We’ll be participating the biggest Nordic startup event Slush next week in Helsinki on Wednesday and Thursday. We’ll be there most of both days meeting people and demoing the newest and coolest feature we’ve ever developed to Grafetee. It’s not yet something we can publicly launch, but a demo is available face to face. Just ask us at Slush and we’ll let you take a look!
We’re happy to announce that Grafetee bookmarklet (drag and drop if from grafetee.com to your browser’s bookmark toolbar) now automatically recognizes addresses and content on many websites. This makes your location bookmarking even easier than before. Let’s take a few examples:
Bookmarking open houses from Trulia is easy: Click the Grafetee bookmarklet you dragged into your bookmarks and the data (address, house details, link) are automatically found by the Grafetee bookmarklet. Simply click “Add to your phone” and the place is in your Grafetee app!
Another example from Trip Advisor – the bookmarklet works the same way there as well:
We haven’t of course tested ALL of the internet but the bookmarklet works at least on the following sites: Trip Advisor, Booking.com, Hotels.com, Expedia, Airbnb, Trulia, Zillow and a bunch of others. If you find a site that doesn’t work, let us know!
Let’s assume that a person is travelling to New York for the first time and wants to store all the relevant locations to her mobile phone before the trip so that she can find all the places she wants to find and share it with her traveling friends. Grafetee is ideal for this purpose.
She uses her two favorite travel sites to do research and bookings. We’ll use just a few sites and places in this example but Grafetee really shines when collecting multiple places from multiple websites.
Step 1 – Install bookmarklet and app. First she goes to www.grafetee.com to get the Grafetee bookmarklet by dragging the G to her browser bookmark toolbar and the app from Apple or Android app store. Naturally, this has to be done only once, so if she already has everything installed, she’s all set. Installing is quick and easy since she does not have to register or give any personal information.
Step 2 – find content from any web site. First she books a hotel and goes to Expedia to do that. She chooses the Belvedere Hotel:
Step 3 – use bookmarklet. She just clicks the “Bookmark to Grafetee” on her browser bookmark toolbar and she gets a prefilled Grafetee widget with the address and some descriptions filled in. She can edit the pre-filled info to add her own notes. The only thing she has to do is to enter the Grafetee code – but fortunately that has to be done only once:
Step 4 – bookmark with Grafetee: She clicks “Add to your phone” to add the place to her phone.
Step 5 – add more content. She then goes to her other websites to discover more interesting places in New York. As the Grafetee bookmarklet automatically picks up the required information from the pages, bookmarking additional content is easy – just two mouse clicks per location is all that is required.
Step 6 – viewing content on phone. Now that she’s collected all the places she can view all the choosen destinations on the phone in her private Grafetee topic. She can delete the places if she wants by tapping the little “x” and add additional notes from her mobile is she wants. Note that the for the Empire State Building the app says that the event is in 1 months, as she set a date and time for that particular location. By selecting an item from the list she can see where it is on the map. She can also tap “Get directions” to get driving or walking directions to the place. She also see the comments she wrote to the “What” box on the bookmarklet.
Step 7 – share with friends. Now she wants to share the cool places she has collected with her friends that will come to New York with her. She taps the blue arrow next to the “Trip to New York” and she chooses “Invite via SMS” from the menu that appears. Grafetee uses the phone’s contact list, so all her contacts are automatically available: once the recipient gets the SMS, the recipient can simply click a link in the SMS message and the bookmarked places becomes available in the recipient’s Grafetee app as well. The recipient can then contribute to the feed by adding more comments or new content in-app or from the web with the bookmarklet.
That’s it, now they’re ready to travel and have fun in New York City together!
Let’s assume that a married couple is buying a home from New York and want to store all the homes they want to go and see on a given day to her mobile phone and share them with each other. Grafetee is ideal for this purpose.
She likes Zillow and uses that to browse homes while her husband prefers Trulia. Grafetee offers a way to gather homes from both sites (and any other site for that matter) into a single list on your mobile. Grafetee really shines when collecting multiple places from multiple websites although it works just fine with just one site and one place as well.
Picture 1. First they both go to www.grafetee.com to get the Grafetee bookmarklet by dragging the G to their browser bookmark toolbars. This has to be done only once for each person.
Picture 2. First she creates a private feed to Grafetee to use for bookmarking the apartments.
Picture 3. She then invites her husband to the feed so that they both see the apartments by tapping the blue arrow after the feed name and choosing the invite option from the menu. The invite is simply an sms, no need to link up social media accounts etc.
Picture 4. She then starts bookmarking the apartments she wants to see. She goes to Zillow and finds a few homes including the one below.
Picture 5. She just clicks the “Bookmark to Grafetee” on her browser bookmark toolbar and she gets a prefilled Grafetee widget with the address and some descriptions filled in.
Picture 6. She then fills in her own comments about the place to the “What” box as well as the time she set up with the agent for the showing. She could add what ever info she wants like links to Zillow, agent phone numbers etc. but now she only adds a note to herself about the location. Now she only needs to add the Grafetee feed code to add the place to the proper feed.
Picture 7. She checks her phone’s feed list from Grafetee and sees the feed she created called “NYC apartment”. She sees that the code is UERWGCTH.
Picture 8. She fills in the code to the widget to the “Feed code” box. This needs to be done only once.
Picture 9. She clicks “Add to your phone” to add the place to her feed. The place is now in her feed! She then goes on to add a few other apartments as well.
Picture 10. In the meanwhile her husband is using Trulia to find some apartments for them. He does the exact same thing as she did. Let’s take an example.
Picture 11. OK, now they have a bunch of showings set up. All the showings are listed in Grafetee in the order they are set up, newest first. They both see the same places from their phones.
Picture 12. She can view the details of each apartment and can see where it is on the map. She can also taps “Get directions” to get driving or walking directions to the place. She also see the comments she wrote to the “What” box on the bookmarklet or write comments from her mobile.
That’s it, now they have the apartments listed, know where they need to be and when and can take and share notes on the apartments collected from the two different websites.
Content is king! Thus we added even more local content to Grafetee. We added a lot of lunch menus from Amica and Sodexo as well as local reviews from Fonecta’s Osuma and real estate for sale and rent from Oikotie. We added public transportation stop schedules too. These are Finland specific which serves our idea of concentrating a lot of content on a smaller area first to see how the app works.
Grafetee now covers quite a lot of different needs for Finnish users as on top of the globally available Yelp, Foursquare, Wikipedia and user generated content they have local reviews, real estate for sale and rent, police, local events, restaurant lunch menus and public transportation stops schedules. It’s a pretty extensive list. If you can think of anything we’re missing let us know at bizdev@grafetee.com!
We’re happy to announce that today we launched a service called Lähivinkki (Nearby tip would be an ok translation) together with the Finnish Police. The service enables citizens to notify the police of any non-critical issues about their surroundings like fallen trees, dangerous crossings, continuous speeding, drunken youngsters and the like. The service is operated by Grafetee (and is visible as a feed for Finnish Grafetee users) but we’re doing this in close cooperation with the police who are watching the messages posted to the service and take them into account when planning their work.
If you find the concept interesting and applicable to your domain don’t hesitate to be in touch: bizdev@grafetee.com. The concept is designed to be copied. You will have your service up and running the next day after your order.
