The day is finally here http://www.iPlacemarks.com just shed its teaser page and has put up a LIVE version of the worlds first Placemarks. We are bringing to you:
- the Chevron Placemark button (finds Chevron gas stations)
- the Starbucks Placemark button (finds Starbucks coffee stores)
- The Antibucks Placemark button
(finds coffee shops that are not starbucks)
- The Jamba Juice Placemark button (finds Jamba Juice stores)

I am very proud to say that we made it to this point at a pretty brisk pace.
From the inception of the idea, what i call the “napkin phase”. All the way to launching this LIVE versionit has taken us 1 month and 12 days.
If i do say so myself thats a rapid start up cycle. Its not trivial to go through a complete idea to launch cycle in such a short amount of time. There are quiet a few steps along the way:
1. figure out an idea
2. plan it
3. design it
4. execute it
5. convince your self you have several viable business models
6. Blog about it
7. Make sure to fit Xmas and New Years holiday into it (as well as a pretty big relocation for one of us )

Anyways. Check out the new iPhone site for iPlacemarks.com. We are finally unleashing the fruits of our ridiculous R&D resources and armies of mad scientists.

To check it all out point your mobile safari to http://www.iplacemarks.com

Then click on a Placemark button and add it to your iPhone’s home screen in 3 clicks.

We hope you guys like these really simple but really useful buttons we made. Add them to your homescreen, share them with your friends via email, and send us your suggestions about what other Placemarks you want.

In our gbrainstorm (brainstorm over gchat) today we were trying to figure out which iPlacemarks to roll out first. Obviously the first questions are - what do people want? What would people use? Why? 

Well, long story short  - I have no idea. I know what places I would want, but I’m not the typical iPhone user. This led us to the discussion of - who owns an iPhone?  Are iPhone owners male or female? Young or old? On top of that - who uses their iPhone for directions?

Working closely in iPhone sales shed some insight into this matter. While I saw only a small cross section of iPhone owners, I came away with some good stuff: Anyone can use an iPhone (almost), and everyone uses their iPhone differently. 

The greatest thing about such a diverse product is that it does just about everything. I’ve seen everything from an 87 year old man using it as a phone to a 10 year old boy using it solely as a video game console. Middle-aged business women using it only for email, and even a twenty-something using it as his only computing device.

No matter the primary purpose, we only hope that everyone uses the majority of awesome features packed in this little device. It’s too easy to use your iPhone without exploiting all the neat features available (free) to everyone.

There are countless applications and webapps available to expand the functionality of this gizmo - soon iPlacemarks will be one of those.

So, back to the original question - who uses an iPhone? And who uses their iPhone for directions?

Hi and welcome to the iPlacemarks.com Blog.

In this  inaugural post on the iPlacemarks  Blog i wanted to kick off  a series of posts that explore what Placemarks really are. 

In the spirit of the Blog Medium these posts are intended to inform others as well as hopefully trigger some dialog with the readers so we can get user feedback and opinion on how to improve iPlacemarks.com

So here it goes:

We have been searching for a way to explain why we are so excited about iPlacemarks.com. How does one convey the usefulness of an iPhone button? a button that with a single click finds and displays on iPhone’s Google Maps pins for Starbucks. Or Jamba Juice. Or Chevron Gas stations. etc

While searching for others who have made a similar offering for the iPhone we came across “Safari +”.  An offering that was a collection of bookmarks saved in your iPhone’s  Safari. When you click one of those bookmarks “Safari +” through some elegant JS extend the functionality of Safari to do thing it normally can’t. Things like Highlighting all the links on a webpage or search the web page for a specific word.

In essence this is very similar to what iPlacemarks offers to users except for Google Maps and not Safari. Instead of adding useful functionality to iPhone’s Safari Placemarks make Google Maps much more convenient to use. Placemarks are location bookmarks on your iPhone homescreen (where Google Should have let you put them in the first place… Google are you listening ? if you are don’t steal our idea).

Wait until you try out a few Placemark buttons on your iPhone for yourself. Then let us know what you think. We would love to hear your suggestions.