Hugo Chavez, the current President of Venezuela has joined the rest of us on Twitter despite trying to block the website just a month ago. His political influence in South America (partly due to his use of Venezuela’s oil wealth and his adversarial relationship with the United States) have given him a comparatively high geopolitical profile.
Chavez has not announced what his new account will be, but unfortunately for him it looks like the screen names @hugo, @chavez and @hugochavez are all being used. Chavez said: “I’m going to have my online trench from the palace to wage the battle. I’ll provide information and even respond to my enemies.”
Other heads of state on Twitter include President Barack Obama (with 3.7 million followers!), the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Chilean President Sebastian Pinera, although ironically Twitter makes the extra effort to verify the accounts of western leaders (a service that isn’t available to dictators).
With Remoteless you can search and browse all Spotify music, store favourite artists, albums and tracks, start songs or playlists, skip songs, change the volume. It also displays the song you are currently listening to and has a handy toggle shuffle & repeat. It is password protected & simple to set up.
It lets you control your Windows PC Spotify client from afar over Wi-Fi. But you need to install a small program on it first so there’s no OS X version yet but the developer says a Mac port is coming.
We must remember that this app actually has nothing to do with Spotify so will we now see Spotify improve on their initial app offering and bring out Spoti-trol?! Or is that just counjering a bad image!! Whatever happens, we think they will be able to improve and upgrade on this good idea.
Ah, the sea. The big blue. From sharks to shipwrecks, from the perfectly formed pipes of Hawaii’s waves to the dark and chilly depths of the deepest sea trenches, it’s one of Earth’s most fascinating habitats – one that people love watching and exploring.
Tonight, Google is bringing Internet-bound ocean lovers a new portal to the amazing biological and topographical diversity that lies beneath the waves. If you’re into underwater environments and you’re down with Google Earth,
we highly recommend checking out Ocean Showcase, Google’s latest product release.
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“Anyone can be a desktop Cousteau,” writes Googler Jenifer Austin Foulkes. The Google Earth browser plugin allows users to browse through a selection of highlighted tours. Users of Google Earth 5 can go on to explore more, downloading tours and viewing photos and videos by checking the Ocean folder in the left-hand layers panel.
National Geographic ocean explorer Sylvia Earle narrates the highlights tour. The smattering of categories in the plugin-enabled tours include research discoveries, shipwrecks, dive spots, surf spots, underwater terrain and the Great Lakes. The tours are dotted with YouTube videos and more information from carefully curated websites.
Google’s put together some entertaining and high-quality content that integrates different technologies, including Google Earth and YouTube. We also think that Ocean Showcase is going to be a huge hit in the classrooms, as it gives brief and educational content snippets in a visual, interactive context that kids can appreciate and learn from.
One company that would be negatively affected would be Storm Media Innovations. The Vancouver company hopes to become the little ad engine that powers the monetization of the geo-local web. The company offers a white label API where restaurants send out venue-based deals via services like Gowalla, Foursquare, Open Table and Twitter. The difference between setting up a deal in Storm and setting up a deal with Foursquare independently is the fact that Storm is based on real-time needs. Rather than offering a 50% discount on meals throughout entire week, a restaurant owner signs in during slow hours to prompt deal offers. Storm does its best to ensure steady traffic without lulls or the stress of an unnecessary fire sale. In essence, the company’s CEO Craig Baker is attempting to build the AdSense of geo-locational apps.
If Apple chooses to restrict advertising, this may be a crushing blow to Baker in the North American market. Nevertheless, if he manages to bridge good partnerships with those developers who have pre-existing advertising programs, he might still have a chance to realize his vision.
Siri is one of the most ambitious mobile services we have seen in the last few years. Imagine if you could just talk to you phone and tell it to call you a taxi, reserve a table at your favorite restaurant or tell you what the weather in New York City will be like tomorrow. If you have an iPhone, you will be able to start doing that tonight. Siri, a virtual personal assistant, will recognize your voice query and either give you the answer to your question or connect you to the right web service.
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When we first encountered Siri 2 years ago, it was an extremely stealthy startup and the company only started to release more information about the product in the middle of last year. Siri was spun out of SRI International and its core technology is based on the ambitious CALO artificial intelligence project. CALO stands for “Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes” – and that’s exactly what Siri does.
Using Siri
The app transcribes spoken text and then takes these commands and routes them to the right web services. If you try to book a table at a Thai restaurant (”get me a table at a good Thai restaurant nearby”), for example, Siri will check where you are, query Yelp for reviews of nearby Thai restaurants, show you the options and then pre-populate a reservation form on OpenTable with your information. All you have to do is to confirm Siri’s selection.
Works Best on an iPhone 3GS
We should note that Siri recommends using the app on an iPhone 3GS, as the app is a bit sluggish on older versions of the iPhone. You can still install it on any iPhone, but your experience might not be quite as good as on a 3GS.
When we talked to the company last month, Siri’s CEO Dag Kittlaus described Siri as “the mother of all mashups.” To make this personal assistant work for enough of the most likely queries that people will enter, Siri needed to make sure that it connects directly to as many web services as possible. The company, for example, pulls concert data from StubHub, movie times from MovieTickets, movie reviews from Rotten Tomatoes, restaurant data from Yelp and you can order a taxi through TaxiMagic. In total, Siri current has partnered with 16 different companies and expects to expand this number continuously over the next few months. Siri will also plans to offer an API for developers.
Siri’s mobile app will be free. The company’s business model relies on getting affiliate and referral fees from these partners whenever somebody buys something through the service. This also explains why Siri is currently only available in the U.S., though given that adapting the speech recognition and semantic analysis to other languages will take a while, we don’t expect to see Siri in other languages anytime soon.
Our own tests of Siri have been limited so far, but the software is surprisingly good at translating voice queries into text. As the Siri team told us last month, the application works so well because it is able to recognize the context of your queries. This kind of semantic analysis is a very computing intensive problem, so most of the actual number crunching happens on Siri’s servers. Siri outsources the voice recognition to Nuance and if you are not comfortable with speaking into your phone, you can always use a regular text query as well.
Obviously, Siri won’t be able to answer every query – and sadly the app doesn’t use Wolfram Alpha to give you answers to factual questions (yet). Should that happen, Siri will just route your query to a search engine and display the search results. As the Siri team told us, however, users tend to learn which queries work best pretty quickly (just like we learned how to structure effective queries for Google).
If you want to give Siri a try, just head over to the App Store. Just remember to come back and tell us how well (or not) it worked for you.
Last fall, we told you about an exciting and innovative competition to find – and fun – civic-focused web abd mobile apps in New York City.
Tonight, after an all-star panel of judges had reviewed more than 80 apps over a month-long period, a handful of winning applications were announced.
These apps include WayFinder, a resource for navigating around the city; Taxihack, a live-feed commentary on New York City taxis; Big Apple Ed, a guide to New York City schools; and seven others.
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Judges for the competition included such media and technology luminaries as NY Tech Meetup co-founder Dawn Barber, Betaworks CEO John Borthwick, Mahalo co-founder Jason Calacanis, EDVentures Founder Esther Dyson, FirstMark Capital CEO Lawrence Lenihan, AlleyCorp co-founder Kevin Ryan, DFJ Gotham Ventures managing partner Danny Schultz, and Union Square Ventures managing general partner Fred Wilson.
The BigApps prizes also included a Popular Choice Award, which was decided by an online public vote from people around the world.
The grand prize winner for the competition, Wayfinder, is actually an Andoird app that allows users to find the nearest and best directions to New York City subway and New Jersey PATH stations. It was also selected as the Grand Prize winner for the Data Visualization Award. That team received a total of $7,500 for both prizes.
Other winning applications include:
Actuatr, a platform that simplifies opening up data to developers;
NYC Way, an iPhone application that bundles a variety of NYC resources for tourists and locals (also the Investor’s Choice for monetization potential and Popular Choice winner, a $5,000 prize altogether);
“We opened up the 170 datasets of City information to unleash the creativity and ingenuity of New Yorkers, and we were not disappointed,” said Mayor Bloomberg, who announced the awards at a dinner tonight. “The apps submitted offer a range of unique capabilities, many of which use the data in ways we hadn’t considered. We want New York City to stay ahead of the innovation and technology curve, and we’ll continue to capitalize on our greatest asset – New Yorkers – to make sure we do. Thank you to all of those who submitted apps, and congratulations to the winners.”
The New York City Economic Development Corporation and the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications worked with around 30 agencies to provide more than 170 datasets for the competition. The data included geographic locations of all sidewalk cafés, laundry facilities, playgrounds, dog runs, city landmarks, as well as census data, extensive property valuation and assessments, the results of restaurant inspections, lists of permitted citywide events and even side parking and traffic updates.
Apple has posted a shocking, if vague, warning to iPhone app creators in its developer forums: submit an app that uses user location data “primarily” for targeting advertisements and that app will be sent right back to you to be changed.
Many mobile developers are planning on monetizing their apps precisely through location-based advertising. There’s no clear criteria for how much advertising is too much, and perhaps Apple will exercise discretion in recognizing advertisements as merely supplemental to other features in many apps, but the language used by the company is wholly disconcerting and is another great example of the perils of developing on a closed platform like the iPhone. This is crazy.
If you build your application with features based on a user’s location, make sure these features provide beneficial information. If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user’s location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store.
Some people immediately accused Apple of implementing this policy so that it alone could use location-based advertisements on the platform.
But what’s with this language about how location can only be used to “provide beneficial information?” Who makes this decision and where on earth does Apple get off making a policy like this? The company says earlier that location may be used to tell phone owners about “nearby restaurants, ATMs, and other location-based information.” What if the restaurants serve unhealthy food, though? What are you going to spend that ATM cash on if this iPhone app helps you find it? How does Apple determine that advertisements, particularly ones for things you could buy in the place where you are, are not beneficial?
What this means for location based social networking, Augmented Reality, mobile eCommerce and other types of applications is unclear. Apple is going to have to do something about this. Location-based advertising has been expected to make economically feasible a universe of new mobile applications. The prospect of Apple taking an anti-advertising stance in selecting which iPhone apps to allow into the App Store is pure insanity.
I’ve used a number of apps in the past few days that are great apps, but ask for my location so they can serve me up locally-based ads from the recently Google-acquired AdMob ad network and that was just fine by me. Show me ads for businesses in my town, please! Why can’t even apps without other location-based features not be monetized by local ads? This seems totally unfair.
Above: One extreme example of location used to deliver ads on an iPhone. Back to the depths of Hell, iButterfly! Discuss
Seesmic just launched a new version of its Android app, which, among other things, now offers support for multiple Twitter accounts and cross-posting from different accounts. The Seesmic team also worked hard on polishing the app’s user interface and added a number of minor new features like extra large font in the app and the ability to change your Twitter password from within the app. Seesmic for Android now also remembers your scroll position in the timeline.
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New Features: X-Large Fonts, Multiple Accounts, Better Auto-Correction
By default, Seesmic now loads new tweets on top of the older ones (just like Tweetie on the iPhone). A lot of users prefer this system of loading new tweets, but if you would rather see Seesmic jump straight to the top of your new tweets, you can switch this feature off in the settings menu.
According to Seesmic, support for multiple accounts was one of the most often requested features. Thanks to the app’s support for multiple accounts, you can now also easily post the same message to multiple accounts simultaneously.
Another new feature in Seesmic for Android is support auto-correction and auto-capitalization in the composer.
But What About the iPhone?
Seesmic was already the best Twitter app on Android and this new release just takes it one step further. According to Seesmic’s founder and CEO Loic Le Meur, over 100,000 people have already downloaded the app. We tested Seesmic for Android on a Nexus One and it’s worth noting that the new version of the app feels even more responsive than the first release.
Given how well Seesmic for Android works, we can only hope that Seesmic will soon release an iPhone app (the company already offers a BlackBerry app). The last time we talked to Le Meur, however, he told us that the company wants to be able to offer something special and not just look like a “me-too” player on the iPhone, so it might still be a while before we get to see Seesmic on the iPhone.
Here at ReadWriteWeb, we’ve discussed the use of third party APIs when building an integrated online product, highlighting the disadvantages such a decision could entail. One topic on the flip side of that is the question of whether providing an open public API versus a closed private one is in your product’s best interest. Massively viral services like Twitter have rapidly expanded their capabilities and brand awareness by releasing an open API for third party developers to build on, but for companies in fledgeling industries, like mobile augmented reality, the API decision isn’t as clear.
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Along with Mobilizy’s Wikitude World Browser, Amsterdam-based company Layar was one of the first mobile AR browsers to market and has since become one of the strongest players in the space. Layar allows users to view geo-tagged points-of-interest (POI) in a 3D “heads-up” display using their mobile phone’s camera. We’ve covered Layar’s evolution since its debut last June and eventual launch on Android devices two months later. Since then Layar has released an iPhone version of their application, but due to random crashes the company has temporarily pulled it from the App Store until they can work out the bugs.
Layar has quickly become of the most popular mobile AR browsing applications across the globe thanks to its impressive set of features, but the company’s choice to provide an open API may have been the decision which fueled them to success. Companies that wish to jump on the augmented reality bandwagon have several choices for getting their content on Layar quickly and easily. Layar provides documentation on its website for how to use and interpret their API, but those looking for an easier method of geo-data input can use any of a number of third party tools. Thanks in no small part to tools like buildAR, Muzar and Winvolve, Layar’s database of geo-data has rapidly expanded to include over 300 content layers including anything from restaurants to Twitter results, to even the locations of nearby heart defibrillators.
On the opposite end the spectrum, the accrossair browser, a similar mobile AR browser available on the iPhone, has decided to keep its API private and helps with the input of geo-data themselves for companies that wish to participate on their platform. Instead of allowing anyone to upload location data onto their platform, acrossair has reached out to corporations like McDonalds and FedEx to provide them with their own POIs in their browser. The one disadvantage this places on their product is a significantly lower number of POI sets that a user can access. With just over a dozen different options, acrossair has a fraction of the curated POI sets that Layar does. Founder Chetan Damani says that while their closed API certainly limits the amount of data on their browser, it enhances the overall stability of the browser – a factor which may play heavily for the company as they expand beyond the iPhone to Android and Symbian devices.
“We are keeping [the API] closed right now because we will be in a period of evolution and multiple iteration,” Damani told ReadWriteWeb. “We want to move to Android, and we want to make sure that the APIs are the right APIs and that they won’t limit our development. We only get one opportunity to get this right.”
Damani and acrossair are playing it safe until they are able to expand their presence to more platforms before opening their API – a step Damani says they do plan on taking. When acrossair moves their browser to Android, Symbian and possibly even Windows Mobile devices, having a closed API will make the transition much smoother. Opening the API after they set up shop on each mobile OS will be a lot easier without loads of independently developed geo-data on their system.
So is it better to limit one’s API early on for the sake of stability while simultaneously hampering the possible reach of one’s product? The acrossair browser seems to be taking that chance, while Layar, on the other hand, is welcoming third party developers with open arms. However, acrossair has one thing going for them that Layar currently doesn’t – a working iPhone application.
How much of a role Layar’s open API played in the demise of their iPhone application is unknown, but all that could be moot when Layar relaunches on the iPhone “by the end of February”. However, if augmented reality is the supposed “future of web browsing” as some believe it to be, having closed browsing platforms is not a viable long-term solution.
Capitol Hill is abuzz as Comcast and NBC Universal defend their merger in an antitrust investigation before the Senate Judiciary Committee. While a number of interest groups are commenting on the potential acquisition, Boxee CEO Avner Ronen’s blog post offers some hints at how the merger could affect the environment for web TV startups.
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In March 2009, NBC’s Hulu requested that Boxeeremove all embedded video content. While fans were certainly disappointed, Boxee found a simple workaround in the form of a Hulu plug-in. In today’s hearing with the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Communications, NBC President Jeff Zucker justifies that initial removal of Hulu from Boxee by calling the web tv startup’s practices “illegal”.
In response, Boxee CEO Ronen writes, “Boxee uses a web browser to access Hulu’s content – just like Firefox or Internet Explorer. Boxee users click on a link to Hulu’s website and the video within that page plays. We don’t “take” the video… There are now close to a million people using Boxee. When they watch shows from Hulu they are watching the ads and generate real revenues to NBC.”
Avner then points to his plans for a payment program suggesting that Boxee users might be willing to pay Hulu for subscription content. While this sort of deal might prove lucrative for Boxee, the merger itself may create an extremely restrictive environment for those startups looking to break into the web tv and social tv space. If Boxee is considered “illegal” then what other access will be denied?
With NBC Universal representing a large portion of entertainment content and Comcast controlling the flow of that content to tv and the Web, what innovations might be pummeled in the wake of a merger?
Hugo Chavez, the current President of Venezuela has joined the rest of us on Twitter despite trying to block the website just a month ago. His political influence in South America (partly due to his use of Venezuela’s oil wealth and his adversarial relationship with the United States) have given him a comparatively high geopolitical profile.
Ah, the sea. The big blue. From sharks to shipwrecks, from the perfectly formed pipes of Hawaii’s waves to the dark and chilly depths of the deepest sea trenches, it’s one of Earth’s most fascinating habitats – one that people love watching and exploring.
The tech world has gone geo-loco for geo-locational apps. As per our article entitled 
Last fall, 
Apple has posted a shocking, if vague, warning to iPhone app creators 
Here at ReadWriteWeb, we’ve discussed
Along with 
On the opposite end the spectrum, the 
Capitol Hill is abuzz as Comcast and NBC Universal defend their merger in an antitrust investigation before the Senate Judiciary Committee. While a number of interest groups are commenting on the potential acquisition, 
