12 December 2008
Lets Your Friends Know
What You Are Doing And Where You Are
 Buddycloud is yet another location based application for your mobile phone that lets your friends know what you are doing and where you are.
Buddycloud adds context to the places you visit in the real world and makes it fun and easy to share these on sites like Twitter and Facebook.
As a Buddycloud user, you can bookmark and tag locations that mean something to you. For eample: Home, The Pub, Joe's House and Favourite Coffee Shop.
As you move around, Buddycloud automatically places you back at previously saved bookmarks, and updates your Buddycloud friends, Facebook and Twitter. It also shows you other people and places nearby. Short status messages can also be pushed into twitter.
Buddycloud is also about knowing where you were in the past and future. A simple future location can also be set. A simple example:
- Status message: Wow, that was a long week. Anyone up for a pint? (also pushed to Twitter and Facebook)
- Previous place: Work
- Current place: On the road in Southwark
- Next place: The Anchor Pub
Now your friends know that you are gagging for a pint on Friday evening.Buddycloud is slightly different to other friend-finder type services. It uses multiple location sources. Cell Towers, WiFi, GPS and bluethooth can be used in combination. This means that it works well indoors where GPS based solutions fail. It also incorporates group chats so that you can chat with other people in the area.
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Friends screen |
Group Chat Screen |
Buddycloud currently works on Symbian S60 and there are iPhone and Android ports in development. Much work has been done on optimising for low data usage and power consumption. The client currently runs on 30KB/hour.
Buddycloud Technology
On average, people spend 80% of their time indoors, and indeed most "Places" tend to be indoors. Using a combination of CellID, WiFi and Bluetooth positioning technologies Buddycloud excels in indoor positioning, assisted by GPS for outdoor action.
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Nearby Screen |
Place Screen |
Buddycloud is built atop the XMPP protocol. XMPP also drives Google Talk, Laconi.ca and other major messaging services. Building on XMPP means that buddycloud seamlessly offers it's users a FireEagle-type location sharing system. Users choose who gets to see their detailed (place-level) location and who can only see their broad (city-level) location.
To be useful location has to be shared. Preferably this is done with an open protocol that anyone can interact with. Buddycloud is spearheading an open XMPP extension (XEP-0255: Location Query) protocols that enables location queries, location sharing and location discovery.
The current phone client is a reference implementations of our open social location API. Buddycloud is a two year old company and is currently self funded.
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