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Posts Tagged ‘Taps’

AppStoreHQ Taps Into Twitter For iPhone App Recommendations

Plenty of ink has been spilled detailing how wildly succesful Apple’s App Store has been, which now counts well over 100,000 applications. However, this huge number of apps presents a challenge: it’s hard to actually find interesting new apps when there are so many to choose from. Apple does its best to highlight quality applications in the store, and it offers a Genius feature, but that often leaves something to be desired. AppStoreHQ is a site that’s looking to help make app recommendations using a new source of data: Twitter. The site generates recommendations based on who is tweeting about iPhone apps, and can generate recommendations for you based on your own tweets.

The site looks at Twitter’s public stream, checking tweets for links back to the App Store. Every time someone links to an app, they treat that as a vote from that user. When you visit the site’s homepage, you can browse through the apps that are currently the hottest on Twitter or on the web (the latter is determined by apps with the most blog post mentions). Or, if you want personalised recommendations, you can tweet about an app or two that you enjoy. The one catch is that you have to include one of a few keywords like “iPhone” or “AppStoreHQ” in your tweet, otherwise the system won’t catch it. The service only resolves links with these keywords, because it would take a prohibitive amount of processing power to follow every short URL and Link to see if they’re linking to an iPhone app.

Once you’ve tweeted about a few apps, the system will make customized suggestions based on what other similar users have tweeted about. Obviously the more apps you tweet about, the better the recommendations become (which is also a good way for the service to grow virally). The system also takes into account a few other sources of data, including any apps you’ve Favorited on AppStoreHQ and which apps you’ve actually clicked through while browsing the site.

CEO Chris DeVore says that while the service could develop a sentiment engine to ensure that apps being linked to in tweets are actually being shared with a positive comment, it’s actually very rare for people to tweet a link to an app they don’t like, so they don’t do this processing.

I like the idea of using tweets for app recommendations — writing a tweet isn’t as involved as writing a blog post so the site will probably be able to get more data to analyze, and it will also be able to surface hot new apps quickly.  That said, the algorithm will also likely have to put up with lots of spam from Twitter. And  I think the AppStoreHQ layout could use some work, as its menu system seems clunky and bland.

AppStoreHQ has actually been around for a while, offering recommendations based on app links in blog posts.  It also has a search engine for iPhone apps that it has white-labeled and is currently integrated in a number of other popular iPhone app news and community sites.

We’ve covered many other App Store recommendation services, including Chorus, Appolicious, AppsFire, and Appsaurus.

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Walky robot understands iPhone gestures, football fanaticism (video)

Hey there sailor, we imagine you’ve been doing your fair share of button mashing what with a certain new bit of software out and about, but how would you like a whole new control paradigm? Taking up Steve Jobs’ war on buttons, a group of grad students at Japan’s Keio University have put together a comprehensive robot control interface that relies solely on finger swipes, taps, and presses. By employing the iPhone’s built-in accelerometer and multitouch screen, the robot can replicate a humanistic walking motion, perform sidesteps and, when called upon, kick a football with gusto and presumed passion. Your destination is just past the break, where the video demo awaits.

[Via HDBlog.it]

Continue reading Walky robot understands iPhone gestures, football fanaticism (video)

Filed under: Cellphones, Robots

Walky robot understands iPhone gestures, football fanaticism (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 17 Nov 2009 04:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Nokia’s first TD-SCDMA-based 6788 ready for China Mobile’s 500 million subscribers

Nokia might be hemorrhaging smartphone marketshare to North America’s meddling upstarts but it still dominates in total handsets sold worldwide. Today’s news can only help that cause as Nokia taps into China’s homegrown TD-SCDMA 3G marketplace for the first time. The Nokia 6788 does the honor via collaboration with China Mobile, China’s (and the world’s) largest mobile phone operator. The handset itself brings a 2.8-inch QVGA display, 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss lens and dual-LED flash, 4GB of memory plus microSD expansion, GPS, 3.5mm headset jack, and Bluetooth 2.0 EDR, all riding atop S60 3rd Edition — not 5th as we’re accustomed to seeing by now. Unfortunately, it won’t start contributing to Nokia’s sagging bottom-line until the end of December.

Filed under: Cellphones

Nokia’s first TD-SCDMA-based 6788 ready for China Mobile’s 500 million subscribers originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 27 Oct 2009 06:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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MINI Roadside Assistance can get you and your MINI out of trouble spots

Filed under: iPhone, App Store, iPod touch

Our colleague, Sam Abuelsamid, at Autoblog has pointed out the release of a roadside assistance app from automaker MINI. The app, MINI Roadside Assistance [iTunes link], is a collaboration between the automaker and insurance company Allstate and allows one to access roadside assistance as well as the specify its cause

So, say you’re driving your MINI to Las Vegas for your buddy’s bachelor party. During the drive, your car overheats; it’s 120 degrees and you forgot were too lazy to check the coolant before you left, what’d you expect to happen? Well, no need to worry — roadside assistance is just a few taps away with MINI Roadside Assistance.

MINI Roadside Assistance is available as a free download. MINI Cooper not included. More info and a demo video are available at Sam’s article.

TUAWMINI Roadside Assistance can get you and your MINI out of trouble spots originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 20 Aug 2009 23:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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RXVantage Taps Into Massive Pharma Sales/Marketing Budgets

New startup RXVantage is releasing a really smart SaaS product into a huge market – drug and medical device marketing.

Selling stuff to doctors is really big business – $60+ billion a year in the U.S. alone is spent annually in marketing to physicians by pharmaceutical and medical device companies. 175,000 reps visit offices and hospitals 110 million times per year to pitch their wares.

Today, pharma reps drop by offices in person just to schedule an office meeting with the physician down the road. They often do sample drops of medications and do a little pitching while the doctor signs for them. The average drop meeting lasts 22 seconds, for which a rep might wait up to 2 hours.

Top prescribers are visited by more than 100 reps per week, and meetings are scheduled as much as a year in advance.

Enter RXVantage.

RXVantage is “Open Table for doctors” – it’s web based scheduling software that doctors and pharma/medical device companies use to calendar those visits, manage appointments, etc. It’s free for all parties to use, and premium features are available to the marketers if they choose.

The company is just preparing to launch nationwide but has had a 2 year closed beta in Rhode Island and Massachusetts with 450 doctors and 400 reps from 75 different pharma companies. The results – 94% of the doctors pitched started using the system, and the average rep reported 4-5 more appointments per month.

The premium version of the software, which is $25/month/rep, allows those reps to get alerts on canceled appointments (and an opportunity to fill it), targeting of relevant doctors and other features.

The company has raised $1 million to date and is currently raising a second round of financing.

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

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Hands on (a little late) with GV Mobile for jailbroken phones

Filed under: iPhone, Jailbreak/pwnage, App Review

After writing about the GV Mobile situation on TUAW the other day, a helpful TUAW reader sent me a Google Voice invite (thanks Ian M! You rock!). I set up my account, hopped over to a jailbroken 3.0 iPod touch and downloaded a copy of the software via Cydia. I then copied it off the touch via sftp, signed it with my developer credentials and installed it through iTunes on a non-jailbroken iPhone to see what I’d been missing.

GV Mobile offers a pretty nice feature set. You can use it to set your Google Voice preferences, such as your preferred phone, so that when calls come through the right phone rings. That’s an awesome feature on-the-go. Yes, the same option is available at the Voice website, but I really like the simple interface GV Mobile offers to switch that number with just a couple of taps.

You can dial directly from the app out to other phones. You still use your AT&T minutes but you avoid having to navigate through the Google Voice command interface. When the call is over, you return to the application.

The SMS and voicemail features are also very nice, each offering a dedicated screen and easy to use interfaces. A lot of design thought went into the program and it shows, especially in these two options.

Unfortunately, since the application was ported for a jailbreak install, it would no longer remember my user credentials between sessions. Be aware this approach works fine for review but isn’t meant for a day-to-day bypass of the App Store, unless your Google username and password are trivial to type over and over again.

Despite the excellent number setting, SMS, and Voicemail features, I felt that most of the application features really needed to be integrated at the OS level, which they presumably will be in Google Chrome or Android. Apple provides its own OS-level telephony system and using this app for outgoing calls really felt more like work than time savings. Yes, the outgoing International rates are superb on Google Voice and the connection quality far exceeds that of Fring’s SIP-based services or Skype’s iPhone app. That said, I think the application could have benefited from a greater focus on the SMS/voicemail features with the telephone portion being pushed back in prominence.

The program does exhibit a few minor quirks. For example, when I tap on the call history tab, I’d prefer that it gave me a button to load that history from Google Voice rather than do so automatically and trap me, especially when I meant to hit another tab.

All said, I really did enjoy using GV Mobile. I think it has good functionality and must have been a really good App Store offering, while it was there. If you do have a jailbroken iPhone system to test it on, it’s certainly worth a spin. And if you find you use it, the application is donationware.

TUAWHands on (a little late) with GV Mobile for jailbroken phones originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 31 Jul 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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