Part of the agenda for each WPUG meeting is to give time for people to demonstrate their application to the rest of the attendees. These applications can be a finished product or something that has just been started by the developer.
This I see as a valuable opportunity for the developers as they get a change to see what people think face to face rather than waiting for feedback or even the emails to their support address.
There is also one other even more important opportunity that is that could be created by the application demonstration.
An example of this is the continuing story behind the TaxiRoute application. On March 17th 2011 (St Patricks Day) the application was promoted to be the featured application within the Marketplace.
The rest of the story behind the development of TaxiRoute is one of a dogged determination of the managing director Trevor Daniel to create a database that holds the local authority hackney carriage tariff data for the whole of GB (Northern Ireland not included).
Once this information was completed Trevor built a web site www.taxiroute.co.uk and offered it out to the public. The web site now records around £1M in value of enquiries each month.
Not only does the web site approximate the charges of the taxy ride you want to take (the web site can not take into account waiting time for metred charges and therefore only provides a best case estimate) it will also provide a list of local firms, along with their telephone numbers.
As you can image when you are out and about you a web site isn’t the best way in which to get the information an obvious progression would be a phone application. Hence TaxiRoute GB was created.
Trevor decided to put his application forward to be demonstrated at the 1st Cardiff WPUG meeting on March 2nd where we were fortunate enough to get a date that had Paul Foster and Mike Ormond attend.
Paul was impressed by the story that led to the development of the application and also impressed by the concept, so he pushed the application at the guys in the UK windows phone marketing.
The upshot of this being that the application has been considered an App Hero and has featured in a couple of ways and also be pushed within the social space.
Although the WPUG meetings (in London and Cardiff) won’t always be attended by members of the Microsoft DPE team it’s the connections that we have with these guys that make attending worth while even if you haven’t yet got that killer app to demonstrate.
The insight and understanding that you will gain along with the possible opportunity’s like the one that TaxiRoute has been given are just not worth missing.
Here is the application Listing in Zune:
Along with the application listing the marketing guys at Microsoft also spread the word socially via Windows Phone UK:
