Here's a smart, clever app idea that's just made an eminently sensible partnership. Think of Worksnug like a specialist Yelp, listing details and reviews of mobile working locations down to the speed of the wifi connection and the quality of the coffee. We first profiled Worksnug, which is on iPhone, BlackBerry and Nokia Ovi, when it launched in the UK in late November 2009.
Worksnug has just teamed up with HP ePrint, which means the app can now list any nearby public printing locations of the 9,000-strong network in places like Hilton hotels, FedEx stores and some Starbucks branches. App users can browse venues by map view or by using their phone's camera for an augmented reality view, though even founder Richard Leyland admitted that although Worksnug got a fair bit of attention back in 2009 as one of the first AR apps, it's not much more than just an interesting way to present information.
He told me that Worksnug will hit 100,000 users across the web and all three apps some time in the next few weeks, and that a forth app, for Android, is in beta at the moment. Users are roughly 30% UK based out of 70% in Europe, with most of the remainder in the US. Though the app is free for users, Worksnug makes money through corporate sponsorships from the likes of Nokia, Cisco and Plantronics, and HP paid for the ePrint presence.
Worksnug isn't shy of talking about its green credentials too. Leyland enjoyed (between the comment spam) a string of mostly gentle abuse on TechCrunch EU after he posted about the company policy of not flying, something clearly listed on Worksnug's published business principles.
Incidentally, Leyland told me about this news in a twitter direct message, giving me a link and a password to a private Tumblr site he'd created with all the details. A little imagination breathed into a pitch that would've been lost in an email swamp. The entrepreneurs are often more inventive in their communication than the PR professionals, I'm afraid to say.
But there's still no perfect solution for the burning topic of what to do with your laptop when you need the loo in that coffee shop, Leyland admitted. "It's a very live debate. Do you ask someone to keep an eye on your laptop and rely on human kindness, do you ask the staff to keep an eye on it, or do you lock it up?" Or can you face the unhygienic and slightly suspicious activity of taking your laptop to the loo with you?
We'll await the Worksnug consensus on that one.
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/pda/2011/jul/27/worksnug-wifi-app
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