Active Captain has a C-Dory owners group

Since I am old fashioned,and avoid social media (Facebook etc), I don't see the point for a C Dory group on AC. What we have on this forum is far better. I understand the "E" boat cards--and personally reject their use. But that is my personal opinion. I see potential for abuse of these by both criminal element and advertisers.

On the other hand I fully support Active Captain and the work Jeff and Karen have done for the mapping part of AC.
 
I agree with Bob, and hate to see another forum that the world of good info. carried here will be split up. With the vast experience here there is not another forum that matches it. I follow Tugnuts, R246 Owners, Trawlers and Trawlering and none match C-Brats for good info. for our type boats and type boating we enjoy.
Ron
 
Well I jump over the fence here and say I think Facebook is nothing short of AWESOME. :D Use it every day to check on fishing friends and family. You can create private groups which keeps the general public out and only addresses members. Sorry guys but my vote is a big FOR. :lol:
 
I don't see the Active Captain "groups" as a forum--more as a contact media--and maybe Jeff will jump in here and explain the "E" cards, and the reason for contacting and following your friends who are C Dories. I would rather see that information continued here however, rather than another medium. However I can see it as a great tool for someone who is doing the loop or cruising (even world wide). Also for folks who do not have a great forum and forum moderators as we have.

Active Captain was started a number of Years ago by the genius of Jeffary and Karen Siegel. From their web site:
"
We're different
There is nothing else on or off the web that rivals ActiveCaptain. While there are boating sites that have come before us and others that are trying to imitate us, no other tool has the quantity or quality of information available to boaters. None.

We've worked for 5 years to build the ActiveCaptain database with one goal in mind - provide a place where boaters can freely share information. The results prove that it works.

There are now 100,000 boaters accessing the ActiveCaptain data. Major marine navigation software developers have choosen our data for display in their chart plotters. Our user base is growing at twice the rate of a year ago. Marina data, reviews, local knowledge, anchorages, and hazards are being added and updated a thousand times a day.

But it's not just the vast quantity of information that attracts boaters. We also have the best quality of data. Only ActiveCaptain allows live update of information by registered users - that's 100,000 pairs of eyeballs ensuring the data is up-to-date. Only ActiveCaptain verifies and validates information to ensure it is consistent and accurate. Only ActiveCaptain allows boaters to enter unedited reviews. Reviews that present each boater's own impression and opinion, good or bad, about a marina or anchorage. Only ActiveCaptain maintains a user-updated database of worldwide hazards with user comments providing up-to-the-minute findings. Only ActiveCaptain."

Understand that Jeff and Karen have devoted thousands of hours with little renumeration for their work. It is one of the most significant body of works which is helping the cruising community. I don't remember when I first "met" Jeff, but it was when Active Captain was just an idea. He has made it work--and a lot more to go! They live aboard and cruise their DeFever 53 (have expressed interests in C Dories), and are also dog/boat people with Golden Retrievers aboard.
 
thataway":i8ck8t4e said:
I don't see the Active Captain "groups" as a forum--more as a contact media--and maybe Jeff will jump in here and explain the "E" cards, and the reason for contacting and following your friends who are C Dories.
Click to expand...

eBoatCards isn't a forum at all. There is the ability to exchange info but in a Facebook sort of way. But it's not for that and it's certainly not something that is meant to replace forums like this. It's meant to augment forums with capabilities that will likely never appear in other ways.

Give me a second to explain...

We're now in our 11th year of near-full time cruising. We noticed that as our baggies of boat cards increased in size after meeting more and more people, it was impossible to keep up and keep track of our boating friends. Some of them have SPOT (like us) and it was fantastic to see where our close friends were located. But what kept happening is that we'd cross paths or anchor near another boat that we knew we knew. Or we'd find out that really good friends were just a mile away and we didn't know it.

Next we realized that your relationships and identity can play an important role in the types of information held in ActiveCaptain. For example, when we'd see reviews about a marina or anchorage from people we knew, those reviews somehow held more credibility and were much more important than many of the other reviews.

So we wanted to figure out a way to put all of that together. Facebook seemed like a good model. It provided the relationship database (friends, groups, apps, etc) and had a way to exchange quick info between friends. And while Karen and I use Facebook, that's more about our full life, family, friends back home, etc. We thought we wanted something that was only about our boating life - and that's something you can't do in Facebook.

So for the last 3 years we've been designing and developing this new capability. We're at the very, very beginning. I wish I had a staff the size of the nighttime janitorial team at Facebook but it's just me developing it. So what is rolled out now is a framework where you can create your identity as an electronic boat card. Your identity right now is made up of profile information, friend relationships, and the groups you belong to.

eBoatCards has a very strong security and privacy model - much tougher than Facebook. I saw Facebook as much too open. We'd be providing boat positions so I wanted much better control over who can see that type of info. Not much is very active in eBoatCards until you develop friends. Then you can see more about what they're doing.

So here are two things coming next.

This summer we'll be releasing a new app called The ActiveCaptain Companion (Windows, OSX, iOS, and Android). It's software that combines ActiveCaptain with your eBoatCards identity. It speaks to you as you approach hazards and is a platform for using ActiveCaptain data in ways you haven't realized were possible. Check out this video to see it in action:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUZceLjMQmw&feature=share&list=TL5-Iu08mIUjo

The Companion is, well, your companion. It's looking out ahead for you to help. There are many other things coming with it besides the hazard warnings (and the alarm is optional - but it's helpful in environments with noise).

While the Companion is providing these next generation features, it's also optionally providing your location to our server. It's kept there as a permanent log of where you've been for future editing/documentation/sharing. But it also provides live info about your position and movement to others that you allow. We use eBoatCards for that permission capability - sharing your friends or group member's locations on the display.

This provides a SPOT type of capability across many people at the same time on one display. For free. We've also been given interface specs from SPOT so we'll grab that data too if configured for offshore tracking. So now you can see your friends who are in proximity. You can see group members so you could see where all the C-Dories are (or Ranger Tugs - there's a group for them too). When you see their marker on the display, tapping on it shows their electronic boat card so you can remember more about them and see where they've been last.

Groups can also include other associations like forums. So a C-Brats group would allow you to see the location of others who sign up. We like the impromptu rendezvous types of things this capability provides - getting together with people you know or have known for years who might be right around the corner....except you didn't know. And yes, you can turn it all off if you want to be private and left alone.

There's another early capability that the eBoatCards relationships provides. Now we'll have another dimension for displaying ActiveCaptain reviews. Consider being able to sort reviews by showing the ones written by friends first. Or show reviews of an anchorage written by members of C-Brats. All of that is possible and the whole thing is being designed to provide that. As marinas are getting more than 100 reviews, we need something to help sort them and make them more valuable for our personal needs. My trawler draws 6' and trust me, many of the anchorage reviews are not adequate when they say, "plenty of water" without letting me know more about the boat writing the review. I'd much prefer to see what other boats I know thought of the anchorage. I want to sort reviews by DeFever owners too.

So none of that competes with C-Brats. It augments it. That was the design of it. No one would have threaded conversations like this in Facebook. eBoatCards is no different.


We've worked for 5 years to build the ActiveCaptain database...

There are now 100,000 boaters accessing the ActiveCaptain data...
Click to expand...
Yikes. This reminds me that I have to edit that page.

We're in our 7th year. We reported that we had 200,000 users last fall. There are 26 navigation products released that license our data (27 next week) with another 20 in development.

And that reminds me of another important eBoatCards feature. We're obviously involved with many third-party navigation products, applications, and apps. These capabilities of displaying friends' locations, sorting reviews by your relationships, and other things are all API driven and will be provided to every licensee. The ActiveCaptain Companion is basically a free demo showing all the capabilities. It doesn't use charts but is pretty good to sit on your phone on the side watching out for you. Next consider that running your Garmin app, Coastal Explorer, or even built into your chartplotter will also be the ability to merge ActiveCaptain and eBoatCards data. Needless to say, that's a key component to what we're building too.

We're at the very beginning of this relationship model. It'll take time for it to unfold and many more people will get involved as the position sharing is released. eBoatCards is the key to making all of this personal and taking advantage of the next generation tools. And there really should be a C-Brats group!
 
Thanks Jeff for chiming in and explaining the eBoatCard premise. As this new function matures and takes shape it will hopefully provide the same fantastic benefits as the base Active Captain website does.

I for one greatly appreciate your monitoring and responding to the C-Brats forum.

Thanks again sir.

Regards,
Dan, Tanya, and Hannah on C-Renity
 
Thanks Jeff,
Great explanation!

As I understand it, you have to manually put in your location--is there a mechanism for "spot" or one of the other tracking programs to put in your location automatically?

For example, I missed Jody Kidd last May at Lake Powell--we were on different time zones, and we were only a few hundred yards apart, but due to topography could not see each other. One of the limits there is cell phone communication--Only Verizon works beyond civilization--and only spotty places there.
 
thataway":178arwlb said:
As I understand it, you have to manually put in your location--is there a mechanism for "spot" or one of the other tracking programs to put in your location automatically?
Click to expand...
The locator capability isn't available yet. It's part of the ActiveCaptain Companion apps and new API's for the 3rd party developers. There won't be any ability to manually enter your position - it has to come automatically. So while you're using the Companion to warn you over audio about upcoming hazards, it's sending a small packet every 10 minutes providing your position to the ActiveCaptain server. Now it can query for friends or groups to get the locations of whatever you choose.

In a similar way, 3rd party products using ActiveCaptain will have the API so they can send the position every 10 minutes and receive locations of your relationships as well.

If you have SPOT, we'll allow you to configure your account inside eBoatCards and then our server will look at your SPOT data every 10 minutes too. We'll record the data forever though. SPOT times out after 7 days.

For example, I missed Jody Kidd last May at Lake Powell--we were on different time zones, and we were only a few hundred yards apart, but due to topography could not see each other.
Click to expand...
That's the exact situation I'm trying to improve. And cellular might not be available - perhaps you'll use SPOT from some places. I'm not against importing position info from other mechanisms (SSB, Delorme, etc) as well.

We call this combination of ActiveCaptain and eBoatCards "social navigation." Your chartplotter tells you how to get from one place to another. ActiveCaptain tells you why to go there and what people think about it. eBoatCards tells you who is there. It's the "why" and "who" that have been difficult to obtain pre-internet.
 
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