Friday 15 November 2013

Weekly update - a couple of quick headline

Wow - time flies. It is nearly going home time, and I have left it a bit late - so just a couple of quick headlines this week.

There is a new version of RouteShoot out for iOS. This deals with a minor bug we had when iOS-7 came out, and the UI has been updated to make it "look and feel" more like the standard Apple applications. We have also included a couple of in app purchases. The first will allow users to "clip" their videos - you can now edit out any unwanted lead-in (or out) bits of video, or you can select just the most exciting part of a journey to upload. The second allows you to record more than 5 minutes of HD video. This is for those of you who just must have HD - and are happy to deal with the larger file sizes and longer upload times.

The second headline is that our MD has flown over to Las Vegas to meet our biggest customer Premier Utility Services at the Amazon AWS re:Invent conference. No feedback yet - other than he is going to breakfast before his first meeting. Look out for more news next week.

Off now for some quality X-box time. As ever, have fun this weekend.


Friday 8 November 2013

Weekly Update - Premier progress

For those of you keeping an eye out for progress with our business applications, we thought it worth giving an update on our biggest client Premier Utility Services . Back on 11th October, we reported that they had 100 active users and over 8,000 videos had been uploaded.

Well, less than a month on and their roll-out has continued at pace. They are up at around the 300 user mark and the video uploads have topped 57,000. Wow - well done guys.

Needless to say, we at RouteShoot are all pretty pleased. This really shows how robust our technology is and how, without a single face-to-face meeting, the power of the internet can really be put to good use - provided you have a good and solid product in the first place.

All our server-side software was installed on Premier's US-based cloud servers from the UK and now RouteShoot is being used all across the US. Sometimes technology is just brilliant.

Have a great weekend.

Friday 25 October 2013

Weekly Update - interest seems to be picking up

Hi again. Just a short post before we all dive off for a half-term week here in Exeter.

A couple more of our meetings with potential business clients seemed to go very well this week. At one of those meetings we hadn't even really gone to talk about RouteShoot as the main agenda item; but as soon as they heard that we had a smartphone app for capturing GPS-referenced video it became the first thing they wanted to hear. Needless to say we were delighted to oblige.

We have also this week come to the attention of the local UKTI (UK Trade & Investment) department - a government body that works with UK-based businesses to promote their expansion into international markets. It is early days yet, but this might help us to undertake more commercial activity outside the UK. So watch out if you are anywhere non-UK, we may be coming to a country near you soon.

Finally just a quick note to say we have updated our RouteShoot for Business website to cover RouteShoot for the Highways Industry. A little dry if you aren't working in the highways sector, but a jolly good read if you are. Please click here to visit the new web page.

Keep having those good weekends!

Friday 18 October 2013

Weekly Update - Diagon Alley

After an extensive catch up last week, just a short post this...

As luck would have it, someone actually hosted an innovation workshop pretty locally to us - for a change. Always on the look out for new ideas we headed out to the Exeter Phoenix; the same place we saw the Damned a couple of weeks ago (see previous post).

This time we were in the daylight, so took the opportunity to shoot a little route. Below you can see Gandy Street in Exeter - allegedly the inspiration for Diagon Alley in the Harry Potter books.

One to share with the kids and the young-at-heart HP readers.

Have a good weekend everyone - we hope your weekend weather forecast is better than it is for us in the West Country.

Friday 11 October 2013

Weekly update - or perhaps more appropriately - a catch up


Capt. Sensible and Dave Vanian
- not endorsing RouteShoot
Ok, so our weekly updates skipped a couple of weeks; but don’t worry we haven’t disappeared – it’s just that a couple of other things came up.Two weeks ago it was our love of music that got in the way. A gig at the Thekla in Bristol seeing 65daysofstatic (gosh it was hot in that boat), followed rapidly by another at the Phoenix in Exeter seeing The Damned meant we just didn’t have time for a Friday blog. Last week it was a client meeting which meant an 11 hour day out of the office, largely playing with the traffic near the M4/M5 junction. Such are the highs and lows of living in the West Country!

So, what has been happening? Well, there are a few pieces of exciting news, the main one being that the Premier Utility Services site is now up and running and over 100 users are actively using the system. They have uploaded over 8,000 videos already! This is a really brilliant demonstration of how quickly RouteShoot can be rolled out to a company’s workforce, how easy it is to use and how robust everything is. We have had hardly any support calls – even less than we anticipated to be honest. I know there has been a lot of effort put in by the guys at Premier too, so I think we need to pass a “well done” on to them as well.

We have also delivered the RouteShoot web and server-side software to a Shire County customer this week. This will manage the video data captured using another system, GeoVideo, which is supplied by our sister company Wilson Pym May Limited. GeoVideo is the forerunner to RouteShoot, developed by us before it was possible to get HD video and GPS from a smartphone. As an enhancement for them we have added features which will allow the GeoVideo files to be launched into a RouteShoot web page from ESRI’s ArcGIS - which is an essential piece of integration for this customer.

We are also very excited about one further international opportunity, and we have been skyping with some guys over in the Far East over the last couple of weeks. There is also a meeting lined up in the UK next week where we are getting to talk to some JV partners; so we get to demo to about 3 distinct companies all at the same time – result!

That’s all for now. Have a great weekend everybody.

Friday 20 September 2013

Weekly Update - iOS7

This week in the RouteShoot village, the jury is still out on iOS7. The luddites, the “don’t fix what isn’t broke”, and the “I’ve just got to grips with iOS6” among us seem rather anti, while the “all progress is good” and the “come on - embrace the new” are pro. However I think we’re all thinking the icons and white backgrounds are a little retro.

One not-so-good thing about iOS7 is that it now handles map positioning on the screen a little differently, so something that wasn’t an iOS error before now is! This has led to a minor bug with playback in some (not all) existing RouteShoot files, but we are already on the case and have a fix for it. We are just looking now to wedge in a couple of feature upgrades that were already in the pipeline – just some minor of bits of debugging and additional testing to do – and we’ll issue an update. We would rather get it all in one release than throw ourselves into the Apple approvals process twice in quick succession for the sake a waiting a few days.

So if you have upgraded to iOS7 and have noticed a few of your old videos won’t play, don’t worry, we should get the upgrade out in the next fortnight. And everyone should be able to pick up the new RouteShoot features too, whether upgrading or sticking with iOS6 for the time being.

Have a good weekend everybody.

Friday 13 September 2013

Weekly Update - bye-bye summer, at least I RouteShooted some sun

Well, the holiday season is over, the rain falls, the kids are back at school, the traffic is a nightmare, and all the parking spaces are gone. Bye-bye British summer time.

Still, with RouteShoot at least I can look back on my holiday and remind myself of the warm sunshine and clear blue skies (not to mention lack of congestion) I was greeted with when I took a short break in Portugal...

Hooray - Portugal; that is yet another Western European country ticked off as RouteShoot output streams in from across the globe.

Despite the gloomy weather and traffic situation, things on the RouteShoot for Business front continue to look rosy. New interest from more customers, and we will be setting up further meetings in the next couple of weeks. Watch this space!

Friday 30 August 2013

Weekly Update - business and (p)leisure

Though it has continued to be a little quiet in our local office, things are progressing well on the RouteShoot for Business side of things. Our major client Premier Utility Services is almost ready to start using the product for real (moving forwards from some pretty intense testing), and we are in the process of setting up their server side software as I write this. Another customer - one of the UK's leading service providers - is also on the verge of going live with a smaller, contract-specific install.

We are all really excited about working with these 2 new customers and are gearing ourselves up for a few extra support calls as we introduce our new users to the product. Based on our experience on the non-commercial side of things (where we are fast approaching 9,000 downloads) we aren't expecting too many problems, but we're sure there will be one or two extra queries coming in.

On the leisure side of things we are really grateful to the guys at Heliski.com for allowing us to guest blog about RouteShoot on their site. Click here for a direct link to the blog page. If high-octane adventure is your thing and you're planning a trip to Canada (or if you live there already) this looks like the ideal website to visit. And make sure you check out some of the videos on their site - the amazingly beautiful locations are well worth taking a look at even if heli-skiing isn't for you.

Heliski.com is the one stop shop for all things heli-ski. They offer free and unbiased recommendations and expert advice - and they cover every heli-ski location in Canada.

Friday 23 August 2013

Weekly Update - festivals and holidays

Hi again. It has been a little quieter at RouteShoot Ltd this week. Holiday season is upon us here in the UK, and many people are probably gearing up for the bank holiday weekend ahead already. At least that has meant that getting a parking space has been pretty easy this week!

As lovers of fun, sun and music here, we have dug out a little bit of footage from the Glastonbury festival that one of our users has agreed we can share with you. There is not too much going on in the video, but proof at least that it wasn't raining this year! And if you've been to the festival before, just seeing that metal walkway, the distant flags and the huge number of multi-coloured bins will trigger fond memories.

This weekend sees the Notting Hill Carnival and the Leeds and Reading Festival taking place. (Some of us here are old enough to remember when it was just the Reading Festival and everything was rock and metal).

So a new challenge dawns - can anyone get some better festival footage? If so we will share it here (with your permission).

Have a great weekend everyone; the kids will soon be back at school, the early morning commute will be congested again, and it will be early starters only getting the parking spaces. Make the most of it!

Friday 16 August 2013

Weekly Update - a great week for RouteShoot

We have had an incredible week here on the "RouteShoot for Business" side of things. Usually we like to keep this blog a bit more light-hearted, but with a major breakthrough in the last couple of days we feel we are just going to have to go the whole hog and publish our press release in full, so here goes:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
16/08/13 RouteShoot to supply Premier Utility Services 400+ workforce

RouteShoot Limited is delighted to announce that it has agreed terms with leading US utilities services company Premier Utility Services to supply RouteShoot to its 400+ workforce.

Gary Wilson MD writes “This is a very exciting opportunity for us, and there is already an amazing working relationship developing between the two companies. This is all down to a great understanding of the technologies and the requirements. The RouteShoot solution was born from a product our sister company was already delivering to UK highways maintenance service providers, and Premier are an organisation at the forefront of incorporating GIS into their business processes. Bringing our understanding of the needs of Premier together with an intelligent customer that is driving technology into its engineering and surveying solutions is proving an ideal fit. While it is early days yet, we are very hopeful that this is only the beginning of a much wider opportunity that we can work towards with Premier and their parent company Willbros Group  (NYSE: WG).

Chris Bartlett,  Information Technology Manager at Premier, adds “Premier and RouteShoot continue to work closely together on this project and the level of service RouteShoot has provided has been excellent. Premier views RouteShoot as a system that will have a tremendous impact within our workforce.  Running this system in the cloud removes the burden of managing on premise infrastructure and costs associated with our existing system. It also allows our mobile workforce to be more productive, yet adding feature rich GIS to our video capture offering. We feel RouteShoot lines up well with our technology visions and positions us very well in the utility services space.”
 
Premier President, Marc Makely, added “We are very excited to partner with RouteShoot on this endeavour. Working together with RouteShoot’s technical staff, this platform provides Premier with a differentiator in the utility market space.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
Our MD was so pleased, it was doughnuts all round in the Exeter office on Wednesday. You can't say that we don't know how to have a good time!

Friday 9 August 2013

Weekly Update - incorporating your existing GIS data during playback

Hi again. For the very observant amongst you, you will see that we have skipped a couple of weekly updates. Mr RouteShoot Blogger (i.e. me) took a little holiday. Nothing too exciting to report, but I did go to see my mum - as all good kids should now and again - and shot some RouteShoot video in East Kent and on the M25.

Over the past two to three weeks we have been working on a couple of commercial opportunities with one in particular, based in the US, being at the forefront. This is very exciting for us as it proves the truly international capabilities of RouteShoot and we are really looking forward to working with a major player in the US infrastructure market. More announcements will be made as we progress with this project, so watch this space.

On another note, our developers have been making good progress with the ESRI mapping. In our last blog we mentioned working with ArcGIS - now we have got our own ESRI map services displaying in our playback web page. This means that we can use any of our GIS data as a background for the video. The example screenshot below shows our RouteShoot playback page with some ordnance survey background mapping replacing the default Google map and the very pale pink area (behind the blue dot) is one of our own polygon features.


 
This development means we can really offer that extra dimension to people's GIS data. We plan to make this functionality available to our professional and enterprise commercial customers in the very near future.

Tuesday 23 July 2013

Starting to work with ArcGIS Online

This is still a long way off in terms of development work we are undertaking at RouteShoot, but here is something we have been researching - ArcGIS Online.

Below is an ArcGIS Online map we have created. Simply click on the red car, then click on the thumbnail image that comes up, and off you go! RouteShoot in ArcGIS. Not very sophisticated yet, but a proof of concept.


View Larger Map

We think this is the beginning of some exciting development work which will benefit our commercial customers - allowing them to use RouteShoot video together with their existing GIS data, and using ArcGIS Online to provide "collaboration" layers where site workers can add GIS data in the field at the same time as collecting video to share with office-based staff.

To find out more about RouteShoot and its potential application in ArcGIS Online please contact our commercial team using this link.

Friday 19 July 2013

Weekly Update - have a giggle on us

For those of you that don't know, RouteShoot was an idea born out of an engineering application that our sister company Wilson Pym May sells to highways authorities and road maintenance companies. In a salute to our colleagues in the highways maintenance industry we thought that this week we would share this YouTube video from Worcestershire County Council. While there is clearly an important message they are getting across - encouraging people to report problems on the roads - you have to admire the fun approach. It certainly made us giggle.

Friday 12 July 2013

Weekly Update - blog your holiday fun

Ok everyone, the sun is still shining here in the West Country. Is anyone thinking of popping down for a bit of fun on our gorgeous coastline? If you are, why not RouteShoot it and create a really great holiday blog?

Here is some footage of jet-skiers between Teignmouth and Torquay - and ok this is from a couple of months ago, but the sky is going to be this blue, and the sea considerably warmer this weekend.
You get the idea.

Friday 5 July 2013

Weekly Update - is that really the sun up there?

Well, after our little distraction with Glastonbury, it is back to thinking about RouteShoot. This week we have mainly been focusing on promotion: Videos, PowerPoint presentations, business awards, AdWords etc etc. Sometimes this all seems a little frustrating - we would much rather be creating new features or talking to customers; but hey, we guess that promotion is all part of running the business - and we will be looking to reap the rewards further down the line.

We also tested out a new in-vehicle mount for the iPhone 5 this week, and the products from RAM Mount UK got a big thumbs up from us. A definite improvement on our previous mount which suffered from quite a bit of vibration due to the design. We certainly recommend the RAM Mount for people using RouteShoot in their car.

Finally a big thanks to the team at iGeeksBlog for the great review they gave us today. To find out what they are saying about RouteShoot please click here.

P.S. Looking back at Glastonbury, it seems our FD was wrong about Primal Scream - his kids report that the Stones were very good, and it seems that 65daysofstatic (@65dos) created a pretty big impression as well.

Friday 28 June 2013

Weekly Update - it's festival week!

This week we are thinking a little less about RouteShoot and - like the rest of the UK's music enthusiasts - a little more about Glastonbury. One of our colleagues from Wilson Pym May and both of our FD's kids are currently at the festival. Let's hope it all stays dry and that the Stones play a fantastic gig - although our FD reckons they'll get some stiff competition from Primal Scream this year for the best set.

Having said we're thinking a little less about RouteShoot, that doesn't mean we haven't coerced one of our users to upload a little RouteShoot directly from the festival - you can view it here: Glastonbury Market Area

Apparently the 3G on site isn't that reliable, hence the short video. We're hoping we get a few more uploads when people get home. Have fun everybody.

Friday 21 June 2013

Weekly Update

Wow - commercial interest seems to be picking up quickly. Gary (our MD) has set up two more meetings next week with potential commercial customers - one Local Authority and one, fairly local, maintenance and repairs company.

Friday 14 June 2013

First commercial sale

Great news - it looks like we have secured our first commercial sale of RouteShoot.

Following a morning meeting with a very large multinational services company earlier in the week, we have been advised that an order will follow shortly. Needless to say we are extremely happy!

While we might have been in what could be consider a friendly environment, having dealt with many of the client's representatives in the past, we were really pleased that they understood the product right away. We were also very encouraged because, while they had asked to see us to deliver a solution for one particular issue, they were immediately thinking of additional applications.

We are really looking forwards to implementing our first system for this client and we are pleased that we will be working with some of our former colleagues and friends.

Tuesday 4 June 2013

RouteShoot now available on Android

We are pleased to announce that RouteShoot is now available for Android devices.

To get the app from Google Play, please click here

Thursday 23 May 2013

RouteShoot goes on trial with second Local Authority

We are pleased to report further interest in our RouteShoot app for use in the highways maintenance market. Today a second Local Authority has taken the app on trial and their representative, who visited us at our offices, went away thinking of multiple practical applications.

If you are a business concerned with compliance issues, or you are looking for ways to introduce or improve collaborative working practices then please see our demo videos using the tab above.

Wednesday 8 May 2013

RouteShoot featured on BBC Click

RouteShoot has been featured on the BBC’s technology programme Click. Our app was reviewed in the “Webscape” section during the 4th May episode which can be viewed or downloaded here:

Click to launch BBC iPlayer

Our coverage starts at around 18:10 into the programme with Spencer Kelly teeing up the piece by Kate Russell.

We are really delighted with the initial response which saw us achieve over 4,500 downloads over the bank holiday weekend; figures which pushed us into the top 20 free apps in the travel category on the Apple App Store for a few days.

Friday 12 April 2013

Creative England's Starter for 10 Competition - Update

Creative England have published some more material on their Starter for 10 website giving further detail on our recent award. To see the full article, including the judges' opinions on the RouteShoot application please click here

Wednesday 27 March 2013

RouteShoot Ltd wins Creative England's Starter for 10 Competition

We are pleased to announce that RouteShoot has won £10,000 of investment in Creative England's Starter for 10 competition. This award recognises new creative businesses based in the South West of England. Needless to say we are delighted to have received this award, and we plan to use the investment to improve functionality on our website. Enhancements will include allowing users to add their own mapping and/or GIS data as a background to the video/route. Work will start imminently and these enhancements will be available shortly. For more details of the award please click here

Friday 15 March 2013

Undergoing Commercial Trials

Colleagues at Dorset County Council have kindly agreed to undertake trials of the RouteShoot app to see how it can be employed by Highways Authorities. Feedback from these trials will be used to inform the development of RouteShoot as a commercial business solution for companies wanting to collect route-referenced video on demand.

Wednesday 6 March 2013

Recommended by National Geographic Traveller

Thanks to Kate Russell of BBC Click for recommending our RouteShoot iPhone app as one of the four best ways to record your trip in National Geographic Traveller (UK) this month. To see the full article click here

Monday 4 February 2013

Ingenious Britain Award

We are proud to announce that our RouteShoot product has been recognised by Ingenious Britain, winning us the award of Small Business of the Week for w/c 4th Feb 2013. For more information about Ingenious Britain please click here

Monday 28 January 2013

The World Starts Using RouteShoot

RouteShoot is already gaining a worldwide presence with users in the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Switzerland, Egypt, New Zealand, Brazil and the United States of America. Join the RouteShoot community today and start to share the routes you love!