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T&T Q&A with Jeff and Karen Siegel How did you come up with the concept? What’s in the future from ActiveCaptain? Five years from now, what will the next big thing in electronics be? What’s your background and expertise in technology? |
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What's in the future from ActiveCaptain? Jeff and Karen Siegel: Internally we call it "The X". It stands for ActiveCaptain Explorer. It takes off from where the website started and adds a modular user-interface and many more capabilities. A preview of it is live on the web site now. We've learned that our users have a lot of information to share. We want to provide more tools to let them do this. For example, every cruiser creates routes for their passages. How come there's no way to share them? Why can't you start with someone else's route and adjust it for your particular needs and then copy it to your chartplotter? That's really no different than sharing anchorages and writing reviews on marinas. That's just the type of thing we're going to add. We're also adding nautical charts to the website and photograph markers. Panoramio.com maintains a database of more than a million georeferenced pictures. Before traveling to a new place, we'll provide hundreds of pictures so you can see what the location looks like. We'll encourage our 10,000 captains to take their own pictures of marinas and anchorages and give them the tools to upload them to the database. We want to give cruisers something to do with that camera that's built into their cell phones. We're also adding pure content to the site. Weather is a good example of that. We ran a poll asking our users what they wanted next. 50% of the users wanted to see marine weather data integrated and presented in one place. Today you can pay a lot of money for services like this or hunt around the Internet for a variety of sites that display different types of weather data. We've contracted with a major weather data producer to provide all types of marine weather overlays on ActiveCaptain Explorer. And all for free on the website. No more hunting around to get buoy data in one place, wind and wave predictions in another, and Doppler radar displays in yet another. Finally, we have some really cool ideas about how this new communications technology can be used. With connectivity on your boat and data being sent to a server like ActiveCaptain, we can provide some next generation tools with benefits to cruisers. Here's an example. Say you're a large marina and you see that your docks are half filled on a particular afternoon. We can provide the capability of showing a "coupon" to all users who are interested in receiving them that gives a 50% discount on slip space for that one night only. The marina now gets filled up by cruisers who would have otherwise anchored out. One more example. Our next version of the ActiveCaptain Mobile (for mobile phones) keeps track of where you are if you allow it. This gives you the possibility of looking to see if another Captain is in the anchorage you're moving toward. We'll provide a quick Captain-to-Captain instant messaging allowing you to ask the Captain already in the anchorage if there is room for another boat. It also gives you a way to meet other cruisers. Of course, all of these messages and communications are optional. You decide if you want to be live on the Web or not. What is ActiveCaptain? Access the award-winning series on mobile phones in boating by clicking here |
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