MobileCrunch |  |
- Why Adobe Failed and Where Startups Can Swoop In
- Glooko Connects Glucose Meters To iPhones For Tracking Diabetes
- Are We At An Inflection Point For Mobile Search?
- Twitter Soars Past TwitPic and YFrog to Become #1 Photo Service
- Review: Motorola Atrix 2
- Meet Swivl, The Motion Tracking iPhone Dock That Always Keeps You On Camera
- Flurry: Android And iOS Games Beat Nintendo And Sony In Portable Revenue
- Rumor: HTC Ville Packs Ice Cream Sandwich And Beats Audio
- A Humbled Adobe Sees Beyond The Browser
- BiteHunter Raises $800K For Real-Time Dining Deals
- Social Planning Service Hotlist Launches New Site And iPhone App
- Video: NTT Docomo Shows Japanese/English Real-Time Translation Service For Mobile Phones
- You Can’t Ignore The Web: OpenTable Launches New HTML5 Website
- An iPhone Case That Will Remind You To Eat The Rich
- Apple: Siri Only Works On iPhone 4S, We Have No Plans To Support Older Devices
| Why Adobe Failed and Where Startups Can Swoop In Posted: 09 Nov 2011 09:16 PM PST  Editor’s note: Guest contributor Ben Savage is the founder of Spaceport.io, a native Javascript and HTML5 platform for mobile game developers. Adobe has discontinued development of Flash-Player plugin for mobile browsers. This is a very important moment in the history of the mobile internet. Since 1997, Flash Player has been an important part of the web. From flash games, to streaming video, to sound, and sockets, many of the most important and central components of the online web experience have leveraged Flash-Player technology. However, Flash-Player has failed to make the transition to the mobile web. How could this have happened? How is it that a company with the resources of Adobe could possibly fail to overcome this hurdle? The transition from the PC to the mobile web is arguably one of the most important inflection points in the history of the internet, and the value to Adobe is very obvious. The answer lies in the history of Flash-Player itself. As Steve Jobs put it: “Flash was designed for PCs using mice”—which is true. When Flash was created back in the 90′s, the target platform that it was designed for, was the PC. Flash was designed for desktop computers, computers with a fast CPU and a power-cable. This is the root cause of all the hardships Adobe has had with mobile. Mobile devices are not always plugged in. They have to rely on small batteries, which need to last for days at a time. For this reason, mobile phones have slower, less power-hungry CPUs. The original iPhone had a 412 MHz CPU. That’s about how fast desktop CPUs were back in 1998. That was basically a 9 year setback in CPU speeds, which was more than Adobe’s Flash Player could handle. You see, in Flash Player, everything is done in the CPU, including the graphics. That means that if you slow down the CPU, you slow down the graphics performance. Back in 1997 when the Flash Player engine was created, the CPU was all that was available. It wasn’t until 2000 that normal PC computers started to get GPUs with hardware-accelerated transform and lighting. The advent of the GPU changed everything. It’s several orders of magnitude faster to do graphics calculations in hardware over software. In addition to that, GPUs are able to perform multiple calculations in parallel. The original iPhone could do up to 16 simultaneous calculations, and the new A5 chip (iPad2 and iPhone 4S) can do up to 128. Most importantly, GPUs use less power to do the same number of calculations. Over the last 10 years, AAA Console game developers have worked closely with companies like Nvidia to optimize the performance of video game graphics. Together, they have created standards like OpenGL for interacting with the GPU, and maximizing the graphical rendering capabilities of a system. It is because of this innovation that iPhones can run beautiful 3D games like “Infinity Blade”, and run them fast. The GPU in modern mobile devices is really powerful if you can just tap into it. So why has Adobe failed to take advantage of the power of the modern GPU? The answer is backwards computability. Adobe is burdened down by history. There are millions of SWF files all over the web from all versions of Flash Players’ history. To play all of these, Flash Player needs to be capable of playing SWF files back all the way to version 1 (we are currently at version 11). It’s the same issue that plagues Windows. The only way to avoid the issue of backwards compatibility is to make a break with the past, stop supporting old versions, and go forward with a new format. Adobe has added new APIs that can leverage the GPU (like stage 3D), but in order to ensure backwards compatibility for old code, their entire pre-existing API does not leverage the GPU. That means that Flash developers still need to re-write their existing games in order to get hardware accelerated graphics. Now startups are thriving by solving the problems that Adobe could not. Solutions like a rendering engine designed for the mobile web that does take advantage of the power of the GPU, for high performance, hardware accelerated graphics. There is an opportunity for startups to come in and provide the same API as Adobe’s ActionScript 3 libraries, so Flash developers left out in the cold by Adobe now have a place to call home. Developers can bring their knowledge and skills with Flash to mobile by partnering with these new crop of companies. Where Adobe can still succeed Adobe may have failed with the Flash Player Plugin, but their art-creation tools are still the best in the industry. Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash Professional are the hands-down best options for creating 2D artwork (both vector and raster) and animation. The millions of artists and designers around the world who have learned the skills to use these tools need not learn any new tools to create content for the mobile web. Startups will fill the gaps left by Adobe and allow developers the ability to use these tools to create the user-interfaces, characters, animations, and other assets. The end of the Flash-Player plugin is an inevitable consequence of history. Flash’s CPU-based architecture was on a head-on collision course with mobile devices. Now that Adobe has exited stage left, let’s see who swoops in. Photo credit: Flickr/Adam Tuttle,
|
| Glooko Connects Glucose Meters To iPhones For Tracking Diabetes Posted: 09 Nov 2011 08:14 PM PST  The iPhone in your pocket can do a lot more than just play games or music. Used properly, that computer can help save your life. Consumer health apps are increasingly hitting iTunes. The latest one to appear today is Glooko (iTunes). Glooko is a digital logbook for people with diabetes who have to check their blood sugar every day. There are dozens of glucose logbooks in iTunes, but almost all of them require manual entry. What makes Glooko different is that the company designed a $40 cable (sold separately) that works with six of the top glucose meters. You just plug it into both devices and it downloads your daily readings. The app itself is free. It lets you mark whether the reading was done before or after a meal, add notes, and email or fax a 14-day summary to your doctor. The company charges for the cable. “What people want to do is download these readings into Apple devices,” explains co-founder Anita Mathew. “Many of these meters don't work with Apple devices.” There are an estimated 19 million diabetics in the U.S. alone, and 17 million of them test their blood sugar levels. By 2025, one in five people in the U.S. is projected to have diabetes. Simply connecting these medical devices to iPhones creates a market opportunity, but this is just the first step. Once Glooko starts collecting diabetes data it could start to analyze it (although there are regulatory barriers—just plotting the data points on a graph requires FDA clearance). It could also charge for premium features. Glooko is an ambitious startup. It’s chairman and co-founder is Yogen Dalal (Xerox Parc, Mayfield Fund). Mathew worked for ten years in product marketing at Johnson & Johnson, where she helped launch several glucose meters. The third co-founder is Sundeep Madra. Glooko also has some serious backers. The startup raised a $1 million seed round in November, 2010 from Chamath Palihapitiya‘s Social+Capital fund, Bill Campbell, Vint Cerf, Andy Hertzfeld, Judy Estrin, Bumptop founder Anand Agarawala, Kosmix co-founders Venky Harinarayan and Annad Rajaraman, Russel Hirsch, and Xtreme Labs. The company lends some of its Palo Alto office space to Social+Capital.
|
| Are We At An Inflection Point For Mobile Search? Posted: 09 Nov 2011 02:29 PM PST  New data from search marketing platform Efficient Frontier and Ben Schachter, a stock analyst at the Macquarie Group, indicates that mobile search advertising is at an important inflection point and may be ready to take off next year. Mobile search currently accounts for about 6 percent of the search advertising dollars in the U.S. as represented by Efficient Frontier’s clients. And that is up 2.7 times from 2010. But by the end of next year, it is projecting that mobile search could account for between 16 percent and 22 percent of total search advertising spending. If the growth rate of mobile search continues, it will be on the conservative end of that projection, and if it accelerates, it could be closer to the 22 percent. Schachter expects the “growth to accelerate in 2012 and beyond as more and more mobile devices with full Internet browsers enter the market.” Another illuminating data point is that click-through rates on search ads are actually higher on mobile than they are on the desktop. Clickthrough rates are 66 percent higher on phones and 37 percent higher on tablets. That makes sense since you only bother to search on a mobile phone when you are looking for something right that instant so you generally have a higher intent to purchase or learn about a commercial offering. Or maybe we just are more prone to click on links on small screens. Regardless of the higher clickthrough rates on phones, it is tablets that are taking a disproportionate share of search advertising clicks and spending. Tablets already account for 50 percent of all clicks on mobile search ads and 43 percent of the search advertising spending by Efficient Frontier’s clients. Tablets are not 50 percent of the mobile browsing device market (if you count all smartphones and tablets), but they are on track to get a lion’s share of the search ad spending. In some verticals, like retail, tablet search ads are already 77 percent of all mobile search spending.
|
| Twitter Soars Past TwitPic and YFrog to Become #1 Photo Service Posted: 09 Nov 2011 01:22 PM PST  August 9th was a dark day for third-party Twitter photo sharing services like TwitPic and YFrog. Twitter launched its own official service with Photobucket as its hosting partner. Now, stats shared with us by photo search engine Skylines show that Twitter has become the number one photo sharing service on the platform, handling 36% of shares. TwitPic now processes 30% of tweeted photos and YFrog is down to 21%. Just 5 months ago, TwitPic had 45.7% and YFrog had 29.3%, but now it looks like they must differentiate or die a slow death. Things started getting scary for the third-parties in March when Twitter announced that straight-forward clients would no longer be permitted in an effort to promote diversity on the platform. In fact, Twitter’s co-founder had foreshadowed it might move into photos back in April 2010. Still, then ecosystem leader TwitPic said it was blindsided by Twitter’s move, as the platform leader never briefed that company despite giving a heads up to YFrog and Plixi. Another critical blow as struck when Twitter announced it would open an API for its photo sharing service, allowing app developers to build on and host their photos with it rather than through third-party photo services. And when it couldn’t get any worse, the roll out of the official photo service was accompanied by the launch of Twitter Galleries, which lets users view all tweeted photos including those from third-parties. With easier ways to share and view photos directly through Twitter, the decline of TwitPic and YFrog seemed assured. Twitter’s current overall lead comes way of its Twitter for iPhone client which accounts for 42% of photos shared to its photo service and 21% of all photos shared on Twitter. Its iOS5 integration is successful too, with iOS Photos and Camera combining to become the 7th biggest Twitter photo client, publishing 5% of tweeted photos. Instagram carries 12% of photos shared to Twitter. However, users seem ingrained in their behavior, as Skyline’s analysis of 24 million photos shared during a week in late October show users haven’t abandoned the third-party services overnight. TwitPic remains the most popular sharing service for Android devices, accounting for 39% of photo shares through Google’s mobile OS. YFrog meanwhile leads on BlackBerry devices with 47%. Still, if they don’t want their remaining user base to slip away, TwitPic, YFrog and others will need to offer something unique — ways to touch up or enhance photos as they’re shared, and innovative ways to sort galleries.
|
| Posted: 09 Nov 2011 12:51 PM PST  Short version:An attractive and comfortable phone with a great screen and solid camera. Not in fact a major update to the original Atrix, but it’s nice, despite some uncalled-for visual effects. Looking for an AT&T Android phone? This is probably your best bet right now. Features:
Pros:
Cons:
Full review:We’ll keep this one short. The Atrix 2 is a high-end Android phone (not to say “superphone” like the Galaxy S II) that improves on the original Atrix, adding a better display and camera, faster 4G, and a few other refinements. Hardware The body of the phone, I have to say, feels great. The 4.3″ screen is surrounded by a fairly wide bezel, giving it a sort of chubby look, but in my hand it feels very natural and comfortable. Buttons are well-placed, though they’re recessed to the point of being flush, making them occasionally hard to hit. The power button, which of course you’ll be hitting the most, feels a little too squishy but always activated promptly and without any extra effort to find or press. The chassis is stiff and strong, and didn’t creak or crack when I stressed it. The rear of the phone is a textured plastic that is very pleasant and grippy under your fingers. I much prefer this to the plain brushed or slick plastic of many other phones. I think it tends to pick up crumbs a bit more than them, though. It’s also nearly flat on the back; the camera unit sticks out just a millimeter, perhaps, not anything like the hump on other phones. The original Atrix had a fingerprint reader, which was ditched for this version, either to save on costs or because simply no one wanted it. But the Atrix 2 has gained a dedicated camera button. This doesn’t work very well as a “quick launch” solution (hitting home and touching the camera shortcut is just as fast), but it’s a welcome addition when you consider that the new camera is one of the big selling points. That camera is actually quite nice. My main criticism is that the shutter button should be a two-stage one, for setting an autofocus point. Also, it’s quite stiff, much more so than the others – to the point where it almost always moves the phone when you hit it. But I found the always-on autofocus to be fairly quick, accurate, and able to focus extremely close. Check out the clarity on these near-macro shots: Even got a little nice foreground blur there. Naturally there’s a good amount of noise, which you’ll find at full size on any small-sensor camera. The colors are definitely not very vibrant, either, but that’s something you can easily control for. There was almost no delay between pressing the button and the shot being taken, and it was ready for another withing a second or two. There’s a multi-color notification LED, which I still don’t believe isn’t standard on all phones. Removing and replacing the battery cover is easy, and the rear panel flexes just enough to make it easier, but not enough to worry you about its quality. The MicroSD card slot is accessible without removing the battery, always preferable to the alternative. Software Stock Android has been modified somewhat, but not to the extent Motorola has previously with Blur. The AT&T blue theme pervades throughout, from a slightly janky lock screen to a really out-of-place browser icon featuring their logo prominently. There is also and extremely irritating and not-subtle flashlight-shining-on-icons effect whenever you go between home screens. It loses its novelty after literally the first time you see it. The animations also seem longer than stock ones, and can only be turned off altogether (there is no way to turn off the flashlight effect). Get a grip, Motorola. Nobody wants this. AT&T has included about 12 “bloatware” apps, depending on how you count, but they’ve also made it spectacularly easy to remove them. You go to your apps, and in the pulldown menu select “AT&T,” where they’ve kindly gathered all their apps. Little did they know how this app bucket would be used! From there you can long-press an app to delete it. No digging in menus, no waiting for app and component lists to populate. Easy peasy. The apps themselves are the usual account access and sponsored service fodder, unlikely to sway many users away from their established file, media, and doc syncing solutions. But nothing malicious. Network speeds are middling. I got around 4 megabits (~500KB/s) in my neighborhood, where I recall the T-Mobile G2 used to get something like 8 megabits. Speedtest confirmed this (3857kbps down, 1641 up). Honestly in practice it was always quite fast enough, and few of these 4G phones really beat each other on the all-important latency. The improved wireless chipset doesn’t guarantee better speeds in every situation, but raises the ceiling. It all depends on the network conditions where you use the phone the most. In Seattle T-Mo is generally faster than AT&T, I’ve found, but elsewhere it will be the opposite. Take my informal measurements lightly. Battery life I found to be very good. I’ve had my phone unplugged since about midnight, receiving emails on a 4G network, taking pictures, sending photos to myself for this review, and so on, and it’s currently at 80% (as I’m editing this three hours later, it’s at 70%). Streaming media on 4G will naturally drain this more, but this seems to me to be an all-day phone, and it’s made it through plenty of days already. I’ve seen other reviews complain about battery, but personally I haven’t encountered anything out of the ordinary. Then there’s the webtop functionality. Unfortunately I wasn’t allocated a unit to test this out, so I’ll stay quiet on it and let you check other reviews for an opinion on this feature. ConclusionIf you’re on AT&T and not an iPhone user, I’d say that this is a bargain for $99. It beats out the competition from HTC in a number of ways, and feels to me like a solid phone plain and simple. As long as you can get around that stupid flashlight effect.
|
| Meet Swivl, The Motion Tracking iPhone Dock That Always Keeps You On Camera Posted: 09 Nov 2011 11:54 AM PST  Oh, the wonderful world we live in. Less than a year ago, I was meeting with the two-man team that was Satarii in their garage-office to check out a product they called the “Star”. It was a camera dock of sorts, but with a fun twist: it’d automatically follow your movements, keeping you constantly in frame while shooting video. At the time, they had two prototypes: a small, dead, spray-painted plastic “looks like” prototype, and a working prototype that was about the size of a Christmas ham. And yet, it was clear they were on to something. This morning, the team is debuting the final evolution of the Star: meet Swivl. This thing is best explained with video, so I’ll let their demo do the talking: Basically: Snap your iPhone (or other, similarly sized camera) in, slap the marker somewhere on your person (or hold it), hit record, and the Swivl will twist and turn to keep you in the shot. Need a video of you skateboarding, but have no camera man? Need to have a “hands free” Facetime session for one reason or another (hey, I’m not asking questions)? That’s where the Swivl comes in. Things have changed rather drastically since the last time I spoke with them, seemingly all for the better:
I do wonder how loud the motors are during rotation. The motors on the original prototype were loud enough to be caught on the docked camera’s recording, and it’s interesting that almost all of the footage in the demo video above is completely dubbed over with the soundtrack. A bit of buzzing and whirring is, of course, almost unavoidable. The
|
| Flurry: Android And iOS Games Beat Nintendo And Sony In Portable Revenue Posted: 09 Nov 2011 11:36 AM PST  Oh, how the mighty have fallen. According to new research from mobile analytics firm Flurry, iOS and Android games now generate more revenue than all of Nintendo and Sony’s portable games combined. Nintendo and Sony have been duking it out for control of the portable market for years, with the two of them generating $2.2 and $1.6 billion in game revenue in 2009 and 2010 respectively. This year though, Flurry projects their combined revenue at a relatively small $1.4 billion while iOS and Android will pull in a projected $1.9 billion. If Flurry’s projections hold true, then mobile gaming will have outshone their more traditional counterparts for the first time. Flurry attributes the spike in iOS and Android game purchases to their low price tag and to the high adoption rate of new smartphones and tablets. It’s a startling turn-around, but I think Sony and Nintendo have to come to grips with the fact that iOS and Android are capable of much richer play experiences than PSP or 3DSs are. Sure, it requires a very thoughtful developer and the right hardware, but novel concepts like Disney Mobile’s AppMates take what could have been a straightforward movie tie-in game and turn it into something very special. It’s also been made clear by franchises like Rovio’s Angry Birds that dead-simple gameplay and ubiquity are capable of creating a huge following. In spite of all that, Nintendo still refuses to dip their toes into the mobile gaming pool. Company president Satoru Iwata stated unequivocally this past September that the idea of Nintendo creating games for smartphones was “absolutely not under consideration,” much to the consternation of mobile gamers. It’s funny that he took such a hard line on it, considering he took a 50% salary cut after dropping the 3DS’s price tag. That hasn’t stopped a number of Nintendo-friendly franchises from taking the leap though. The Level 5-developed Professor Layton series is set to make its first appearance on iOS sometime in the future, and a few of Square’s classic RPGs are currently Android-bound. Sony, to their credit, seems more open to the possibilities of expanding their presence in the mobile space. Their PlayStation-branded Xperia Play attempted to marry game-oriented hardware with a special catalog of mobile games, and the forthcoming Playstation Vita has a built-in 3G radio to facilitate head-to-head gameplay. Even so, I don’t expect the mobile gaming trend to slow down any time soon. Every developer wants to create the next the big thing, and for $.99 a pop, it’s much easier for potential customers to take a leap of faith on an app than on a $30 cartridge.
|
| Rumor: HTC Ville Packs Ice Cream Sandwich And Beats Audio Posted: 09 Nov 2011 09:21 AM PST  It looks like someone over at HTC just can’t keep their mouth shut. Not that I’m complaining, mind you: the newly-leaked HTC Ville looks like a device after my own heart. The Boy Genius himself reports that the Ville has a 4.3-inch qHD (that’s 960×540) Super AMOLED display, with a 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor under the hood. Sorry quad-core fans: you’ll have to look elsewhere for your fix. The Ville manages to make up for it with an HSPA+ radio and a remarkably svelte metal chassis that comes in at under 8mm thick. Oh, and who could forget the inclusion of Beats Audio support? If the lack of hardware buttons wasn’t enough of a tip-off, the Ville will sport Ice Cream Sandwich out of the gate. For better or worse though, Matias Duarte’s stylistic choices may be painted over: the Ville is said to run Sense 4.0 on top of it. The jury’s still out on whether or not the Ville is actually real, but BGR claims that it will soon make its first appearance alongside the HTC Edge at the 2012 Mobile World Congress. Interestingly, a sizable list of HTC device code names made the rounds yesterday and a similar-sounding device called the “Villa” was included among them. Considering that other entries included the Ruby (now the Amaze 4G), the Holiday (now the Vivid), and the Vigor (now the Rezound), the Ville may indeed see the light of day soon. Still, it’s equally possible that this is a crafty hoax meant whipped together with a name pulled from the list to give it some credence. I suppose we’ll just have to wait for MWC to see for sure, but considering the string of HTC leaks, new details may surface even sooner than that.
|
| A Humbled Adobe Sees Beyond The Browser Posted: 09 Nov 2011 09:18 AM PST  I can’t help chortling a little in Schadenfreude at Adobe’s expected announcement that it is abandoning Flash for mobile devices. For most of the past two years, the anti-iPad contingent has cited flash incompatibility as the primary reason they weren’t going to give Apple their money yet the devices they did back – the Xoom, the Notion Ink Adam, the Playbook, and the like – all shipped with buggy or non-existent flash implementations. But I will not chortle, friends, because this is some serious stuff. First, I want to say Flash wasn’t a bad idea for mobile. It would have been amazing in the early years of the smartphone revolution. It was comfortable, familiar, and a great way to get app-like functionality onto phones that might not have been powerful or popular enough for a real development platform. However, it was never implemented in a way that added value and what value it had value really peaked a few years ago and has progressively dropped over the past few months. If I’m to pick nits, I’d like to show this video from Lee Owen. The native iOS application, as you see, worked smoothly and seamlessly. The Android/Flash implementation, on the other hand, exhibited lag, touch insensitivity, and a general “wrong-ness” that disturbs the purists out there. This is obviously evidence of Android’s “familiar lag” but it also part of Flash’s problem: all of the things people wanted to do in Flash, barring viewing web video (an activity that is better in dedicated apps anyway) – play Flash games, view flash animations (why?), and, I assume, see Flash advertisements – are poorly served by these laggy implementations. Flash made Flash look bad. Adobe never got mobile Flash right but even as they claimed injury at Steve Jobs’ mean comments, they were probably already moving past the issue internally. The depth of that move is now public. In their statement, it’s clear that they’d rather have Flash and Air exist as standalone apps rather than an add-on. They want center stage on your device, not playing second fiddle to someone else’s browser:
You’ll also note that they want Flash to run high-end 3D games and other rich content, a possibility that is truncated by Flash in the browser. By going in this direction, they create two interconnected tracks – the direct to PC track and the direct to mobile track. Each track would presumably start at the same point and the differences in coding and development would be trivial, allowing an Adobe user to make a rich app on the desktop and the mobile device at the same time. Apple didn’t win this battle – if it even was a battle. Instead, Adobe ceded ground to the future in hopes of surviving another decade as the go-to tool maker for creative professionals. It’s fun to think that Steve Jobs had a hand in this, humiliating big bad Adobe with his Zen trickster techniques. However, it’s clear that Adobe is a business in crisis and that posturing doesn’t pay the bills. [Image: Brett Mulcahy/Shutterstock]
|
| BiteHunter Raises $800K For Real-Time Dining Deals Posted: 09 Nov 2011 08:46 AM PST  BiteHunter, the new mobile app for finding nearby dining deals, has just completed a $800,000 funding round. The round was led by angel investors Avraham Kadar, M.D. and Eyal Chomsky. The funding will be used to provide additional resources for the development of new features, an expansion to other platforms, and ongoing maintenance of BiteHunter’s deals database. The app, sometimes described as a "Kayak for restaurants," launched on iOS back in June, initially in New York, San Francisco and Chicago. In October, the company launched a major upgrade which included integration with hundreds more dining deals sources including Yelp Deals, Groupon Now and LivingSocial Instant. The newly added time-limited deals are now featured within the app's new "BiteNow" section, showing you discounted dining options you can access on the go. With the new funding, BiteHunter says it will soon add a personalized deal recommendation notification system and the option for its users to purchase deals on the go, without having to register at all the different deal providers. BiteHunter plans to serve as the middleman between you and the deal you want, so you can purchase the deal in the mobile app with credit card information you have on file. The plan is for BiteHunter to house 70-80% of the deals in the U.S., BiteHunter CEO and Co-Founder Gil Harel told us recently. BiteHunter 1.3 is available here in iTunes.
|
| Social Planning Service Hotlist Launches New Site And iPhone App Posted: 09 Nov 2011 08:25 AM PST  Location-based social planning platform Hotlist (formerly “The Hotlist”), is launching a revamped website and iPhone application today, with an increased focus on ease-of-use, improved discovery of upcoming activities and events, and better tools for coordinating plans with your friends. According to Co-founder and CEO Chris Mirabile, the company is also nearing the close of its next round of funding to the tune of approximately $1 million+, raised primarily from angel investors (via AngelList) and previous investor Centurion Holdings, among others. “When you think of other location-based services, like Facebook and Foursquare, it’s about what’s already happened in the past, it’s a more historical view,” explains Mirabile. Hotlist, instead, wants to help you find out what’s going to be happening in the future. It does this by tapping into users’ Facebook profiles to see what events users’ friends plan to attend. It also aggregates public data to show which places will be trending nearby. Hotlist users are then offered recommendations based on a combination of factors: their friends, places, events and the brands they follow. With the update, Hotlist has added the ability to take “virtual peeks” into venues hours or days ahead of the actual events in order to see event details, photos of those planning to attend, and who among their Facebook friends plans on going. The other notable new feature is the “Planner” which helps users determine the best place and time to meet up with friends. Users can specify up to 5 locations and times and friends select which ones work best. However, the best part of Hotlist’s update may be the redesign. If you remember what the app and website used to look like, you’ll likely be pleasantly surprised by the changes which make the service much easier to use. Hotlist says it now has over 100 million plans in its system for over 2.7 million venues in over 40,000 cities. Mirabile says that the service has also grown to half a million users since launch. The new app is in iTunes now, but an updated version will arrive in just a couple of hours with additional bug fixes.
|
| Video: NTT Docomo Shows Japanese/English Real-Time Translation Service For Mobile Phones Posted: 09 Nov 2011 08:13 AM PST  Japan’s biggest mobile carrier NTT Docomo has developed a real-time Japanese <-> English translation service for mobile phones, the first of its kind. The way it works is that you speak something into the device and wait to hear a voice interpretation of what you just said in another language. As you can see in the videos embedded below, the service, which uses the cloud for the heavy lifting, isn’t quite “real-time” but pretty close. NTT Docomo says the service can be used for communicating over the phone but also face-to-face. The company also claims the success rate for speech recognition stands at about 90% in the case of Japanese and about 80% for English (other languages will be added soon). That’s significantly more than the 15-20% back in May, when we introduced the service first. A test with 400 end consumers in Japan started today and runs through March next year. If everything goes according to plan, NTT Docomo plans to offer the service to all of its 56 million subscribers in the second half of 2012. This video [JP] shows the service in action:
|
| You Can’t Ignore The Web: OpenTable Launches New HTML5 Website Posted: 09 Nov 2011 07:17 AM PST  Restaurant reservations service OpenTable is launching a completely redesigned mobile website today based on HTML5. The company says it was prompted to make the changes due to customer demand. Since 2008, the company has seated more than 15 million diners through both its mobile website and apps, representing over $600 million in revenue for its restaurant customers. These days, OpenTable mobile solutions account for more than 1 million diners seated per month. The updated website offers a new look and feel, and was designed with a focused effort to better mirror the mobile app experience. Like OpenTable’s native apps, the site can now use geolocation to find nearby restaurants with tables available. Diners can also refine searches by neighborhood, cuisine and price, plus access photos, maps, menus and parking info. In addition, it also offers the most highly requested feature: reviews from other OpenTable diners. The updated website is currently supported on Android, iPhone, Windows Phone and BlackBerry devices, which is kind of funny, considering that the company already has apps for all those platforms. It seems that no matter how big you get, you can never ignore the biggest platform of them all: the Web. OpenTable also recently added a new Android Honeycomb (tablet) app, updated its Windows Phone app to support Mango’s Live Tiles for reservation reminders and updated its iOS apps to allow users to export reservations to their calendars. In an accompanying infographic, OpenTable revealed a few more tidbits of data, including the following:
|
| An iPhone Case That Will Remind You To Eat The Rich Posted: 09 Nov 2011 06:31 AM PST  If you have more money than sense, I have an iPhone case for you. Watchmaker De Bethune has created the DW4 aka the Dream Watch 4, an iPhone case made of bead-blasted titanium with an embedded mechanical watch in the back. Why? Because the poor can suck it is why. Only twelve of the limited edition cases will be made, with one given to John Corzine as a retirement gift. The rest will be flaunted on the streets of various famine-torn nations by impossibly thin Russian models who will order huge plates of food that they won’t eat. No pricing, but seriously?
|
| Apple: Siri Only Works On iPhone 4S, We Have No Plans To Support Older Devices Posted: 09 Nov 2011 05:48 AM PST  Recently we’ve seen reports flying around claiming that Apple has plans to put Siri on older generation devices, and may even be testing out the personal assistant on the iPhone 4. The news seemed more than a bit unexpected, so we decided to wait for Apple’s confirmation. Lo and behold, Apple has responded just as we thought they would: Siri is an iPhone 4S exclusive, at least in any official sense. In the past few days, we’ve seen Siri running on an iPhone 4, a 4th Gen iPod Touch, and an iPhone 3GS, but Apple played no part in that. As the word spread, rumors began to circulate that Apple was indeed planning on bringing the personal assistant to older devices, but that hope has been effectively killed. An iOS developer by the name of Michael Steeber reached out to Apple asking whether or not Siri might be part of a special, paid update to iOS 5. Just like they’ve said before, Apple responded with this:
When it comes down to it, it simply doesn’t make business sense for Apple to move Siri onto older devices. The company disappointed many by bringing the exact same design to the table this year, and Siri is the number one defense against that. Especially considering just how little the mass majority of consumers care about specs, much less understand them. Putting Siri on older handsets severely depreciates the iPhone 4S’s value, and we wouldn’t want that would we?
|
| You are subscribed to email updates from TechCrunch » Mobile To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
