Pelago knows that just about every location-based app in the world is seeking coverage right now just prior to SXSW where they will all battle Highlander-style. So they approached me with a pretty smart pitch: curing the “social rut.” What they mean by that is these days, despite the prevalence of social networks, people are actually less social than ever because they’re being roped into playing games like Farmville and Mafia Wars for hours on end. Sitting in their rooms. Alone.
While that may be a part of social networking (a rather large, hugely profitably part), it’s not really social. That’s why location-based networks excite me: they have the potential to bridge social networking with actual social activity. And that’s exactly how Pelago is positioning the latest version of its location-based app, Whrrl 3.
No wonder Apple is suing HTC for patent infringement over its Android phones. In the three months between October and January, Android’s overall share of smartphone subscribers in the U.S. rose 4.3 points to 7.1 percent, according to mobile market share data released by comScore. Android showed the biggest single gain of any of the top five smartphone platforms. Apple’s share was virtually flat at 25.2 percent (up 0.3 percent), while RIM’s Blackberries saw a 1.7 percent gain to 43 percent.
200 students surveyed in a Stanford study were found to be “addicted” to their iPhones. “When asked to rank their dependence on the iPhone on a scale of one to five – five being addicted and one being not at all addicted – 10 percent of the students acknowledged full addiction to the device, 34 percent ranked themselves as a four on the scale, and only 6 percent said they weren’t addicted at all.”
One common complaint about Foursquare is that in a increasingly crowded location-based space, it’s not pretty enough when compared to the likes of Brightkite and Gowalla. The new iPhone app launching soon should help that. But for some, it still won’t be enough. Those people should definitely check out Fourface.
Fourface is a free iPhone app built using Foursquare’s API. It takes the basic functionality of the service (check-ins, seeing who else is at a venue) and puts a stylish user interface on top of it. Specifically, you can choose from “Arcs,” “Clouds,” “Bubbles,” and “Spots,” for your new interface. Each offers a slightly different way to interact with Foursquare, and different ways to do things such a check-in. With Bubbles, for example, you simply find the venue bubble you want (represented by different colors) and hold it to check-in.
It’s hardly a secret that all of the major location-based players are planning big updates to their services to coincide with the SXSW festival starting next week in Austin, Texas. One of them peeked out a bit early: Foursquare.
Earlier today, the latest version of Foursquare, 1.6, went live in the App Store for a brief period of time. I’ve been using the build for a couple of days, and while the functionality isn’t all that different from the previous versions, the look-and-feel has been completely revamped.
Here we go again . . . Apple App Store Fail No. 5102928. A few weeks ago stealth Israeli startup Tawkon gave me a sneak-peak developer build of what I believe is the most important app on my iPhone. What does it do? It analyzes the cellular radiation your iPhone emits at any given moment, at any given location, whether in standby mode, or within a call.
Sounds like science fiction, right? Well, that’s where Israeli hardware and software engineering prowess come into play (more on that in a second). Sadly, Israeli military training may have met its match . . . the infamous iPhone App Store approval process.
The idea was a way to show people the best food in Japan beyond sushi — to literally show them, in picture form. Then the thought morphed into writing to a book, where the best food in the world was shown. But that’s a lot of travel for one person. So the thought became, why not crowdsource it? That’s Foodspotting.
Foodspotting is an application that allows you to take picture of a food, say what it is, and pin it (with geolocation) to the restaurant where you got it. You may wonder who would use such an app — but just think for a second about how many of your friends on Twitter tweet out pictures of food. People have been doing this long before Foodspotting, this app just gives them more of an incentive to do so, and let’s them organize it.
It’s also one hell of a new food discovery tool. And that’s exactly why the team behind it, Alexa Andrzejewski and Ted Grubb, hustled to get the official iPhone app done in time for the SXSW festival, which starts next week in Austin, Texas. With it, you’ll be able to use the “Guides” to easily find (and contribute to) the best foods in Austin. The Foodspotting team put together a few of these guides (including a scavenger hunt, and a street food one), but other users have already created others as well.
Mobile data is on fire. Despite a few false starts, we are now in the midst of a transformative “Open Mobile 3rd Wave” (remember WAP, and J2ME?). We are just in the early swell of the wave; the iPhone itself is not even three years old, and thanks to continued improvements we’re now seeing in smart phones, mobile OS platforms and 3G/4G networks, the raw ingredients are just getting better every month. Per the views of many mobile denizens and thought-leaders such as well-known internet analyst Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley, I certainly believe there will emerge new industry-transforming Facebooks, Googles, and Yahoos in this mobile wave.
However, a key topic discussed by us mobile geeks and startups is the challenge of mobile platform fragmentation. There is an alphabet soup of protocols, standards, and regional differences by-country which can be daunting for any entrepreneur.
Editor’s note: Richard Wong is a venture capitalist with Accel Partners, an investor in AdMob, GetJar, and SunRun, and a former mobile industry executive..
More and more apps are stricken from the App Store as of late, for a variety of reasons. Today, the Apple hammer hit Tokyo-based Tonchidot whose augmented reality app Sekai Camera was removed without warning.
The free app, which made its – memorable – debut during TechCrunch 50 in 2008, intends to help users “tag the world” by imposing information (text, pictures, video and audio) over images in the iPhone camera.
In December 2008, Microsoft surprised a lot of people by releasing an iPhone app — Seadragon Mobile. A month later, they ensured the move wasn’t taken as a joke or gimmick by launching another app, Tag, into Apple’s App Store. Now, they have a few, including an app for Bing. And starting today, they’re doing the same for Android.
Tag for Android is the first Microsoft-made app launched on the mobile platform. This is notable, of course, because Android is the mobile platform by Microsoft’s chief rival: Google. Still, as we saw with the iPhone, Microsoft has no problems getting its technology out there, even if it means using rival platforms. Aside from Android and iPhone, Tag also currently works on Windows Mobile, J2ME, Blackberry and Symbian S60 phones.