We are approaching the end of the year and we wanted to update you on current and future improvements. Our team is busy at work growing the BlooSee platform and we are thankful to have your contributions. The ocean is our largest ecosytem and the ultimate environment for adventure. We are dependent on the sea for so many reasons. The BlooSee team is thrilled to roll out some new features starting this New Year as our community of ocean lovers continues to grow. Going forward we are happy to answer any of your questions. We want to make sure your BlooSee experience is as enjoyable as possible. Here’s a sneak peak of what you can expect.

• We improved the infopoint creation process by adding a step-by-step wizard. But we’ll continue to update it to make the process even easier.
• The Boat Directory is up and running in beta. The directory will be ready for everyone to use early in the new year. We’ll roll out various boat types (sail yachts, motor yachts, tall ships…) in different stages. We’re sure it will be an exciting new feature to play around with soon. We’ll also have pages for companies, organizations and institutions.
• The America’s Cup is coming to San Francisco in 2013, but other events in the world series are planned in different venues. As preparations begin for the race, we will be bringing you as much information as possible, with a dedicated site for it.
• We’ll improve media management, the weather forecast, and add tools like a new review system or digital dive logs for divers.
• A focused commitment to conservation. We at BlooSee plan to do our part to to protect the Ocean and all of her bounty. In 2012 we will be implementing a number of initiatives that will benefit from your participation. As our community grows stronger, so will our efforts.

We will be keeping you updated on these developments as they happen. You can stay up to date on all new features and just about everything ocean related by following us on Twitter. End 2011 with some Geotags and share some infopoints. Let’s take the ocean further.

An interview with ocean scientist Laura Rubiano-Gómez

Underwater gliders are revolutionizing ocean research, allowing scientist to get more mileage -literally and figuratively- from their scarce research funds.  Ocean scientist Laura Rubiano-Gómez is responsible for the operation, maintenance and deployment of a fleet of underwater gliders, a type of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) used in the acquisition of data for various federally funded research programs.

BlooSee: Tell us a bit about yourself.

Laura Rubiano-Gómez: I first became interested in oceanography while doing an internship in Venice, Italy during college. It was there that I started learning about the importance of studying our oceans. After graduating college with a degree in environmental engineering, I went off to graduate school to study physical oceanography. In graduate school I learned how to use numerical models to study oceanic features like coastal currents, but it wasn’t until I began working at Oregon State University (OSU) that I began working with underwater gliders. I spent three years as a member of OSU’s glider research group where I participated in the planning, deployment, recovery and piloting of our fleet of gliders in support of projects off the coast of Oregon and Chile.

What are underwater gliders? What are these being used for?

An underwater glider is a type of autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) that uses small changes in its buoyancy to propel itself forward as it glides through the water. Gliders follow an up-and-down, sawtooth-like profile through the water, providing different types of data depending on the instruments it carries. The most common instruments measure water temperature, salinity (to calculate density), depth, dissolved oxygen, optical backscatter and chlorophyll fluorescence. The instruments on the glider continuously collect data as it glider through the water and transmits it back to the base-station every time it comes to the surface, which is usually about every six hours.

Gliders are currently used all over the world, from the tropics to the poles, to monitor and study the ocean and its changing properties. They are often used to study climate change, to monitor where pollutants are going, to study red tides, hypoxia and other oceanic features such as upwelling events.

“A glider, RU-27, completed the transatlantic journey from New Jersey to the western coast of Spain in 221 days”

What are the main advantages of gliders compared to traditional research methods?

Traditionally, oceanographic data is collected by scientists aboard seagoing vessels. Unfortunately, this method results in a very low rate of data acquisition compared to what it costs to obtain the data. The use of gliders is more advantageous. They provide subsurface data on a larger scale and higher frequency than traditional shipboard techniques at a fraction of the cost, and their ability to gather data is not affected by rough weather.

Can you share some interesting facts/examples/achievements pertaining to underwater gliders?

After the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico gliders were used to monitor the problem and track the spill.

A couple of years ago a team from Rutgers University led the effort to have a glider cross the Atlantic Ocean. A glider, RU-27, completed the transatlantic journey from New Jersey to the western coast of Spain in 221 days.

Do you think it could be useful to allow people to follow these gliders online, and find out more about them on sites like BlooSee.com?

There are several universities in the US and abroad that have gliders in the water collecting data year-round. It would be great for people interested in what is going on in the ocean to be able to check out the realtime data, and look at how properties like water temperature and salinity change seasonally and across oceans and hemispheres.

Thank you so much Laura, keep up the great work!

BlooSee’s app is really intuitive to use. In fact, its user interface is quite similar to the Maps app of your iPhone. A crosshairs button allows you to go to your real location, while a search function takes you to any place in the planet using Google’s geo search engine.  You can also search for specific infopoints, and use your fingers to zoom in, out, and move around the world visually.

Nautical charts. Tap the chart icon  to view official nautical charts for North America (NOAA), Brazil, New Zealand, and the vast majority of the Pacific Ocean. A slider control allows you to adjust the transparency of the chart.

Worldwide wind conditions: Tap the sails icon to activate the wind layer. A slider control allows the user to adjust the transparency of the wind layer, while buttons in the lower part of the screen provide wind predictions for the next 6, 12, 18 and 24 hours.

So, now you have a map app for the 70% of the world that Google Maps doesn’t cover! ;-)   –plus winds, charts, user generated infopoints, photos, and more.

What are you waiting for? Download it now!

Why does the sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste of the ocean set our souls at ease?

How does our “brain on ocean” behave?

These questions and much more are the subject of the BlueMind Summit, the first conference in history to bring together leaders in neuroscience and ocean exploration. It will take place June 2, 2011 at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, and BlooSee is proud to be a sponsor.

The BlueMind Summit is the brainchild of Dr. Wallace J. Nichols, a noted sea turtle biologist, an ocean advocate, and a Research Associate at the California Academy of Sciences. Dr. Nichols sits on the Advisory Board of BlooSee.

“Humans have a deep connection to the sea that drives many of our decisions—from what seafood we eat and where we live, to how we vacation and relax,” says Dr. Nichols. “But that connection is poorly studied and tricky territory of discussion among scientists and policy makers. So, I decided it was time to bring the mind and ocean together. The result is BlueMind. Understanding the connection between neuroscience and the ocean may shed new light on the best use of our brains to evolve our relationship to our ocean planet.”

Dr. Wallace J Nichols

The BlueMind Summit will bring together neuroscientists, ocean scientists, experts in technology forecasting, photographers, explorers, writers, and ocean advocates, in an unprecedented gathering.

With ongoing threats to the ocean intensifying, there is urgent need to focus on solutions. Nichols and his team believe that new insights may emerge as we understand our brains more deeply—and most critically, our brain’s interrelationship with the ocean planet.

At BlooSee we hope to build much more than a great platform for ocean information, or a technology business.  Our brains are always yearning for a good dose of ocean, and we want to help millions be closer to the ocean, to foster a better enjoyment and stewardship of our beloved en endangered oceans.

BlueMind seeks to help define an emerging field that unites neuroscience, ocean exploration and stewardship, providing an opportunity for humans to shape a new era of better understanding of the ocean and its great emotional power.

At BlooSee we are really proud to support this endeavor and we invite you to watch the BlueMind Summit live June 2, 2011, 8:30 am – 5:00 pm PST (GMT-8) at http://justin.tv/calacademy

We’re excited to announce that BlooSee now features the official nautical charts published by NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration agency of the United States Government.

NOOA charts in the San Francisco area - Click to enlarge

To view the charts use the slider control that will appear in the upper right hand side of the screen while browsing US waters on BlooSee’s Explore map. You’ll notice that the precision of those charts will change as you zoom in or out: the “closer” you are the more detailed the chart information is.

NOAA charts in the Midway atoll - Click to enlarge

This powerful navigational information is available now for free to all BlooSee users, and will be available soon to iPhone users as well.

We are working hard to bring nautical chart coverage for the rest of the world, stay tuned.

Enjoy!

The truth is that tweeting about stuff that is happening in and around oceans and shorelines can be a challenge. The reason? How do I tweet about a threatened dolphin pod in Japan, a sea lion rookery in California, an exploding oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, a fancy new marina in Dubai, a diving spot in the Philippines, or a a great surfing spot in Fiji? What is the URL of a place in or on the water?

This is a problem that BlooSee solves perfectly since it allows any ocean lover to find and/or create points of interest in the ocean and shorelines in a matter of seconds. These points are given a unique URL that anyone can tweet, either directly from the “Share /Twitter” button on BlooSee or by grabbing the URL (Via the Share/URL button) and shortening and tweeting it as usual. Here are some examples:

• Watching @TheCoveMovie: see the spot where dolphins are slaughtered: http://bit.ly/dwMuzu
• Exploring the USS Yukon shipwreck off San Diego http://bit.ly/d2dhnW #SCUBA
• Shacketon’s 100 year-old whiskey found in Atarctica http://bit.ly/aGnM0M

BlooSee also allows anyone to tweet maps of the ocean centered and zoomed in a certain way. For instance:

• Sailing the Straits of Gibraltar http://bit.ly/ajZBfl
• Kayaking along the southern coast of Santa Cruz Island http://bit.ly/9SNrM6
• Planning a vacation to the Istria Coast in Croatia http://bit.ly/cPZU3Y

BooSee has been created with twitter-friendliness in mind.   BlooSee + Twitter allows anyone to bring the oceans into the online conversation, for a better enjoyment and stewardship of the world’s oceans.

(This post was originally published on TwiTip.com)

Short entry to inform everyone that we’ve just updated our iPhone app. There was this nasty bug in the logout sequence that made the application crash. No longer.

What’s more important to most users, the infopoint icons load faster now! So we recommend everyone to update it.

What’s New In Version 1.0.4

- General speed improvements in loading infopoint information
- “Logout” button bug fixed (application no longer crashes at user logout)
- Minor bug fixes

Changes include:

• Improved the infopoint balloon: buttons are clearer, and contact info (tel., website, etc.) appear right under the description, so there’s no need to go to the full details to see them. Major improvement.
• Added a few categories under “Commercial services”: “Mechanical/Electrical services”, “Clothing and apparel”, and “Other services”.
• Improved the groups section. Still lots of work to do with Groups, but at least they are clearer/nicer now.
• Corrected minor bugs and improved a few other things.

This will help spread the BlooSee word, so go ahead and sync your accounts!