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Here’s a not-stupid idea: Drive, a companion app for drivers, cuts out all the extraneous stuff that you’re not gonna need on the road and limits you to four basic things: calls, texts, music and maps. Easy on those texts though, buddy.
One step closer to a more perfect union with our technology.
(via thenextweb)
Everpurse, a Kickstarter project by Dan and Liz Salcedo, enables users to wirelessly charge their mobile devices wirelessly and on the go.
Using the Qi standard for inductive charging, the purse itself must be charged for six hours on a charging pad before use. Dan Salcedo says that give your iPhone two times more battery life — meaning that when your phone’s going dead at a party, you need only pop it into the bag to get it back into service with a minimum of downtime.
There is no dock, but a magnetic charger within the purse pulls your phone down into the plug and starts charging it once you’ve slipped it inside. And the technology isn’t heavy: in total, the battery and receiver combined weigh a grand total of six ounces.
Find it in a variety of colours on Everpurse.com. Guys are also welcome — isn’t function the perfect excuse to go man-bagging? But if the murse is too girly for your taste, the Salcedos say they’re working on suit jackets and pants with similar technology. They likely won’t appear, though, until the Kickstarter campaign is over.
No worries, though — the campaign ends in six days and they’ve already more than doubled their hoped-for $100,000 funding goal. Minimum pledges for the bag are sold out, but you can still lock yours down for just $129!
The Guardian writes that as Shazam hits 250 million mobile app users, it’s expanding US-based social features. All shows can now be tagged, versus just networks or producers that have a marketing deal with it. Soon, Shazam also plans to link its app to Facebook, permitting people to publish tags to their newsfeeds.
“With more than a quarter of a billion people who have used Shazam worldwide, no other app has our scale when it comes to offering the opportunity to engage with the media that interests them the most, whether it’s music or television,” stated chief executive Andrew Fisher.
Some background: people typically use Shazam to identify — and therefore tag — any music track in its database. Now you can do the same thing with ads of partner brands and American TV shows. According to Shazam, over 160 channels have been covered for the latter.
When you tag a show, you’ll receive cast info, soundtrack details, trivia and news, as well as Twitter updates and data from IMDB and Wikipedia.
“With our expansion into television, we’ve seen a surge of activity due to recent Shazam-enabled events such as the NBC Olympic broadcast, where more than one million people tagged the closing ceremony,as well as the US Open tennis grand slam event on CBS earlier this month,” said Fisher.
“We think that broadening our television service and offering more comprehensive social features will continue to drive activity and engagement.”
Expanded features are expected to launch in the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain “in the coming months”. Until then, those countries can tag ads from partner brands, including Renault, Reebok, Unilever, Pepsi and Microsoft.
Shazam reports that users produce about 10 million tags daily. It claims to have generated about $300 million in sales of digital goods for the music industry alone (as it enables users to purchase songs they like from iTunes). It hopes to do the same for producers and broadcasters in the TV industry.
Here’s a nice little survey of Google Maps’ trajectory, from game-changing zoomable map to the multi-level modern cartography device it is today.
What we love about Google is its commitment to dive deep into the heart of things, whether the project be search (one day we’ll be able to search our genes, condemning ourselves to a life à la Gattaca once and for all) or mapping. The capacity to see mapped locations at street level is an impressive and massively ambitious project which we now take for granted, not to mention its ongoing effort to map interiors like shopping malls — meaning I’ll never lose myself in Great Mall’s eternal circle ever again.
Even Wes Anderson used the Goog’ to find the perfect location for Moonrise Kingdom.
AT&T is launching a service called U-verse, a video-narrated bill that recounts your service expenses in real-time, powered by SundaySky’s SmartVideo technology.
An example video appears above, and there are a few obvious benefits to the format: its web 2.0, infographicky style is easier to follow and to understand.
The more transparent format also highlights instances in which AT&T helps customers save money (though I can’t help thinking it’s the format that forces them to incline themselves thus): discounts are more visible, as is the breakdown of services you’re paying for, and instances in which you don’t fully use a service in a month are docked from your expenses entirely.
The question is whether people will use it. And I couldn’t help noticing that for all the improvements this video bill does make, it still doesn’t help users out with the toughest task of all: getting in touch with a human if, after watching your month’s activity scroll by, you have something to contest.
Disney’s research and development team in Pittsburgh has produced a smart touchscreen system called Touché, which goes further than Apple did in giving touch technology unbelievably wide, yet totally unobtrusive application.
Think smart tables that look like the ones you have at home, smart doors and furniture, phones that sense touch on all sides, smart “liquid” that can tell when your hand is submerged in water or that you put a fork in your cereal instead of a spoon.
But the application most telling to us is one that resembles the technology of Sixth Sense, only less complex: the ability to play music or makes commands on your phone by touching your own skin.
“It is not inconceivable that one day, mobile devices could have no screens or buttons, and rely exclusively on the body as the input surface.”
That day is closer than we think; it awaits the right kind of minds to prepare the market, in the same way Steve Jobs prepared us for tablet consumption en masse by taking us down the unassuming path of iPod, iPod touch, iPhone … and then iPad. Disney’s got the brawn; what does it plan to do with it?
Via.
Will AR content make people keener on the notion of buying (near-obsolete and still overpriced!) DVD’s? That’s what Universal Films is setting out to discover with specials like its Limited Edition Back to the Future collection, one of 15+ Universal films whose DVD boxes will include augmented reality easter eggs.
How it works: download the Universal 100 App, then use it to scan the cover of your spiffy new Back to the Future DVD case. AR content available will include a 3D apparition of the DeLorean, which will turn a full 360° before blasting off, somewhere in the general direction of your face.
To develop this radsauce bell-and-whistle, Universal worked with Aurasma, a tech firm that seeks to join the physical and virtual worlds via mobile. I’m just glad they’re not positioning themselves as production-level web designers, because their site looks like WordArt and GeoCities had a baby who went Wiccan. (Srsly, what is this? More importantly, who at Universal Films looked at it and said “Hey, there’s a tech startup I can finally fall in line with”?)
Nvidia has published a slide showing how the performance of its graphical processors will rise in the coming years.
Check that mobile line at the bottom right: essentially what Nvidia is saying is that mobile phones will be packing Xbox 360-quality graphics sometime in 2013. Although note, consoles will be ready for their next step on by then, so this isn’t a case of mobile overtaking console – just overtaking the capabilities of the current generation of consoles.
Anyway, the danger here is that console game developers think ‘Great! We can make loads of Call of Duty-style games for phones now, they’re finally up to the task…’ The most interesting and successful mobile games will always be those designed for the medium – which means its controls but also its usage patterns.
Strategy Analytics predicts that global consumer spending on mobile media will reach $138.2bn in 2012, up 13.4% year-on-year. Add to that the $11.6bn it thinks advertisers will spend on mobile media this year, and the mobile media market will be a shade under $150bn ($149.8bn, in fact).
What is mobile media, and why is this number so large? Well, that’s the thing. A whopping $82.8bn of the consumer spending figure is ‘data plans and web browsing’, which rather inflates things if you were thinking this is all just about entertainment and apps.
Talking of the latter, Strategy Analytics claims that consumers will download 32bn apps in 2012, spending $26.1bn on the ones they pay for. The company also claims that in the US and major Western European markets, advertisers will spend more on in-app ads than on the mobile web.
“Advertisers chase eyeballs so the fact that brands spend more on in-app advertising than the mobile web is a clear sign that apps are what consumers are glued to for an increasing range of activities,” says SA’s David MacQueen. “In the eyes of many advertisers, web browsing on the smartphone is playing second fiddle to the app economy.”
For at least five years, we’ve been working with the same operating logic in the consumer technology game. This is what it looks like:
There will be ratings and photos and a network of friends imported, borrowed, or stolen from one of the big social networks. There will be an emphasis on connections between people, things, and places. That is to say, the software you run on your phone will try to get you to help it understand what and who you care about out there in the world. Because all that stuff can be transmuted into valuable information for advertisers.
That paradigm has run its course. It’s not quite over yet, but I think we’re into the mobile social fin de siècle.
-Alexis Madrigal, “The Jig Is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future”, The Atlantic.
As ennui builds and geolocal mobile apps get freakier (man, Highlight was the last straw), SoLoMo’s soil will be fertile for seeds of disruption. And to think, they didn’t even really have time to nail down a super-simple business model. Things are moving so quickly now!
