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Stickymap reaches 10,000 unique markers!

Monday, July 30th, 2007

Max and I are very excited to announce that Stickymap has reached a great milestone. On July 23, Bob Smith, an avid user of Stickymap, created a marker called Sears in Lincoln Village, just north of Stockton California. This marker is the ten thousandth unique marker added by our users to the Stickymap database. You can visit the marker by clicking here: http://www.stickymap.com/?m=10000

We’re especially proud to reach this milestone, as Stickymap approaches its second birthday. For those of you who are wondering what the nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety ninth marker is, Bob Smith created it as well, a J.C. Penny within the Weberstown mall. http://www.stickymap.com/?m=9999

Posted in Development updates | 44 Comments »

Our thoughts on “Web 2.0” development

Friday, July 27th, 2007

Currently, there is a great opportunity for innovation. Our team has tried to take the best of each available resource to create a dynamic system that empowers the web. Presently, large web companies have created a new niche by making expensive to develop technologies available to the masses. In addition, free software licensed under the GNU General Public License provides developers with low cost, easy to manipulate tools. This open source environment creates a system of trust between internet web corporations (Yahoo and Google) and software/web developers. The web corporations have provided a jumpstart to innovators through large capitol investment that funds the creation of new technologies. While the success of the web companys’ investments lie in the trust and acceptance of developers, the innovator has faith that the technology will be reliable, ideally free and open source.
While the web appears to be removing barriers, one major issue still persists. Before beginning this project, the team consisted of web developer amateurs. We have found that the development of our technology was impeded by the terrible differences of structure between the internet browsers. We strongly feel that the lack of standards obstructs the growth of the World Wide Web by increasing development costs. We encourage software companies to adopt universal codes.

Posted in Development updates, Web Development Tips | 32 Comments »

New Version Update

Monday, July 23rd, 2007

As of today, we are still hard at work on our interface updates. Some of our ideas are coming into a clearer focus. Creating a marker is going to be very easy – we have been able to make good use the “info window” from Google Maps. However, we don’t want to make creation too easy. Unlike Google mymaps, we’re going to ask our users to make sure they’re not posting a duplicate. The trick is to strike a balance between the integrity of our data and the flow of user experience.

More specific updates are to come soon. Who knows? Maybe I’ll get some screen shots up here.

Max

Posted in Development updates, Google Maps API, Interface | 1 Comment »

Stickymap wins Yale Entrepreneurship Executive Summary competition

Monday, July 9th, 2007

Neighborhood Resources LLC is proud to announce that the Stickymap project won 3rd place in Yale Entrepreneurial Society’s Executive Summary Competition (Y2K), Social Entrepreneurship category. We prepared the executive summary over the course of several months with the help of two Yale undergraduate interns who are currently studying economics. We are particularly pleased with this success; not only does it validate our plan to help communities grow and succeed, but it also suggests that there is a strong need for our map tools. We also believe that this award is another reason for community groups, non-profits, and associations to trust our technology and support our efforts. If community groups want to share their neighborhoods, we want to be their first choice.

You can see the Yale announcement here: http://www.yesatyale.org/y2k.php
Dan

Posted in Development updates | 3 Comments »

Share and create personal maps on Stickymap

Thursday, July 5th, 2007

We’ve recently implemented a really cool tool that allows every user to create his own maps and share them with friends. To create a map with locations of your choice just follow a few easy steps.

First, find the marker that you would like to place in your map. If the marker already exists, then move to step two. If the marker does not exist, then you’ll have to create it. Just use the marker creation tool to quickly create the marker.

Second, tag the marker with an appropriate description. If you’re having trouble understanding the tagging system, think of the tags as categories. Just place the marker in a category that best describes the marker.

Third, go to your Stickymap personal profile page and create a personal map of the markers that you tagged. Please understand that the tagging feature is only available to users who are registered.

Let us know if you have any questions or trouble creating your maps.

Dan

Posted in Development updates, Interface, Marker creation | 3 Comments »

Beta testing our Community Group tool

Tuesday, June 26th, 2007

In January of 2006, we announced that Neighborhood Resources LLC was going to be launching a new feature, the Community Group tool; a utility that helps groups of all types (foundations, non profits, associations, religious groups, development associations, clubs, etc) create interactive maps for their communities. Last week, we started our beta tests with several groups in the New Haven area. While at first, the groups ran into several bugs, they have all bared with us and have begun to create maps of their neighborhoods. We realize that we are fortunate to find groups that are willing to take the time to help us develop and refine this feature, which we believe will be a useful tool in building communities. Please let us know if you would like to volunteer to Beta test the Community Group feature, which we expect will be available to the public around October.

Dan

Posted in Development updates, Interface | 46 Comments »

New Icon Selector

Friday, June 22nd, 2007

Today, we released the new icon selector on Stickymap.com. Instead of having to look through the tree structure, there’s a single general search to find the icon you are looking for. Hopefully, this framework will m ake it easier for you to find the icon that you want.

The new selector appears in four places: the sifter, marker creation, changing marker “settings”, and editing a marker’s description. Changing the icon can be done through either the marker’s settings or through changing it’s description. This is because we used to have it all done on one page (the change description page). There should probably be a single, easy to access place to change the icon of a marker.

If you are a user, let us know what you think of the new icon controller. Do you find it easier to use? How do you think we can improve it? Shortly, we’re going to take a look at marker creation, and try to make that easier to use. The new icon selector is just one step in this initiative.

Max

Posted in Development updates, Icons, Interface, Usability | 2 Comments »

Choosing Your Icons

Wednesday, June 20th, 2007

There are over 150 different icon images to choose from in Stickymap. When users create a marker, or use the sifter, they are asked to choose one specific icon. In order to find the icon that they are looking for, the users have to struggle through categories and sub-categories in order to find the one they want. This is a tedious process, and even when a user has a particular icon in mind, it’s not always clear which category to look under.

That’s why we’re working on a new way to search icons – the 21st century way. No longer will users have to click and unclick categories, unsure of what they’ll find. The new icon selector will be simple: users will just type in what they’re looking for in a search box, and the relevent choices will pop up. Users can use their own logic; they won’t be confined to ours.

This hasn’t been easy to implement, but so far it’s going more smoothly than expected. If you are a stickymap user, how can we make selecting an icon even easier for you? Let us know – and look out for this new interface feature in the near future.

Max

Posted in Development updates, Icons, Interface, Usability | 1 Comment »

Creating a Web 3.0 Local Search

Sunday, June 17th, 2007

For the past week, we’ve been developing our local search capabilities and the results have been fantastic. We’ve decided to take a very challenging but innovative approach; to combine our Stickymap content with Yahoo! Local content and the Google Geocoding tool. When we introduce our new interface in a few weeks, our algorithm will search through the Stickymap database, the Yahoo! Local database, and the Google Geocoder database to return the most relevant results. While writing algorithms that return merged results from multiple databases is nothing new, we believe that we’re the first to implement this method for user generated content in local search. We are very excited to hear your thoughts and can not wait to make this interface available to our users.
Dan

Posted in Development updates, Local search | 1 Comment »

Laying out a complicated homepage

Monday, June 11th, 2007

We just started working with a graphics designer to create our new home page. So far, we’ve had some useful discussion and results. Over the next few weeks, we plan to continue to refine the look and feel of the homepage so that it is easier for our users to interact with the software. We have always found it challenging to present our technology in an “easy to use” interface; it’s complicated and requires the user to make educated decisions. We do not want to create a homepage that is overwhelming. So, we’ve been testing out a few concepts with test subjects and we’re training a quality assurance intern to help us perfect our new homepage.
Please let us know if you would like to help us complete our project. We would especially be interested in graphic designers who would be interested in volunteering a few hours to offer advice and direction.
Dan

Posted in Development updates, Graphics, Interface, Usability | 4 Comments »

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