The brand new Voice Mark App is now available on the iTunes App Store! It was previously called GeoGraffiti, but we have since  rebranded it to Voice Mark by GeoGraffiti. It has been a roller coaster ride building this new app for our users because we decided to rebuild it from scratch.  Why did we do this?  We spent many months collecting feedback from users and friends about what the new Voice Mark App should be able to do.  We ended up with a huge list of features that, after careful analysis, indicated that users basically wanted ALL the functionality of the GeoGraffiti Voice Mark Map within the iPhone App.  We were able to build most of the functionality in for this initial 3.0 release.  The features we were not able to complete will be coming to our users in the 3.1 version which is a very short time away from release.

One of the biggest complaints from users and friends was the App’s design.  It just wasn’t “sexy” or “pretty” enough.  How were we going to solve that problem?  Simple!  We decided to hire a very talented summer intern, Yannell Rodriguez, who would lead the graphic design of the new app.  As you will see in the video and screenshots, she did a fantastic job!

So let’s get right to it and start you off with a nice demo video that was produced by our friends at Scraster who also published a nice blog post about the new Voice Mark App.

Get the App Now

Key New Features

• Google Maps Mashup Interface
  • You can now create and browse Voice Marks using the familiar Google Maps interface.
• Facebook Connect Single Signon
  • To customize their accounts, users can now sign in to the Voice Mark App by using their Facebook account.  This eliminates the need to remember yet another username and password.
• Twitter Account Linking for Voice Tweets
  • Link your Twitter account and now every Voice Mark you publish will automatically update your Twitter status with a link to your Voice Mark that your followers can listen to.  It’s essentially a Voice Tweet!
• Email and SMS Notifications
  • You can configure your account to notify you when you have a new Fan/Follower and when someone responds to your Voice Marks.
• Social Sharing and Bookmarking powered by AddThis
  • Sharing Voice Marks has never been easier!  Clicking the “Bookmark and Share” button for a Voice Mark will let you share the Voice Mark using hundreds of social sharing services such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Digg, Delicious, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, and Yahoo Buzz.  You can also forward Voice Marks to your contacts in your address book via email.
• Create Voice Marks by inbound telephone call or iPhone Microphone
  • Voice Marks can be easily and quicklly created using a standard inbound telephone call (we call you and your phone acts as the microphone).  You can also create Voice Marks using your iPhones built-in microphone in situations where you want to capture something immediately (e.g. breaking news) and can’t wait for a phone call or when the phone lines are busy (e.g. New Year’s Eve).
• Customizable User Profile
  • Create a user profile with a profile pic and other information such as User Name, Birthday, and Location.
• GeoTag Voice Marks to any location
  • You have the option of using the iPhone’s GPS to GeoTag your Voice Mark to the exact spot you are standing at or to a remote location that you designate via Search/Google Maps.
• Search for Voice Marks in any location
  • You have the option of searching for Voice Marks around you using the iPhone’s GPS or Voice Marks in a different location via Search/Google Maps.

Before & After

Old Version 1 & 2:

All New Version 3:

To view more info and screenshots of the new app, visit the product page

What Users are Saying

“The new app is so much sexier!” — EJ Liao

“Voice Marks are truly powerful” — Cordell Kennedy

“Extremely handy & innovative app.  Very user friendly.” — Karina Amezaga

“A quick and easy way to share info on locations I’ve been to” — Ben Graham

“I updated and wow the entire interface is different! Not bad.” — Eva Cheung

“I love hearing real people talking about their favorite restaurants and bars.  They give me a better idea of what a place is all about” — Luis Sotomayor

“Great way to share without typing!” — TJ Thinakaran

“An awesome informative app when on the go and need to know!!!” — RC Villareal

“I love the new design and add ons to this update.  The whole voice networking concept is definitely a great tool for tourists and education.  I like how this app has the yelp-fiend effect except through voice reviews.” — Gisselli

“I love being able to hear the genuine emotion in people’s voices … something I can’t get through reading reviews on my phone.” — Stephanie Kim

So there you have it folks … our brand new Voice Mark app!  We’ve enjoyed building this and look forward to improving it in the coming months.  Please let us know what you think and if you have any suggestions for improvement.  We’d like to thank all our beta testers for the time they spent testing the app and offering suggestions.  We couldn’t have done it without you!  Thank You.

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Today, we are celebrating Ada Lovelace Day to honor the GeoGraffiti Women in Technology.  What is Ada Lovelace Day?  Taken directly from http://www.pledgebank.com/AdaLovelaceDay, “Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Whatever she does, whether she is a sysadmin or a tech entrepreneur, a programmer or a designer, developing software or hardware, a tech journalist or a tech consultant, we want to celebrate her achievements.”

Here at GeoGraffiti, we want to thank and honor the 3 women who helped bring the latest GeoGraffiti Voice Map Mashup to life.  Here they are in alphabetical order :) …

Eva Cheung

Eva Cheung, my beautiful girlfriend, has helped with GeoGraffiti from the start.  What is her role?  One of the most important roles in any user-facing technology is that of user acceptance testing.  No I don’t mean she develops test plans and test functionality according to some test matrix.  I mean REAL honest no-hold-barred user acceptance.  Basically after I develop some feature, I want honest feedback so she’s happy to offer constructive criticism.  I’m not looking for “This is a good value-added feature…blah blah blah“  I’m looking for what a user thinks and she has said stuff about some of the GeoGraffiti features like, “That’s ugly…“, “Mmmm… yeah no… I can’t use that…“, “It sucks…“, and the ever popular, “It’s just not pretty!“  While this may sound funny, it’s feedback that we take very very seriously!  After all, GeoGraffiti is for the the community so to have someone give you this sort of feedback is priceless.  This is the stuff you want and basically the root of what caused us to completely redesign the GeoGraffiti Voice Map Mashup from scratch.  I’m not the only person who thinks this way.  In fact, Guy Kawasaki, mentions a woman’s common sense as a valuable tool in producing a technology, business plan, etc.  In one of his books he mentions that if you have an idea, run it by 3 women and if they tell you “It sucks”, “It doesn’t make sense”, “I wouldn’t use it”, etc. then you’d better get back to the drawing board.  We take this to heart and really value this sort of opinion and feedback.  For your feedback and contributions, Eva, GeoGraffiti thanks you and honors you on this Ada Lovelace Day!

Gisselli Rodriguez

Gisselli Rodriguez, my youngest sister, has helped with GeoGraffiti since this past August when she moved to LA to attend Cal State Northridge.  What is her role?  Gisselli oversees all the GeoGraffiti Voice Marks and makes sure that all the data is accurate, corrects and updates our geographic data in order for GeoGraffiti to provide you, our users, the most accurate data possible, and removes any Voice Marks that aren’t exactly legal or violate any terms of service (there aren’t that many of those, but you’d be surprised with the kind of stuff we get sometimes).  Aside from her main role, she also requests feedback from her friends and ocassionally leaves a Voice Mark.  While this is just personal, I would like to thank her for taking some work off my hands when I was busy developing the Voice Map some months ago… no joke… I had a SERIOUS case of identity theft and she was able to take care of it for me within a month!  This is huge!  I had been battling this for over a year and within a month she had my record cleaned.  For your feedback and contributions, Gisselli, GeoGraffiti thanks you and honors you on this Ada Lovelace Day!

Yannell Rodriguez

Yannell Rodriguez, my other sister, has helped with GeoGraffiti since Eva told me “It’s ugly…“  What is her role?  My creativity only goes so far when it comes to graphic design so I decided I should consult someone who has a passion for this kind of stuff.  Who better than your own sister?!  It’s been a long and grueling process to get the GeoGraffiti Voice Map Mashup to the state it’s in today (yes yes I know there are still bugs… don’t worry we’re working on them :) ).  Her talent is amazing.  I’ve sat down with her countless hours just spitting out thoughts in my head about what I want and what I want to experiment with and she’s able to take this and turn it into art.  She’s also been instrumental in keeping us from making graphic design mistakes.  Much like Eva, she too will gladly tell me, “You know… this stuff just looks like @!#$” or “What are you thinking?!  That’s not the way you should do that!“  Wow… I guess after picking on her as a kid, it’s her chance to get back at me!  Ok ok… just kidding.  Again, this feedback is priceless.  We love when people are candid and don’t try to rephrase their sentences into something more acceptable.  It just makes everyone’s life easier and gets right to the point.  It’s exactly what you need when you’re working at a startup company pace!  She’s currently helping design the next version of the iPhone and G1 apps so watch out for those in the next few months!  For your feedback and contributions, Yannell, GeoGraffiti thanks you and honors you on this Ada Lovelace Day!

Don’t forget to forward this around to make sure our GeoGraffiti women are recognized today!

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It’s done…well it is for now. GeoGraffiti’s new Voice Marking map mashup UI. I guess you could say it was a team effort, but really there was only one “man” behind the man who did all the heavy lifting. He was born to code, likes working the vampire schedule, but can occasionally ignore public guidance.

No seriously check out the new UI and features at www.geograffiti.com/map

Some of the most notable new features are:

• Search – We have enabled our Voice Map @ www.geograffiti.com/map with content search.  When a new Voice Mark is published, its title, tags, address information, and category will become searchable within within a few hours.  What does this mean for you?  It’s now easier than ever to find Voice Marks.  You can type in what you are looking for in the WHAT box and, optionally, constrain the search to a specific location by typing the location into the WHERE box.  The better part of this search comes into play within a few days (it could be as short as one day or as long as three).  That is, we index your Voice Mark audio content and it becomes searchable so you are able to search for Voice Marks where a person mentions, for example, “parking” in “Los Angeles,CA” and all Voice Marks related to parking will show up.  It’s not perfect, but it is WAY better than what we had before (nothing) :). 
  
• Social features – You now have the ability to view who your fans are, who you are a fan of, and view user profiles.  This can be done by clicking on the “My Account” tab on our Voice Map.  To view user profiles, you can click on a Voice Mark’s creator link or search for users by clicking on the “Search Users” link on the top right-hand side of the Voice Map page.  You can also upload a profile picture to associate with your profile by clicking on My Account.  We have also enabled a rough version of groups support.  We are still actively working on this feature so any input on what you want “groups” to do will be greatly appreciated.
• Notifications – This feature will allow you to keep up-to-date with the latest buzz.  You can now enable notifications for “users responding to your Voice Marks” and “users becoming your fan”.  To do this, you simply click on the My Account tab and then proceed to the Notifications section.  You can enable two types of notifications:  Email and SMS Text Message.  In order to have a text message sent out to you, make sure you select your Carrier in the My Phones section.  You will now be notified when someone responds to your Voice Mark (good for Voice Marks about help, advice, dating) and when someone becomes your fan.  Some of our users will be happy about the response notifications because they want to use GeoGraffiti Voice Marks to “hook up”.  Hook up?  It seems like plenty of users want to post a Voice Mark that functions like a personal ad (…looking for woman in …. that likes dogs…).  If someone is interested, they can reply and the user will be notified and the two users can take it from there.  Pretty cool, eh?
• A “prettier” look – You may have noticed that our Voice Map and home page have been redesigned.  We wanted to provide you with a better user experience so we redesigned everything… our company logo, the voice map page, color scheme… One of the best parts of the new Voice Map is the resizable map.  That has been a complaint from users from day one.  People with huge monitors or high resolutions were not able to see a bigger map.  This is all taken care of now.  The Voice Map will now stretch to accommodate your entire screen.  If you have any comments or suggestions about the redesigned look, email us using the Contact Page.
• Social Sharing – Every Voice Mark now includes a [better] Sharing feature.  You can retrieve the direct link (just like before), send to a friend’s phone, or share via Email,AIM,etc (provided by AddThis).  Our Send2Phone feature allows you to send a Voice Mark to your friends via telephone.  You type in their number and click Send.  Your friend will get a phone call (your number as the caller ID) and GeoGraffiti will say “GeoGraffiti will now play that Voice Mark that was sent to your by your friend” and then play the Voice Mark on their phone.  There is one catch though… YOU MUST be signed in and have a verified phone number.  This is to comply with the law and to prevent anyone from sending out Voice Marks as spam to annoy other users (remember YOUR phone number will appear as the caller ID on the other person’s phone).  The other sharing feature is provided by AddThis.  This will allow you to share a Voice Mark via Email, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and a whole lot of other services you currently use.  To try this out, just click on the “Share via Email” link on any Voice Mark on our Voice Map.

• Better URLs – Aside from this being a no-brainer must-have feature, this was inspired by a friend of mine that left a Voice Mark from his iPhone for a waitress at a restaurant.  But how would that waitress listen to the Voice Mark?  Prior to this release, you’d have to link to a Voice Mark like this http://www.geograffiti.com/gu/SearchMap.html?vmid=1. YUK!  That won’t help my friend at all because the link doesn’t even fit on a napkin!  Instead, you can now link to our Voice Marks like this:http://www.geograffiti.com/X or http://www.geograffiti.com/voicemarks/X where X is the Voice Mark’s ID.  For example,   http://www.geograffiti.com/2708 or http://www.geograffiti.com/voicemarks/3114What’s the difference?  Not much.  We provide the former style for scenarios like “I want to leave a Voice Mark for a guy or girl at a bar”  The latter style is what you should use when linking from a blog, website, etc.

GeoGraffiti is platform to publish a voice message and geotag the message to a location.  It is not a private voice mail service.  Rather, every Voice Mark message is made available to the public and accessible from anybody’s mobile phone (although the GeoGraffiti iPhone3G and G1 apps make geotagging easiest).  Everybody has local knowledge, opinions, advice and warnings that the rest of us can benefit from. It’s wisdom of crowds intelligence.

GeoGraffiti offers a public voice information exchange that all generations (Gen-Y to Boomers) can relate to and use because it just requires phone, an opinion and a voice message.  Our voice2.0 map mashup website interface is most convenient for setting notification preferences, joining social groups around a topic, and searching or filtering for specific content.  The phone interface (either from an iPhone, Android G1, or direct call to GeoGraffiti at (213) 221-3802) is available when you are mobile on location.  Why voice?  It’s expressive, personable and authentic.  We have nothing against text messaging and are exploring the idea of partnering with a text messaging platform, but our focus and goal is organizing location-specific voice content.

To hear a little more about the idea and use cases for GeoGraffiti, view a TechZulu interview with Chad taken right after our launch a while back.  Note:  Chad drank enough gin & tonics that our gin bottle was 3/4 empty :) … but somehow still managed to finish the interview.

– Adrian & Chad

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