iPhone 4 vs the Nexus S: Breakdown

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Sobees Luncurkan iPad App NewsMix, Sebuah sosial Curated Magazine Digital.

Sobees has made a business of creating innovative social media clients, particularly focusing on bringing Twitter, Facebook and social search to the a variety of platforms. Today, the developer is getting into the news business with the launch of NewsMix, an iPad app which presents news and content shared by your social circle in a magazine format on the device.


The app, which costs $2.99 in the App Store, allows you to create and mix a digital magazine composed of content shared in your Twitter, Facebook and RSS feeds (Google Reader and feed search). The app will categorize content in a magazine or show news in a separate timeline format for Facebook and Twitter. And you can view photos and videos in separate sections.

In terms of social capabilities, the app allows you to comment and like Facebook posts directly from the magazine, and you can share articles on both Twitter and Facebook simultaneously. The App also allows you to email content and send articles to Instapaper.

Sobees founder Francois Bochatay says that the app contains the startup’s proprietary curation technology, which will will automatically prioritize and curate Twitter and Facebook posts based on your interactions with the app.

Of course, NewsMix sounds very similar to the enormously popular iPad app Flipboard, which also curates articles and images from your social streams like Twitter and Facebook, and presents them in a magazine-like format. Pulse also plays in the space as well.

The Brand-New iPhone 5

ShareSquare Gets Out 150K Untuk Membangun QR Code Its Platform [Invites]

QR mobile platform ShareSquare pada hari ini melancarkan beta dengan pengumuman bahawa mereka sudah keluar 150K dari 500K pusingan benih di bawah ikat pinggang mereka, dan dari malaikat Paige Craig, John Frankel Pengurusan Assett ff, Jeff Miller dan Roy Rodenstein of Angels Hacker.


Di ruangan yang sama seperti Likify dan MoFuse, ShareSquare adalah QR Code penciptaan jenama platform khusus untuk muzik dan hiburan. Dengan ShareSquare's CMS, seniman dan promotor boleh dek keluar branded merchandise seperti poster, promo, risalah dan bahkan pelekat bumper dengan kod QR yang berkaitan dengan aplikasi web HTML5 custom (lihat satu mockup untuk Justin Bieber, ke kiri).

Fans dengan pengimbas kod QR seperti RedLaser, maka dapat mengimbas kod untuk menyemak kandungan yang berkaitan seperti MP3, video muzik, kontes dan, akhirnya membuat pembelian.

CMS ShareSquare juga membolehkan penempatan realtime dan oleh media (billboard iaitu poster vs vs stiker) untuk kod pelacakan analytics QR serta sebagai sesuatu pengasas ShareSquare dan Pengasas Institute lulusan Mattias Galica panggilan "Seperti Lock," mana fan to "Likes" mengungkap akses khusus untuk hadiah dan kandungan eksklusif. Kandungan adalah menghasilkan wang melalui iklan.

Pada uji coba selama enam minggu, ShareSquare telah bekerja dengan sukses dengan lembaga Hollywood dan studio seperti William Morris Berupaya dan Disney. Kempen QR untuk artis Mitchel Musso mencapai 2.500 poster, pelekat 10.000 bungkusan dan lebih dari 181 pusat membeli-belah kebangsaan.
Gallica menjelaskan cabaran ruangan,"Hanya Geeks mengenali apa kod QR ini. Cabaran besar dalam ruangan ini adalah bahawa kod QR punya banyak hal yang dapat anda lakukan dengan mereka Sharesquare adalah disiplin cukup untuk fokus pada dua menegak .. "

Memang, mengambil laluan hiburan mungkin bergerak pemenang untuk syarikat berasaskan LA yang juga akan melakukan leaderboards band di SXSW, "Kami ingin melihat apa yang beberapa bulan ke depan membawa kita," Perkataan Galica.

Pembaca tertarik mengikuti kita ShareSquare pada 500 tawaran mereka tidak mengundang boleh mendaftar di sini, Menggunakan TCRN500 kod.

IPhone Verizon Laman Produk Dan Lebih Adakah Alive Untuk Anda mengerling

The Verizon iPhone lives! Hurray! But now comes the long wait until February 10th. Yeah, it’s going to be tough sitting there, staring at the one bar next to the AT&T logo on your current iPhone when you know salvation is just right around the corner. But fear not, while we’ll have plenty of Verizon iPhone stories for you to peep in the coming days, Verizon just went live with a slew of iPhone pages that should keep you entertained until the lines start forming at Verizon stores everywhere.
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GoodGuide Rolls Out Sosial Fitur Baru

GoodGuide — the mobile app and website that helps people find products that measure up to their environmental and social values — quietly rolled out new, social networking and product recommendation features this month.


Groups of friends and colleagues can now follow each other via GoodGuide, share product reviews, and either warn to avoid, or encourage one another to try certain brands or items, there. The “social networking overlay” (as the company’s executives call it) adds the following features to the app and site:

Realtime feed of what products people are scanning or looking up on their iPhones, now. Community voting, with an aggregate view of which products the GoodGuide community recommends or avoids. Social context that lets users see which products their Facebook friends recommend or avoid. Influence scores for GoodGuide users, taking into account their number of contributions and how many connections they have with others. A leaderboard of the GoodGuide members with the highest influence scores. Trending topics, covering ingredients, issues, and brands that are of interest to consumers based on site traffic and Good Guide’s science team.

The founder and chief sustainability officer of GoodGuide Dara O’Rourke explained most of the app’s users worry about health, environmental and social impacts, but everyone prioritizes differently.
Some worry more about fair labor and trade practices, like whether a company compensates their workers fairly all along their supply chain, while others worry more about how biodegradable a product or its packaging might be. In 2010, O’Rourke said, GoodGuide’s users increasingly turned to the app to avoid specific known toxic or disagreeable ingredients.

The company’s employees have formed their own group with the new social features, and begun sharing and discussing corporate social responsibility issues, and products’ impact and effectiveness (image above).
An earlier version of the app already allowed users to scan bar codes on items they own, and store lists of items corresponding to a room in the house (image below). They rack up automatic “scores” reflecting how their bathroom, or laundry room supplies rank given their stated values. With Good Guide’s new social features, users can compare bathroom to bathroom, pantry to pantry, etc.

O’Rourke believes social features can give a huge word-of-mouth boost to brands that are most appreciated by customers and are most honest (or transparent) about what they make and how. He also believes it can inspire people to be competitive, in a good-natured way, about living a healthy and sustainable lifestyle.
Social recommendations make brands more memorable than editorial mentions or ads, generally, recent research suggests. This fall, Nielsen Online published research that found 68 per cent of people were more likely to remember an advertisement, brand or company name if they saw one of their friends recommending it or associating themselves with it online.

GoodGuide reports its unique visitor count and engagement numbers increased by about 20% each from November to December 2010, thanks to the addition of the social features. Comparing December 2009 to December 2010, Good Guide saw 12% growth in unique visitors.

Tujuh Technologies yang Akan Rock 2011

So here we are in a new decade, and the technologies that are now available to us continue to engage (and enthrall) in fascinating ways. The rise and collision of several trends—social, mobile, touch computing, geo, cloud—keep spitting out new products and technologies which keep propelling us forward. Below I highlight seven technologies that are ready to tip into the mainstream 2011.

Before I get into my predictions, let’s see how I did last year, when I wrote “Ten Technologies That Will Rock 2010.” Some of my picks were spot on: the Tablet (hello, iPad), Geo (Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places, mobile location-aware search, etc.), Realtime Search (it became an option on Google) and Android (now even bigger than the iPhone). Some are still playing out: HTML5 (it’s made great strides, but isn’t quite here yet), Augmented Reality (lots of cool apps have AR functionality, but for the most part it is still a parlor trick), Mobile Video (FaceTime and streaming video apps pushed it forward), Mobile Transactions (Square and other transaction processing options came onto the scene), and Social CRM (Salesforce pushed Chatter, and tons of social CRM startups pushed their wares, but enterprises are always slow to adopt). And one got pushed to 2011: Chrome OS (we are still waiting).

What’s in store for 2011? Some of these themes will continue to evolve, and some new ones will gain currency. Here are seven technologies poised to rock the new year:

1. Web Video On Your TV: We’ve already seen many attempts to turn the Internet into a video-delivery pipe to rival cable TV: Google TV, Apple TV, the Boxee Box, Roku, and a slew of “Internet-enabled” TVs.  None of them are quite yet cable killers, but they are seeding the market with simple ways to bring Internet video to your large-screen TV in the living room. The more cable-quality video that becomes available over the Web via streaming services such as Netflix, Vudu, or iTunes, the more that people will turn to Web when they are looking for something to watch. This trend is not about surfing the Web on your TV. Nobody wants to do that. It is about using the Internet as an alternative way to deliver movies and TV shows to your flat-screen TV. Even the cable companies will dip their toes into the Internet delivery waters (or plunge deeper if they already have their toes wet). What looks like a pale competitor to cable today will be a lot more viable in a short, twelve months.

1. Quora Will Have Its Twitter Moment: Social Q&A site Quora may be the current darling of Silicon Valley, but not a lot of people beyond the insular tech startup world actually use it yet. That will start to change in 2011, which I believe will be the year Quora has its Twitter moment and start to really take off. Quora represents a bigger technology trend, which is the layering of an interest graph on top of people’s social graph. On Quora, you can follow not only people, but topics and questions. It defines the world by your interests, not just the people you may know or admire. This is a powerful concept and is not limited to Quora (both Twitter and Facebook also want to own the interest graph), but Quora is designed from the ground up to expose and help you explore your interests. It is addictive, and as it reaches a critical mass of early users, this will be the year it emerges from its shell much like Twitter did in 2007.
2. Mobile Social Photo Apps:The end of 2010 witnessed a spate of mobile photo apps including Instagram, PicPlz and Path. They all take advantage of several massive key trends: the growth of iPhone and Android, the ubiquity of decent cell phone cameras, GPS, and existing social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare. Each of these apps is built for mobile first. They let you take a picture, mark your location, and share it with your social network (sometimes public, sometimes private). With Instagram and PicPLz, you can choose a filter to make humdrum pics look more exciting or capture a mood. By building on top of existing social networks like Twitter and Foursquare, they are making popular new ways to use those services. Instead of simply checking in, now you can do a photo checkin (even Foursquare lets you do that now). Already Instagram is one of the most popular photo apps in iTunes. Sharing photos is pretty much a universal impulse, and these apps make it easier and more fun.
3. Mobile Wallets: If you could use your cell phone as a credit card, would you? Everyone from Apple and Google to Nokia want to make that a reality and tap into the mobile payments market. Both Apple and Google are exploring this opportunity. Google bought mobile payments startup Zetawire to gain experience and the latest Android phone, the Nexus S, comes with an NFC chip—the same kind that is embedded into credit cards and lets you pay by waving it over a wireless reader. The iPhone 5 also may come equipped with an NFC chip, and Apple was sniffing around mobile payments startup BOKU last year for a possible acquisition. It is going to take more than just NFC chips in every phone to make mobile payments a reality, but efforts by the major players this year should begin to move the needle.
4. Context-Aware Apps: Whether it’s search, mobile, or social apps and services, the most useful apps people will keep coming back to are the ones which help people cut through the increasing clutter of the Internet. Apps that are aware of the context in which they are being used will serve up better filtered information. When you search on your mobile phone, that means you get local results and local offers served up first. If you are on a service like Quora that understands your interest graph, it means that you are only shown topics that you care about, sorted in realtime. If you are on a news site, you will see the most shared links from people in you follow on Twitter or are connected to on Facebook. Music and movie services will similarly surface social recommendations. In a world of information overload, context is king.
5. Open Places Database: Every mobile app, it seems, taps into the geo capabilities of phones to pinpoint your exact location and show you what is around you. (Incidentally, that is another example of a context-aware app). But there is a lot of duplication going on, with everyone from Google to Facebook to Foursquare creating their own database of places. It would make much more sense if there was an open places database that any company could both pull from and contribute to. While we are not there yet, we are making progress towards a more open places database, or at least a federated one. Factual is providing some of the data for Facebook Places and creating a places database is a major focus for the company; MapQuest (owned by AOL, as is TechCrunch) is adopting OpenStreetMaps (which could very well become the central places database with more resources and development); and Foursquare lets other apps pull from its places database through its API. There are economic reasons why some companies don’t want to participate (controlling the places database makes it easier to serve up local offers), but expect to see this movement pick up steam in 2011.
6. The Streaming Cloud: As all media moves to the cloud, more and more people will stream their movies and music whenever they want to any device. I’ve already mentioned the forces that will bring Web video streaming to your TV, but those movies and TV shows should also be available on your iPads, Android Tablets, or even mobile phones if you want. Expiring downloads will still make sense for plane trips and other places where the network is spotty, but you will manage your subscriptions and collections in the cloud. Think Netflix streaming applied to all media. 
7. If Google or Apple can convince the record companies to come along for the ride, the streaming revolution will hit music as well, with both working on jukebox-in-the-sky services. Why would you want to bother with managing all the download rights for the songs you buy from iTunes between your iPhone, iPad, laptop, and your wife’s computer, when you could just sign in form anywhere and start streaming? Plenty have tried with varying degrees of success and failure (Rhapsody, Rdio, Spotify), but it will take someone with the negotiating muscle of Apple or Google to finally bring streaming music to the masses.

What technologies do you think will make it big this year?
Photo credit: Flickr/ Pandiyan