Squace blog

The summertime usually means less time in front of the computer. But not for us at the headquarters. In order to give you a brief on what’s happening right now, I will talk to some of the fine people working here. First up we have Pelle, our designer.

What are you up to today, Pelle?

- Well, right now we’re building to enhance the tool for creating blogs in Squace.

Please describe the tool!

- A blogger will only have to choose a background image, a short “about” text and a link to the feed. Which gives the blogger a customized promotion button and a landing page.

What is a landing page?

- A page where the blogs reader can see how the site will work in the phone.

Why do people need such a function?

- To get familiar with the service on the computer before downloading to the mobile.

Which is your favourite site in Squace?

- Trafiken.nu, a site with local traffic info, in which I can see the traffic cameras around the city on my way to work.

Which service would you like to have in Squace?

- I think I would like to improve a service that already exists; Wine ratings! We already have a site by a big wine supplier, but it would be great with an independent site like Winespectators.

It seems like we’re getting new fans in the most unexpected areas. We’re proud to present the first Squace rapper we just run into while googling! /Tobbe

Here’s a little clip we made about Squace last year:

When and where is the next game for Ekerö IK’s soccer team for boys born 1999? What’s the phone number to Vallentuna BK’s ice hockey coach? How can I look at the photos from The “Girls spring soccer cup” on the bus? All this and much more is now possible in Sweden through a new service provided by Sportnik and Squace.

Sportnik is a Swedish company offering free sites for sport clubs and teams. The team sites offer smart tools for disseminating information quickly and easily to the whole team – no matter if you’re a player, manager, parent or just a fan. All the sites within the club system are integrated, making it possible for teams and members to communicate with each other. Thousands of teams have created their own sites on Sportnik’s platform.

Through a joint development project, Squace has been integrated into Sportnik’s platform. With a single click all existing and new team sites are available in Squace as well. The Squace site contains the most important and fun information when a user is on the move, e.g. calendar, news, guest book, contact details, and a photo gallery. Through a login functionality, some information is available to players and team leaders only, whereas other is publicly available. Check out one of the teams here! /Bo

I recently read a research paper (From Awareness to Repartee: Sharing Location within Social Groups, click here for .pdf) that discussed a new way to use GSM triangulation to automatically microblog about your position. If you for instance were somewhere, say at work, you could name, or tag, that location by typing “Work” in your phone. Every time you then were within a 70 meter radius (give or take) your status would update to “At Work”.

If you stay for a longer period of time, it would change to “At Work since 12:17 am”. Then when you left, it would change to “Left Work at 2:23 pm” until you enter another known (or named) location. Locations could be your own or reached by a closed group consensus, so you could optionally reuse someone elses “Home” so it would say “At Ernies Home” if you were at Ernies place.

You could also turn off automatic updates if you for example snuck off to an interview over lunch.

I think this is a vary nice take on microblogging (like twitter and jaiku already do well) since it requires very little recurring effort from the user, and the level of detail is entirely up to you.

For our users, it could add a few nice new fun things to do in Squace. First, you could see where all your contacts are (if they want to show you of course).

Second of all, we can help our users to find new stuff in squace based on what they usually do “At Home” or “At Work”.

Relevancy on a whole new level!

Yesterday when MobileMonday held its last event for this season we took part of three very interesting presentations from MoMail (Lars Aase), Rebtel (Hjalmar Winbladh) and our own CEO Aage Reerslev.

The theme for this event was “Mobile long tail” inspired from the book The Long Tail by Chris Anderson. All the presenters agreed on that to succeed in the mobile internet we must all focus on the long tail – that is where the battle will be won. Squace approach to this is to use microsites. In short this means that a site with a lot of blogs can offer every blogger their own site (with a custom download page) in the mobile with just a few hours work! More on this in a later blog post.

After the presentations the presenters was hammered with questions from a very interested audience. We wrapped up the event with pizza and beer – you can’t go wrong with pizza and beer!

Here are some pictures from the event.

We’re hosting a MobileMonday event at our headquarters on monday, june 16th.

“MobileMonday is a global community with over 60 chapters worldwide of mobile industry visionaries, developers and influentials fostering cooperation and cross-border business development through virtual and live networking events to share ideas, best practices and trends from global markets.”

On this event people from Momail and Rebtel along with our CEO, will talk about mobile long tail. After that we’ll have a panel discussion and wrap it all up with a Squace release party.

If you would like to attend, please sign up here.

Von Karsten Lemm, San Francisco
Ein neuer Mobildienst will das Internetsurfen auf Handys unkompliziert und schnell machen. Der Trick: Vierecke statt Fenster.
Full story: Click here.

Squace looks promising, though time-stamp filtering and the ability to add content from the phone interface are notably absent. As for the geometry, Squace’s tiny squares may give way to a squint, but it’s an intriguing form factor that’s despite the uniform sameness is designed very well.
Full story: http://www.frenzyblogging.com/2008/06/05/zumobi-and-squace-read-the-mobile-web-in-squares/

Article in Mobile Choice, 22 May 2008
Save your favourite websites and share them with your friends with unique mobile internet browser…
Full story: http://www.mobilechoiceuk.com/News/Squace+the+internet/1552