Dog-lovers, listen up.

This may be one of the coolest Boxcar providers we’ve featured yet. It’s just that awesome.

The Doggy provider was created by Bernhard Üllenberg, of Germany.

And just so we don’t get your hopes up too much, we’ll go ahead and let our English-speaking users know that, yes, this provider is currently specific to locations in Germany.

In other words, we’re telling you about a really cool *concept* that is applicable to anywhere, and may well show up as a provider you can use someday, even if you don’t speak German. Got it? Ja? Das is gut. So keep reading, already.

Short version: This location-based site for dog owners offers local information and some really cool services, such as allowing you to connect with other dog owners in the area, get notifications about threats like poisoned food, and even track your walks.

We’ll let Bernhard tell you more: 

   

A.                                                             B.

A. The service is very much organized around your actual location. So you start with a page with status info (new messages, new friend-requests), news about lost dogs, and alerts about poisoned food (horrible threat to dogs) in your area.

 

B. Then we have a Radar, where you can see yourself and other users (if allowed by them) doing their dog walks. This helps you to decide where and with whom you’d like to share your dog-walk-time.

 

It’s also the central page to start to interact with other users: See their public profile, send a message, make a friend request.

 

C.                                                               D.

 

C. The idea behind the service is to stay in contact with other dog owners without the need to exchange personal information (phone number, name, address, etc.). When you meet somebody new on your walk, you tell him or her about the website and your username. Since registering is a matter of seconds (name, email, password and zip) you can befriend right on the spot. For communication there is a internal post system.

 

D. On the Android platform* (with Firefox) you can also track your walks. Motivate yourself to walk more and longer. We think about a point system (like other check-in-services) to make it a bit competitive.

 

E. (to the left)  

Statistics about your dog walks in the past. (Tracking and statistics are private data.)

 

Recently we also added social sharing features, where you have a simple Facebook/Twitter-style diary with a plain privacy model (private, public, for friends).

 

We have a very high percentage of females (approx. 80%) and some people think about our service as a dating site for dogs. ;)

 

I started out very much focused on creating a local vibrant community in Düsseldorf (and we were glad to get good press), before we extend it to other cities. 

 

Boxcar allows us to push the internal messages on time between users. As a website, we love having the ability to feature instant communication, which is typically a capability only or primarily of apps.

 You can sign up for the service here. Guten tag!                   - Bernhard Üllenberg

   

*Android users, we’re making progress on having Boxcar for you guys - stay tuned!