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Posts Tagged ‘Photos’

LoKast launches a ‘disposable social network” for sharing media from your iPhone

There are a number of companies at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin offering their own way of sharing your location with friends. LoKast, an app from a company called NearVerse, is launching a mobile app with a compelling spin on that idea — instead of sharing your location with people elsewhere, you share media with people in the same location.

In other words, when you open the LoKast app, you get a list of anyone else who also has LoKast open in your proximity (about 300 feet). When you click on their profile, you can see and download any content they’ve uploaded for sharing, including contacts, photos, songs, videos, and links. For example, if you’re at a conference, you might share the contact information of yourself and business partners, so anyone else at the conference knows how to reach you. Or if you’re at a concert, you could bring a favorite playlist, which all the other concert attendees would be able to view. And users could tailor the content they’re sharing to the occasion.

Co-founder Boris Bogatin describes LoKast as a way to link our online and physical activities.

“We’re doing all this internet stuff, we do internet or we do physical, but we don’t do both,” Bogatin said. “But the physical stuff is so powerful and rich.”

Philadelphia-based NearVerse has paid particular attention to the music side of the app. In most cases, you’re not sharing complete songs, but rather short clips and a link to purchase the song on iTunes. But musicians can also create accounts on LoKast where they make their songs available for free download. So if a band threw a promotional concert, they wouldn’t have to give out demo CDs. Instead they just ask everyone to download the songs from their LoKast portal. Then when all those fans wgo to other events, they could offer those songs as free downloads to other people, allowing the music to spread.

As part of its launch, NearVerse is announcing partnerships with music distribution companies The Orchard, IODA and Monalis 360. The model extends to promotional movie clips, which is why NearVerse is also partnering with Magnolia Pictures.

Beyond making money from music purchases, Bogatin said he sees LoKast as a platform for sharing content in other apps, though he didn’t offer many details. He added that LoKast will be adding app-sharing soon, which also provides revenue opportunities.

One of the big challenges with this kind of media-sharing app is speed. If it takes minutes to download a song or contact information, no one’s going to use it. But when the NearVerse team gave me a demo at South by Southwest (where there are lots of iPhone users competing for network bandwidth), the app seemed very responsive, with updates reflected immediately between phones and most (not all) downloads taking only seconds. You can download LoKast from the App Store here.

NearVerse has raised venture funding, but it hasn’t announced the details yet.

Tags: LoKast

Companies: NearVerse

People: Boris Bogatin

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Rumor: iPad in-store reservations may be over 40,000

Filed under: Retail, Rumors, iPad

In the wake of yesterday’s iPad sales estimates of 50K in the first couple of hours (now revised by Silicon Alley Insider and Apple 2.0 to about 91,000 in the first six hours), we have an unconfirmed but plausible number from inside the retail stores. According to our source, the in-store pickup reservation count differential between the start of the day and closing time was about 41,000; that represents reservations for the WiFi iPad only.

If you’ve got a pickup reservation and you happen to know your ID number for it — and you made your reservation either at the very beginning of the day yesterday, or at the very end of the day — let us know in the comments and we’ll start doing some arithmetic. We’ll also try to cross-confirm this number with other little birdies from the retail front. Update: Looks like there’s no tracking info on the registration emails. Drat.

TUAWRumor: iPad in-store reservations may be over 40,000 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 13 Mar 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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SuperGlued: The Can’t-Miss Live Music iPhone App for SXSW 2010

If you’ve ever done SXSW before, then you know about the music here in Austin. If you haven’t, let us tell you now – there’s a lot. But how do you find it all? And how do you find out which show is best? And how do you share blogs, photos, videos and tweet about it all at once?

SuperGlued, which has integrated with both Foursquare and Twitter, will be your your one-stop shop for the more than 1,200 bands that are set to invade Austin over the next week and a half.

Sponsor

SuperGlued is a can’t-miss app for navigating SXSW without having the schizophrenically switch between iPhone apps just to keep up. With the release of a new version of its iPhone app, users can find shows, buy tickets, tweet and read what others are tweeting, post photos and check-in to Foursquare. And if you find yourself at a lame show, the new “Where My Friends At” feature will let you know what shows your friends are seeing so you can ask them if it’s any better.

A new partnership with BandsInTown not only helps the service find all the shows going on, but lets you buy tickets from your iPhone. And for special events, like SXSW, Superglued brings all the shows together into a separate event listing.

Aside from the iPhone app, the website lets you continue to interact around the shows you’ve seen long after they’ve ended. Rush Doshi, who co-founded SuperGlued with Gawker CTO Tom Plunkett, told us on the phone the other day that SuperGlued is the water cooler for everyone to gather around and talk about that crazy show they saw last week.

“The idea came about from going to a lot of shows and wondering about who else was there – it just seemed that there was no one place to go to see what everyone else thought,” said Doshi. “We built SuperGlued to be that place.”

SuperGlued connects with Flickr, YouTube, Blogger, Wordpress and Tumblr, so when the shows all over, you can both add and check out block posts, videos, set lists and more from the website.

Doshi told us that they have made extra efforts to make sure that all of the SXSW shows are list, but if a show isn’t there, users can add shows via the website. With the number of shows springing up in parking lots and backyards, this is a must-have feature. In the near future, the company is looking to include show-specific merchandise in its iPhone app, letting you browse and even order show merchandise from your phone and having it shipped to your house.

Beyond SXSW, SuperGlued is available around the world with nearly 200,000 show listings, many of which it pulls from BandInTown and Last.fm, in 140 countries. So, wherever you are, get off your duff, download the iPhone app and go see some live music.

Discuss

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Adobe Offers Android Developers Free Photoshop.com Mobile Editor, “Unlike iPhone”

Adobe this morning announced that third-party developers now have access to the Photoshop.com Mobile for Android 1.1 editor, allowing them to make it a part of their applications.

The news comes four months after the company released Photoshop.com Mobile for Android, enabling users to easily edit and share their photos. That app got an upgrade, too.

Amusingly, Adobe also takes a bit of a swing at Apple for not being able to provide such tools to iPhone app developers.

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Dear Aunt TUAW: Does size matter (when it comes to iPads)?

Filed under: Apple, iPad

Dear Aunt TUAW,

I am planning on getting an iPad WiFi+3G when they become available, but I am still undecided on which (storage) size I should get. I currently have a 16GB iPhone 3GS which comfortably, for now, holds all my media needs. While I have a lot of music and photos and some video I don’t feel the need to have it all on my phone at one time.

Looking at what I store on my iPhone I think an iPad 32GB would more than fit my needs — but will my media files be larger on the iPad with the larger format of the device? I don’t expect that my iTunes songs will take up anymore than they do on the iPhone, but will the format of pictures and video take up more storage space? With AT&T increasing the download size limit over 3G it got me wondering if 32GB on the iPad will be more like a 16GB iPhone.

At this point I would be deciding between the 32GB and 64GB. Just wondering if the $100 price difference would be better spent buying the 32GB and putting the $100 toward a year’s worth of 3G connectivity?

Love, kissies & hugs,

Your nephew, RJ

Dearest RJ,

16GB data? Buy the 32GB model, unless you can easily swing the 64 GB one. Then go for that.

Auntie has a pretty firm policy on this kind of thing: always buy the most storage you can afford unless the storage on offer is insufficient, whether truly insufficient or plausibly insufficient. Here’s how it works. Let’s say you have about 30GB of data. There’s a 32GB item for sale and a 64GB item for sale. Which should you buy? Auntie’s advice is to always buy the 64GB item. There’s plenty of room there for you to grow over time, and overbuying your storage ensures that your device will remain useful as your data demands grow.

Now let’s say, we’re in the same situation but with 16GB and 32GB units instead. Here’s where Auntie goes mental.

In that scenario, my advice is to buy low, just getting the 16GB model. “OMG, Auntie,” you’re saying to yourself. “How can you give such poor advice? The 30 GB of data I currently use as of today will fit comfortably on that 32GB unit! What the…um…heck?”

Here’s the reasoning behind that advice: Buying any iPhone/iPod/iPad unit with just 2GB to spare is asking to pay extra for not-enough-room misery. You’re going to ebay-and-upgrade within six months anyway, right? So why not just save the money and wait until something decent actually comes out? That’s why I stayed to 4GB and 8GB iPhones until my beloved 32GB 3GS finally debuted. The money I saved helped underwrite the equipment I actually wanted. Of course, I’m now thisclose from running out of room on my newish 64GB iPod touch. And my 3GS? Sadly, overburdened already. (Although, to be fair, it’s had a really great year — and I’ve loved the storage space that it added to my life.)

It’s the same way with the iPad. Top of the line 64GB simply isn’t going to cut it for me under any plausible near term usage scenarios. With movies and books and lots of other iPad-ready great digital resources that go way beyond normal iPhone use, my storage requirements are constantly moving upwards, not downwards. I’m buying the 16GB model until at least a 128GB (and, preferably a 256GB) model shows up.

Is this biting off my nose to spite my face? (And, by the way, that’s physically harder than you might imagine unless you have a very flexible nose and jaw, but I digress.) No, it’s keeping my eyes on what I really want instead of settling for not-quite-good-enough. Over time, prices drop. Storage increases. So long as I have an entry-level iPad to get started with, I’ll be fine — at least until my dreamPad finally debuts.

If you do have the spare cash on-hand and don’t have to count pennies, well, buy the best unit available. With that kind of cash flow, you don’t have to worry about asking Auntie T. questions about which unit offers the best value. But if you’re like me, a tech addict on a tight budget and unwilling to compromise on quality, you may consider buying down instead of up until the right model comes along.

Love & hugs,

Auntie T.

TUAWDear Aunt TUAW: Does size matter (when it comes to iPads)? originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 04 Mar 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Top Ten Ways To Fix Google Buzz

Google Buzz was pushed out the door too early and force-fed to users by placing it in Gmail. The launch has been marked by both privacy and usability issues. But the team at Google behind it, led by Bradley Horowitz, is working hard to fix problems and respond to user feedback. In fact, earlier today, Horowitz pointed people via Buzz and Twitter to an official Google product idea site for making suggestions to improve Google Buzz. The site is powered by Google Moderator, which lets people suggest ideas and then vote them up or down.

Below are the top ten ideas and feature requests on the site right now, which already has 13,607 votes on 338 ideas from 692 people. They range from making comments more manageable to fixing Twitter update imports so that they are more realtime to better filters and a ReBuzz button.

1. “Collapsible comments.”
2. “Allow me to “star” or “favorite” a buzz to read later just like Gmail, Google Reader, Google Groups and Twitter.”
3. “Fix the Twitter feed so they update in realtime instead of hours later in giant batches.”
4. “A “ReBuzz” button that forwards someone else’s buzz (including links, photo’s, etc. but not reactions) to your followers with a @reference to the original poster.”
5. “Move “Mute this post” from the menu to the Buzz item itself (e.g.: next to ‘Like’ etc.).”
6. “Buzz filter. Some people may not be interested in posts coming from certain sources (e.g. Twitter). It would be nice to have a simple way of filtering those out.”
7. “Labels. Or any other way to group either people or buzzes (or both?) into categories. The ability to group information or people according to topics or personal preferences, etc.”
8. “Allow multiple links in one buzz and let me add photos after adding a link. Currently only allows one link, and must add all photos before the link, or the photos option disappears.”
9. “View the stream chronologically, without bumping buzzes back to the top every time a comment is added.”
10. “More options for sharing posts from Buzz to other places”

Hmm, sounds like people want it to be even more like FriendFeed. What’s your top feature request for Buzz?

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Optoma joins the 3D party with HW536 and EX762 DLP projectors

If 3D monitors aren’t doing it for you, here are a couple of larger display options — our lucky pals over at Engadget Chinese witnessed the birth of Optoma’s first two 3D projectors in Taiwan yesterday. Pictured on the left is the HW536 cinema DLP projector (NT$36,900 or about US$1,150), which has HDMI input and projects a 1,280 x 800 image at 2,800 lumens with a 3,000:1 contrast ratio. Next up is the EX762 business DLP projector (NT$79,900 or US$2,490) that also sports HDMI input and a network jack, while delivering a 1,024 x 768 resolution at 4,000 lumens and a 3,000:1 contrast ratio. Just to add a tad more burden to your overdraft, each pair of ZD101 shutter glasses — not bundled with either projectors — will cost you a further NT$4,000 (US$125), in return offering a wireless range of up to eight meters courtesy of Texas Instruments’ non-directional DLP Link technology (so no need to position any external emitters). A couple of close-up photos after the break.

Continue reading Optoma joins the 3D party with HW536 and EX762 DLP projectors

Optoma joins the 3D party with HW536 and EX762 DLP projectors originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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BlackBerry slider photos leak out!

You can consider our minds completely and utterly blown tonight, as we’ve just stumbled upon these photos of what appears to be a new BlackBerry device… a vertical slider. The source (BlackBerry Leaks) doesn’t seem to be able to confirm the legitimacy of the photos, but we’re mostly convinced that this is some variation of a RIM device. While BB Leaks speculates on the possibility of this being the Storm 3, Kevin Michaluk over at CrackBerry suggests this might not be a device headed to market, rather an early version which has been scrapped, similar to that Magnum handset that floated onto the internet recently (though Kevin suggests that our friends in Canada may very well have plans for something in this form factor). What we can say with assurance, however, is that this device coupled with those new BIS 3.0 Gmail integration upgrades, that forthcoming RIM WebKit browser, and a rumored new OS would help push things into the territory of that dream smartphone we pleaded for back in 2008. Coincidence? We think not.

BlackBerry slider photos leak out! originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Mar 2010 20:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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