Last week, we discovered we hadn’t won a prize in the final of the Apps Star Awards 2. Based on our success in previous competitions, and the enthusiastic support we are getting for our beta programme, I can’t deny there was a glimmer of hope for our entry, and a pang of disappointment when the winners were announced. There are, however, a number of positives we can take from this exercise.

The first, and one that proves the success of our online use of social media as a marketing tool, is that we received by far the most ‘thumbs up’ votes for our category. It may sound like a relatively unimportant accolade, and clearly wasn’t a key factor for the judges, but it does validate the time we have spent nurturing an online community who are genuinely interested in Woobius’s progress.

The second benefit we gained is exposure to the judges – a formidable bunch who included Mike Butcher (TechCrunch), Loic Le Meur (Seesmic) and even Robert Scoble. Each in their own way, the 30 judges exert a unique influence over the future of App trends and recognition from them can only be a good thing.

Lastly, we found the third positive aspect of entering the competition, and the one that is least obvious, came about through our response to the requirement of producing a 30 second movie to explain what Woobius Eye is all about.

You might have noticed that in previous blogs we have been asking our readers to suggest novel uses for the application. This is not because we don’t know ourselves what it can be used for, rather there are so many potential uses that we don’t believe we have thought of them ourselves. The challenge, therefore, was to condense this plethora of uses into one key message that is holistic in its explanation.

The competition schedule gave us little time to develop this train of thought and the result can be seen here. I think it’s a great little video combining the drawing skills of Bob and the musical talent of Cliff, but I wonder (and the competition result backs this up) if we have quite cracked the message yet.

What is great, though, is that entering this competition has made us think further about how we portray the Eye, and how we can condense its essence into a format that allows the viewer to instantly recognize its purpose, simplicity and usefulness. This is of course all part of developing the brand message, and if now the brief for the Eye has switched, from an emphasis on the construction industry to a potential multi-purpose tool for all walks of life, we have an interesting challenge on our hands. I’d love to hear any ideas you might have on how we should achieve this, so please do leave a message below.

(I would also like to congratulate Bob on learning how to animate his sketches over a sleepless 24 hours prior to the competition. There is nothing like a deadline to increase productivity and learn new skills!)

As this blog goes to press I’ve heard the Eye has been nominated in another award. This time it’s the MEX award – an international design competition for cutting edge mobile and multi-platform experiences. We have qualified under the category ‘innovation’ despite not yet being launched as a commercial product. Please have a look , and should you feel our nomination is worthy of a prize, feel free to show your support by clicking on the 5th star under the title.

These last weeks, I have been overly preoccupied with architects’ wages and loss of jobs, at the expense of updating our readers on progress at Woobius HQ. Now that our clocks have been put forward, the evenings are getting longer, and spring is in the air, the time seems right for something more positive: a Woobius news up-date.

At the end of February the Woobius team got together for their first ever photoshoot in central London. Construction Manager Magazine was keen to write a feature on new collaboration technologies within the construction industry, and naturally they thought of us to be the main focus. Fortunately for the rest of the team the group photo was omitted, with Bob taking all the glory in a full page, full figure shot (My, what a handsome chap!). Bob uses the article to discuss the merits of low cost tools such as Woobius and to introduce our new app, Woobius Eye, described by Paul Wilkinson as ‘taking mobile collaboration to another level.’ Have a read, it’s interesting stuff.

Out of the blue another article hit the web, setting the twitter-sphere alight. Our thanks go to Whitson Gordon for such a positive review of the Eye on Life Hacker. The concept seems to have made a mark and it has been fascinating watching news of Woobius Eye spread around the world. (A quick search on twitter suggests the article has now reached Japan, via Russia yesterday!)

As we might have expected, sign-up for our Woobius Eye beta test has been incredible, with many more interested parties than expected. These include some big names in the construction world, including Zaha Hadid’s architectural practice. No doubt trying to explain the position of a shadow gap detail on one of her twisting, fluid amorphous signature buildings will become a great deal easier with the introduction of the Eye.

Our feedback request has yielded some interesting responses. We have taken on board suggestions for additional features and been pleasantly surprised that people have understood what we are trying to achieve. Key uses we are hearing time and time again include commenting, coordinating, brainstorming, snagging, and collaborating. One future user hits the nail on the head…

Another says,

Of course, some people have less serious applications for the tool and would rather ‘play Pictionary with friends whilst on the bus’ or even ‘plan ideas, screw with employees and other random things!’ but the joy in this is that it reveals the extraordinary potential inherent in visual communication.

I will sign off with a great little clip we have made to describe the Woobius Eye in less than 45 seconds. The animation is from the pen of our very own Bob Leung and the music is courtesy of fellow Woobian Cliff Rowley.

Like most men I know I hate shopping and will do my utmost to delay a trip into town. When new clothes become a necessity I go to one shop and buy everything I need for the foreseeable future. Speed and efficiency are my priorities and woes betide the eager sales assistant who tries to offer their advice.

My lovely girlfriend, on the other hand, sees shopping in an altogether different light. It is a drawn out process of trying every shop and every combination of garment to find the right look. It is not a chore but a day out to be enjoyed socially, which invariably means me trailing her around heaving high streets, offering advice on how she looks. I can manage half an hour or so but my humour is guaranteed to sour after the third or fourth shoe shop.

Last weekend was different. We were trialing the new Woobius Eye app, trying to find novel uses for the new technology. I had lost my patience somewhere on the second floor of Zara and demanded a coffee in the Nero’s down the street. We have been going out for long enough for her to know when my limits are being tested and agreed to meet in twenty minutes. She had more shoes to try on.

Off the hook and considerably more relaxed I settled down with my coffee and the papers. A gentle buzz in my pocket from my iphone awoke me from the oasis of calm and revealed an invitation from Laura to share an image on Woobius Eye. There she was in the changing cubicle a line of shoes and skirts hanging on the rail. ‘Does this look ok?’ appeared on the screen ‘What about this belt?’ ‘Looks great’ I replied, adding, with a great big arrow,’but I prefer that one.’

Amazing. I had managed to offer my constructive advice, reclining in a sofa, without having to even open my mouth. The future is indeed a little brighter.

A girl shopping is a novel use for the Woobius Eye and the mind boggles at the thought of 6 girlfriends all offering their advice from assorted locations around the world. What the story really reveals is the huge potential the Eye has in fundamentally changing the way people are able to communicate to each other by supplementing verbal communication with real time visual communication.

When one recognizes that statement the potential for use is vast. Just off the top of my head I can think of quite obvious applications in the education sector, (remote teaching), the health industry.( remote diagnosis for GP’s), archeology,(identifying objects on site) photographers, crash investigators, forensic policing, film crews, engineers on oil rigs….. You get the picture. I even have a farmer friend who intends to make it an integral part of his ditch digging programme.

Essentially Woobius Eye benefits anyone who works in ‘the field’ and needs to share data, either for expert advice, or approval of a decision, with a head office anywhere else in the world. A natural progression of this thinking is for the general public to benefit from the expert advice of specialists wherever they may be. I can imagine a large utility company using it as part of their customer support service.

My boiler, for instance, was playing up recently and I had a lengthy and at times incomprehensible chat with a gruff northern engineer who was trying to sort the problem out. I couldn’t really understand his instructions and he couldn’t understand my inadequate description of the problem. Had we both had Woobius Eye to hand we could have cut the conversation to five minutes.

Woobius Eye clearly has a multitude of uses in every sector of life one can think of. Our problem is we don’t believe we have thought of all them. The list is long, but could be longer, so if any you can think of more applications for the Woobius Eye please do get in contact and post a message below.

In terms of communication the telephone is surely the mother of all modern invention – the first true instant message, shrinking the distances between people to near irrelevance. But even a century after its invention, and as ingrained in our lives as it is, a telephone conversation is still not a very natural experience. On the telephone we can’t illustrate and emphasise with gestures (though occasionally we find ourselves trying), we can’t pick up a pencil and sketch something in seconds that might otherwise elude explanation.

The digital age has brought us lots of wonderful tools to bridge the gap, such as webcams, screen sharing, and online meeting rooms. But a virtual meeting invariably begins with a time consuming process of registering accounts or remembering passwords, exchanging addresses and sending invitations, and so we tend to reserve these for more formal arrangements.

We wanted to build a tool that could reclaim some of the power of visual communication and enable us to talk more naturally. A tool that could be used impromptu (even mid-conversation) without distraction, that doesn’t care how your network is set up, or what firewall you’re using. A tool so simple that our Mums could use it. Honestly, those were our requirements. And so I’d like to announce the public beta of Woobius Eye.

Woobius Eye: As convenient as pen and paper

Woobius Eye lets you point and draw on a shared canvas as convenient as pen and paper. It’s firewall friendly, platform friendly (almost, we’re still ironing out some bugs), requires no setup, and you don’t need to register. Oh, and it’s free!

To learn more, please take a few moments to watch our introductory video.

Woobius Eye is by no means a finished project. It’s a work in progress, an experiment if you will. But we love it already and use it extensively in house (Bob’s Mum uses it too!), and we’d love for you to try it out and give us your feedback so we can make it better.

We also have plans to go mobile, with an iPhone app already in development and Android to follow. If you have an iPhone and you would like to take part in the beta programme, please go to the Woobius Eye homepage and click the “Register for interest” link.

Enjoy, and let us know how you use Woobius Eye!

Pointing is an fundamental, intuitive part of communication. “Which cable do you mean?” “This one.” “Ah, I see.” It’s so much easier to convey certain things when both parties are not only looking at the same thing, but can see what they’re each pointing at. A picture is worth a thousand words, but a finger on a picture seems to be worth a whole lot more.

As an architect, I often find myself on site, looking at a problem (say, a misaligned window). I’ll call my colleagues back in the office to try to resolve it. Often, this is a frustrating process: I seem to spend more time explaining the problem than solving it, and sometimes it’s tempting to say “Forget it, let’s wait until I’m back at the office and we’ll discuss this in person.” Emailing a picture of the problem helps, but it’s still painfully slow and unintuitive, without the ability to point at the picture. “Which cable do you mean? The second blue one? Counting from the left? And you’re saying the third bend is wrong?”

It’s like trying to eat with your hands tied behind your back.

What if…?

Naturally, technology can solve this. In fact, this is already largely solved where desktop-to-desktop collaboration is concerned, thanks to tools like desktop sharing applications, Skitch, and a thousand others.

But on the move, this is still a problem. The obvious next step is to bring this collaboration to the phone that we carry with us at all times. Why shouldn’t it be possible to point at something while talking on the phone? Why shouldn’t we be able to take advantage of this incredibly intuitive means of communication when we’re away from our desks — on site, on the move, or, god forbid, on holiday.

This is exactly what we’re trying to do with Woobius Eye. See below for a short sneak preview of how we see it working.

Calling for beta users

We’ve started development on Woobius Eye, and are now looking for beta testers. There are 50 places available. If you would like to be the first to try out Woobius Eye, drop us an email at eye@woobius.com. Please include, in the email:

• Your name and company
• How you intend to use Woobius Eye

There are only 50 places available, so be sure to email us now to avoid disappointment.

What can an iPhone do on a construction site? Most people only use them for checking email, but I think that there’s something much bigger coming than just allowing people to indulge in their Crackberry addictions while wearing a bright yellow jacket and a safety helmet.

1,001 rooms, 10,000+ drawings

Five years ago, I was working at Foster + Partners on the refurbishment of Her Majesty’s Treasury in London. It was a vast project, with over a thousand rooms and nearly three thousand doors, every single one different because of the building’s complex arrangement and history.

All this work needed to be checked. Were all the light fixtures in place? Was the correct door installed (or removed, for that matter)? Were there any other issues? Taking all the drawings with us to each room to check that it matched the requirements would have been difficult (picture dragging a trolley of large drawings after you room after room, through several floors). So we did the opposite – we took the rooms to the drawings.

Taking the rooms to the drawings

Her Majesty’s Treasury Photo by chaserpaul

Because of this vast complexity, F+P spent the resources to develop a custom Microsoft Access database that could be used to record the state (or absence) of each of those innumerable fixtures, to track the progress, make notes of problems, and take pictures for reference and illustration. The data (in the form of drawing schedules) was already available electronically, so it just needed to be pulled together and integrated into a single screen that could tell you what you should be checking in the room you were in right now. This was basically a primitive version of BIM (Building Information Model).

We used to spend hours each week combing through the building’s Arabian Rooms, examining its thousands of doors, and snagging the details of each room on a tablet computer running our then state-of-the-art Access application. Back then, tablet computers were the latest and greatest, the “in” thing that was going to revolutionise the industry and bring it into the 21st century. The way I saw it, it was a huge, hot, heavy and power-hungry monster that I had no desire to lug around if I could avoid it.

And yet, to the annoyance of the contractor, we did carry it with us, dutifully recording everything from the absence of light bulbs to incorrect door numbers, snagging every little thing that was not perfect to the Foster standard. We put up with it because it was immensely useful and saved us countless hours of paperwork, and because for this particular project it was simply not possible to do it any other way, due to the building’s complexity.

This was five years ago.

A heavy burden Photo by Akihabara News

The revenge of the monster tablet

Considering how useful this was, you would think that this technology would be widely used by now. And yet, the building sites that use it are still rare. In part, this is because most projects can’t find the budget for that bit of work to create the snagging application. But the greater issue is the impracticality of carrying that laptop around.

Today’s tablets aren’t so huge and monstrous anymore, but they’re still a pain on most building sites, particularly since they seem to have the uncanny ability to sense when you’re halfway through your site visit and promptly run out of battery.

It doesn’t have to be this way, of course. Smart phones can perform all of the snagging functions of the tablets of yore. Better still, they are much less bulky, they rarely run out of battery, and they can easily integrate photo taking (the Treasury tablets didn’t have cameras, so we had to take the pictures with a separate digital camera and write down the file name into the tablet).

And yet, it seems no one has yet built this snagging application. Perhaps it’s because powerful, useable, wi-fi-connected smart phones with large screens are only just now becoming popular and mainstream enough to warrant it. The iPhone has also shown us that even complicated applications can present a simple, easy to use interface on a mobile device.

What it would look like

You get a call from a potential client. Your phone in your pocket, you go over to the site to meet the client. You create a new job on your phone and start taking pictures and making short verbal notes attached to the pictures. Back in your office, you can then take the time to evaluate the job properly with good information.

Later in the project, you’re doing regular site visits to inspect progress. You spot something going awry, so you take a picture and record a note “There’s a crack in the concrete, and the wrong window is blocked.” This is automatically synced and recorded back in the office (perhaps on a repurposed monster-tablet) and forwarded to the contractor. At another visit, you can simply load up the snag, check that this has been fixed, and mark it off. No need to carry a big folder or have to remember a thousand todo’s.

Once the project is at completion, you’re inspecting the site prior to signing it off for your client. You walk into a room and tell your phone where you are. It brings you a checklist of door handles, light fittings, fire alarms and window requirements. Can you sign off the room? Almost. There’s a light fitting missing and one of the doors has the wrong handle, again. You record them as before and move on, safe in the knowledge that the contractor will hear about them and maybe even fix them before your next visit.

Is this realistic?

To get this sort of tight integration, you’re going to need applications, both on the phone and back in the office, that are specifically tailored for architects. But you don’t need any new technology – all of this is perfectly doable with today’s hardware and with fairly unchallenging software (it’s not rocket science, and it’s all been done before). At the beginning, maybe only large practices will be able to afford this. But over time, I think software companies will look into developing this software and selling it more widely.

The smart phone is going to play a massive role in the industry. Within the next two years, we’ll start seeing a wave of smart phone applications tailored for the construction industry. And if other people don’t do it, maybe we’ll start doing them ourselves at Woobius.

What role do you think smart phones will play in the construction industry? Please post them below.