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Feb 18
0

New Orleans’s WWL Introduces Mardi Gras App

By | Apple, Apps, Droid, iPhone, New Orleans, news | No Comments

NEW ORLEANS – Mardi Gras is entering the age of the smart phone.

This year Carnival revelers can get a new free application for smart phones that serves as a built-in parade tracker.

The parade tracker relies on devices placed on the head and tail floats of select parades, said Rob Hudak, the interactive creative director at Zehnder Communication Inc., a New Orleans company that created the app in partnership with television station WWL.

The Times-Picayune newspaper reports that the free app, called Experience Mardi Gras, is in its early stages but will allow parade-goers and those hoping to avoid parade traffic to track up to one parade every day starting with Muses on March 3 and ending with Zulu on Fat Tuesday.

The app also features a post-parade events section and live streaming video of select parades.

“This is version 1.0, and we hope it grows into a more robust app experience,” Hudak said. “We’re talking about adding social and augmented reality components. Something almost like an extension of the Mardi Gras experience.”

There are a handful of apps connected with Carnival, but Zehnder and WWL’s app actually provides real-time tracking of Carnival parades, without relying on user-generated reports.

Production of the app began in December and comes on the heels of a successful Voodoo Experience music festival app that the agency launched in October. With the Voodoo Experience app, concertgoers could point their smart phone cameras at a band and the app would tell them who was currently on stage. It would also give them information about the band and who was playing next.

By panning the camera around the premises, users could see where they could go to the bathroom or where they could get their next beer. By pointing it at a vendor, users could look at the menu items available at that concession stand.

Hudak envisions using the same concept for the Experience Mardi Gras app by 2012.

“An idea we’re throwing around is doing virtual throws, so that when you point your phone at a float, it’ll have a button that you can press to get a throw, which could be a coupon to a sponsor,” he said.

Sponsors now include Zatarain’s and Tabasco, but Hudak expects to add restaurants and bars on the parade route in future versions of the app.

Dec 20
0

Foursquare Revamped to Include Photos and Comments

By | Apps, Droid, iPhone | No Comments

Earlier Monday, Foursquare revamped its service with the addition of photos and comments.

The new features may seem like belated additives that merely keep Foursquare on par with its location-based competitors, but this update is replete with service-wide improvements that drive home the social utility and post-checkin possibility of the platform.

The new features can be instantly experienced via the updated iPhone app and the web, and support for Android and BlackBerry is coming soon.  If you’ve already downloaded the update, let us know what you think in the comments.

First Impressions

The best word to describe today’s improvements is social. Photos are social, comments are social and now the entire Foursquare experience, by extension, is exponentially more social in nature.

Photos and comments have been adroitly molded into the Foursquare experience. The new checkin screen includes an empty photo box that politely begs the user to share a photo, and each checkin displays camera and comment box icons to denote social activity happening around a place or picture. The net effect is an app experience that is noticeably more compelling and engrossing than before.

Other words that come to mind are context and depth. Prior to today, CEO and co-founder Dennis Crowley would speak of Foursquare as a service that seeks to reinvent what happens after the checkin. It’s a nice sentiment that, in theory, sets Foursquare apart from the rest, but the startup wasn’t really delivering features that made the what’s next? aspect of the service tangible.

The addition of photos and comments are a big step in that direction. Now, after you check in, you can continue to add photos to further document your experience. Plus, you can leverage the comments to better facilitate meet ups or solicit feedback and advice from friends on a particular locale.

Photos associated with checkins are nice, but photos added to tips and venues are also quite significant. Tips, especially, come to life with photos and we’re curious to see what happens as Foursquare partners and users add color to recommendations through their photos.

Nice Touches

The new iPhone app and the website are littered with subtle design enhancements. The first time you fire up the app, for instance, you’ll notice a nicely stylized loading screen.

There’s also a cute mayor crown that appears in the lower righthand corner of the app anytime it takes a few seconds to process an action. After you check in to a venue, you’ll see a redesigned checkin page that more clearly denotes the venue mayor and the points you earned for the checkin.

Push notifications alerting you to comments on photos make for a richer, more engaging mobile experience.

On the web, your history page now highlights checkins with attached photos and comments using the same camera and comment icons as the iPhone app. Venue pages and tips are also decked out with uploaded photos on the web.

Best of all, though, is the immediate symbiosis between your Instagram, Picplz and Foodspotting photos and your Foursquare activity. If you’re actively using one of those mobile photo sharing apps, then you’ve probably noticed that the photos associated with checkins from the past few days have already been pulled into your Foursquare timeline.

Room for Improvement

Foursquare concedes that photos and comments were pushed out quickly to users in time for the holidays. Certain features including the ability to export photos to Facebook and Flickr and an easier way to track comments and access your collection of photos are still in the works.

We’d also like to see Foursquare build ways to allow users to simultaneously attach a photo to a checkin, tip and place. Right now, these are all separate actions and that feels unnecessary and a bit counterintuitive if the startup designs to get users to enhance the venue and tip experience with their photos.

Noticeably unavailable is the now ubiquitous “Like” option popularized by Facebook and present in most mobile photo sharing services. It’s not as if the app needs a “Like” button, or suffers because it lacks one, but it does seem relevant to note its absence.

Crowley agrees that something of this variety is missing and says that Foursquare will consider adding a way to favorite tips, checkins and photos. “There’s a lot of things we still need to build into photos, but it’s useful for us to see how people are using it, listen to feedback from users and then evolve the product from there,” he says.