Lollapalooza goes to crowdsourcing
Lollapalooza recently decided to release their API to the world and crowdsource a new app for their upcoming festival. The organization pared it down to 19 entries they felt had promise and are going to vote on the two best to feature at the festival. As a development company, that is to say, folks who make a living off of making apps, I am not terribly excited about crowdsourcing. I think it is akin to child labor in the sense that the person or entity engaging in crowdsourcing is knowingly exploiting a large number of people and paying a fraction for the output that they should. In the end...
read moreFord bolsters smartphone sync
Ford is really on top of things it would appear. Already launched now but soon to hit the scene in even more of their cars is a system called Sync AppLink. The goal of this system is to further integrate the passenger’s smartphones with their cars. The overall goal is to reduce the amount of time it takes to control various aspects of the car (from the user control vantage point that is) as well as reduce passenger interaction with their phones. Turns out people download apps while driving! Can you imagine? This step is significant as it is a recognition of mobile’s stratospheric...
read moreApps: 38 billion by 2015
Apps are everywhere. They have gone zero to 110 through the popular vernacular in a shockingly small amount of time. We went from a handful to over 350,000 in just shy of three years. Where do we go from here exactly? According to Forrester, up, way up. By 2015 they predict the app business to be north of $38 billion. This report is significant. $38 billion is a lot to work with to be sure. The report also calls out corporations specifically citing that they are expected to spend $17 billion on apps for their goods or services. That does not include the service component to this that will be...
read moreApple to make iTunes more like Pandora?
I heart Pandora. No doubt about it. It is slick, easy to use, ultra personal, and will sit there quietly (or as loud as I want) and do its job; serve me up music. No muss, no fuss. By contrast I have thousands of songs in my music library that I rarely listen to because they are never on the hard drive near me, not sorted properly, not tagged, you get the point. It is often times easier to simply ignore them and stream. Apple is toying with a solution to this. Make iTunes a cloud service. It would allow unlimited downloads to iPads, iPhones, or desktops via any internet connection. I say...
read moreVerizon iPhone as good (or bad) as AT&T
According to Consumer Reports it would seem as though the Verizon iPhone is seemingly identical to its AT&T counterpart. That is to say it pretty much rocks in every way but the antenna. For this reason it was shunned from the recommended list with the group. The other news here is that they also did not recommend it for AT&T. No one seems to be affected by this news, certainly none of the people we know. While we do know people with a few dropped calls from time to time, they appear to be an acceptable cost of doing business.
read moreCel phones and your brain
This is a hard topic for us. Everyone has a cel phone and most are on it non-stop. No one has come out yet with significant proof that we are all slowly dying of brain tumors so, we continue to talk. Keep in mind though that until about 60 years ago we all though smoking cigarettes was actually healthy. (check this out). Unfortunately this study won’t actually answer any of your questions either but it does get us talking. Essentially it states that test subject’s brains were in fact sensitive to the low levels of radiation emitted from cel phones. Hooray. I can certainly sleep...
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