Guest Post from Moment.Us

Last week one of our startups, Moment.Us, held a private testing session at  TechHub Manchester. Fueled by pizza, music, and the chance to play with new technology, the testers scrutinised every aspect of the app and wrote all their thoughts down. These types of events are crucial to a startups growth, and so it's always worthwhile to reflect back on how it went, what was learnt, and what to do next time. Over to Ioana Craescu, the Marketing & Comms Lead, to tell us how it went. 

"Recently we had our second Private Beta testing session for the Moment.Us music app at our lovely office at TechHub Manchester. We’d like to thank again everyone for attending the session! The things that we loved the most were not only your enthusiasm and curiosity to play with the app, but also that this lead to great questions and great conversations.

The highlights of the afternoon:

• We had some time before we started the testing session to chat a bit with Bernardo, Niyati, Karen, Katie, Haider, Carys and Adam. Hope you guys will also keep us updated with your projects!
• We made a bit of noise in the office, but this is one thing that we love about TechHub – creative environment all the way!
• The Moment.Us team all wore for the first time the white t-shirts Fiafo made for us (thanks guys!)
• It was lovely to see Max, Vlad and Toni so relaxed, confident and communicative!!
• On the same note, the members of the Moment.Us team who talk a lot (who could that be?) welcome Max into the gang! Don’t ever interrupt your flow.
• We were happy to have David online from Toronto, even if he was conditioned by where we would take the flat screen to
• Thanks everyone for trying to be as critique as possible – we need  the things that you don’t like the same way we need the ones that you love!
• Thanks for being patient to go through some steps more than once
• Thanks for putting down on paper every detail that you found relevant (yes, Katie, even wondering if it’s your finger or our app). You’d be surprised to know how helpful that can prove to be!
• We appreciate that everyone asked us questions whenever they felt we could help with more information
• Thanks for feeling confident to share any idea about what features you’d like to see build in future versions (like radio stations from World War II – crazy, but neat!)

If you’ve enjoyed it, come again! You’re always welcome to stop by TechHub or drop us on email for a coffee downtown. And don’t forget to tell us that on Twitter or on our Moment.Us Facebook page with a Like, comment, share or however you feel more comfortable expressing it.

Soon enough we won’t be talking about testing sessions, guys! You’ll be able to download the app yourselves and your friends and, wow.. isn’t that exciting!? Don’t forget to Subscribe to our mailing list (you’ll find the form at the bottom of our website) to be the first who finds out when we release more exciting stuff.

Keep in touch

Ioana

You can see the original Moment.Us post and lots more on their blog, here. 

Moment.Us Makes the News!

Moment.Us co-founder Andrew Ko has been interviewed by the Manchester Evening News about his smartphone app, which assesses factors including the location, date, time of day, weather and more, to create custom music playlists.

Here's an excerpt from the piece.

'Ko remembers the 'eureka moment' when he first came up with the concept. He said: “I was walking to class on an overcast, chilly day and I wanted to listen to some downbeat music but I kept having to press 'next' because my iPod was playing all the wrong songs. I thought 'my iPod should know not to play me Christmas songs in March.'

“These days we use our phones every day, including to play music. Our phones know so much about us and our habits. Moment.Us is about tapping in to that knowledge to help understand the person. It creates playlists of songs that feel the same, not just sound the same.”'

To read the full article, click here.

Location Apps are Making Positive Changes

It's been an important week for location technology, with Foursquare announcing some big changes in their plans to monetise their service by generating revenue outside of it. One of our startups, HitMeUp, have been also making some excellent progress with their social location mobile app. HitMeUp is designed to help you discover what's hot near you, right now. It does this by allowing you to upload your photographs onto an evolving map. The photos will only appear on the map for a limited number of hours, unless they are voted up, which adds time, using the 'Hit' button. This uniquely allows users to see where is trending, and to get involved with events local to them.

Recently, they conducted a treasure hunt where local businesses hid prizes around London in little HitMeUp boxes, and provided their locations using the app. Then the businesses tweeted about the hunt; overall there were over 30 prizes up for grabs, and scattered all over central London. When people found their prizes, they added pictures of themselves with their prize on HitMeUp. Also, in the box was a note that said "if you thought this was a nice idea, take your prize, go and buy another prize to put back in the box, re-hide the box, and give the new location using HitMeUp".  Wonderfully, some members of the public did that. 

Here is some key data HitMeUp collected from their Treasure  Hunt:

1.) During the day they tripled their user base, with 90% of those users returning to the app since.

2.) The app had a minor crash in the morning due to a logging-in bug,  but it was discovered and solved quickly, making the app even stronger.

3.) HitMeUp is perfect for these interactive and quick events, as well as discovering what's going on around you.

These results and the news mentioned earlier prove that location apps are becoming increasingly relevant in this ever-mobile and ever-social future.