Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Evoz is in the midst of raising a first round of funding..
Very soon (as in: in the next few days), I’ll become a father for the first time. And of course, as every existing parent seems to know, babies cost money. One of those unbearable things young parents need to purchase without further ado, is a baby monitoring system.
Me and my wife already bought one, but while we were evaluating existing systems I couldn’t help but notice that even the more advanced ones on the market today seem little more than glorified walkie-talkies.
A couple of weeks ago, knowing that I would soon become a dad, Jyri Engestrom nudged me and said he had stumbled upon a fledgling company, Evoz, that set out to build a baby monitoring system for the always-connected generation, and that I should check it out.
A couple of emails with the startup in question later, yesterday I finally got a live demo from the company’s founder Avishai Shoham. The verdict? It’s freaking amazing.
Imagine if you had an iPhone or iPod touch to spare, and that you’d simply install it in a charger in your young child’s room like you would any baby monitor.
Now imagine that an always-on application installed on the device would let you call in from anywhere in the world to hear how your baby is sleeping (or exactly how hard he or she is crying, or if you’re lucky, laughing or playing). Imagine that you could also opt to receive ‘quiet’ alerts by SMS or email whenever your kid cries for longer than, say, 5 minutes, so you can give the babysitter a quick call to see what’s up after e.g. a meeting or dinner.
Imagine that the app also automatically collects data on the sleeping and crying behavior of your child, and that you could analyze that data to see if he or she matches the behavior of children of the same age. And that you could just as easily get in touch with a network of baby health experts or sleep consultants if you have any questions or concerns.
Evoz lets you do all that, and more. The company isn’t quite ready to launch yet, but intends to roll out its service more broadly in the next few months. Shoham tells me the company will eventually support multiple mobile platforms. Also in the works: a proprietary hardware unit so you don’t necessarily need a spare iOS or Android device to monitor your baby (prototypes are already in the wild, however, and you can see what it looks like in the image above).
Early adopters with young children (aged 18 months or less) that own at least 2 iOS devices (iPod touch, iPhone, iPad) and don’t mind testing out an unpolished product and provide feedback to the team can apply for early access to Evoz Monitors here.
Please note that you’re required to fit the above criteria to get in – only 20 fast responders will be allowed access to the private beta service.
Check out Hitmaker 1.7
Noisetoys, creators of music discovery and promotion App Hitmaker, have come out with another hit this week. In the same App-discovery space as Explor and Chomp, Apptidude is an iPhone App that shows you the iPhone Apps that your friends have most likely downloaded, all based on their posts and Likes on Facebook.
“Quitely” launching in the App Store this week, the App recommendation App is currently number 29 in the App Top Free Apps list, most likely because it incorporates social elements and Facebook Connect as a way of gaging what’s actually hot in the anti-social Apple App Store, where homegrown Top 25 lists leave much to be desired.
When you initially open Apptitude and log onto Facebook you see a scrollbar of your Facebook friends stack-ranked by the number of apps they’re using. When you click on your friends’ profiles you can swipe through a series of chosen apps and you can also to drill down into specific stats about how many Facebook friends use the app, many people have Facebook Liked the app as well as into the ability to download directly to your phone.
Apptitude creator Shalin Mantri hopes to use all this social app data to eventually create a better way of finding relevant iPhone apps, and tells me that an eventual Facebook-powered recommendations list based on what apps are trending in your social graph will be including in v1.1, which Apptitude will be submitting to the App Store next week. Wish I could be a fly on the wall in the iOS review room on that one.
You can download the App here.
Monday, April 4, 2011
Laptop gear
Could his beautiful, svelte, and decidedly black laptop be the new Macbook Pro that should land in stores on or around the ides of March or early April?
Probably not, but a girl can dream. Why does it look fairly convincing? Well, as 9to5mac points out, Intel has leaked future MacBooks before and there is some evidence of new MacBooks in the pipe for Best Buy and others.
Read more…
Creatively in a way that won’t make your friends giggle or cringe.
Deep down, each of you has an inner artist yearning to break free and expose your creative juices to the world. Unfortunately that inner artist probably isn’t especially talented — or is at least very out of practice — which is probably why you’ve kept it locked up for so long.
But fear not: CHROMAom is a startup that wants to help, by making it as easy as possible to express yourself creatively in a way that won’t make your friends giggle or cringe. It boils down self-expression to the creation of color palettes — a smattering of five colors that look good together — and tonight, it’s releasing an app called ColorSchemer for the iPhone. You can grab the app from the App Store right here for $2.99.
CHROMAom actually has a fairly interesting history — the startup resulted from the fusion of color-sharing community COLOURlovers and ColorSchemer, which makes software for matching colors. After the companies merged, CHROMAom received funding from Y Combinator earlier this year.
Fire up the ColorSchemer app and it will prompt you to start throwing colors together. This is pretty intuitive — you tap on a color wheel, then tap the next open spot in your palette, tap the color wheel again, and so on. But what if you’re still having trouble coming up with something you’re proud of? Well, ColorSchemer has you covered — take a snapshot of something that you thinks looks cool, and it lets you select the colors present in that photo.
You can then take this color palette and share it with the 450,000 members on COLOURlovers, the social network that revolves around designs and colors. The app includes other COLOURlovers integration as well: you can browse through palettes shared by otherusers, leave comments, mark your favorite palettes, and use the other social features on the site.
Will it be a hit? Probably not on the same order as photo-based creative sharing apps like Instagram, but the application is polished and already has an established audience of color fans. My only major gripe is that you can’t currently upload the photo you’ve used to generate a palette, but the company says that this will be coming in the next release.
CHROMAom says that it’s profitable — while the COLOURlovers social network is free, the company generates money through its software sales (including a desktop version of ColorSchemer), advertising, and sponsorships.
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