Quovadislive.com and your Twitter account

If you've checked QuoVadis Live!'s Support Page or if you're following us on Twitter, then you already know that QuoVadis Live! works with Twitter. For if you wanted to know "but never dared to ask", here's exactly what you can get with your free quovadislive.com account:

Have your followers automatically informed about your geoevents, how to get there, weather forecast, who plans to go as soon as you map them...
...and also the country, the city, the street (you decide!) you currently are in.

Be immediately notified via a direct message (not public) as soon as a friend of yours is in a particular area or an event of a particular type happens in one of your places.

"What do I need to do?" you may ask. Well, you just have to click a "Connect with Twitter" button in your QuoVadis Live! account settings page for Twitter.

"Do I have to give away my Twitter account password for this?" No way! We're following OAuth standards.

Try it out at quovadislive.com!

Street View now available in QuoVadis Live!

It was about time! One of our users asked us this week if it was possible to have Google Maps' Street View in QuoVadis Live! quovadislive.com. This is actually a feature we had in mind since Google released Street View for its map API but never been a top priority feature to implement as we had other work to do first. However the specific query of that user was also a call to action and using the time between two tasks we decided to finally implement it. From a "feature wish" it became a requirement. Therefore we're happy to announce Street View is now available in QuoVadis Live! along with the map view, the satellite view and the bird's eye view. And by the way, if you too have a special feature you'd like to see in quovadislive.com let us know!

What a great idea! Do you have a business plan?

According to business e-zines there seem to be companies who can get funding without even having a business plan. OK as I write that I'm specially thinking of one company in particular: Twitter which has raised at least $55 million from Benchmark Capital, Spark Capital, Institutional Venture Partners and Bezos Expeditions without having implemented a proper revenue model yet in despite of having ideas on how to generate money. So how do they do it?

Behind a company you have people and that's where one has to look first. Fact is Evan Williams, Twitter CEO, also co-founded Blogger in 1999, which Google bought in 2003. Means you have one guy there who's got experience in not only developing a business successfully but whose business has done very well with a quick and very profitable exit. That builds attraction, credibility and trust: the guy is actually capable of delivering and has proved it.

Twitter is not generating money at this stage. Actually the startup plans to use its new funds precisely to develop revenue models. Furthermore Twitter has already started in developing key business partnerships. Which means... Tada!... They've got a strategy.

As Twitter's CEO put it on December 2008: "We will make money, and I can't say exactly how because...we can't predict how the businesses we're in will work." Indeed how can one forecast what needs to be done one year from now? What credibility can you give to a document that pretends to cover at least a three years period? Specially considering that there's not such thing as a static market. Customers and competition are actually the two basic elements of any market. And they're active. Very much so. According to the Basic Rule Of All Competition "you are not smarter than either the customer or the competition". And that's why you cannot have a "roadmap to the future". In relation to competition threats Evan Williams adds: "I'm pretty sure they are (planning to), but we can't worry about that. Focus is a really big deal. Even Google stumbles on the focus issue. It's not as important as search and advertising. Innovator's dilemma works against bigger companies." Again: strategy.

So there you go. Now the question is if this works for Twitter would that work for other startups? Or do Twitter have a business plan which they haven't officially released... At QuoVadis Live! quovadislive.com we don't have a business plan but we have a pretty clear strategy to support a great idea!

Geolocation and Situational Awareness

Basically Situational Awareness is when you know exactly what's going on and where. Well with QuoVadis Live! Geotracks you'll now be able to develop your Situational Awareness by being automatically notified everytime one of your contacts is around or in one of your areas and also when geoevents of types that are of interest to you are happening in any of those areas. And best of all is that you don't need an expensive mobile phone to use the service!

By the way, we've also updated the homepage so it reflects better what you can do with QuoVadis Live! And for if you need any help, we've also completely rewritten the support page. Where are you going then?

http://www.quovadislive.com/