For all those minions of Steve Jobs who camped out over night to get their grubby little hands on the iPhone 4, I give the behind the scene’s commentary from the product development team. Enjoy!
Thank you Funny or Die!
Archive for the ‘Mobile’ category
How do you feel about the iPhone 4?
June 25th, 2010
Phillies fan tasered, news at 11…from YouTube
May 5th, 2010
Earlier this week a fan of the Philadelphia Phillies jumped on the field while the game was in progress, was chased down and tasered by security and escorted from the stadium. This is actually not a unique experience in the world of professional sports, or for Philadelphia fans. All TV broadcasts of the game cut away from the fans antics as FCC law instructs them to so other rouge fans don’t have any wild ideas. Problem solved for network TV and the G-rated masses of viewers who would be corrupted by such hijinks (insert sarcasm icon here).
But wait, not so fast. In this case, the running fan was captured by numerous fans’ smartphone video cameras and the footage was quickly uploaded to YouTube for the world to see.
What happen next was quite interesting. Hundreds, if not thousands, of news organizations – including those same TV broadcasters – started showing the YouTube videos that captured the event. Anyone else see the obvious hypocrisy here?
The Extraordinaries brings crowdsourcing to micro-volunteerism
May 4th, 2010
The San Francisco-based startup called The Extraordinaries just announced its raising $750,000 in funding, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Extraordinaries allows its members to complete altruistic tasks on their mobile phones, effectively bringing together the power of crowdsourcing with volunteerism.
The company offers its users a way to take advantage of small moments of free time they have during the day to participate in volunteer tasks. The idea is that you may not have a lot of time to dedicate to volunteer for a cause, but everyone can probably find five to ten minutes here and there. With The Extraordinaries iPhone app (iTunes link), you can perform small tasks for nonprofits ranging from reviewing images for the Smithsonian to mapping playgrounds for KaBoom or identifying craters in photos for NASA.
Foursquare goes primetime
February 1st, 2010
Foursquare announced today a new partnership with Bravo TV which will integrate a number of Bravo TV shows with the site. The partnership is designed to engage viewers after they turn their TV’s off in leveraging Foursquare’s rapidly expanding location-based gaming presence. Foursquare will begin integrating various show personalities and their city tips, as well as a Bravo badges, into the game experience.
This new deal will include the introduction of a number of new Bravo-themed badges to Foursquare will also turn some of Bravo’s top personalities behind its hit reality TV shows like The Millionaire Matchmaker, Top Chef, The Real Housewives, Top Chef Masters and Shear Genius into content creators. These personalities will share their tips and to-do’s with users effectively adding a plethora of new city-specific content to venture.
The real scoop on Google’s Nexus One
January 6th, 2010
As I’m sure everyone has seen, Google has entered the mobile phone business. While the Silicon Valley giant has historically resided in the mobile operating system or applications space, their launch earlier this week of the Google Nexus One moves them into a very real player in the mobile personal devices marketplace.
Many technology pundits have hinted for some time that Google may have Apple envy and the launch of the Google Nexus One seems to prove it.
How deep does this envy go? Check out this video:
All kidding aside, the early reports on the Google Nexus One are quite positive. Not only does the hardware capabilities surpass those of the iPhone, but the Android operating system and Google applications are really impressive. That said, creating a huge application marketplace and ecosystem that Apple has done may be out of reach for the Mountain View Googlers.
Gowalla’s 10 and a half days of Christmas game
December 17th, 2009
Location-based game and social networking company Gowalla has announced its push for the holidays with their “10 and a half days of Christmas” game (because the 12 days of Christmas is too predictable). Foursquare competitor Gowalla recently closed a Series B investment round from an all-star Silicon Valley cast earlier this month in an effort to unseat Foursquare in the buzz-worthy location-based game/social network race.
While we have covered Foursquare in the past, we haven’t yet profiled Gowalla’s service. Similar to Foursquare, the Austin, Texas-based Gowalla game is all about checking into various places, sharing them with your friends and competing for prizes. Gowalla does have a slightly different spin on their game platform such as enabling virtual goods at different location points. You can see a brief demo of the service in action below:
Shoot live video with your phone and share in real-time with Qik-in-Touch
December 14th, 2009
Qik, the mobile live video sharing startup, has launched their new invitation-only beta service called Qik-in-Touch. It’s been an active two weeks for the Redwood City, CA-based startup with last week’s iPhone app announcement and this week’s Qik-in-Touch beta launch. The new Qik-in-Touch service brings the Qik live video sharing experience to your desktop and makes it really easy to share video clips with your friends in real-time. Check out the Qik-in-Touch concept below courtesy of the company’s blog.
Qik-in-Touch is in private beta, but you can request an invite by going to http://qik.com/qntbeta.
Qik-in-Touch is an Adobe Air application, so it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux platforms. The Adobe Air app runs behind the scenes when you go “live” on you account so your friends can watch and chat instantly as you’re recording the event.
No smartphone? No worries. HipLogic brings smartphone functionality to the masses.
December 2nd, 2009
HipLogic announced today they have have closed a $7 million in Series B round from Benchmark Capital, Stage 1 Ventures, Bay Partners, and Accrue Sports and Entertainment Ventures to bring smartphone intelligence to mass market phones. Don’t have an iPhone, Droid, Blackberry or Palm – no worries. HipLogic’s platform enables smartphone-like applications to work on non-smartphone’s. With all the attention on the many rich applications hitting the smartphone market, its important to note that smartphones are still the global minority when it comes to cell phone usage. HipLogic’s solution targets that large mass market segment, bring cool apps to the masses.
This new round of financing follows a Series A round the company raised back in 2008 when it was called Numobiq. With new round, HipLogic is looking to accelerate their rollout of their easy-to-use application platform for lightweight mass market phones.
RunKeeper raises seed round, social mobile fitness ready for primetime
November 30th, 2009
FitnessKeeper, the Boston startup behind the GPS-based RunKeeper iPhone application, announced today a seed round of $400,000 from a group of local angel and venture investors. While a $400k investment is small news by venture capital standards, this investment may have a bit more meaning behind it. This funding marks the evolution of what I’m calling “social mobile fitness”.
The mobile RunKeeper app gives fitness buffs the ability to train socially. By using RunKeeper on your iPhone you can track your workouts – running, walking or cycling, build and communicate with your “Street Team”, and seamless update your progress by clean and simple integration with Facebook and Twitter. This really brings a new level to not only iPhone training applications, but also potentially all mobile fitness applications. Full integration with social networking applications really expands and enriches the fitness experience.
Foursquare unveils API to the public
November 16th, 2009
Earlier today, Foursquare announced it would be opening up their API for the public. Up until now, only a handful of developers have had access to the location-based service startups platform. Foursquare’s hope with this move is to create a robust app-based community of developers that will leverage their unique platform.
Along with their announcement of the API, Foursquare also unveiled their existing app gallery to demonstrate a number of apps that developers have already built with the API. So far, the following apps are in the Foursquare gallery:
- Foursquare Android, the open-source Android app
- SocialGreat, a venue popularity tracker
- MobZombies, a location-based Zombie check-in game
- PeekMaps, a way to view your friends on a map on Peek Mobile devices
- FourTap, links London subway card swipes with Foursquare data
- YipIt, a way to find nearby deals in New York
- A Foursquare WordPress plugin
