OOKL – explore the world around you

We’re thrilled to release some new functionality this week that helps users follow trails around a space. Venues can now create trails online – just specify a starting point, choose up to 20 objects from your object storeroom and add some supplementary commentary.

Users can follow these trails on the website and on OOKL’s iphone app v2, which will go live in Aug/Sept. Trails will be downloaded to the iPhone so that the experience won’t be dependent on a strong mobile signal throughout the experience. We expect the service to be of particular interest to outdoor spaces that find it difficult to provide interpretive information.

We’ve added an event listing section to the website. Let your marketing department know that there’s a new tool to promote your events to thousands of visitors every day. Best of all, it’s free and they will also appear on the next version of the iPhone app which will be released very soon.

Watch this space for a digital shop…

They lasted a long time and are loved and hated in equal measure by people in the museum world. But with the mass market adoption of the iPhone which can deliver high quality content and has an inbuilt payment mechanism (iTunes), it’s hard to see how a model dependent on dedicated hardware can survive. When Android, Blackberry and every other fruit achieve a user experience on par with Apple’s iPhone then audioguides will have a new place in the museum – in a case.

If you’ve made it this far you’ve probably noticed that the site has been redesigned. Why the redesign? Partly fashion – what looked good on a website 4 years ago was starting to look a bit dated. Partly change in strategy – we have repositioned the service to address the needs of adult visitors in addition to students/families – so it needed to become 10 years older, or less child-like. Let us know what you think?

Wouldn’t it be a wonderful resource for the world if every zoo, botanic garden, museum, art gallery, historic house, archaeological site, sporting venue, library and religious site published information about 8 important objects in their collection.

Why 8? because it’s few enough that it will take no more than a morning for someone working in a venue to accomplish – but large enough, when aggregated, to be a valuable resource for every learner.

Register NOW and upload 8 objects today.  The world wants to LOOK at your collection.

Please share this message with every venue you know.

After 2 months of design and 3 months of development across several continents, 32,923 cups of coffee, 72 swearing contests, Britain taking the first gold medal in an individual winter sport since time began, meltdown of the ice caps – the OOKL iPhone application is now live on iTunes.

The good news doesn’t stop there. It’s FREE to download. Set up an account on OOKL and you can blog away for free. If you use OOKL at a participating venue to learn about their collection then a fee might apply.

Download it from iTunes app store and let us know what you think! If you don’t have an iPhone you can see what it looks like here.

OOKL is pleased to announce it’s involvement in two separate university projects:

The Out There and In Here (OTIH) project has been awarded funding from the Research Councils UK Digital Economy Programme under the ‘Research in the Wild’ call. The project team, led by Dr Anne Adams, will develop the use of mobile technologies and interactive tabletop displays to support collaborative group work between field and lab based geology students.

The Museum Studies department of Leicester University is also running a project using OOKL. This initiative is led by Dr. Giasemi Vavoula who has a particular interest in the application of new learning technologies in a museum context.

Want to increase access to your collection on your website. Problem solved. Put an OOKL badge on your website and visitors will be able to search through your collection. Log in, click on ‘Resources’ and choose from the three options.

Have you used an OOKL badge already? We’d like to hear your feedback.

Crowd-sourcing is defined by Wikipedia as ‘an activity normally performed by an employee of an organisation which is undertaken by a group of people or community in the form of an open call or mass collaboration’.  Ok, so the notion of people coming together to help achieve a common aim where the benefits extend beyond the group is as old as… but web 2.0 makes is a lot more feasible.

As OOKL’s aim is to help  venues publish their digital content it makes a lot of sense for us to introduce tools so that venues can enable their network (friends, volunteers, enthusiasts, academics, secondary school or university class) to create content on their behalf, while always remaining in control over the content.|

To start crowd-sourcing your collection today read this.

We’re very excited about our latest project – OOKL will be available on the iPhone in January 2010.  No pressure, of course, on the development team here over Christmas.

Why should OOKL on the iPhone matter to our venue partners?

- Visitors will be able to use their own device to engage with your collection
- All you need to do is publish your digital content, attach labels to some of your objects and put up some point of sale material
- When visitors pay to access your content on their iPhone, the whole transaction takes place on the device (so there is no impact on your front of house staff)
- We’ll be starting with the iPhone but expect to roll it out to more devices in 2010
- You earn 60% of the net revenues (after Apple’s fees and local sales tax)

LATEST NEWS: Congratulations to the development who finished the app before christmas as promised. It’s been submitted to a Mr S Jobs so we now wait with anticipation.