Introduction

Welcome to the Public Beta of the LightPole Publishing System. This document is intended to provide you with a basic overview of the product and instructions for receiving support or providing feedback.

Concept Overviews

Basic Purpose

LightPole is designed to give you information you’re interested in about points of interest (POI)—locations such as your current location or locations you’re traveling to. For any location, LightPole is designed to answer the most probable questions in the shortest amount of time and with the least amount of interaction.

We call the LightPole experience Mobile Discovery. When you’re on the go, you want to quickly discover what’s useful and interesting about where you are. You’re traveling with a mobile phone, not a 19” video monitor. You don’t want to have to thumb through myriad pages of search engine results. You’re looking for hot tips, not a research project. You want the wheat, not 17 pages of chaff. With Mobile Discovery, you get the highlights you’re interested in right away.

LightPole shows you a map of your location, highlighting the POIs around you, and giving you summary information about each one, while allowing you to click to drill down for details (e.g., a hotel’s address, its rates, its amenities, how much it charges for parking). Unlike search engines, LightPole Mobile Discovery presents you with information you care about, in an easy-to-navigate form, based on your current location, and using an interface—a map—that’s natural for exploring locations and making plans.

Points of Interest

Broadly speaking, a point of interest is a location that is interesting to you. Within the LightPole application, a POI is published information about an interesting location, event, or person. The information relates to a person, a place, a thing, or an event. For example, a POI may include the address of a restaurant, a rating for the restaurant, and a brief review of the restaurant’s fare and atmosphere.

Channel

Publishers distribute information about POIs through channels. A channel is a dynamic body of information, usually about a particular topic, such as San Francisco architecture or New York jazz clubs. In a sense, a LightPole channel is like a cable television channel dedicated to a specific topic, such as food or animals, only this channel presents information in terms of locations—POIs—and may originate from a Web site, a magazine, a travel guide, a blogger, or some other kind of publisher.

Through the editorial content of a channel, you can discover what you’re looking for in your area. For example, a channel might be dedicated to providing information about museums, making it easy for you to answer the question “Are there any museums near me?” with 1 or 2 key clicks.  The editorial focus and scrutiny present in a channel makes Mobile Discovery much more efficient than typing “museum” into a search box of your mobile phone and then manually sorting through all the search results mentioning museums and books about museums to find an actual POI in your vicinity.

The publisher of a channel might be a traditional content publisher (e.g., a travel guide publisher, a newspaper), a community of users aligned along some special interest (e.g., dog lovers who contribute fun places to take your dog for a walk), or a single blogger creating a channel of “places I care about or have visited.”
You have complete control over which channels you subscribe to, and the list of available LightPole channels grows every day.

Simple Use Case

To illustrate the use of the system, consider an evening out in San Francisco. Acting on a friend’s recommendation, you’ve just finished a nice dinner in new restaurant. It is still early, and you’d like to go to a club for an hour of music and dancing before returning home. You’re not familiar with the area, but you do know that SF Station typically has good recommendations of interesting night spots. You go to your phone and open up the LightPole application. Since you have a GPS enabled phone, the program starts with a street map with your current location at the center. You select the POI menu and choose ‘Channels’. You select the “SF Station” channel. You are taken back to the map which is now populated with up to 9 POI markers, based on distance from your current location. You may find that one of them is more conveniently located and simply click on the number that represents it to find the detailed information (to make a call or find out who is actually playing there). With a small number of key clicks and no typing, you have found a place to go.

Launcher Screen

When the application runs you will be presented with a “launcher” screen. This default startup display shows you your current location and channel. The first time the application runs, it will either take you directly to the “Set location” dialog or, if you have GPS in the device, will set your location automatically. From the launcher screen you can go directly to the part of the application you wish to see. Optionally, you can disable this screen, in which case the application will start up in the map view.

Mapping and Searching

There are two important considerations regarding location and search within the LightPole application; your current location and the search area defined by the current display (the “bounding box”). Your current location as the system knows it is always displayed by the red bubble on the map. You can change this location by using the ‘Set location’ option in the main menu on the map screen or via the ‘*’ hotkey (see specific hotkey section below). This is the location used for the ‘Re-center map’ command in the main menu on the map screen.

When a channel is selected or refreshed, the search for ‘closest’ POIs is done with the center of the current location as the origin of the search. This allows the user to move the map view around on the phone, hit refresh and get an updated list of POIs based on this view. The ‘current location’ does not change, however, allowing a quick return to the actual user location (or the original set location). For channels that support it, the search will also specify the current display as a ‘bounding box’, limiting the results to that particular window of interest.

Menu Details

POI

The POI menu is selected via Softkey 1 (the left Softkey) on most phones. (On Blackberry phones, the upper left and upper right keyboard keys are mapped as Softkey 1 and 2, respectively.)

1. Channels. This selection brings up a list of available LightPole Channels. The current channel can be changed by selecting something different from this list. This screen contains the option to update the channel list, which initiates a request to the LightPole server to update the channel list for any additions or deletions.
2. Refresh. Sends a new POI query to the LightPole server. Used to capture changes in the POI list due to additions or deletions in the channel, or changes due to a change in the sort by parameter on the phone, or to reflect a change in the current display map location.
3. List. Displays a summary list of the current 9 POIs displayed on the map.
4. Next 9. Requests the next 9 POIs (if available) based on the sort by criteria.
5. Previous 9. Requests the next 9 POIs (if available) based on the sort by criteria.
6. Show All. Zooms out the map far enough to display all 9 current POIs on the display.
7. Sort by. Sets the sorting parameters for the POI selection. Choices include:
   1. Distance (from current location)
   2. Rating (high to low, numeric set by publisher)
   3. Name (alphabetic sort)
   4. Address (alphabetic sort)
   5. Time (when POI entry was created)
8. New Query. For channels that support additional search parameters this option brings up the query input screen. If the channel does not support additional parameters this option is greyed out to indicate it is not available.
9. Add POI. Allows the user to save a location (either current or a selected spot on the map). This is saved in the “<username> places” channel.

Main

The main menu is accessed via Softkey 2. This menu includes the controls for the map and for the application as a whole.

1. Zoom. Brings up zoom scroll bar.
2. Set Location. Gives the user the ability to set a “current location” via GPS, Zip Code, or street address. This location becomes the primary reference point for POI relevance filtering.
3. Re-center map. This resets the displayed map to be centered on the last set “current location”. This is used to return after scrolling off the display to a new point on the map.
4. Invite friend. This allows the user to email an invitation to the LightPole application to another user.
5. Messages. Invokes the messaging subsystem of the application.
6. Options. Gives access to “About”, system log and logout functions.
7. Help. Takes user to simple help information.
8. Exit. Ends the application.

Detail Page

When in a detail page for a POI, Softkey 2 is used for an “Options” menu. This menu includes controls to move forward and backward in the POI list, the ability to center the map on this POI and the ability to “share” the POI via an email message.

1. Back. Returns to the POI list view.
2. Next. Displays the next POI detail page in the list.
3. Prev. Displays the previous POI detail page in the list.
4. Map it. Sets the current location to this POI and re-centers the map on this POI.
5. Share it. Allows the user to send an email message containing the POI detail and a small map of the location
6. Bookmark it. Saves the current POI in the user’s personal channel.
7. Delete it. Removes the POI. Only valid in “<username> places” channel.

Channel list

The channel list screen is an alphabetic list of the channels configured for a particular user. It always includes the user’s personal channel known as “<user_name>’s places”.  This channel includes any POIs entered by the user from the ‘Add POI’ option on the POI menu.

1. Back. Returns to the map screen.
2. Update list. Refreshes the list from the LightPole service

Messages

The messaging subsystem allows users to share POIs with others, even if the others are not currently LightPole users. Since messages within the LightPole system are specifically designed around POIs, the ‘Share it’ option in the detail page menu is the way a message is created. For a recipient that is not currently a LightPole user, this message is sent as a normal email with the message, the detailed information about the POI, and a small map of the POI attached. If a recipient that is also a LightPole user the message will appear in a standard ‘inbox’ within the LightPole application. From here messages can be read, saved, deleted, forwarded or replied to.

Hot Keys

The LightPole application supports two ‘hotkeys’ from the map screen.

Use the ‘*’ key either to change the current location on a map or to add a POI.

Selecting the ‘*’ from the map display changes the red bubble into a target icon. Using your phone’s arrow keys or trackball, move the target icon to the location you want to select as the new ‘current location’, then press the ‘*’ key again to change the LightPole application’s location to the coordinates you selected. To change the location to the current center of the screen, therefore, is accomplished by simply hitting the ‘*’ key twice (‘**’).

To add a POI, press ‘*’ then the Softkey 1. The LightPole application then offers the option to bring up the ‘Add POI’ screen.

The other hotkey is the ‘#’ key. This toggles the user between the current channel and their personal channel.

The LightPole Web Portal

The LightPole system is designed to bring you a greatly enhanced ‘mobile discovery’ experience. There are many times, however, where the same capabilities will prove useful from your desktop. The LightPole web portal is designed to offer you the same rich content experience on a full size device. In addition it provides the interface to a variety of account and system configuration information.

Login Overview

As a LightPole user, you can utilize the login identity you find most convenient. By default your phone number is always an acceptable login identity for the web portal. If you registered initially via the phone, this is where you start with the web portal, with the ability to add a screen name of your choice or an email address within your Profile that can subsequently be used as your login identity. Your 4 digit PIN is the password in all cases. If you registered initially via the web portal, your screen name, email address and phone number will be set up for subsequent login.

Note that you cannot login until you have confirmed either your phone number (via an SMS reply) or your email address (via an embedded link in a message from LightPole to this address).

User Home Page

Once logged in, every user has a personal web page on the LightPole portal. This can be used to configure the channels that will be available on the phone, to view new channels, to preview a channel, and to interface with the messaging system (viewing, sending, or saving POIs). The home page displays ‘My Channels’ and “Channels’, and has tabs to go to the message system and the user profile pages.

My Channels

The ‘My Channels” section displays the list of channels currently available on the mobile device. This allows you to remove a channel from your list or to preview/use the channel from the web portal itself.

Channels

The ‘Channels” section displays the list of all possible channels. This allows you to add a channel to your phone or to preview a channel before adding it to your phone.

Messages

The Messages tab takes you to the messaging control section of the web portal. In this section you can see a list of POI messages that other LightPole users have sent you, the list of POI messages you have sent, and the list of POI messages that you have saved. One important distinction to ‘saved’ messages is that the POI referenced in the message is automatically added to your personal channel (<your_name>’s places).

Profile

The Profile tab allows you to view and edit your personal information within the LightPole system. For users who have registered from the phone this is the place to add a personal screen name and an email account for subsequent login and identification purposes. This also includes the ability to change your existing PIN if you feel that this is necessary.

Providing Feedback and Support Questions

Please direct all support inquiries to through the Beta Support Form. Include as much of a description of the problem (what you were trying to do, what happened, how you were or were not able to recover, etc) as possible. We will attempt to work with you on the problem as quickly as possible.

You can also send general feedback using this form. Please be as detailed as possible, especially in providing what you believe you were trying to do, what happened, and your thoughts (positive or negative) about the actions/results. Include the details of your phone (type, carrier, number) also.