This video shows an example where a cinema owner enters the available movies calendars along with categories and actors. We show then how users can search and filter by the entered data.

On this video users can see how to filter business by time or to show all available google local business center entries. To see how that information was put to the system, look at the video at the left.

How it works?

This page is to explain the way Next Street works, it was done very fast to answer to urging questions:

For a fast guide, follow the images and comments at the right.
To read a detailed documentation, just continue on this column (helped by images at your right).

Next Street is a web 2.0 application, it was designed with the community philosophy in mind: contributors do the content.

Contributors here are Business owners who want you to know they exist: they have all reasons to contribute. So they shoud want to communicate about their agencies planning. The only reason why a business owner will not fill this information will be probably just because he didn't hear about it.

Users on the other side can't take profit of the system as long as business near them didn't enter their planning: they have in turn all reasons to ask business owners they buy services from to enter the information in the system.

Android Market is a very good place to start because there is a community of users directly impacted by the fact of having or not the information filled in. That's why we count on you, users, to communicate about this concept to all kinds of near business that interest you. You will be the first to take benefits of it, and people around you will do so without additional effort.

Choose a category to see the map directly for that kind of business or tap the button for an advanced search
To see where is our enterprise choose the category "Cultural"

I'm a User. How to?

For users, the options are constantly evolving: (we still did't reach our version 1.0 objective). We had to focus on the business owner part first to enable local business to enter information while we upgrade the software for a better user experience. After all, if there is no information entered, a nicely featured application would be useless.

• Start-up screen: you have the option to use the integrated GPS to have the phone automatically detect where you are and find business near you, or type an address to find business near a given address. At the moment the option just changes settings. You will be able to change these settings later.
  Note: The GPS is enabled only for one request, the application then unregisters itself from the GPS notification to preserve your battery. As a consequence, your position on map will not be updated as you move. The Google Maps license is also ambiguous about the possibility to update your position in the context of a step by step guiding instructions, so we prefer to avoid updating your position on the map since we display your target direction.

  • a help menu also explains what to do in this screen.

Now choose the category of business you want to find.

• The map view screen.

  • If you opted for entering addresses manually, a pop-up will open asking you to type the address. The adress can be type the same way as in google Maps: “Number street, town, country”. Town and Country are most of the time optional.

  • The application asks the server for registered business that is open right now (at the time the request is sent). If none was found, a translucent pop-up will inform you about it.

    • If you see blue flags, click on each to display details. The detail is shown as a translucent pop-up:

      • You can still move the map, zoom etc. when the pop-up is displayed.

      • You can also Tap on

        • A phone number to call it

        • The email icon (if present) to send an email to the business owner

        • The web browser icon (if present) to navigate to the business's web site

        • There's an edit button reserved for business owners (see the related section if you own a business that you want integrated in the system)

      • Note: you can still move the map even if you tap on a zone in the translucent window, if you drag and exit from the info window, this one disappears.

    • If you don't see any flags and no pop-up was displayed:

      • wait a little more, the server is maybe over-requested. (a translucent pop-up will be visible for all the time the request is hanging for next versions to avoid this type of confusion)

      • Note: if the server didn't find any entry in the near neighborhood, it retries with the double distance, and if it fails it doubles the distance again : this can lead to slower answers sometimes.

• If nothing was found, we're sorry. That can mean one of two things:

  • Too few business owners have filled the information. You can correct the situation by talking about us to the business that interests you. In case the business owner doesn't possess an Android phone, you can still ask him to fill his timetable in google calendar (preferably crate a dedicated account for the purpose), then lend him your phone so he can enter his (username and password) in the dedicated fields when asked for the calendar (see the next section). For security reasons we don't remember the entered google credentials so it is safe to fill the form from anybody's phone

  • All business are closed, you should maybe also go to bed :-).

• Note : This same application will be available on internet within the next months. We believe Android will take a big part of the wireless devices market but it is a lot more comfortable to navigate from a traditional PC. Especially when having to fill long forms. So stay tuned for the internet version that will come on this same address

• Below is a screenshot of the map with a selecte entry. You can click on the phone numbers to dial them, the world icon to go to the web site (if available) and the mail icon ton email the business directly from within your phone. If you're a business owner you'll be interested by the edit button which opens the edition form. See th next section for details.
  
  The available menu is shown on the image on the right. The button "Only Open" toggles between two search modes: Taping on it once will show you only open business (those whom we have the timetable). The icon will immediately turn to a google icon to tell you that if you tap again you will have the google results (so without the time information). This is a shortcut to the other button with the google icon, except that rather than asking you for a name to search, we do a search on the active category: eg. if you're in the pharmacies category we will search with the word Pharmacy avoiding you to write it. If you have a specific search to do choose the "Google Find" button and fill the pop-up with the search of your choice.
  As you expect it, being in the Google mode doesn't guarantee the business is open nor can it do. You can manually check details on each entry on Google maps page's link (coming soon)

You can combine your search on different fields, all the fields execute the search on the entire stored value: ex if you search "droi" in the field Business and there is a stored enterprise which name is "Android", the application will find it.
A search on the field Business will search both in the name of the entity and in its description
A search in Calendar will search in the calendar chosen label (ex: this is where you search cinemas that play a given movie)
Searches on the Event field are less likely to be done but imagine an enterprise where each employee has its timetable entries (labeled with his name) in the enterprise calendar. You can do your search to see if you'll find the employee you want to reach.
You can also leave the fields blank to have the same behavior as taping directly on the Category (without the button).
Tags are searched with an "OR" condition: if any applies, the result is returned. If you have more possible values for a tag, insert a line for each possibility: you can't put more than a value per line.

If you opted in the first screen for the GPS mode this pop-up will not display. You can access this screen in 3 ways: When you choose the "Manual Address" mode and you select a category, when you tap on the advanced search mode plus button (The welcome screen), and finally when you select the menu option "Search" from the map screen. Here you choose to type the address or to have it auto-detected from the phone's GPS, switch the advanced mode by taping on the title "Advanced Search", and in the next future you will be able to specify the date and time of your search. Note: The latest search on each category is saved (you retrieve it when you return to this screen). Closing the advanced search panel (by taping on the title) means you don't want any of the hidden fields to apply in your search.

The blue flag here indicates a business was found. Taping on the screen will make visible the zoom controls. If you zoom directly without dragging the map, you will find your self at the tapped address (your location if in GPS mode).
Clicking on the blue flag will open an info window showing the details of the business you tapped.
From the menu option with a clock icon (on above image labeled "Now") you can re-execute your current search for a different time.
If you don't find any entry you can both click on the menu "Show All" (on image at top is in state "Only Open"). This button executes for you a search on Google for the current category. If you still can't find your entry choose the menu "Google Find" and enter your custom search words.

I'm a Business Owner. How to?

Congratulations, people appreciate what you do!

In fact, since it's not an evidence you own an Android powered phone, you were probably told about this application by an Android user who appreciates your business.

Now that you're here, it's very simple to finish your process:

• Go to the section “I'm a user, How To?” and follow instructions opting for the manually typed address. Then choose the category your business should appear in. Now that you're on the map screen, you have two possible situations:

  • Your business is not in the list of flags (or no business can be found):

    • choose the menu option “Google Find”

      • a pop-up window will ask you for the name of your business: Enter the same name you entered in (http://maps.google.com/local/add ) Google Local Business Center (LBC). Your declaration to the LBC is mandatory because google performs the necessary checks that you really exist.

      • You're back to the map screen, but this time you are presented with LBC entries. Find yours by clicking on the right address.

      • You are presented with a detailed view that shows your business name, address, phone numbers and other icon buttons. Click on the “Edit” button

        • You can see some of the information you filled in Google LBC. Those are read only.

        • Complete following the blank fields, notice that today there are more fields in this form than the information displayed to users. Don't hesitate to fill all data, this will make people find you easier in future releases: Since waiting for business owners to fill their relative information takes time, we've opted to focus on this part first so that we can launch the application then improve the user side during the incompressible time needed to have data inserted to our system. The email and website fields are those used under the icons in the user map screen.

        • You have at the end of the form two fields under the section “Google login for Calendars”. This is where you fill you office planning.

          • Goggle calendar is a comprehensive evaluated tool to do plannings: you can access it from everywhere in the world (including fro your android phone), share it, create multiple calendars, we decided to take profit of these features already present and constantly evolving instead of developing our own calendar planning screens. So connect to your google account you have chosen to manage your business planning, and fill one or more calendars with the dates your business is open.

            • You can opt to have more calendars that together define the overall business times: eg. You can have each employee fill his calendar of presence and share it with you (read only access is sufficient). The union of all calendars can be your overall business hours. Another example can define happy hours in a separate calendar labeled “Happy Hour”. All this will be then available to users searching for a pub with the text “Happy Hour” (since the displayed flags are only those that match the request time, you will have more chances to see people come at that hour).

            • When you change a calendar in Google calendar, changes are sent to our system 2 weeks after the last save action. Remember to enter this form again if you want your changes to apply immediately.

          • Enter the username and password for the google account you used to define your calendar and press “Next”.

            • If the user name or password are incorrect you are prompted to try again.

            • Now you see the screen to define your planning. Press the (+) button at the right of the label “Calendars” at the top of the form:

              • you are displayed with a list of your google available calendars. Choose the ones you want to integrate in the system

              • Now you have a panel added with the name of your calendar in Google, you can label it differently in the label field eg. For a cinema enter the movie name, for a restaurant enter “happy hour”.

              • You can also configure Tags. Tags are predefined attributes related to categories, a movie category will have the tags: “actor”, “producer” whereas an emergency will have the tag “Domain” to fill with values such as “pediatric”, “cardio-vascular”. We recommend filling multiple lines for tags with multiple values rather than comma separated values.

                • If you don't find a tag that corresponds to your activity, feel free to write us about it. We will do our best to provide it as soon as possible.

  • Your business already has a flag:

    • This means you (or someone else) have already filled information about your activity planning. Just click on the icon and edit your entry as explained in the previous section.

    • For this first version we let everybody declare it self as a business owner so that people and the android team (for the Google Developer Challenge 2) can see the application in its full functionality. In the middle of september we will provide you with a 3 letters string you will have to append to the name of your enterprise in Google LBC. This check will confirm you can change the name of your entity so you really own it. From that point your email will be trusted and you will be the definitive owner of the account. However you will still be able to delegate your entity handling to another email if you decide to.

This is the detail screen of a business. To edit your business click on the "edit" button. If your business is still not in our system click on the menu button and choose the option "Google Find". A pop-up will open asking you for your business name.
Tap the same name you entered in Google Local Business Center to declare your activity on Google Maps. Press ok, and you'll be back to the map screen but this time with Google Maps entries.
Find yours and click edit.

Google Local Business Service (LBC) gives limited information to third party entities. Grayed fields are the ones you entered in Google LBC, you can fill more information here such as your web site or a short description containing key words that best describe your activity.

Add phone numbers if any, or correct their types. Then fill in your google user and password for the account you will use to manage your activity calendar. We recommend you create an account specifically dedicated to your enterprise: we plan to add more services and integrate more with google services in the future, so it's a good idea to keep that account different from your personal one.

At this point, we suppose your calendar entries are already saved and ready to use. We also recommend making your calendars public so they can be seen and subscribed to by people interested in your activity. All what the "Send" button does is connect to your Google account and store calendar entries locally to make searches efficient.

Still following the same example, in my enterprise we labeled a calendar nextstreet. You can choose to have a different public label. This is the label advanced searches will be made on. Back to the cinema example, here's where you should enter the movie name.

Next to the label there is a button. You can add tags specific to the category with this button. For a movie a Tag labeled "actor" is in the available list of tags. Advanced search will make possible searches on these tags in the very next future. ex: to find all playing movies near you in the next hour where a given actor plays.

When a calendar is saved correctly, you are notified both by a toast and a status bar notification.