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Droid RAZR MAXX To Launch On January 26th?

Posted: 13 Jan 2012 03:24 PM PST

Droid RAZR Maxx

While there wasn’t much to say about the recently announced Droid RAZR MAXX to begin with (it’s essentially the Droid RAZR with a bigger battery and more storage), Motorola and Verizon decided to leave out one key bit of detail: the launch date.

While it’s still not 100% confirmed, Motorola’s own RAZR MAXX product page now pinpoints the big day as January 26th.

Don’t go lining up outside of the Verizon store on the 26th or anything (this could very well be a placeholder, or a lingering detail from before the date went all tentative), but would-be MAXX buyers should keep it in mind.

[Via DroidLife]

Hands-On With The LG Spectrum: So Last Year

Posted: 13 Jan 2012 01:04 PM PST

Here at CES 2012, phones are a bit in short supply. At least, new phones are. LG is one of the few companies to officially announce a new smartphone at the show, and I have to say it’s one of the best phones we’ve seen out of LG. Unfortunately, that still leaves the Spectrum quite a ways behind some of the other new phones we’ve seen recently like the Xperia S, Titan 2, or the Galaxy Nexus (of course).

The real stand-out feature here is the 4.5-inch 720p display with a True HD Graphic Engine and Corning Gorilla glass, boasting 326ppi. The phone also touts Verizon’s 4G LTE, which is mostly solid unless it’s December.

The Spectrum has a .4-inch waist line, and a glossy back panel which is a far cry from the more premium feel of the LG Nitro HD. What’s odd is that the Spectrum is actually meant to be an equally high-end phone, but takes prints so poorly and is so obviously plastic that it feels kind of cheap.

Under the hood you’ll find a 1.5GHz dual-core processor, 4GB of on-board memory, and 1GB of RAM. The phone also comes with a 16GB microSD card, but the slot itself can handle a card up to 32GB.

The 8-megapixel rear camera shoots video in 1080p, and there’s a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera for video chat if that’s your style.

What’s perhaps the worst news of all is that the LG Spectrum will ship with Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread, and won’t get Ice Cream Sandwich until the second half of 2012. At the same time, most phones we’re seeing with these specs go for around $250 or $300 and the Spectrum can be had for $199 on a two-year contract.

Like most things with LG phones, you win some and you lose some.



Apple Releases List Of Its Suppliers, Discloses Labor Violations

Posted: 13 Jan 2012 12:27 PM PST

Apple

Apple has, for the very first time, released a report of its suppliers. There are 156 suppliers listed in the PDF the company published (available here), including big names like Sony, Intel, Samsung and Foxconn (also known as Hon Hai Precision Industry Co.), which dragged Apple’s name into the light over questionable labor practices, when fourteen of the company’s workers plunged to their death at the Foxconn factories in 2010.

Since then, the company has been under increased scrutiny, with critics saying it should to be more transparent about the working conditions throughout its supply chain. Today, Apple appears to have answered its critics’ calls.

For more on Foxconn, read John Biggs’ four-part series, “The Future of Foxconn,” here.

With the newly released series of reports from Apple, there’s not only a listing of suppliers, there are also details of Apple’s supplier audits over the course of the past year. In its 2012 Supplier Responsibility Report, Apple says it found fewer labor violations in 2011 than in 2010, based on 229 audits it conducted last year. That’s an 80% increase from 2010. From 2007 to 2010, in fact, the company had only conducted 288 total audits.

The report examines all areas of the supply chain, from components to assembly. There were, as you may expect, several labor violations. These included pay violations, issues with employee benefits, environmental hazards, and even some incidents of child labor.

A few standout numbers:

  • Apple suppliers were in compliance with the max 60-hour work week 38% of the time
  • 93 facilities had records showing that over 50% of their workers had exceeded a 60-hour week (in at least 1 week of the 12-week sample period)
  • 108 of the 229 companies didn’t pay proper overtime as required by law
  • AT 90 facilities, over half the records showed that employees had worked more than 6 consecutive days at least once per month
  • 37 facilities lacked controls to ensure workers got at least 1 day off every 7 days
  • 5 facilities used child labor in 6 cases
  • There were 13 historical cases of underage labor
  • 68 didn’t provide benefits (insurance, free physical exams) as required by law
  • 49 didn’t provide employees with paid leave or vacation
  • 56 facilites didn’t have procedures to prevent discrimination towards pregnant women; 24 conducted pregnancy tests
  • 18 facilities screened for Hepatitis B; 52 didn’t have procedures to prevent discrimination based on those tests
  • 3 facilities lied to auditors or gave them misleading answers and records regarding payroll and workers’ hours; 1 blocked Apple’s efforts to obtain payroll records
  • 112 weren’t storing, moving or handling hazardous chemicals properly
  • 112 facilities were not properly storing, moving or handling hazardous chemicals
  • 69 weren’t recycling or disposing of hazardous waste properly; 74 lacked management procedures on recycling and disposal
  • The improper handling of combustible dust led to deaths and injuries at 2 facilites (one has corrected their procedures, the other is shut down); Foxconn lost 4 employees, and 18 were injured while Ri-Teng (a subsidiary of Pegatron) injured 59

Despite these numbers, disturbing as they may be, Apple says things are improving.

For comparison purposes, in 2010, there were 91 underage workers found working in 10 facilities, Apple disclosed. This year, the company says it found “no instances of intentional hiring of underage labor,” and that facilities simply didn’t have sufficient enough controls to verify age or detect fake documents.

Apple is also opening up access to an independent team of auditors from the Fair Labor Association (FLA), to review its ongoing performance in these matters. The results of those reports will appear on FLA’s website.

The company also expanded its Apple’s Supplier Employee Education and Development (SEED) program to all final assembly facilities. This program, which allows workers to take free finance, computer, English and other classes, has already been taken by over 60,000 workers.

4Mads Launches New Adtech Startup For DIY Online & Mobile Ads

Posted: 13 Jan 2012 10:59 AM PST

4mads_logo

San Francisco-based 4Mads is a new, angel-funded startup in the adtech space which allows SMB’s and local brands the ability to create both online and mobile rich media ads. The service, which has been in private testing for the past year, just went live this week with the launch of its one-stop shop and easy to use, drag-and-drop tools.

The company was started by the founder of NetDoubler, Eugene Walden, the former Chief Software Architect at Crackle Piers Haken, and Alfredo Guilbert, who was the former regional VP of AlwaysOn. It also has over $1 million in seed funding from angels including Roger Lang, Andy Laursen, David Roux, Jon Staenberg, and others.

The target market for 4Mads is the small to medium-sized business owner who doesn’t find it cost efective to hire their own ad agency to design their mobile and web ads. These businesses often turn to “local deals” services like Groupon and Living Social, as well as to traditional media, in order to bring in new customers.

What 4Mads offers instead are a set of tools and tutorials that allow the business owners to create their own ads. Using the provided instructions, the company claims a client can create an ad within 10 minutes or less. The ads offer over 100 animation effects (and growing), and come in both Flash and HTML5 formats, so they work on mobile devices and desktop browsers alike. You can check out a gallery of what these ads look like here.

The new service launched just yesterday, amid the hectic week of gadget-y and mobile news courtesy of CES. There are four different pricing plans available, beginning with one campaign for one month for free (“Starter”), 3 campaigns/month for $25 (“Professional”), 10/mo. for $75 (“Brand”) or unlimited campaigns (contact the company for pricing).

To learn more about 4Mads or sign up, go here.

iCloud’s App Search Engine: A First Step To A Cloud-Enabled Phone

Posted: 13 Jan 2012 09:52 AM PST

icloud-app-search

Apple has built a search engine for apps. It’s called iCloud – or more technically, it’s one aspect of the overall iCloud service. Using it, you can search through every app you have installed on your iOS device or have ever purchased in the past. And it’s available on your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch right now.

The average smartphone user has 64 mobile apps installed on their mobile device. I’m ahead of the curve. I have around 400. It’s pushing nearly 7 GB of storage. Granted, many of these apps were installed for testing purposes only – they aren’t used daily by any means. But my real problem is that I’m not inclined to remove apps I don’t use. They just sit there on the phone, abandoned, languishing on the back screens. I could delete them, but I don’t. You know…just in case.

But the promise of iCloud, as I see it, is that these apps can disappear from the iPhone’s homescreen, but never have to fully disappear from reach. They can be recalled through a simple search.

Note to Android users: This whole post is about Apple’s iCloud. Android has cool ideas, too. I love my Nexus S. But Android is not being addressed in today’s article. 

That search mechanism already exists. For now, it’s tucked away under a couple of screens within the iPhone’s App Store app. It’s neither an everyday necessity for the average user or functional enough for a power user’s needs. But it’s there, and somewhere at Apple HQ, it’s being improved.

Today, it’s easier to flip through your screens to find your apps, especially if you only have 64 of them (or less). Worst case scenario: you can’t remember which folder you tucked the app in, so you flip to the left side of the homescreen and use Spotlight Search to find the app in question instead.

But let’s extrapolate out to a few years into the future. A few years of downloading and abandoning apps on our backscreens. A few years of iPhone upgrades, with hundreds of leftover apps syncing to new devices. Why not delete the unused apps? Why not perform regular app cleanups? Because users are lazy. I’m lazy. I don’t want to. I have better things to do. So does everyone. And so the apps continue to sync from one device to the next, forgotten.

We need a new metaphor for search. Homescreens, app folders and Spotlight Search will not be enough. We need a cloud-hosted index of searchable apps.

A number of companies are working towards this end. (See: Chomp, Quixey, Do@t, Xyologic, Appolocious, AppsFire, Kinetik, and Crosswa.lk, for example). There are a lot baby steps being taken here, and the occasional leap. Build a search engine like Google, but for apps! Include rankings and user reviews! Use keywords from app descriptions! Make it social! All good ideas. But not enough.

And anyone who’s just building an app search engine app without some other larger business behind it, could easily get trounced on by Apple in the coming months.

To see what I mean, check out the bare-bones iCloud app search engine that’s on your iOS device right now (assuming you’re on the latest version of iOS):

  1. Launch the App Store app.
  2. Tap “Updates.”
  3. Tap “Purchased” (at the top).
  4. Drag the screen down so you can see the search box.
  5. Enter in a keyword (try something common, e.g. “photo.”).
  6. Tap “Search.”

Look at your results. There, all your apps matching your keywords. Ranked by – how? – I’m not 100% sure, but it looks like time of installation. It’s certainly not update date or alphabetically.

This iCloud app search engine is only partial functional, though. Like Spotlight, it only looks at the app’s titles, not descriptions, for keywords. It doesn’t know how much you’ve used an app or how you’ve rated it. Sometimes, it would show me which apps were installed versus which are available on the cloud. Sometimes it got buggy and showed all apps as having the iCloud download button, even if they were installed on the device.

But it’s there. And it’s only a matter of time before iCloud search is integrated with Spotlight Search and Siri, via APIs. We’ll soon be calling up our preferred apps using natural language, both in typed-in queries and in spoken ones. We won’t need to know whether the app is currently on our phone. iCloud will know. Siri will know. We may not even need to initiate the download ourselves. Our phone will do that for us.

In addition, our homescreen clutter will be gone. Apps will delete themselves after periods of non-use unless you configure them as “locked.” Maybe there will be an “auto organize” option for our homescreens, which arranges apps based on usage.

With the exponential growth of the mobile application ecosystem, this is one of the only possible ways to manage the entirety of a user’s app archive in the months ahead. Many of today’s apps are cloud-enabled, but this will be a cloud-enabled phone.

Maybe I’m dreaming? But if Apple can’t get it done, someone should. (Android? Windows Phone? An app developer? A startup?) The mobile ecosystem is still young enough to be entirely disrupted by someone with a new idea for parsing the new web of apps. Today, I believe it’s Apple that’s the closest to implementation, given the glimpse it’s given us with iCloud. But who knows? We could still be surprised.

Source Code Marketplace Binpress Adds Github Integration

Posted: 13 Jan 2012 07:24 AM PST

binpress-logo

Source code marketplace Binpress is now offering integration with the popular file repository Github. According to Binpress CEO Adam Benayoun, this move will allow developers to import their open-source projects and add a commercial layer on top of them.

For those unfamiliar, Binpress’s marketplace opened up in January 2011, in order to provide a platform for software development companies and developers who want to publish and discover source code and components to aid in rapid development of their projects. The site joins several other efforts competing in this same space, including Verious (TechCrunch Disrupt finalist), Chupa, and Appcelerator's Open Mobile Marketplace, for example.

With the integration now provided by Github’s API, developers can offer commercial licenses in addition to free licenses. This allows their open source projects to offer support and future enhancements while operating as a viable business, says Binpress.

To set up their Binpress account, Github users can both register and log-in using their Github credentials, and then import their Github projects directly as Binpress components.

Binpress, which just moved its offices from Tel Aviv to Mountain View a month ago, is a completely bootstrapped effort. Prior to Binpress, the company’s founders operated a web development shop and incubator in Israel for four years.

Cupidtino, The Dating Site For Apple Fans, Releases iPhone App

Posted: 13 Jan 2012 05:46 AM PST

ifangirl

It was with a strange mix of amusement and horror that I learned about the existence of an online dating service specifically for Apple fanboys and girls almost two years ago.

But, Cupidtino is still around, and last night they quietly debuted an iPhone application to complement their dating website. You have to wonder what took them so long, but at least they’re in time for next Valentine’s Day.

The application, which you can download here, is free and pitched as a “Mac-inspired dating app designed exclusively for fans of Apple products”. It lets users search and browse profiles, send ‘heartbeats’ to members that intrigue them, and more.

Users can upgrade their membership via in-app purchase for $4.99 per month, to read unlimited messages and chat with other Apple fans.

According to the FAQ on its website, Cupidtino has attracted some 30,000 members interested in dating another Apple fan so far (provided they regularly update this number).

From the app description on iTunes:

Why?

Diehard Mac & Apple fans often have a lot in common – personalities, creative professions, a similar sense of style and aesthetics, taste, and a love for technology. We believe these are enough fundamental reasons for two people to meet and fall in love, and so we created the first Mac-inspired dating app to help you find other Machearts around you.

Cupidtino is like a neighborhood café where the people are hip, decor is classy, conversation is intelligent and prices are reasonable. But it’s open at your convenience, folks are from around the world, and it’s less awkward to talk to someone.

You’ll forgive me for cringing a little when I read that.