BirdsEye: Interview with Kenn Kaufman(cs.birdersworld.com)
cs.birdersworld.com
BirdsEye: Interview with Kenn Kaufman
http://cs.birdersworld.com/brdcs/blogs/field_of_view/2009/12/02/birdseye-interview-with-kenn-kaufman.aspx
3 comments
Carl here (one of the engineers who worked on birdseye),
The web interface to eBird isn't very usable, especially if you want to know what birds are near by and where to go see particular birds. It is however the best repository of bird observation data in North America and we are thrilled to contribute to it.
This release just reads from the eBird database. Our next release will also allow contributions to the database. This will make BirdsEye a great front end for eBird. It's much easier to record observations in the field on a device with GPS etc than to remember everything until you get home.
Right now, eBird is getting over 1 million observations per month and we're hoping that BirdsEye will double or triple that.
The web interface to eBird isn't very usable, especially if you want to know what birds are near by and where to go see particular birds. It is however the best repository of bird observation data in North America and we are thrilled to contribute to it.
This release just reads from the eBird database. Our next release will also allow contributions to the database. This will make BirdsEye a great front end for eBird. It's much easier to record observations in the field on a device with GPS etc than to remember everything until you get home.
Right now, eBird is getting over 1 million observations per month and we're hoping that BirdsEye will double or triple that.
This is great news. And I wouldn't be surprised if "double or triple" ends up being an underestimate. ;)
I was just talking about an app idea like this with friends.
Its just proves - there IS an app for everything!
I'm pretty excited about this. Carl, one of their engineers is someone I've been trying to poach for my own company for a long time. This is giving me a good use for all of my telephoto lenses besides tech conferences!
Maybe this will actually be good enough that I won't find myself wishing I had time to write my own...
I do have my doubts about the dependency on eBird, though. Given that eBird = Cornell Lab of Ornithology = the top birders in the USA, linking up with eBird is obviously the right move from the branding standpoint, and the right move from the I-don't-want-to-piss-off-the-establishment standpoint. But from the user's standpoint? They claim that "participation in eBird has exploded in the last two years". Either they vastly improved the eBird interface or birders are a very stubborn and obsessive lot [1], because I looked at eBird a while back and it had one of the worst interfaces I had ever seen. Like, corporate internal Java application bad.
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[1] Which is to say: I'm not convinced they've improved the interface.