Our Biggest Issue...

After three years or so of Linelo development (with time outs to work on other platforms) we’re pretty happy with the app itself. Our biggest issue now is how to promote it.

The question is not so much how to let people know that Linelo exists — that problem can simply be solved by throwing some ad dollars at it. Instead the question is how to let people know how Linelo can be used.

Like a word processor, Linelo essentially present the first time user with a blank piece of paper and some information about how to use it. But it’s value isn’t really apparent until you’ve been using it for a while. When you need to remember something and it’s in Linelo because you put it there this morning, last week, or last year.

We are going to use two different tactics to address this. First, we’re going to update the startup file to put some real content in it. Perhaps a bit of a grocery list, perhaps links to top movies or websites, maybe a bit of a calendar, that kind of thing.

Our other strategy is to create a series of apps that use the Linelo engine to encapsulate and present popular stuff. Our first attempt of this came last year, when we create and app called “Fringelo” which had all the listings and details for our local Fringe festival.

It was a quite a useful app, as it users could wander around the festival with all the listings in a very usable format on their phones. And it allowed us to show just how valuable Linelo can be for packing large amounts of information in a way that makes it highly presentable even on the relatively tiny screen of a phone or tablet.

So look for a bunch more of these apps to be coming out in the near future. With the first few we’ll try a few different domains; we’re planning to do one of our favorite plays (Hamlet), a legal document (the Landlord and Tenant Act), and the top 500 (number subject to change) movies of all time. We’re also looking at building these apps for large organizations. It’s great for putting out standards such as safety procedures for companies that have construction sites for example.

Of course we’re open to suggestions — if you have an idea for an app that can be built from the Linelo engine, please pass your suggestion along to me — terry.oneill@linelo.com.

In the meanwhile, we’ll announce the new apps as we build them here and on Twitter.  Hopefully we’ll have a couple out by the end of this week.