So says Today Online's Hedirman Supian! In an article on Today Online, ShowNearby has received yet another media coverage/mention thanks to our provision of AED locations in Singapore! Read the entire article here!

Did you know that each and every AED location that you see in our application is provided by users like yourselves? With a picture, the latitude and longtitude (captured automatically by our application) and a short description of the AED's location, you just might become a lifesaver one day. And this is exactly how everyday heroes are born!

If you haven't already known, there is an ongoing islandwide AED hunt competition organized by Dr Dana of the First Aid Corps to increase the number of AED locations in Singapore! So download ShowNearby AED on your Android and join in the hunt today! 

So add an AED today! You'll never know when it saves a life! =)

Jeric, our resident singer songwriter based in Taiwan has released another MTV! We liked this one every bit as much as the first ShowNearby MTV. This time its a cover of a popular song known as 威尼斯的淚 (directly translated to "Tears of Venice"). Check out the video below!





We are really happy that Jeric is making waves in Taiwan and achieving much success in his musical career. To show his support, PK bought Jeric's album and has been playing it in office every day for the whole month of November. He is now renting it out at $2 per hour for anyone interested :( Luckily, we stole it while he wasn't watching :)

It's ours now!

Just over the period of a few days, we’ve received numerous feedbacks from users enquiring ‘What’s AED?’ This is noteworthy to us because our users noticed this category and showed keen interest to unravel the mystery of the acronym. Just to re-iterate, AED stands for Automated External Defibrillator. For more information, check out our blogpost entitled ShowNearby AED featured in the USA!

ShowNearby’s collaboration with First-Aids Corps clearly will continue to play a vital role in raising public awareness on the significance of this sensational life-saving device! 

If most of you have not already known, First Aid Corps is having their 2^nd AED Hunt Competition which already began (HURRY!) on the 31st August 2010 and lasts till 30th December 2010. Of course cool prizes are up for grabs for the Top 6 Seekers! What are you guys waiting for!? Joint the Hunt by downloading ShowNearby AED on Android and be a SEEKER to catch the GOLDEN A.E.D and make a DIFFERENCE! =) 

For more information, visit First Aid Corps' website. 

P/S: Seeker is also the position in the wizarding sport of Quidditch for none other than the Boy who Lived, Harry Potter. Speaking of movies, who’s up for the premiere of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”? It's been a long time since we last had a ShowNearby company outing...The last outing was to some fishy village in Malaysia...

On the right, we have Seeker Harry Potter for Hogwarts and on the left…..Our very own local Seeker Kenneth P emerging as the winner of the world’s first AED Hunt Competition with 31 points successfully geotagged 25 AED locations in total (10% of AEDs in Singapore)

 

Many of our partners, clients and customers have grown accustomed to our ShowNearby business cards. It is simple, plain and pretty straightforward. However, as we simultaneously ran out of business cards, we thought "Hmm...what better way to torture challenge our designer Derek, than to task him to design a new business card for all of us!".

So just one month after we put Derek through that whole fiasco of designing ShowNearby's first physical advertisement, the imperial edict of designing the business cards was delivered, received and accepted!

For the benefit of our users who may not have met with anyone from ShowNearby, here is a picture of how our old business card looked like:

Front and Back

So we dived into the long drawn out process of designing a new business card for all of us! The requirements were straightforward (we believe)! It had to be simple yet sophisticated, elegant and uncluttered but show a lot of information and it needed to have a unique style of ShowNearby! (Also, we wanted it within 3 days...)

So Derek came up with a whole bunch of designs for us to choose (probably a mistake on his part....)

Design #98101

Design #98102

Design #98103

Based on these designs alone, we had an email thread of about 137 conversations going back and forth with some people saying "Hmm...I like Design #XXXX's, front with Design #YYYY's back, could you try it out and let me see?".

However, all the above designs did not fit the last criterion which is having a unique style to ShowNearby. And then Derek made the biggest mistake of all...He came up with the following design...

Design #ALL-HELL-BREAK-LOOSE

As you can see, the major difference between this one and the previous ones was the inclusion of the mascot! That opened up a Pandora's box of requests from all over the office to have their own mascots in the namecards!

After a few more iterations, and a few more bald patches on Derek's head (constant hair pulling), the mascots found their way to the front of the cards!

Design #1: Bald Patch spotted

Design #2: Bald Patches spotted

Design #3: Pockets of hair remain...

Design #4: Minoxidil Needed!

However dear users, as we all know, it ain't over till the fat lady sings! And since we hired no fat ladies, Derek's nightmare is far from over! Seeing as how Shoby (the male UFO) is ShowNearby's flagship mascot, many other family members (like Reynard as shown above) requested for it too!

Douglas then sent the following email to Derek:

"Yes. Derek, can my shoby have a cool shade of sunglasses and maybe a tie?"

This meant one thing: Customizable mascots! Yay! And this was how it turned out...

S'up Dude!

The next email came from Daniel and it went something like this:

Hi Derek, I have simple requirements...

Can Juggy be wearing a Hugo Boss suit from their fall collection of 2009. It has thick white stripes. The tie should follow exactly that of Ermenegildo Zegna's Summer collection 2010. Red tie with diagonal yellow stripes and white borders. Make sure you accentuate the texture of the tie...it has light squarish outlines on the red base. Insert a Mont Blanc Meisterstuck pen in the suit pocket as well..

Oh a top hat plus a Blackberry Torch half opened showing up till the second row of keys of the hard keyboard goes well with the image of an executive too!

At this point, Derek photoshop-ed an old photo of us and sent it to everyone with "subtle" hints that we should probably stop making changes...

From Left to Right: Daniel, CJ and PK (Smile Guys!)

So lastly we decided that we shall just go with whatever he has done so far and just live with it. Of course, a longtime later (about 2 days to be exact), we felt Derek would probably be feeling a little better! So we decided to test the waters a little bit more and tasked him to do one final thing!

Create a facebook version for all of us!!!! And here it is, check out our facebook version of the business cards! It includes a one-liner from everyone too! :)

Cheers!

PS: We really appreciate all the effort you put in entertaining requests from all of us Derek! Wonderful job you've done for us! For that, you earned yourself free flow of dark cherry frappucino on the company!

PPS: Free flow as long as it does not exceed the volume of a Grande Starbucks cup! ;)

Introducing another fresh blood joining the ShowNearby family! Our very own first female Product Executive, Patricia also nicknamed Pat!

What do you wanna see in your product dear users?

To combat the ever increasing testosterone levels here in the ShowNearby office, we have employed a female to join the Product team! Pat will be assisting in product and project management as well as social media. In other words, she will be the online face of ShowNearby!

Some of you users might have already came in contact with her while sending your feedbacks through our mobile applications. Isn't she sweet? =) (y'all have to say yes or there will be dire consequences...)

Here's one important detail though, Pat got off on the wrong start on her first day in office because she ran up to Android Master Jose and happily proclaimed "Wow! I love how ShowNearby looks on my iPhone!". Needless to say, over the next few days, Jose has been giving her the cold shoulder. Oh well, I guess she has chosen her allegiance...

Pat also dreams of pursuing an MBA in the future and to travel around the world. However, her current motivation is to contribute her 101% towards ShowNearby!

Welcome onboard Pat!

Cheers!

Let no one tell you otherwise...

Ever since we launched our 1st mobile application on Android, we have gone with the believe of the power of free and we will continue doing so. Hence, when we launched our iPhone version and subsequently a blackberry version, we did not hesitate to choose $0.00 as the cost of the app.

Recently however, it has come to our attention that someone in the app store has written a review claiming that he was charged for the app a few days after he downloaded it for free. The only way that this can happen is if an application has in-app purchases, which as most of our ShowNearby users know does not exist in our application.

To set the record straight however, we would like to show some screenshots of our account in iTunes as of today below...

No Money for Us from 2 years ago till now!
P.S. ShowNearby has been available since 31st May 2010

No Revenue again :(

The reason we upload these screenshots is because ShowNearby takes this assault on our company's integrity very seriously and we sincerely hope that it was simply a misunderstanding on the user's part. We have taken appropriate measures and escalated the incident to Apple as well.

To all our other users, we apologize for this downcast blogpost which is a deviation from our usual happy mood here. But we needed to set the record straight. Thanks for supporting us all these while and we promise to continue doing what we do best: building useful and relevant products for our users! :)


Saddened...

When was the last time you ever played Monopoly with your family and friends? Well, it's been ages for us especially in this day and age where computer games are overtaking our social lives from FarmVille & Angry Bird to multi-player online games like WOW and Starcraft 2. Have we lost our patience to sit down for a board game? What do you think?

Fortunately, in Singapore, we are sure many of our users have gone crazy with the McDonald's Monopoly game by munching your breakfast, lunch, dinner and even supper at the fastfood outlets. The elusive "80,000 cash prize" is indeed so tempting. All you need is the rare Marina Bay tag and the even rarer Sentosa Cove tag. Our whole office has gone mad with this Monopoly collection and the average weight gain since October is about 2kg/person....

Fastfood laggards Douglas and PK started out claiming that its all marketing hype and refused to participate in it. However, 37 extra value meals later and a little bit of encouragement from the rich old man in the picture who was once a jailbird but has somehow managed to get out of jail with a simple yellow card (We're sure its possible in real life...just not sure how), Douglas and PK have succumbed to the temptation!

Guess where was this taken?

Many of you may think that the mascot is called Mr. Monopoly. But do you know his actual name? Here's a hint... He is rich, he looks like an old uncle and he has tons of bags of pennies (yup, we triple checked the spelling of this word ;)). If you know the answers, feel free to head down to our office at Siglap and we will buy you a cup of McCafe coffee =) So far we have given out about 19 coffees to users who have participated in some of our ad-hoc invitations!

Till then please do eat at McDonald's to your heart's content and we wish all of you best of luck in winning those prizes. We have Marina Bay tag with us =D, anyone wants to co-share?

We also have about 27 small fries, and 12 green tea winning tags...we figured the 12 green teas tags might be worth a Sentosa Cove, but that's just our thoughts. Wanna trade? =P

As many of our dear users may already know, ShowNearby is currently in a relationship with Sony Ericsson. To be precise, any purchase of Sony Ericsson's Xperia series of smartphones will come preloaded with an exclusive version of ShowNearby that contains additional features not available on the ordinary version! (Sorry to our other users...but we'll release those special features to you all soon enough :P)

Our dear folks at Sony Ericsson have also returned the favor by featuring us for their marketing efforts! Apart from the co-advertising and featuring us in product launches, they have also allocated space for us at their point of sales booths! Below is a picture of what the ShowNearby wobbler looks like courtesy of Derek our designer!

The ShowNearby Wobbler!

Now let's play a simple game. The idea is to find the wobbler in the following pictures taken at handphone shops located around Singapore (selling Sony Ericsson Xperia phones of course)...If you are familiar with the "Where's Wally" books from aeons ago, then let's play "Where's Wobbly"!

Handphone Shop @ Ion Orchard

M1@Paragon

SonyCentre@Ion Orchard

SonyStyle at Paragon

Starhub@Cuppage

While there are no prizes for finding the wobblers, you do have our thanks and our appreciation for playing the game! And we believe that is worth a lot more than material gifts like stuffed animals and things like that. To these readers, we say "Thanks for playing!"

If you believe otherwise however, feel free to head down to our office at Siglap and we'll buy you a coffee :)

Cheers!

PS: Sony Ericsson will be holding a workshop to help its users of the new Xperia smartphone range better understand the capabilities of their phones and ShowNearby will be involved as well! If you have recently bought an Xperia phone, do head down to Wisma Atria this saturday at 13th November to join us!

Short Answer:
No we don't :)

Long Answer:
Every since ShowNearby was founded, users have always been our focus in everything we do. From the development of our mobile application, to the way we manage feedbacks from the community, it is in our DNA to give users the best possible experience.

Recently, one of our users was pleasantly surprised that our replies to his feedback was actually done by a REAL HUMAN. The user reported the removal of a burger king location and Uncle Sam replied to the user that he likes Burger King too and is indeed equally sad and in mourning for the loss of a mushroom swiss distribution outlet.

Indeed, reading and replying to all the feedbacks from all our users is an extremely time-consuming tasks. So much so that almost everyone in the company has to contribute to the replies. So why do we continue to do it?

Poor Shoby...

Our CEO, Douglas, sincerely believes that we should take each and every feedback to a personal level, a level which our users feel that ShowNearby really values their feedback and thus giving users a sense of ownership. That belief has spread throughout the organization and is key to the way we build our products.

"If our users are willing to take time off to give us suggestions or report that the information of the place is inaccurate, we should also put in the same amount of effort or even more in our reply to express our appreciation to their contributions" - Douglas

As ShowNearby is gaining huge popularity is the mobile space, the number of feedbacks have also increased feverishly. By maintaining the stance of replying to all our users on a personal basis, it is indeed demanding but at the same time rewarding as we establish a fruitful customer relationship with our users. As we continue to grow as a company, it is very important that we do not lose sight of this vision which ShowNearby was founded upon.

For now, we would like to thank all our users who have contributed one way or another to ShowNearby, and do pardon us if we take a while to reply your feedback. We seek your understanding and patience =)

It was iPad, followed by the Tab and now it’s Playbook… Are we going back to the days where big devices are much more appealing? (Remembering the days of the old “brick” handphones”, how troublesome was it to bring around). Indeed, the lines between a laptop and a mobile device have been blurred ever since the introduction of tablets! But is tablet the way to go? I truly believe so.

With the processing power on smaller devices doubles every 6 months (based on Moore’s Law) and the upcoming push for cloud computing, we no longer need a laptop to surf the web, read our emails, do productive work or even play games as everything is available from the web. What we do need is a device with full internet connectivity. This makes tablet the best bet as the next device for the future. But whatever case, you can be very sure that ShowNearby will be there on these devices to give our dear users vital information on the go!

The first Android tablet will be arriving on the shores of Singapore on 13th November. It is none other than Samsung's Galaxy Tab. I was lucky enough to play with the device at Singtel's Accelerate 2010 and I am pretty impress by it. Here's a complete review of Galaxy Tab. With the last IT show for the year 2010 happening end of the month, we believe tablets will challenge for the hottest device of the year.

"Flash-Capable" Android Tablet :)

For the Non-Flash-Capable iPad, ShowNearby managed to steal borrow not just 1 or 2 but... 3 in total over the weekend. To the iPad Fan boys, you know what this means? ShowNearby for iPad will be coming out real soon. In fact, CJ has been working on this secret project for quite some time, and we are really excited about it. I can't really share much for now, but I suppose a sneak peek wouldn't do any harm =)

"Arriving Soon..."

Are you intending to get one soon? It would certainly make the perfect Christmas Present for us this year :D ShowNearby now accepting donations of iPads (3G or Wifi enabled will do fine. We do not look gift horses in the mouth.....but 3g is better :P)