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Posts Tagged ‘phone’

Brightkite is tricky. Tricky and smart.

While larger than most of their location-based rivals with over 2 million users, they know that in the past year they’ve lost some momentum to the newer check-in services like Foursquare and Gowalla. So they’re trying to do something unique to swing momentum back in their favor.

Today, at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, Brightkite is unveiling its new Group Text service. It’s both a feature on the website and a standalone application in the App Store (it should be available shortly). With it, Brightkite is latching onto one of the most popular and fast growing categories in mobile applications: group texting. Unlike regular text messaging, this type of app allows you to message many people all at once (and go back and forth). And better, in a world where cell providers are still managing to rip-off users with their text message bundles or $0.15 rate per-text, group texting is absolutely free.

Services such as textPlus have already made the functionality very popular on the iPhone, and now Brightkite hopes that will translate into converting different types of users over to its core location-based service. The reason is that built-in to the Brightkite Group Text app is the core Brightkite functionality itself. While it’s a bit buried to the left hand side of the menu, you can both check-in at venues, and get check-in updates from other users in the app.

It’s a smart play. As other location services such as MyTown have proven, there’s a market to get users outside of the traditional early-adopter crowd into location by doing something novel (in their case, a straight-up Monopoly-type game). Group texting users seem to be rabid about the software, so why not give them a little location-based bonus to play around with if they desire?

At the same time, this app provides a nice compliment to the Brightkite service itself. With it, users get another social outlet to communicate with, sending messages or pictures, and having them threaded both in the app and online. And yes, it still works with traditional SMS messaging, as Brightkite was lucky enough to be granted a texting shortcode (41414) and it can work with these threaded conversations. For example:

By adding three digits to the end of the code, each person can now have 100 simultaneous threaded text conversations running on their phone.
41414-001 = conversation 1
41414-002 = conversation 2

And thanks to the SMS support, you can contact anyone in your address book, not just those using the app.

The service is now live on Brightkite’s site, and look for it later today in the App Store.

If I lose my phone, it’s a bad day. If this guy loses his phone, he just lost the equivalent of a CEO’s salary. Read the rest at MobileCrunch > >

Continued here:
$200,000 BlackBerry takes gaudiness to a whole new level

Aol launched Lifestream, a social aggregator and publisher, as part of their AIM platform at TechCrunch50 Last Fall. Since then it has gained nearly 2 million users, say Aol. Based on that success Aol is now launching Lifestream as a standalone product at lifestream.aol.com.

Like Friendfeed, Lifestream aggregates a number of third party social networks – Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Foursquare, Delicious, Digg, Flickr, YouTube, etc., so if you follow a Lifestream user you’ll see all of the content that user publishes on those networks, and Lifestream automatically pulls in content from people you already follow on those various social networks, so you don’t have to create yet another new friend list. Lifestream isn’t yet integrated with Google Buzz, but Aol says it may be coming soon.

Users can filter out content from specific networks if they like, on a per user or broad basis. A way to think about this – “noise cancellation for social networks.”

Lifestream also lets users publish back to social networks. Status updates posted to Lifestream can be posted back to Facebook, Myspace and/or Twitter. Lifestream also optionally notes your location in your status updates via GPS on mobile devices, or you can manually add it instead.

That’s not it though. Users can sign in to Lifestream using their Facebook account via Facebook Connect, making it unnecessary to remember separate account and credentials for the site.

You also have a variety of choices in how you use Lifestream. You can access it via the website, an AIR application, or via iPhone and Android applications. As I said above, the mobile applications are particularly useful because they auto-note your location for easy check-ins, and you can post pictures you take from the phone.

That mobile version of the product is what excites me most. You can see where your friends are checking into on, say, Foursquare, click through to a place page and then go there yourself and check in. And Lifestream allows you to follow places just like people, so you can see whenever someone checks in to your local cafe or bar. That ability to follow places is probably the single best reason to use Lifestream.

The Lifestream product is simple, intuitive and really, really useful. Frankly it’s what Google Buzz should have been – both an independent social network on its own, but very deep integration into all of the other social networks you are likely to use daily. It’s nice to see actual innovation coming out of Aol.

While a lot of people are pretty pumped about Windows Phone 7 , there’s are some people who definitely are not : everyone stuck on a now antiquated Windows Mobile 6.5 handset. Microsoft has already confirmed that if your phones running 6.5, it’s not going to be running 7 any time soon.

Read the rest here:
Video: Android hacked in place of Windows Mobile on a Touch Pro2

Using a foam packing peanut to hold a nail or screw in place is brilliant. I like to think of myself as a pretty mild-tempered person but any time anybody’s asked my wife about the most angry she’s ever seen me, she always tells the story of when we first moved into our apartment here in Boston and I went around the house hanging our window blinds. Shoulda used peanuts.

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Tip: Use packing peanuts to hold nails and screws in place

While Loren Brichter may be hard at work on Tweetie Two for the Mac, he hasn’t given on his baby: Tweetie 2 for the iPhone. While the app hasn’t been updated since late November, a new build is due shortly with one big addition: native Foursquare support.

What this means is that anytime someone in your tweet stream sends out a tweet from Foursquare (which, to the annoyance of some users, happens automatically at times), that Foursquare link (shown as a 4sq.com URL) will be able to be opened in Tweetie in a way that displays the location information in a nice format. When a tweet is eligible for this feature, you’ll see a purple square logo in the upper right hand corner of the tweet in Tweetie.

When you click on a Foursquare link, you’ll be taken to a page that shows the venue’s address and phone number as well as the Foursquare mayor of the place. If you click on the address you’ll load a Google Map showing you exactly where it is. If you click on the phone number, you’ll be able to call the place right from the iPhone. Below all of that, there is a button to open the venue in Foursquare, which launches the Foursquare iPhone app.

A couple other new features in Tweetie 2 include Vodpod video uploads and the ability to attach messages along with your TwitPics to that service.

Look for this Tweetie 2 update soon in the App Store (it will be version 2.1.1). Meanwhile, Tweetie Two for Mac should be released in a private beta in about a month, according to new info shared on MacHeist today. Tweetie for Mac will soon be added to the nanoBundle 2, and in anticipation, they’ve added this message:

As a MacHeist customer, you’re not only receiving a free upgrade to the upcoming, highly anticipated Tweetie 2 – we’ve also arranged exclusive access to the pre-public beta for you guys!

Have fun using the best Mac Twitter client for now… and stay tuned for an email from us in about a month with your invite to the future of Mac tweeting.

Need a DIY gift for the phone programmer who has everything?

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For the programmer who has everything: Android pillows

In December 2008, Microsoft surprised a lot of people by releasing an iPhone app — Seadragon Mobile. A month later, they ensured the move wasn’t taken as a joke or gimmick by launching another app, Tag, into Apple’s App Store. Now, they have a few, including an app for Bing. And starting today, they’re doing the same for Android.

Tag for Android is the first Microsoft-made app launched on the mobile platform. This is notable, of course, because Android is the mobile platform by Microsoft’s chief rival: Google. Still, as we saw with the iPhone, Microsoft has no problems getting its technology out there, even if it means using rival platforms. Aside from Android and iPhone, Tag also currently works on Windows Mobile, J2ME, Blackberry and Symbian S60 phones.

Microsoft’s Tag technology allows you to use your phone as a mobile barcode reader. You simply point your phone’s camera at a tag (think: a smaller QRCode), snap a picture, and the Tag program will interpret it. This can be used to place things like coupons in physical locations, for example. Other companies, including Google, are working on these mobile barcodes as well. In fact, just prior to the Nexus One unveiling, all Google employees were given the device with a special barcode on the back that other Android devices could scan to get that person’s information.

Despite the high level on animosity between Microsoft and Google, it’s great to see that Microsoft isn’t above creating apps for the increasingly popular Android platform. Microsoft made its own big mobile headlines last month with the unveiling of Windows Phone Series 7, a complete reboot of its mobile strategy, due to launch later this year. That move should help Microsoft better compete with the current hot mobile platforms, Android and the iPhone.

The Tag application is available today in the Android Market; it’s a free app.

Android users have a new way to search their phones today, and it’s pretty damn cool. Google has just released a new application called Gesture Search that lets you search your phone’s contacts, bookmarks, applications, and music simply by scribbling out letters with your finger. No hunting and pecking — you just draw out each letter as if you’re finger painting. The new application is currently only available for devices running Eclair (Android 2.0, which is currently only found on the Nexus One and Verizon Droid).

Using Gesture Search is quite simple. First, you boot up the Gesture Search application, which you need to download from Android Market. After installing it, your phone will prompt you to ask if you want to add the application to your home screen (which you’ll probably want to do if you intend to use it with any frequency). Tap the application, and you’ll see a black screen, where you’re supposed to start drawing the first few letters of your query. As you complete each letter, the application will refine your results. If you mess up, you can delete the last letter by drawing a horizontal line to the left (you can delete the entire word by swiping to the right).

I’ve been playing with the new application, and the character recognition seems to work pretty well. It’s still too early to tell how useful this will be on a day-to-day basis, but it has potential. For one, it’s great for people who don’t like having to flick through long lists or use the phone’s integrated keyboard. And because everyone knows how to draw these letters by heart, it makes for a good way to search when you can’t keep your eyes on your phone (don’t take this as a recommendation to use it while driving, though — that’s never safe).

At long last, webOS has been granted a Facebook application worth its weight in kilobytes. A completely revamped version of the Facebook application has just gone live in the Palm App Catalog – and boy, is it an improvement.

Palm has offered some level of Facebook support on webOS since the launch of the Pixi – but as we noted in our Pixi review, calling what it had “Facebook support” was probably exaggerating. You could sync your Facebook contacts, read your news feed, and.. well, that’s it.

The new app, however…

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>