After a few brainstorm sessions, market studies and meetings, we have reconfigured our app to focus upon the hospitality industry. Here are the first screen shots of our app.

This is a screen shot of one destination of an adventure called 2 Days in San Francisco. Each destination has a photo, text and GPS directions to the location. It’s coming together pretty well. The Hotel tab gives information on the hotel and its services. The FAQ tab answers the most common questions the hotel staff receives from their guests. The Essential Services is a listing of phone, address and directions for essential non-hotel services such as pharmacy, hospital and gas stations.

We are evaluating options about new business models. Our nugougo app has plenty of good content but is a community driven site the best way to leverage the content? What is the best way to monetize what we have? As we progress down the mobile app road, what is the best path to take? Stay tuned….

nugougo now has a review system implemented. The features for UGO 1 keep getting knocked out by Sam at a quick rate. There are only a few features left for the alpha launch of nugougo. In addition we do have quite a bit of content to bring in from our currently content partners and hopefully we will get a few more content partners. We are still trying to decide if we are focusing on becoming a professionally created content site or community created content site. We’ll see.

nugougo is ready for beta testing. Currently testers are limited to friends and family. Please send an email to info@nugougo.com if you are interested in participating.

Currently we have over 120 adventures within the bay area created by 4 professional writers as well as a few by the staff here at nugougo. Our adventure tag cloud looks pretty interesting. Check it out:

artery clogging barn dancing bbq beer brewing beer drinking berry picking biking birding bocce burlingame butter churning camping canoeing chocolate cocktailing cow milking crabbing cruising culture cupcaking cycling dating dining dog walking drinking driving egg collecting environment farming ferrying fishing flying food foraging gaming goat fainting goat milking hiking history horseback riding hot mud bathing hot springs hot tubbing kayaking kids learning maze solving motorcycling museum museuming nature outdoors park partying peninsula picnicing playground playground romping racing relaxing run sacramento valley san francisco scavenger hunting shingle making shopping sky diving sonoma south bay sports stumbling surfing swiming swimming tidepools touring tree climbing urban outing walking water whale watching wine country wine tasting

The nugougo blog is up and running.  Starting always seems like the longest part.  Reminds me of the parable about the young bull and old bull.  We’re definitely much older than the last time we started a company.  Preparation is the key to avoiding a lot of pain down the road and now it seems as if the preparations are coming together.

We have decided to create an iPhone app. In addition, we have decided to start a blog to document our progress and our experiences. The idea…we’ll talk about that later. The name of the app? nugougo (new-go-yoo-go). There is a lot of progress on the development side for nugougo. Luckily, there is a lot of code out there for us to use instead of developing it ourselves. We should have a quick and dirty (very dirty) demo up and running by the end of the month.
So the question is how are we going to avoid the Field of Dreams issue? As in “If to build it, he will come…” Our goal is to create content and group partnerships to have content ready for users to try out as well as have users who would be interested in using that content. So far interests has been good. Many content providers/publishers are interesting in getting their content on the mobile space. It’s gonna be a long road though.