World On A Shoe String

Archive for the ‘Explorya’ Category

From the statistics shown in Google Analytics, the changes made to the web application thingstodosingapore.com over the past few weeks has thus far had a positive impact on on the length and depth of incoming visits.

• Average length of stay has increase a 100%, from a pathetic 53 sec beginning of last month to 2 mins and 30 secs
• bounced rate has  dropped to an average of 6% from the previous 12% beginning of last month

The results could be attributed to the following changes:

• Migration of web hosting server to Singapore where up to 70% of the visits are coming from, a choice resultant from analysis of data available in Google Analytics, Alexa.com as well as valuable inputs from end users.
• Ajax auto count of items in each category when visitor scrolls to a new section of the map resulting in preempt of information users could browse through. (A feature adapted from YouTube.com)
• In the event whereby a visitor arrives in a page other than the main page, the starting category will be set to the one this content belongs to. The pheriperal markers will also be from the currently selected category. This results in increased relevancy in contents presented (A feature adapted from Google.com).
• The migration from in map content presentation to the use of the Thickbox library. Users can now browse through the current content with more ease and less irritation. This is a choice resultant from the series of usability analysis I conducted.
• Auto population of Event contents from Facebook.co. This is a feature inspired by Facebook’s newly launched Graph API and the existing Google Map API. The process is made more comprehensive by an ever growing internal dataset of locations specific to Singapore. After months of experience dealing with the Google Map API, I have concluded that while the Google Map Geocoding feature is pretty extensive, it has problems detected locations in the event whereby the location is referred in the local jargon.

Over the past few days, I have had the great opportunity to correspond with a few corporate event organizers and in the process receive some feedbacks. One of the features, resultant of my correspondences, will be the visitor analytics which event organizers will find useful.

Another set of features related to the first set will be the viral feature which I will hope to implement over the next two weeks, it will be somewhat inspired by one of the prototypes we have had the opportunity to build in Silicon Valley during the Techcrunch Hackathon. This second set of feature will be designed to increase foot track to events by organizers happening in Singapore, increase visibility of such events to the general public as well as aid in the process of customer retention.

Considering the fact that Singapore is in the midst of positioning itself as business hub where multiple international conventions will take place, the infrastructure for the online social media support for events is thus far minimal, if not non-existant. This might in fact be a niche that is uncompetited for and in demand.

Not only does ThingsToDoSingapore.com concentrate on providing valuable information to people interested in attending events happening in Singapore, it also complements these events with information on related facilities at nearby premises.

Another thread of work to be done is the android application. I have had the opportunity to bring the HTC desire I recently acquired out for a test run and have identified some issues of concern which I will have to that into consideration when building the Android Application that will allows users to gain access to relevant information on ThingsToDoSingapore.com while on the road. Thus far these are the issues identified:

1. Content Synchronization vs Bandwidth Lag
2. Content Synchronization vs Android SqlLite memory size
3. Content Synchronization vs Battery Life
4. Content Presentation vs Screen Size
5. Content Presentation vs Relevance to User Experience

The options available for the Android Application are as follows:

1. Map
2. Listing View
3. Grid View

While the above issues are important, there is a more fundamental underlying area which begs for my attention. I will need to identify the use cases that will be relevant towards the Android Application User experience when exploring Singapore on foot. This presents a difficulty for me at the moment as I have yet gathered a comprehensive set of data, enough at least to determine which features are critical to a Singapore explorer and which are not. The option available for my pursuit at the moment is that I do trial runs using other peoples application to determine the painful spots not covered as yet. However even, the resultant set might be biaised as it due to my personal experiences as Ricky once said. Hopefully this biased could be resolved via the feedbacks gathered from my test users (guinea pigs) after the initial prototype is developed.

The path ahead is still long. There is much to be accomplished.

David K.K. a friend on facebook got my attention when contacted me two days ago stating his interest to have his events published on ThingsToDoSingapore.com. I instructed him that by simply signing in as a member on ThingsToDoSingapore.com, the system will automatically poll his account and his friends’ accounts for newly created events  every 24 hours. Just for curiosities sake I went and did a manual polling for his account after getting his account id. To my surprise his account itself contributed close to 300 new upcoming events. To gain more understanding of this phenomena, I went and did a study on David K.K.’s facebook profile. Results showed he is one of the top ten members who have the most number of friends on ThingsToDoSingapore.com. This fact brought immediately to my mind a key point which I ever came across from the book “The Tipping Point”.

All individuals are not equal by nature, the differences could be attributed to their character, personality and natural disposition, as such when analysed in the context of the social network, some people are spokes (connected with just a few main people) while other people are hubs (connected to many people). According to the theory preached in the tipping point, to gain wide coverage for a message, it is important to gather the support of people that are hubs in a particular section of a social network as ambassadors of a sticky message.

After gaining this new insight, I modified a section of my codes to prioritize the polling of members accounts for events based on their number of friends.

After talking with Pasha last night, I managed to further fine tune the picture of what I want to do with this new site Explorya.com which I will be devoting my entire time andd effort to for the next two years. It is a whole hearted commitment on my part to this idea I have been envisioning for the longest time. The first prototype (ThingsToDoSingapore.com) seemed be getting rather popular amongst the locals, as well as nationalities from multiple countries that frequent Singapore.

By November 2010, I will stop all commercial activites relating to providing customized IT solutions to external third parties as well as all social activites that does not lie in the path I decide to thread.

Now what is Exploray.com? Explorya.com aims to be a community platform that allows the easy sharing of location based information that will help make exploration fun and easy for travellers in various parts of the world. Being a natural extension to the original vision behind ThingsToDoSingapore.com, this platform will be one that is by the people for the people.

One of the main challenges which me and Pasha have identified is the presentation of information of various forms.Thus far these are the types of content objects we have identified:

• Bus stations
• Travel routes
• Accomodation Types
• Scam and Rip offs
• Border crossing procedures in remote parts of the world

With no intention to recreate the wheel, I started the initial prototype with the Joomla Content Management System with the use of the JomSocial component.

I envision that the various content objects will be described with the use of XML documents. A modular struture will be enforced. This will allow for easy system extension to accomodate more content object types as the platform progresses to later stages.

One of the main features for the content insertion process will be use wizards. The main intention behind this is to increase usuability for end users. I am currently pondering on how the use of XML could be used to provide a comprehensive description of a wizard content entry process.

A few months ago while I was less occupied, I did create a component for the Joomla 1.5 called the workflow component. It is somewhat similar. However due to sudden increase in commercial activites on my part, this project was left half baked and never released to the open source community. One of the main things I hope to accomplish now is to salvage chunks of the existing codes into this wizard engine I will be building for Explorya.com.

Thus far these are my thoughts which I will slowly make reality over the next few weeks.