Mobile Musings

Smartphone apps are getting really…uh…smart.  This new app, available to iPhone users can actually recognize the faces of your friends in pictures.  Read more about Klik below:

A new iPhone app called KLiK performs real-time facial recognition to automatically identify and tag friends in photos.

“It’s our most recent evolution of both the platform and the consumer product that we’re offering,” said Gil Hirsch, the CEO of the facial recognition technology platform Face.com, which launched the app.

Read the entire article here:  http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/software/new-iphone-application-called-klik-reveals-identity-in-photos/articleshow/13351827.cms

App downloads are the future of software. Internet TV has apps, Facebook has apps and smartphone has apps.  They are basically small programs that accomplish a specific set of defined instructions. For example, they may help you find the nearest Barbeque restaurant (Urbanspoon.com) or the closest Farmer’s Market (Iowa Farmer’s Markets).  If you are a business, they may show the 10 target sales locations in a community for a sales team. There are so many opportunities and one app, Instagram, recently sold for more then $1 billion to Facebook….crazy!  So this article piqued my interest when I read it because our company, VictoryApps.com, is in the middle of this app building craze.

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With more and more people picking up smartphones and tablets, it should be no surprise that app usage has also seen a swift uptick in the last year.

According to stats from Nielsen, the average number of apps per smartphone has increased 28 percent since 2011 - from 32 to 41.

The large majority of those apps are being downloaded onto Android and iOS devices. Those mobile OSes accounted for 88 percent of app downloads in the last 30 days, Nielsen said. At this point, 50 percent of mobile subscribers in the U.S. have a smartphone, up from 38 percent last year.

This has prompted a switch from the mobile Web to apps; users are spending about 10 percent more time using apps than mobile browsers. Still, the top five apps haven’t changed much. Users are still gravitating toward Facebook, YouTube, Android Market, Google Search, and Gmail, and are only spending about two more minutes on each app than they were last year, or 39 minutes.

Read the entire article here:  http://www2.pcmag.com/media/images/345374-nielsen-apps-report.jpg?thumb=y

(Source: pcmag.com)

Extreme athletes now have a way to extend their training apps for use in a way that finally makes sense.  If you’re riding a bike or in a kayak, it’s a bad idea to pull out your $500 iPhone and take a look at your pace, the time or any other app you might want to view. But now, wristwatches, connected by Bluetooth, allow the phone app to be worn and quickly viewed.  While this may initially not seem like a disruptive idea, stop and consider the implications:  time, weather, GPS, messaging and many other tools can be a quick glance away rather than digging in your pocket for your phone. It’s a big challenge to the dominance of Garmin on their GPS watches used by athletes as well as a major threat to all watchmakers. 

It’s a tool that allows app development companies to think different in the way that apps are delivered to users.  While we can’t sit here and predict all its uses, but there’s little doubt it will catch on and become integrated in the daily use of many people.

Learn more by reading this article:

The Pebble, is a watch with an e-paper screen that runs apps from your iPhone or Android device. In its first three days on Kickstarter, the project has attracted 18,867 backers and raised $2,656,389, of their initial $100,000 goal for putting the watch into production. So far, The highest grossing Kickstarter project ever raised $3 million in 60 days, so the Pebble is positively off the charts.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/04/15/pebble-watch-for-iphone-and-android-the-most-successful-kickstarter-project-ever/

We just ventured into the e-book publishing world last month with Apple. I’m a fan of their products and services generally, but the experience trying to publish a multi-media book was less than easy.  Even more, it’s been three weeks and I don’t know if they have received my book for approval, despite my best efforts to use their system to check on the status of my book. Doh! 

So it sparked my interest today when the Justice Department filed an anti-trust suit against the major book publishers for colluding to control pricing and eliminate competition. Generally, I don’t think these suits have merit since competition is hard to control on the Internet, but it will be interesting to see how the e-book world reacts over the next few months.

Learn more below:

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department on Wednesday sued  Apple Inc. and five major book publishers for allegedly colluding to fix e-book prices.

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in New York, alleges that Apple and the publishers “reached an agreement whereby retail price competition would cease (which all the conspirators desired), retail e-book prices would increase significantly (which the publisher defendants desired) and Apple would be guaranteed a 30% ‘commission’ on each e-book it sold (which Apple desired).”

The agreement helped drive prices up to avoid retail price competition from Amazon, in violation of antitrust laws, the suit said.

“Millions of e-books that would have sold at retail for $9.99 or for other low prices instead sold for … generally $12.99 or $14.99,” the suit said.

Read the entire article here:  http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-apple-ebook-suit-20120411,0,2437575.story

Detroit is finally getting it when it comes to technology.  They are investing in the little things that can make a big difference. People love gadgets and they love their phones.  Now, maybe they will love GM again. Read the article:

DETROIT — General Motors soon will sell a $50 smartphone application that could replace your dashboard navigation system.

The company said Wednesday that the app, called GoGo Link, will project smartphone navigation systems onto a dashboard touch screen. Drivers can control the system with the touch screen and listen to voice directions through the car’s speaker system. The screen also will show maps.

Read the entire article here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/new-general-motors-smartphone-app-could-mean-the-end-of-car-navigation-systems/2012/03/28/gIQAhPl9gS_story.html

The iPhone is picking up momentum. Wherever I go this year, the iPhone is surprising me. I had read that the iPhone wasn’t really a big hit in Asia, but when I was in Singapore and Shanghai for a few days, it was everywhere.  People loved their iPhones. 

Then I understood that it was too expensive for high schoolers to own them so Android phones were more popular.  Huh? High Schoolers are clamoring for them. They are the new Uggs, the Coach purse of the season. 

Any thought that iPhone is not on its way to almost monopoly status I think is wrong.  The Apple ecosystem makes it a natural fit with all the products in the Applesphere.

I have never been a fanboy, but I get it when I am holding a quality piece of machinery in my hands. 

And making room for all these iPhones is the former market leader, Blackberry. This article shows how Canada - home of Rim, maker of Blackberry - is turning to Apple.

Research In Motion Ltd. has been ousted from the top spot for smartphone shipments in its home market for the first time, trailing Apple Inc.’s iPhone.

RIM, based in Waterloo, Ontario, shipped 2.08 million BlackBerrys last year in Canada, compared with 2.85 million units for Apple, data compiled by IDC and Bloomberg show. In 2010, the BlackBerry topped the iPhone by half a million, and in 2008, the year after the iPhone’s debut, RIM outsold Apple by almost five to one.

As disruptive technologies continue to displace current modes of doing business, restaurants may be next.  Using iPads as cash registers gives restaurants a way to do business better, faster, sell more and all with greater efficiency.  It’s such an obvious transition, that I have little doubt we will watch it unfold over the next three years.

This is a pretty good article about how that transition is starting:

It seems that everywhere you go these days, someone is using an iPad to catch up on work, surf the internet or watch a movie. Tablet computers are even finding their way into the hands of waitstaff at restaurants across the country. With a number of apps and services on the market, restaurants are using the iPad in a variety of ways, including displaying menus and having servers enter customer orders instead of writing them down. Some are even handing the tablets directly to customers.

Incorporating iPads into your restaurant is an important decision, both in how you run your restaurant and for cost purposes. Before you jump on the latest technology bandwagon, here are five questions to help you decide if you should trade your notepads for iPads.

Read the entire article here:

http://www.openforum.com/articles/should-your-waitstaff-trade-in-their-notepads-for-ipads

Google’s open source, wild-west approach to apps is great for developers in that we get to avoid the approval process of the Apple hierarchy, but for users, it can put some really crappy apps out there.  Apps with malware, phone apps masquerading as tablet apps and just plain rotten, poor performing apps are freely available.

Read this article about a new 3rd party option for Android tablet apps that solves many of the issues that currently exist:

Enter Tablified Market—a curated market just for tablet-specific apps. The people behind it have a strict set of criteria that an app must meet in order to be included in the database, which to us means no more phone apps in search results. For one, an approved app must be distinguishable from its phone-specific counterpart (if it has one). This means it has to take full advantage of the larger screen somehow. Also, the Tablified gatekeepers are specifically on the lookout for apps that incorporate Android’s Action Bar and use the tablet-specific Fragments API.

Using Tablified is as intuitive as using any other market. It lets you search for apps based on keyword, browse by category, or sift through lists like Editor’s Choice and Recently Added. Each product page then brings you to a description, screenshots, and comments, along with a link that leads you directly to the download from the Google Play Store. So, Tablified itself is not an actual market. Rather, it merely acts as a filtered version of the market we already have.

One thing I find troublesome about Tablified is its laggy performance. Because the app basically pulls content from its Web site into its frames, load times can be annoyingly long, even with a strong data connection. It’s a small price to pay, though, for the service the app provides.

Read the entire article here: 

http://asia.cnet.com/crave/tablified-market-filters-out-android-apps-for-tablets-62213928.htm