peeq

peeq is an app that lets you take a peek inside a place before you go

[takeapeeq]

This just got real.

­Today we began the incorporation process for peeq.

We signed up with a Clerky account, and are forming as a Delaware C corporation named Peeq, Incorporated.

To commemorate this occasion, we decided to go to Nick’s Around the Corner, the best restaurant in town, and open up a fantastic bottle of single malt whiskey.

This marks the beginning of our company’s existence, and the start of an incredible adventure for peeq.

  Stay tuned for more information!

[takeapeeq]

Alpha Test - Los Gatos

Alpha Test #1

May 20th, 2013 marked the first day that peeq was actually used in the wild! We spent several hours in downtown Los Gatos checking in at various venues and seeing what worked and what failed. One very humorous thing was immediately discovered - a bug in the code that didn’t send you to a home screen after you checked in was considered a feature by our testers. Since our users were enthusiastic and excited, they wanted to take multiple photos at a venue (which translates to multiple check-ins).

  Going through our entire process of hitting the check-in button, verifying your location, taking a picture, adding text, and hitting submit was fine for the first check-in, but not for subsequent ones. A bug in the code made it so that after taking a picture, you stayed on the submit page, and if you hit the take a picture button again it would just check in at the same place again with a new picture. This was exactly what our users wanted, and we only discovered it by accident.

  In addition, we found a fun feature of the iPhone while handling images sent to peeq. When you take a picture while holding the phone vertically, it thinks you are holding it sideways and sends the picture sideways! In addition, it calls it image.jpg by default, which might not seem weird right now, but I promise it gets interesting. When you take a horizontal picture, it rotates it the correct way, for viewing in peeq that is, but then it changes the image default name to photo.jpeg. We were confused as to why this happened, but I suppose worse things have happened while developing software for use on Apple technology.

  The last major thing to look at while observing our alpha test was that of user embarrassment. Some people were embarrassed to walk into a restaurant, not order anything, but still take a picture of the place. This isn’t a bad thing; it simply means that some people are beginning to take checking in at places more seriously. Stay tuned for more tests and updates to peeq!

[takeapeeq]

Smartphones as Tools

Smartphones are incredibly useful tools. The ways that they allow us to interact with our environment boggles the mind. I’d like to delve into a brief and certainly incomplete list of what smartphones can do.

Smartphones can access the internet.

 This is above and beyond the most important aspect of them, since they allow us to connect with virtually any computer remotely.

Smartphones can make phone calls and send text messages.

This feature is almost lost on some people, but they are the tool that we use to control communication with remote parties.

Smartphones can take pictures.

Enormously powerful, low light cameras with crazy resolution and shutter speed exist in most modern smartphones.

Smartphones can take video.

This is arguably more important than the ability to take pictures, because video is harder to take. A photo simply captures light. A video captures motion, light, and sound. A video also must continuously focus, and most smartphone technology allows for this.

Smartphones can detect magnetic fields.

The possibilities with this feature are quite stunning. In most smartphones there is a magnetometer, which provides a functional compass for the device. As a result, it is also possible to detect studs in walls or magnetic fields using your phone.

Smartphones can gauge distance.

By using the lens on your camera, you can effectively gauge distance by changing focus.

Smartphones can provide directions and maps.

Almost every smartphone user uses the GPS feature of their phone. This allows people to simply search for a location on earth, and the device will route the individual to the place within seconds.

Smartphones can provide traffic updates.

Many people use GPS, and since Google tracks this data, they can identify where traffic exists. Users are thus able to figure out an optimal path to their destination, by observing traffic on roads remotely.

Smartphones allow us to play games.

Most people play games on their phones, at least once in a while. Snake existed on the early versions of phones, dating as far back as the 90’s, but offerings like Plants Vs. Zombies, and Words with Friends have changed the face of mobile gaming. Words with Friends even allows people to game remotely in real time with multiple parties.

Smartphones function as a flashlight.

Even before lights were added in the form of camera flashes to smartphones, people were using their phone as a light.

Smartphones act as a security verification path.

Google caught onto this early on by requesting that Gmail users verify their accounts with their smartphones. This has since evolved into authenticator apps for multiple accounts, notably also Blizzard.

Smartphones tell time and weather.

People wear watches, but it is often hard to compete with a networked device when it comes to accuracy. In addition, weather data over time is provided instantly to a phone and on a real-time basis.

Smartphones can transfer money.

Everyone noticed this in a big way when Square released their lovely little doohickey that lets you swipe a credit card. However, purchasing applications on a phone has been around since before smartphones, when cell phone companies simply tacked your purchases onto your bill. In Kenya, there exists an entire system called Mpesa that operates on the Western Union Network. No one carries wallets anymore, they simply text money to people.

Smartphones can do math.

Any Economics student who forgot a calculator for a test can tell you that the calculator application on a smartphone is one of the most useful things in the world. I actually have a now discontinued app that fully recreates a Ti-83 on my phone, giving me graphing capabilities. This doesn’t even touch on the fact that Wolfram Alpha exists, and is accessible via the internet via a smartphone.

Smartphones can play music.

Everyone knows that Apple’s breakthrough into consumer electronics happened in a big way with the iPod. Now, no one buys iPods anymore, and everyone listens to music via their smartphone. HTC’s big play in music right now actually is attempting to play off this idea by making the claim that Beats Audio improves music in unheard of ways.

Smartphones can make music (or other audio!).

There are applications that allow you to create electronic music using your phone. You can control beats, stack tracks on top of one another, add reverb, and do many more crazy things. Tascam makes a special adapter that allows you to link an XLR microphone to your phones TRRS port, which basically means that you can have a real handheld stage microphone playing into your phone.

Smartphones can control other electronic devices.

Beyond simply using a smartphone to control your computer (or vice versa!), you can actually plug 5D Mark II or III into a phone and control it via a cable. This is fantastically useful when you want to be away from a camera, not touch the camera, or be able to take a shot from inside the picture!

Smartphones can provide wireless internet to nearby devices.

Phone companies have been trying to control this for quite a while, but the concept of tethering is by far one of the more interesting smartphone technologies. Tethering allows you to share your connection to the world with anyone nearby you, which makes all smartphone users network entry nodes for people without smartphones (but who have internet capable devices).

Smartphones can store data.

I can store pictures, video, books, or complex programs like Adobe Photoshop, or secret government databases. I don’t even need a direct connection to the device I want to transfer between, I can use utilities like Dropbox, or my web browser to transfer data.

Smartphones can track life signs.

My friend has a heart rate monitor that attaches to his smart phone that he uses to work out. In addition, a smartphone can tell if you’re drunk via a breathalyzer attachment, can track movement, and can test cognitive function via brain training games.

  What peeq seeks to do is add another tool to this list.

We really hope that people see the value that peeq can provide as a tool, and that they use it to create the peeq network. Peeq combines the camera tool with the GPS tool with the text input tool to allow you to give a powerful description of the place you are currently in. Much in the same way Google Maps tracks road traffic data, we want to help you track and share your experiences. The same way you would look at a traffic map to determine which roads to take, you can look at a peeq map to find out which places to go.

 At peeq, we don’t have any interest in selling your data; we only want to provide a real-time map of the world to our users. We also don’t have any interest in showing you advertisements, ever. At its core, peeq’s business model focuses entirely around controlling the contributions to the peeq network from businesses. We intend to allow the business to show its image of itself to users alongside the images provided by peeq contributors.

We really hope this will go a ways toward alleviating concerns that we will go the way of so many other “free” apps, that eventually wind up serving you ads or selling your data wholesale to other companies.

[takeapeeq]

Mystery Gathering in San Francisco

This morning we were playing with foursquare’s API, and we saw this

  all Concourse Exhibition Center (49e7eb2cf964a5202d651fe3) - Event Space : 32 Taqueria Dos Amigos (4a8478a4f964a520b2fc1fe3) - Mexican Restaurant : 3 Caffé Roma (4ad4f2ddf964a520d80021e3) - Coffee Shop : 2 Cluster F Studio (506f3376e4b04a8a46d7c188) - Whisky Bar : 1 Flower Market Cafe (4aec9b96f964a5205bc921e3) - Coffee Shop : 1 San Francisco Tennis Club (4a6ce8edf964a52008d21fe3) - Tennis Court : 1

  32 is actually a lot of people to be checked in anywhere on foursquare in California, so naturally we investigated. We wanted to know what everyone was doing at this place, but when we went to foursquare’s site we couldn’t find anything out.

https://foursquare.com/v/concourse-exhibition-center/49e7eb2cf964a5202d651fe3

We were still super curious, but couldn’t find an explanation, at least until we came across this website.  

http://www.sfvenues.com/events/events.html

Which in turn took us to this.

 http://festival.launch.co/

That let us realize that there was actually a pretty cool event going on, one that we would probably be interested in going to, but if we didn’t have such good “google-fu”, we would never have figured it out. It also is important to mention that we were using laptops to do this, and if we had been simply out and about using our phones, we really never would have made it this far.

Our primary takeaway from all of this was that if people used peeq instead to check in at LAUNCH Festival, we would have known all about it immediately. Maybe next year we will be there, solving this problem for the next round of people playing with our API. 

[takeapeeq]

What is it like to use peeq?

peeq consists of a viewer tool and a contribute tool. 

The viewer tool is usable by anyone at any time. It lets you see all of the cool places around you, sorted by how many people have checked in at each location with peeq. The red pins mean there are a lot of people at a place, and the blue pins mean there aren't very many. 

Checking involves the use of the contribute tool!

If you hit the big red button at the bottom of the screen, you will be taken to this screen.

This screen is filled with Lorem Ipsum, but hypothetically it will have a bunch of locations that you could potentially be at. We do a pretty good job of finding your precise location, but GPS is only so accurate. By selecting the proper place from a list, you actually help improve our odds of guessing where a place is!

After you select a place, you are prompted to take a picture. 

If you hit the big green button, you will be redirected to your camera application. Take a cool picture of what you're doing right now, and let the world know how awesome the place you are at is! We also added a textbox in case you wanted to say some context about the place. 

Your final step is to hit the smaller blue button at the bottom to confirm the submission, and then you will have "taken a peeq"! 

[takeapeeq]

peeq Origins

The idea for peeq has been sitting in the back of our minds for quite a while, and now just seemed like the right time to actually implement it.

Way back in 2010, Tyler, Andrew, and John all went to Comic-Con in San Diego together. It was a fun event, but one of the things about Comic-Con was that crazy cool stuff was happening in these random places, and there was no way to know what it was until you got inside. 

That would be fine and good in a normal situation, but as anyone who goes to Comic-Con knows, lines are everywhere during the event, and they are LONG. 

We wanted a way to know which lines were worth standing in, and Tyler pointed out that someone inside the place could just post an image of what was going on and let us know. 

Andrew laughed and pointed out that without a central database receiving and organizing all of these pictures, it would be impossible to achieve this. 

Well folks, today we actually have that database, and we've built a really cool tool to help people contribute to it. The purpose of the app is to give you an easy way to share your experience on the peeq network. 

We hope you like it!

[takeapeeq]

Error Handling

Nothing works all the time. There are constantly things that can go wrong with software like peeq, and some of the time it’s our fault and other times it is the phone or location’s fault. Recently Argo won the Best Picture Award at the Oscars, giving audiences everywhere an entertaining portrayal of a “sub-optimal decision”.

Today we unveil our answer to our software breaking down!

I present you…. Mr. Frowny Mustache Face!

We decided that since we can only do so much to make perfectly running software, we at least should make it a little fun when things fall apart. We thought that this guy looked hilarious, and that while people might be annoyed that peeq was broken, they might be at least a little happy to see this little fella every once in a while.

Alternately, you can look at an artists representation of this smiley face.

Drawn by Miranda Winterz, check out more of her cool stuff at  http://mirandawinterz.com/

[takeapeeq]

User Interface Design

User interface is notoriously difficult. Everyone at peeq has spent an awful amount of time using and trying to navigate bad user interface, and we have hereby decided that we don’t want anyone to say that about our creations. Peeq is supposed to be a tool that anyone can use to view and contribute to their environment, so we’ve put a bunch of time into making sure anyone can figure out how to use it in a few seconds.

We thought it was really important that anyone using the application could learn how it works. The first and easiest thing a user gets to do when they install peeq is view the map. We assume that no matter who you are, if you are a peeq user, you are interested in getting easy access to what all the cool places around you look like.

However, if all of our users only view the map, we quickly will run out of content for them to look at! We thought about what the best way to get people to contribute pictures to the map, and one idea immediately came to mind.

People love pushing big red buttons.

So that’s what we did. There is a big red button at the bottom of the screen that if you push it, it starts you on a path to checking in to your location via taking a picture. First, you verify your location, then you take a picture, and then *boom* you’re on the map. What you thought was important is now viewable by anyone trying to figure out something about the place you are at!

There are of course, other things that you can do with peeq, but we think the view and contribute functions are the most important. Keep reading to learn more fun things about peeq!

[takeapeeq]

peeq Whiteboard

peeq HQ now has some spiffy new whiteboards! We have always felt that a startup isn’t complete until it has its first giant whiteboard. We actually made these out of White Shower Board from Home Depot.

  Here was our magic Recipe -

4 foot by 8 foot White Shower Board - 1x

Liquid Nails - 2x

4 foot by 8 foot Cheapest Plywood you can Buy - 1x

  The recipe is simple, but I highly recommend having some large tables and heavy objects before constructing this board. The trick to having a really good, flat, fully adhered bond between the plywood and the shower board is flat, uniform pressure. What we did was lay the plywood down in a garage, put the liquid nails all over the board, focusing particularly on the edges, and then we carefully set the shower board on top. Then we immediately flipped several tables over and covered the white board with them. We set all of the heavy objects that we could find in the garage on the tables, like bags of concrete, buckets of water, and many 12 packs of Diet Coke.

Everyone loves solving problems with Diet Coke.

We let the white board sit overnight, and in the morning we performed the executive test of drawing a whole bunch of silly pictures everywhere. In all seriousness though, we immediately began drawing large software flow diagrams of how peeq functions, and immediately learned the value of having isopropyl alcohol in a spray bottle to erase things, and of having several colors of dry erase markers.

  Our next white board project is going to be creating a permanent black grid onto a whiteboard, so that we can actually sketch out layouts and possibly do some cool math. Keep reading and we will keep you posted on our exciting progress.

[takeapeeq]

Introductions

This is as good a place as any for you to meet the people behind this software project / company!

There are 4 of us that are the founders of peeq, and our names are Tyler, Andrew, Harry, and John.

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Tyler

He is a UI / UX programmer and rapid prototyper. He likes building stuff and making software to solve complex problems. 

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Andrew 

He is in charge of figuring out how to make money with peeq.

He is also responsible for answering any questions about peeq, so if you send us an email at [email protected], he is the person who will respond.

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Harry

He was a NASA scientist for many years, and is now using his extensive database knowledge to help people figure out what they should do on a Friday night.

He is also really good at pool, barbecue, and whiskey. These are the three core pillars of peeq that everything is organized around. Just kidding…. mostly.

Harry is also very security conscious. No picture of him is available. 

Have a smiley face instead. 

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John

He was also a NASA scientist for many years!

He is in charge of deployment and operations of the software, as well as writing the native applications (iOS, Android). Peeq HQ is also in his former media room.

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There are a ton of other people that are helping us every step of the way, and eventually we will give them all introductions too! 

[takeapeeq]

Welcome to peeq!

This is our official blog, and we will post updates and cool things that we are thinking about while we design the community.