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This is the story of why I built the
BCycle.Me Mobile Web-App


The Background

On St Patty’s Day my girlfriend and I bought 24-hour passes to B-Cycle, which has 52 bike sharing stations all throughout downtown Denver. The very next day we both bought annual memberships. It’s completely changed our transportation method & places we now frequent. B-Cycle is like Redbox for bikes. You check out a shared bike at one station and check it in at another station. As long as you get from one to another in less than 30 minutes, no additional charges apply. They really push for short rides so that bikes are readily available and thus prevent the problem of somebody hogging the bikes so no other members could use them ($4 every 30 minutes after 1 hr of continuous use). Memberships are very affordable, too: $80/yr (on sale for $59 until 4/30), $20/wk, or $8/day.



The App

Now it’s time to scratch my own itch. Each station has about a dozen or more “docks” (which lock the bikes into the station). On average there are 5.8 bikes available per station for you to check out (I’ve been running my own stats), but at any given time there can 12: which would make the station full and thus not available to check-in any more bikes - or there could be 0: which means you’re not going to check-out a bike at this station, obviously. Therefore it’s important to know which stations you 1) want to check-out from and 2) want to check-in to. There are a few mobile-friendly options for doing this currently (including an official B-Cycle iPhone app), but they’re all terrible to use - none of them allow you to quickly understand the availability of each station. So I created my own B-Cycle Web-App. You won’t find it in the iPhone App Store or Android Marketplace - it’s simply a website you visit on any smartphone: BCycle.Me. It utilizes the latest mobile technology so it feels & acts like a real app.

Some features of the app:
  • Availability is shown by green (4+ bikes available), yellow (4 or less), or red (0). This is all real-time, you can even test it: check-in a bike, hit refresh, and watch the counter go up.
  • Bike-friendly routes can be shown from one station to another by setting your “A” starting station and “B” destination station (shake to clear directions)
  • What’s Around: after selecting a station, scroll down to see nearby businesses/restaurants

Scan this with your mobile phone’s QR reader (iPhone / Android) or simply visit BCycle.Me to see the app in action:



Over the past few months I’ve been building out sites around the daily deal space (ie. Groupon/Livingsocial). There’s been a ton of activity around these sites - new ones popping up, mergers, sites going stale, and big players posting huge losses.

I started out with a product called preVU that is a daily deal aggregator - much like Yipit - but I didn’t like how the competitors were displaying the deals nor were they showing all the deals available (specifically for Denver). So naturally I threw some PHP together and built my own which is now up at the new address since I recently sold the pre.vu domain name: Dealert.Me (http://dealert.me). The other piece to the puzzle was an alerting system. Rather than sending an email everyday with the current deal that you may or may not be interested in, I wanted to be able to get an email only if there was a deal I wanted to know about. So I built a keyword tracking tool that does just that called Dealert.Me Alerts (http://dealert.me/alerts/). It’s fairly straight-forward to use - put in your email, your location relevant to the deals, and the keywords. It will go out and check 2x per day on a nation-wide level of every deal currently available - if any of your keywords match up against the current deals you’ll receive 1 email with a list of all the deals you might be interested in.

There is a 3rd piece that is actually the most important. In terms of business, when someone says “most important” it usually means “most profitable” and this is no exception here. I license the preVU/Dealert.Me product to bloggers whose content is focused on providing deals either at a national level or for a specific city. Examples of this in action are at Mile High on the Cheap and Atlanta on the Cheap (two of my best clients). This licensing feature is a win-win for myself & my clients. The deals shown on their sites have their affiliate codes built-in to every link so anytime somebody makes a purchase through their customized preVU page they make a % of the sale (payable by each daily deal site). The deals are automatically updated for them every 3 hours, and the install code is less than 1/2 a tweet using a Wordpress plugin. If you’re a blogger or know any blogger that might be interested in this please have them reach out to me via paul@sixteenseven.com.

PROTIP: Some people might be worried about only having their email as the login for Dealert.Me Alerts as anyone could then find the keywords associated with your account - if you’re using gmail you can create your own “password” by putting in your email with a ‘+’ sign at the end of your username. Ie. username@gmail.com -> username+eiou@gmail.com (‘eiou’ is my password in this case). Using the plus sign is a built-in feature that all gmail accounts have and it will still get sent to your original email address.

An opening class act

I ended up at a Baywood show on Friday at Larimer Lounge - Baywood was amazing, as expected (check out ‘I Can Breathe Again’ for some sing-along-clap-along). The surprise, however, came from one of the opening bands out of Boulder who call themselves The Yawpers. The lead singer/guitarist rocking cowboy boots was an all-out entertainer with great talent. I picked up a copy of their new EP and thought I’d stream it here for ya’ll to hop on board the Yawp-train.

FLOW

Csíkszentmihályi identifies the following ten factors as accompanying an experience of flow:

  1. Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one’s skill set and abilities). Moreover, the challenge level and skill level should both be high.
  2. Concentrating, a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it).
  3. A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.
  4. Distorted sense of time, one’s subjective experience of time is altered.
  5. Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed).
  6. Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult).
  7. A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
  8. The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action.
  9. A lack of awareness of bodily needs (to the extent that one can reach a point of great hunger or fatigue without realizing it)
  10. Absorption into the activity, narrowing of the focus of awareness down to the activity itself, action awareness merging.

Not all are needed for flow to be experienced.

A growing TED

I’m a huge fan of TED, so I’m delighted to hear that their facebook page just reached 999,999 other fans. TED is one of those things that I wish more people knew about. Ideally, all 230 million adults in the US would be fans. They cover topics that will be sure to reach every single one of us in some way. It’s about pushing the World to a better place through individual motivation. While some speakers do cover some political topics, they manage to bring people together to find solutions that actually work. If you stay out of politics because you think your voice doesn’t count, I would invite you to pick a few TED talks to listen to and see how you feel after. They are free to watch so next time you catch yourself watching a reality show just turn it off and watch a 10 minute TED talk instead. You might just get hooked like I did.

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