Don G. Park

As mentioned in the last post, the focus of icecondor is on the RSS reader part. Documentation was written this week to show the steps to adding an RSS feed on the G1.

A lunch and learn event at the OTBC happened this week. The focus was on vetting the potential market and pricing the product. Reaching customers is critical. Icecondor to date has 33 "active installs" and no way to reach them. The new version put on the market today has one important addition - a menu option called "Feedback". Any android user will come across this menu as one of the first things they do with the app. Selecting feedback sends the user to the browser and to getsatisfaction.com/icecondor

while I am not looking for outside investment on this project, i use evalution points from bigpaperblog.com as they become available. These are some points from the "entrepreneurs who get it" post.

• Clear revenue model

  The definition of revenue model changes from person to person, so I'll take my stab. Google built the android marketplace for developers to display and sell their apps. IceCondor has a feature-limited free version and a full $2.99 version. The market and the credit card processing and bill collection is outsourced to google. The iPhone app store and portland-area iPhone development houses have proven that some apps can do well.

• Demonstrated market need (pre-orders, active sales pipeline, specific feedback from clients

  The market need so far has been very low. I feel communication with the customer is critical and icecondor will change to meet the needs of the customer, even if its focus changes drastically. I firmly believe that location services is an emerging market and the smartphone platform is a fantastic place to execute.

• Hefty metrics (site traffic, income, user accounts, clients, partnerships)

  the metrics I keep are a daily count of the android client downloads, correlated with event information such as a new version release or a blog post. Also, icecondor.com has a log file of every web hit it has received. I am currently looking for software to turn the log into a usage graph.

• Impressive prior/relevant experience

  Technology experience, i have plenty of. The freedom and the associated perils of being self-employed have been managed well, if i do say so myself, over the past 5 years, being a freelance software developer. Including budgeting, taxes, lead generation, and skill acquisition.

• Demonstrate grasp of accurate business assumptions in conversation

  Hit me up for lunch and we'll talk. You're buying.

• Prior quantifiable success at a past job/company (sold company for X, managed budget of $XMM)

  I managed a student computer lab of 10 employees while working at Reed College, with a modest budget. This project is self-funded using the proceeds from a successful software programming contract in 2007.

• An intriguing concept that appears to specifically marry a marketable solution with a valid market need

  I've written in past blog posts about this.

idea: rename icecondor to GeoRSS. Focus on consuming GeoRSS feeds.

• RSS(brightkite,shizzow) and ATOM(eaglefeed)
• hcal inside RSS (upcoming.org)
• user-configurable map marker for each feed
• proximity alert configurable per feed

Take location tracking to a new level of accuracy, ignoring battery life since these apps would not be used all the time but during intense gameplay that lasts hours instead of all day. Specifically target augmented reality gaming and alternate reality gaming.

• updates detected and delivered as fast as possible. 30 seconds or better
• augmented map, with arrows on the edge of the screen pointing to teammates, etc (see PC games)

"Floyd was amazed. He couldn't believe that nine guys, all of us so stressed and tired, could be so forgiving of one another's performances. But that was exactly what made us a strong team. We urged one another on, and teased one another. Sometimes we exceeded expectations, sometimes we fell short, but we always tried to find out if we had more to give. For a rider to discover new capacities he didn't know he had - that was the whole point of the Tour" -- Lance Armstrong, Every Second Counts, p188

She walks everyday through the streets of new orleans
She’s innocent and young from a family of means
I have stood many times outside her window at night
To struggle with my instinct in the pale moon light
How could I be this way when I pray to God above
I must love what I destroy and destroy the thing I love
Oh you’ll never see my shade or hear the sound of my feet
While there’s a moon over bourbon street

The IceCondor android app is split into two halves. The GeoRSS reader, and continuous location tracking. The GeoRSS reader is the hook. Its the no-cost component that is free-standing. It has real value and could be an app by itself, but a great app contributes back to its ecosystem. it needs to produce data as well as consume it. Producing location data is what the continuous tracking half does. I see this as similar to craigslist - people come for the classified ads, but a smaller portion of the users pay for the service that subsidies everyone else.

The continuous location tracking part of the app uses a web service - icecondor.com. That adds a lot of complexity and resources that have to be maintained. The phone could hold all the track data and maybe it should, but there is not easy way for phones to communicate with each other (this deserves more investigation). Icecondor.com serves as the mediator between icecondor users. The storage of one's "track" is modeled after flickr. The first 12 hours of tracking are free and storage beyond that (probably along with other services) are $x/year. The server side payment processing is not in place and I'm glad I did not work on that part yet because its not needed yet.

The lite version came out Sunday and got a download an hour for a couple days, now its at a download every two hours. It has two limitations, 3 feeds in the GeoRSS feed reader, and a feed update frequency as well as a location publish frequency of every 1 hour at most frequent. The full version has an unlimited number of RSS feeds and updates as frequently as every 3 minutes as well as publishing the user's location as frequently as every 3 minutes.

I've been using the lite version this week and I can honestly say that I want position updates more frequent than once per hour. Which is a good feeling because other users might feel that compulsion as well. I would love to reach the 35 users who have it installed currently as well as the 100 or so who tried it and uninstalled it but with a free app, there is no info on individual users who download it.

I was playing with xmind a couple months ago and made this mindmap.

the catch-phrase/mantra for last week was 'ask for advice'. the mantra for this week is 'use your options'. that means look for the creative solution to problems, difficult and ordinary. Ray King of AboutUs, during Recent Changes Camp 09, used the phrase "the genius of and" and "the tyranny of or". problems that appear to be either/or, and usually either choice is not very desirable, look for a creative solution. that usually means rewriting the question to include resources the original question did not consider. the book crucial conversations calls choosing between two bad options the 'suckers choice'. creativity and a bit of bravery can find something better.

after the weekend of no activity on icecondor's market entry, i took half of sunday to make a lite version. the lite version has two limitations: RSS reads and location pushes happen at most once an hour, and the RSS reader has a limit of 3 feeds.

Its become a positive saturday ritual to go to forest park and run on the leaf ericsson trail. I have been amazed that this year I have exceeded the usual 8k distance handily. I've been doing 15k runs for the last 3 weekends. Last weekend I finish the last two miles with the help of a friendly jogger who ran as a sort of wingman and kept me from stopping. Today's run I did the whole distance and felt fine at the end - i could have gone further! Since I'm going the distance, I'm focusing on speed. I'm still doing 10 minute miles.

On the trail today i saw the Jesuit High School track team blow past me like I was standing still. Some were marathon runners. You can tell the marathon runners by the tiny packs of liquid refreshment attached to the belt.

"If you surveyed all the greatly successful people in the world, some would be charismatic, some would be not so; some would be tall, some would be short; some would be fat, some would be thin. But the common denominator is that they're all capable of sustained, focused attention" -- Lance Armstrong, Every Second Counts p156

icecondor has been in the android market for 24 hours now. Isaac, who presented at IgnitePortland 5, purchased a copy. thats the total amount of sales activity so far. i think a lite version is mandatory at this point. Also I can get a blog post or two written about it on friends' sometimes-powerful blogs. Its still early for sure but its got me thinking.

the other hook in the water is ShowMyIp (formerly WhatIsMyIp?) at $1. It has no bites.