About a year ago, we launched LocalUncle 1. We built it because we wanted to give us (and everybody else) an easy tool to figure out what was going on in the world around us. We’ve been listening to our users and realized that we were in the position to build something much more substantial. Something that would improve the day-to-day lives of millions of people.  That’s why we created LocalUncle 2:

LocalUncle makes your life in the city easier.

Cities are crazy. They’re big, complex and change constantly. It’s sometimes hard to quickly find the information, things and places you need, where you need them and when you need them. With LocalUncle, all you have to do is ask your question. That’s it. It’s the most natural way of finding an answer to your problems. Fellow users on the ground will answer. It’s like having thousands of friends all throughout the city who you can reach at the same time with one text. It’s that simple.

Brand New Home Screen

We redesigned and rewrote the entire app to make it much more intuitive and useful. We got rid of most of the buttons and menus and made it much simpler to use. You can ask a question from within the home screen about an area or a specific place simply by tapping on the text bar or the pin.

We also came up with an innovative split-screen view where you can see all the action around you as it’s happening. On the top half, you see a map with the most popular places around you. A simple tap on a marker and you can fire off your question. On the lower half of the screen you’ll see a list of all the conversations taking place within that map area. Feel free to explore the world by moving and zooming the map.

Strike Up a Conversation

A question and an answer are really just the beginning of a conversation. We made it easy for you to keep chatting with the people who answered your question. You might have follow-up questions, right? Now you can ask them, in real time. It’ll feel like texting a good friend.

You can join any conversation you want and contribute your knowledge. Our messaging system works exclusively through push-notifications because we hate emails. We’ll never send you an email with a question or answer in it. That’s why it’s important for you to allow push notifications. Don’t worry, our smart algorithms will make sure you won’t get more than one question every few days. We hate spam and certainly won’t spam you. We promise.

Powerful Search Tools For Faster Access

It’s easy to find out about stuff around you, because, by default, we center the map and all the conversations around your exact position. But what if you wanted to know something about a place at the other side of town? Would you move the map till you saw the place? What if you didn’t exactly know where that place was?

That’s why we rebuilt our search design: tap on the magnifying glass on the home screen and you’ll enter search mode. You can search for a particular place name, such as Starbucks, or a whole neighborhood or city like Soho or San Francisco. We’ll show you a list of places, neighborhoods and cities that match the keywords you entered. The higher up in the list the place is, the closer it is to your current location. It’s an easy way to quickly find any place, neighborhood or city and ask a question about it.

Why did we build LocalUncle?

We believe that people are fundamentally good. We believe that people like to help others when they need help. We built LocalUncle so we could harness this altruism and magnify it and in doing so, we end up with something that is more valuable than the sum of its parts. We believe that a more open and connected world is a better world and we do our part by allowing you to communicate freely with perfect strangers across neighborhoods, cities, countries and borders.
We built LocalUncle because we think that the world is a better place with it. I know, I know, this might sound sappy, but we really believe that. Improving your quality of life in your home city or any others you may visit is only the beginning. LocalUncle takes strangers and turns them into fellow citizens of the world. And sometimes, even friends. We are connected as a global family “ and together, we might just change the world, one friendly question-and-answer at a time.

Welcome to our family!

Available for iPhone

Thanks Switzerland, for being so awesome!

We’re nerds

We have one confession to make: We here, at LocalUncle, are huge space-junkies. No, not this type of space junkies. We’re space

junkies in a sense that me and my co-founder are both Mechanical Engineers who are into Robotics, AI and all that fun stuff. Me in particular, I remember growing up in the 80′s watching Carl Sagan, observing Saturn’s rings at age 5 through our home-telescope (with the help of my dad) and playing with a toy version of Atlantis that you could launch 30 feet high using a compressed-air launch pad. Good times! But what does this have to do with LocalUncle you might ask? Keep reading.

Borders from Space

Ron Garan is one of the few people who have been lucky and brave enough to go into space. He returned last September to Earth from a half-year long stay on the ISS. During his flight, he snapped tons of photos. He says that Earth looks usually very peaceful from up there. He took, however, one photo that made him write a great blog post and put his opinion into perspective.

This photo shows the man made border between India and Pakistan. It’s as beautiful of a photo as it is sobering. A constant reminder of humanity’s division.

He then went on to say, surprisingly, something that captures the very essence of LocalUncle

We can look down and realize that we are all riding through the Universe together on this spaceship we call Earth, that we are all interconnected, that we are all in this together, that we are all family

- Ron Garan, kick-ass Astronaut

Ron, we salute you! We’re on this ride together and we know that the social web and services like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and LocalUncle are bringing these borders down. It might not be today, it might not be tomorrow. But sometime in the future, people across the globe and across borders, will be helping each other out, without asking for anything in return. Just like family. And photos like the one Ron took will be a thing of the past. This day will come. And we’ll be part of it. Ron, we’re on it!

- Your friendly neighborhood LocalUncles

Anyways, there’s this thing called Holland Tunnel that connects Manhattan to New Jersey. Not a lot of New Yorkers know or use it, cause, who goes to Jersey? Right? But for the ones who do, it’s a constant pain to know when to cross it. It’s constantly jammed at rush-hour.

LocalUncle is here to help. Check out Caroline’s answer to the question “When’s a good time to cross Holland Tunnel?”

Depends…I use the Holland to get into the city at 4pm but use the Lincoln Tunnel to come back to NJ…the Lincoln tunnel is poorly merged from NJ which causes delays but then the Holland is poorly merged on the NY side. I check the traffic report and whatever the delay is you can always double it and find the actual time you’ll be spending.

- Caroline, LocalUncle user

Thanks for that great answer, Caroline. You are magnificent!

Remember, Screw Google. We ask humans. Have a good one everybody!

Yes, yes, I know. “Gamification” is the new cool kid on the block. Or is it already so “January 2012″? Points, badges, ribbons, medals and whatnot is being given away by pretty much every consumer app under the sun.

The scary part is that “Gamification” is very often part of an answer to the question “How will you guys grow from 100 to 100 million users?”. The most important part is to have a killer product, i.e. create actual value for the user, before you slap any sort of points or badges on to your app. Lately a few services have popped up that got their game mechanics right from the get-go: Codecademy and Turntable.fm being two of my favorite.

Boost your productivity with beer!

Now, it’s relatively easy to gamify your app. But how do you gamify your inbox? I didn’t know that I already knew until Andrew from Brainscape made me realize it. In a typical Friday afternoon banter-session in our shared office space, I was explaining Andrew how I get through my inbox, which is my worst enemy, on Friday afternoons. It’s pretty simple: For every mail I reply, I get to take one sip of an ice-cold Corona. Not the best Mexican beer in the world, I know, but today it was the one that was available. And so when you hit that “Send” button and immediately take a sip, it refreshes your mind and motivates you to dive right into that next mail.

Try it out! It’s a cool feature! It costs a little money, but is very easy to install on your desk and to use!

So here it is. And if only a single person’s productivity on a Friday afternoon goes up because of this post, I accomplished my mission.

We’re super happy to announce that we successfully won Phase I of the Swiss Government’s initiative to fund disruptive business ideas. The organization behind it is called venture kick and they chose us amongst potentially hundreds of other concepts. Thanks Switzerland! We heart you long time!

Now, let’s get back to work and make LocalUncle as cool as the Swiss Alps! We’ll see us for round two and three, venture kick!

We can’t even begin to express how awesome this is! Our very first and raw version is sitting up there next to Starbucks, Etsy, Snoopy and Superman! Somebody pinch us, please. Needless to say that we’ve seen traffic spikes the size of the Empire State Building! And because it’s so nice, here’s how it looks on the iPhone

If you haven’t downloaded our app yet, shame on you! Even Apple thinks it’s “noteworthy”.

Go grab it here right now, in real-time. We’ve heard it’s where all the cool kids hang out.

Well, what have we been up to in the last four months since our last blogpost you might ask? Answer: A lot! We retreated into our bat cave and built some really amazing stuff. Out came these three amazing things:

1. We made our vision and scope bigger. Way bigger. (oh, have we mentioned that it’s BIG?).
2. We built an iPhone and web app that teleport you through space. (no joke!)
3. We created a smart, self-learning algorithm that automatically makes our product better. (think Skynet)

Let’s have a quick look at each of these points.

Big Vision

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be able to teleport through space? Our friends over at Star Trek have been doing it since the Sixties. Jumper proved that cool things happen to you if you’re able to teleport: You get rich, you fight dangerous villains, you meet cute girls and you star in Action movies. “Anywhere is Possible”.

May be you’ve caught us by now: We didn’t actually build a teleporter that lets you physically travel through space. However, we built one for your mind! The big vision is to let you know what’s happening anywhere in the world, right now.

Vision: Know the World. In Real-Time

We give you remote eyes and ears to any place or area in the world, in real-time. Kaboom! This is big. This is really big. This is way bigger than our initial idea of “getting local advice”. We give you the ability to see what’s happening at any place in the world – in real-time – whether it’s a bar in NYC, a hardware store in Yokohama or a remote beach in Bora Bora, your mind can “go” there in a instant, have a look around and “come back”. All without even getting off your lazy armchair. How do you teleport, you ask? You do it by asking questions about these places/areas on LocalUncle. We route your questions, using our patented Skynet technology, to other users who are currently there and/or have been there recently and/or have been there a lot and/or have been to a place nearby. You’ll get an answer, from a real human being (and not a soulless machine) in less than a New York Minute. Try it! It’s insanely great!

Some really interesting use-cases we’ve seen so far from our first users:

• “How long is the line to my favorite bar, right now?”
• “Is the store, I have to go to, open right now? And do they have a particular product that I’m looking for on stock, right now?”
• “Does anybody have floss in my office building, right now?”
• “How bad is traffic in the area I’m driving to right now?”
• “How are the waves at the beach I want to go surfing right now?”
• “Where around my office can I find a healthy lunch right now?”
• “I just heard gunshots. What’s going on in my neighborhood right now?”

There are many, many more use-cases that we haven’t even thought of yet! We’re really only scratching the surface of what’s possible with our new service. Think Twitter in its early days. We give you the ability to extract the current state of the physical world, in real-time. Our system will grow into a global, inter-connected, intelligent beehive that will make humanity as a whole smarter and the world a better place. Game-changing concepts like The Internet of Things will finally have a platform to build upon. It’ll be LocalUncle.

Now, this is something worth fighting for, right? This is our dream, our vision and our passion and we won’t stop till we made that dent into the universe. Remember, we’re cockroaches. We’re here to stay.

iPhone app

Before you continue reading, grab your iPhone, open the App Store, type in “localuncle” and download our app! Go ahead, we’ll wait for you. Seriously, we’ll wait till you downloaded it. Here’s the full iTunes link: itunes.com/apps/localuncle.

Next is our super nice looking app icon. What do you guys think? Double bonus-points to whoever can guess which famous park/area in NYC we depicted. Write your answer in the comments.

Get the app and tell all your friends to get it. It’s free and still warm! The more people that are on our system the more valuable it gets for everybody.

The only two things you need to have to use our iPhone app is a Foursquare account and you need to have access to the US iTunes store.

Why Foursquare?

We chose to build on top of Foursquare because we like to stand on the shoulders of giants. They’ve done an outstanding job at getting millions of users to share their location in real-time and they’ve built a remarkable, real-time, crowd-sourced venue database of the world. We took these ingredients and added our Q&A layer and our smart question routing (Skynet) on top of it. The result is magical! We see check-ins not just as a way to tell your friends “I’m here”. A check-in is so much more if you think about it.

A check-in is an access-point to extract the physical state of the real world, in real-time

Or a portal through which you can teleport, if you want to stay in the teleportation analogy. We took the concept of checking in and added real-world value to it.

You don’t use Foursquare? Don’t worry, you can either go and sign up right now or you can wait a little bit, till we add more networks to our system.

Why only in the US?

The iPhone app is currently only available in the US App Store and the web app can only process questions about locations in the US. The reason behind it is the fact that quality and speed of answers are our highest priority. Since we let you know what’s happening right now we have to assure that answers come within a few minutes after asking a question. We’re confident that we can pull it off in the US but want to improve the product in the US first, before we launch it worldwide. Please bear with us, if you’re not located in the US.

You don’t have an iPhone and you have questions about locations in the US? Just register with your Foursquare account on our web app and start using it!

Skynet

Once you ask your question, our smart algorithms immediately route it to a handful of users who are at that place/area right now and/or know a lot about that particular place/area. This is great news for you! We do the hard work of finding the most knowledgeable users and/or people who are standing at that place right now. This means that every single question you ask will be shown to real humans and answered by those who know the most about that place or area.

And as if it wasn’t good enough already: Our system learns! With every check-in you make, question you ask or answer you write, our system gets smarter and smarter. Let’s just hope it doesn’t become self-aware and revolt against its creators.

What’s next?

There’s a lot of stuff we want to do in the coming months

• Grow LocalUncle quickly to critical mass in major US cities
• Improve the product based on your feedback (we LOVE and need your feedback! Please, keep it coming!)
• Expand to networks beyond Foursquare
• Get our hands dirty with Android
• Expand our product worldwide

Now, it’s up to you

We know that LocalUncles is going to change the world. And we want you to be part of it! Get our app, visit us on the web, follow us and Like us. Tell all your friends and help us build the future. It starts right here, right now.

The Thank You Button

We’re big on manners here at LocalUncle so our brand new feature gives people the opportunity to quickly thank those who have answered their question by clicking ‘Say Thanks’.

This feature goes to the heart of the LocalUncle brand and like doting parents we are eager to encourage an environment where our kids can play in a helpful, honest and respectful manner (and no horseplay!) Our CEO Phil Reichen decided to bring in the feature after being inspired by Gary Vaynerchuk’s latest book “The Thank You Economy“.

In keeping with the theme of Vaynerchuk’s book, the Thank You button appears on all questions that you ask so now when you  get several responses from the community, you can automatically thank each person by clicking the button next to their answer. Not bad eh? LocalUncle is all about community and we thought it crucial to include features like this one in order to facilitate positive interaction between users.

The New Notifications Tray

The other new feature is less about manners and more about appearance. Because what’s the point in manners if you don’t look good doing it right?! After some great feedback from our users on the notifications which used to roll from the top left of your page we’ve decided to revamp how notifications appear in your browser. In an effort to de-clutter the layout we have introduced a new notifications tray which we’ve squeezed into the top right of your screen between the home button and your profile picture (as above). Now when you receive a new notification the message symbol will be highlighted with a red number. KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid!)

There are plenty more new features to come so stay tuned and keep asking those questions ;)

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1. Dance.Here.Now Festival / Governors Island NY 1-4 July

Happening this weekend! Although some of the line-up are a bit, well, naff, we just love the Day 2 line-up especially with the gifted James Zabiela (sort of like the Wayne Rooney of electronic music) and Fatboy Slim. We’ll be there with bells on and if you wanna meet up and discuss the intricacies of the NY rail system or whatever (!)  hit us up with a comment on Twitter.

2. Burning Man / Black Rock City, Nevada August 29-September 5

Does bartering for cutlery, old tennis shoes or rocking horses sound like fun to you? Doesn’t sound great when you put it like that but trust us this weeklong “celebration of community, art, self-expression and self-reliance” commands repeat visitors from all over the globe and really has to be seen to be believed. Life changing…

3. Summer Stage at Central Park, NY throughout the Summer

Enjoy the hot Summer nights in NYC knocking back Bud Lights to the sounds of Talib Kwali and Roy Ayers (to name a few). Most of these events are free, which is great news, however, to paraphrase Braveheart, “freeeedom, eh, it coms att a preece” (freedom comes at a price) – the price here being the large volume of crowds :( Still, if you can get your hands on tickets you won’t regret it.

4. Electric Zoo, Randall’s Island Park, NY, September 2-4

By far the best crowd in dance music, period, with an extraordinarily strong line-up year after year, this Labour Day weekend session gathers the best electronic artists from around the planet to play the the tunes that have been sizzling on Ibiza all Summer long. We will be all over this one however a word of warning – not for the faint hearted. And another word of warning – bring an inhaler. Oh, and another – pace yourself :)

You’ve gotta love festival season…

Advice is something that should be shared. If you need any more advice just ask us.

LU

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