Saddle up Bay Area Brightkiters! We are hosting a kiteup on Thursday, July 9, at the Old Pro in Palo Alto! We’re very excited about this one because the Brightkite Headquarters are just a short ways away and most of the team will be there to hang out and answer your questions!
The fun starts at 6:00PM and there will be t-shirts, stickers, food, drinks, and a mechanical bull…yes, a mechanical bull.
If you can make it, we would love for you to join us! Please RSVP if you are coming.
We have exciting news for our Android users — Brightkite is now available in the Android market! This is our latest application, after our iPhone app, and we have extended the user experience and functionality to the Android platform while taking advantage of the features that are unique to Android. As TechCrunch mentioned, we have an even smoother interface and we’ve added some cool, new features. The Android app includes integrated Google Maps and background notifications, so now you won’t need to open the app to know you have a direct message or friend request!
To quote TechCrunch: “If you liked what you saw of the iPhone app, you’ll probably like the Android app just as much — if not more.”
As with all things Brightkite, the app can be downloaded for free - so stop by the Android Market and check it out! Please don’t hesitate to give us your feedback — we’d love to hear what you think!
Want to kick off the July 4th holiday with a little Brightkite?
We’re happy to announce that we will be hosting a kiteup in Phoenix together with Phoenix Friday Nights on Friday, July 3! The kiteup will be held at the Gallo Blanco Cafe in The Clarendon Hotel from 5-8PM. It’s a great venue and we will spend our time chilling out by the poolside bar and up on the rooftop with spectacular views of the Phoenix skyline. I’ll be there to raffle off some t-shirts, answer any questions you may have, and of course have a few drinks and hang out with everyone!
Jomichele has put together an RSVP, so please let us know if you’ll be able to make it.
We’d like to say a big thanks to everyone who came out last Thursday for the kiteups in Berlin and Kansas City, both events turned out great and were a lot of fun!
Berlin had a nice group of about 10 people that showed and they got to hang out outside of the incredibly cool looking St. Oberholz.
You can check out all the posts from the kiteup here.
Those of us in Kansas City were probably wishing we could have had such a cool venue, literally. The air conditioning upstairs at The Cashew wasn’tworkingtoowell, if at all, and with 40-50 people packed in there it was just a tad warm. But the KC peeps are tough monkeys and hung out for hours despite the sweat dripping down their faces.
If you just can’t get enough, there are more photos from the kiteup in our Facebook album.
I had such an awesome time meeting everyone, we really do have an amazing community in Kansas City and I think they are a testament to how special the Brightkite community is as a whole. If you’d like to host a kiteup, send me a message and we’ll do what we can to help! I look forward to traveling to other cities and having the chance to meet other Brightkiters out there!
First things first, what is a kiteup? Well, a kiteup is a meetup that follows the simple equation of: people + Brightkite + beer = AWESOME.
We’re excited to announce that we have two kiteups happening on Thursday, June 18 — one in Kansas City, MO and the other in Berlin, Germany!
The Kansas City kiteup will be taking place at The Cashew starting at 6:00pm CT and we will have a couple people from Brightkite HQ on-hand to answer any questions, hand out goodies, and of course hang out with our fantastic community.
Please RSVP here so we have an idea of how many people to expect.
The Berlin kiteup is being organized by the awesome Mari Raku and it will be held at St. Oberholz starting at 20:00 Berlin time. We’ve already shipped a little care package over there, so Mari will have a few goodies of her own to give out. It looks like a very cool spot and should be a lot of fun!
There are also kiteups being planned for early July in Phoenix and Austin. The lovely jomichele and jmaygs are the masterminds behind the Phoenix get-together and our friends over at Knuckle Rumbler are organizing the event in Austin. We will be giving you more details as we get them.
Our last kiteup was a totalblast and we are really looking forward to the ones we have coming up. Anyone can put one of these together, so if you’re thinking about organizing a kiteup in your city, feel free to shoot me an email at lesley[at]brightkite.com and we’ll help out in any way we can.
Yasushi Tsugihiro is an avid Brightkite user who also happens to be a television producer in Japan, where Brightkite has become very popular. A show he produces called STYLEBOOK featured the Brightkite iPhone app in their episode on “Location Based Services” which aired on May 30 on the BS Asahi station. Yasushi was kind enough to put together a short video for us with clips from the show (the part on Brightkite starts at about 1:17) and we thought we would share it with you.
There aren’t any subtitles, so we at least think they like us. If there are any Brightkite users out there who can translate, that would be great. Heck, you could even make up something and we wouldn’t know any better. There might even be a t-shirt in it for the person that can make us laugh.
It’s always great to see where the Brightkite schwag we send out to our community ends up, so we created a Tumblelog to keep track of all the photos you post showing off your Brightkite pride.
We tried to find all of your old posts, but if you don’t see your photo here you can message me on Brightkite or send an email to lesley[at]brightkite.com with a link to the post on Brightkite and we’ll make sure it gets added to the blog. For future posts, just add the hashtag #mybrightkite and it won’t get missed.
With our latest batch of t-shirts finished and more stickers on the way, we’re excited to see what you guys do with them.
We really cannot thank Brightkite user Chris Hallgren enough for choosing to create a Blackberry application by himself, using our public API. BrightBerry, which is available here, has been quite the hit with our community — offering most of the basic functionality that makes Brightkite on the go so much fun.
Currently, you can use the app to:
View and navigate your streams (Friends, Nearby, Universe, Mentions, and User)
Post a Note to your current location
Check in to Placemarks
Send and receive Direct Messages
View and post comments on a post
You can also check-in via GPS and via Place Search, but both of those still need some tweaking. This is a big undertaking for one person, so Chris has decided to make the app open source and we’re hoping that there might be a developer or two out there with some free time that would be willing to contribute.
In addition to GPS and Place Search check-ins, the following things are still being worked on:
Posting photos from camera capture and media viewer
Sending and responding to Friend Requests
Creation of Placemarks
Viewing a Place Stream
Improving load times on streams
Creating a better GUI based on the iPhone app
We would love to see this become a full-featured application and we are reaching out to you, one of the best communities out there, to lend a hand to one of your fellow Brightkiters.
Again, a big thanks to Chris and all the hard work he has put into BrightBerry, he has certainly made a lot of our users happy.
Here are a few links with more information about the app:
We love hearing stories from you about how Brightkite provides those little connections of social goodness. This one we had to share. Hats off to both @scooter and to United Airlines for going the extra mile and upgrading a fellow Brightkite member @chipd.
“I was sitting half asleep at Denver International Airport waiting to board a United Airlines flight to Reno. I pulled out the iPhone, checked in on Brightkite and posted simply “DEN -> RNO”. A couple of minutes later, my phone buzzed with a text message via Brightkite from a user I did not recognize. The text read “check w/ the agent … I got you a better seat.”
My original assigned seat on my ticket was in a middle seat in the back of the plane. Puzzled, I went up to the agent, handed her my ticket, and told her I had received a message telling me I had a new seat assignment. She punched into the system, and promptly exclaimed that I had indeed been upgraded to the exit row and on the aisle. It was a much more comfortable flight with the extra legroom!
So, I have to give a big shout out and thank you to @scooter for the change. It definitely puts a positive plus in United’s corner due to the personal touch of an engaged employee!”
If anyone else has anecdotes of how Brightkite has made their day a better one, please let us know @brightkite or by emailing support AT brightkite DOT KOM.
A few weeks ago we were contacted by an enthusiastic student from Purdue University who said her group was working on a presentation about Brightkite for their Education Technology class. They were putting together a Brightkite wiki on how it can be used in the classroom and asked if we could send some swag for the group before their final presentation at the Teaching and Learning with Technology Conference. We loved the idea and happily sent them a few t-shirts and stickers to help make their presentation the brightest.
Last week was presentation time and we got to see the finished product of all their hard work.
We especially like the Brightkite-colored candy, nice touch.
Awesome job guys! This may not reflect on your grade at all, but you get a big A+ from the Brightkite Team.
If anyone else out there is lucky enough to have Brightkite for a class project, is using Brightkite in a creative way, or just has a cool Brightkite story, we’d love to hear about it — just shoot an email to lesley[at]brightkite.com.
