In our continuing effort to make your bliin experience richer and simpler, today we have launched a new release of our mobile site: m.bliin.com

NOKIA handsets: clear your cache and/or restart your device. We are using new CSS and NOKIA has a reputation for storing CSS data very very deeply. If your browser does not render something like below … you know where to go: Options > Clear Privacy Data > Clear Cache

Now for the novelties …

• Partly because of the new Group Category addition to bliin, we have come up with a new top-nav tab design. It is a combination of the simple 3-tab design you are familiar with on bliin, combined with a breadcrumb path for specific content items e.g.: users, photos, trips, groups … When entering m.bliin.com you land on the Find tab. Left of it is your Home tab which contains all your personal items. To the right is the Feed tab which shows a global view on all public events on bliin. If you click a specific content item, a 4th item tab appears with the item category as tab name; indicating that you are now browsing within the item itself. If you now click the Find tab, you will find the item centered on the map, the Feed tab shows you all the events connected with the specific item. You can ‘release’ the 4th tab by un-marking the box below the map; which brings you back to the global tab.

  

• Below the map you will now find a dropdown to display - search for - content: anywhere, near me, very near me, or within current view, allowing you to find content anywhere, easily.

  

• The big one: we have now added Groups to bliin. Groups are designed to help you categorize content on bliin. You can create groups e.g. to manage your photos or trips. You can also group content from other bliin users and they may group yours. If a group you want to create already exists - e.g: ‘cats’ - you may choose to join that group or create new one with a more specific name - e.g: ‘cats amsterdam’.

This years The Web and Beyond dives into the world of Mobility. From their site: “The web is in a state of motion, no longer is it primarily being accessed through PC’s, but more does it find its way into our phones, our cars, on the streets and in buildings. And once there, the Web is interacting with us in smarter and richer ways than before.”

The Web and Beyond 2008: Mobility takes place on May 22nd, 2008 at the historic Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. bliin will be present to demo her service and interact with speakers and visitors.

Keynote speakers include:Adam Greenfiels (author of Everyware), Juri Engström (founder of Jaiku), Ben Cerveny (Game Neverending -> Flickr) and Christian Lindholm (Nokia & Yahoo!Mobile)

We hope to see you There!
kind regards,
bliin team

A new release of bliin has come online with quite a few updates & new features across the line.

On bliin.com we now have a first version of a new feature we named: Feed. The feed lists all activity on bliin in page view; you can select to view a global view of the feed, or of your Friends only. You can now also search the Feed. Displayed results also include geographic names … all content on bliin is now geo-named so you always know streetname, city and country of items.

On m.bliin.com we have added a FAQ to help you navigate around and get help with using service. If you start m.bliin.com without a GPS signal, you can choose your ‘last location’ as a bookmark.

Also, a new release of bliinGPSXS is now online. When you start your older version, you will receive a notification saying that a new version (V1.1) is now online (notification does not apply for WindowsMobile users). You will be sent to m.bliin.com where you can download the latest version directly. This new version includes:

• capturing time difference on local device vs server time for more accurate positioning of photo Shares
• 3 seconds Send interval for extreme sports utilisation- capturing cell tower location IDs. important as we are building a dbase of towers so we can serve non GPS users also in the near future
• in the bliinGPSXS version for windows desktop we fixed a bug dealing with comma/point separator difficulties

Today we’ve launched a - we think - sweet new feature on our mobile site: m.bliin.com. When you are in the Find tab there is now an option to Tile Results. What it does ? well simple: it shows you mini thumbnails of all the Users & Shares in your immediate area; giving you a bird eye view of what’s going on around you in mini pictures. You can ‘page back’ in time to view what went on weeks and months before as well. Below’s a Tiled screendump of Users & Shares in my immediate office area here on Rembrandt Square, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

The nice part Tiling is of course the option to Tile results of your search. Suppose you’re looking for Italian Restaurants in your immediate surroundings. Simply type your search in the box, Tile Results and you get an overview of thumbnails of all the Shares matching your query … Imagine what it will do when you search Sunsets worldwide.

Check here to get a web-based preview of Tiles Results of search: sun. All thumbnails link back to the the original Shares and their locations. Resize your browser window to match the mobile experience … or better … goto m.bliin.com on your handset and experience the real deal now.

Enjoy!
bliin team

Our first public release of bliinGPSXS for Windows Mobile is now available for download from: m.bliin.com (from your handset browser), or here at bliin.com.

As with the J2ME version, the software works in combination with our mobile site: m.bliin.com. bliinGPSXS sends coordinates to bliin servers, to position you Live! the rest of your bliin experience is within your handset browser.

The software should work properly on all Windows Mobile devices, but please keep us posted of problems you encounter. Older handsets may require manual configuration of the GPS port & baud-rate. If you need assistance … we’re here to help. info [at] bliin [dot] com

Features in this release
Auto Upload
Auto upload is a feature that uploads your photo’s running in the background. No hassle pin-pointing your photo files, if you wish we sync an entire folder to bliin. By default this feature is disabled, you can enable it by checking the box in the Auto Upload dialogue.

Which photo’s will be uploaded ? All photos stored in your My Pictures folder or it’s sub-folders which file names contain - or subfolder-name contains - the pre-fix as specified in the auto upload dialogue box. Be Aware: If you leave the pre-fix box empty, ALL photo’s will be uploaded. You can match your pre-fix in the options dialogue of your handsets Camera application.

Send Interval
Here you can specify the interval of sending your position to bliin: 15seconds, 15minutes or manual. This feature may save you cost of data if roaming abroad.

Web
Click this option and your handsets native browser will launch our mobile site m.bliin.com

Today we have discontinued POCKETbliin downloads from our site. During the past month we have been publicly testing bliinGPSXS and we think we have found a worthy follow-up in it.

We started POCKETbliin to offer you a seamless experience for creating & navigating bliin content. All of the bliin features were embedded in this application (photo Shares, Trips, Friends, Bookmarks). The obvious drawback of this was the portability to the multitude of handset makes and models that are out there. Screen resolution, camera triggering, keypad layouts all of them needed different installer .JAR files. We were not always sure that what we put out, was actually working because we could not always physically test on all the devices. The user feedback on our forum is testament to this.

So we decided to take a different approach, one we had already started with bliinGPSXS for desktop computers: bliinGPSXS for handsets. The challenge: create a single version software for sending GPS-location only leave all other features in the handset browser. This is where m.bliin.com comes in.

bliinGPSXS for handsets can be downloaded from m.bliin.com or from bliin.com. Once installed and started it will ask for your username and password. Beyond this the application is pretty straightforward: when a connection is made with our server and when enough GPS satellites are found for a fix, you are Live!. Choose: Options > Web and your phone-native web browser will start to take you to m.bliin.com.

Other features in bliinGPSXS
- Setup: for selecting your GPS device: internal, Bluetooth or com-port
- Send Interval: to set your location send interval: 15 sec, 15 minutes, manually
- Minimize: sends bliinGPSXS to the background so you can continue using your standard handset functionality. Does not work on all handsets: NOKIA S30’s and Samsungs are known to not support background applications.

We believe we have found a better, more robust and simpler user experience in this solution. We are curious to see receiving your feedback.

NB:
POCKETbliin users can continue to use their software. You can also use POCKETbliin in combination with m.bliin.com if you want. We do however advice to check out bliinGPSXS as well.

POCKETbliin is still available on request. Send us a note at : info [at] bliin [dot] com and we will make sure to respond.

We’ve just added a new feature to our mobile site m.bliin.com. When you’re logged in check out the Me tab. From here - under Share - click the location link. Your phone-native SMS dialogue will open with a pre-formatted text saying something like this:

From here select a contact from your phones’ address book and hit send. Your contact will receive the link which opens the handset browser and points to your Live! location on m.bliin.com.

If you are on a bookmarked location you can do the same; the pre-text will be:

Hi, I am at bookmark. Find me here: http://user.bliin.com

Experimentally:
In this same release we have added the option to email your photo Shares to: upload [at] bliin [dot] com. You can do this from your handset or in your regular mail app. Your sender email address should be the one known to bliin. Check this in your My >Settings > Profile dialogue on bliin.com. Your photo Share will point to the geo-coordinates where you currently are. We will soon be building a confirmation procedure into this process. Don’t abuse it in the meantime …

While you’re at it … don’t forget to embed your bliin widget to your personal site. Nokiageek is liking it, thanks to Matt who’s been supporting bliin from the get go!

2007 has been an exciting year for us. The company – not even a year old – had the pleasure of seeing a number of highlights that we would like to share with you in a list of appearance. From all of us here at bliin we wish you a superb 2008 in which you may all find “your where in the web”. We hope that bliin may help you to achieve that.

With kind
Bliin team

February 28th
Started bliin BV (Ltd) with our first share holder DCIF
April 19th
Moved into our Summer Residence ‘Gillis’ to enjoy a wonderful summer.
May 1st
Successful migration to new back-end and first release of POCKETbliin for NOKIA N95.
May 16th
First attempt to fly-bliin … Gustaaf takes bliin for a spin on his propeller plane from Amsterdam Schiphol to Maastricht Airport
May 31st
Bliin on Next Web, Amsterdam start-up arena
April 2nd
Runner up Van Speijk Innovation Pitch
June 13th
Contact Management & User Messaging on bliin.
June 19th
Heavy traffic due to BBC radio 1 broadcast on bliin and Social Networking on the Move.
June 25th
Bliin in Grand Finale New Venture 2007
July 15th
Idle mode on bliin … or the end of GPS dependency
August 14th
First bliin-widgets ready for embedding on personal homepages and blogs
September 3rd
Trips recoding & playback on bliin.
September 5th
Presentation at Prix Ars Electronica // Linz
October 10th
Bliin selected for ESA business incubator; starting January 2008
October 23rd
Bliin regional winner (Holland) Galileo Masters 2007
November 10th
Bliin selected amongst 12 most innovative mobile applications by Forum NOKIA
December 4th
bliinGPSXS for handsets & m.bliin.com live!
December 5th
Heineken Delivery Men live! powered by bliin

A group of candidate journalist students at the IT-University in Copenhagen, lead by Niels Darmgaard Nielsen, are conducting a review into the reach and effects of location aware mobile social networking. They have created a bliin-questionnaire page that they’ve asked to post on our blog.

We’ve been assured to get a share in the research results which obviously we will post back to this blog.

Do take a few minutes to help this initiative.
with kind
bliin team

This monday - we are proud to say - a new Heineken campaign went live on www.heineken.nl in cooporation with bliin. The campaign focusses on the delivery of beer and the Delivery Men that make this happen. In a Live window you can follow 8 trucks in their daily routine of delivering beer from distribution center to bars across the country. Each Delivery Man is equipped with bliin installed on a NOKIA N95. You can follow their delivery’s and watch their lives as they upload photo Shares instantly to the site.

There is also a game element to the site where you guess the location of delivery to win a NOKIA N95.

Again we are proud to work with both Heineken and Qi-ideas, who came up with this excellent campaign and very suitable application of bliin. We are looking forward for more great application ideas!

From the heineken site:
Heineken Delivery Men – To serve and deliver

Heineken Delivery Men are out there every day working hard for you to ensure that Heineken beer reaches bars across this country. Important work, ‘cause imagine what would happen if they weren’t on the job … Well, have no fear. Now you can track them live via this website. What’s more, you can guess where they’re going next. A unique form of geo-tracking, together with bliin.com, allows GPS and mobile phone tracking technologies to track a delivery’s position via internet to within just a few metres.

Watch Them Live
The trucks will be travelling between 9:00 and 17:00 (GMT+1). After that the will go to the distribution centre for loading. Click on ‘watch live’ to see where the Delivery Men are travelling right now.

Play the Game
Play ‘The Game’ and use the hints and delivery route map to guess the delivery’s next bar stop. If you guess correctly, you’ll get a chance to win our weekly giveaway item, a NOKIA N95 – the GPS telephone of choice.