The Jamboree Party!

Last night we had our Jamboree Party and it was good fun!

I spent a good part of the afternoon walking around on the Jemaa el-Fnaa asking travelers to join us for our party to share their ideas of what the ideal travel guides should be like. Even though I sometimes felt like I was a Moroccan tout trying to lure people to come and eat at my restaurant, it was actually very interesting. Just talking to these travelers, explaining what we were doing and asking what they used as a guide book was like a mini field research.

Each and every one of them had bought books (Lonely Planet, Guide du Routard were the most popular). Most of the them had not considered the option of downloading a travel guide to their phone because they were not aware that there were guides for places like Morocco. "I know there are guides for London, but I didn't know they would exist for Morocco," one person said. When I showed what our app was like and what they could do with it, everybody said it would be useful for their trip (but maybe they were just being polite). They mentioned offline maps, restaurant reviews and price indications for transport as things they particularly liked in a travel app. One person had searched for offline maps in the App store but had not been able to find one for Morocco.
And yes, yes, yes, one traveler had actually used Triposo for her trip (and liked it!)

Then finally we had our party!

The Triposo team at the start of the party

Even though it had started to rain and the restaurant was a bit of a walk from the square, some of the travelers we had invited actually showed up. So we did a little travel quiz and gave away Triposo t-shirts to the winners as well as the losers.

The contestants in round one of the quiz

Jamboree Party

We're throwing a little party in Marrakech to celebrate the fact that we're having such a good time here.
If you happen to be in the neighborhood, drop by. The party starts Thursday at 20:00 hours and we'll keep you posted on where it is.

First launch from Marrakech

It's official: the first Triposo product launched from a rooftop terrace in Marrakech is here. Just watch us launching it - Jon, the second from the left, is pressing the launch-button.


Just minutes ago we published the website where you can see all the places where you checked in with our app from the rooftop of the Riad. You can see the checkins I did here: http://checkin.triposo.com/c/richardosinga

Even though the website is working, you need the new version of our App which isn't available to the public yet for your checkins to show up on the site. Luckily, we set it up in a way so that it will work automatically once you update to the new app - even the links from Facebook that now land on a place holder page will be working automatically.

Our office

During the Jamboree our office is located in Riad Linda, an old Riad in the Medina of Marrakech. To get there you go into the souks from the Cafe the France follow the Dabachi street until you pass the mosque. There you take a turn right and end up in a very narrow street. When you smell a lot of cat pee you take another left and end the very end of an alley that's so narrow we need to walk in line there is a small door.

As an office, it's about as cool as they get. We sit around a large table in the patio, which is completely filled with cables, laptops.

There's one draw back, however...

Yup, that's a bird shit on a Mac Book Air

First night in Marrakech

Marrakech is famous for many things. The daily spectacle of the main square. The beautiful backdrop with the snowcapped Atlas mountains. The hard haggling salesmen of the medina. But not for its bars. And last night we happened to be looking for one to have a few beers, so with our Triposo apps in our hands we hit the town.

 Some rights reserved by Wrote

Our guides lists only a handful places to have a drink in Marrakech. So we decided to go for the Maimounia, the famous hotel where Winston Churchill used to down his highball. Off course Winston wasn't wearing tennis shoes and we didn't know about the dress code of not wearing tennis shoes... On our way to the next place we stumbled upon Marmara (not in our guide) - we went down to the basement to have a beer. The Karaoke fun had just started. We're sorry to report that we took part in the singing: Douwe and Richard did their own personal version of Jaques Brel's classic Le Port d'Amsterdam.

The last place we went to was Narwama. It's certainly a nice place, with a sort of a fire fountain in the middle, but the beer is on the expensive side there (our guide did warn us here though, but the adjective slightly wasn't totally justified we feel). So we headed back to our Riad, where luckily we had a whole tray of beer waiting for us.

Our take away from our first night out is that adding places (bars) to our guide would be cool functionality to build during this Jamboree. We'll be scouring the streets of Marrakech for better places to have a beer at night and if we find any that are not in our guide (like the Karaoke place) and that deserve to be in (unlike the Karaoke place).

Ducks and pigs and chickens call: Jamboree!

... and the Jamboree is taking us to Marrakesh!

We'll be brainstorming, mocking stuff up, designing and coding long hours in this amazing city, just a few blocks away from the main square, where the bears dance, story tellers of all stripes whisper their ghost stories and orange juice sellers make fresh juice for just a dime or two. Just imagine us on the rooftop terrace of our Riad, laptops on our lap, where they belong), a cup of sweet Moroccan mint tee at arms' length. If this doesn't inspire us to build great stuff, than what will?

Facebook Places and their coordinates

To make our travel guides we crawl a number of sources for travel information. The next step is to match the points of interest from these different sources on each other. This is quite complicated. OpenStreetMap may call the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art "SF MOMA" and wikitravel may call it "SFMOMA" - our job is to find out if they are talking about the same thing. We do this both for open content sources as well as copyrighted sources, such as Lonely Planet - but for these last sources we don't use the actual content of course, we just use them for reference.

An important element in the matching process, is the location. Different sources give different locations for the same pont of interest, of course, but they shouldn't be radically different if they're really talking about the same place.

If we look at how far the coordinates from a sources for its points of interest are from the coordinates of OpenStreetMap we get the following overview:

Source	Average distance to OSM
TripAdvisor	65.8 meters
Facebook	43.8 meters
Lonely Planet	51.6 meters
Frommer's	75.7 meters

As we see the distance is smallest for Facebook - which means the coordinates of Facebook places are more like the ones found in the OpenStreetMap than in any of the other sources. So we thought let's have a look how many points of interest have a distance that's under 1 meter. In other words: which percentages of all points of interest have the same coordinates. We don't need a table for this. The answer is 15% of all Facebook points of interest have almost exactly the same coordinates as the OpenStreetMap. For other sources this is under 1%. Wow. You can hardly call this a coincidence.

Foto CC by Roger and Renate Rossing

For a moment there we thought that Facebook was copying OpenStreetMap coordinates (which is allowed) without crediting the OpenStreetMap (which is not allowed). But before making any (wild) accusations we dug a bit deeper. We looked at how much the coordinates matched in different countries. And it seemed that most of the difference we saw between Facebook and the others was explained by one country: the United States. In the US alone a whopping 37% of the coordinates of Facebook were exactly the same as the ones found on the OpenStreetMap.

If Facebook had really been using OpenStreetMap to seed their Places database with good coordinates, why had they only done it for the US? There had to be a better explanation. And there is. Unlike any of the other sources OpenStreetMap actually shows where coordinates come from (they don't make them up either). We checked some ten points of interest that had exactly the same coordinates and found all of them had one single source: GNIS So both OpenStreetMap and Facebook use GNIS for their location database.

And GNIS is free to use, for all, without the need to mention where it's from. It also explains why every single church in the US is on Facebook Places - it's not just because Americans like to check in every Sunday morning.