MobileCrunch |  |
- As Quora Thinks More About Mobile, They Drop A Pin On Location
- Ness Serves Up Their First Personal Search App Catering To Restaurant Discovery
- Samsung’s Galaxy S II To Hit T-Mobile, AT&T, Sprint, But Not Verizon?
- OfficeTime Expense Tracking Software Expands To iOS With iPhone, iPad Apps
- Nextpeer Lets Mobile Developers Turn Single-Player Games Into Multi-Player Games
- Samsung’s IFA App Reveals New Galaxy Tab, Wave Handset
- Jumio Comes To WordPress, Turns Blog Readers’ Webcams Into Credit Card Readers
- Android Users Finally Get Full Qik Premium Experience
- Scandy: Yet Another Pointless Smartphone Stand
- Webs.com Adds Mobile Site Syncing To Its DIY Site Builder
- RIM Launches Inexplicable BBM Music App
| As Quora Thinks More About Mobile, They Drop A Pin On Location Posted: 25 Aug 2011 02:39 PM PDT  Some of the most interesting and relevant content on Quora are related to places. But up until now, Quora hasn’t done much to focus that data using location. Today, they’re starting to. A new feature going live shortly will allow users to set location information for topics. For example, if there’s a topic about the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, you can now drop a pin to indicate where that is on a map. This location will then show up to everyone browsing that topic. And the map can be set to show the satellite or terrain view as well (they’re using Google Maps). Specific addresses can also be entered. This may not sound like a big deal, but it likely points to where Quora is thinking about heading with regard to location itself. The company notes that as more people use the service from their mobile phones, location-based questions and answers are increasingly important. This is something that other startups, like Hipster, have been built around. Location also more generally allows Quora to tie topics together in a new way. For example, if you’re planning a trip somewhere, you could look up interesting information around the area you’re headed that might not otherwise be surfaced by a general query. It looks like Facebook aren’t the only ones taking location more seriously. Quora, founded in June 2009, first launched in private beta in January 2010. Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who...
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| Ness Serves Up Their First Personal Search App Catering To Restaurant Discovery Posted: 25 Aug 2011 01:24 PM PDT  Last night I went out to dinner. But I didn’t pick where I was going, Ness did. The place was good. Score one for Ness. We previously covered Ness Computing in July, talking about the technology that would power their eventual apps (as well as their funding). Today, the first such app has gone live in the App Store, called simply, Ness. It’s a personal search engine catering to restaurants. And it’s good. Whereas most food and restaurant recommendation apps focus on ratings from the general population, Ness is tailored around social as well as your own tastes. Others have tried this before as well, but Ness seems to have it nailed thanks to a ton of data they’ve already been pulling in before the app even launched. They can do this because they hook into Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter (as well as a few other, smaller sources) to find signals about certain restaurants. Are people tweeting about liking them? Are users checking in there a lot? Those kind of things. This helps to determine what restaurants Ness should show to you within the app. When you first load up the app, you’re asked to rate ten places you’ve been. This helps calibrate your “Likeness” score, the key to the recommendations. These Likeness scores show up as a percentage likelihood that you’ll like the restaurant being shown. This alongside proximity and the social data determine what restaurants are shown to you. But the app is also more of a search engine in the more traditional sense as well. You can easily search for different types of food, whether they’re broad or specific. And you can choose to search in other cities. Or you can alter the search settings to restrict a search by price and weed out bigger chains, for example. When you find a place you like, you can drill deeper to get hours of operation, phone numbers, a website, etc. You can also save places to come back to later. And you can share restaurants with friends with the click of a button. They key to the app though is the ease of use and the accuracy of the data. I was constantly finding the Likeness ratings were roughly correct for what my actual rating would be for restaurants I’ve been to. And the system will only get better as you rate more venues. The look and feel of the app is also beautiful. I’m told that we can thank an original iPhone team member formerly of Apple and now with Ness, for that. Remember that restaurant recommendations are just step one of what Ness hopes to offer. The next steps are to point the Likeness engine towards shopping, music, nightlife, and entertainment. All of that could make for one killer, subjective mobile search engine. You can find Ness in the App Store here. Sadly, it’s U.S.-only for now.
Ness Computing's mission is to make search personal. By combining its understanding of human nature with its expertise in search, recommendations and social networking, the company can deliver experiences...
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| Samsung’s Galaxy S II To Hit T-Mobile, AT&T, Sprint, But Not Verizon? Posted: 25 Aug 2011 11:49 AM PDT  After what has felt like forever for many an Android fan, the Samsung Galaxy S II is finally set to touch down stateside. Come next Monday, Samsung will be spilling the details surrounding the Galaxy S II’s US launch. Between the launch timeframe and its positioning as a flagship Android handset, it’s pretty much unavoidable that the Galaxy S II will be spun as the iPhone 5′s greatest rival — and in that battle, Samsung will need as much carrier support as it can get. Alas, it looks like they’ll have to go on without the support of the biggest carrier of all: Verizon.
According to a report coming out of the Wall Street Journal, Verizon will be the odd man out in the Galaxy S II game. AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint will all be a part of the big launch event, while Verizon plans to continue pushing the devices already in their portfolio. Of course, this goes against prior rumors (though ones we left unreported, as they seemed a bit too shaky) that Verizon would be the first in the US to get the Galaxy S II, launching it under the name “Function”. That’s just how things go when you live life around the rumor mill. It’s not as if Samsung couldn’t build a Verizon-friendly Galaxy S II; they’re already supporting CDMA if they plan to launch a Sprint variant, and they’ve been building phones that work with Verizon’s LTE network since April — so why might Verizon pass up such a long-awaited device? Blame it on the timing: Verizon knows a new iPhone is coming, and all signs are pointing to a September 8th launch of Verizon’s other big Android handset, the long, long delayed Droid Bionic. A carrier can only split their marketing love so many ways. Update: We have confirmed with Verizon that, at least for the time being, they do not plan to carry the Galaxy S II.
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| OfficeTime Expense Tracking Software Expands To iOS With iPhone, iPad Apps Posted: 25 Aug 2011 10:41 AM PDT  Time and expense tracking is tedious, even on a personal level. Dealing with it in an office environment is clearly much worse. But OfficeTime is looking to make that a bit easier, today announcing its expansion from just a PC/Mac desktop app to iOS. For something as annoying as expense tracking, OfficeTime took a smart approach for mobile. The theme here is “the fewer taps, the better.” The iOs versions seem to have most of the same features as the desktop app. One-touch reports would be one of them, which allow users to get instant access to project tasks, time spent working on them, and expenses, along with a way to compare to last month’s reports. There’s also a way for freelancers to track their hours and even see how their pay measures against a fixed-cost estimate. The apps also feature team reporting, which offers cross-team reports on who did what (and when they did that what) through the ability to sync between iPads, iPhones, Macs and PCs. No matter where you plug in info, it shows up across all devices. The app also lets users export anything to Excel or Numbers. The iPhone and iPad apps will go for $7.99 in the App Store, with the desktop apps retailing for $47. No monthly subscription required.
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| Nextpeer Lets Mobile Developers Turn Single-Player Games Into Multi-Player Games Posted: 25 Aug 2011 09:47 AM PDT  Nextpeer is a newly launched mobile developer toolkit that lets game developers quickly and easily add multi-player gaming to their single-player games. With Nextpeer’s tournament and social SDK (software development kit), developers can add customizable features that enable their game’s users join real-time, social tournaments where they compete against other users for top scores or achievements. The idea is so simple, it’s surprising it hasn’t been done before. People like mobile games and they like playing games together, but until now, the only way developers can build a multi-player gaming experience is by building a multi-player game from scratch. With Nextpeer, however, any game can become a multi-player game. How It Works For users, Nextpeer is easy to use, too. Gamers launch the app, tap the “online tournaments/multi-player” button and sign in using Facebook Connect. This takes them to a screen displaying which live tournaments are available to join – an experience similar to joining a table on Zynga’s Texas HoldEm, for example. The player then places a bet to join the tournament. (This part is optional, and will depend on the game). When the tournament starts, the gamers aren’t playing alongside each other in the sense that all their characters are on the screen together. Instead, the user plays the game as usual, but receives real-time notifications regarding their status, e.g. “You’re in 3rd place! Hurry up!” or “Daniel is about to win!” Depending on the game, the goal may be to be the first to reach a certain number of points, earn an achievement, complete a task, etc. When the session time completes, the players re-join the table, the winner is announced, and if a wager was involved, the winner takes all the other players’ virtual money, in the form of Nextpeer currency. A Standalone App for Finding Nextpeer Games is Next Nextpeer currency will be available for purchase in the accompanying Nextpeer mobile application (not out yet), which will also feature the games that use the Nextpeer technology. Company Co-founder and CEO Shai Magzimof admits that the details for how the revenue share will work haven’t been worked out yet, but it could be something like 90/10 (developer/Nextpeer). But revenue share isn’t the main reason why developers would use Nextpeer technology, Magzimof says. More importantly, Nextpeer will allow developers another avenue for distribution and opportunities for marketing, both within the Nextpeer standalone app and its website. Access to more players, especially more engaged, regular players, means an increased opportunity for generating revenue through the game’s own monetization mechanisms, whether that’s a virtual economy, advertising or paid downloads. And Nextpeer promises to stay out of whatever that in-game revenue stream may be. Join the Beta! The Nextpeer SDK is initially available for iOS only (Android will come later), and the company already has a few games in testing. It’s also in talks with other developers, both big and small/indie. (And by “big” we mean really, really, really big.) Interested developers can sign up now to join the private beta here. The Nextpeer app will go live in a couple of weeks. Magzimof previously participated in the Y-Combinator program on the startup that later became Greplin. Co-founder and CTO Daniel Shir was formerly a developer at Fring and Co-founder and VP Itamar Mula also co-founded mobile game studio Social Expeditions. Nextpeer is the pivot from Android app Innobell, which made phone calls social. The company has raised $300,000 from angel investor Morris Wolfson. Company: NEXTPEER Website: http://nextpeer.com/ Nextpeer is a multiplayer mobile gaming platform that adds a social aspect to multiplayer gaming.
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| Samsung’s IFA App Reveals New Galaxy Tab, Wave Handset Posted: 25 Aug 2011 09:29 AM PDT  Samsung’s pre-IFA Unpacked app is usually pretty dry as far as contents are concerned: there are event schedules and press releases aplenty, but some curious Android fans have discovered some juicy new tidbits deep within the app’s innards. This is my next reports that after a bit of poking around in the app’s contents, logos for the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7, Samsung Galaxy Note, and the Samsung Wave 3 have all been spotted. The Galaxy Tab is probably the most straightforward of the bunch: it’s the closest that Samsung has come to revisiting the original GalTab’s pocketable dimensions, but it hopefully runs Honeycomb like its bigger brothers. The Wave 3 is presumably a Bada-powered handset, and may well be the one spotted in a leaked roadmap from a few weeks back. The Wave series have been Samsung’s flagship devices for the Bada OS, so the leaked specifications (4″ Super AMOLED display, Bada 2.0, 5 MP camera, 3 GB of onboard storage) may hold true come September. Most intriguing is the new Galaxy Note; the name would seem to imply (at least to me) a pen-driven tablet a la the HTC Flyer/View 4G, but it may well be another smartphone Samsung will be adding to its inventory. Samsung has recommended for Unpacked users to update the app come September 1st, most likely to flesh out these and other upcoming devices with some official details. Here’s hoping that another update comes even sooner than that — who knows what surprises may lay hidden inside?
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| Jumio Comes To WordPress, Turns Blog Readers’ Webcams Into Credit Card Readers Posted: 25 Aug 2011 08:37 AM PDT  Jumio, the new technology that turns webcams into credit card readers, is now offering a plugin for WordPress websites. The new Jumio Netswipe add-on allows website visitors to pay for products or make donations quickly and easily, just by holding up their credit card to their computer’s webcam. For WordPress publishers, adding Netswipe to their site is simple – just download, install and activate like any other WordPress plugin. With the new plugin, WordPress site owners get a “Netswipe PayMe” button which can be placed anywhere on their website. All the payments are managed through your Jumio account, which is free of charge after registration. After downloading the WordPress Plugin here, just unzip it and upload the folder 'Wordpress_Jumio_Payment_Plugin' to the '/wp-content/plugins/' directory. Then activate the plugin through the “Plugins” menu in WordPress. You can then configure your options in WordPress’s “Settings” menu. (More detailed instructions are here). Jumio launched last month, introducing its seamless, one-stop solution for merchants and developers with the intention of disrupting the payments industry. Not only is the technology easy to use, it also adds a layer of security to digital transactions since the physical card has to be present in order for Jumio’s webcam solution to work. Initially, the technology is only available for desktop websites, but, later this year, a two-part mobile solution will become available. This part of the Jumio’s system will include a mobile app and developer library. Jumio’s mobile developer tools are the aspect of the solution that’s most like Card.io, which offers a similar toolkit. Jumio received $6.5 million in funding from Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin and other investors back in March. Jumio offers an advanced technology that increases security and ease of use for online credit card payments. Jumio is the inventor of Netswipe, a patent pending solution that turns...
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| Android Users Finally Get Full Qik Premium Experience Posted: 25 Aug 2011 08:24 AM PDT  Android-toting Qik fans will have reason to smile today: the Skype-owned company has announced that their Premium service for Android devices has finally been fleshed out with new functionality and services for the discerning mobile videophile. For $4.99/month, Qik Premium users are now treated to unlimited storage of video content on Qik.com, where basic users are limited to a scant 25. Video management from a PC is also in play with a desktop app that allows for wireless syncing. Owners of 3D capable smartphones are now in luck too, as Qik Premium now supports the sharing of recorded 3D content, in addition to HD quality video. These new features are in addition to Qik Premium’s original toolkit, which already includes unlimited video mail and the ability to take pictures while recording video. Priority support is also available to Premium members, which means all of your app-related gripes will get their much-deserved attention. All said, Qik Premium is shaping up to be a compelling little package for videographers on the go. Qik’s Premium service isn’t exactly new news (their premium efforts first went live in the Ovi Store, of all places), but the addition of nifty new capabilities are always welcome. Support for Premium service has been folded into the Qik application, so current users are only a quick update away. Qik was founded in 2006 to enable mobile phone users to share live video with their friends, family and communities on the web and on their phones. The first...
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| Scandy: Yet Another Pointless Smartphone Stand Posted: 25 Aug 2011 07:11 AM PDT  We’re big fans of Kickstarter around here, but for every good project that gets its much deserved funding, there are innumerable lesser ideas trapped in financial limbo. Today’s case in point: the Scandy, a telescoping clamp that promises to turn your smartphone into a scanner. The idea behind the Scandy is that since your smartphone has a fairly decent camera mounted on its rear end, it would make a half-decent scanner if you managed to hold it just right. Rather than leave that onus on the user, the Scandy clamps onto the nearest table and allows you to adjust its height to get the entire document in view. This, in short, is completely ridiculous. The time necessary to whip out a Scandy, bolt it onto a desk and adjust the height would completely eclipse the time it would take to snap a few pictures and pick out the best one. Maybe there’s some untapped market out there that really wants to lug around a $40 set of plastic tubes in order to take pictures of paperwork, but with only 13 backers at time of writing, to call it a niche market would be an understatement. John says it could be useful for library researchers who don’t want to spend 10 cents a copy at the old biblioteca, but seriously? Plus, wouldn’t this ruin the reading table’s finish? Alas, I could be completely wrong (note: I’m not), and this could be the next must-have accessory for the road warrior in your life. The Scandy is compatible with all smartphones, mostly because you’re expected to just rest your phone on top of it and get snapping. If the $40 base model doesn’t strike your fancy, the limited edition model (plus capacitive stylus!) can be yours if you pledge $100, and a $500 donation nabs you the laser-engraved Signature Edition.
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| Webs.com Adds Mobile Site Syncing To Its DIY Site Builder Posted: 25 Aug 2011 06:18 AM PDT  Webs.com, a popular DIY website creation service, is announcing a new mobile site builder today that automatically keeps a smartphone-friendly website in sync with your main website. Previously, mobile application creation was an option only available in the company’s App Store, which provides additional enhancements for site owners. But as of now, this product has been fully integrated into the Webs.com Site Builder. As with Webs.com’s full website building service, the idea behind the mobile site option is to keep things as simple as possible for small business owners and others who want to design professional sites easily, without having to code the sites themselves. The mobile feature will include a variety of themes, colors and images, the option to password-protect pages, optional mobile apps like a calendar, FAQ, testimonials and members app, and additional editing features including the ability to adjust the size of the main logo or remove the header title. The mobile sites are also now compatible with more versions of Samsung, LG, Symbian, Nokia, Playstation and Nintendo DS devices, in addition to iOS, Android and BlackBerry. For current Webs.com site owners with custom domains, mobile sites will be available at m.yourcompany.com. If this type of service sounds familiar, it’s because Webs.com partner, DudaMobile, which provides the backend functionality for this new feature, recently launched its own self-serve platform that does much of the same thing. Several of DudaMobile’s partners are now integrating similar options into their website building tools as well, including Yahoo and Logoworks by HP. Webs is a website creation service that lets users make fully functioning sites complete with several apps including blogs, photo albums, video galleries, calendars, and discussion forums. Users...
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| RIM Launches Inexplicable BBM Music App Posted: 25 Aug 2011 06:04 AM PDT  Though Slacker and Pandora have made the migration, the BlackBerry App World’s selection of music apps is pretty limited compared to competing platforms. In fact, the App World is found wanting in a couple different categories. But that doesn’t mean RIM isn’t open to improvement, albeit incremental improvement. That said, RIM today announced its BBM Music app. It’s basically a subscription music app with a strong social element. For $4.99 monthly, you can have 50 different songs on what RIM is calling your BBM Music profile. From there, it really all depends on popularity. You have access to all of the music on each of your friends’ BBM Music profiles, so theoretically your selection could extend way past the original 50 songs. It could also remain at 50 songs if you can’t learn to play nice with others. Oddly enough, you can only swap out 25 of your songs a month. In other words, it’s a VD-like music service except that the more you spread it, the more popular you are. Since it’s all going down BBM-style, BBM will of course be a part of the mix. While in BBM Music, you’ll be able to message your friends through BBM as well as sharing songs. Users can also check out their friends’ music activity in a timeline to get truly stalkerish about it. In truth, the bang you’ll be getting per buck isn’t all that great, especially if you’re lacking in the social department. But you have to applaud RIM for testing out the musical waters this way. They’re basically forcing users to invite and add friends because the more friends you have, the more music you can access. RIM expects the app to roll out later this year, but the Beta is ready to roll in the U.S., U.K., and Canada right now. You must download BlackBerry 6 first to get in on the fun. More information is available at the BlackBerry Blog.
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