The naive way of doing it is to extrapolate the earth to be a sphere and easily find the distance using simple equations. Here is a short explanation about that.

This will work great for locations that are very close to each other, but we wanted to be able to measure distances all around the globe (*World Wide* Quest).
To do that you need to forget about the sphere and see the earth as it is an ellipsoid.
This makes the math a hell of a lot more trickier and requires approximation methods to be used.
Luckily, a great mathematician called Vincenty came to aid and created a great algorithm that we use to do the job.

Many thanks to these guys for implementing it in the code:
http://www.gavaghan.org/blog/free-source-code/geodesy-library-vincentys-formula/

When we first started designing the server solution, we knew that we had to build something
that can scale fast, effortlessly, and be cheap. Since our game is so heavily dependent on our servers, it had to be up ~100% of the time; it had to support many API calls / min and process large amount of data queries.
For the past two months we have been experiencing with Microsoft’s Azure platform as our server backbone. So far, it has supplied us with everything we wanted. We use it to build our Cloud DB (Azure storage), our front end site (asp.net) and our API (WCF & Linq).

both on the C# server code and on the Cocoa code on the iPhone 3.0.

We joined the best designers in the world and started building our dream iPhone app.

The iPhone game for geeks that will hopefully manage to get outside the geek circle to the whole world. We have an idea, we believe in it, think it’s the time for it, think the world is ready.

Will we succeed? (How do you measure success?? this should be a whole different post….) that’s a good question. Lately we’ve been debating between us what are the success factors. Our bottom line became numbers. That’s what happens when you have a mathematician in the gang.
So without further ado - the recipe for success


1. 3% good idea
2. 20% timing
3. 15% luck
4. 10% operation
5. 52% marketing


we are hopefully covered with item # 1 and # 4. In the timing zone we think we are doing well, although there is quite a bit of fine tuning in it - it’s one thing to launch on 2009, but there is also launching Google wave the day after Microsoft launches Bing.

So this is it. Stay tuned for more updates on our process, we will share as much information as we can.

Let’s start, as in starting.
Are we there yet?
(no, not yet)