Time is the most naked manifestation of our irrelevance and perhaps that is why I am fascinated by all means of time-telling. Sundials, hour glasses, watches, clocks and now in the age of iPhone, time-watching apps. In the past I have written about the Nooka app for the iPhone. Today, I got a handful of new apps that are worth checking out: 1. Time in words — Qlocktwo It is a very minimal clock for iPhone and iPad. It costs 99 cents but I like the idea of the simple black screen telling me what time it is. Built by creative design agency Biegert & Funk, who have also created similar watches and clocks. Download from the iTunes store. (via Ultralink) 2. Uniqlo Wake Up It is so wonderful and delightful and meets my very simple requirement from an app: high emotional quotient. It is bright, cheery and it comes with alarm tones that mimic the weather, time and day of the week. It is intelligent and fun. It works both on Android and iOS and is free, thanks to Uniqlo, a Japanese clothing brand, whose clothes I will never fit into. As an aside, this is a perfect brand extension vehicle and what brand-advertising should be in the future. The alarm music, which is automatically created based on the weather, time, and day of the week, was co-written by 51st annual Grammy nominee Cornelius (Keigo Oyamada) and Yoko Kanno, who is active in songwriting across a wide range of genres including video games and anime (COWBOY BEBOP, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Macross). The app allows users to share a record of their awakening – specifically, the time, weather, and temperature at the moment they stopped the alarm – via social media (Facebook, Twitter, RenRen, Weibo). In addition, the “wake up Read More
One of the nifty new software features on Samsung’s Galaxy S III smartphone is called Pop Up Play; it allows you to watch a video while multitasking on the phone. That may not be a “must have” feature for everyone, but I can see the value. If you’re watching a movie or YouTube video and a text or email comes in requiring a response, you can quickly manage it while still watching your mobile flick. It’s probably more of a convenience than anything else, and of course, it requires a Samsung Galaxy S III. Or does it? The Pocketables enthusiast site turned up a third-party app for Android devices that does the same thing. It’s called Stick It and it will cost you $1.49. Thanks to the 15 minute refund policy in Google Play, you can give it a try with out spending the coin, and that’s just what I did this afternoon. I can’t say I’ve tested every possible video type, but on my Galaxy Nexus, Stick It worked great for my own captured videos, YouTube, and even a video I downloaded locally from the official TED application. According to the information on the application page in Google Play, Stick It supports nearly all of the major video file formats and even a few video streaming protocols. Video played back in Stick In simply floats above all other content on the display, but you can still interact with other programs during playback. You can resize, drag or minimize the floating video window as well. Again; not something for everyone, but for a buck and a half, it’s a nice feature that I thought was limited to one specific phone. Now it isn’t. And it may even better suited for tablets where you have more screen real estate for multitasking. Related research Read More
Brent Hoberman knows a thing or two about last-minute bookings, being the co-founder and former CEO of aptly-named British e-commerce legend Lastminute.com. So it must be particularly heartening for Spanish outfit Blink Booking to have him on board as an investor. Hoberman’s PROFounders Capital vehicle is one of several investors in a funding round announced on Thursday, which brought in $2.5 million for the mobile-focused last-minute hotel booking service. Other big names in the round included London’s DN Capital, SoftTech VC’s Jeff Clavier, former American Express global chief Charles Petruccelli and Carlos Domingo, the head of Telefonica Digital. Not a bad lineup, considering Blink has only had its virtual doors open for the last six months. Already, the company offers last-minute hotel bookings in 39 cities across seven countries (Spain, Italy, Germany, the UK, Portugal, France and Ireland), with more than 400 hotels on its roster. Customers get a choice of four hotels each night in each city – Blink says it does this so it can negotiate the best rates on exclusive terms, and that Blink reps personally visit the hotels before they are selected. Blink has seen more than 160,000 downloads of its Android and iOS apps. It also claims to be the largest mobile reservations platform of its kind in Europe, and promises hotels that it’ll be giving them access to more than a million customers by the end of this year. Going global This mobile-led strategy is smart – after all, a truly last-minute booking will usually be made on the move – but there are rivals out there. These include Hotel Tonight and Priceline, and it would come as no surprise if Blink used its new reserves to take them on on their home turf. The company said in the funding announcement that it would use Read More
Someone follows you down a dark alley or you feel a sudden tightening in your chest. You’re in a bad situation. Don’t panic! Okay, go ahead and panic, but at least do it productively. Call 911, determine your location and send the coordinates to your loved ones, get your medical records in order. Or better yet, hit this big red button. Mobile software developer Avanquest Mobile Technologies has designed a panic button for smartphones. Upon launching the app you’re presented with a big emergency button. Once you press it the app immediately begins a countdown, which, if you don’t stop by the time it reaches zero, will set the rest of the app’s wheels in motion. It doesn’t matter what country you’re in, the app will call the relevant emergency line. It will send SMS messages with your GPS coordinates to a list of friends, relatives or emergency contacts. Notices of medical conditions immediately start flashing on screen along. Oh, did I mention the phone makes a hell of a racket? A siren will sound, alerting everyone around to your presence until deactivated or the phone goes dead. There are other emergency apps available in the smartphone markets, though none of them seem to go to quite the lengths of Avanquest’s Mobile Alert service. Avanquest’s business model is also a bit different. It doesn’t plan to sell its software through iTunes or Google Play. Rather, it’s selling it as a platform to carriers, handset makers and other resellers who can customize it as a stand-alone service or package it with other features specific to their businesses, Avanquest VP Brian Yarosh told me. Perspective buyers might be medical insurance companies, looking to offer some around-the-clock protection to their clients, or travel agencies, who want to ensure their customers can call the police Read More
The National Hockey League, which already has an official iPad app, is jumping further into the second screen trend with what it calls the first sanctioned predictive gaming app for a major sports league. The free NHL PrePlay app, which just got approved, allows TV viewers to play along with a game by making live predictions on the action. Users will be able to predict who wins face-offs or who will score the next goal and the outcomes of power plays, penalty shots and other in-game events. As the game progresses, the app will serve up new questions based on the action and will process the results of those predictions in real-time with points awarded. Before the game, players can also enter predictions on things like goalie performance or the final score. A user can play against the entire universe of PrePlay users or they can set up private challenges among friends. There are other predictive gaming apps that let people play along with the NFL and other leagues. But the NHL is the first to incorporate the feature into a league-sanctioned app. It’s teaming with PrePlay Sports, which is supplying the predictive gaming elements for the app. Christopher J. Golier, VP Mobile Marketing & Strategy for the NHL told me the app is designed to keep fans tuned into longer games. And it can draw in more casual fans, by letting them play along from their couch. “This is more engaging than a check-in,” Golier said. “It takes the game to the next level.” Beer vendor Molson is sponsoring the app and is using it to augment its existing TV advertising. So when an ad shows up on TV, the app hears the commercial and will display a similar advertisement that offers the chance to get more information. This is becoming a new Read More
Want a new iPhone, but not sure which U.S. carrier is best suited for your needs? Enter CarrierCompare, an iPhone app that uses real network tests in your location combined with crowdsourced data to help you choose the carrier that’s right for you. The app isn’t brand new as it launched about two weeks ago, but it’s still an effective way to help determine coverage and speed by carrier for your next iPhone. The semi-odd thing is that the app is iOS only, meaning you need an existing iPhone on a carrier to figure out if you have the “right” carrier. Regardless, CarrierCompare is a sound approach. It first performs a speed test on your current iPhone to see what service your carrier is providing at your location. The app then uses speedtests and data from other iPhones in your area to compare the three major carriers: Verizon, AT&T and Sprint. One of the key metrics the app initially provided — signal strength — is no longer available, although speed test data and network latency is still there. The signal strength data was pulled from the app at Apple’s request. SwayMarkets, the developers of Carrier Compare note on their site that they’re working with Apple: “We had to remove signal strength from CarrierCompare to remain in compliance with our developer agreement with Apple and avoid having our apps pulled from the App Store entirely. Apple has been very cooperative through this process, and we are pursuing ways of bringing signal strength back in the future. As mentioned in the CarrierCompare update description, signal strength has the smallest impact on the quality of your data experience, so the rankings we present will continue to focus on that. We recognize signal strength is an important metric for comparing voice quality, and we encourage you Read More
Big data meets the quantitative self with an iPhone EKG-tracking case and project to collect every heartbeat for science. Dr. Leslie Saxon, the founder of the USC Center for Body Computing, wants everyone to send in their heartbeat data to a website to help create a database to track heart health. Fast Company’s Co.exist blog has the details of the project, which hopes to understand what the heart rhythms of an entire population look like over a period of days, weeks and maybe even years. So while doctors today might get a few moments of a normal heart rate from patients in their office, most continuous monitoring occurs only when a patient is in the hospital and experiencing distress — like a heart attack. Using medical devices such as the AliveCor EKG reader that acts as an iPhone case, an app, or even some of the hoped-for wearable tracking sensors, such as the theoretical wearable thin-film patch from mc10, doctors can get a more well-rounded view of what a healthy heart looks like. From there, it’s only a matter of establishing patterns and teasing out data points. Then perhaps, doctors can discover how heart rates change ahead of heart attacks, before someone comes down with a serious illness or any other number of indications that a person is less than their best. It’s the type of project that Seton Healthcare, an Austin, Texas hospital system could embrace to discover population health trends and lower the cost of delivering medical care by finding small problems before they become big ones. Healthcare is the type of use case that big data is made for. And plenty of efforts are being made to find ways to make this type of aggregated and constant data sharing acceptable for consumers. We have devices that can do Read More
Foreflight takes a navigation chart and overlays current satellite weather imagery, in this case, fog in San Francisco. It’s become somewhat controversial when and how air passengers use mobile devices. But the idea of pilots using them, specifically Apple’s iPad, is gaining broader acceptance. At least four major airlines are either testing or allowing pilots to replace their flight manuals and paper charts with the 9.7-inch, 1.5-pound tablet. Most passengers probably don’t care what their pilot uses to fly the plane as long as they arrive on time and with as little turbulence as possible. But I can tell you as someone who lives with a pilot, using his iPad to prepare for flights is the best thing to happen to him in a decade of flying. Just as contributor Mark Crump told us how he uses mobile devices and apps to re-learn guitar after 20 years, I talked to my husband Greg, a search-and-rescue helicopter pilot, about how his iPad 2 has become part of his daily work routine, what apps he uses, and why Apple’s tablet is beginning to catch on in aviation. A: Well, in case my boss is reading this, I do not play Angry Birds at work. Zombie Gunship on the otherhand… But seriously, when I do pre-flight planning, I need to know what’s going on in our entire “area of responsibility” for the next 24-hour period we’re on duty. Before we assume the watch, we’re responsible for checking the current and forecast weather at our base and all major airports in our area. That’s in addition to knowing radio navigation aids that are inoperative and runways that are closed, FAA temporary flight restrictions (places we can’t fly) — these pop up at the last minute. There are legal and flight safety implications of us not knowing Read More
Smartphones are proving to be more popular than standalone cameras when it comes to photos but one company continues to buck the trend. On Wednesday, Eye-Fi released a memory card for digital cameras that directly uploads pictures over Wi-Fi or transfers them to a nearby smartphone or tablet. In theory, the $79 Eye-Fi Mobile X2 can be used to get images from a point-and-shoot or DLSR to Instagram, Facebook, TwitPic or any number of other photo sharing sites. This can be handy for those that do carry a traditional digital camera but still have the desire to share great shots on photo sites. There are new cameras available with Wi-Fi on them, but the sharing functionality is limited to whatever sites the camera manufacturer enabled in the software. By sending images to a phone or tablet with Direct Mode, which the company debuted last year, pictures can be edited easier and shared with any site or social network through a mobile app. The Mobile X2 is actually an extension of Eye-Fi’s new product line. It joins the $49 Connect X2 and $99 Pro X2. All three memory cards offer the Direct View functionality. With it, photos can be sent directly to an iPhone, iPad or Android device running Eye-Fi’s free mobile client. This eliminates the need to carry a USB cable or Apple Camera Connector Kit for image transfers. The main difference between cards is in the storage capacity and file format support. The Connect X2 is limited to 4 GB of memory and doesn’t support RAW image files; the new Mobile X2 has the same file limitation but doubles the available memory. Eye-Fi’s Pro X2 has 8 GB of storage, but does support the larger RAW file format; essentially an unprocessed image directly from the camera sensor. The storage for all three cards can Read More
Rich people have phones, like apps and want to buy things using said phones. The less-than-groundbreaking results of a study from the Luxury Institute offer some facts and figures around affluent people who own smartphones (60 percent), use apps on them (73 percent) and who have or want to buy something (67 percent) using their handsets. But what’s really worth pondering is the call by the Institute to create luxury mobile experiences via apps and in-app advertising to help drive commerce even when affluent shoppers aren’t in the store. “Consumers are becoming so much more mobile and we need to figure out how to translate that mobility into a humanistic experience,” said Milton Pedraza, CEO of the Luxury Institute. “Apps are becoming ubiquitous, so it’s what we do with them that make the experience more extraordinary that will make the difference,” he said. “How the app is being used by the consumer or to contact someone who represents the brand is now where the real opportunity lies.” So what exactly defines luxury in a mobile setting? In the original web world, sites or luxury brands equated an “experience” with processor-hogging and time-consuming animations, movies and Flash-like experiences (see restaurant web sites), or they scorned the web for years (see Prada). So in bringing luxury to mobile devices and to popular mobile apps such as Words with Friends, Angry Birds or other popular games that the Luxury Institute discovered rich people also play, how do brands and developers indicate their class? The Institute’s survey respondents had an average net worth of $2.8 million, so I’m not in the demographic, but I do have some experience with luxury brands that might offer some clues for creating an experience that resonates with some shoppers. There is a woman at Nordstroms who picks clothes out Read More
