Jolly good show!

If you didn’t spot it, we’re in the top 5 travel apps in all of 44 different countries! It was getting so that we were starting to wonder why Apple has featured us all over the globe *except* Britain, when we’re British (except Dave), we’re based in Britain (except Tris) and all our robots are British (except Harold).  So, we’re really pretty British then, but we’ve had no British love at all.

Until today! Yes, calloo callay, this sunny Friday we’re featured in the UK App Store in both iTunes and on the jolly old iPhone.  O frabjous day! I think I shall go and pop a bottle of British bubbly (no sniggering in Reims, please) and chortle in my joy. Why not join me in a toast to flook, and then make sure you get your mojo on this weekend and get flooking before all the best spots are taken!

We need a bigger shelf

Flook is shortlisted for another award. The Meffys (not to be confused with a cute rabbit*) are an annual award ceremony from the Mobile Entertainment Forum (or MEF – see what they did there?)

flook is nominated in the “Content Discovery & Personalisation category” which seems just about perfect.

As before, we’re chuffed that people would even shortlist us for an award and we’re far too British to have any real aspirations to win… it’d be nice though wouldn’t it. The Meffys are judged by a panel of the great and the good of the mobile industry so no voting requirements on our loyal flookers this time round.

* but wouldn’t it be cool if we’d been nominated for a Miffy

It’s an honour… uh honor

We got a very nice letter in the ePost today. We’re not quite sure what it means right now but it is very nice all the same.

It is my pleasure to inform you that Flook has been selected as an Official Honoree for the Best Use of GPS or Location Technology category in The 14^thAnnual Webby Awards.

We went over to the site for the Webbys and sure enough there we are.

The nice people at the Webbys even gave us a nice picture of the award to put here. Here it is:

Coo, it’s even all black and everything to match the blog. The nice people even told us what to do next:

THROW A PARTY Invite co-workers, friends and family to your own “Webby” party to honor your achievement.

Seriously, this is a real honour, the webbys are big news and we’re a little company so it means a lot to us. If there is voting involved, you know we’ll be in touch. Thank you to The Webbys, we really are honoured/honored. Now, for that party…

Her second 15Mb of fame.

When we won the MEX UI award, one of the prizes was a ticket to the MEX conference. Well, Jane is such a clever stick, they asked her to present. Here’s what she’s going to talk about:

What does serendipitous discovery mean, and how does it differ from task-based search? What are the different use cases, what are the interaction flows, and what are the implications for the UI? Are these two top-level use cases in competition with each other? How efficient are traditional task-based search applications on mobile anyway?

How does the application learn the user’s content preferences? Is it necessary to explicitly ask the user, or are there other ways of discerning her likes and dislikes? Which is best? How does the social graph play into this, and what about the dangers of the empty room syndrome? What are the implications for the ‘engine’, whether that be on a server or in the mobile application?

The difference between location-based content that is ‘broadcast’ (one user to any user) versus ‘personal’ (one user to friends) and managing the tension between these in a mobile application.

What happens when we add commercial content to our applications? Can ads ever co-exist happily with user-generated content, and if so, how do we do it without relegating the ad to become a second-class citizen? Why receiving a text message from Starbucks as you walk past is the most ridiculous thing ever, and how to achieve a similar aim while delighting the user. ‘Facebook and the menopausal ad’ or ‘why a little ad relevance is a very dangerous thing’.

Goals for the session

Many of the metaphors we used for discovering new places, information and experiences in the mobile environment are relics of traditional methods. This talk explores how new techniques can transform mobile devices into the ideal platform for serendipitous discovery.

More details at the MEX site.

Wow, we won a Mobile Premier Award

We are feeling very un-Mondayish today, even though it is in fact Monday, the 15th of February. In fact, we’re feeling positively “Friday at the start of a long weekend”! That’s because the kind people at the Mobile Premier Awards, organized by dotopen, have just this minute awarded us the “Best Startup in Mobile Experience”, out of 115 other entries in that category!

This award was sponsored by MEX, whose founder Marek Pawlowski said:

“Investing in truly user-centered design is essential for a successful mobile service and goes far beyond creating a pretty UI for your app. Flook has embedded great user experience in the heart of its product through clever interaction flow, interesting visual metaphors, customer involvement and attention to detail. It is a deserving winner of this Award and a great example for other start-ups to invest in user experience from an early stage.”

All our robots wholeheartedly agree with Marek’s words. They’d like to point out that user experience was the initial inspiration for flook, when we thought that swiping cards would be a much more mobile-friendly interface for location-based discovery than maps and pins.

We’d like to thank dotopen and MEX for choosing flook, and Andy Chung of Eden Ventures for accepting the award on our behalf.

Jane of the silly hats did (and does) much of the design work on flook, but we’d be very remiss if we didn’t also thank Nick Healey of Slash Design and Pete Borlace of pbdesignsolutions for their massive contributions. Nick is our user experience guru and is a real person not a robot called Robert. Pete is our graphic designer and he dreamt up our rainbow of robots. I’m not sure if he really does wear tin hats.