ProjectX Blog

We’re going to through lots of changes at ProjectX.

Staff

We’ve had a few additions to the team with Tom, Daniel and Tim officially joining the team. Tim and Daniel have joined after successfully completing the Summer of Code.

ProjectX is on the move

We’re flying the coup from Creative HQ. We’ll be moving from into our new office in a couple weeks. We’re moving downtown to the 4th floor of VSA House. We’ll be sharing the floor with Effacy and CBDrealty.

New ProjectX site

We’ve been working on a fresh new ProjectX site. We’re just putting the finishing touches on the site and we’ll be making it live soon.

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We want to make ZoomIn better by making sure our content is up to date, appropriate for the community. We added a tool to flag any content that incorrect, objectionable or violation of copyright.

So if you see any place descriptions, photos or comments that need some attention, flag them and we’ll take care of it.

We value your feedback, any improvements or suggestions are appreciated.

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We want to make ZoomIn better by making sure our content is up to date, appropriate for the community. We added a tool to flag any content that incorrect, objectionable or violation of copyright.

So next time you find any place description, picture or comment that’s not quite right, flag it and we’ll look much sure that its fixed.

We value your feedback, any improvements or suggestions are appreciated.

ProjectX selected as Cyber Gold finalist for Wellington Gold Awards 2007

Tonight, John and I went along to the formal announcement of final nominees for the 2007 Wellington Gold Awards. The event was held at the offices of Bell Gully. Let me tell you folks—what a spectacular view of our beautiful city extends before the 21st floor panoramic windows of this simple, slightly understated yet oh, so sophisticated and cool office space. Their hospitality was top notch too. Great drinks and most exquisite nibbles.

Anyway, after we won two TUANZ awards I was in a bit of a shock. I thought to myself “what the hell did we win these for?”. Tonight was a reminder to me that it’s easy to forget about the whole world while you’re working hard with great people on really fun and interesting projects. It’s easy to get caught in your own little world and not realise that there are people watching us with keen interest. Some are looking at us as a great emerging business, some are looking up to us as technology leaders and some are looking at us as dangerous competition. Tonight I was reminded of all of this as the name of our company was read out in front of Wellington’s most influential business men and women. And I had butterflies in my stomach. Not because I was nervous but because I was excited, honoured and humbled.

We have built our company from nothing, with next to no resources and it feels great to be recognised for our focus, effort, creativity, technological expertise and dedication to provide a great service to local communities and businesses. Being nominated for this awards is very important for the company but it’s also important on a much more personal level. It gives me a great boost and makes me want to work even harder at making ProjectX the success that it is going to be.

We’ve just added over 5700 Auckland bus stops to ZoomIn. Now you can search for bus stops in and around Auckland eg. Mount Albert, Mission Bay or Henderson.

A big thanks to Auckland Regional Transport Authority and Maxx team for helping us get this content online.

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We’ve been talking to a lot of our users and we realise that we let a bugs and glitches slip into the system. Due to one thing or another they haven’t been fixed and as a result ZoomIn is not as good as it should be. We’ve decided that enough is enough, so we started an internal project to fix the broken windows.

To start with we are making a list, when its finished we’ll post it on the blog and keep you updated as we make progress.
So we want you to tell us what is broken, annoying, or frustrating on ZoomIn.

To kick things off, here’s the start of our list:

• Search – Inconsistent results when trying to find a street number in a long street eg. Great South Road
• Search – Auto-suggest does not find all results
• Aerial Photography – Bring back aerial photography !
• Email: Fix email map to a friend
• URLs: Make sure that all the ZoomIn url’s are friendly and don’t have %20 etc
• Place Page: Stop munging place names

Finally, thanks for your patience. We’re working on fixing our problems, let us know what you want us to fix and we’ll add it the list.

We’re having lot’s of fun at Foo Camp. It’s a total geek fest and great opportunity to drill into a wide variety of topicswith amazing people. I have been taking lots of pictures and will post them up once I get back.

Rather than adding my 2 cents on Broadband and other debates. (The government is starting to make some traction on levelling the playing, and I’m really happy to see things progressing.) I ‘d like to say what’s happening about Mobile pricing ? I’ve ranted to lots of people about my experiences in India and how cheap pricing for data and fair royalties for mobile services has led to massive choice of mobile applications.

The market is not servering our needs, when will the commerce commission or government stepping in ? I want to telecom / voadfone is think long and allow content providers to build applications. The big question is how long do we have to wait ?

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We’ve just updated the API to enable users to add text directly on top of the maps. The new API function is called GText. You have the ability to customise the size and style of the text via css. Check out the example
page to see what you can do.

Kudos to Tim for his work.

Tomek, Nick and I will be up at Baa Camp this weekend.

Lot’s of interesting topics to talk about, and we’ll be bring a little demo for show and tell.

Looking forward to meeting lots of new people.

2006 was a big year for ProjectX, roll on 2007 – its going to huge.

Wishing everyone, a happy and prosperous 2007!