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Posts Tagged ‘Neighborhood’

Possibly as many as 50,000 iPads pre-ordered in first two hours

Filed under: Retail, Apple Financial, iPad

The early adopters are out in force today. Based on analysis from Fortune’s Apple 2.0 blog & the investors of the AAPL board on Investor Village, it seems that as many as 50,000 iPads were pre-ordered in its first two hours of availability this morning. That’s pretty staggering demand, especially considering that on a typical day Apple only receives an average of 15,000 online orders for all products combined.

Naturally, we have no way of knowing if these numbers are exact as of yet. The numbers reflect over 50,000 orders placed in two hours, and the percentage of those that are iPad orders isn’t clear. Considering that the iPad was just made available for pre-order today, however, and the 15K daily average noted above, it’s likely the majority of orders placed this morning were indeed for the iPad. Additionally, the numbers only reflect the number of orders placed, not the number of units ordered; taken with the 2-pad maximum for today’s pre-orders, the data does suggest that somewhere in the neighborhood of 50,000 iPad pre-orders were placed within two hours of its availability.

This suggests a huge demand for the device, at least among early adopters. It will be very interesting to see if this trend is repeated once the iPad is actually available in stores.

One interesting note: even if all 50,000 of those iPads were the $499 version (which is very unlikely), based on iSuppli’s analysis of that unit’s build cost, it means Apple gained nearly $13.5 million in revenue profit from the iPad alone in a mere two hours — and that’s the bare minimum. Once you factor in all the other models and their higher prices, the numbers climb by several million dollars. Even for a company with a market cap in excess of $205 billion, that’s still pretty amazing performance.

[h/t MacRumors]

TUAWPossibly as many as 50,000 iPads pre-ordered in first two hours originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Lotus outs wild Evora 414E Hybrid plug-in concept car

Concept cars are like unicorns — they’re so prevalent and vaporous, they’re hardly worth remarking upon. Every so often, though, one pops out into the ether that’s really worth a second look. Lotus’ Evora 414E Hybrid concept certainly fits into that category.This plug-in car boasts (or would boast, should it come into existence), 1.2 liter, three-cylinder engine, independent electric motors for the rear wheels, with a range of about 300 miles. The glass engine cover pictured above, however, is just one of the features we find ourselves double-taking here. The Evora 414E would also pack some ‘vroom vroom’ noises by way of its audio system to take care of the ever-pressing danger of silent auto engines. The engine can operate on alcohol-based fuels or regular old gasoline, and the battery-only range is in the neighborhood of 35 miles. The Lotus Evora 414E hybrid will be unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show.

Lotus outs wild Evora 414E Hybrid plug-in concept car originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Glow: Location-Based "Feelings" for iPhone

Ever wonder how the people in your neighborhood are feeling? How about those that work downtown? Are people really happier on a Friday than a Monday? A new mobile application called Glow will tell you. Designed for the iPhone, this app lets you share your feelings using a simple star-based rating system that you manipulate using a swiping gesture. Once you’ve added your “feeling,” it’s displayed a map so you can see how those around you feel, too. The feelings on the map are represented by glowing colored orbs that range from blue (happy) to red (unhappy). In addition, an augmented reality street view lets you see those same feelings layered on top of real-world photos.

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How to Glow

When you first launch the app, five stars appear on the screen. Drag your finger across the stars to rate how you’re feeling at the moment. As you move from one star to five, the colors change from a darker red to a bright blue. Five stars represents you at your happiest while one star means you’re unhappy. Your feeling is then geo-located and tagged to a map. You can zoom in and out and around on the map to see how others in your area are feeling, too. If available, you can switch over to street view to see a sort of augmented reality view which superimposes feelings on top of the actual photos from that location.

For now, the application is limited to the iPhone. And because it was only released a couple of weeks ago, it suffers from the same problem that plagues most newly-launched social media websites: not enough users. That’s unfortunate because the concept, though simple, is definitely intriguing.

But Where’s the Sentiment Analysis?

That said, we wish the app would do even more. A sentiment analysis engine, for example, could analyze tweets and/or public Facebook updates to depict the overall feelings in a particular locale without having to rely on manual updates from iPhone users. These sorts of “feeling” algorithms are already in use on a number of services, including real-time Twitter search engines Tweetfeel and Tweet Sentiments, social media search platform SocialMention, Waggener Edstrom’s trend-tracker Twendz and several others. While it’s nifty that Glow lets you add real-time feeling updates to a map, not including an optional social layer that extracts feelings from social sites and services is an unfortunate (and potentially dooming) omission for what is otherwise a fairly clever concept and implementation.

However, despite its flaws, Glow is a great example of the new and unique types of applications that mobile phones and their location-awareness features make possible. We hope that future updates to the app will take this concept further and provide us with a true analysis of the feelings around us…even from those who don’t use Glow.

If you’re interested in trying Glow on your iPhone, you can download the app here. (Note that if you try to locate the app via the iPhone’s search, you should use the company name “Heckacopter” as the keyword – there are just too many apps with “glow” in the title!)

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Macworld 2010: Flook app brings urban exploration to your pocket

Filed under: Macworld, iPhone

Among the unusual and innovative iPhone apps we saw at Macworld Expo was Flook, a location-based search tool for urban discovery that turns your walk through town into a multimedia adventure, complete with audio and image annotation and growing popularity for the most intriguing spots.

The idea is to create “serendipitous discovery” of the interesting and novel places around your neighborhood — “a bit like StumbleUpon for the world around you,” as the Flook site says.

We got a chance to chat with Ambient Industries co-founder Tristan Brotherton, who provided a quick demo of the app and a few words about the Flook approach and philosophy. Catch the video below.

TUAWMacworld 2010: Flook app brings urban exploration to your pocket originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 17 Feb 2010 03:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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iPad CPU may find its way into next-gen iPhone

Filed under: Hardware, iPhone, iPod touch

Since the announcement that the iPad comes with a 1 GHz A4 chip developed and owned by Apple (thanks, no doubt, to their acquisition of chipmaker PA Semi), one thing’s been on a lot of people’s minds: when will this chip make it to the iPhone?

The iPhone 3GS runs on an 833 MHz Samsung chip, that, presumably to increase battery life, is underclocked to 600 MHz. While this is better than the original iPhone and iPhone 3G’s 620 MHz CPU (underclocked to about 412 Mhz), there’s still plenty of room for improvement. Analysts fully expect that improvement will come either from the A4 chip itself or a lower-powered variant of it designed for the iPhone’s smaller screen and battery.

Early impressions of the iPad’s speed from people who have actually handled one are that the device is far faster than any iPhone or iPod touch released so far, with applications opening “instantly,” and provides far smoother graphics performance. With Apple now designing and implementing its own “system on a chip” CPU for the iPad, it seems very likely this will be one of many iPad features that will trickle down to Apple’s smaller mobile devices. Once the iPad actually finds its way to consumers (and teardown sites), we’ll have a much better idea of what Apple’s A4 chip is capable of. As for the next-gen iPhone’s CPU, I’m placing my bets on an A4 variant rather than the full iPad CPU, with an operational speed in the neighborhood of 800 – 850 MHz — more than twice the speed of the iPhone 3G.

TUAWiPad CPU may find its way into next-gen iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 29 Jan 2010 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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BlockChalk Is Location-Based Sidewalk Chalk For Your Mobile Device

With its new geolocation API, Twitter has the potential to delve into the realm of messages that are relevant based on location. But right now, most geotagged tweets are simply regular tweets that are being tagged with location, and really don’t have much specifically to do with it. Enter BlockChalk, a new service built around the idea of leaving simple messages directly tied to a specific location.

The service, created by Stephen Hood, the former product team lead for Delicious, and Dave Baggeroer of Stanford’s Institute of Design, works because they keep it simple. You load up the application on your mobile device, it locates you, and you leave a message. This can be whatever you want: A note about a good cafe, a tip of something in the neighborhood to watch out for, a request to borrow something that someone else may have in the neighborhood, etc. When other people also using the app come upon the area that you’ve pinned your “Chalk” (their word for message) to, they’ll see it on their screen in a stream of Chalks.

And you can do a bit more with these Chalks. With the service’s new iPhone app, if you use the syntax “[here],” BlockChalk will put in your exact location. You can also attach a link to a location on a map by inserting an actual address in those same brackets. If you don’t do either of these, BlockChalk will hide your exact location, and keep your message pinned to the general area instead.

Once you drill down to a specific Chalk, you can choose to “Chalkback” (respond publicly to a message), “Reply Privately” (respond just to the user who left the Chalk), “Bury,” or “Share,” the chalk.

While I noted the service’s new iPhone app (which you can find in the App Store here as a free download), it’s already available on a number of other platforms thanks to some more advanced web technology. For example, you can use it on Android phones (or the mobile web of the iPhone, for that matter) because the web-based version of BlockChalk uses HTML5 to access location through the browser, Hood tells us. Obviously, that’s a vital part of the app. There is also a webOS BlockChalk app already that will work on the Palm Pre or Pixi. Hood notes that they are currently working on native apps for Android and BlackBerry as we speak.

Thanks to this mobile web usage, BlockChalk is already available in some 93 countries, 6751 cities and 10910 neighborhoods. And while the obvious integration with Twitter’s new location feature is pretty loose right now, Hood tells us that in the next release, it will be much tighter.

The company is in the process of raising a seed round of funding. And while obviously they’ve declined to say how much they’re looking to raise, we hear Hood’s old Delicious counterpart Joshua Schachter is interested. That shouldn’t be surprising given his recent location-based investments.

Learn more in the video below:

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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5 ways to save money on iPhone apps

Filed under: Deals, iPhone, App Store, iPod touch

With over 100,000 iPhone applications in the App Store, finding the right app can sometimes be a bewildering experience. Apple’s getting better at refining the interface — it’s certainly easier to find what you’re looking for now than when the App Store first launched — but if you’re on a limited budget or just love a good bargain, the App Store doesn’t give you the tools you need if you’re waiting for that $9.99 app to go on sale for $4.99.

Fortunately, there are alternatives to the App Store’s built-in search engine that do let you know when iPhone apps go on sale, and they can save you tons of money. As of right now I have 74 third-party apps installed on my iPhone, and out of those, 34 of them are paid apps. Out of those 34 paid apps, I snagged 17 of them when they were temporarily available for free; almost every other paid app I’ve downloaded at a significant discount from the nominal, full price.

I’ve saved somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 on apps for my iPhone, and I got the opportunity to try out apps I might have ignored otherwise. It’s all thanks to two websites and three iPhone apps that monitor App Store prices and let you know when apps go on sale. Read on to find out what they are and how they can save you buckets of cash.

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Continue reading 5 ways to save money on iPhone apps

TUAW5 ways to save money on iPhone apps originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 04 Dec 2009 01:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Augmented Reality App Shows Recovery.gov Funding Near You

Want to see who got part of the hundreds of billions of dollars in Recovery.gov funds near you? Now you can point your iPhone 3Gs or Android phone in any direction and see the closest recipients, thanks to the publication of the official data set onto the Layar Augmented Reality platform. Sunlight Labs published the marked-up information and the results are fascinating.

This may be the most accessible way to view this information yet. I must confess, I am surprised to see that an auto shop and a Bible college in my neighborhood received a lot more money than the technical college, eco-car company and Native American youth program down the road. Fire up Layar on your phone, search for “Sunlight” and you can see the effects of the funding program on your own neighborhood. This is the kind of thing that standardized data makes possible.

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As Sunlight explains: “Layar is an application that overlays your view of the real world with waypoints representing your favorite coffee place, the movie theatre you’re trying to find, or in this case, where some of that $787 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is going.”

Fortunately, the Recovery funding information was published by the Federal government in KML format – making it easy for 3rd parties like Sunlight to mash it up with services like Layar. I wish there was an option in the interface to Google the name of the recipient, not just look up its location. Right now there’s no information made immediately available beyond name, sum and address.

Sunlight was deeply critical of the initial release of data by the federal government this Summer. This is a great example of what kinds of things they and other groups can do when they get their hands on data.

So how does funding in your neighborhood look?

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