DeepDarkSee

So it’s been a while. Kathryn and I are hitting the gym 3 times a week and share a personal trainer. She’s off for two weeks at a Spanish language immersion school in Peurto Vallarta next week, and Audrey is off to summer camp as a “CIT.” I’m still doing things for Bones in Motion and Rocket Mobile, but have been spending lots of time with Moblyng on their mobile strategy and build-out. We’re doing interesting things with video to mobile phones, and web sites that adapt to different phone browser capabilities. Some secret stuff that should pop out soon too! BiM was a great ride, but it’s really fun to involved with a fresh new start-up.

I’ve also been looking at what I want to do next as a self funded project. Lots of digging around Marine related resources on the web, and pondering iPhone app opportunities. I’m really pleased, as an early iPhone adapter, that I’ve got all the capabilities of the new phone except the faster network and better GPS. Go Apple!

So what’s new? BiM is moving along well. Audrey was a wonderful Alice in Alice in Wonderland, her 8th grade play. She also just started her first non- babysitting job, working the concession stand at Lemos Farm, and was a junior counselor at Wavy Gravy’s Camp Winnarainbow. Kathryn has had a rockin’ summer at Camp Winnarainbow, where she was in a chess tournament, did juggling, performed in “A Mid Summer Night’s Dream”, and was invited into the advanced improv group. She is also enjoying being 12! Leann is liking her job at Applied Bio Systems. I’ve been fooling around with a marine commerce site, and working on an iPhone application that shows tides, weather, waves, and marine advisories (and maybe charts!). I’ve also been really active at the Half Moon Bay Yacht Club, sailing the San Francisco Bay on a Santa Cruz 27, and running the Yacht Club summer youth sailing program. It looks like I’m also part of that new old crowd landing on face book. And hey, aren’t my daughters beautiful???

Check it out on YouTube here!

Runner’s World is launching “Wireless Run Tracker” – powered by Bones in Motion. A huge step for our company. We may make it on the map yet!

Take your training to the next level with Wireless Run Tracker. Record your speed, distance, route and caloric burn during your run through the convenience of a GPS enabled cell phone.

• Upload data such as mile splits, speed, distance, and calories burned to your PC
• Real time pace information displayed on your cell phone
• Access hundreds of running routes
• Track your progress online
• Create routes on Google maps
• Blog your results instantly

We’ve been working for a very long time to be one of the first third party LBS (GPS) applications on the Verizon Wireless service. BiM Active is availabe on Verizon phones as of this week! We’re already on Sprint and Nextel.

Why is BiM Active interesting? Check out the recording of a snowboard run below… made with a mobile phone! And the mainstream uses, like running, hiking, cycling, aren’t bad either!

“Going Bedouin.” What a great name for an extension of “virtual office.”  Other than the two founders in an office in Austin, we’ve been virtual at BiM for the past year and a half.  It’s working great for the development/operations team, but the CEO and the original founder sometimes miss the in-person contact.

I think the big issue growth issue is that communication needs grow non-linearly as the company grows in headcount.  That said, we’ve learned over the past 18 months to make sure to ‘drop in’ the ‘offices’ of others very regularly, and have staff conference calls weekly.  The Dev/Ops team has daily, or multiple times per day, impromptu group phone calls – which we’ve ended up sometimes calling “WC’s”, or “water cooler” time.  We also keep a group IM channel open all the time.

So BiM is a case where Bedouin is working, although it will be a challenge as we grow.

Wow, so much has been going on.  The big news… we publicly launched Bones in Motion and our first product, BiM Active, at Demo 2006 yesterday.  We’ve all been working non-stop to pull this off.  You can check out the 6 minute video of the presentation.  We also announced availability on Sprint and Nextel phones (and another big carrier will be announced very soon).

The bigger news is that we’ve had a fantastic response from the launch at Demo.  An AP story highlighted us in an article that was picked up by over 50 papers, including USA Today.  The San Jose Mercury News featured us (1 of only 6 companies mentioned and first in the story) in their article.  Editors from several major publications are requesting phones to take back from Demo 2006 to use for testing and in-depth articles.  We’re hearing from Sprint that no application launch has ever generated this level of inquiry and activity to their PR group (a reflection on ‘Demo’ as a great launch vehicle).

Oh, and I spoke at Mobile Monday the night before the launch (and I’m told that despite sleep deprivation, I was even coherent)!

Info from Red Herring about some of Verizon’s “Location Based Services” plans here.

If Social Networking 1.0 is eGroups, Evite, Yahoo Groups and such, and Social Network 2.0 is Friendster, Linked In and such, then what is Social Networking 3.0? David Hornik defines it in a post as enablers of other compelling consumer experiences. He writes that “dozens of new social networks are emerging to enable specific, valuable consumer experiences that are enhanced by the underpinnings of the network.”

We’ve been thinking of the social networking integration into the BiM Active web service since the earliest days of development. We started with the assumption that communicating and sharing is an integral part of the use of the web service. It’s not an add-on, but is part of the normal use. Ironically, doing this well – so that it is just ‘there’ – is not a simple task, and we’ve left parts of that implementation incomplete. It’s our next big functional push. It’s become obvoius that we really have designed it in as an integral part, because the absence of more than the hooks is so obvious in our current state of implementation.

So it’s great to see some more validation for this model. We considered tie-ins to Tribe and the like, but couldn’t figire out to how to really integrate them into the fabric of what we’re doing. OK, so now all we have to do is do it well (yikes!).

PS: BiM Active will be publicly available (out of restricted beta) in January! February!