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Just behind Twitter and ahead Foursquare, Compass by Catch.com is one of the most widely installed and highly rated apps on Android. Until now it’s been under the radar.

The point of Compass is to help you find your way. Yes, it starts with a variety of actual compass designs to choose from that point North with as much accuracy as your phone’s magnetometer will allow.

The real power of Compass, however, is to make it easy to save and retrieve places that are important to you together with your geo-tagged notes.

Compass was developed by Catch.com, and it integrates seamlessly with the Catch Notes application on Android to enable you to attach notes to locations. When you take a note from Compass, the note is automatically populated with your current address and other data gathered from the phone’s sensors.

After you attach a note to a location, you can also add photos and soon a voice note.

Use Compass to annotate your world. Then when you want to find your way back to your important places and recall what you were thinking at the time, Compass points you toward them.

Compass ranks in the top 25 apps on Android, out of over 100,000 apps in the market. As of today, Compass has been downloaded over 8 million times, and is installed on nearly 5 million Android phones according to the Developer Console where Google reports Android Market data to developers. Most Android developers keep this data a secret, but we decided to let you in on how we track installs and usage of our app.

But just being installed on a phone doesn’t mean that people actually use it. That’s why we use Google Analytics Mobile to understand how many people actually use Compass and which features get used the most. Google Analytics shows aggregate usage data that cannot be linked with users. We use this summary data to help understand and prioritize our development tasks.

In December 2010, Compass had 1,762,328 Absolute Unique Visitors according to Google Analytics Mobile. This makes Compass one of the biggest location checkin apps in the world. Despite the many Compass users, the app has been under the radar because Compass helps you track your private places and notes, and there is no push to share your location or geo-tagged content as there is in most other checkin apps. No one can see your checkins and notes unless you decide to share them.

If you use Compass and you have any thoughts and ideas for the product, or if you would like to share a story about how you use it on your Android phone, please leave a comment. If you don’t have Compass, why not give it a try?

If you are one of the 8% of online Americans who used Twitter in 2010, you probably understand hashtags as a convenient way of tagging and organizing ideas simply by sticking a number sign in front of any word. In Twitter, hash tags automatically become links to the entire stream of Tweets that share the same #hashtag.

But for the 92% of online Americans who did not use Twitter last year, including some of my friends and family who asked me “What is a hash tag?” over the holidays, the answer might not be as obvious.

Hashtags emerged because Twitter only allowed posts comprised of 140 characters of free text without any obvious way to organize and categorize the content. The beautiful simplicity of Twitter fueled rapid and viral growth, and the Twitter community looked for ways to organize the flood of information within the 140 character constraint.

Hashtags became a fundamental organizing principle because you only needed to sacrifice one character of your 140 free text field, and putting a # in front of any word gained an easy way to associate information into relevant topical streams.

Hashtag example from Catch Notes for iPhone

Catch Notes uses hashtags for the same reason: The notes field starts as a simple free text entry field, without the need to add special titles and categories. The first line of each note automatically is considered the title. Any word with a hash sign in front of it automatically becomes a category and tag for organizing and associating your notes.

I use hashtags in Catch to create interlinked streams of related information about topics ranging from restaurants to recipes, from ideas to expense reports, and just about anything else that I might want to remember and come back to later.

Whenever I find a restaurant I want to go back to, I take a quick geo-tagged photo note using Catch Notes on my iPhone, and I drop a # in front of the word restaurant. Now the note is in my #restaurant stream. Once you have created a few hashtags, the most frequently used hashtags automatically pop up in the hashtag picker when you click the # symbol on the screen.

I also might sprinkle in hashtags like #local or #roadtrip to indicate other associations with a particular restaurant note. Maybe the chef came to the table and told us how he made a dish, and I add a note with the #recipe, automatically linked to all of the other recipes that I have collected or clipped from the web. Or maybe the #restaurant note also contains a business #expense that should land in my expense report, or we talked about an #opportunity and I want to set a reminder to follow up.

Hashtag example from synced notes at Catch.com

Hashtags in Catch appear as links in the sidebar, like categories. They also appear as links within the note itself, as hashtags. We designed Catch for people who don’t necessarily have an elaborately planned filing system, and and who want to keep their organizing principles fluid. The world around us keeps changing with new information, new topics, new ideas, and it is hard to define a fixed filing system.

The idea behind hashtags in Catch is to allow users to think freely and capture their ideas in the moment without fretting about how to organize them or which folders they should go in. Organization emerges with increased use of Catch, and it is easy to change simply by adding a # in the right places.

Here’s the presentation I gave at the Quantified Self meeting at Institute for the Future in Palo Alto this week. Sixty smart and passionate people on the frontier of personal life and health monitoring technology joined the discussion about using lifestream data to improve memory and cognition, enhance self-awareness, and understand health. Some attendees were researchers trying to discover signals in lifestream data, starting with their own. Some were developers and investors in health and behavioral monitoring companies. Some were from Google. Some were simply curious.

One presenter from Fujitsu demonstrated his around-the-clock blood pressure, heart rate, and blood oxygen monitoring results in an effort to understand which medications influenced his sleep apnea. Esther Dyson showed her 23andMe genetic profile and compared it to her family members and colleagues, while another researcher showed the challenges of posting his genome on Twitter. (Hint: at 140 characters per Tweet and 1000 Tweets per day, it takes two years and you have a high risk of being flagged as a spammer.) Others logged symptoms and environmental factors related to medical issues, analyzed language to passively capture information and insights on mental health, while one person showed his 10 year mind map.

The common denominators at the Quantified Self meeting were that everyone was interested in taking notes on their life experience in a quantifiable way in order to better understand their own experience and to solve problems. In each case, the limiting factor seemed to be the ability and persistence to take notes that could be converted into something useful. It’s just too much darned work.

Simplicity is the key to any kind of self-monitoring and information capture, because no one needs a bunch of extra work. I learned the strength of simplicity working in the field of personal health monitoring for many years as the founder and former CEO of Health Hero Network, the developer of the Health Buddy System, a pioneering effort of electronic “lifestreaming” to improve chronic care. (more…)

3banana Notes has been nominated as one of the best Organization & Productivity applications for the new Google Android smartphone!

3banana is a notebook that you can keep on your phone and on the web at 3banana.com. On your computer, clip stuff from the web or jot stuff down on your private 3banana page, and you also have it handy on your phone. Take a note or tag a photo on your phone, and you also have it organized on your computer. Your notebook is private, but you can selectively share and discuss pages from your 3banana notebook with your friends, like notes about books, restaurants, or wine.

3banana is free and simple to use. It functions like a private blog or private Twitter. We have been adding lots of new features to the Android smartphone app, like hashtags for organizing your ideas, barcode scanning and printing so you can connect virtual notes to physical objects, and easy sharing with Twitter and Facebook.

For a little more detail on 3banana, here’s my presentation from our launch at the Dow Jones Wireless Innovations conference on March 17, 2009. I presented some examples of how you can use 3banana to organize information and notes around the home and attach virtual notes to objects using your own personalized scannable QR Codes, or two dimensional barcodes.

Next up, I will be speaking at CTIA, the International Association of the Wireless Telecommunications Industry, at the Wireless I.T. & Entertainment conference in San Diego, October 7-9, 2009. My talk is in the Mobile Healthcare Track. An easy to use mobile journal comes in very handy if you are tracking your health, especially when you make it less work, more useful, and easier to share with services on the web. Look for some special new features at CTIA on October 7, 2009!

 
3banana Presents Android Smart Phone App at Dow Jones Wireless Innovations 2009 – Presentation Transcript
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Every song ever written started with a first experimental musical note of the composer. In the same way, every essay, every letter, every book, every blog post, started with that first mental note of the author. Most of the time, our ideas and experiences float away and we forget them. Sometimes, we jot a thought down, remember it, and it leads to new experiences. Sometimes an idea, an experience, a name and phone number, or a note-to-self remembered rather than forgotten, makes the difference in the direction of our lives.

Taking notes can translate a fleeting conception in our brain into action, and that action usually involves sharing our experience or idea with someone else. As we carry more and more powerful technology around with us every moment of the day, might it be possible that we can start to translate more of our otherwise forgotten notes-to-self and fleeting experiences into shared experiences? Into the start of conversations that make our lives richer?

In 1995, Bill Gates concluded his book The Road Ahead with a prescient but disquieting idea: Carrying around mobile technology connected to networks would lead to the fully “documented life”:

“Your wallet PC will be able to keep audio, time, location, and eventually even video records of everything that happens to you. It will be able to record every word you say and every word said to you, as well as your body temperature, your blood pressure, the barometric pressure, and a variety of other data about you and your surroundings.… It will be able to track your interactions with the network—all of the commands you issue, the messages you send, the people you call or who call you.”

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