Tag Archives | Apple. iPhone

Katango: Your Facebook Friends, Grouped Automatically

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 12, 2011 at 9:46 am

When Google+ arrived at the end of June, it made a splash in part based on its defining notion: you have different kinds of friends and don’t want to share everything with all of them all of the time. This week a new iPhone group-messaging app called Katangoo is debuting. And its defining feature–which it came up with a long time before Google+ went public–is that people have different kinds of friends and dont want to share everything with all of them all of the time.

Katango’s distinctive feature is that it uses artificial intelligence to analyze all your Facebook friends, identify common attributes, and then automatically sort them into groups of people with something in common. The more friends you have, the more time this approach might save compared to you trying to organize them by hand.

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Apple Rumors: The More the Murkier!

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 8, 2011 at 4:08 pm

Apple rumors, in case you hadn’t noticed, are everywhere. There are tons of them–especially on future iPhones and iPads. And if you don’t like a particular one, wait a day or two–another one will come along that confidently says that the first one was hogwash.

As I’ve mentioned here, perhaps too often, I don’t bother to report most Apple rumors here. (I do cover ones that seems utterly plausible or utterly implausible–they’re the two best kind.) I do read them on other sites, though. And I’ve decided to perform a public service by rounding up a bunch of them. I figure that the chances are virtually 100 percent that at least a handful of the “scoops” after the jump are spot on. Your job is to figure out which ones!

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Verizon Powers 32% of All iPhone 4s in the U.S.

Posted by Ed Oswald on July 7, 2011 at 2:12 pm

If you subscribe to the theory that most potential iPhone buyers on Verizon have held out on purchasing a device till the new model launches this fall, then this statistic should surprise you: 32% of all current iPhone 4 users in the U.S. are on the Verizon network.

Yep, that’s right. Research firm Localytics released data Thursday that shows the device has shown steady growth since its launch on the Verizon network in February. The iPhone 4 started out on the right foot rather quickly, quickly grabbing 20% of the market early on, but its real growth has been over the summer.

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BlinQ TV, a $9.99 Social Universal Remote for Your iPhone

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 1, 2011 at 11:36 am

Back, in July, I wrote about Peel, a software-and-hardware system that turns an iPhone or iPod Touch into a slick universal TV remote. It’s neat. But it costs $99.95, and involves two doohickeys–one that you plug into your router, and one that sits near your TV.

Ryz Media’s BlinQ TV has a new twist on the same basic idea–and the most striking difference is the hardware. Instead of routing commands from your iPhone over Wi-Fi into a gizmo like the Peel’s “Fruit” and then into the TV via infrared, BlinQ gives you a lollipop-shaped IR blaster that plugs into the phone’s headphone jack and lets you control a TV, set-top box, and other living-room devices with no intermediary hardware. It costs one-tenth as much as Peel: $9.99.

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For Wi-Fi, PCs and Macs are Now a Minority

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 23, 2011 at 12:16 pm

It’s a big week for interesting stats relating to Internet usage breakdowns by device. Comscore has released numbers that say that the iPad accounts for 97 percent of tablet usage on the Web–no shocker there. And cloud networking company Meraki has published some data based on device usage numbers from its customers networks:

Whenever I look at numbers like these, I try to remind myself that we don’t know how precisely they map to the world at large. But they’re still fun to ponder.

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Pogoplug Goes Software Only (and 200 Technologizer Readers Get the Premium Version for Free)

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 22, 2011 at 11:08 am

Pogoplug is a clever $99 gizmo that lets you plug USB hard drives into your home network, so you can access their contents–photos, music, movies, and more–across the Internet. As anyone who’s used it knows, much of the cleverness lies in the nicely-done Web-based interface (and mobile apps) you use to connect to the drives and get at the stuff on them. And today, Pogoplug is releasing a software-only version for Windows and Macs that lets you experience that cleverness without investing in the gizmo.

Pogoplug’s software-based version works just like the hardware device, except the drive it’s putting on the Web is the one inside the Windows PC or Mac the software is running on. Once you installed the application on a computer and let it index your files, they’re available to you from any Web browser and from PogoPlug’s iPhone/iPad and Android apps.

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Talking Tom and Friends Aim for the Big Time

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 21, 2011 at 7:46 am

Outfit 7's Talking Ben

Characters from video games have been showing up in other media since…well, at least since Hanna-Barbera’s dreadful 1982 Pac-Man TV series. Now Outfit7, whose apps for the iPhone, iPad, and Android have been downloaded 135 million times, is getting in on the act. It’s signed up William Morris Endeavor, the talent agency headed by superagent Ari Emanuel, to represent Talking Tom Cat, Talking Ben the Dog, and the other characters from its programs.

Outfit7, which was founded in Slovenia and started releasing apps last year, doesn’t make games, exactly–its apps let you interact with puppet-like digital creatures by poking them, petting them, and speaking to them (they repeat what you say in their own voice). The programs are fun, the quality of the animation and the quality of the animation is good given the devices it runs on. The company has aspirations to become a Pixar-like powerhouse whose creations appear everywhere from movies to books to toys.

The most iconic characters to debut in a phone app to date are, of course, the Angry Birds. They’re already licensing superstars. The Outfit7 troupe hasn’t seeped into the public consciousness to that degree. But they were meant to be personalities from the beginning (unlike the Birds, who–let’s face it–are weaponry more than characters). I’ll be interested to see whether their appeal transfers to other media, and whether it’s possible to give them a bit more depth so people keep on caring for them throughout a film or storybook.

 

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Yahoo Tries Its Hand at App Discovery

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 17, 2011 at 10:58 am

The iOS and Android application marketplaces may both stock hundreds of thousands of programs–a reasonable percentage of which are pretty darn impressive–but it can be surprisingly  tough to find the good stuff. Neither Apple’s App Store nor Google’s Android Market does a fantastic job of steering you towards every program you might find useful and/or entertaining, giving third parties such as Chomp an opportunity to full the void.

Now a very large third party is entering the fray: Yahoo. It’s launched an app search engine for iOS and Android designed for desktop browsers, plus an app called AppSpot, available in iOS and Android versions, that recommends apps and lets you search for them. I’m glad it’s doing it–this is a logical challenge for a search engine to take up–but the results so far are mildly pleasant at best.

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