Virtualization, Cloud Computing and Mobile

2010년 9월 16일 목요일

Nokia and Intuit Announce Partnership for Mobile Marketing Services

At Nokia World 2010 in London, Nokia's EVP of Mobile Phones, Mary McDowell, brought Intuit's Global Business Division president Alex Lintner on stage for an announcement regarding a new partnership between the two companies. The partnership is a strategic alliance for a first-of-its-kind service designed to help small business owners around the world increase revenues through a mobile marketing service offering. This service will include a combination of offers, advertising and location-based features that will direct customers to where they can find products to buy in their own neighborhoods.

According to McDowell, the partnership will increase foot traffic to small businesses that adopt the service by at least 10%.

Specifics about how the technology will be implemented and distributed were not delved into in any detail, but at one point McDowell referred to this suite of services as an "app." The app will connect businesses to potential customers over multiple channels, including social networking services like Facebook and Twitter, as well as SMS and email. Location-based services will also play a role, which will be tied into Nokia's Ovi Maps, something that McDowell said will be an important part of the new offering.

Now Any iPhone App Can Be an Augmented Reality Browser

Augmented reality (AR) is a fast-growing trend for mobile application developers, but few tools exist that make including the emerging technology in an app quick and easy. Many popular brands have published content on various mobile AR browsers, but it's not too surprising that they might want to include the technology in their own apps. Layar, the most widely used mobile AR browser, is looking to fulfill this need with the release of Layar Player - a few lines of code iPhone developers can use to embed full AR Layar content in their apps.

Popular high-end vendors like metaio and Total Immersion offer licensed SDKs that can be used to develop full-blown applications from the ground up, but some brands may want a simpler solution to add some AR flare to an existing app. Just as the popular app RedLaser offers embeddable barcode scanning (as used by Target and other brands), Layar now lets iPhone app developers include AR layer browsing directly within their apps. Oh, and it's free.

By dropping a few lines of code in an existing iPhone app, developers can fully embed their Layar content layers within their own apps. Layar likens the ease of use to embedding a YouTube video on a web page. For AR content developers with layers published on Layar, they can now include this AR view directly in their own apps.

The ease of use Layar Player provides is an attractive solution for brands that may not want to dive in head-first into augmented reality with a full-blown app. Target, for example, which implemented RedLaser's barcode scanning SDK, could similarly use Layar Player to let app users find store locations in an AR view.

2010년 9월 13일 월요일

Android Will Be Number 2 Mobile Operating System Worldwide by Year-End

Research analysts at Gartner have forecasted that Google's Android mobile operating system (OS) will become the second largest platform in terms of market share by year-end 2010. Symbian, however, will remain number one. Garner also notes that by 2014, the end of the forecast period for this latest market research report, Android will vie for the top spot against Nokia's Symbian OS.

Yes, Android is officially on the path to world domination.

Here in the U.S., much of the tech news is centered on the smartphone battle between Apple's iPhone and Android. But on the global stage, the top mobile players are Nokia's Symbian, Android, Research in Motion (makers of Blackberry smartphones), then iOS, the operating system that powers the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

Principal analyst Roberta Cozza at Gartner noted that recent and upcoming launches of new smartphone operating systems including iOS4, Blackberry OS 6, Symbian 3 and 4 and Windows Phone 7, will help maintain the current trend of heavy growth in the smartphone sector, but her firm believes that market share worldwide will still revolve around the four key providers mentioned above.

The reason these companies have maintained, and likely will continue to maintain, their top spots involves a number of factors, most notably the support they have from communications service providers and developers, as well as their strong brand awareness with both enterprise and consumer customers.

Introducing Google Instant

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElubRNRIUg4&feature=player_embedded

Google Instant Search Inspires Mashups Across the Web

People are still getting used to Google Instant Search, the format that displays search results as you type. But the idea has captivated developers and inspired a growing number of search engines that let you preview the results without having to press enter.

You can now try Instant Search for Twitter, Flickr or iTunes, or just head to the new site Instantise to find links to 16 instant search apps inspired by Google's innovation last week.

Why do developers love instant search

This App Recommender Would Like to Use Your Location

The Software Engineering Lab at Münster University of Applied Sciences in Germany has released an interesting Android app discovery tool as part of a research project on context-aware mobile systems.

Appazaar learns which applications you find interesting by tracking your application usage and comparing you to other people with similar interests, much like Apple's Genius does in the App Store. It also takes your real-time location into account.

"Android users are mobile people and often change their location," researcher Matthias Böhmer wrote in an email. "With their location they also change their activity, for instance from working at the office to chilling at the beach. Appazaar uses that to optimize its recommendations! Surely you agree that you require apps for productivity at work and games and music apps for relaxing at the beach."

Like other app discovery tools, appazaar makes recommendations based on users' interests and the apps they've previously downloaded. But it also uses context - time and location - to serve up suggested apps. "A use that has never been in a specific context before receives recommendations on what other users have used in a similar context before," the researchers wrote in a paper that will be presented at an upcoming international conference on recommendation engines in Barcelona. In downtown Portland? Try the PDX Food Cart Finder.

A Fail Whale For the Rest of Us: Social.DownorNot.com

Netherlands-based website monitoring company WatchMouse has created a public website dedicated to measuring performance at social networking sites including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Del.icio.us, Digg, Xanga and Flickr.

WatchMouse also release uptime statistics for the top 20 social sites for the month of August. The leaders were Orkut, which had no downtime, Flickr with just four minutes of downtime, Del.icio.us with 12 minutes of downtime and the gaming site hi5 with 32 minutes of downtime.

Digg was in the bottom five with 15 hours and 35 minutes (2.16%) downtime due to issues with its relaunch. Other relatively poor performers included MySpace with a day, seven hours and 27 minutes of downtime (4.36%) and YouTube with a day, five hours and 18 minutes or 4.07% downtime.

Twitter was only down for an hour and 16 minutes total all month, tied with LinkedIn and Yelp.

Uptime for the top 20 social networking sites monitored by WatchMouse: