It all started in the summer of 2013, during a sunny July afternoon in Paris. We were working in our office when we heard a faint, hissing sound. It became a loud roar, a thunder. We rushed to the windows, only to catch a glimpse of what looked like low flying fighter jets, already disappearing behind the roofs. The loudness, the fury of those beasts, that was scary. Was there any danger? As model urban citizens of the XXIst century, we did the only thing we could think of … we went on the Internet. And there was nothing. News websites, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, no one said what was going on. We did manage to find people mentioning it sporadically, but no explanations at all. End of story.
Still we were curious, so we kept digging. And finally, after an hour of Googling and Wikipedia searches, one of us stumbled upon it, and boy, was it obvious: it was the 14th of July, France’s national day. And like every other year before, the “Patrouille de France”, French Air Force’s aerobatic team were demonstrating breathtaking twists and turns in the skies over the Champs Elysées in their Alpha Jets, with a huge crowd cheering on. So long for us being models citizens.
The situation we found ourselves in made us think. First: how could we have gotten this information quicker? Second: once we did have it, how could we have spread it to the people still asking out there? And of course, finally: why the hell do we work on a public holiday anyway?! The point here is simple. Despite the overabundance of news sources and social networks in the digital age, there is no simple, quick solution to get information about what’s going on around you. You can make API calls on Twitter, use professional grade solutions like Topsy, but a 5 seconds, mobile ‘what’s going on’ ? Nope.
So we started working on an app that would let you know what was happening in your neighborhood, real time. We worked on it for several months, founded a dedicated company, gathered a team, made theories, mockups, prototypes, the usual start-up stuff. But still it didn’t feel like we nailed it. It was cool and everything, but not that different from what was already out there. We were kinda stuck. Then, most exactly a year later, another flying beast, in it’s demise, showed us the way.
On July 17th, 2014, around 11:14 am CET, Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 was shot down in Ukrainian territory, killing all 283 passengers and 15 crew on board.
We among millions of others were looking on Twitter for updates from the people in nearby villages witnessing the incident on the ground. We started monitoring about everything on the Web that could give us updates about the crash site; including Tweetdeck where we set up a feed column with the hashtag #MH17. And the computer exploded. The screen showed us about 1000 tweets per seconds, for a few seconds, before the whole thing crashed badly.
We restarted it and looked more precisely at all this data. We realized it was, for the most part, noise. People commenting about this and that, retweets of previously seen info, press reports of what we already knew, etc. The signal, real people at the crash site, broadcasting quality, new information, was lost in the crowd.
Suddenly, everything was clear. Knowing what’s going on around you, that’s good, that’s cool, and sometimes it can be really useful. But the world is a much bigger place than your neighborhood. You have to be able to see anywhere. We had to redesign everything that we had built to that point and make it global. And then a lot of new questions could be answered.
Is there still people protesting, right now, in Tahrir Square? In downtown Hong Kong? What is Barack Obama saying right now at the White House press briefing? This party I’m supposed to go to, has it started yet, is the music good? Where is Bansky’s latest street art, exactly? What are people — the people looking at it this very moment — saying about it? And of course, on that sad July day, what was the news in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine?
So, here it is. After nearly two years of hard work, we are introducing Castr.
What Castr is.
It’s a communication network that links people, places and information, bound together by space and time. You come to Castr to push, search and browse brief information updates, which we naturally have named casts. Every cast has a location, that can be linked to either a place, an address or simple GPS coordinates. This is how we make sure that content on Castr will always be relevant to a particular location.
Let’s pretend you are alone in a remote Alabama village, and you see a polar bear — that would be pretty unusual, right? You’re the first person to see it and the only one who managed to snap a proper photo of the bear. You cast it. A few hours later, when the event makes headlines, and everybody talks about it, and wants to know more, you will still be the only signal. The one who was there. Nobody will be able to add noise to that. What the others can do, though, is rate your cast, comment it, ask for more information, etc. All of this happens right inside your cast. That makes you the link between what happened and the rest of the world.
Now on the other side, how do you receive content? First, on Castr, you can follow people, like on other networks, but you can also follow places. Restaurants, train stations, concert venues, national parks, anything. When you launch the app, you have three different news feeds. One showing what’s happening around you, one for the people you follow and one for your places. Each of those feeds display, well… updates, casted by the users. You can see where it was on a map and what other things happened there or nearby.
We also developed something we called the Mapsearch. It’s a global search engine based on a map. The feature offers to explore a map of the world and narrow down to areas with a perimeter of just 100 meters to up to 2 km. When a desired spot is selected the location-tagged content served in real time appears. You can then sort these updates, by most comments, by score, etc. For example: what was the most popular cast on New Year’s eve at Time Square, New York?
It also comes with the full range of options you would expect from such a service — you can manage your people and places, change your photo, see your activity, etc. And it is free, of course. But since it is location-based, it only works on mobile devices at the moment. Desktop/web based service is due not too long from now, and will be designed for reading and commenting rather than content creation. Open API will also be released soon.
So, that’s Castr. Of course, we could talk about what’s coming next, the exciting features we are working on (real time streaming, proximity chat, mesh networking), sugarcoat everything with tales of how we are going to transform the way information spreads and change the world, but no.
Castr is not a revolution. It probably won’t change the world. It’s just something we made because we thought it could be useful to people out there, because it could be useful to us. Something that could get rid of the noise to give you the signal. We made it because we saw flying beasts and wanted to know more, and instead we got kittens videos.
And yeah, we made it with love. Maybe you’ll love it too.
You can get more info on Castr’s website, or download the app for Android or iPhone.
Barth Picq is one of the two founders of Castr, along with Alexis Antoinat. He has 4 years of experience as a director/designer at Yodog — a Paris based digital agency with client portfolio including BNP Paribas, Heineken, Société Générale and Lacoste. It was founded in 2011 by Barth and two other partners.
