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Interview: Mr. Iain Barclay, Electric Pocket
August 22, 2001
If this picture looks familiar, then chances are you’re using BugMe! on your handheld. And if you’re anything like me, then you’ll agree that it’s a great tool for setting little reminders for all the things you need to do throughout the day. I’m very excited to present the first Palm Goddess interview with Mr. Iain Barclay, the creator of BugMe!, who currently serves as the Chief Product Officer of Electric Pocket.
Thank you, Iain, for agreeing to this interview. First off, I would like to ask how it feels to know that you are literally “bugging” thousands of Palm users every day.
It’s flattering, and amazing - hardly a day goes by when I don’t wonder how this all happened!
Could you tell me a bit more about how the BugMe concept originated?
BugMe! came about because I found there was no easy way for me to use the Palm to record the kind of things I needed to remember - life tasks like going shopping at lunch time, or remembering to return a phone call in 10 minutes. Things like that don’t easily fit into the built-in Datebook, which is geared toward more permanent events - like birthdays and meetings. I wanted something that was as easy to use a yellow-sticky note.
The original BugMe! only let you have one reminder, and you could only set alarms for the current week - and that to me is still the essence of BugMe! It’s an effortless way to create short-term reminders.
BugMe Messenger is an interesting idea. How did you come up with the idea to create your own system whereby people can share BugMe notes wirelessly?
BugMe! has always been about ‘me’ - personal notes and reminders. An obvious extension was to let people bug each other - by sharing BugMe! notes—much as people write ‘yellow stickies’ and give them to other people. We wanted to make it easy to take short notes and share them, and BugMe! provided a great interface to offer that capability. We could have kept it as a closed BugMe!-to-BugMe! system, but that seemed to be missing out on a lot of potential, so we opted to use email as our delivery channel - meaning that BugMe! users could send their notes, reminders and messages to anyone.
Having gone down the email route, we were able to offer a nice new capability to everyone - the ability to send and receive short email notes on a Palm handheld without having to fight with Graffiti or wade through all the morning’s company email just to pick up an urgent alert. We think BugMe! Messenger fills a nice middle ground between email and SMS - offering the openness and the richness of email with the convenience of SMS.
Integrating BugMe Messenger with the EyeModule SpringBoard was a stroke of genius— I love being able to take quick snapshots and share them wirelessly with my own handwritten notes. How did that develop?
As with all the best things, it happened by chance! We were at PalmSource last year showing BugMe! Messenger off to anyone who would give us a moment. One of our ‘victims’ were the IDEO guys - we showed them a demonstration using our screenshot capability to grab a photo from their camera viewer, annotate and send it. They were amazed, and we all realised that we had stumbled upon something very cool - so we set about doing the proper integration using the EyeModule SDK.
We call this capability Photo Messaging - and it has enormous potential, in business and pleasure. All the big companies, Kodak, Nokia, etc are exploring this area, as it helps to sell cameras, telephony and airtime. The next generation of SMS will add support for sending pictures and photographs from cell phones, so it’s going to be massive. We’re very proud that BugMe! Messenger is one of the pioneering Photo Messaging solutions - the challenge for us, of course, is to stay in the game!
You’re introducting a new feature today, Notepack Stationery. How exactly does that work?
BugMe! NotePacks are downloadable stationery templates for BugMe! notes and messages. The first set has been developed by Handtap Communications and features comic characters like Garfield, Cathy and Bizarro. The idea is based on greetings cards, where you choose the character to suit your message and mood. The character adds emphasis and style to your message, and heightens the impact. Handtap has done a great job on Comic Notes and they add a whole new angle to the BugMe! experience.
We’re also releasing the BugMe! NotePack Developer Toolkit so that others can make and share their own template sets. We think this will be popular within companies who can make note and message templates with their own branding and we’re also hoping that this will catch on in the community, and that people develop and publish their own BugMe! NotePacks. We’ll be adding an area to the bugme.net website where they can be uploaded and shared. It’s exciting to be enabling a content development process - and we’ll be watching what happens with a lot of interest.
You recently released a PocketPC version of BugMe. How did you come to that decision, and do you plan to release any other PocketPC applications?
We’d been thinking it over for ages, without taking the plunge. It eventually became a very sensible thing to do, both in terms of our credibility as a company and as protection against over-reliance on one platform. Whenever we talk to people outside the PDA industry they always ask if we have a Pocket PC version - now we can say “yes”! Our next foray into Pocket PC will be to port BugMe! Messenger. That will be interesting, as the Pocket PC seems to be a very good wireless platform.
What new innovations can we expect from Electric Pocket in the future? In other words, do you have any secrets I can convince you to share with my readers?
We’re interested in communications solutions that work when people are _really mobile_ - ie. they have just a second or two to spare. That concept fascinates us far more than solutions aimed at replacing laptops. The whole BugMe! thing is about being quick, easy and appropriate when you are in a hurry, and I hope that we can carry that forward in the future. In industry terms, the emergence of PDAs and cellphones and the availability of higher bandwidth wireless networks gives a lot of scope for rich mobile messaging solutions like BugMe! Messenger, which - I hope - means we’ll be quite busy for a while to come!
