Interview: Creators of BEETAUN

I’ve been sleeping a while, had many other projects lined up.. and travelled alot, and while travelling i was missing something.. something that would’v made me not so tourist like in the new city.. I guess we’re gonna get one and Enter, Sergey and Dmitri from Russia who’re working on an application/service for android called Beetaun. We’ve made numerous posts about it. Their launching their service pretty soon and hence we think its time to get some more information!

So here we are interviewing Sergey and Dmitri about their App : Beetaun (Top 50 Apps in Android Developer Challenge

Lets start off with an introduction from you, your background in the industry.
Beetaun (and CodingAndroid.com) is founded by Sergey Gritsyuk and Dmitri Shipilov. Sergey is an engineer of Information Systems and Technologies (graduated in 2007). Dmitri is a master of Computer Science (graduated in 2008). We have more than 3 years experience in the field of scientific and applied systems in Java (JSP, Servlet, Applet, JDBC, Hibernate) and PHP.

What psyched about Android. And is Beetaun the first mobile app you guys made? or you were involved in Symbian or WM OS or iPhone.
Beetaun is our first mobile application. We have not any experience in Symbian, WM and iPhone. We will plan such expansion on future =).

Do you find anything wrong with Android? Any scopes of improvement here?
We’ve been working with Android for more than 10 months and most of the time it had many bugs. But version 1.0 available at this moment is more stable. And of course we will expect many improvements in the future. As far as we know Android is more friendly for developers (because friendliness was one of the main goals of Google engineers), it will be more stable (because it uses Linux kernel), it will have good UI (like iPhone), and phones on Google Android platform will be a mass product. And of course Android has many cool features, like Intents, Gmail sync, three desktops, etc.

A brief intro to Beetaun and what does it actually mean???
Word “Beetaun” consist of “bee” that means something active like swarming bees, lots of communication, crowds and “taun” is a distorted version of “town”.

How do you feel about being in the big TOP 50 on Google’s Developers Challenge
We are proud that our application Beetaun is in the first 50 applications on Google Android Developer Challenge. It was great competition, many new contacts and great emotions.

What made you come up with this idea.
Ideas are around us. They are everywhere. We just put it in list and wait a good time to implementation =).

Why do you think Beetaun is different from other Android Applications concerning Social Networking. There are reports of Motorola looking at launching a whole device banking on SocialNetworking.

We tried to make the application more social. The main goal of Beetaun is emotions and feelings. We think that it is interesting concept that is needed in modern society. Motorola plans SocialNetworking device on the end of 2009 as far as I know, it is too long.

What network components have you utilised in creating Beetaun.
I don’t clearly understand your question. We implement only basic social components like messages, friends, etc. But we do it in a different way than in other geo-services. Our main goal is best moderated content and good community.

As a user, what all would I be able to do apart from adding location spots on the map?
The main content of Beetaun is places and routes (some sequence of places). The users will be able to share their emotions about all these and meet new people with similar interests.

Lately, there’ve been alot of exciting applications that are location-based. Is this a new trend we’re all looking at?
Yes, I think it is a new trend. And after new generation phones will be accessible for many people we obtain the really explosive increasing of geo-application and geo-application users.

What were the difficulties you faced in coding?
In round 2 of ADC we had many problems with unstable SDK. Really we could not run our project on 3 versions of SDK. But nevertheless Android is superior =).

Any expansion plans you’ve got regarding Beetaun in the future.
Right now we are developing web-version and we plan to start it in the first quarter of 2009. Then we want to rebuild our Android app and release it in March or April. Our main goal for this half of the year is a user’s feedback and iterative improvement of our ideas and our direction.

Are we going to see more applications from your company?
Yes of course. As I have mentioned above we have the list of differentcool ideas =).

Did you get your hands on the first Android Device? I didnt
No we didn`t. We live in Russia and have some troubles getting the phones even from Google. But we believe that in near future we will obtain one of the phones for testing purpose.

What advice would you give for upcoming developers who are now realizing Android’s Potention and want to start up something?
Don’t afraid the problems and code, code, code and analyse what you code… And we think ADC II can be a good start for every coder even if he won’t develop Top-app, he will obtain much experience.

Thanks for your questions!
Sergey and Dmitri

No related posts.