Time off

Just to tell you tht I am taking some time off. We are on holidays in Salou, in Spain, with limited Internet access.

Back in August ;-)

Google Launches App Inventor: DIY App Creation Tool for Android

Google launched “App Inventor,” a do-it-yourself mobile app creation tool that lets anyone build their own Android applications without needing to know how to program or even write a line of code. Instead, using an online interface, would-be developers visually design the app’s interface and interactions, using drag-and-drop blocks that specify what the app should look like and how it should behave.

Want your app to talk to Twitter? There’s a button for that. Want your app to use text-to-speech? No problem. Use the GPS? Piece of cake. Or so says Google, who had tested the app for a year prior to launch with groups that included “sixth graders, high school girls, nursing students and university undergrads who are not computer science majors,” reports The New York Times, who broke the story this morning.

Does that list of testers sound a little odd to you? “It’s so easy a high school girl can use it!” Or a nursing student! (A profession still dominated by women, mind you.) In any event, the point The New York Times was making is that Google App Inventor is so easy anyone can use it; they just came about that point in a somewhat sexist way.

Official DIY App Highlights Difference Between Apple and Google Philosophies

But DIY app creation tools aren’t new, nor are they unique to Google Android. However, apps like these usually exist as third-party applications, not ones that are officially launched and blessed by the company whose software they support.

For example, in Apple’s ecosystem, there are a number of DIY apps that let non-developers create and submit iPhone applications to the iTunes App Store without needing to know Apple’s own development language. Last year, we profiled over a dozen of these services, ranging from the templated creations made with Sweb Apps to the more robust app builders from Appceleratorand Rhomobile.

Unfortunately, third-party Apple tools are always just one step away from being knocked out of existence, thanks to Apple’s ever-changing software developer kit license. Earlier this year, Apple famously updated its terms to specify that only applications written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript would be permitted in the iTunes Store. The move was a swipe at Adobe, and the intended victim was Adobe’s Flash-to-iPhone packager, a tool that would have allowed Adobe developers to code for Apple’s platform with Flash. But in Apple’s zest to kick out Adobe, other application developers were fearful as well that they, too, would be affected.

Google: Anyone with an Idea is Welcome Here

Google, on the other hand, is taking an entirely different stance than Apple. Instead of locking down its App Market, barring entry to anyone but those who know how to code in the languages it specifies, Google is embracing “openness,” saying anyone with an idea is welcome here.

To function, Google’s App Inventor uses the Open Blocks Java library for creating visual blocks programming languages. Open Blocks is distributed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Scheller Teacher Education Program and derives from thesis research by Ricarose Roque. It’s also closely related to the Scratch programming language – a language, notes Forrester Research principal analyst Jeffrey Hammond, that was banned on the iPhone.

Yes, that may mean a bunch more “junk” applications, as TechCrunch rightly points out. But it could also mean more great applications, too. Or maybe just more of everything. Like Michael Gartenberg, partner at Altimeter Group, quipped on Twitter this morning: “…look how much damage those WYSIWYG word processors and graphics programs have done.” Damage? Like a Web where everyone can publish?

Those interested in signing up for App Inventor can do so here.

(from readwriteweb)

Google Maps Adds Built-In URL Shortening

Single-Serving Wine Glass is a Perfect Picnic or Party Ware

We drink beer from bottles, but even with a small single-serving wine bottle there is always a glass – so why not combine the two in to one and save everyone some hassle? These plastic glasses might not go over well at a formal dinner party, but for a toast-on-the-go or quick picnic they could just be the perfect table(-free)wares.

One inventor did just that, and then founded Wine Innovations around the concept. Though his yogurt-style, peal-off lid initially did not go over well with potential investors it ultimately has led to booming sales in Great Britain.

Think about it: sports games, large celebrations, all without the worry of broken glass underfoot and with the easy-carry advantage of walking around with non-spill, pre-filled glasses of wine. Hopefully they can do not just red and white but sparkling wines as well, since these would be ideal for something like a sizable New Years Eve event.

Whether this one-use disposable partyware is a step in the right direction in terms of sustainability is another question. Still, the units can be recycled, and surely it is at least a better design than handing out both miniature bottles and plastic cups (as they do on airplanes, etc…) for wine.

(from dornob)

Great Travel guides for the iPhone

Condé Nast Digital Britain recently unveiled a series of apps for the iPhone and iPod touch, dubbed Condé Nast Traveller City Guides. There are four separate apps for Barcelona, New York, Paris and Rome priced at around $9.99 each.

The apps [iTunes link] are divided into six sections containing more than 500 searchable listings, complete with venue information, photos and editors’ reviews:

• Neighbourhoods: Browse all listings in a single neighborhood
• See & Do: Major sites, museums, parks, farmers markets and other attractions
• Places to Stay: Organized according to location, price range, type (i.e. fashionable, family-friendly or classic), and a key feature (gym/spa, internet access, etc.)
• Eat & Drink: Mainly high-end sit-down restaurants with some exceptions, like a well-known knishery and an East Village dumpling house
• Shopping: Features an array of products, including apparel, home, records and electronics from high-end to outlets
• Nightlife: Bars, music, dancing and other venues for late-night entertainment
• Word of Mouth: Recommendations from celebrated New Yorkers like designers Oscar de la Renta and Paul Smith, nightclub owner Amy Sacco and architect Carlos Almadada

The list of venues is well-curated; there are enough to appeal to a relatively broad array of tastes without being overwhelming. Users can bookmark interesting listing by adding them to a to-do list and share them via Facebook, Twitter and e-mail.

What’s most impressive about the apps is their Augmented Reality functionality (pictured above). Simply point your phone in a direction and it will bring up images of nearby attractions, which you can narrow down by type. You can also use GPS to pull up venue locations on a map.

The apps contain a number of other neat little features as well, including a handful of guided audio tours and magazine articles, a travel journal, a Flickr-integrated personal photo log, a timeline of the city’s history and essential travel information about local customs, transportation and the location of tourist offices and so forth.

What’s more, Condé Nast Britain promises to update the apps’ content every four months free of charge.

The only major drawback are the prices, which are hard to justify when free apps like restaurant-finder Urbanspoon also come with many similar features (although Urbanspoon’s Augmented Reality functionality is admittedly more basic and many users would rather read a review from a food editor than from the guy next door). In all fairness, Zagat’s TO GO app [iTunes link] also costs $9.99, but then it has a key feature Condé Nast Traveller’s does not: the ability to make restaurant reservations. It also covers almost every major U.S. city in one app.

(via mashable)

Fring for iPhone gets 2 way video calls over 3G, even without iPhone 4

The Fring app, known by consolidating together Internet Messanging services such as Skype, MSN, Gtalk, ICQ and others, has just released an update that in the iPhone 4 allows to use the front camera for video conferencing using 3G.

This is big. Now if you have an iPhone 4 you are not obliged to use FaceTime alone, calling only to other iPhone 4 users using wi-fi.

Now you can call using 3g, and the thing I wonder is if you can call a PC running skype. That would be  big for me. I could call my mum in Spain and have a video call. I hope you can do so because in their official blog they put it this way:

Face-to-face video calls with friends on their Droids, Nokia (Symbian S60) and other iPhones

For those (like me) that have an iPhone 3GS, it does work as well. It uses the rear camera, so impossible to see your caller at the same time he sees you, but good enough for people, like me who has a baby and the grandma wants to see him (again if you can call a PC).

For the time being I just tested the test call. Quality was pretty bad compared with FaceTime videos I see around.

Another big thing (to be tested because I am a bit hesitant about the functionality in general) is multitasking. In principle it can run in the background, and uses push to notify new call.

They have also added twitter and facebook, but who wants that?

Good work Fring.

Soho OS Lands $1M, Opens Business Management Suite To All Small Businesses

A couple of months ago techcrunch covered Soho OS,describing its offering as a soup-to-nuts “hybrid of Quicken + Zoho + SalesForce”. Today, the company is announcing that it has secured $1 million in funding from The Time. This is on top of the $250K the company had raised in its pre-seed round.

The company has already begun putting the money to good use. As noted in the initial post, “the interface could certainly use a UX overhaul,” and it got one, and a new logo to boot. With a new color scheme, layout and consolidation, the new interface’s look & feel is softer, more pleasant on the eye, and more convenient to use. A definite improvement on the interface we previously reviewed.

Soho OS also beefed up communications features with video chat, SMS, VOIP, voice messaging, as well as improved conference calling and broadcast emails.

I really like where Soho OS is going but would like to see them charging a tiered service fee rather than rely exclusively on cutting commissions off their 3rd party integrated services. There’s no shame in charging your customers kids, especially if you provide them with clear value. Tattoo that please.

(from techcrunch)

10 New Retail Rules: What Would Google Do?

10 New Retail Rules: What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis Inspires New White Paper

Inspired by Jeff Jarvis’s book What Would Google Do?, Oracle has prepared a new white paper that outlines 10 ways retailers can profitably navigate today’s competitive landscape, which is marked by transformative consumer technologies as well as profound macroeconomic changes.

In his book, Jarvis reverse-engineers the success of Google and offers a prescription for success in a new economy that Google itself is helping create.

Titled “New Rules of Retail,” Oracle’s new white paper draws on Jarvis’s approach, focusing specifically on ways retailers can respond profitably to the new realities. The 10 rules, each illustrated by specific retail success stories, include

1. Listen to your customers. Social media means customers are talking to each other. Convert critics into fans and fans into influencers.
2. Become a destination for information. Assume customers are accessing information via smart phones—even from within stores. Retailers that share the most accurate and comprehensive product information will win favor with consumers.
3. Be transparent. Share both successes and failures with customers. Customers appreciate candor and want to align with retailers that reflect their values.
4. Communities of customers already exist, so help them organize better. Bring like-minded customers together to promote product discoveries and word-of-mouth advertising.
5. Serve small markets with niche products. Today’s technologies make it much easier to reach small, widely distributed markets.
6. Offer experiences to go with the products customers buy. Different experiences attract different customers for exactly the same products.
7. Use social networks to make better merchandising decisions. Social media makes it easier not only to collect data but also to collaborate and vote on new ideas.
8. Being green earns customers’ respect and lowers costs too. Consider new ways to recycle, be more energy efficient, design better stores, reduce emissions, and encourage environmental values.
9. Be prepared to pounce on your customers’ fickle interests. When assortments are kept fresh, customers tend to visit stores more often.
10. Give staff permission to fail so innovation won’t be stifled. A culture that allows for risk-taking and early adoption of technology can pay off handsomely.

Read the “New Rules of Retail” white paper.

(from oracle)

Keep your books library in the cloud

Let’s talk about books.
If you read blogs probably you enjoy reading books. During our lives we accumulate a ton of books and magazines. Well magazines we can bin (some of us) but books we keep.

Now with ebooks this is changing. There are still a lot of people who still things that all this kindle, iPad, Sony book reader are not the same, that they prefer to have a book in your hands. The smell of the book, the pages, the fact that there are no issues with direct light or if you take it to the beach… but if you think like this is probably because you are over 30.

Ebook readers have room for all the books you can have in a life time.

The parallelism would be CDs and MP3. Are you still buying CD’s? If you do, then traditional books are still for you.

Well what I wanted to discuss here is how do you organize your books. The ones you have on paper and the ones you have in your ebook reader and the ones you have in audio (this is my favorite now…).

For the paper ones, I take photos of each of them and I upload them to evernote. I have talked a million times about evernote, but briefly is a software that makes your photos indexable, so the text in it is searchable. I tag them and I put them all in a notebook called books.

Now every book has a note, so you can even add if you have lend it or tag it so.

True you have similar more dedicated software, but for me evernote works like charm. Same for the wine ;-)

If you want to have them in the cloud, so you can share, review, publish in facebook and so, there are 3 very good tools you should look at:

Visual Bookshelf from Live Social: This is a free software that it is fully integrated with facebook (and also they have a stand alone website), which is great for the following reasons:

You can have your full collection of books, those you have read, those you want to read and those you are reading.
You can publish at anytime in your wall that you are reading it. When you finish you are offered to give a rating and to write a review and then to publish it in your wall.
You can see what your friends are reading, which is the future of advertising. Direct recommendations from friends, who you trust in taste.

I started using this because my friend did.

Then I found:

Goodreads: They also have a dedicated site for this, also fully integrated into facebook. I also used it. I first exported all my books from Visual Shelf and imported them here. I prefer this site, but unfortunately none of my friends use it, and the fact I use and recommend this sort of sites is for the social aspect.

Finally:

Google Books: As a google fan boy I had to try this one. I don’t think they have an facebook extension, but I imported the book list too. It is ok because is google, but zero social

Conclusion:

For me Visual Shelf is the one that most of my friends use, so I use it, but I keep the three of them updated. Be aware you can import and export from all of them. Sometimes is not trivial though.

Tour de France 2010 real time with bing maps

Looking for tools to help you follow the 2010 Tour de France? Microsoft has built an app for Bing Maps that visualizes the various stages of the race and provides information like weather and results.

You can see the routes the cyclists are taking on the map, including important points like the beginnings and ends of stages. Weather forecasts, distances and times are provided for each stage, and results are updated in their own tab as they come in.

Microsoft has also put an elevation profile over the map. Just move your mouse along a route to see where the climbs and falls are.

Evo vs. iPhone: second round

Traveling? Create your own travel guide

Stay.com turns travel planning into a fun and social activity. Have fun discovering some of the best attractions, restaurants and hotels around the world, collect places you find interesting in your own guide and share it with family and friends.

Forget about your already outdated travel books. Stay.com has updated information on thousands of places to visit for your next vacation or business trip.

Simply collect everything you find interesting in your own personal guide. This way you can bring along all the details you need. You can print your guide in a nice compact format which is easy to fold and put in your pocket.

A very cool idea!

44 Creative Logo Designs with hidden symbols

Since I found out that the Carrefour logo (French supermarket chain) had a hidden “c” (in white), I started seeing a lot of logos with hidden stuff.

Here you have some:

Carrefour

Living in France and having Carrefour supermarket all around Europe, it is only now that I realized that there is a “C” in the white part of the logo. Carrefour is one of the biggest European retailers, and it’s also French for “crossroads”. The logo symbolizes this word via two opposite arrows. They also added the first letter of the name, because if you look closely you’ll see the letter C in the negative space between the two arrows.

Toblerone

You’ve probably seen the Toblerone logo dozens of times – it’s just a mountain, right? Look closer. There’s a bear shape hidden in the negative space within that mountain, symbolizing the city of Bern, Switzerland where the Matterhorn mountain that inspired the logo is located.

Read more