Pantha Corp

We have unfortunately received a negative response from the 'Commonwealth Copyright Administration' that will not grant us a license for the government funded project toiletmap.gov.au. Based on the reply, there do not seem to be any hard, conclusive reasons for not granting Pantha Corp with a license other than that information should be always "correct and up to date" within the iPhone application which i am sure we would have found ways to ensure both requirements would be met by 'Show the Loo'.

Instead of providing Australians with an alternate means of access to the data on toiletmap.gov.au - that the Department of Health and Ageing collects and a 3rd-party supplier manages on behalf of the government - whereby we could have integrated and made available information such as opening-hours, nearby parking places, whether there is access for disabled and if there are baby facilities available, we will switch over to integrating data from other countries such as the UK, Germany and the US.

We will continue to keep the Australian version of 'Show the Loo' free in the hope that the Department might re-consider their initial reply which i paste in here below in its entirety.

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Thank you for your interest in the National Continence Management Strategy and in particular the National Public Toilet Map (NPTM) project.

The National Public Toilet Map website aims to help people retain their freedom, independence and confidence by providing information on toilets throughout Australia. The main target groups for the website are older people with disabilities, carers and family members. The website shows the location of over 14,000 public toilets around Australia, with information on opening times and access for people with a disability. Public amenities data is provided through well established and supported networks, including local councils.

The Department of Health and Ageing is committed to maintaining the quality and integrity of the data and has contractual arrangements with a private third party provider in place until 30 June 2010.

As part of the contractual arrangement, a mobile phone application was developed in November 2008 which is now operational. Any mobile phone which has Internet capability can access the toilet map site via the normal website address www.toiletmap.gov.au. By entering the street address of your location, a mobile phone user will automatically be access information for up to five of the nearest public toilet locations, their opening hours and facilities.

In addition, an iPhone application is currently being developed by the contractor on behalf of the department.

The current arrangements ensure that people using the website and/or associated mobile phone application have, at all times, access to information which is correct and up to date. The department is therefore unable to provide you with access to the NPTM data requested.
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There are a number of different ways to get in touch with us to provide feedback for 'Show the Loo'.

No toilets in your area? Anything in the user interface/ interaction with the app you dislike?Did the application crash unexpectedly? Found loo's you had no idea of existed before? Do you have great ideas on what you would like us to add in future releases?

We want to know from you and can be reached via our support site and on Twitter under the id panthacorp. Soon we will open up the blog for comments as well.

We are quite pleased with the first reactions we've received and are certainly not going to sit still for very long in making adjustments where necessary and adding some features that we felt would risk the necessary perfectioning phase of version 1.

Testing prior to the release showed that the update to iPhone firmware 2.2 improved stability drastically as we are relying on Firefox for the time being to display the map. For future releases, we plan to have a native Objectice-C implementation. We recommend anyone who might not have yet updated to move to the version 2.2 which also brings along many other nifty new iPhone features alongside improved overall stability.

In the coming days we will approach the Department of Health and Ageing once more with an official (this time) request for a license of the toiletmap.gov.au data. We have always meant for this app to remain free and there theoretically shouldn't be a compelling reason to reject our request. It appears however that we are not the first to try and fail, judging by this blog entry by Joshua Gans on CoreEcon. I fully agree that data that was created by public funding should be accessible to all Australians and am looking forward to being in touch with the Commonwealth copyright administration to discuss the matter.

After many days of waiting for Apple's approval, 'Show the Loo' can now be downloaded for free in the App store! We also launched a mini-site under showtheloo.com for product support.

More in the article itself...

Ever since Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone SDK roadmap (talk about goosebumps), we have been keeping a keen eye on the evolution of the iPhone ecosphere. Due to other commitments we haven't been able so far to dive into developing an application but we are certainly going to give it a try at some point. Allowing transLucidonline customers to manage their sites and comments is one of the possibilities of delving into this space.

It is clearly fascinating to see how fast the market for iPhone application seems to be maturing. If we were to get into this space now as a provider, only seven months after the launch of the SDK and app store, we could be considered opportunistic rather than cutting-edge and early adopters.

Nonetheless, it is good to see that there are still segments that - even though they seem obvious to launch an app in - have not yet been well catered for. Example: Surfers. Living in Australia and having an office at the beach must sensitize me to this particular lack in solid offerings. :) Here a good overview from MobileCrunch describing the recent launch of an app by Oakley providing surf forecasts around the globe.

We'll see what the future will bring. Surely it's going to stay an exciting market and maybe we'll decide to get into it as well.