Before the big, social media darlings realized that collecting all the photos and videos from live-events would some day drive eyeballs and ad dollars, little ‘ole PicPocket worked out a simple, yet clever way to take the pain and frustration out of aggregating bazillions of related photos.
We called it “eventsharing” because… <light-bulb>… the focus all along was on events. Weddings, family reunions, road-trips, breaking news, insurance claims… any type of ‘event’ around which some number of people would want to group content, media and/or data.
So while the term “geofence” began its life describing a virtual perimeter that could be used to track who (or what) came and went from a warehouse, we knew there was a lot more we could do with such a powerful concept to make it both useful and entertaining.
But something was missing…
If we were going to make PicPocket all about events, then it wasn’t enough to know WHERE an event was taking place… we also had to know WHEN! And so our journey of self-discovery began…
Step 1. Add a time window to our geofence/geospace so that it references a UNIQUE event (i.e. the Golden Gate bridge, New Years Eve from 11PM to 1AM New Years Day.) Now any photo or video taken by revelers as they usher in the New Year in the geographic footprint of one of America’s most recognizable landmarks, would automagically flitter up into the cloud, grouped together as a single event.
Step 2. Instead of dropping a pin in the middle of the Golden Gate bridge with a radius of X-hundred yards, let users draw the geofence in by hand. Any shape, any size. In this case, just the span of the bridge.
Step 3. Offer an option to make the geofence three-dimensional – basically, allowing the event creator to limit the geofence to a certain altitude by setting a floor and a ceiling. Now, only those photos that were actually taken by someone ON the bridge would make their way into their event – ignoring any photos taken by, say, a ship’s captain 220 feet below.
Thankfully, the Marketing intern convinced us not to trademark “volumetric geofence.”
Introducing PicPocket’s “geospace™.”
Cool, right? We think so.