jamcode

Station Deletion

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:24:00 +0000

We pushed out a new version of GasBag a couple of weeks ago now, which adds a much needed feature: the ability to delete stations. The main reason for this is that despite sinking huge amounts of time into finding ways to keep our database clean, at the end of the day our systems just aren't as good as trusting you guys to tell us when a station is bad. This new feature was added by one of our interns, Takeshi Ohishi, and was an awesome piece of work from him, despite a difficult spec and demanding coding standards (read: I'm a nazi). Thanks Takeshi!

Here's how it works: when you find a station that shouldn't be there (it's closed, or it's a duplicate, etc), tap on it to go through to the station details screen and then tap the "Delete this station" button, confirm the action and it will be instantly obliterated.

We've now disabled our other mechanisms for identifying duplicate stations, and over the next few weeks we'll be undoing all the work that system did, because frankly it wasn't very good at what it did. So when you see new stations popping up that shouldn't be there, we'd love it if you took the time to delete the bad record (in general we prefer to keep stations with more precise addresses: eg a street number instead of an intersection, but don't stress too much about this).

One last comment: we have chosen not to make a new release of GasBag Pro with this change in it. This is because we had to make a lot of changes to our code to get it to build with the latest versions of XCode. Not wanting to break things for our paying users is pretty important to us, so we're delaying adding this feature to Pro until it's seen some more testing. If the current trends hold up, it will probably be rendered obsolete by the time we get around to rolling it into Pro.

Thanks to all our users for your support thus far, and thanks for helping us maintain the service for everyone.

James.
Co-founder and CTO.

Job posting - BD / Sales Manager

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Fri, 08 May 2009 23:56:00 +0000

This is an incredible opportunity to join a team of talented entrepreneurs and engineers in the iPhone space. Our applications have been featured in the NY Times, TechCrunch, Wired magazine, and many other newspapers and blogs. We are fully engaged in writing innovative, user-friendly applications that drive community involvement and participation.

We are a small team across California and Australia, looking to expand our Business Development resources so we can focus on what we do best. Head office is in Mountain View and we'd prefer someone close if possible. Our technology has great traction in the consumer space and we are looking to expand that by targeting relevant institutions that could utilize branded versions of our products.

Responsibilities:

- Identify the target customer list out of a large potential pool
- Contact, negotiate with, and close deals with the largest, lowest-hanging fruit first
- Work closely with the product and engineering team

Requirements:

- 3 to 5 years work experience in software sales / BD
- Knowledge of the iPhone applications industry and the App Store process
- Ability to effectively and succinctly communicate technology benefits to Luddites
- Excellent communication and people skills
- Self-motivated and driven to succeed

Compensation:
- The company is wholly boot-strapped and post-revenues but at this stage the compensation will be purely commission-based
- The size of the opportunity is more than enough to provide excellent compensation to the right individual
- Days, hours, and working location are flexible; your performance is determined by your success!

Please contact careers at jam-code dot com for more information and send:
* Your resume
* Your contact details
* Reference from a relevant position in the last 12 months

DoucheBag

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 04:04:00 +0000

We are very excited to announce that our latest application DoucheBag has been released on the Apple AppStore. Official press release:

JAMCODE LAUNCHES DOUCHEBAG - PARTY WITH THE COOL CROWD

Never party with the wrong crowd again - find out immediately where to hit the town

Mountain View, Calif. – April 1st, 2009 – jamcode LLC, the leader in rich-mapping applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch, today announced the launch of DoucheBag, the best way to avoid uncool bars and clubs.

* DoucheBag uses the same rich-mapping technology as GasBag, GasBag Pro, and myATM, to quickly and easily show the users where the nearest clubs and bars are.
* DoucheBag users can rapidly identify the "Douche"-level of a bar and inform the DoucheBag community instantly
* Sophisticated trust network algorithms ensure the best DoucheBag-identifiers are rewarded and their recommendations propagated more quickly.

"It's harder than ever to go out and have a good time without some douchebag interfering," said Mick Johnson, CEO & Co-Founder of jamcode LLC. "Now with DoucheBag on the iPhone I can avoid them like never before."

"Sometimes I just sit at home." he added.

"We've taken the best algorithms around the globe, mixed them up in a glass, and added a pinch of salt," said James Gregory, CEO & Co-Founder for jamcode LLC. "Our Advanced Douche Detection (ADD) engine is second to none."

DoucheBag is free on the AppStore - get it today.

Facebook Connect

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 01:17:00 +0000

At last we've submitted version 2.0.4 to the AppStore. As James was alluding to before, we had some extra special features we wanted to roll out, and just as we were about to, Facebook announced Facebook Connect for iPhone at SXSW. So we went back and added that in, which to my mind makes GasBag even more cool! In short, if you log into Facebook through GasBag (hit the Info screen), then whenever you update prices or fill up you can check a box to inform your Facebook friends as well as the GasBag network.

We're rolling this out for GasBag first, to be followed by GasBag Pro later.

Hope you all like it!

iTunes Connect Scraper

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 05:23:00 +0000

Just a quick note about a, well, smaller release than most of the others. As have many other iPhone developers, we've been pretty frustrated that we're not able to automate the process of getting sales reports from the iTunes Connect portal. It's frustrating because it means someone has to have the responsibility of logging in and downloading them every day, and we've just got better things to be doing (like making great software!).

So we're trying to be part of the solution. Last night, I put together a simple script using the fabulous Beautiful Soup framework to automatically log in and download the latest daily report for you. Paragon of software engineering excellence it is not, but it does rather neatly solve this problem for us. So if you're an iPhone developer, check it out here. It's BSD licensed, meaning you can do pretty much whatever you want with it, but we'd love to hear about any novel uses you find for it, and we'll gladly accept patches for bugfixes or new features or what have you.

I hope you find it useful!

James -- Co-founder and CTO.

Taking the bear by the horns

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 21:36:00 +0000

Liz Tay at ITNews did another great piece on us and how we've been approaching business given the recession. It's been a bit of a roller-coaster I have to say, but I'm very glad we've done so and I have a huge amount of faith both in the jamcode team and also the community that is growing and growing every day.

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/98687,recession-kicks-thrifty-startups-into-top-gear.aspx

"Some businesses forged during recessions have achieved great success. These included Cisco, funded during the recession of the early '90s, and Australian start-up Atlassian that was established during the dot-com bust."

A sentiment I strongly believe in. Now's the time!

Releases

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 06:20:00 +0000

We're about to roll out a set of updates to GasBag and GasBag Pro, so I wanted to briefly fill you in on what to expect, and provide some rationale for the process we're going to use to get these releases into your hands.

First up, what's changing: this is primarily a bugfix release, intended to target two issues that have been frustrating users since the 2.0 release: we call them "the Sydney bug", and "the price update bug". The "Sydney bug" is where the app will unpredictably jump over to Sydney, Australia, without any really good reason to do so. This is very frustrating except for a very small percentage of our users who also happen to be at that location* :). The "price update bug" is an issue we inadvertently introduced in the switch over to the new map technology. In short, when you enter a new price, that update isn't reflected on the map when you go back to it. The prices are getting to our server just fine, but no-one has any way to know that.

We're still debating whether to add a couple of small pieces of functionality, but if we do include them, we'll be sure to let you know. We're hoping that the new release will be out late next week, but as always we're subject to Apple's approval process, so we can't give any guarantees.

But the more important part of this release is that we're experimenting with a new, staged release cycle. The idea is that we're going to roll these new features into the free version of GasBag, and assuming that all goes well, we'll fold them into Pro a little while later. If it doesn't go so well, we'll repeat the process until we get it right. Why? Well, we've had a lot of feedback about our apps, on everything from our icon to our database, but nothing angers people more than unstable software (and rightfully so). Now don't get us wrong, this release has been through the same testing process that all our software goes through, and we think it's solid, but it's also true that every time we've done that, you guys have managed to find something we didn't think to test for. While we hugely value all our users, we feel that it is fair that people who have actually put down hard-earned cash get the benefit of this "crowd-testing". Ultimately, this is a bugfix release, so we're hoping that no-one's going to be missing out on anything too critical, and we're only talking about a week or two.

So if you're on GasBag Free, look forward to an update in the next week or so. If you're on Pro, you'll get the update as soon as we can manage, and you can be sure that it's ready to rock when it hits your phone.

Let us know what you think of the new release process in the comments -- we're always trying to do the right thing by our users. Let us know how we're doing.

James -- Co-founder and CTO.

[*] as it happens, I live quite close to the area where "the Sydney bug" dropped you, so for a long time I wouldn't believe the rest of the team that there was anything wrong!

myATM is launched

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 08:06:00 +0000

Very happy to announce that our latest application, myATM, has just been approved on the AppStore. Official press release below:

JAMCODE LAUNCHES MYATM

Find your nearest fee-free ATM in under 5 seconds,  for less than the cost of a single transaction fee

Mountain View, Calif. – March 11th, 2009 – jamcode LLC, the leader in rich-mapping applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch, today announced the launch of myATM, the fastest and easiest way to save on ATM fees.

myATM is fast:

Same rich-mapping technology as the best-selling GasBag and GasBag Pro applications
250,000+ ATM locations stored on the phone, so users can search immediately without needing to connect
Rapid launch brings up the map and ATM locations in under 5 seconds
Panning and zooming instantly refresh the map for a great viewing experience

myATM saves you money:

A single transaction fee can cost from $2.50 to over $6!
For the first week only, myATM on sale for just $0.99
Standard price of $1.99, still less than the cost of a single transaction fee at a foreign ATM

myATM launched with the ability to individually identify the 20 largest banks in the US, with all other ATMs identified with a generic dollar sign. It also comes with the ability to jump straight from the ATM details screen into online banking for that bank, so users can check their balance or transfer money before they reach the ATM.

“With the US economy in a tail-spin and families everywhere feeling the pinch, who wants to shell out more money in fees just to get your own cash out of the bank?” said James Gregory, CTO and Co-Founder of jamcode LLC. “Now with myATM people can get their own stimulus package, directly on the iPhone.”

myATM is available and on sale for just $0.99 on the AppStore today.

Get it at the AppStore

Maps

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 13:41:00 +0000

One of the most visible changes in GasBag 2.0 was our move away from Google's map over to Microsoft Virtual Earth. It's been really interesting to watch the way this change has been received, because it hasn't worked out exactly the way we anticipated.

Today I'd like to tell you all the story of why it was that we switched, and hopefully give you some insight into what we were thinking. If you don't like the change, I totally understand, but hopefully you'll find it an interesting story nonetheless.

The story starts in Summer, 2008. We had the idea to build this application, so we all went out and bought Macs, downloaded XCode and got started. The initial concept was to deliver "map-based, community-driven mobile gas-price finding". That's a very hyphen-rich mission statement, but there it is. We pretty quickly got to a point where we needed to embed a map into our app, and this is where things suddenly got hard.

We looked around, and since this was really the early days of iPhone app development, there were very few mapping toolkits around. The one we settled on, iphone-google-maps-component, seemed really nifty: it did all that hard Objective-C stuff (we all had a lot of experience in pretty hard-core C, HTML, Javascript and so on, but objective-C was still a mystery back then), and all we had to do was provide a data-source for Google Maps. We thought this was great, because it had the added benefit that since we were setting up Google Maps to serve our data anyway, we got a web version of the app for free! We put together a prototype in a week or two, ran it up in the iPhone Simulator that ships with XCode, and man, were we impressed! It was wicked-fast, had sexy Google styled maps, and it was responsive which in turn meant that it was usable. "Home run!" we thought.

And we kept thinking that right up until the day that we finally got accepted into the dev program and were able to install the app on our phones. You might think that a day like that would be cause for celebration, but instead we were all hugely disappointed. You see, running our application in the Simulator brought with it all the processing power of my laptop's fairly significant CPU to it plus the huge bandwidth of my home Internet link. Needless to say, the iPhone does not have as much CPU power as my MacBook Pro, nor the bandwidth. So we ran the app up on our phones and quickly discovered that the sub-second load times we'd seen from the Simulator were complete fiction: load times on the phone were about 60 seconds, and the beautifully smooth interactions we had in the simulator were nowhere to be seen either -- movement was jerky and the slow interactions affected usability badly -- pinching and swiping both worked in the app, but it was so slow to respond that for the most part nobody noticed.

Undeterred, what followed was a solid month of hacking on the code to get it into shape. We managed to get the typical load time down from 60 seconds to about 10, improved the responsiveness of the map, and we eventually got it to a point where, well, we weren't thrilled about it, but it was definitely workable, and with the screaming about gas prices at the time, we thought we helped more people by releasing than by holding it back.

So release we did, and things actually went pretty well ("well", in the sense that a startup uses it, means that the first day's deluge of users brought our server to its knees, requiring a quadrupling of compute resources to handle the load), and we saw some solid growth, helped by the gas price crisis, and for a while, we forgot about the map.

Along the way, we started discussions with WhatGas, who are an awesome bunch of guys in the UK doing some similar stuff on the web. We saw some great synergies, so we formed a partnership with them, and then began the hard work of retrofitting internationalization (or i18n as we call it) to the server and to the app. We also figured that since we'd done all that hard i18n work, why not release it in Australia at the same time. And so we got a good database of stations in Australia, and launched it and held our breath.

It was at this time that I was suddenly acutely aware of our map's shortcomings again. As a co-founder and Sydney-sider, I felt duty-bound to enter petrol prices everywhere I went, and so I religiously did exactly that. And it was at that point I realised what I imagine a lot of our users had known for a long time: the map was too slow.

But what to do? Well, fortunately the iPhone dev community has come a long way since our initial efforts, and a particularly bright developer called Joseph Gentle invented RouteMe, which is just an awesome piece of code to display a fast, responsive map in your application. So over my Christmas "break", I put together a prototype with RouteMe, and... wow! It solved pretty much all of my gripes with version 1, just like that (you'll have to imagine me snapping my fingers at this juncture).

But Google Maps as a source of map imaging just wasn't available. Not only did RouteMe not support it, we looked at the Google Maps terms of service and it was pretty clear: you can't use the map imagery outside of Google Maps. A little more research showed that they were serious about it too, having served several take-down notices to websites who had tried to push the limits. In contrast, Microsoft actually provides a detailed explanation, including source-code, on how you can build an app using their map imagery.

So we went ahead and launched with Virtual Earth as our source of map imagery. This time, we were truly proud of the application: we could say with a completely clear conscience that it was the fastest app of its type, and that it was easy to use. Like I said, all our gripes from previous versions were basically eliminated. We released, and also pushed out GasBag Pro, which added some features users had been asking for for way too long in our books.

But this is where the surprises started rolling in. We've had a huge amount of feedback from people saying "Why did you take the Google Maps away?! The new map is ugly and waaaay slower." Needless to say, we were surprised: we'd done a lot of testing prior to release, and the response was unanimous: version 2's map was a huge leap forward in terms of performance and usability.

We've now looked into a few of these, so let me give you the scoop: the issue is with caching. For those who don't know, this is a technique used in many programs in many ways, whereby the computer remembers something it did before, in case it needs to do it again. When that happens, the computer just inspects the cache and gives back the answer it worked out last time. In the case of HTTP based applications, web-browsers (and web-browser toolkits) will store data that they download from webservers, and use this cached copy the next time that document is requested.

Now as part of that effort to get version 1's load time down from 60 seconds to 10, we shipped with what we called a primed cache: we shipped with a cache that had already been loaded with map tiles for some commonly used areas, and a bunch of other stuff that we figured most of our users would need. We didn't do that with version 2. Mostly this was because the huge win in load times that RouteMe got us somewhat obviated us of the need to do so, but it was also because we wanted to shrink the download size. Version 1 clocked in at around 7MB, while version 2 is a little over 1MB -- much more palatable, especially when you're on the road and don't have a WiFi link to work with.

So what people are now seeing is that when they upgrade to 2.0 and fire it up, they're met with a few seconds of a grey screen while those first map tiles are pulled down. Similarly when they pan around, there's more grey where the first version didn't have it because those areas were in the primed cache. I hope that they're also seeing that when they do that panning, the application responds instantly, zipping and zooming wherever their finger takes it.

But the great thing about a cache is that it remembers -- after you've suffered through those first few seconds of downloading map tiles, you'll never need to wait for them again; the phone will store them and the next time you load up the app, you should get a map on the screen within about 3 seconds of tapping the GasBag icon. That's faster, much faster, than CoreLocation is able to get a fix on your location in most cases, which is pretty hard to beat.

As for the map being ugly, well, I got used to the Virtual Earth imagery pretty quickly, but it was a bit of a shock initially. As things stand, we really don't have much of a choice at the moment. The good news is that the popularity of mapping apps on iPhone is bringing with it renewed interest in mapping imagery, so we're hopeful that new options will appear in the not too distant future. We're certainly keeping an eye out.

But hey, don't get me wrong, we love the feedback. The good and the bad. So keep it coming, and thanks for your patience while we try new stuff like this out; we hope that we're making a better app for everyone.

James -- CTO and Co-founder.

Interview on IMES Blog

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 11:57:00 +0000

International Market Entry Strategies' David Brown has just posted an interview he did with Mick, jamcode's CEO, and co-founder of the company. In the interview they chat a bit about what we think makes jamcode applications special, talk a bit about our philosophy, and there's a quick mention of our next app, which we're planning to launch soon.

It's a good interview, and there's some good advice in there for aspiring entrepreneurs who are nervous about taking the leap. You can watch it here, and keep an eye on David's Blog; he talks to a lot of interesting people.

James -- Founder and CTO.

GasBag Pro and 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 02:43:00 +0000

After a long wait, the new version is finally out with an awesome map and much better car tracking support. For those of you who want to track more than 1 car, please buy GasBag Pro for only 99c from the AppStore.

Below is the press release that's going out tomorrow:

JAMCODE LAUNCHES GASBAG PRO

99 cent version tracks multiple cars and ad-free, while free and paid versions have much faster maps

Mountain View, Calif. – February 11th, 2009 – jamcode LLC, the leader in rich-mapping applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch, today announced the launch of GasBag Pro and GasBag 2.0. Both enable users to locate gas stations and the cheapest gas prices while on the move, wherever, whenever.

New features in version 2.0:

• Faster panning and zooming with a new map
• Personalize your car by make, model, year, and color
• Much more stable and responsive to the touch
• Still 100% free with advertisements

GasBag Pro also provides:

• No advertisements for a bigger, easier to view map
• Track mileage and expenditure for more than 1 car
• Easily port data from GasBag into GasBag Pro
• Only 99c

GasBag was first launched in the US in late August 2008 and is available for FREE. Since then the GasBag community has grown at a staggering pace, with hundreds of thousands of dedicated users in the US, UK, and Australia.

“We rely on the constant feedback of the users and testers to ensure GasBag remains the best and fastest gas price finding application on the iPhone and iPod Touch,” said Mick Johnson, CEO and Co-Founder of jamcode LLC. “We’re looking forward to a fantastic 2009 for GasBaggers everywhere.”

GasBag also provides a logbook that calculates metrics such as miles per gallon, average price per gallon, etc. This allows GasBag users to budget and track gas expenses more efficiently. Because GasBag knows your location, how many gallons you filled, and how much you paid, that also feeds the price at that station back into the community. Users of GasBag Pro can now record these purchases and link them against one of several cars. Watch the latest video at http://jamcode.blip.tv/.

Both GasBag and GasBag Pro are available for download from the AppStore today.

Duplicates

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 02:07:00 +0000

One of the most frequent support requests we handle here involve helping kind people around the world reporting that there are duplicate entries in our database; many including detailed reports of which entry is wrong and including comprehensive, correct data for us to use in its stead.

I wanted to write a bit about what a duplicate is, where it comes from, and some new strategies we're trying to solve the problem.

So, what's a duplicate? The case we're talking about is where a single physical station is recorded more than once in our database, with a very slightly different address. For example, one of our users might enter 12001 S Douglas Blvd, Guthrie, OK, whilst another might enter it as S Douglas Blvd & E Charter Oak Rd, OK. If you click both of those links, you'll see that they're for almost the same location -- Google's geocoder places them only 1 metre apart -- but in practice, any human would recognise both those addresses as being for the same place.

How does it happen? A lot of these duplicate entries are due to a couple of poor design decisions we made at our end. One of the issues we have is that there's an expectation that stations will appear on the map as soon as they've been entered. Unfortunately, for purely technical reasons, this is not the case: it can take up to 15 minutes for a station submission to be approved and placed on the map. When this happens, a lot of people think that something's gone wrong, so they'll try adding the station again, under some variation of the address. Other times it's where we've sourced a listing of stations from somewhere (a handful of chains have complete listings available on their websites), and find that these listings have stations listed that have already been added by our users under slightly different formulations of the address. The other source of confusion here is that GasBag 1.x will actually "hide" some stations, but I'll write more about that in a moment.

The problem with all this is that since we're a map-driven application, we need to find a way to cram all these stations onto a map. This is often hard enough when we only have one entry per station (it's common to have stations clustered around an intersection, for example), but the problem is just compounded when we have three or four listings for each of those stations. As I mentioned above, when faced with this situation, GasBag 1 will actually just stop putting stations on the map once a certain density of stations has been reached.

The big question is: what are we going to do about it?! Well, there's two main strategies we're planning to use to sort this problem out. The first is that starting with GasBag 2 (which is making its way through the approval process now), we will no longer omit any stations from the display. If its in our database, past a fairly modest zoom level, it'll be on your screen. To avoid having so many bubbles that you can't actually see the map, we've introduced an innovative new "bubble stacks" concept. The idea is that when we have an area with lots of stations, those stations will be represented by a bubble icon resembling a set of bubbles that have been stacked, one on top of the other. When you tap on that bubble, GasBag will zoom in and unstack the stack, revealing each of the stations it represents. We hope that this interface will solve a lot of problems, but we're hoping that it will at least resolve some of the confusion people are having with GasBag 1.

The second thing we're doing is to run a batch job each night to go through our database looking for duplicate stations, and we're just going to have this program pick one, scrap the other, and get on with life. Our reasoning is that if two stations are so close together that their location on the map is indistinguishable, then it probably doesn't matter that much which of them we choose to display. This script will ensure that you'll never see two stations of the same brand within a quarter-mile of each other (that's 400 metres for those of us Down Under). Initial testing of this script has shown very encouraging results. This one will be rolled out later today to our live servers, so if you've been frustrated by duplicates in the past, keep an eye out for improvements over the next few days.

We're pretty excited about this, because we know it's been a big problem since day 1, and its always satisfying to cross one of those babies off your list. So thanks for putting up with us while we work on this; we hope it will have been worth the wait.

James -- Founder and CTO.

GasBag in Wired magazine

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 23:38:00 +0000

Very brief mention in a Wired article by Mathew Honan recently.

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/wireless/magazine/17-02/lp_guineapig?currentPage=2

I actually quite like some of his points on issues with a location-aware lifestyle; we haven't really set up societal norms for whether broadcasting your dinner plans via twitter means anyone's free to join you.

UK Press Release

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 19:21:00 +0000

Just posting our UK press release from today...
GASBAG LAUNCHES IN THE UK TO FIND CHEAP PETROL ON THE IPHONE

Free software from jamcode LLC will help commuters find cheap gas prices anywhere, anytime, while on the move

Mountain View, Calif. – December 23rd, 2008 – jamcode LLC, the leader in rich-mapping applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch, today announced their best-selling iPhone application GasBag is now available in the UK and Australia. This easy to use application enables users to locate gas stations and the cheapest gas prices while on the move, and is available for FREE from the Apple App Store.

GasBag was launched in the US in late August and has grown at a staggering pace, with a user-base of hundreds of thousands of dedicated users. jamcode is now looking to leverage that experience and a partnership with WhatGas LTD to drive a similar community in the UK.

A video of GasBag in action can also be viewed at: http://blip.tv/file/1067165/.

“The user take up of GasBag was far better than we expected; we hit number 1 in the Navigation category within the first few weeks,” said Mick Johnson, CEO and co-Founder of jamcode LLC. “By focusing on the user interface and making it as easy as possible to submit data, the user community expanded rapidly, which in turn drives the accuracy of our data.”

“We are pleased to be partnering with the jamcode team in introducing GasBag to the UK market”, said Alistair Taylor, WhatGas LTD. Our company, www.whatgas.com, has been providing a web-based gas price data service to users throughout the UK with a large dedicated user-base. By teaming up with jamcode we can now collectively share gas price data feeds and leverage the rich-mapping functionality GasBag provides on the iPhone platform.”

To provide users with information about gas stations and prices in the immediate area, GasBag takes advantage of the location platform on the iPhone and iPod Touch. GasBag works best on these devices because they are the only ones that use location from Skyhook Wireless.

“The iPhone's location platform offers GasBag instant location results, regardless of environment,” said Ted Morgan, CEO of Skyhook Wireless. “As the mobile application market matures, applications that offer useful information based on accurate user location will be the most successful. GasBag's early popularity serves as an indication of this market direction.”

A critical part of jamcode’s monetization strategy centers on delivering targeted mobile advertising to its users in an unobtrusive fashion. By partnering with companies such as Mobclix, GasBag features ads that can be targeted to users.

"We are excited to be working with jamcode in serving mobile Ad's to the GasBag community," said Krishna Subramanian, co-founder of mobclix. Our business at mobclix is all about increasing the monetization opportunity for developers, and given finding cheap gas is to everyone's interest, working with jamcode so we can serve Ads to GasBag is an ideal application scenario."

World Domination

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 03:37:00 +0000

Well, it's a big day at jamcode HQ... actually that's not quite true: our HQ dweller is in FNQ at the moment, but we'll get to that. Today is a big day because GasBag has just launched in the UK and Australia!

In the UK, we've partnered with Whatgas as a provider of pricing data. Whatgas have been great to work with, and we're looking forward to what should be an awesome year of saving UK drivers cash.

In Australia, we're relying on you -- we've populated our database with a pretty respectable selection of petrol stations, but we're relying on our users to make this work. So get out there now, grab the application and start using it. In case you're thinking "why would I use this thing when there's no prices in there?" well, GasBag is a great way to find petrol stations, which can be more useful than you think: stations that are closer together tend to have lower prices just through competition. But that's not all! It also includes a nifty mileage tracker that you can use to work out how much you're spending on petrol and how efficient your car is. Better yet: every time you use the mileage tracker, we'll calculate the price you paid, and use that to update our database. It's a win-win situation.

We're also pretty proud of this achievement, because it's the first time an application like this has scaled across multiple countries, which has been a pretty significant amount of work, both for our servers, and for the iPhone app itself.

But what are you doing still reading this? Go download it now! And tell all your friends, or Lillian's cousin, Bazza, will attack.

Price aging

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 03:25:00 +0000

We do get queries along the lines of "Why will i update a price and the next week it is gone to $0.00". We have to find a good balance between conflicting goals here:

- Display accurate prices
- Constant price data
- Feedback on user input

After 2 or 3 days, a price is normally too out of date to give any meaningful information for comparing stations in a given area. For this reason, after that time we stop showing that price. By coming up as 0.00, this also alerts other users that this station needs to be updated again.

We start showing the age of the price in days to give people a bit more information on this as well. If the price is still accurate, you should be able to just tap the "These prices are still correct" button and we'll reset the age stamps on those prices.

Finding your UDID

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 18:56:00 +0000

A few people have asked, so here's the quick and easy way to find your UDID:

- Plug your iPhone / iPod Touch into your computer and wait until iTunes recognizes it.
- Select your iPhone / iPod Touch from the Devices list in iTunes and click the "Summary" tab.
- To see your UDID, click on the word "serial number" beside the picture of the iPhone / iPod Touch.
- You should see the word "identifer" and an alphanumeric string – this is your UDID.
- To copy it, just press command + C on your Mac's keyboard (or control + C in Windows)

This helps us do a couple of things:
* Identify any error messages your phone in particular has sent through to our servers
* Potentially create a debug build of GasBag that you can install on your phone using the Ad-Hoc distribution method

Today: The Server, Tomorrow: THE WORLD.

noreply@blogger.com (James) — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 11:29:00 +0000

Last night, we rolled out a new version of the server code that runs GasBag. This is the nuts and bolts that runs behind the scenes and makes sure that all the prices you've been submitting are made available to all the rest of our community. The new server rollout adds a lot of new stuff, most notably it will be more lenient about what kind of submissions it will accept from our users (hopefully reducing frustration that price-updates don't go through), and it introduces support for international operation (Pounds, Aussie Dollars, Litres, Kilometres and so-on). There's also a lot of other features deep under the hood, but if we've done our job properly, that's all stuff that no-one should ever notice, except that the quality of our data should improve over time. We're pretty excited about it all, because we're planning to use this as the platform to take GasBag to the rest of the world.

This is a move we've been planning for the last couple of months, and is the culmination of a lot of work at our end, and a lot of great feedback from our awesome beta-testers.

That said, if you hit any glitches in the next little while, it's probably because of the new server. We'll be keeping a pretty close eye on it and will be rolling out fixes as soon as we can get them done, but bear with us during this transition period, and we'll try to keep everything humming along.

- James.

NY Times review

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 07:44:00 +0000

Peter Wayner from the NY Times posted a general article about iPhone applications related to cars. This covered G-Tac, Dynolicious, Car Care, Rev, Car Finder, and GasBag. You need to register in order to read the article at:

http://nytimes.com/2008/10/30/automobiles/autospecial2/30phone.html

I do still think it's a smart move to source user data and present it in a useful fashion for a free application, although it also presents its own challenges.

SMH

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 06:56:00 +0000

We just got a great article from the Sydney Morning Herald describing our collective lack of sleep :-)

http://www.smh.com.au/news/smart-phone/sleeps-for-the-weak-iphone-goldmine-for-geeks/2008/10/14/1223750013791.html

I think it's important to note that GasBag is the result of very hard work by everyone at jamcode - while it's fun for me to be a face on the page that doesn't really reflect the reality of what everyone's done so far.

And I was watching Die Hard when that picture was taken :-)

AustralianIT coverage

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 07:19:00 +0000

Mahesh Sharma from the Australian wrote a great piece on jamcode and how far it's come in the month we've been around.

http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,24486900-15306,00.html

Mahesh said "An Aussie-led Silicon Valley start-up could be one of the first groups in the world to develop an advertiser-supported business model for an iPhone application."

I think that's really key to long-term success in this market, building services that actually run at a profit while still being really useful to users.

100k

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 10:52:00 +0000

Dear all,

Well it's been quite an amazing journey since we started this a few months ago. In the 6 weeks we've been on the App Store we've had 100,000 downloads in the United States - a number I never thought we'd reach in such a short time.

The energy and enthusiasm we get from the user community is great! We're in every state of the US now, and we're hearing a lot of requests from overseas to bring GasBag there. Stay tuned for more details :-)

iTnews coverage

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 07:04:00 +0000

Liz Tay from the iTnews.com.au wrote a great little piece on GasBag coming to the Australian market.

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/85960,iphone-startup-brings-fuel-price-app-to-australia.aspx

Liz Tay noted: "Another challenge could be competition from Google, which recently partnered with petrol price monitoring company Motormouth to provide a similar Web-based application."

MotorMouth have a great system that works quite differently from our own, so I'm looking forward to seeing how both types operate in Australia over the next year or so.

More from TechNation

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 07:08:00 +0000

Kim from TechNation did an update on us, particularly with reference to other developments in fuel price mapping for Australia. Good job Kim!

http://www.technation.com.au/2008/10/02/updates-on-gasbag/

"....the GasBag iPhone app is so much sexier than the google version that on pure usability alone they should come out in front!"

Obviously we've come a long way since the initial post - 2 and a half months of development, 4 weeks on the App Store, and 75,000 users later, I think we can say we've learnt a lot. The trans-Pacific thing has been a challenge but so far we seem to be meeting that.

TechNation coverage

noreply@blogger.com (Mick) — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 07:13:00 +0000

Kim Heras from TechNation just the first ever piece on jamcode! Great article on where we want to go.

http://www.technation.com.au/2008/07/20/jamcode-rich-local-search-for-mobile-devices/

Kim noted "It’ll be interesting to see if they can do the trans-Pacific development thing and if they get the necessary pickup of GasBag to reassure them that they’re onto a winner." I guess that will be one of the key challenges for us - working together effectively despite the time and geography differences.