TagSpot Blog

When I decided to turn TagSpot into a startup project and brought Eric on board, our original plan was the following:

1. Build a prototype
2. Write a business plan
3. Seek investors with prototype and business plan
4. Build the real product

The first step was an easy one, we had it completed in about 3 months. And then we started to write the business plan, which was much harder to us than it first seemed: having to project yourself 3 years in the future when all you have is a technical expert background and a prototype is very hard. Whether we liked it or not, business is a whole world in itself and trying to understand what investors need to make a decision is a very tough job.

So after 2 months of trial-and-error, we realized that writing a business plan was the standard way, but not our way. Strategy number 2:

• Build the real product, without investment so on our spare time
• Write a business plan with information gathered around our first beta released
• Seek investors
• Keep going

The main problem with this second approach was the “spare time” part. We thought we could work after hours, we thought we would gather often during the week and at least once a week. But it didn’t work. Because we all have very busy lives and bringing money in is an important part of our lives so we managed to meet once a week and we didn’t move forward a lot inbetween. At some point it became clear that we needed an extra-boost, some time free of any day job to actually work on our product full-time. And to do that, we needed money! Back to starting point? Chicken-and-egg? Not really…

We started to look for an early investment solution. In the US, there is YCombinator. They give you a few tens of thousands of dollars based solely on a short presentation to get you from the idea to the first version. But we are not based in the US, and we don’t want to move since our best market is Europe. So we looked for a European equivalent, and we found better than that: SeedCamp.

SeedCamp is a three-step early investment program:

1. You fill in the application form, a set of interesting questions about your project, what you want to do, etc.
2. Based on this application, they select 20 teams to spend one week in London networking with all sorts of interesting and talented people and presenting your project and learning plenty of stuff.
3. At the end of this week, they select 5 teams who get 50.000€ (against 10% equity) and spend 3 months in London to build the product, write a business plan and get ready for the big jump.

This is exactly what we needed. So strategy number 3:

• Get early investment
• Build the first beta release
• Write a business plan
• Keep going

Aaaaaaaalleluiah!

Now, if we get to the final 5 (BSG fans, this is not what you think!) of SeedCamp, we should have enough money and time to build our product, and now that Fabien has joined us to help us write the business plan, virtually nothing can stop us from conquering the world! Well, nothing except ourselves…

We’ve submitted our application form yesterday, now we’re waiting for the results and in the meantime, we keep working on our product. The results of this first step should be here in 2 weeks from now. Hopefully we can get to the SeedCamp Week, and then it’s the Success Highway :oP !

Having a strategy is not difficult, accepting to change it is much harder, but it seems necessary if you want to find the right one.

We needed a reusable mapping component for TagSpot development, and we wanted it to be Open Source so that everyone can reuse it and improve it for the general interest. There was no such library available on the environment we’re working on so… we made it!

And here comes MobiMap. MobiMap is a library that offers a reusable and customizable mapping component for several mobile platforms. Today, we’re releasing the first release candidate for version 1.0 of the JavaME version. We’re still working on porting this library to Windows Mobile and iPhone environments, and we’ll release the final version of all three libraries at the same time. Until then, we need feedback from mobile developers and we need help to improve the library.

The project website is on http://mobimap.epseelon.org
Out support forum is on http://groups.google.com/group/mobimap
Our issue tracker is here: http://bugs.epseelon.org
MobiMap’s Subversion repository is here: http://svn.epseelon.org/mobimap-javame

Special Thanks go to…

First I would like to thank developers of Pyx4Me and Microemulator, thanks to which we could develop this library on the Mac.

I would like to thank Romain Guy, Richard Bair and the whole SwingLabs Team: MobiMap component is heavily inspired from JXMapViewer Swing component.

Special thanks also go to Antoine Jacquet, aka Royale, whose blog article about tile providers really helped me a lot in understanding all the tile APIs.

And last but not least, thanks to the whole TagSpot team for their help and support.

Finally, if you want to see what MobiMap can do on your phone, you can type the following URL on your phone: http://mobimap.epseelon.org/mobimap.jad. Or if you’re just too lazy to type this URL and you know how to use a QRCode, you can use the one on the right.

Be careful though, as MobiMap will download quite a bit of map data over your mobile connection so…

No it’s not an excuse to justify my stoutness, even though it’s certainly an indirect consequence. Actually I’ve been pregnant for something like 3 years now, which makes my gestation period even longer than the elephant’s 22 months (ridiculous!). What makes it even more surprising (I mean beside the fact that I’m a male) is that I’m carrying a project.

And since I hope to give birth to it very soon, I think the time is right to start talking about it, anticipate it, celebrate it. This is the whole purpose of this blog. Here you will be able to follow the last weeks of the gestation and the beginning of the life of TagSpot.

Now of course, I’m carrying it, but as a baby is usually raised by… several parents, so will TagSpot. And I brought Eric and Céline on board to help me do just that. Céline will be the main editor of this site and will tell you everything about how the baby grows up. And of course, Eric and I will tell you a few stories here and there along the way. We might even bring more “parents” on board!

Ok, I’ll stop here with this silly analogy because it’s becoming really creepy. I just wanted to write the first episode of what will hopefully be a long and prosperous adventure.

Stay tuned!