Wipley, Social Gaming Platform

Last friday, we had our first meeting with an investor. This time, we met Rodolfo Carpintier, who we got contact trying to get some investment in Wipley, but also to get in contact with american inverstors in order to take advantage of our next travel to California and Corea, where we will present part of our present research in CIKM 2008 e IDEAL 2008.

The meeting wasn’t as productive as we wanted, as we got no contact with any american investor. As Rodolfo told us, the american people has a huge market and they do not make investments far away from their own homes. Rodolfo criticised us some aspects of our actual business plan, most of them very useful to us in order to arrange the next “II Foro de Inversión de Madri+D”, where we have been invited, but some other critics seem to be in contrast with some topics we have recently read and we used to improve our presentation.

Next, I have posted a photo we took to us in a post-reunion meal in a McDonald’s, where we tried to relax before the meeting.

Wipley developers are centered on the development of Wipley. But, I’ve been trying FlickrBabel a lot and I like it very much, that’s why I told them to develop Wipley a little more in order to make it funnier and more useful. We have a meeting this thursday in order to arrange the roadmap of FlickrBabel 1.0. I have some ideas for FlickrBabel 1.0, so have the developers. Some users like Jordi and Jesús have posted some suggestions that we seem very interesting, like add advanced options to the search process in order, for example, to allow the search of CC images, or generating some code to insert the search results in places like weblogs.

If you have any sugestion, do not heasitate to post a comment here and we will try to add it to FlickrBabel 1.0 roadmap. Thank you very much for your suggestions

This week, our development team has improved FlickrBabel. Most of new functionalities are related to geolocation:

1.- Now you can restrict searches according to a certain location

2.- Fixed a bug related to translations with non english characters

3.- Now, you can see tags and geolocation when displaying the photographies. You can also perform searches by tags clicking on them

4.- Improved the search for phoographies near a certain one

5.- Some visual improvements

The development team continues working hard on Wipley. While, and using spare time, they have performed some improvements on FlickrBabel.

• The GUI is implemented in 2 languages: English and Spanish. However, FlickrBabel uses another 2 languages (German and French) for expanding user queries.
• The result’s interface shows the results photographies but also the translation of the query into the 4 languages it uses internally.
• The results that includes geolocalization, now are marked with a ‘G’, and you can access directly from them to a map where the photo is geolocated.

By the end, now FlickrBabel has a Twitter account (http://twitter.com/flickrbabel) that will be used as “changelog” and also as an aggregator for all the news related to FlickrBabel.

Until now, in the blog we have described Wipley’s goals, and some tools we have coded during the development of Wipley. But we had not presented to the enterpreunship team that is behind the project.

The enterpreunship team (and, until now, developers) of Wipley is formed by Francisco Carrero, Borja Monsajve and José Carlos Cortizo. Those people are lecturers at Universidad Europea de Madrid. From the academic perspective, they had a hughe experience of developing and managing R+D projects, including technology transfer and science difussion. They had formed part of more than 10 research spanish and european R+D projects that used technologies related to Internet, like contents filtering (spam and pornography), recommender systems, semantic web, etc.

Previously, and in some cases in parallel to their academic and research works, they had enterpreunship experience, as they had worked in several companies, and also have founded 3 technology start-ups in the last 10 years.

For more detailed information, each member of the Wipley crew are going to write a post about their personals trajectories and their vinculation to Wipley. We will link those post to this entry:

• Francisco Carrero
• Borja Monsalve
• José Carlos Cortizo

My friends from Wipley are working hard on developing the first prototype. I have been asking for trying some functionality but they don’t let me to go near their workplaces. At least, they gave me some previous designs that they are using to test ideas and select one for developing the final Wipley design.

Here yo have the 3 designs. I hope that you make some critics, tell me what you prefer from each design, etc.

Design 1: Inspired on Facebook. As Facebook is considered by Wipley crew as a reference Social Network, they have tried to modify the Facebook’s desing in order to adapt their colours and style. The design isn’t finished (some parts are cutted and pasted from Facebook) but it allows to see how it could seem.

Design 2: This design is more similar to standard social networks. It is inspired on Moterus and UGame.

Wipley developers says that the first design, as it follows Facebook’s philosophy, is centered on the interaction with your friends. The second one, is oriented to discover new contents not taking care about the authors (if they are friends/contacts or not). They have developed a mixed desing (design 3), with two areas that allows several kinds of interactions (with your friends, to discover new contents, etc.)

I already have my favourite design, so do you?

This week we have finished the design of Wipley business cards and we have sent it for printing to Vistaprint, an online printer that R4P crew recommended us.

We wanted to show some previous designs before in order to receive your feedback but we had no time. We hope to receive your comments about the business cards in order to receive feedback for future designs.

The first application we have developed is FlickrBabel, a service to help in multimedia information retrieval, first using Flickr. The operative and utility of this tool is very simple. When a query is given to the system, it generates translations (by means of Google Translation API) to other languages (Spanish and English, by the momento) and it creates an expanded query with these translations. Finally, it generates the query using Flickr API (we use phpFlickr class for interacting with Flickr from PHP) and shows the results. servicio de ayuda a la búsqueda de fotografías en Flickr. El funcionamiento y utilidad de esta herramienta es muy simple.

As well as expanding queries by means of automated translation, FlickrBabel is able to search for related photographies using the contextual information attached to a given Flickr photo. When a photographie is geotagged, FlickrBabel also shows the photographies taken near from that location as a way to expand the vision of some places.

FlickrBabe borned as a satellite application when exploring several web services APIs trying to understand better how they work to use that knowledge in Wipley development. For getting a deeper knowledge from that APIs, nothing better than doing something practical, and this is the first result. By now,  FlickrBabel is at a “beta” stage, so we will add some functionalities from time to time.

And, What is Wipley? Wipley is a project that is being developed since some months ago by some enterprising (Francisco Carrero, Borja Monsalve y José Carlos Cortizo). This project combines some topics we are really interested on: videogames, social networks and intelligent systems.

Wipley hopes to become in some kind of Facebook for ganers. A Social Network highly configurable and usable that allows videogamers to access all the information about their games, characters, groups, clans, etc. unified in a single site. But, we also look forward into a easier and more dynamic way to relate videogamers.

By the other hand, Wupley will not be a typical social network, it will incorporate several technologies to increase its usability, the information access and its interoperability, and it will also have some functionalities further than typical ones in social networks.

Where do we want to reach? We have decided to do not impose limits to ourselves. We hope the users guide the development of Wipley. For that, we have created this blog, to inform all the possible users about our advances, and where we hope to receive all kind of comments and suggestions that help us to improve Wipley.

Which is the actual status? By now, we are centerd on the business plan and working very hard in the first prototypes. We plan to release the first beta after the summer.

I like videogames. I was going to say that I spend over 10 hours per week in games like WoW, GTA, FIFA, . . . ot even SingStar, but it could seem I’m an addict :P. Besides, I spend some other hours searching for information about videogames, discussing in forums, or even having something for drink with people from my clan.

The truth is that I have just realised that I waste most of the time I am surfing the Internet. Having to read 30 blogs, log-in and review 10 forums, visit pages and pages of Google search results, access the web of my clan to see what’s going on, connecting to the messenger to see if anyone wants to play a fast game… I hope you don’t missunderstand me: the problem os not going through all that websites, but having to access all of them without knowing if there are upgrades, if my friends would have posted a message for me or if anyone would play that game with me.

I have already told to my friends from Wipley: “I want you to develop a unique web where I can find all that stuff about videogames, access all my clans, and searching for new friends to play with. I want a Facebook for videogamers.”

Said and done. They are working on it…