So why is this useful? As location aware applications become more common you can mix and match the service you use. Tell Fire Eagle to allow the Travel Journal to update your location and now the Facebook application that uses Fire Eagle will be updated as you travel. Have a fancy phone with a GPS? Use Navizon to update your location and the Travel Journal can retrieve your accurate location from Fire Eagle.
Fire Eagle is currently in private beta, which means you need an invitation to join. Send us an email with your journal id to tjfeedback (at) ekit-inc (dot) com if you would like an invite.
We have released our first update to the Travel Journal. It’s only been a couple of weeks since the first release so it’s mainly bug fixes and minor usability improvements.
We’ve added a simple set up page when you purchase a SIM to let you choose a journal name and a visitor password and enter a few email addresses so you can share your journal with family and friends more easily.
We have also added some functionality to make it easier to manage your journal posts. There’s now a manage page that let’s you quickly see your posts and edit or delete them. You can also now change the date of an entry in case you procrastinate like me and don’t get around to posting every day, or if you want to update your journal when you get home.
A bit more about our first release. We’ve built a lot of functionality that you’ll find in many travel journals. You can create entries through a web interface, with fields to enter where you are, and you can add photos as well. People can comment on your posts and see your journal as a list of posts, or as a map.
As we have integrated the journal with our mobile service we can populate your journal with location entries automatically as you use your phone. To make it a bit more interesting we show a photo of the place where you are and the weather there too. Of course, you may not want to share your location with other people, so you can turn the tracking off, or restrict who can see it.
The idea is that you can buy one of our SIMs, take in on your holiday and when you get back you have an attractive record of the places you have been to without doing anything. When you travel there are often times when you have time to kill, like sitting on a bus or waiting at an airport. This is a great time to send a text message to your journal with an update. To make it as easy as possible you can send the text message to a short code like ‘888′.
Of course, you may want to share your journal, particularly with family and friends, so we let you set your posts for private viewing, friend and family viewing or public viewing. If it’s private, only you can see it when you sign in. You can set a visitor password to give to family and friends so they can see the family and friend view. Or if you post to you public journal, anyone can see it. If you want to get sophisticated there’s an advanced settings page that lets you get even more flexibility about what type of information is shown.
One of the other problems when you travel is that you may be in a different timezone which means that you only get a small window to call home each day. Posting to the journal is a great way to let people at home know what you’re up to without having to find that window. If you do want to get in touch, we’ve built a ‘get in touch’ page that lets people call you or send you a text from the website. On that page we show where you are and, very soon, the time there, so Mum and Dad don’t call you at 3am.
We will be updating the service with lots more features in the coming months and I’ll post more about that next time.
This is a blog about ekit and our products. We are a communications provider to international travellers which is a fancy way of saying that we make products that make it easier and cheaper to stay in touch with friends and family when you’re travelling overseas.
In 1999 we launched our first product, a virtual calling card with integrated email and voicemail that you could buy online and use in dozens of countries. In 2004 we started selling SIMs and mobile phones and last year we launched our own global mobile service that uses callback to reduce roaming costs.
All our services help people share their travels with their friends and family through phone calls, text messages, emails and voicemails. So last year we started thinking about ways to use our services to build an application that would allow people to share their trip with others. We wanted to create a service that could be useful to people who don’t want to do much and also to people who want to actively create content.
The first version of what we call the Travel Journal has just been released as a beta. It’s a travel journal that you can use to keep a record of your trip, adding descriptions and photos of where you have been and what you have done. What we have done, though, is integrate the Travel Journal with our mobile service. This means that we can automatically add entries whenever you use the phone – we’ll know what country you are in so we can bill your calls, but sometimes we can match the cell you are in to a city or better. You can also post entries to your journal from your phone, and if you want to allow it, people can call your mobile from the web.
Eating our own dog food
Published September 18, 2008 commentary 1 CommentTags: travel, travel journal
Eating one’s own dog food is a term used to refer to the practice of actually using the products you make. We certainly believe in doing that, and I had the opportunity recently to use my travel journal on a short holiday break.
I’m going to be biased so I won’t bore you with tales of how great it is. Instead I’ll describe how I used it. The first thing I wanted to do was add entries for the places we were going – hotel addresses and flight numbers. With a quick google search I found a photo from the hotel website to add to the entry.
The first couple of days we were away I had convenient access to the Internet, so I updated my journal through the website and added some photos from the day. However I still use the phone to send text updates during the day – making a short note of interesting things we were doing, or the names of good restaurants or pubs we visited.
The rest of the trip I didn’t have Internet access so I used the phone exclusively and I found myself sending text posts when we did something interesting, and also used the posts as placeholders for photos. Later when I did have Internet access I added photos I had taken to those posts.
Other people at ekit are using the travel journal when they travel, and customers are telling us about their experience through the feedback form on the website. All of this feedback is feeding into our development process to to improve the way the travel journal works and to help us prioritize the new features we add.