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!
Posts Tagged ‘Apple’
How do you feel about the iPhone 4?
June 25th, 2010
It’s back…Social Media Revolution 2 (Refresh)
May 7th, 2010
When I started this blog back on September 25, 2009 my first post was a simple “welcome” message with a YouTube video clip produced by Erik Qualman author of the blog called Socialnomics. Interestingly enough, YouTube subsequently removed that video for copyright issues. The video was titled Social Media Revolution, and it was a series of very interesting facts and stats that demonstrated the massive change social media is making on our lives. A good introduction to the reason I started this blog.
Well Mr. Qualman is back at it again with his latest creation, Social Media Revolution 2 (Refresh). In this latest creation Qualman has included some pretty interesting and powerful social media stats, such as;
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.
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.
Apple approves video recording app for iPhone 2G and 3G
December 15th, 2009
Apple announced today on their official blog that they will enable its 2G and 3G handsets to record video by admitting the new iVideoCamera (iTunes link) app to the iTunes store. This now means that users can now legitimately record, share and save videos without having to hack their handsets via ‘jailbreak‘. The app will be released for 99 cents in the US store and will have similar entry-level pricing in other iTunes stores around the world.
By adding this new application to an iPhone 2G or 3G handset, Apple has made their older users quite happy and has eliminated one of the big incentives to upgrade to the 3GS model. Interesting move by Apple.
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.
Have you Bumped your friends yet? Bump Technologies gets funded.
October 25th, 2009Bump Technologies, the Mountain View, CA-based startup, has some added fuel in their tank after the recent investment led by Sequoia Capital. Details of the funding round have not yet been disclosed. Known for their rather simple, but incredibly useful Apple iPhone app called Bump – this marks what could be the beginning of a new form of ‘Friend Connection’. The app is very simple to use – check out the video demo below:
As you can see by the clip – this app is a must have for any iPhone user out there. The current functionality for information sharing is clean and elegant – contact information, your entire contact card or even other files you may have stored on your iPhone.
Microsoft launches Windows 7 on The Today Show on a MacBook Pro
October 23rd, 2009You may be asking yourself why is nextATOM covering the mounting public war between Microsoft and Apple for the personal operating system given that we primarily cover socia
l media on the web. Well I just couldn’t help myself. There has been so much noise between the two tech giants and some pretty good clips – that I had to share them with you. Inevitably, this ever growing and evolving competition for the OS does impact – pretty fundamentally – how our social internet and tech world evolves. That being said, here are some of the blow-by-blow’s over the last few days which culminated earlier today when Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer went on The Today Show to introduce the new OS (clip below):
Apple jumps on board the Twitter express
October 20th, 2009While Silicon Valley stalwarts like Google have been extensively leveraging Twitter as a social media outlet with over 500 accounts – Apple has stayed on the sidelines, until now. While earlier this year Apple added their first Twitter account – iTunesTrailers, whic
h they marketed on the Apple.com Trailers site and has over 1 million followers – they have been very slow to jump on the Twitter bandwagon. They’ve just added four more Twitter accounts, iTunesMusic, iTunesMovies, iTunesTV, and iTunesPodcasts.
All of these accounts are relatively new and currently have a small number of followers. That being said, this is a good move by the big Silicon Valley brand that has always tried to distinguished itself as something unique and different. This move isn’t just jumping on the social media bandwagon as other major players have like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. This move and distribution medium should allow the iTunes platform to begin leveraging the power of user generated distribution and marketing.
