Moojive's Official Blog

Moojive is awesome beause you can ...

Sat, 21 Apr 2012 09:10:58 +1000

Use Moojive if you’re organizing a soccer training session. Download Moojive free on the Apple App Store: http://goo.gl/Lr3bh

Moojive is awesome beause you can ...

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 17:27:15 +1000

Use Moojive when site seeing with friends. Download Moojive free on the Apple App Store: http://goo.gl/Lr3bh

Moojive is awesome beause you can ...

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 10:24:06 +1000

Use Moojive when organising birthday parties. Download Moojive free on the Apple App Store: http://goo.gl/Lr3bh

Moojive is awesome beause you can ...

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 05:54:58 +1000

Use Moojive when organising a flash mob. Download Moojive free on the Apple App Store: http://goo.gl/Lr3bh

Moojive is awesome beause you can ...

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 18:31:00 +1000

Use Moojive when organising blind dates. Download Moojive free on the Apple App Store: http://goo.gl/Lr3bh

Moojive is awesome beause you can ...

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 12:38:00 +1000

You can use Moojive when catching up over coffee. Download Moojive free on the Apple App Store: http://goo.gl/Lr3bh

Moojive is awesome beause you can ...

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 08:48:00 +1000

Use Moojive when going to a concert. Download Moojive free on the Apple App Store: http://goo.gl/Lr3bh

Check out our new Moojive video! Download Moojive free:...

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 21:36:09 +1000

Check out our new Moojive video! Download Moojive free: http://goo.gl/Lr3bh

“Moojive is a mobile app that extends your Facebook event experience. It makes it easy to share your location for group events and saves you the hassle of calling or texting to find your friends when heading out without draining your battery.”

For more details: http://moojive.com

Moojive is awesome beause you can ...

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 12:22:00 +1000

Use Moojive if your bar hopping with friends. Download Moojive free on the Apple App Store: http://goo.gl/Lr3bh

Moojive is awesome beause you can ...

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 23:08:00 +1100

Use Moojive when going out to dinner with friends. Download Moojive free on the Apple App Store: http://goo.gl/Lr3bh

Create all your events within Moojive

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 20:33:00 +1100

Whatever the event may be: a coffee catch up, a concert, beach volleyball match, a lunch or dinner, you should try using Moojive to create the event. This way you’ll be able to easily share your location and save yourself the hassle of calling or texting to find your friends when heading out.

All you need to do is download Moojive, tap the “Create” middle button and fill in a event name, start time, address and select your friends. It’s that simple!

Happy event creating :)

-Dennis

Helping you with the "Where are you" call

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 04:00:06 +1100

Save yourself the trouble of making that dreaded call trying to describe your surrounding location. As the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.

In the latest release of Moojive there is a new feature in the contacts tab. Just select the friend you want to share your location with, select your duration and presto! Moments later you begin sharing where you are.

The duration limit ensures that you don’t have to worry about turning off your location sharing. We also believe this choice gives the user a lot of flexibility. Here’s a picture showing how it works:

Don’t worry if your friend doesn’t have the app because they’ll be given a link to download Moojive from the Apple App Store.

-TJ

Moojive was reviewed on feedmyapp.com!

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 00:20:00 +1100

Hey there,

Woohoo, thanks to feedmyapp.com Moojive is now featured and reviewed on their site.

Check it out at: http://feedmyapp.com/review/private-geolocator-find-your-friends/

-Dennis

The latest version of Moojive is out now!

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 01:06:00 +1100

Hey there,

Today we released our latest version of Moojive. Download it from the Apple App Store: http://t.co/3pblJ7IN

In this version, we’ve got:

A new feature “instant friend finder” - Get your friend’s location on demand.
A new tab “Create Events” - Invite all your Facebook friends to events.
Events filter button - Refine your list of events based on guest / rsvp status.
Background location updating - Turn on/off to help manage your battery levels.
Event and event member pictures - See your friends facebook profile and event picture on the map tab
Red loading bar - Minimal non blocking to make navigating Moojive faster.
Improved overall performance - Various bug fixes to make Moojive even better.

If there are any request for features, suggestions or feedback, please email us at: contact@moojive.com. We love hearing from you!

-Dennis

Moojive on the app store!

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 00:22:00 +1100

Moojive on the app store!:

Hey there,

As you know we’ve been working on Moojive for a couple months now and are really excited to announce that our early preview release is now available on the Apple App Store: http://t.co/3pblJ7IN

We are still working hard and will be rolling out some really cool features over the next few weeks. In the meantime, we’re looking for you to test out Moojive and give us feedback so we can make the app more awesome.

-Nish

CTO in a Lean Startup vs.Orienteering

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 10:15:00 +1100

When you’re a developer in a young startup you are often faced with implementation decisions. You know how you want a module to function or appear to the user, but there might be multiple avenues to achieve that result and there’s no one obvious winner. You weight up all the factors like the tradeoff between getting something up quickly that functions 75% of the time and something more robust, but takes 4 times as long to implement (and one isn’t a strict superset of the other).

Included in this decision process can sometimes be how long you want to spend deciding. You might not know enough about one or more avenues and you need to do a little research or even feel like you need to implement one or more to make the decision. In academic research, by definition, you are encouraged to try all avenues to find the absolute best one, but in an early startup you don’t have such flexibility with time. In a startup it might sometimes be better to decide upon what turns out to be the second best way of doing something rather than spend a heap of time finding the best. This feeling became eerily familiar when out on my midweek run this week.

Every Wednesday afternoon over summer I travel to different parts of Sydney to do Orienteering (check out photo taken from Checkpoint 15 looking out over North and South Head of Sydney Harbour). It’s actually a very fun sport that many people mistake, upon hearing the name, as an activity you might find at a bush survival camp. (My brother calls the sport girl scouts). It’s nothing like that. Think of it more as a treasure hunt for grown ups. You get given a map, a clue sheet and an electronic stick. The aim is to try to visit as many checkpoints on the map within a 45 minute period. Checkpoints come in different point values, so some are more valuable to visit than others and you are penalised for every minute you are late. (The electronic stick is used to “check in” to each checkpoint to prove you went there, incase you were wondering where that came in). They do give you a little time to plan a general route before you begin running, but you can never know how that plan will actually fair until you get out there and run.

The first time anyone does orienteering in this flavour, they usually look at the map for 1 or 2 minutes then just start, having only planned their way to the first checkpoint. I did the same and I found after my first few weeks of doing it that I was no where near the top runners each week (there are some absolute gun runners who turn up, but I didn’t think I was that far off in terms of fitness). I found that I wasn’t really pre-planning further than the first three checkpoints, so at each checkpoint I’d stand there for 15 seconds and see where to go next (over about 20 checkpoints that adds up to 5 minutes that I could be running an extra kilometre). So I started doing much more planning before I started and left the actual 45 minutes for running a set course.

There are still some unknowns that make it interesting each week like planning more conservatively if the course looks hilly or has a fair amount of off-road sections, or even how fit you think you feel that particular week. If you come in early, that’s wasted time and there’s no bonus for that. If you come in late, you get slammed with penalties. There’s even weighing up whether on a smaller map it might be better to run overtime as you might just be able to score points at a rate higher than the rate at which you are penalised. You get better at judging these things over time, but some weeks still catch you out. As an experienced developer you generally know how long something might take you to build to that magical 85% mark, where enough things are in place for you to functionally test it, but you wouldn’t release it to a user. (Unfortunately the other 15% usually takes 85% of the time).

Here’s where the analogy gets interesting. Even though I now spend a good solid amount of time planning a decent path each week (and score reasonably well) there are still factors that just spring up and screw you over. You might run all the way up a long steep hill only to find the checkpoint stolen, or just so well hidden that you spend precious seconds trying to find it (there’s no way to fix this and it’s just unlucky - move on quickly). The worst is when you just get lost and lose your position on the map (it’s completely your fault, there’s really no way to get back from that and you just have cut your loses and head back to the finish if you want to maximise your score). The one that I find fun when it’s well executed is when you get halfway around your planned route and you get the feeling you’re going to be severely late if you stick to it. You need to re-plan a decent path home without spending too much time planning.

The best results I’ve had in these time critical ad-hoc situations is to do a quick scan of 2 or 3 immediately obvious, generally about the same scoring, paths back to the finish, then pick one and just stick to it. If you’re standing there looking at your map, you are getting no points. If you’re at least running on a path that’s semi-decent you’re accumulating points one way or another. Deliberation and indecisiveness chews up time in this situation.

Similarly in a dev start up, if you know there’s a way of doing something that’s probably in the top 3 best ways of doing that thing, then just do it. The great thing a startup has over orienteering in this situation is that if enough people like that feature, then you almost get a do-over or at least time to refine the current solution later. In orienteering if you screw up one week then that week’s a bust and you have to wait until next week to do better.

Of course, if you can simply run faster or dev more efficiently then your options are going to be more flexible.

-Steve

PhD vs Startup

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 06:37:00 +1100

There are quite a few parallels between being a PhD student and trying to get a startup off the ground. I’ve had quite a few articles and comics sent to me by fellow PhD students comparing a PhD to child birth or even marriage (PhD comics). But over the first few weeks of Startmate I can really see where PhD experience can be beneficial over working for the man, when being part of an incubator.

Everyone knows the general sequence of phases the average tech startup goes through (Moojive is definitely going through them now). Get an idea, make a prototype, see if people like it, if not try again. That is, keep trying things until you find the niche that works and then scale. In a general sense a PhD is all about trying different approaches to solve a problem and when you find the niche that’s novel you publish before anyone else does.

When I started a PhD we were given a speech by a student who was just wrapping up theirs. She told us all wonderful things like you’ll have the time of your life, meet new people, if you want to go to Italy find a conference in Italy and submit some papers to it. In between all the inspiration was an important point. In academia you’ll be doing a lot of the “re” in “research”. In other words be prepared to try a lot of things that won’t work then when you find the thing that does work, develop that into publishable content. I’ve never worked in a “proper job” with a big company for an extended period of time, but my impression is that there is a completely different mindset. If you’re working on a project for a company and the idea doesn’t work out, there’s no real loss for you, you still get paid either way so there’s no real sense of risk in doing work without reward. In a PhD as well as in a startup you definitely need to get used to and prepared for investing time in something without expecting anything to come of it.

Another parallel between the two is a need for focus as soon as possible. When every PhD student starts they want to “change the world”. They soon realise that they can only do so much. If you’ve ever been to a university graduation where postgrads are graduating they read out the title of their thesis. I used to be amazed by how incredibly specific each of the titles were. “Application of [some algorithm in computing that only really has one practical use] to [some biological area] specifically for [some small problem that only 10 people in the world are affected by]”. (See this comic for another example).

At my last PhD review session I could see this difference between the scope of a first year thesis student and a second year student. The first year guy went up to present before my presentation. He’d done a few good months of reviewing the literature and was about to embark on developing a system that would do robot localisation, mapping, path planning and dynamic high level direction of multiple agents to carry out a series of tasks related to fighting bush fires more autonomously. (In other words, solve field robotics). His feedback from professors sounded very Mick Liubinskas on Startmate finals day, “You can’t possibly think you can solve all of this. Pick one thing and work on that.”. My presentation was next and I presented my 2nd year progress on a really efficient way of solving just the path planning problem using new fast GPU technology.

I’ll begin to wrap up now as my co-founders want me to stop “writing my thesis” and start coding again, but I thought I’d leave you with some of the smaller similarities. Incubator funding with a cut of the company is like getting a scholarship with the requirement that your supervisor has his or her name on each of your publications. When you’re a PhD student you rely heavily on your supervisor’s connections, while in an incubator you use mentors connections to help get traction and advice. Once you get your PhD or if your startup succeeds you have a certain level of implied awesomeness that opens doors. Both select candidates based on their skills as well as their proposed idea or research topic. Both involve living off little money to begin with. Both (luckily) have a very casual dress code as you are there for your ideas and skills rather than how good you look in a suit.

-Steve

Adaption is our best friend

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 05:37:00 +1100

I think the biggest challenge we have at the moment is to create a product of real need. Anecdotally we see our app to be quite appealing. However, is this really going to be something that will attract a large amount of users? Probably not from a lot of feedback and existing apps (stalqer). But really, who really knows?

One thing I’m sure of, is that we’re going to have to learn how to adapt as fast as possible. We can’t just cling to our vision and insulate ourselves from criticism. We’ll really need to pay close attention to what the market is telling us (user feedback, competing products, industry trends) and position ourselves accordingly. The text below really sums it up:

Startups that become long-term businesses master the art of adaptation. If that means ditching a feature we’re passionate about (but no one else wants) then so be it. The goal is satisfying customers first and yourself second. Stubborn startups ignore this, putting all their time and resources behind the original plan in hopes of forcing it to work. “If nobody wanted your app last month, we should spend twice as much promoting it this month.” Needless to say, this is nothing more than a painful shortcut to bankruptcy. Don’t delude yourself with wishful thinking - fail fast and fail cheap so you have money left to start over (source: http://www.focus.com/fyi/how-do-startups-buy-time/)

This is all easily said, but doing this…well, that’s the whole challenge. In the end, regardless of what happens, we’ll probably have a hell of an experience.

-Dennis

Clique to Moojive

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 05:05:00 +1100

This was a hard call to make, doing a name change when we already have press coverage. After not being able to secure a .com name and a unique twitter name with Clique, the final straw came when we discovered that the name on the app store was taken. In fact three other apps were using a variation of the name.

We then put a few names to the scrutiny of family, friends and random people around Sydney Uni. So in the end the decision came down to Moojive, which was rated the highest from the feedback.

Here is our new logo:

I hope you like it!

-TJ

The mystical world of analytics

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 19:58:00 +1100

“All great truths are simple in final analysis, and easily understood; if they are not, they are not great truths” – Napoleon Hill

Given that our beta release date is fast approaching we have now started looking into integrating analytics into our app. Like for most start-ups we are looking for something that gives us a certain amount of business measurement capability. As we delve deeper into success rates of start-ups we realise that it all boils down to METRICS. That’s right metrics are the building blocks to success.

Defining and analysing metrics is a separate and distinct challenge. Paul Graham has written an interesting essay on the importance of understanding users and making them “love you”. And nothing tells a user “I love you” like updates they request and love using. So the first step was to define a list of metrics we should measure. I suspect like most other companies we ended up with a more or less generic list including metrics like - the number of repeat users, - number of new users invited by existing users, etc.

The next step was to look for that ideal analytical tool. We had an idea of what we were after, something powerful, with lot of graphs, data points, that can be implemented on both our web and mobile apps and of course is real-time. – enter Mixpanel. Mixpanel helps us analyse customer engagement and retention in real-time. Their segmentation and funnel analysis is awesome and helps us highlight specific events in both our web and mobile apps. What’s more they gave us a “start-up discount” and now we love them even more.

We have only scratched the surface so far and are looking forward to defining more complex metrics to help us better understand our user base. Like Steve said yesterday, we don’t know how the “farmville cow hat person” thinks but metrics should give us a few insights into their likes and more importantly their dislikes.

We would love to hear about how you’re using analytics to improve customer interactions. Leave us a comment below or tweet @moojive

Finally, for all you analytics junkies out there – food for thought ?

“The more one analyses people, the more all reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature” – Oscar Wilde

-Nish