Got hooked up this morning w/ last Sundays paper with our @airrand article!!! on Flickr.
This could never get old! Love the airrand press and general interest that is slowly starting to get out there!
foursquare + Location Lab’s Mayor Maker = The magic of airrand geofencing!
One thing that we’ve had to rely on with airrand is leveraging a check-in service in order to know where you are at. In a perfect world the app is most beneficial when it alerts you regardless if you have checked in or not. For about 2 weeks now I have been testing out the concept of geofencing in-line with airrand. Geofencing is the term for creating a virtual perimeter around locations than can be set to trigger something else when you break that barrier. That is where Mayor Maker comes in; this app allows you to link your foursquare account to auto check you in when getting close to a location. I set Mayor Maker to our grocery store, my office, and our home.
The result: Now airrand just texts me when I need things at places I just walked into, no checking in = purely magical user experience.
Details: In my findings check-ins are typically reserved for restaurants, bars, travel logging, etc., and rarely is it used for home, work and grocery store - so this was optimal for trying out geofencing. Geofencing is a huge battery drain on current devices in the market due to the GPS always being on - so limiting the fences to 3 key places only seemed to impact my battery by 10% added loss in a day. Not sure on how Mayor Maker is handling distance to fences; in other words I would expect it to chill the hell out with pinging satellites if I am 40 miles away from my closest fence, but not sure. Originally I would have loved for the app to allow us to fence categories, so we could trap any grocery store, not just a specific one. We soon realized thru personal experience as well as conversations with friends that we’re fairly loyal to our grocery store, so having airrand ping you every time you walked by some random store would be annoying and in result have a negative impact on the experience.
Conclusion: This feature with airrand is truly amazing and just feels like the future, however, with today’s device and our app limitations it comes with some drawbacks. Building a product which relies of someone elses product sucks! airrand is downright awesome when you add geofencing but there is no reason for airrand to have its own checkin - there are too many in the space already and we like foursquare. In our defense, leveraging popular services frees the user from having to do the same task over multiple apps all competing for the users attention and we’ll probably piggy back on other services down the road (Boxcar to offer native iOS and Android pop-up notifications). So if you have a lot of battery at the end of the day, download and link Mayor Maker and give it a try and let us know what you think.
Recent Press coverage from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Airrand.com for more function in Foursquare - JSOnline
Thanks Stan for the great article!
Why we chose HTML5 for airrand
When we went down the path of building out our idea for a location smart to-do list, we mapped out all the things the service needed and weighed that against the abilities of HTML versus a native smartphone solution. We already knew that a native app could offer us all the abilities that we would need today, as well as tomorrow. So we did some field testing of mobile web applications using HTML5 to see what was possible and its user experience. Some apps we tried were untappd, fitbit, basecamp, to facebook’s mobile web versus their native app; we realized quickly that not only was this our quickest option to offer on all mobile operating systems, but the experience could be feature rich as well.
One major perk is that one site serves all the needs for our customers from any device – you can access airrand.com from your laptop, your tablet, to your phone and the site will adjust to fit the constraints of the screen. The hidden benefit was one source to edit changes that would be represented over all devices. We didn’t have to worry about features being offset with the iPhone version going thru approval process while the Android version had already been out for two weeks. And we had free reign to make tweaks and changes on the fly as we saw fit without having to wait for app approval, which was critical in push out features fast and often.
One of the draw backs to being web based, however, is app recognition in being related to an app store. I’ve heard on more than one occasion, “I searched for your app in the Android Market and couldn’t find it.”. We hope this trend will change as mobile browsers offer more functionality for developers to leverage HTML and customers starts to look to the internet to either find the app, or be directed to it’s appropriate device store.
At some point down the road we may outgrow the abilities of HTML5, but at our current state we were happily able to quickly release our product for almost every smartphone that is available. So if you’d like to use airrand, all you need to do is point your desktop or mobile browser to airrand.com
Missed our release mark of launching at SXSW by about a week, so we only gave out a small batch of these gems while we were there. Props to StickerMule and AppSumo for a great SXSW release package that was perfect timing startups looking to launch there.
airrand beta 2 minute questionnaire
If you’ve been using airrand, please consider giving us a little feedback to help make the product better! Thanks!
Click here to fill out the online survey
Why we chose foursquare for location awareness
We are very happy to release our beta to the foursquare-using-public and hope that airrand provides even more value to your check-ins.
We considered all of our options when deciding which check-in services airrand should tie into; facebook places, gowalla, google places, SCVNGR, and foursquare. But it became clear that our friends overwhelmingly use foursquare. And the incentives foursquare provides at places like Whole Foods encourage people to check-in actively and often, which is perfect for a reminder service like airrand.
A special thanks to the crew at foursquare for allowing us into the early beta for their new push API service which has been extremely helpful for scaling airrand.
Release the Kraken (aka Press Release)
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
airrand.com launches today, delivering your to-do list at the place you need it most
Milwaukee, WI - 04/20/2011 - airrand, LLC is pleased to announce that airrand.com has launched its open beta. airrand is a web-based service for use on any web browser and smartphone which offers users the ability to link to-do list items to specific locations.
airrand links to a user’s foursquare account - a location check-in service. Users are alerted when they check-in to any location associated with a to-do item by either text message or email. E.g., moments after checking into Whole Foods a customer would receive an SMS from airrand with a link to a checklist containing all of their to-dos.
“Our goal is to offer a “what @ where” engine, which provides relevant information to our customers, where and when they need them.” says Michael Massie, Co-Founder of airrand. “We asked ourselves what we would like to know about a place when we walk in, and our to-do list was at the top of our needs.”
airrand also offers the ability to couple your to-dos with others (ex. spouse, roommate, etc.) in order to tag team the things to-do in your life.
In today’s release, airrand.com is offering a limited set of options with the intent to gather feedback to help guide product direction and future development. In the coming months airrand looks to expand its features to offer customers more options and abilities based off this close interaction.
About airrand, LLC
Launched in January of 2011 as a joint collaboration between Co-Founders Michael Massie and Robert Ralian.
For more information about airrand.com, contact Michael Massie at mike@airrand.com
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Come check out the new airrand beta
airrand is a web based to-do application that leverages foursquare to know where you check in, and then alert you, via SMS/email, with things you have on your list there.
Here is a breakdown of how it works:
Point your browser to http://www.airrand.com and load up all the items that you want/need to-do, and where - 10m Run Day @ Gym, Orange Juice @ Grocery, Gift for Timmy @ Store, etc. - make sure to check-in everywhere, and when there is something that you need at a venue you walk into, we’ll alert you and link you back to our site so you can check off all the things you did while you’re there. Note: When checking in at a location, on foursquare, opting not to “Share with Friends” will NOT trigger airrand notification.
Try airrand now: http://www.airrand.com
and… lets see… oh, let us know if you find anything buggy, or generally have any feedback, talk to us at: beta@airrand.com
Here’s to gettin’ ‘stuff’ done.
Mike Massie & Bob Ralian - The airrand team
A location smart, to-do list.