Tim Sears

An iPhone application for Google Latitude, Google's location-based friend tracking service, was spotted last night in the Japanese iTunes App Store, thanks to a TechCrunch tipster. Shortly thereafter, the application was pulled down and is now no longer available. Obviously, Latitude's iPhone launch was a bit premature. But it's coming. Soon. The question now is: should you use it? Or should you stick with your favorite check-in application, like Foursquare or Gowalla? Latitude is Google's own take on friend-tracking location-based services. Like Foursquare, you can use Latitude to see where your friends are, but the similarity ends there. Latitude is a completely different animal than your typical check-in app. On check-in applications like Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Brightkite and others, you check in to a physical venue through a very manual process. To check in, you launch an app on your smartphone, it locates you via GPS and returns a list of places. You then select the location where you are from the list provided and the app will check you in to that place. It may also dole out a virtual reward of some kind for doing so, including things like points, a stamp or badge or, in the case of Foursquare, the honorary title of Mayor if you've checked in to that venue more than any other user. Sometimes, a coupon or discount is provided by the merchant to those who participate by checking in, too. However, outside of urban tech hotspots like New York and San Francisco, this is still a decidedly hit-or-miss operation. Latitude, on the other hand, is a real-time tracking service. There aren't badges and coupons here, there is only a pushpin on a map, indicating your location. For users of Google's Android smartphones, tracking your location as you move around town is a built in feature, assuming you've opted in to the service. No dedicated app is needed - it works within Google Maps. However, on iPhone, background location-tracking of this nature requires a native app. Up until now, I've been using Latitudie for this purpose on iPhone, a third-party application that shares my location with my Latitude friends (err, friend - more on that later). Unfortunately, a recent update has left the app non-functional - it always crashes now. An official Google app will be welcome, to say the least. But the big question you need to answer now, as the service is poised Read More

by Foursquare players too busy painting the town red to go to the trouble of whipping out their iPhone and checking in can sit back and let Checkmate do the work for them. At $1.99, Checkmate offers a convenient alternative for those looking for a passive aggressive way to play the geosocial game. The brand new app harnesses background-running location on the iPhone to check in Foursquare players automatically at specified venues. After you download and fire up the app, you can select different venues to add to your “Auto Checkin Venues” list. You can toggle automatic checkins on or off for the whole list, as well as specify whether to automatically post a shout or share the checkin on Facebook and Twitter. Once you’re within 50 meters of a designated venue, Checkmate will take over and check you in on Foursquare. The application works on iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 and eventually will add support for other checkin services. Future Checkin [iTunes link] is similar in nature; it too supports automatic checkins for specified venues via background location on the iPhone. Future Checkin differs by letting you adjust the GPS settings for more accurate or more battery-friendly automatic checkins. Both applications warn that by running location in the background, you risk draining your phone’s battery. Do automatic background checkins appeal to you? Leave us a comment and tell us why or why not. Read More

...being in Union Square in New York and the app deciding to “check in”—to where exactly? You could be close to 10-20 places you’ve already checked into in the past. Not only could you have tons of previous check-ins within a small radius, but you may just be walking (or in a taxi) with no plans to stop anywhere. The Future Checkin app intelligently uses “favorites” to mitigate thi... Read More

I'm a fan of Foursquare, the social networking app that allows you to check into locations that you visit. Don't ask me why -- I find it to be somewhat intrusive, but I love the fact that I can be the mayor of a number of places I frequent. The only problem is that if I'm running a lot of errands, pulling out my iPhone to check in at each location can be annoying and time-consuming. Enter developer Tim Sears, who has come up with the perfect solution for Foursquare aficionados. His new app, Future Checkin (US$0.99 introductory price), uses the backgrounding features of iOS 4 on the iPhone 4 and 3GS to constantly check your location and then automatically check you into Foursquare locations that you frequent. No longer do you have to remember to check in -- your iPhone will do it for you. Sears does warn you that using Future Checkin will reduce your battery life as it constantly checks your location. I can see where the app would be very useful if you have your iPhone plugged in while running errands, as the battery concerns would be minimized. Future Checkin is definitely a unique solution to a rather silly problem, and I love the fact that I now have one less thing to remember to do. Read More

...the launch of iOS 4, Loopt was the first app with the ability to run location in the background. But that doesn’t auto check you in to venues, instead it just continually shows where you are to your friends on a map. In that regard, it’s more like Google Latitude. That may actually be a better solution for many users now, as it’s not yet clear if the world is ready for these auto check... Read More

Amybeth Hale is a Talent Attraction Manager with AT&T’s Interactive Staffing team. She uses social technology to help drive awareness of job opportunities as well as interact with candidates. Connect with her on Twitter at @researchgoddess. As conference season is upon us (including SXSW, of course), I began thinking about all the things one might need to survive and stay connected with a busy schedule of travel and networking. Personally, I’m headed to San Diego to attend both SourceCon and the ERE Spring Expo. Then I remembered that I’m the proud owner of an iPhone, and that almost everything I’ll need to make it through is easily accessible and at the tip of my fingers. Here are some of the apps which I believe will help you navigate, stay connected, and meet new friends when you attend a conference. If you’re the ultimate procrastinator and you haven’t yet booked a hotel, even on arrival at the conference, the Priceline Hotel Negotiator app is for you. It pairs a great deal-finder with some comic relief in the form of William Shatner, the Priceline Negotiator. Just load up this app and shake — you’ll get a chuckle and some sweet hotel deals within a radius of your current location. Cost: Free So you’ve booked a hotel, but the room doesn’t offer complimentary WiFi (grr!). This app will use your location to find some local spots that offer free WiFi access. You can tailor your results from as near as 0.1 mile away, to as far as 40 miles. You can also filter results by categories such as libraries, cafes, airports, and hotels. You could probably couple this app with the Priceline app to make sure you don’t book a hotel room without WiFi in the first place. Cost: Free Let’s say you’re in a city you’ve never visited before, and you want to find some cool stuff to check out. Sure, you could use Yelp, but where’s the augmented reality fun in that? My former co-worker Tim Sears created this app, and it’s a neat way to find anything from ATMs, to gas stations, to hospitals, to movie theaters. Better yet, you can also check out who else is tweeting around you locally, who is sharing Flickr images, and learn about local attractions via Wikipedia and Bing search functionality. Note, this app works best with the iPhone 3GS. Cost: $0.99 Foursquare is a Read More

Augmented reality. It's definitely a buzz phrase, but what is it, exactly? How do you experience it? Is there an app for it? Oh, most definitely. Here are 10. True to their title, augmented reality apps add something to what you see, using a combination of camera, GPS, and sometimes, in the case of the iPhone 3GS, a compass. The result is something like a real-life heads-up display on your phone, and it's spectacular. It's been a few months since Apple enabled AR apps in the iPhone's firmware, and as you might expect, there's been an explosion of new takes on the concept. Here are ten of the best: Note: Most of these apps will work best with the iPhone 3GS, and some explicitly require it. It's worth checking into exactly what you lose without the compass before downloading. Also, here's the article in one page. Read More

Ever since I first saw heads-up-displays in science fiction movies like The Terminator, I knew that I had to get my hands on one. How neat it would be to get instant information on anything about anything in my field of vision? Well, just as the iTablet won't be the Knowledge Navigator, the new buzz-phrase of the year, augmented reality, won't give me Terminator eyes. Such is life. I tested out a pretty decent augmented reality app called Robotvision [iTunes Link], and for US $0.99 what you get, if you have an iPhone 3GS running OS 3.1 or better, is quite cool. Will it solve your problems, cure the common cold, or tell you anything that more established apps won't? Not really. But tossing a buck on a neat novelty is not unheard of in the iPhone 3GS world. This one does more than most. First you tell it how widely to search and then, if you're in a highly populated area, you can set up a category ranging from ATMs to Travel Destinations. For the most part, I didn't fool with this since being in the suburbs, I can't be too picky. Run it and the camera shutter opens. Moving the iPhone around, I found Cousin's Pizza, only 8432.1 miles away. Hmmm. The setting was for 5 miles. Wait, I guess it needed to be calibrated by doing the calibration figure eight wave of the phone. It seems that a lot of GPS apps require this. OK, much better. It found a bunch of places but they were all stacked on top of one another. No big deal, since when you touch one, you get a screen like the one in the picture. The closest place is displayed first and the right and left arrows take you back and forth through the stack. While an item is in the front pane, you can call them, see them on a map (by cleverly pointing the iPhone to the floor, which invokes Google Maps, but all the stick pins aren't really any clearer than the AR view... maybe less so). You can also hit the Bing button where there might be a review or more information. The problem is that the direction it puts you in is not quite accurate. It might get you to a nearby corner, but not to the butcher shop itself. I don't think we can slight Robotvision Read More

...- Type in anything you want to find with Open-ended Search - Get a top-down view from Google Maps by looking down - Quickly select from popular location categories like Coffee Shops and Tourist Attractions - Discover rich, social content like Flickr and Twitter, with more on the way! - Easily jump to more info on Bing like restaurant reviews, call a location or get driving directions - To... Read More

Now that the iPhone OS 3.1 is officially official, the is free to play around with all sorts of cool AR apps. One of the coolest new augmented reality apps for iPhone is Robotvision. The iPhone AR app uses Bing’s new Bring iPhone SDK to help users to find nearby Tweets, geo-tagged Flickr photos and places of interest. Robotvision uses Yelp and Citysearch info to give the user the crowd-sourced lowdown on restaurants and businesses. AR, or augmented reality, is a new way to explore the world around you. Rather than show you a completely virtual mockup of the world around you, augmented reality technology takes a real-world view of the world (through the ‘s camera) and overlays location-data on top. What you get is a cameraview of the world that shows you interesting places of interest in the direction that your iPhone 3GS camera is pointed. What Robotvision does is overlay restaurant and business information onto your iPhone 3GS cameraview. The app sources Bing, so you’ll have to get over your uneasiness about cheating on Google. Once you get comfortable with your Bing tryst, you can view nearby places of interest through Robotvision’s AR eye. Tilt your iPhone 3GS towards the ground and Robotvision switches to a map view of your current location, showing your restaurant and business locations as pins on the map. When you find something interesting, simply tap the place of interest to get reviews of the business, the address and even make a phone call. Twitter and Flickr fans will be happy to hear that Robotvision also display nearby Tweets and geo-tagged Flickr photos on your cameraview. We’re not sure how useful those two features will be in day-to-day use, but they definitely add value to an already impressive AR app. Grab Robotvision for $0.99 on the AppStore. Will hails from The City of Angels - Los Angeles, California. He spends his time playing with his numerous gadgets and looking forward to seeing what future holds for mobile technology. An avid promoter of a fully "digital" life, he promotes the widespread adoption of truly mobile, paper-less living. He dreams of the day when he can go completely digital. No more snail mail, paper receipts, bound books, notepads/spiral notebooks, credit cards, hard currency. He's a digital warrior - fighting for the converged life. He is an idealist and a realist - he has a perfect view of Read More