Squace blog

For centuries the Chinese used an ancient curse: ‘May you live in interesting times!’ This is no longer considered a curse. It’s a blessing. With the current experience of raising money during the last couple of month I have to agree that we are living in interesting times but I’ll really have to kneel down deep to feel “the blessing”.

Anyhow, one experience richer, a much tighter plan and 100% focused on delivering a great universal mobile interface. In fact, so focused that we will close the current open Beta version of Squace for new registrations in favor for the next version. Almost 500.000 downloads over less than 6 month from all over the world have not only given us enough input and suggestions for improvements, but also the self confidence needed in times like this – we are on the right track – thanks for your support. Use the current version, share squares, etc and we will come back in less than no time with a much tighter, faster and broader user experience where you can access what ever service (URL) you like on the Internet. Just the way it should be – your fast track to your stuff regardless of country, carrier or handset.

See you soon.

If you need some more inspiration about the current climate in the start up world – learn from this message from Sequoia Capital. Or better, learn from Benchmark Capital – message (not: read the part far down the memo about lessons learned from one of their CEO’s during the last crash).

To see the interview click here!

Squace one of the winners!

- Invited to present the company to the world’s most influential IT decision makers at the conference ETRE08.

This year’s ETRE conference takes place in Stockholm, 14 to 17 October. ETRE, organized by Red Herring, is one of the world’s most important and prestigious meeting places for IT and telecom leaders. More than 500 personally invited people from all over the world meet and discuss technology and business trends in IT.

Now that ETRE for the first time visits Sweden, InvestICT and Red Herring decided to make it possible for 10 innovative companies to present themselves and their products at the conference. Red Herring was so impressed by the high level of the applications that they finally selected 14 companies. None of them was possible to resist!

In addition to Squace, the following companies were invited: Appear Networks, Bambusa, BehavioSec, ChromoGenics, Density, Josh, Kaskado, Mobi Soft, Nano Radio, Penny, Popcatcher, SERSTECH and TIFIC.

Squace wants to thank Red Herring and InvestICT for their confidence.

MOBILIZE 08, SAN FRANCISCO, CA – September 18, 2008 – Squace, creator of the free application that makes surfing, searching and sharing Internet content possible on ordinary mobile phones without typing, today announced it won a contract from Vinnova, the Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems, www.vinnova.se, to connect Stockholm day care administrators, teachers and families using the mobile Web.

Eighteen day care centers in Stockholm serving approximately 300 children and their families will be brought online in September.  During Phase I of the measured rollout, 60 teachers will use Squace’s free mobile Web application to keep parents up to date.  Parents will use Squace to get contact information for the families in their child’s class, scheduling, and school news.

“Managing your child’s ever-changing school schedule can be an exercise in controlled chaos,” said Aage Reerslev, Squace founder and CEO.  “Even though parents may be at a computer during much of their work day the time that they need the school-related information most is when they’re on the run – when they’re in the car or on the train. With Squace they now have fast and easy access to their child’s class and school sites from their phones, any time, anywhere.”

How Squace works
Squace is a free mobile phone application for people who rely on the Internet as their primary source for news, information and entertainment, and want real-time Web content anytime, anywhere – not just when they’re sitting at their computer.  The free software features a uniquely phone-friendly interface that can be continually updated and personalized so the user is always able get to exactly what they want and care about most on the Web.

Squace divides the mobile phone’s screen into a grid of small squares.  Each square is linked in alphabetical order to a Web service or content provider such as a newsfeed, Web site, game or widget.  As the user moves the cursor over the grid, pop-ups appear revealing the connected content.  When the user finds the link they’re looking for, a single click opens the content in a format that is readable and useful on a small screen.

Vinnova project
Under the Vinnova contract each class in the 18 Phase I centers received its own home page that can be managed from any PC.  Day care center staffs have been tasked with populating the pages with useful information and content, such as contact details of all parents and teachers, a picture of each child, and scheduled activities for every day and week.

Invitations have been sent from the site directly to the mobile phone of every administrator, teacher and parent.  Following easy to use instructions, users are now activating their Squace accounts to have access to the sites from their handsets.

“Parents and staff now have instant access to school calendars, any schedule changes, curriculum updates, after school care and activities, emergency information and much more right on their mobile phones,” said Mehradad Ghaffar, manager of the Nockby Day Care Center of Stockholm, the first school to test the Squace application in the Spring.  “We’re already seeing big benefits.”

Funded by Vinnova, which is chartered to conduct Information Technology projects that enhance people’s daily lives, the day care center project is being administered for the Stockholm municipality by a consortium comprising Squace, the 18 schools, and The Research Institute, part of the Swedish Institute of Computer Science, which was tasked with studying usage and the proliferation of the Squace mobile Web application.

About Squace
Squace is a free mobile phone application for people who want fast, easy access to real-time Internet content anytime, anywhere.

Squace gives users a uniquely phone-friendly, intuitive interface that makes surfing, searching and sharing Internet content possible on ordinary mobile phones without typing.  Users can continually update and personalize their links so they can always get to what they want and care about most.

For content providers and advertisers who want to use mobile phones to connect and interact with their Internet customers Squace provides a network-independent, open mobile platform for creating mobile sites in minutes and full-blown mobile services in just a few hours.

Go mobile! Download Squace today at http://www.squace.com.

Contact:
Leigh Anne Varney
+1 415 387 7250

If you are traveling westwards, and more specific, to Silicon Valley, you will gain some new perspective such as people seams to line up in front of stores named Apple (Only in the bay area not in LA) and that European cash is worth a lot more.
If you also are working within the Mobile Web 2.0 (ouch, I’ll probably get sued if I’m not mention the strange fact that Mobile Web 2.0 is a registered trademark by Verizon – a total contradiction to me. Read some more about this FACT by Oliver Starr), as I am, you’ll find some other curious things in the most advanced high tech area in the world.

1. They don’t have 3G coverage at Stanford University! August 22 2008. I think the 3G network covered my university in Stockholm like seven years ago.

2. The carrier walls are higher than the Berlin Wall (dismantled 1989). Among other things, you can not automatically send SMS by “uncertified” Internet services. You have to get approved AND pay (about 500 USD a month).

3. You have to pay for receiving call and SMS – you get to pay even if your not answering the phone. Given this fact, why not allow more services to send SMS, se above, then you could really make some serious money.

Click on the grid below and watch how two friends share stuff using Squace

The summit itself? If you are fortuned to be invited to present your company it’s among the top events in the world. You’ll find that your LinkedIn profile will make a major quality jump – tones of interesting people there. And, if you have the right concept and are based in USA you can score some capital.

As for the actual content of the conference? Nothing new and really surprising other than the music panel at the end including MC Hammer and some other really cool rappers – a powerful finale!

Thanks Tony

Aage Reerslev, CEO, Squace AlwaysOn 2008 – filmed by my friend Phil Jeudy

Now we’re gonna talk to Fredrik, who is the spider around here. He work’s at “business” but has a technical background, althought we’ve heard him say “I will never get back to boring programming”

What are you working at, Fredrik?

- On a project that will compile content for Squace in new markets.

How will you accomplish that?

One part of the project is to gather people from different countries to sort out content in their own different languages.

-What markets do you feel are the most important?

There are lots of them. India is of course an important big country, and so is China. But also european countries such as Italy. An unexpected country where we have lots of users is Iran.

Iran?! Why would people in Iran be so intrested in Squace?

- I’m guessing that it’s sort of like in Italy. The Internet infrastructure isn’t that well built in comparison with the mobile market, which is huge! Iran is also one of the world biggest blogging countries, and Squace is a perfect blog reader.

Which countries has their own content right now?

A lot of countries already got content. What I mean is that we’re preparing full pre-selected content for these countries. We have four packages ready today, UK, Spain, Sweden and a international one.

Which site is the most popular one in the UK?

-That is a secret!

Which is your favourite site in Squace?

- I have a morning routine. While eating breakfast I check out Aftonbladet (Swedens biggest online newspaper) , dev.mobi and also a random blog, often mobile related. On the subway this morning I realised that Metro – the free news paper – are having a summer break, so I read Metro through Squace instead.

Which service would you like to have in Squace?

- A groups of sites I discovered today, map sites where you could pinpoint and grade different domestic services like the best Sushi, places with Wifi, and so on. But also a to-do-list, like remember the milk.

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.

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!