Posts Tagged ‘parking’
Life in the Slow Lane: Zipcar’s Sputtering iPhone App Release
Sometimes even a do-gooder company flubs something badly enough that it deserves to take some crap. So I give that honor to Zipcar, which over the past few months brilliantly and boldly promoted its iPhone app even though, for all practical purposes, it didn’t exist.
The story begins with a giant coup: Zipcar won an invite to show off its App at Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco this past June, the one at which Apple rolled out its 3G phones. It’s the kind of exposure that could turn an App into the mobile equivalent of a summer blockbuster—and that, presumably, was exactly what Zipcar execs had in mind.
So on June 8th, Zipcar CTO Luke Schneider and principal engineer Jonathan Wolfe took center stage before a packed house and gave a slick demo of the car-sharing company’s futuristic App, which, as Schneider proudly announced, “We’re very excited to introduce….”
Wolfe played the role of Zipcar customer, Schneider narrated, and the audience—which of course extended to the Web—watched on a giant screen.
Schneider described how Jonathan, a carless San Francisco resident, needed a Zipcar to pick up friends for dinner. Jonathan taps the Zipcar icon, and a map emerges on his phone. It locates Jonathan via GPS, and then shows him nearby Zipcar lots, complete with bright green pins to indicate available cars. Jonathan taps a location, selects a Mini Cooper and reserves his wheels for the evening.
This was cool stuff—remember, this was Apple’s first release of an iPhone with GPS–but the duo wowed the audience even more when Schneider described how Jonathan nears the parking lot, taps on a virtual key fob and—voila!—the car horn honks. Next, Jonathan reaches the car, taps on his fob once more, and the Mini unlocks, as if by magic. The crowd applauded enthusiastically.
It was a sweet victory for Zipcar. The press picked up on the futuristic idea of smart phones controlling your car. Bloggers got excited. And the company said its App would be available this summer.
In the following weeks—nah, make that months—Zipcar scored all kinds of adoring press, culminating with a September 14 cover story in Fortune (the actual release date is a couple of weeks earlier) in which the magazine hailed Zipcar as, The Best New Idea in Business.
The article naturally opens with newest and coolest thing: That iPhone trick. The writer describes Zipcar CEO Scott Griffith entering the parking lot at his office in Cambridge, Mass., and using his iPhone to make his Mini Cooper honk and then unlock itself. The story goes on to explain how this revolutionary company is growing like mad, about to turn a profit and on track to go public in 2010, which likely explains why Zipcar has been doing courting the media so hard. This was killer press for any company, well worth the visit Griffith paid to Fortune headquarters in June to make his pitch to the editors.
As for the iPhone App, however, Fortune didn’t bother to mention one little thing. It still wasn’t available.
More than a month after that story came out, on September 29th, Zipcar at last announced the “immediate availability” of its Zipcar App at the iTunes App Store—a full 114 days since Schneider introduced it back at the Apple conference, which, in the age of Twitter, seems roughly equivalent to a decade.
Okay, then. Great! The App must be killer, what with all that extra time.
So let’s go to the user reviews, where the leading category is….
The two key complaints: One, the App crashes the phone. And two, Zipsters, as they’re known, still need their Zipcard access card, and they want the App to replace it entirely.
So what gives?
I emailed Zipcar spokeswoman Nancy Scott Lyon. “In just a few weeks,” she wrote, “We’ve had nearly 140,000 downloads of our app. About 3% rated the app and less than 1% of those who downloaded the App have reviewed it–we’ve noticed that this is a trend that many other popular apps have experienced such as Starbucks, ESPN, Bump, Gap, and Whole Foods.”
In other words, the reviews off too small a sampling to draw any conclusions but are enough of a concern that we’ve roped in others to show we’re in good company.
But does the App really cause the phone to crash? Well…
At Zipcar, we constantly are pushing the envelope when it comes to technology. We’ve already submitted a point release to Apple that currently is in their review process. This point release addresses every crash/freeze bug we have become aware of since the 1.0 launch. Once approved, anyone who has our app automatically will receive an update that they can download.
Oh, shit, sometimes it does cause iPhones to freeze.
As for replacing the Zipcard access card, Scott Lyon said the company’s aware that some members want this, but that the first version was made this way so that people “don’t get stranded because their phone batter goes dead, they lose their phone or can’t get a network connection.”
Fair enough.
Really, though, why did it take almost four months to get the damn thing out when you showed a working demo back in June? Scott Lyon sent me an answer, but, in truth, she didn’t answer the question. I’m guessing it’s a sore subject back at Zipcar HQ.
Now, just for fun, let’s look another car-controlling iPhone App that just hit the market, the Viper SmartStart, which came out October 13. The Viper App differs from Zipcar’s because it’s made for your car and as such requires installing hardware in your vehicle.
But it has features Zipsters want: It can unlock the car on the first try (Zipcar requires you to first sign in with your Zipcard), and you can start the car, not just open it, from anywhere, which could come in handy on sub-zero days in big Zipcar markets like Boston.
The Viper App was made by after10Studios, an App-building company in Santa Monica that’s run by a 24-year-old named Mohamed Alkady. I asked Alkady how long it took his team to get the Viper App designed, built and in the App store. Answer: Three months.
Now, I know this is just an App—it’s not like Zipcar is knowingly putting people in exploding cars. But when you reach a certain size, you become fair game. So when you start posing on the cover of Fortune and talk about becoming a multibillion-dollar company, well, the honeymoon is over, even if you are great for the environment. Besides, Zipcar likes to point out that more than 25% of its 325,000 members have their lives on their iPhones–so this whole App thing seems like something they might want to be a little more careful with.
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Interview: Talking To The Rentals’ Matt Sharp About His Music And Photography
I spoke to Matt Sharp, founder and frontman of The Rentals, a few weeks back as a result of my weird fascination with film photography. (Incidentally, I have Louis CK, who you can now see on Parks and Recreation every week on NBC, to thank for my initial interest in film.) Current fans of the band know that it’s been working on a yearlong project known as Songs About Time. Rather than going through the standard rigamarole of recording an album in a secluded studio, then touring to support it (not to mention dealing with the apparently crazy record labels), Sharp and Co. came up with a different idea: how about, instead of one big album, which is so start-stop, we sprinkle a few EPs throughout the year, and document our days together for our fans in the form of short movies and frequent photographs?
Or, in Matt’s own words:
The project is one year in photography, film, and music that’s all coming, in real time, on our Web site. There’s not a better word for it than a multimedia project, but we have one element of the site that deals with photography, one part that deals with film, and one part that deals with music. At times they intersect and feed off each other, and have a cyclical, creative rhythm.
Back-to-school: 10 Things You Should Know About Going To The Bar
College is a time to try new things - especially that second or third year, when everyone’s turning 21. Suddenly, a whole new world has opened up - a world of intoxicated semi-public bliss, previously off limits to your nascent self: the world of bars
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Back-to-school: 10 Things You Should Know About Going To The Bar
Coincidence? Three Interesting Things About 345 Spear Street, San Francisco
- It’s the location of Google’s San Francisco office (floors 2-4)
- It’s the location of the Secret Service’s San Francisco field office (floors 5-6)
- And someone who works there has a license plate that says “Drunk”
Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to theorize how these three facts form the backbone of a massive worldwide conspiracy. Feel free to add additional “facts,” such as “That building was also constructed on top of an ancient Native American burial ground” or “I heard that’s where the Secret Service keeps all the counterfeit cash they confiscate, and the floors are really thin.” Just make sure to bake in the drunk license plate, too.
I took that picture of the license plate, by the way, in the parking garage of that building. And a different picture of it ended up on the FailBlog last month. So if you can work that into your conspiracy theory, you get bonus points.
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The Song of the PowerSquid: The Inside Story of the Life of an Invention, Part 3
Hello, my name is Christopher Hawker.
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The Song of the PowerSquid: The Inside Story of the Life of an Invention, Part 3
Apple’s App Store: 1 Billion Served
Well, it finally happened. Apple just delivered its 1 Billionth application download from the App Store, which currently features over 25,000 apps (35,000 by one estimate) built by thousands of developers. The significance of the milestone (besides just the 1 billion mark) is that it’s taken only nine months from when the App Store launched on iTunes to hit 1 billion paid and unpaid downloads.
Last summer, Apple sold one million 3G iPhones worldwide across 21 countries in the first 3 days on sale. During that same time, iPhone users made 10 million app downloads from the then newly launched iTunes App Store.
The count was at 300 million in early December, and the App Store hit 500 million downloads by January 16th. It took Apple six months to reach the first 500 million downloads. It would take Apple only three months to get another 500 billion downloads. By March, 2009, it was at 800 million. We started keeping track via Apple’s billion-app countdown at around 928,077,779. Apple also offered us a fleeting glimpse of the most popular apps ever, something the company only did once before.
Apple apparently already had a hunch of when the billion mark was going to be passed, because the billionth app celebration page was already ready to go.
Apple predicted the time when the billionth app would be downloaded: 1:24:06 AM PST on April 23. That didn’t happen.
The number of different apps available has also been growing steadily. In November, the app store had 10,000 apps, and grew to 15,000 by Apple’s quarterly earnings call in January. Within a month, the app store added 5,000 more apps, bringing the total available apps up to 20,000. By March, the app store has over 25,000 apps. Now, according to an estimate by App Store analytics firm Mobclix, there are 35.550 apps worldwide.
Some lucky iPhone user who downloaded an app in the past two weeks will win a $10,000 iTunes gift card, MacBook Pro, Time Capsule, and iPod touch. We also hosted our own contest to see who could guess when the billionth app would be downloaded and we will release the results soon.
Here’s a current list of the top apps, free and paid, downloaded, courtesy of Mobclix. The numbers next to the global stats indicate how many countries had that app ranked as #1.:
Top 5 free (Global):
1: Heat Pad - Relaxing Heat Sensitive Surface (17)
2: Skype (9)
3: Ferrari GT Evolution: Lite Version (6)
4: Racing Live (4)
5: Yahoo! Messenger (4)
Top 5 paid (Global):
1: Camera Zoom (12)
2: Flight Control (11)
3: Playman Track & Field (3)
4: Wild West Pinball (2)
5: Airport Mania: First Flight (2)
Top 5 free (US):
1: Catcha Mouse
2: iDare
3: F-MyLife
4: Heat Pad - Relaxing Heat Sensitive Surface
5: Dictionary.com
Top 5 paid (US):
1: Flight Control
2: StickWars - Siege
3: Pocket God
4: iHunt 3D
5: ParkingLot
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Target kicks off video game reservation program
Hoping to woo gamers who somehow manage to plan ahead more than a day in advance, Target is implementing a new video game reservation program. The basic idea is that you pay $1 for a reservation card, which holds your game for seven days after the release date, and when you return to pick the game up, you’ll also get a $5 Target gift card good on future purchases
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Target kicks off video game reservation program