Category — mobile

Cool map from UMapper that shows Olympics-related geocoded tweets from Vancouver. The synergy that arises out of the realtime “on-the-ground” nature of tweets with the geographical pinpointing of mobile GPS is really incredible. It represents a whole new way to experience shared events like the Olympics.

UMapper is a site that makes it really easy to create and share map mashups and map-based games.

See UMapper / Explore / Vancouver 2010 : Olympics.

The web was all atwitter (pun intended, and regretted) yesterday after Google announced their Buzz platform, which integrates geo-located status updates and link / media sharing into Gmail. I’ve played around with it a little bit, and thought I’d add my little voice to the echo chamber with a list of pros and cons. Interestingly, a lot of the pros are also cons, as you’ll see below:

Pros

• Integrated into Gmail – Unlike Wave, you automatically start following the people you “email and chat with the most.” Additionally, comments to your buzzes show up right in your Gmail inbox.
• Granular privacy settings -  Not only can you choose to share your “buzzes” publicly or privately, but if choosing to share privately you can even specify which group/s to share with, given the ones set up in your contacts; this is hugely important for the next feature:
• Geotagged buzzes – with the mobile app, you can “snap” a buzz to a location, which sort of places it somewhere between Twitter’s geotagged tweets and Foursquare’s check-in model; you can also view nearby buzzes as well as a “buzzes” map layer in Google maps; and snapped buzzes will also appear on a “Place Page” for that location, if it exists.
• Rich media – shared photos appear as slideshows
• Integration with other sites like Twitter, Google Reader, Flickr and Picasa
• Realtime updates – don’t have to hit refresh in the browser to see new buzzes come in
• Comments & Likes – this is something sorely needed in Twitter and is one of the only areas in which Facebook’s status update implementation beats Twitter’s

Cons

• Gmail integration – I actually don’t use Gmail. I have a Gmail address but it just forwards to another email address I have hosted on my own server. I may use buzz via the mobile app, but I don’t have much reason to go to Gmail and use it, and I suspect neither do the millions of other people not on Gmail. Also, just because I email with someone doesn’t mean I want to follow their buzzes, or have them follow mine. I think the assumption is wrong that the people you email with are the same people you want to relate with on a social media site.
• Yet another social network – Microsoft’s quick response to Buzz’s launch was one of defensive antagonism, but they actually made a good point: “Busy people don’t want another social network, what they want is the convenience of aggregation.”Granted it seems like you can pull your Twitter feed and other feeds into Buzz, but until you can post your buzzes to Twitter, Facebook, etc., I think people will be slow to adopt yet another tool like this.
• Too Little Too Late – with Twitter and Facebook so thoroughly entrenched, is Buzz compelling enough to pull users away from those services? I don’t think so, not in its current state. To be sure there are numerous examples of meteoric rises and falls with social networks (Friendster, anyone?), and who’s to say that won’t happen with Twitter or Facebook, but I think in order for people to switch at this point, the new service, whatever it is, will have to be a revolution rather than an evolution.

So there you have it. I guess I’m being one of those infamous fence-sitters, but how could there not be two sides to the story for any new piece of technology?

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I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the Apple iPad since it was announced a couple of weeks ago. From Apple’s promotional video it seems they think the typical user will use it lying down on his couch with his knees up. Maybe. But maybe there’s another place that would work well. I think a great place for an iPad is in your car, mounted on the passenger-side dashboard.

In this case it basically becomes the über PND–maps from Google, turn by turn directions from any number of 3rd party vendors, and a whole slew of “what’s nearby” apps like Geodelic, Aloqa, even plain old Google. And then of course you have the built in iPod app with music, audio books, podcasts and movies. Oh and you also have a web browser and email for anything else.

This is definitely not something you want to put anywhere near the driver, but for the rest of the passengers in the car it could be a great way to pass the time on long road trips. And with the bigger form factor than the iPhone, it would be a lot better-suited to the tasks above.

But don’t take my word for it. For some counter arguments, check out these articles from CNET and Jalopnik.

On Wednesday Apple posted a bulletin in their iPhone Dev Center regarding how (not) to use the Core Location module in the iPhone SDK. In short:

If you build your application with features based on a user’s location, make sure these features provide beneficial information. If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user’s location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store.

Now I’m not saying it’s not a good idea to provide your users with useful information in addition to ads, but it’s kind of weird that Apple would make this a policy in their App Store review process. (Unless of course they’re doing it so as not to interfere with whatever they are working on from the acquisition of Quattro Wireless.)

However, I see it as yet another reason to bypass Apple’s heavy-handed review process and build your location-based service as a web app with the HTML5 Geolocation API.

Read News and Announcements – February 2010 – iPhone Developer Program.

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On Sunday, my iPhone’s battery lasted about 4 hours. Granted, it’s no secret that smartphones demand everything and then some from their batteries, between the mobile signal, the wifi, the GPS, the large hi-res full color screen, etc. For the roughly year and a half I’ve had my iPhone, I’ve come to live with the fact that I just have to charge it every day.

But it’s not just the iPhone. While the iPhone promises 5hrs of 3G talk time or internet use, the Droid claims only about 6.5 hrs. To be sure, you shouldn’t need to talk for 5 or 6 straight hours on the phone, but using the internet for 5 or 6 hours straight is not completely outlandish, especially if you’re using an app like Pandora that’s constantly streaming data across the network.

Today I went into the Apple Store that’s across the street from my office, and when I told the greeter about my battery woes, he said, no problem, its just “software corruption,” just do a factory restore and then it’ll be back to normal. Wow! A silver bullet! As soon as I got home I followed his instructions. And then, with the battery indicator showing full, I did a little test. How long would the battery last streaming the Bill Monroe station I have in Pandora? The answer: 2 hours, 10 minutes. Less than half the advertised talk time.

So given that I’m constantly charging this thing, the most practical thing to do is to leave it charging all day at work, and then all night at home. Now I know that charging for long periods of time shortens the life of the battery, but if I only get a day’s use from a battery, when exactly am I supposed to charge it? Either phones need to last more than a day without a charge, or I should be allowed to charge it overnight.

Or, most importantly, phones need to allow for changing out their old batteries. Obviously this is a problem specific to iPhones, because with an iPhone you can’t easily replace the battery. To this day it seems sort of unbelievable that this is true, especially given the iPhone’s high energy usage as well as the notoriously short life of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. If I had a Droid I’d just be able to pop out the battery and put in a brand new one. My iPhone’s battery, on the other hand, is housed in a dauntingly shuttered case, even though it lasted only a little longer than the included one-year warranty and far shorter than the two year contract I signed with AT&T.

Is the iPhone’s battery not replaceable for purely aesthetic reasons, because Steve jobs didn’t want an “ugly” battery door on the rear of the device? Or is it because they’d rather sell you a new phone than a new battery? In either case, the decision is inexcusable. I can’t really think of a rational reason why they might have made this choice. In a lot of cases I can understand Jobs’ fascistic design choices (case in point, getting rid of floppy drives in 1998), but not in this case.

Interesting article in the New York Times about the glut of iPhone apps and the consequences of having too many choices. Did you know that

The average iPhone or iPod Touch owner uses 5 to 10 apps regularly, according to Flurry, a research firm that studies mobile trends. This despite the surfeit of available apps: some 140,000 and counting.

I have 96 apps on my phone and a lot more that are deactivated in iTunes. But I’m not the average user. And although I think there’s something to be said for keeping things simple and limiting the number of apps on your phone, I also think that the fact that average users own only 5-10 apps is a clear failure of the App Store.

With 140,000 apps, the store needs to do a better job of organizing them and recommending new ones to you. According to the Times article “people tend to gravitate to the most popular” apps. This may be because popularity is a good correlate for quality, but I think it’s simply the only yardstick the App Store provides.

As innovative as the App Store is, it needs to get smarter and better organized–and quickly too. (I could say the same about the iTunes Music Store.)

via Skirting the Glut of iPhone Apps – NYTimes.com.

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Asked how local services tie into Google’s mobile vision, [Senior Vice President of Product Management Jonathan] Rosenberg touted the possibilities of location-based ads and commerce: “In mobile we are seeing that when phone numbers and coupons are offered people are much more likely to click on the mobile ad. Well, imagine if [a store's] inventory information is there so they can actually consummate a transaction locally. As that information becomes available, local is going to be much, much more powerful.”

via Google calls local services ‘hugely important’ to mobile future – FierceMobileContent.

TechCrunch presents a case for what may be the dark horse of next week’s Apple announcement:

This afternoon, Fox News “confirmed” that we’d being seeing the latest iteration of Apple’s hugely popular mobile OS for the first time. Should that be the case, there’s also a good chance we’ll see launch of a very important new feature: background applications.

It’s funny to be salivating over parallel processing, but this is the one thing that Droid Does (well) and by which the iPhone is really made lame.

Read Will Next Week’s Apple Event Finally Bring Background Apps To The iPhone?.

UPDATE: Boy Genius Report has a list of rumored new features for iPhone OS 4.0.

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