Tagcrumbs - Share your favorite places with friends.

Tagcrumbs @ Mobile World Congress in Barcelona

noreply@blogger.com (Cornelius) — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 17:20:00 +0000

The Mobile World Congress that takes place from Feb 15th to 18th 2010 in beautiful Barcelona is the class reunion for mobile startups, network operators, device manufacturers, mobile media and everything else mobile. We are excited to be there with the whole Tagcrumbs team. Let's meet there to talk about the future of location-based services! You can find us everywhere but chances are highest at Mobile Sunday, Mobile Premier Awards, GoMo News Blender, TechCrunch Mobile or the Motorola App Planet.

Send us an email to team AT tagcrumbs.com or tweet us under:

Team / @tagcrumbs
Sascha (IT, iPhone) / @sashthebash
Ben (Biz Dev) / @forcevive
Cornelius (Product Dev) / @rabschi

Enjoy the Mobile World Congress and share your new mobile insights! Looking forward meeting you!

Remember and share places easily with the new Tagcrumbs iPhone app

noreply@blogger.com (Sascha) — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 09:27:00 +0000

Our brand new Tagcrumbs iPhone app is now available for download from Apple's App Store at www.tagcrumbs.com/go/iphone. Check it out!

With Tagcrumbs you can remember and share your discoveries with your friends and the world. It's about those locations that you enjoy visiting, where you spend some time, experience something special and that you would readily recommend to others. This can be a beach or diving spot you discovered during a holiday, a museum or park that you visited or the café on the corner with the best espresso.

Asking yourself what to do around where you are? With the application you'll also have access to all of the favorite places of our growing community.

Enough talk, see for yourself:

Let's gather and share all of the great things to see and do around the world. The iPhone app is free, by the way (download here: www.tagcrumbs.com/go/iphone).

More info needed? Here's our press release.

To stay up to date just subscribe to our blog or follow us on Twitter or Facebook.

Tagcrumbs iPhone App: Launch in January

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 08:11:00 +0000

We are excited to announce that in a few days time - on January 12th - we'll be launching Tagcrumbs for iPhone. We've long been waiting for this moment to come and are eager to have all of you try it.

Tagcrumbs for iPhone helps you share your favorite places with friends on the go. Similar to what you've seen on the website, it's all about exciting locations to swim, dive, slackline, surf, climb, fish; famous landmarks, stunning viewpoints and sublime architecture; laid-back parks for barbecues and picnics. And all your other favorite hangouts like restaurants, bars, cafés and shops.

The app will be available in both English and German from the start and we've been busy to include some nifty features:

No sign-up required: if you'd just like to try Tagcrumbs you're very welcome to do so. Tag some places and save them on your iPhone and find out what's nearby. To upload your discoveries and share them, you can always sign up later.
Offline use: imagine you're abroad and discover an awesome place. Tag it right there and upload it when you're back home or via WiFi in the hotel.
All of your places, favorites and followers are automatically synchronized between the website and your iPhone.

Here's a first impression of how it'll look like:

Tagcrumbs iPhone App

Tagcrumbs Website: New Features and Design

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 10:17:00 +0000

Lately we've been busy to give our website a fresh look and integrate your feedback. With your help, the Tagcrumbs has grown up a bit - but still we'd love to hear your feedback, ideas and thoughts! This is what helps us make the community a bit better every day.

Let's dive right into some of the new things that await you on the website:

Images: many of you asked for the possibility to add images to your places. Well - now you can! This should make your discoveries even more interesting for your friends.

Maps: we've had maps before - but now they're much bigger. And on each place pages, an extra map gives you a good overview of where the place is.

Profile: we've completely revised the profile so now you have all your stats, latest comments and places as well as an overview of who you're following on one page.

You can check out all the new things on the website: www.tagcrumbs.com. Or have a quick look at a video tour of the site:

Location-based ... everything.

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 16:08:00 +0000

What's currently happening in the location-based services arena? It's an incredibly competitive space, that's for sure. There are several interesting approaches and here's a quick overview. Originally posted as a comment on TechCrunch.

1. Location-based games
Location-based games are currently being (rightfully, in my opinion) hyped because the rate of user adoption and active use (a couple of times a day) is fabulous. It's fun to check in to places, compete against others for a good ranking on the leader board - and maybe even some free coffee when you're mayor. Let me add another European-based company who'll soon be competing with the Gowallas and Foursquares: Aka-aki.

2. Friendfinding services
Friendfinding services, too are interesting - albeit in comparison to l-b games they look a bit pale as those games allow you to do the same thing (share your whereabouts) and play a game at the same time.

3. The good & bad
What's great about both approaches: it takes very little effort to participate. What's not so great: the information that is generated by both types of services isn't very valuable in the long-term. Of course it's great for pattern analysis and better behavioral targeting but that's about it ("the half life of a check-in").

4. Placemarking
And then there's this opportunity that Tagcrumbs is targeting. It's focussed on creating valuable content rather than interacting with existing content.

So while l-b games will surely have a bright future, the mid and long-term looks promising for content creation (i.e. placemarking?) services:

Rather than connecting people via a gaming-mechanism, the placemarking services help people share discoveries with friends and build new relationships with others that share similar interests.

For people interested in coffee-shops and restaurants (in fact: who isn't) this might sound lame but for more specific fields of interest (think divers, climbers, sailors, architecture fans, history geeks, …) this might prove quite interesting. Those people are however already gathering in specific social networks, frequent the same websites, read the same magazines, etc...

5. So?
Here at Tagcrumbs we do see this as an opportunity, not a hindrance. We take the fragmentation of this space as a given and try to play with it, knowing that we differentiate starkly from the other companies in our field with this approach (no matter if it's Whrrl, Nextstop, …).

Let me explain: next to our end-user offering (which is open to all types of places - and btw. we just submitted the iPhone app yesterday), we'll offer each of these groups their very own location-based content service - which can integrate with Tagcrumbs or even stay independent (do I smell a biz model here?).

If you like it's a bit like Ning - just for physical locations (and a clear focus on mobile). We'll provide the infrastructure so that location-based content can be efficiently exchanged. What's the result then: many very narrow fields of interest (i.e. 'vertical markets') where we enable the group members to exchange the locations of their interest.

Questions? Opinions?

Tagcrumbs at Le Web 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 17:20:00 +0000

LeWeb09 is coming up next week (Dec. 9 and 10) in Paris. More than 2.000 participants signed up to the event this year, a great list of high-quality speakers and round tables has been announced and everybody attending is thrilled with anticipation (judging from the many tweets and blog posts that are popping up). It's without a doubt one of the most important web (and mobile) related events of the year.

A diverse crowd of entrepreneurs, technologists and thinkers from a host of different countries will gather in Paris during these days and will surely make each one who'll be attending leave with new inspirations and ideas.

Here's what I'm looking forward to most:

Two sessions dedicated to mobile applications. A round table (including the CEO of wildly successful Shazam, and the founder of Tapulous) as well as a session on business models for mobile apps, which will conclude the second day.
Lively exchange with fellow entrepreneurs from all over Europe (and beyond).
Showcase our iPhone app and get some reactions.
Test our iPhone app's "offline" feature in real-world conditions (ability to tag places without an Internet connection and synchronize them when you're on a WiFi connection or back home).

And of course I'd be glad to help out other attendees with a hint or two on what to do or see in Paris... please feel free to get in touch and let's meet up!

Get in touch via Twitter (@tagcrumbs or directly with me (Benedikt) @forcevive).

Mobile Monday Berlin Recap. What's the state of Location-Based Services?

noreply@blogger.com (Cornelius) — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 16:50:00 +0000

Two days ago I attended the Mobile Monday in Berlin that took place at the HomeBase Lounge, a nice event location with an exciting 360° panorama screen and a focus on hosting events for the media industry. So, what is the Mobile Monday?

MobileMonday is a global community 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. [Src: www.mobile-monday.de]

The focus of this specific Mobile Monday was Location Based Services and the event teaser stated early on the common opinion...

For many years, Location Based Services (LBS) have been the most disappointing "Killer Application" of the Mobile Internet. Technically, it was possible to locate a mobile phone user based on his proximity to mobile network cells and offer him bespoke services as early as 2001. But the well-known hindrances of the German mobile business - namely handset fragmentation and suffocating operator policies - prevented LBS to ever take off. [Src: http://www.mobile-monday.de/events/location-based-services]

Disappointing or not, Location Based Services are popping up everywhere and there is a crowded ecosystem with startups developing products for mobile devices covering friend finder, location tracking or discovery services, to name a few. The presentations covered a broad range of mobile topics, infrastructure providers (Qualcomm, Skyhook Wireless), a device manufacturer (Nokia), consumer services (Aloqa, Woabi, Skobbler, Aka-Aki, Servtag, Vooch), up to a venture capitalist (Kizoo). The general impression: a lot of experimentation is going on but maybe this is the only path to success. Experimentation with respect to revenue models, product features and designs, targeted platforms or the company's focus in general.

Some random notes:

Nokia's Social Locations group with over 250 employees is situated in Berlin and focuses on developing internet services, a more and more strategically important area for Nokia. Mapping and navigation plays a key role in these service offerings, supported by several acquisitions (e.g. Gate 5 or Plazes; both from Berlin).

“Our goal is clear, and that is to make it effortless for our partners to create highly appealing, context-relevant applications that consumers will find indispensable.” Niklas Savander, EVP, Services, Nokia

The presented OVI SDK is nice but yet another platform that developers could target, platform-specific UI components have to prove their efficiency, reusability and ease of use. Using HTML, JavaScript and CSS for mobile development is nothing new, there are web views within SDKs for every platform or widget engines trying to achieve similar things (from a consumer perspective). Better integration into the whole device can make this approach successful but on the other hand the whole concept of mobile web applications is better suited to be platform independent and open.

Aka-Aki made an entertaining presentation asking where the user's value is and that they will move more into mobile dating with their 300.000+ member strong social network. Sounds like experimentation or the typical problem of social networks to find the right monetization approach. I'm waiting for an Android app to judge better. ;)

Woabi is a barcode scanning application that tells you more about products of all kinds. Barcoo is a competitor in this area; both companies are from Berlin. It worked ok, the app found 3 out of 5 random products on or near my desk. The integration with finding nearby offers for the product is well done. As a minor advice: let the users know how to scan a barcode, there is only one correct orientation to hold your device, the intuitive one is often wrong...

The Aloqa speaker had the courage to say that they are technology driven, not often the case in Germany, thumbs up, and the result is a very nice application for local discovery with a lot of good feedback so far and a high potential (e.g. location-aware recommendations; adaptive content; smart notifications and high customization). Definitely one of my favorite LBS apps, check it out.

The speaker from Kizoo Technology Ventures immediately pointed out that for a VC the presented LBS concepts are not sufficient enough to get investment from his perspective. Ideas too small, markets too small, revenue models to small... but the mobile ecosystem is extremely about scale, so nothing can be too small or narrowed down?

Oh, I should mention Tagcrumbs as an awesome LBS ;), we are heavily working on our platform launch and thus some more weeks in kind of a stealth mode.

To conclude, it is great to see such a healthy LBS and mobile ecosystem here in Berlin. I am looking forward to the next event!

Photo credits to philcampbell on Flickr.

Interact with your Facebook Friends on Tagcrumbs with Facebook Connect

noreply@blogger.com (Sascha) — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 11:37:00 +0000

Just recently we wrote about our OpenID Integration, that allows you to create a Tagcrumbs account and sign into it without requiring another password.

The advantages are obvious, but many of you will have a Facebook account already. Instead of OpenID you can also use your Facebook account to create a new Tagcrumbs account or to log into your existing Tagcrumbs account, as we are officially supporting Facebook Connect.

Connecting your account with Facebook brings you two more benefits besides easy authentication...

Keep all your friends up to date

Each time you discover a great new place you will have the option to notify all your Facebook friends about it, directly on the Tagcrumbs website. Sharing an existing Tagcrumb with your Facebook friends is also possible. You will be able to add some additional details and post directly to your Facebook Stream:

Your Facebook friends will then be able to interact with your post by commenting or "liking" it:

Find your Facebook friends on Tagcrumbs and invite others

You can use Tagcrumbs to just remember places for yourself, but the real fun begins when you start to interact with your friends on Tagcrumbs. You can invite any of your Facebook friends to join Tagcrumbs:

And soon you can easily befriend all of your existing Facebook friends on Tagcrumbs. This saves you the hassle of finding and adding all the same friends again and you will be able to share stuff and see what your friends discovered on Tagcrumbs in no time!

Roundup

We are all heavy Facebook users and therefore very excited about Tagcrumbs & Facebook Connect, as we see Tagcrumbs as an extension to existing social networks like Facebook. The next version of Tagcrumbs, on which we are working currently, will have even better Facebook support.

And hey, if you are a Facebook user, you should become a fan of Tagcrumbs on Facebook!

Who do you trust to have the insider knowledge?

noreply@blogger.com (Cornelius) — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 06:54:00 +0000

Exploring your neighborhood can be a hard task, especially in cities your surroundings with its local businesses, cafes, galleries and bars change frequently. So who do you trust what’s worth going to and where do you get your best recommendations from?

Looking from my balcony at the skyline of Berlin, I spotted a huge red balloon flying around 50 meters high and wondered what it is. It has been visible from far far away and had the shape of an arrow. Thus, the conclusion that it was highlighting a specific location, maybe for the World Championships in Athletics that take place these days.

This is definitely one of the most exciting ways to highlight an interesting place in your neighborhood. Normally brick-and-mortar businesses are having a hard time to market themselves and to reach their preferred audience. But also consumers are facing the problem to explore hidden gems, places that surprise and make you want to go there more often.

Tagcrumbs helps you to remember interesting and newsworthy places but more important it allows to send quick recommendations to friends on Tagcrumbs, on Facebook, on Twitter or to everyone with an e-mail address. We aim to simplify and accelerate the recommendation process, especially the one between circles of friends. Convince your friends to join Tagcrumbs and start watching your friends' activity streams and send personal recommendations. The more you share, the more you get back.

Because you hear most often about place recommendations while on the go, we are heavily working on different mobile services. Watch this blog to hear first about upcoming applications that focus on exactly what I just described, creating a recommendation flow that is mobile-targeted and that integrates well with existing communication tools like Twitter or Facebook.

How do you find out about interesting places around you? Yellow pages, local review sites, city magazines, advertisements or do you only trust your friends' tips and experiences? Let us know!

Tagcrumbs with a View

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 06:44:00 +0000

Recently I've been travelling through the Alps, starting from Stuttgart and making my way through Switzerland to arrive in Milano a couple of days later. On the way I enjoyed a couple of breathtaking views - snow-covered mountain ridges, tranquil lakes and picturesque villages.

Many people share this pleasure to look out; these places allow us to take in the beauties of our surroundings and, quite literally, help to change our perspective on things. On Tagcrumbs there are many great examples of memorable lookouts:

Agatha likes the view of the castle from Charles Bridge in Prague.

Richard describes a spectacular view from Knocknarea mountain: the Atlantic's waves breaking, deep bays extending inland and more mountains in the distance.

Moinho do Don Quixote in Portugal is one of Mariana's favorite places. A stunning ocean view and cozy atmosphere - and it's close to Cabo da Roca, the westernmost spot in Europe, pictured below.

Image credit goes to tuergeist.

Easy Signup With Existing Accounts - We support OpenID now

noreply@blogger.com (Sascha) — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 17:41:00 +0000

Do you know how many accounts you have on different websites all over the web? Even if you are only using the web every once in a while you probably have at least 5-10 account, if you are a social media enthusiast like we are you probably have many many more.

It has been a hassle to create all the accounts and now it is hard to remember all those credentials. Did you signup on xyz.com with your favorite username "neo" or was it taken and you took "neo88"? And what was the password again?

The smart folks at the OpenID Foundation created a solution for this problem. You log into the account at your favorite identity provider (only once!) and afterwards you can easily use other services across the web without another login. You can find out more about OpenID on the official website or Wikipedia.

Tagcrumbs supports OpenID now. You can create a new Tagcrumbs account by logging in with your OpenID provider or you can couple your existing Tagcrumbs account with an OpenID provider of your choice.

Let's say you don't have a Tagcrumbs account yet but you already have a Google account for Gmail or any other Google service. On the login screen, you would click on the Google logo to login with your existing Google account.

You will have to verify that you allow Tagcrumbs to use your Google account for login purposes and you are basically done. You now have a new Tagcrumbs account that's coupled with your Google Account.

You don't have to remember a new password or username to log into Tagcrumbs again. The next time, you just click on the Google logo again and you will be logged into Tagcrumbs with your account.

It can hardly get any easier than this! We see Tagcrumbs as an extension to other existing services, that's also why we don't have a built-in messaging system between users. You can write a message to your friends on any other social network. We want to provide the place-related part that is missing on other social networks. Making the signup and login process as easy as possible therefore makes a lot of sense to us.

You can also use Facebook Connect to create a new Tagcrumbs account, but this will be part of another post in the future.

A Road Trip through Poland

noreply@blogger.com (Cornelius) — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 14:00:00 +0000

After submitting my master thesis I had the chance to attend a wedding of two Polish friends. It seemed like a perfect opportunity to get to know Poland. The wedding took place in Augustow which is in the Northeastern part of Poland, close to Lithuania, Belarus or the for its forests and lakes well-known region of Masuria. From Berlin it's a 12 hours drive, which is ok when you are used to North American distances. ;-)

Augustow is is a small touristic city that is surrounded by beautiful lakes and forests, an ideal place to sail, swim and relax. After the wedding we went to the Wolf's Lair, which has been Hitler's Eastern Front military headquarter in World War II. An impressive sight where you can see destroyed bunkers with up to 7 meter thick concrete walls and it was the location where Claus von Stauffenberg attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler on July 20th 1944, exactly 65 years ago, but failed due to unfortunate circumstances.

On the way back we had a quick stopover at Malbork Castle which is a Unesco World Heritage site and the largest brick Gothic castle which was founded in 1274 by the Teutonic Order.

Then we stopped for two days in Gdansk (German: Danzig) which has a beautiful Old Town with the picturesque Piwna street that invites everyone to buy amber jewelery in one of the many small market shops, to explore and analyze the architecture of the surrounding houses or to just grab a coffee in one of the many cozy cafes. You can walk up the St. Mary's church tower to get a wonderful view over Gdansk. By the way, St. Mary's is the largest brick church in the world.

Sopot is as well part of the Tricity region, together with Gdansk and Gdynia. Some of us played beach volleyball while others walked along the longest wooden pier in Europe with more than 500 meters in length. In the evening Sopot provides a variety of good nightlife points of interest.

Do you know any other interesting spots in Poland that are worth visiting? Share them on Tagcrumbs. I was really impressed by Gdansk, so add it as a favorite and tag it with 'todo' and 'travel'. ;-)

Set sail...

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 19:40:00 +0000

It's taken us a while but finally Cornelius and I have also finished our studies. Writing a thesis and preparing the last exams took up most of our time these last weeks and therefore we've been quiet here (wonder if somebody noticed ;). We're both extremely happy to join Sascha as full-time entrepreneurs now.

Is it a good time to be an entrepreneur (crisis, etc.)? Louisa Alcott gave a good answer: "I'm not afraid of storms, for I'm learning how to sail my ship".

So ... what now? What next? The three of us spent the last week in Sindelfingen together to speak about that. We took our time during our first 'real' meeting (meaning in the physical world) since 6 months to review where we come from, what we've learned since we started in 2008 and, most importantly, where we'll be heading from now.

Expect some more months in relative clandestineness. There are a couple of things we need to work on... like mobile applications, a new version of the business plan - and the website asked us for some polishing, too!

To our precious few followers: we'll keep you posted here on the blog, on Facebook and on Twitter... (@tagcrumbs). Thanks for your patience! Let's set sail!

Image is by BasL.

Diving with Tagcrumbs

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Wed, 20 May 2009 06:30:00 +0000

In German, 'tauchen' does not only mean diving - it is also the name of Germany's most-read diving magazine, reaching a quarter of a million readers each month.

We have teamed up with tauchen and starting with the new magazine, which goes on sale tomorrow, you will find a Tagcrumbs icon and shortURL next to the diving spots they present (the short URL makes it easier to type in the info...: tagcrumbs.com/p/NDdiNDd)

Their readers will be able to access more information related to the spot on the site, add their comments and - by favoriting spots they like - build up their very own digital diving logbook and planning tool.

There's a vast number of diving spots, scattered in all the oceans. Divers need to choose their spots according to their skills (a heavy drift dive when you just started is not recommended), the conditions (when is the best time to see whale sharks in Mexico?) and sights ('I'd like to dive with manta rays'). On Tagcrumbs, tauchen and the readers can share their discoveries and experiences, recommend their favorites and easily organise diving spots according to these criteria.

tauchen created a profile and below are some of the places they already added to Tagcrumbs:

Get the tauchen @ Tagcrumbs widget and many other great free widgets at Widgetbox!

We are looking forward to working with tauchen, let's welcome the diving enthusiasts very warmly in the community. We hope to see some interesting conversations around the world's most beautiful diving spots.

Tagcrumbs Pitch at Next09

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Tue, 19 May 2009 17:29:00 +0000

The video footage of the start-up track at Next09 was just released and we have prepared Sascha's presentation for you. It's a condensed 9 minute talk where we try to illuminate some of the company's aspects.

Starting off with the explanation of the value proposition (the problem and how we solve it), Sascha then diggs deeper into how we are different from our competition (for an in-depth comparison to Qype check out the blog post here), continues with the explanation of the components of the platform that Tagcrumbs represents and heads on to explain how we are planning to build the community and make money. At the end Sascha talks about the team - our 'fit' and how we complement each others' skills.

The slides are a bit hard to read in the video so feel free to open them in another tab for more detail.

Thanks again to Björn Negelmann and the Next09 team for making this possible!

Back from next09 - A roundup

noreply@blogger.com (Sascha) — Thu, 07 May 2009 08:11:00 +0000

next09 is over. It has been a great conference, I enjoyed being there and meeting a lot of people. Thank you next09!

Most of the talks were good, I was especially excited to hear Chris Messina and Rudy de Waele speak about the Open Web and Mobile.

I presented Tagcrumbs in the start-up track. I think it went fairly well even though I was a bit excited :). Here are the slides of my presentation. A video will follow. Any comments, any feedback?

Tagcrumbs Start-up Presentation - next09

View more presentations from tagcrumbs.

P. S.
A tip for next year's conference, marketing Next as an international conference is good but it should be clear which tracks are in German and which not, there has been a lot of confusion and international attendees had to wander around to find an English session.

Tagcrumbs at next09

noreply@blogger.com (Sascha) — Mon, 04 May 2009 05:52:00 +0000

We have been selected to present Tagcrumbs at the start-up track of the next conference in Hamburg. The next conference put on by SinnerSchrader is one of the most important networking and trend conferences within the European web industry.

Share Economy is this year's theme of next09. This term is shaped by the economy theorist Martin Weitzman. His basic idea: The more we share our success with others, the more we profit ourselves.

We think this term fits perfectly for Tagcrumbs, due the collective creation of places and our openness.

We are very much looking forward to the event. If you want to meet, drop us a line on twitter (@tagcrumbs).

How Tagcrumbs approaches local reviews in comparison to Qype

noreply@blogger.com (Cornelius) — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 12:16:00 +0000

We are often asked how Tagcrumbs is different from popular review sites like Qype or Yelp and why you should favor the one over the other. Yes, there are obvious overlapping use cases but let's do a quick comparison to show in which areas Tagcrumbs is suited best.

Qype is a user-generated local review site where users add reviews about local businesses like shops, bars or restaurants.

With Tagcrumbs you and your friends can add stories, opinions or reviews about any arbitrary place that you discover while on the go or while surfing the Web.

First, this sounds similar, with both services you can read and write interesting reviews for places you have been. The difference is that Tagcrumbs has no thematic focus on reviews and thus supports a higher diversity of user-generated content. It's about all the little local discoveries and the insider knowledge around us, for example:

Tagcrumbs creates a virtual layer on top of the physical world, where every place can be attached with virtual post-it notes. The good thing, it's not mandatory that you have been at this place, you can also use Tagcrumbs to plan your travels or to plan which restaurants you want to visit while on a city trip.

So what are the advantages of using Tagcrumbs?

Ease of use and the fastest way to share places of your interests with friends and others
Powerful mechanisms to discover new content by tags, keyword searches, places or friends. E. g. "Show me all my friends' places around me for the topic architecture."
We support the author, whenever you add a new place to Tagcrumbs it becomes it's own page with a focus on exactly this content. I.e., it's not one out of many reviews on a local business page.
Sharing, recommending and adding favorites is well-integrated into the system so the user-generated content can be part of everyone's conversation.
Support for the geo community with standards like KML or GeoRSS

To conclude, there is a demand for more than just review sites, the world is more diverse and with Tagcrumbs we help all the heterogeneous interest groups to share their insider knowledge.

By the way, here you can see all my Tagcrumbs in the center of Galway visualized with Google Earth. I marked, shared and recommended meeting spots, free wifi cafes, reviewed restaurants, reported about a fire, complained about the bicycle situation and participated in local events. Although very diverse local content, Tagcrumbs as a one-stop 'place book' makes every place stand out on its own.

Update: Comments

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 16:44:00 +0000

Thanks to the ongoing feedback of our users who, over the course of the last couple of weeks were asking for more possibilities to exchange opinions, discover other members and add to the stories and descriptions of individual Tagcrumbs we have now integrated comments.

One detail that I like a lot is the possibility to follow a conversation: if you add a comment to someone's Tagcrumb you can choose to be notified via e-mail if someone else joins the conversation and leaves a comment herself.
This is just one of the things on our agenda which in the future will result in an increasingly detailed and colourful impression of every place tagged on Tagcrumbs. Stay tuned for more!

One question that you could help us answer is the following: should comments have a subject line (which e.g. would make it easier to scan through them if there are already a couple)? Have a look and let us know what you think. We are as always looking forward to hearing your feedback.

Update: Favourites and Recommendations

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 21:06:00 +0000

We have updated two integral parts of Tagcrumbs that should make the service faster and easier to use. Here is an overview of what's different:

1. Favourites
Our members can now show that they like a place (and maybe even more importantly easily remember where it is and what it's about) by adding it as a favourite. Wherever the star symbol () appears, clicking on it lets you choose which tags you'd like to use and adds the Tagcrumb to your list. What's great about favourites: it's easy to see who else and how many people in total liked the place you discovered.

To be able to better distinguish your own Tagcrumbs from the ones you favourited, we have chosen to show them in two different formats. The upper one is Cornelius' Tagcrumb which I favourited and below that is mine (story on a public park created on an old train track in New York). As you can see, both have been favourited once.

2. Recommendations
It's now possible to add a short note (Twitter style, 140 characters) to recommendations and send it off to friends on Tagcrumbs or via e-mail. Recommending it to someone who's already on Tagcrumbs has the advantage that the friend will see the note directly in his list of places. Great to personalize a recommendation :)!

Here's an example. Cornelius recommends me The Berg (a fake mountain imagined by some inhabitants of Berlin):

We hope you like the changes - please do check them out. And if you have any comments or feedback we would love to hear from you! Also stay tuned for the next updates, there's more to come!

The Places of the Show Me Galway Photography Challenge

noreply@blogger.com (Cornelius) — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 15:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I participated in an enjoyable photography community event called Show Me Galway.

'Show Me Galway - Spring' is a Photography, Sketch Challenge and outdoor time challenge all rolled into a one day event.

Each team had a four hour time period to take the best suited photographs for twelve categories ranging from Park Life, Cafe Culture, Saturday Market to Industrial Harbour. The interpretation was up to each team and resulted in sometimes very similar photographs but often to very interesting takes on a topic, still having the bold head in my mind, a perfect fit for the Recession category...

Exploring your neighborhood is always bringing you new insights and perspectives, a perfect example to showcase Tagcrumbs and how easy it is to add the places of your interest and to share it with your friends and your local community. Start by walking to the Saturday Market, eat vegetarian Indian Mattar Paneer, drink a coffee at the Skeff or Cafe Luna, watch the park life at Eyre Square or the children playing with the fountain, and don't forget to take a look at the exhibited photos at Bar No. 8 at the Docks.

A big thank you to the organizers, everyone I talked to really enjoyed the event. Wishes for the next event: a more transparent voting system, knowing the winning picture of each category would be really interesting, too.

All photos of my Show Me Galway Flickr Set are licensed under Creative Commons. Take a look at other interesting places to explore in Galway.

More great photos by Gerhard, team Espresso, another DERI team.

St. Patrick's Day Parade in Galway

noreply@blogger.com (Cornelius) — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 15:05:00 +0000

Pipe bands, dance groups and performance artists come from all over the world to Galway each year to experience a parade that is widely regarded as one of the best in Ireland. The beauty of the Galway Parade is that it is small enough for group to truly feel a part of, yet big enough to create a special atmosphere.

Source: St. Patrick's Day Parade

Last Tuesday, March 17th, I went to the St. Patrick's Day Parade here in Galway. It showed the city's diversity that's hard to grasp unless you are living for many years at this place. From the Caribbean, the Asian, the Indian or the African community to a variety of charities to hospices they all presented themselves to show their existence and their support for the Galway community. Here are some impressions of this event.

With Tagcrumbs we are trying to provide a space for all kinds of local content, a platform that allows you to grasp the diversity of your neighborhood. Start by experiencing Galway.

Tagcrumbs Interview on Tiburon-TV

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 19:15:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago at LIFT09 in Geneva, Cornelius and I spoke with Viktoria, entrepreneuse and always-on-the-move reporter for Tiburon-TV (a great site for entrepreneurs by the way, you should definitely check it out!) to try and explain what Tagcrumbs is about.

Tagcrumbs allows you to discover those little things that might give you interesting information about the places you visit and share them with your friends, family and the world. You can build a mini community of people you know and recommend places you care about.“

You can find the accompanying post on the site (thanks for the excellent summary) and of course we would be interested if you think we made ourselves clear... always learning :)!

The places of LIFT09

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 18:29:00 +0000

LIFT09 is almost over. Again I enjoyed every last bit of it. Inspiring talks, great discussions, new friends and a travel plan (from Moscow to Beijing on a train - but not in winter ;).

The last couple of days we have collected (tagged and placed them on a map) a couple of places related to LIFT. You will find some of the places that the speakers mentioned: Patrick Gyger's Maison d'Ailleurs, one of the green "no parking zones" in New York that Natalie Jeremijenko showed us or the Digital Water Pavilion in Zaragoza that Carlo Ratti spoke about.

We have also collected some places and stories for you to explore if you're staying in Geneva another day. You could take a walk to the longest bench in the world and see if the official chestnut tree is already budding (which would mean winter's over in Geneva) or maybe you'd like to kick back for an hour and relax in the sauna and hammam on Lac Leman or buy some good Swiss chocolate at Geneva's best chocolate maker.

You can find the complete list of LIFT09 places here: http://www.tagcrumbs.com/placemarks/tagged/lift09. Feel free to add your findings with the LIFT09 tag as well. Social Placemarking at #LIFT09

Science fiction in Geneva and at LIFT09

noreply@blogger.com (Ben) — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 11:22:00 +0000

Nicolas Nova and Patrick Gyger talked about predictions that did not happen, about imagined futures that did not come to life. I found their take on technological innovation on the one hand and science fiction on the other hand very interesting.

"Science fiction works as a creator of desire, planting the seeds of dreams"

If you're interested in science fiction and discovering Geneva and the Lac Leman region in this regard, here are some tips that we collected for you;

The image shows Maison d'Ailleurs and is by Nicolas Nova