Mobile Archives - Page 12 of 15

Instagram For Android Review

So Instagram is finally on Android. We’ve been waiting for this hit iPhone camera app to come to Android for a while now, and while some of the community is saying “Android didn’t need Instagram, we have our own Retro Camera”, the fact of the matter is this: Instagram is a big deal. Instagram has received millions of downloads on Apple’s App Store, and no doubt will receive a ton of downloads on the Play Store as well. However, a lot of times when apps are ported from iPhone to Android, they lose much of the polish that made them what they are in the process. Did this happen with Instagram? Should you jump on the bandwagon and give this app a try? We’re here to tell you.

Instagram on Android is very simple to set up. You simply download the app, input your credentials, and you’re on your way. Once you link all of the social media accounts you choose, you can find all of your friends that have linked their Instagram accounts to these networks, and easily follow them. Once you add all of your personal friends, the service will then suggest users you can follow to keep up-to-date on some of Instagram’s most popular photos.

More after the break

When you finally get into the app, you can immediately see the home tab where your stream of pictures show up. From this page you can scroll through and look at all of the different things uploaded, like them, and comment on them as well. The scrolling is very smooth and you can easily expand and comment on photos. Their are a lot of cool aesthetics to make the app shine, such as the name of the uploader scrolling with the picture until it is bumped of the screen by the next uploader. You can also do other cool little things like double-tapping on pictures to like them, and so forth. Next to the home tab is the popular tab, and from here you can check out all of the most view and liked pictures on Instagram. They show up in a grid format where you can see about 20 pictures at one time with a little room to scroll and a refresh button in the corner to bring up new content. When clicking on these pictures you can see the same normal options: liking and comments.

When you click the middle camera button you can choose to take a picture or choose one from the gallery, and after you decide and have a picture Instagram really starts to shine. You can choose from a ton of different filters to add cool effects to your pictures, making them look old and worn out or bright and trendy. There is plenty of filters, and they all add a new, different effect to your photo. Sliding through the filters is very easy, and it takes no time at all for it to be applied to your picture. Once you choose your filter you can choose to post and share with Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Tumblr, but alas, there is still no option for Google+.

On the next tab you can see all of the news you and your friends are sharing, such as things people are liking and when someone follows someone new. This can offer a pretty easy way to find new people and discover new photos to like and comment on based on what your friends are interested in. In the next tab you can view your profile and edit your information such as your name, picture, and bio. The push notification settings are also buried in this menu for some reason, but once you get to them you can choose what you want to be notified for which is also a very helpful option.

As a whole, Instagram made a great jump from iPhone to Android. Just about everything from the filters to the polish came along with the port, and the time it took the devs to get it in the Play Store really paid off. Instagram is smooth, easy to use, and really brings the full experience to Android without leaving much behind. Whether you’re into photography or not, you should definitely check this app out.

Be sure to follow us on Instagram too! ElijahIsMe & TheDroidGuy

Instagram’s Play Store link

Google Wallet Co-Founding Engineer Joins Square

Fresh on the heels of the departure of Google Wallet’s Jonathan Wall, co-founding Google Wallet engineer Rob von Behren has departed the internet giant as well.

In what von Behren categorized as an unplanned move, he has left Google entirely for Square’s San Francisco office. von Behren told the NFC Times:

“When I left the Google Wallet project in January, I fully expected to stop working in payments but to remain at Google,” he said. “After meeting the team at Square, however, I decided to do the opposite. Square is doing some great things in the payment space. They have a strong leadership team and a culture that fosters innovation.”

Square’s current solution doesn’t rely on NFC. They manufacture a dongle that connects to your Android smartphone or iPhone and allows small businesses to purchase credit card transactions by swiping a card through the dongle.

Square has just re-released their consumer app which is now called “Pay with Square”. This payment method allows people to pay without submitting a card for swiping.

The app uses geolocation to identify account holders in proximity. This would be a really good place to start looking for NFC integration.

source: NFC Times

Siri Gets Sued Again

Siri has been in the news it seems like everyday since she was released on the iPhone 4S. Not only has she been in the news she has been featured in regular sitcom tv as well. Earlier this year Big Bang Theory featured Siri in an episode where Raj falls in love with her. Raj has an ailment that doesn’t allow him to talk to human women without consuming alcohol. With Siri, he didn’t need to consume alcohol. The joke is driven home when Raj tracks down the Siri command center and tries, to talk to the real life Siri and just stumbles in disappointment.

The way Apple showed off Siri’s abilities have driven two different men to file suit against Apple. The latest plaintiff is David Jones. He filed his lawsuit on Tuesday in a Los Angeles district court. The suit was filed because of “false and deceptive representations” of Siri’s skill set, according to the Los Angeles Times.

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Flud The “Instagram For News” Raising $8 Million Dollars Heads To Android

San Diego based startup Flud, a social news reader app for iPhone is does a great job of differentiating itself from other news readers like Taptu and Pulse.

They do this by allowing users to create profiles join the platform and share their news with others in their network. The UI is very polished and some in tech circles are calling Flud, the Instagram for news.

Sure everyone has access to the same internet and the same news stories but the way people curate the news is what makes some blogs and most news aggregates so popular.

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Millennial Media Stock Opens With A Bang

Millennial Media, the largest independent mobile ad platform in the world, went public this morning on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker symbol MM. Millennial had said earlier on that they expected shares to go for between $9 and $11 at their IPO. Yesterday that number was revised to $11 to $13 per share. What happened today was nothing short of amazing.

The opening trade this morning on Millennial stock was $25 it was hovering around $26 per share around 10am eastern time this morning. It was at $25.16 at noon.

CNBC’s Jim Cramer has been talking up the mobile phone space saying that it’s the way of the future. That could be what’s driving the stock for the Baltimore based ad network.

They also have a financially sound business. Millennial did over $104 million in ad placements last year and have been on a steady trajectory of growth since being founded in 2006 by former Verizon VCast honcho Paul Palmeri.

Millennial Media’s stock story this morning has been raising some eyebrows. Yahoo advertising executive, Michael Katz, tweeted this morning:

Millennial Media’s marketcap is almost bigger than the actual Mobile Ad Maket [sic]. Tell me how this makes sense.

The Motley Fool this morning called Millennial Media “The mobile advertising play you’ve been waiting for”. Fool writer Rick Aristotle Munariz speculates that Millennial’s position as the second largest mobile ad player overall, and ahead of Apple’s mobile ad unit, may be driving the success of their IPO.

source: SAI

Seattle Based Urban Spoon Sees Big Growth In Reservations

While OpenTable is still by far the giant in the world of table reservation apps, Seattle based Urban Spoon is making great strides in a territory that once exclusively belonged to OpenTable.

UrbanSpoon has been known since it’s inception for it’s slot machine style interface for serving up great restaurant suggestions. When you open up the Urban Spoon app on your Android or iPhone you shake it and the three bars rotate like a slot machine. They eventually land on a restaurant recommendation.

UrbanSpoon reported to Geekwire that last month they sat one million people using their reservation system. That’s not a lot considering San Francisco based OpenTable claims they’ve sat over 280 million people since coming online in 1999. Opentable also claims to have 25,000 restaurants in their system.

Urban Spoon on the other hand says they have restaurants in the thousands, the San Francisco Chronicle says that Urban Spoon has 4,000 restaurants in it’s network.

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Charlotte Based Startup Rawporter Putting A New More Viable Spin On Citizen Journalism

Rawporter made a pretty nice impact at South By Southwest in Austin Texas earlier this month. This two person start up out of Charlotte NC is bringing a new concept to citizen reporting. With Rawporter, not only can a citizen report the news via video, they can also get paid for it.

Rawporter came about when friends and co-founders Kevin Davis and Rob Gaige were hanging out and then saw a horrible accident. Of course everyone on the scene of the accident had their camera phone out and were shooting the entire scene, but when they got home and turned on the 11:00 news, Gaige tells me that the only shot they had was the reporters stand up at a cleared scene.

Gaige and Davis knew that there had to be someway for those people who too that video, and the hundreds of thousands of people who take videos of incidents like this everyday, could both get sourced and make money.

Gaige has a background in marketing. Davis has a background in news radio, and then changed careers to marketing. They both met in the marketing department at Bank of America. As they see first hand that the biggest companies in the world are cutting back staff, and Davis knows that news media jobs are eliminated every day, citizen reporting can easily become a huge source for news stations.

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I Won The Windows Phone 7 Challenge But They Didn’t Let Me Win In The End

Microsoft might have to sweat this one out for a while as Sahas Katta walked into a Microsoft store today, took the Windows Phone 7 Challenge, WON, but was denied his prize. For those that don’t know the back story on the Challenge here we go…

This is a skill-based Contest. The object of this Contest is for You to come into the Microsoft Store and try to beat the Microsoft Windows Phone in a series of five (5) “Smoked by Windows Phone” challenge scenarios selected by Microsoft at its sole discretion including: (1) Pocket-to-Picture-to-Post, (2) Real-Time Information with Live Tiles, (3) Using the People Hub to Stay in Touch with the People You Care About Most, (4) Updating Your Status Across Multiple Social Networks, and (5) Local Scout (“Challenge”)

Knowing There’s NO Interest In Window Phone 7, Nokia Willing To Bribe AT&T Employees

Window Phones 7 which never picked up any steam now may get a push due to some bribing by Nokia. The Verge and other outlets are reporting that due to no one in the public actually wanting a WP7, Nokia will be bribing AT&T and their employees with their latest one. The Lumia 900 will be free for all AT&T employees as part of their “Company Use” phones. While this isn’t a first for a manufacturer to offer a phone for free to employees as part of a program. This is the first time one paid a company over $25 million to bribe it’s employees to use it.

OMGPICTURELIFE: Charles Forman’s Next Project Heating Up

Charles Forman (left) with MC Hammer & Dan Porter (photo: Business Insider)

The news that Zynga has purchased OMGPOP for a reported $200 million dollars must have made Picturelife.com founder Charles Forman very happy, and very rich. While OMGPOP’s executive team has been running the show, Forman, founder of OMGPOP with Dan Porter, has been busy working on his new start up Picturelife.

Picturelife is the collaborative effort of three young executives experiences in the entrepreneur world. You’ve got Charles Forman who started OMGPOP as Iminlikewithyou iilwy, Nate Westheimer, who for 4 years with the Executive Director of the NY Tech Meetup, and Jacob DeHart, founder of threadless.

Picturelife is supposed to be the one central place to put and store all your photos from all your devices. Some in tech circles have called it a Flickr killer. Currently it’s in beta and it will cost you $7.00 a month of $70 for a year to get into the beta. The founders do promise a freemium model when they launch to the public.

source: VB

16 Year Old Secures $300,000 In Venture Capital For Summly

16 year old founder of Summly, Nick D'Aloisio Is Said To Be The Youngest Person To Ever Secure Venture Capital

At London’s Web Summit being held this week in the UK, it was revealed that Nick D’Aloisio, the creator of iPhone app Summly, had received $300,000 in venture capital from Asia’s Horizon Ventures. Horizon Ventures is led by Li Ka-Shing, Asia’s richest person. It’s being reported that Aloisio is the youngest person ever to secure venture capital.

Summly is an iPhone app that summarizes and condenses search results and web pages. D’Aloisio developed this app out of necessity while he was studying for a history exam for school. He started to notice that his Google searches weren’t yielding quality results.

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New Mobile Healthcare Start Up Gets $7.5 Million In Funding For Doctor Video Replays

Have you ever gone to a doctor’s appointment, and after waiting an hour in their waiting room and spending 8 minutes in the doctor’s care, gotten home just to forget what the doctor ordered? Well apparently this happens to a lot of people. That is the fundamental idea behind a new mobile healthcare start up called Jiff.

Jiff allows doctors to make quick video presentations based on recommendations with voice, video, charts, drawings and more. These video replays can be stockpiled for typical diagnosis or customized based on the doctors and patients needs. Than, the HIPPA compliant app can send the videos to the patient’s email address so they can review it later, over and over again.

Jiff hopes to solve the problem of follow up phone calls because the patient couldn’t recall the conversation, freeing up doctor’s time for follow up phone calls with further problems and complications and other ways of assisting patients.

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Synapse And Start Up Viableware Develop Mobile Payment Platform For Restaurants

As payments go more and more mobile the next industry that should naturally heat up is restaurants and hospitality.

Although it’s not a rampant issue there have been cases where restaurant employees have been able to swipe and clone customers credit cards and then sold the information on line or used it later to commit credit card fraud. Viableware’s new RAIL system will eliminate than once it’s implemented on a larger scale.

Windows Phone Soon To Join Google+ Party

Google+ took the world by storm this past summer and quickly excelled to over 90 million users. Of course the Google+ Android app has the most features and is the one updated the most however the iOS version has caught on quickly, and after a brief problem with no back button, and no “clickies” it’s almost as good as the Android version.

Windows Phone 7 users were left out in the cold. Google only has one app on the Windows Phone 7 OS and that is their search app which just received a nice overhaul. Google+ users who have a Windows Phone have been relegated to using the mobile web version of Google+. While the mobile web version is pretty feature heavy, it’s not the same as having a dedicated app for the fastest growing social network in the history of social networks.

That may all change soon as a Google PR Rep from Germany, Stefan Keuchel, posted a message on Twitter letting folks know that the Google+ app for Windows Phone 7 is currently in the works. Keuchel didn’t specify a release date.

There’s been a flurry of Google+ news on the internet lately. It all began with a ComScore report that suggested most Google+ users are spending less than 3 minutes a month on the service. That news was compounded by two interviews with one of Google+’s leads VP of Social, Vic Gundotra. The most recent, a fireside chat with author and Twitter celebrity Guy Kawasaki. In the Kawasaki interview Gundotra suggested that people not getting the most out of Google + are using it wrong.

Google has pushed their social initiative to the max by basically integrating almost every Google service available through their social network.

source: Neowin

How Guy Kawasaki’s Chat with Vic Gundotra Changed My Thinking about Google+ (anetahall.wordpress.com)
New Google Search app released for Windows Phone (cnet.com)
Google Tries Its Hand Again at Windows Phone Search App (pocketnow.com)

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