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Tracking Cuba Gooding Jr’s Twitter follower count

Happened to see Cuba Gooding Jr’s first tweet about 30 minutes or so after he created it.

Update: @cubagoodingjr is no longer active so not getting tweets from it any longer

At the time his profile said he had 559 followers. A few minutes later I refreshed his profile and saw the follower count had increased to 590 and every few minutes it kept increasing. By the end of the day he had about 4,000 followers.

I thought it would be interesting to track how his follower count changed going forward. So I used the Twitter API to get his follower count once per day, save the data, and then created a web page to visualize his follower count per day.

cubatweet

After 2 days Cuba had about 7,000 followers which averaged out to about 175 new followers per hour.  However, the number of new followers slowed down quickly to 30 or so new followers per day and after about 3 months he only gets about 10 new followers per day.  In fact, some days, he has net loss of followers, eg more people unfollow than him, than new follows on that day.

For the technically inclined, I setup an automatic retrieval of Cuba’s Tweets using Twitter’s API and the Tweepy Python module scheduled to run daily using a cron job.

The follower counts get put into a database. I created a PHP web page application to retrieve the data from the database, and create a web page that includes the Google Charts API to create a simple line chart to show Cuba’s regularly updated follower count by day.

You can get the cron job and PHP web page code from my  Github repository. 

If you want to run this code yourself you will need a Twitter developer account and an OAuth file.

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Using ATMs as wifi hotspot

Wirebase was a concept created in 2001 before broadbrand, wired or wireless was widely available.

wirebaselogo_top
wirebaselogo_bottom

The concept was shopped around to a bunch of Vancouver area VC’s and potential investors ultimately got lost in the dot.com bubble crash.

The idea was to create ‘wirebases’ that were a modular component integrated into an automated banking machine or deployed as a stand-alone unit in a public area.

At the time I was contracting with a western Canadian credit union banking services bureau who was in the process of building its first national automated banking machine switching system so we were privy to the details of ATMs and banking machine switching. Automated banking machines have computers inside. At the time they were regular PC’s and could have peripherals connected just like any ordinary PC eg internal slots, etc.

The Wirebase set-up is illustrated in diagram below.

overview diagram

The Wirebase module is connected to the internet via a proprietary network solution that is similar to that used by the global ABM network.

A mobile device (Palm Pilot [LOL, remember this was 2001!!], digital camera, portable MP3 player, portable computer, etc) can connect to the Wirebase.

A copy of the website (long since gone) is maintained at the Internet Archive:

https://web.archive.org/web/20010227065841/http://wirebase.com/

Our business plan and presentation can be downloaded below:

WireBase Biz Plan Slideshow

WireBase Short Biz Plan

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Introducing Speedvisit – a quick and easy way to record visits from people

Here is a demo web application / SaaS called SpeedVisit that individuals and companies can use to easily and quickly record visits from people to record basic customer demographic information.

Features include:

  • Groups – create a group so you add other users, locations and referrers to it.
  • Users – add additional users to your group as you want.
  • Locations – add locations where visits will take place.
  • Referrers – add referrers to record how visitor was referred.

The definition of ‘visit’ is pretty broad. It could be customers, co-workers, classmates, attendees in many situations including:

  • Retail Stores
  • Staff Meetings
  • Convenience Stores
  • Restaurants
  • Street Vendors
  • Art Studios
  • Non-Profits
  • Community Clubs
  • Sports Events
  • Social Events
  • Trade Shows

The demographic information that you can record currently includes:

  • Gender
  • Age
  • Zipcode or postal code
  • Income
  • Prev Visit
  • Referrer
  • Location
  • Purchase
  • Email
  • Comments

The site is mobile friendly responsive design so it works on phones, tablets, laptops and desktops.

The data is totally portable with easy export of all visits to csv file. It is setup with SSL so your data will be securely transferred between your browser and the server.

This is a screenshot of the top of the visit capture page which is the central feature of the application and workflow.  Simply use radio buttons and choosers to select categorize the visitor and add record. The page will then be ready for the next visitor.

speedvisit1

 

The data is available for anyone else to view it, to view aggregated statistics, etc. This is screenshot of the recorded visit data.

speedvisit2

You can sign into the demo account to see what sample account and visits look like too.

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Introducing Cardivvy – a website showing Car2Go real time car locations, parking and service areas

Car2Go provides developer access to their real-time vehicle location and parking availability, and service area boundaries for all of their city locations around the world.

I was using the Car2Go API to power a website created for my own use after struggling with the official Car2Go map on their site when using my mobile phone. I wanted a way to find cars by street locations.

The site includes link to get vehicle location, parking lot location and service area boundaries on a Google Map. You can click into each city, view available cars alphabetically by street location or parking lot location, and then click through to car current location on a Google Map. Each city’s Car2Go service area can be viewed on a Google Map.

I am waiting for ZipCar to get their API up and running which should be available Fall 2015, then I will integrate that into the cardivvy site too so I can see where both cars are available.

This is example of Car2Go service area boundary for Vancouver area.

car2gomap