Consider me "popped in"
The ActiveCaptain site has had a huge addition to the amount of data in recent months. We've always been happy with the response - we're now a bit overwhelmed. For about the previous 9 months, we've been averaging over 1,000 updates every day of the week. We've gotten used to the validation time needed for that. With the recent SAIL Magazine innovation award, we're now averaging over 2,500 updates a day. We also started a program with marinas getting direct mail from us every week (I'm embarrassed to admit that it could be viewed as spam - but we allow any of them to opt out or opt out for the season). The response from that has been really good and we're getting many marinas to update their own data now. We especially want good fuel pricing since the next version of the web site allows you to sort marinas by fuel price in the list.
Overall, the biggest change has been the reviews. While it's good to know that a marina has showers, it's way more important to know if they are clean. The reviews give that type of information that's just not written down anywhere else.
As many of you know, you earn "points" as you make updates, write reviews, and add markers. More will be done with those points eventually - we have some great ideas. But for now, we have a ton of captains with over 1,000 points. That's really huge. We even have one captain with over 10,000 points! Honest! He actually has over 11,000 points right now.
There are many more features coming. Weather, routes, photographs, enhanced searching...all starting to show up. There's a preview of the user-interface for this under the "X Preview" tab. Nautical charts should start showing up in that next week. I gave a demo of it yesterday and it worked like a champ. It needs some tweaking before it'll work well with the 100-200 simultaneous users we have on a busy day. It's pretty slick to see the markers (especially anchorages) showing up over the nautical charts.
Terry is right - we need Canadian chart support. The government of Canada is not making this very easy. I just don't think that charging hundreds of dollars per region is going to work for the web site or mobile phones. I've pitched an idea to them and they are considering it. They're just not being quick about it. There are a couple of other options too but they also add cost. I'd really like the charts on the web site to be free - for planning, viewing, and exploring. Charts on the phones will have to have a cost but I really like the $20 per region and $50 per country prices - I think that's fair. By the way, they're one-time costs - it's not a subscription. It's just so difficult to convince governments that no one is going to spend $400 for part of a coastline on their phone. It's just not going to work.
Weather is a good example. We just signed contracts with a major weather data provider. We'll have really excellent real time data for all types of marine weather throughout the world (including Canada). And they're allowing us to make it free on the web site. Perfect. That is a 2010 company who understands the internet. More will come with that soon.
I'm really pleased with where we are right now. It's all because of the members who are adding the data and making it all work for all of us. We're trying to provide good utilities but it's everyone else who's doing the heavy lifting. Suggestions are always welcome!
