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Touchanote Brings Evernote to Life With NFC Tags [VIDEO] (Mashable) : Technet |
- Touchanote Brings Evernote to Life With NFC Tags [VIDEO] (Mashable)
- Deutsche Telekom: U.S. staffing not linked to AT&T deal (Reuters)
- Can Obama Save Android? (ContributorNetwork)
- Tracking Hurricane Irene with FEMA and other Android apps (Appolicious)
- Live updates: Hurricane Irene belts the East Coast (The Lookout)
- Best HP TouchPad Apps (Digital Trends)
- Mobile apps in the eye of Hurricane Irene (Appolicious)
- How Powerhead Games went from work-for-hire to building its own titles (Appolicious)
- When a slimmer iPhone just isn't good enough (Reuters)
- Salesforce Conference Pushes 'Social Enterprise' (NewsFactor)
| Touchanote Brings Evernote to Life With NFC Tags [VIDEO] (Mashable) Posted: 26 Aug 2011 03:13 PM PDT [More from Mashable: Why Evernote Bet the Company on Mobile & Social Media] Mix an edgy consumer NFC idea with $55,000 in prize winnings and the support of Evernote's fast-growing & well-financed platform, and you might have a soapbox stand tall enough to capture the world's attention. This is the position that startup Touchanote finds itself in after winning Evernote's developer competition. [More from Mashable: How 9 Food Trucks Use Tech To Drive Business] Founder Hamid Zaidi wowed attendees and judges at the Evernote Trunk Conference with an Android application that stores links to Evernote content on physical NFC tags (see above). Create a link to an Evernote note and slap an NFC tag on any object you'd like. Then, simply touch your device to the tag to open your note. Touchanote, says Zaidi, who spoke with Mashable in an exclusive post-win interview, proffers a right-here, right-now consumer use case for NFC technology. Much ado is being made about NFC-enabled payments, but the infrastructure and business adoption required to support payments is likely still two years out, he says. "Meanwhile, millions of lonely NFC phone users out there are excited to use the technology now," says Zaidi. "We want to be the face for the consumer-driven NFC market." Touchanote is like a backup disk for your brain: Evernote serves as the memory bank and NFC markers make for physical placeholders that route you back to important information. Instructions or passwords stored on tags stuck on associated objects make for practical use cases. Tags on photo frames, however, could call up more memories in digital photo form. The application connects the digital and physical realms in a way that brings Evernote CEO Phil Libin's vision of a "trusted second brain for all your lifetime memories" to fruition. Touchanote has received an encouraging post-victory reception. The application launched on the Android store last Thursday and users have already ordered 500 tags -- tags are sold in 1, 10 and 25 batches for $3, $10 and $20 respectively. The startups biggest challenge, says Zaidi, will be to meet demand with enough tags, which are supplied by a third-party manufacturer. He doesn't seem to the think that the lack of NFC-enabled devices for sale will work against the company. "This is a tangible market that people have disregarded," he says, citing a forecast that more than 40 million NFC phones will ship this year. "I think that is a huge and blank canvas." This story originally published on Mashable here. |
| Deutsche Telekom: U.S. staffing not linked to AT&T deal (Reuters) Posted: 27 Aug 2011 03:58 AM PDT FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Deutsche Telekom (DTEGn.DE) said it had not been cutting jobs at its U.S. arm T-Mobile USA in anticipation of the unit's sale to AT&T (T.N), as reported by a German online magazine on Friday. Focus Online, quoting a representative of the CWA union, reported that Deutsche Telekom had cut 2,600 jobs at T-Mobile USA call centers in the past few months ahead of the merger. "We have not carried out any measures to cut jobs ahead of the planned T-Mobile USA sale to AT&T," a Deutsche Telekom spokesman said late on Friday. "In the past 12 months the workforce has been reduced by 2,000 but that is in line with normal fluctuations." The U.S. unit employs 36,000 people at present. Deutsche Telekom is awaiting regulatory approval for the sale of the ailing T-Mobile USA business to AT&T for $39 billion. It expects the sale will be sealed first quarter of 2012. (Reporting by Peter Maushagen; editing by Keiron Henderson) |
| Can Obama Save Android? (ContributorNetwork) Posted: 27 Aug 2011 09:11 AM PDT Contribute content like this. Start here. Imagine if McDonald's suddenly decided it had a beef with Burger King and wanted to ban the Whopper because it infringed on the Big Mac. That may sound ridiculous to you, but it's the problem being faced by Android smartphone and tablet manufacturers like HTC, as Apple is trying to outlaw their wares here and abroad. The problem has gotten so bad that Verizon's chief legal officer supposedly called President Barack Obama to ask him to intervene. What can he do, and just how bad is the problem? Read on. Why Android is getting outlawed The trouble lays with international patent law. You may remember patents from history class: Edison invented the incandescent light bulb, and got a patent on it. What you may not remember is how patents allowed companies like Bell and AT&T to basically own every telephone in the country, and abuse their customers until the government finally broke them up. (Although some say they're still abusing their customers.) That's roughly the situation Apple seems to want to be in, with regards to tablets and smartphones. The iPhone is the phone and the iPad is the tablet, and woe betide someone who makes a gadget that looks too much like them. Apple has patents on everything in your iPhone, right down to the clickable links in your emails, and it won't hesitate to use them against its competitors. Should Apple have that kind of power? Nearly every programmer you'll ask disagrees. The patent situation has gotten so bad, any program or app you can write will infringe on at least half a dozen patents that you've never heard of. So the game is no longer one of invention; it's one of patenting everything that hasn't been nailed down, then looking for ways you can sue other companies. Where Obama comes in Yan M. of AndroidPit explains the situation: The way Apple is trying to outlaw Android involves a government agency called the International Trade Commission, which has the power to ban shipments of goods from overseas ... like, say, the Android smartphones that Verizon sells. An executive order from President Obama could rescind or block its decision to ban Android gadgets. Should Obama save Android? Some say he shouldn't because of the way Google is changing the rules of the game by giving away Android for free. But by doing so, Google benefits everyone by producing open-source code that can be used by anyone and by enabling people to compete with Apple. A company like Apple, that is already on top of the market, does not need the government to help it out by destroying its competitors. It receives enough help as it is. Will Obama save Android? It's doubtful. Although if he does, look for Senate and House Republicans to portray it as socialist somehow, in between destroying Medicare. Jared Spurbeck is an open-source software enthusiast, who uses an Android phone and an Ubuntu laptop PC. He has been writing about technology and electronics since 2008. |
| Tracking Hurricane Irene with FEMA and other Android apps (Appolicious) Posted: 27 Aug 2011 10:41 AM PDT |
| Live updates: Hurricane Irene belts the East Coast (The Lookout) Posted: 27 Aug 2011 02:57 AM PDT |
| Best HP TouchPad Apps (Digital Trends) Posted: 27 Aug 2011 05:45 AM PDT
Since HP's TouchPad firesale brought prices on the tablet down as low as $99, a number of you have picked one up, and so have we. Since HP chose to use its own proprietary webOS operating system, not all of your favorite apps may be here, but fear not. We're here to help. There are a number of great apps specifically built for the TouchPad, perhaps more than Android tablets currently offer. Below are a few of our favorites. For more HP TouchPad goodness, here are a few related articles:
Before you read all those articles, check out these apps!  Epicurious Recipes (Free): The TouchPad has some good apps, but for its purpose, Epicurious may be the best recipe and cooking app we've tried on any tablet platform. The app lets you choose from 30,000 recipes (or submit your own) and its instructions are straightforward. Best of all, if you choose a recipe, it will automatically add the ingredients to a shopping list, so you know what you have to buy. Recipe sharing is easy, too. Glimpse ($5.00): Glimpse costs a few dollars, but it's probably the largest and most full-featured app available for the TouchPad. It's actually an app full of little apps (or widgets). Glimpse lets you connect to RSS, Twitter, weather reports, YouTube, has a browser, stocks, Google Reader, Read It Later, and other services. But it's more than that. Much like one of the upcoming features of Windows 8, Glimpse lets you run two or three of its apps at the same time. Listen to music while you read Twitter, check your RSS while you watch YouTube, etc. It's a very cool idea and works well. Check it out. Accuweather for HP TouchPad (Free): The weather is kind of boring, but we all want to know about it. Accuweather has interactive maps, emergency warnings (in case a giant hurricane is barreling toward your city), disease and outdoor warnings (how common is the flu in your area right now?), video updates, and an extended forecast. Angry Birds HD (Free) and Angry Birds Rio HD ($1.99): The TouchPad has a few good games on it like Robotek and Radiant, but Angry Birds is still our favorite. Unlike most games studios, Rovio has fully adapted Angry Birds to the TouchPad. It looks pretty and runs smoothly. Enjoy your pig and bird massacre. Camera for TouchPad (99 cents): The TouchPad has many great qualities, but it's lack of a rear camera is somewhat disappointing as is its lack of camera software for its 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera. This app lets you take pictures with the front camera using the volume rocker as a shutter button. This lets you attempt to aim it at things other than your face when you take photos, but the process is still a bit difficult. Still, it's something. TuneIn Radio (Free): For those of you who like radio and podcasts, TuneIn is a good option. It lets you instantly connect to stations and programs from sources like NPR, and has a good database of podcasts to subscribe to as well. It also lets you look up an artist or song and listen to it if its playing on any radio station. We recommend RadioLab if you're looking for a particularly amazing radio show. HP Movie Store (Free): Unfortunately, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon OnDemand, YouTube Movies and Vudu are all absent from the TouchPad. If you'd like to rent (please don't buy) a new movie for your TouchPad, HP's Movie Store is the best and only option. We didn't have a problem with it, found it had a good selection of TV shows and movies, and its rental prices are a standard $2.99 to $3.99. InterfaceLIFT HD (Free): Interface LIFT is a pretty simple app. It has a library of photos that you can use as wallpapers. That's it. Surprisingly, adding a wallpaper to our TouchPad has really livened it up. And hey, it's free, so why not check out the many beautiful photographs available? Pandora (Free): If you want to download MP3s, then 7Digital MP3 music is your best option, but for some casual listening, Pandora is still king. Unfortunately, this app isn't configured for the TouchPad, so it is small and runs on an emulated Palm Pre on your screen. Luckily, even shrinkified, Pandora still works. Mosaic Reader (Free): If you read as much news as we do (there's almost no chance that you do), a good news reader is essential to your daily life. Mosaic Reader attempts to take a somewhat Flipboard-like approach and display stories and pictures in a mosaic of tiles, allowing you to glance around at your leisure. And while it has connections |
| Mobile apps in the eye of Hurricane Irene (Appolicious) Posted: 27 Aug 2011 12:27 PM PDT |
| How Powerhead Games went from work-for-hire to building its own titles (Appolicious) Posted: 27 Aug 2011 10:00 AM PDT |
| When a slimmer iPhone just isn't good enough (Reuters) Posted: 27 Aug 2011 10:56 AM PDT NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Tim Cook has big shoes to fill and he can't do it by just pushing out snazzier versions of the iPhone or iPad. Apple Inc's newly minted CEO needs a revolutionary product to prove he has the chops to succeed Steve Jobs, and that may be a full-on assault on the living room by as early as 2013, analysts and industry experts say. Jobs has called Apple TV -- a 4-inch-square box launched in 2006 that connects your plasma or LCD TV to the Web -- a hobby, but it is also one of the rare missteps in the course of Apple's meteoric ascendance. If Cook can succeed where Jobs has failed, he would put to rest questions over whether he has the vision to lead Apple, in addition to widely respected operational skills. "The TV is the obvious gap in Apple's product line up," CCS Insight's John Jackson said. "There's pressure to constantly innovate, (but) there's more than sufficient momentum at Apple right now that they don't need to reinvent the movie screen the TV, the car or the horse and buggy in the immediate term." Getting Internet programing off computers and onto television sets has long been viewed as the next big thing for consumer technology companies, but none has succeeded so far with a product that has gained wide appeal. Cook and the $350 billion company he now leads would be jumping into a field crowded with Microsoft, Google, Sony and Samsung. "The Holy Grail is the living room," said David Rolfe at Wedgewood Partners, which devotes 9.5 percent or about $1 billion of its portfolio to Apple. "They would get into it, only if they can make a significantly better product than what currently exists." OBSTACLES It remains far from clear what Jobs -- and now Cook -- intends on the TV front. There are persistent rumors that Apple may produce an actual television to go along with content in an iTV, as part of the ongoing debate over whether the beleaguered television industry is ripe for an Apple-style shake-up. The current market offers a confusing array of options -- from video streaming through game consoles like Microsoft's Xbox to Google-powered TV sets from Sony, Samsung and others. Apple has "been the early follower in the iPad-tablet space, been the early follower in the music space, the early follower in the smartphone space," said independent digital media strategist Mark Mulligan. "They wait for a market to get primed, learn from the mistakes and then go and do everything better than anybody has done before." Analysts estimate Apple takes roughly five years to develop a wholly new product, so either Jobs has already started down the TV road or Cook needs to start thinking now. Chief among the obstacles would be concerns in the entertainment industry about potentially aggressive video licensing terms that Apple would seek -- and has gotten in the past for music and video licenses on iTunes. Executives say Apple had asked for 30 percent of rental fees for iTunes, which is blamed for smothering the music recording industry. THE ROLE OF CHARISMA Jobs' charisma and negotiating power were crucial to the launch of iTunes in 2003 and the then-unprecedented sale of songs rather than albums on the Web. Cook remains untested on this front, despite his deft hand dealing with the supply chain partners that make Macs, iPhones and iPads. "It was Steve's rock-star status that convinced these guys, they were in awe of him," said a former major recording label executive involved in the negotiations before iTunes was launched. "Without him Apple would never have been able to pull off that deal." There's some evidence that Cook can be as tough at the negotiating table. Peter Misek at Jefferies cites Cook's command of the iPad 2 rollout, and his firm stance this year when the Japan earthquake and tsunami threatened to turn off one of the world's largest semiconductor-component spigots. "Cook was able to double or sometimes triple source component suppliers," Misek said. "To date, no competitor has been able to gain meaningful share in the tablet market and ... Cook's leadership during the introduction was critical to this." Now, the former Compaq executive needs to prove that he can not only execute his boss's vision and keep Apple's fabled product pipeline alive, but that he can also make that intuitive leap to tell consumers what they want. Wall Street will be watching. "The market and the organization needs to see that Tim has the judgment to pick a winner," said Jane Stevenson, vice chairman of Board and CEO Services at Korn/Ferry International. "The market will need to see a continued stream of innovation that has his fingerprints on it," ranging from launching new products to turning around products that haven't much success, like Apple TV. (Additional reporting by Poornima Gupta and Sarah McBride in San Francisco and Yinka Adegoke and Jennifer Saba in New York, editing by Tiffany Wu; Phil Berlowitz) (This story corrects to show iTunes was launched in 2003, not 2009 in paragraph 14.) |
| Salesforce Conference Pushes 'Social Enterprise' (NewsFactor) Posted: 26 Aug 2011 02:50 PM PDT Is your company a "social enterprise"? That's the central vision and theme of Dreamforce 2011, an annual event produced by CRM leader Salesforce.com. Dreamforce 2011, which opens Tuesday, August 30th, at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, will be keynoted by Salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff. The always colorful chairman will further define his company's view of how social media, business processes, and business tools are melding into social enterprises. 'Social Road Map' In a statement that previews Benioff's vision, Salesforce talks about how companies are completely changing the way they communicate and share information with customers and employees in the cloud -- transforming themselves into social enterprises. This transformation, the company said, needs to leverage social media as well as mobile and open cloud computing. The conference will feature 475 sessions and roughly 700 speakers. Helping to ensure that "social" still means partying, Dreamforce promises an evening performance by Metallica, plus an after party by musician and pop entrepreneur will.i.am. A look at Salesforce's major platform and application services shows how social media have affected its offerings, with social-media monitoring, analysis and engagement. There's Salesforce Chatter, a private social network for businesses, the Sales Cloud for contact management and sales force automation, the Service Cloud for customer service and support, Radian 6 for social-media monitoring and engagement, and Herkoku for building social and mobile apps in Ruby. Key sessions at Dreamforce 2011 emphasize the social-enterprise theme. Set the Social Road Map for Your Company is the title of one. Others include Mobile Marketing: Stay Engaged Wherever You Are, Building Your Social Strategy: Prioritizing for Scale, and The Science of Social Media: Engineering Contagious Ideas. 'Heading in That Direction' Laura DiDio, an analyst with industry research firm Information Technology Intelligence Corp., said the need to become a social enterprise "doesn't apply to every enterprise at this point, but we're heading in that direction." As the consumerization of IT becomes more prevalent, she said, more companies will find that their employees and their customers are relying on social media. The companies, to communicate fully with employees and customers, will have to follow suit. Social media for the enterprise has emerged as a major emphasis for Salesforce's products. In March, it announced "the next generation of social contact centers," Service Cloud 3. It positioned the updated software-as-a-service customer-service platform as "customer service for the social era." Service Cloud 3 is designed to let organizations more completely engage with customers in social communities such as Twitter or Facebook. To facilitate that, the platform included a new integration with a Radian 6 app. Salesforce bought the social-media monitoring firm Radian 6, also in March. Scale Up Quickly A key selling point of the new Service Cloud upgrade is that it allows companies to scale up quickly to analyze millions of conversations that involve their products or service. Real-time reports and customizable dashboards offer social channel analyses, customer conversation analyses, and social dashboards for identifying trends. Comments in Facebook, for instance, can be filtered by the number of friends a commenter has, as an indicator of how influential that person is. Facebook names can also be tied into actual customer records. Social media has become a major part of many companies' approach to their customers. One of Salesforce's major competitors, SAP AG, described its SAP Sales OnDemand package as "Facebook for the enterprise," and it is seen by industry observers as SAP's answer to Salesforce Chatter. |
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