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.

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.

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!

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.

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!

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:
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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.”

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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!

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.