Android Archives - Page 5 of 6

Beyond The Lens: Colby Brown

This past weekend, in between our busy schedules some how me and Colby Brown where able to sit down together for another interview. He was the first Photographer I’ve interviewed for Beyond The Lens so our talks are a little more interesting. For those of you who have been living under a rock Colby pretty much is the ambassador on Google+ for both Photography as well as Android. He spear headed Behind The Lens Critique a group in which Photographers put their work on the “Chopping Block” and ask for critique. He also is the man behind the Android Photography page as well.

For what turned out to be yet another great interview, here you go.

Denver Startup: Closely Gives Small Businesses A Competitive Edge With Perch Dashboard

As a small business owner how do you keep track of what your closest competitors are doing? Do you wear blinders and pretend they aren’t there? Do you shop at competitor locations to see what they’re doing? Do you plant spies? Do you set up Google alerts?

While some of these things (except wearing blinders), may seem effective, they all involve time and most small business owners don’t have that. Luckily there is a Denver based startup called Closely that is looking to simplify the monitoring of your competitors in one easy to use dashboard they’re calling Perch.

Perch is currently in a closed beta. The founders at Closely are hoping that Perch will give local merchants a snapshot of competitors marketing activities and help merchants build ideas of how to respond.

“We found that the majority of businesses don’t quite yet understand the level of activity surrounding them,” Closely CEO Perry Evans told Street Fight in an email. “As the application that they learn to rely on for daily tracking and watching, we’re in a front row position for helping them participate.”

Evans, started his career in technology as head of the Mapquest publisher group so he’s very familiar with the benefits of LBS, group deals and the other technologies that are preying and benefiting local merchants.

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Leesburg VA Based Startup: Time Razor Promises You’ll Never Miss Out

Time Razor, a Leesburg VA based startup just recently took their project out of stealth mode. The company is venture backed and puts a new spin on events, and time management. TimeRazor was founded by Barry White (no relation to the R&B singer), who has a mixed background mostly in real estate development. However in the hustle bustle world of the DC suburbs we’re sure a developer knows a thing or two about time management.

What TimeRazor ultimately does is cut out the noise from other similar event recommendation apps. Through their proprietary software and algorithms TimeRazor combs through over 300,000 events a day and serves up suggestions and updates for events that the user would actually like to attend. They call this technology the “distillery”.

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Philly Startup: Lokalty Combines Local Loyalty Reward Cards With The Power Of One

Three University of Pennsylvania graduates, Balu Chandrasekaran, Philip Tribe and Bipen Sasi created a startup last October that puts an entire new spin on recommendation, reward and loyalty at the retail level. We’ve often suggested that the recommendation/reward space is going to become hotter than daily deals as merchants focus on retaining and growing their customer base through loyalty. While Lokalty is only available in Philadelphia at the moment, these three entrepreneurs get that.

According to their website Lokalty was born in February 2011 out of an idea that the three had at a Rittenhouse gym. They started working on the project seven months ago and went live just five months ago. As we suggested above, they were growing tired of daily deals and wanted to find something more effective for both the merchant and the customer.

The idea behind Lokalty has been tricky as Chandrasekaran told FlyingKitemedia:

“Growing the company has been tricky”, says Chandrasekaran, who says he and his partners have taken on a difficult task, marketing to businesses and consumers at the same time. “It’s the classic chicken and egg problem.” While Lokalty means marketing for retailers, “most small business owners would rather hear sales pitches that address the cost side instead of the revenue side.”

After the trio gets over this hurdle, the benefits to a platform like Lokalty are easy to see. A customer in the Lokalty program, like may of us, has a key ring full of rewards cards. With Lokalty you get one card for all the network merchants. Lokalty makes it so if you buy enough coffee from Elixr you can get free bagels from Spread Bagelry . You can use points from one merchant in the network with any other merchant in the network. So not only is the Lokalty program encouraging repeat business at one merchant, but they’re encouraging discovery and repeat business at all the other merchants in the network as well.

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Uber: Mobile Web App launched for those “other OSes” Windows Phone 7 and Blackberry

Yesterday Uber announced on their blog that they would begin to support Blackberry and Windows Phone 7 devices (and beyond, whatever that means). With the launch of m.uber.com users of the once dominant and almost relevant Operating Systems can finally take advantage of one of my personal favorite startups.

Prior to the mobile app being launched it was not possible to order a cab through devices other than iOS or Android, before that even Android was waiting in line (pun intended). Uber said in their blog post,

We’re excited to announce that our latest product, m.uber.com has been built with love and care for BlackBerry, Windows Phone and beyond! We want to make the Uber experience available to everyone, regardless of phone or carrier. That’s why we’ve introduced mobile web requests to let you request an Uber at any time from any phone……And when you make requests, you can also save favorite locations for places you frequently request from, such as home or work.

We recently stopped in to Uber’s Washington DC office but did not get a chance to spend any time talking to them about their expansion into new cities nor could we discuss the full-blown assault by the DC Taxi Cab Association. We are huge fans of the service though and we have been keeping a close eye on when they will be invading my hometown of Philadelphia. If you are in Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Paris, Seattle, Chicago, Toronto, or New York and you haven’t used Uber yet….you should. It’s that good.

Boulder Mobile Food Startup: Splick-It Adds Meal Ticket For Charity

Splick-it a mobile app startup based in Boulder Colorado has added a community minded touch to its app that allows customers to skip long lines and order ahead at area restaurants.

Customers who use the Splick-it app to order their favorite food can now round their order up to the nearest dollar which will in turn benefit Community Food Share. It’s a very easy process. Customers using the Splick-it app can change their donation settings in the settings menu and then forget about it. It’s that easy.

Splick-it is available on Android and iOS.

“Community Food Share can distribute four meals for every dollar donated,” said Jim Baldwin, chief executive officer for the 31-year-old charity. It distributes more than 7.5 million meals annually through a network of more than 50 member agencies and two direct service programs which target specific at-risk populations in Boulder and Broomfield counties.

Splick-It was founded by Trish Groom and Rob Taylor after Groom, who at the time owned a coffee shop, found that there was a giant obstruction in the form of a 10 foot beam that blocked the entrance to her shop and the counter. Groom found that she was missing customers. Taylor, a regular at Groom’s establishment, suggesting taking text-based orders and allowing those people to fly past the line and just pick up their order.

After the all too familiar bad experience with outsourcing development for their new app to Indian developers, Taylor and Groom happened into Adam Rosenthal from New York who eventually became their third co-founder and co-CTO. Today Splick-it has an Android app, iOS app and hundreds of area businesses participating in their community. It’s only fitting that they are trying to make giving back to the Boulder community an easy experience for their users.

source: Boulder County Business Report

Massachusetts Startup: 7 Lunches Brings Lunch Specials Right To Your Email Or Phone

The daily deals space is blowing up like crazy. Other than social discovery apps, daily deals has to be the hottest app platform out there right now. It’s getting crowded, but every once in a while something different comes along in the daily deals space worth mentioning.

7 Lunches is one of those things. With the hustle and bustle lives we all live these days, the cost conscious business professional doesn’t have time to comb through lunch specials on restaurant websites. They also don’t have the time to cruise down to their local hot spot to just “see” if there is a good special. We need to know the specials and we need to know them now.

That’s how co-founder and co-creator of 7 lunches, Ryan Maturski came up with the idea for 7 lunches. He was eating in a local sub shop in North Adams, MA and he told the owner that he should send his daily lunch specials out via email. Voila. Marturski and co-founder Jeff Lee set out to do just that, not just with the sub shop but with every restaurant that they could get to participate.

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Mark Zuckerberg Announces That Facebook Just Bought Instagram

In a post on Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg has just announced that they have bought the entire team at Instagram, the Photosharing mobile app. No price was mentioned in Marks post though as you can read below.

Beyond The Lens: Brent Burzycki

For this Beyond The Lens we take a look at Brent Burzycki, whom recently opened up to us in our What’s In Your Bag feature. He explains to us about his love for photography and how his Dad was a major influence in getting him interested in photography. Along with hints for those wanting to Photograph models in the future ;)

Instagram For Android, Why Did We Even Need It?

Instagram for Android came out today, and by searching Twitter, you could find either utter stupidity in the hatred or joy that it’s finally on Android. Both views though are utterly stupid. For one, those iPhone users are idiots and need more proof just reread what was said above, or click on Twitter in the first sentence and just follow the stream of stupidity down to your local Apple store.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying Instagram isn’t a “good” application, it’s just Android really never needed it. We have applications such as Paper Camera, puddling camera , Retro Camera Plus . Just to name a few. What Instagram did for the iPhone is something that has been done since Android first came out. Third party Camera applications with trendy filters that the camera couldn’t do on it’s own.

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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T-Mobile: We Are Sorry We Got Caught Spamming You, We’ll Stop

T-Mobile is coming under pressure today for an update they pushed to Android phones who’s users have downloaded the My Account Application. Not for battery drain, but for getting caught Spamming users. Knowing what they where doing, only to back peddle when it came to light it was them.

During a recent software update, a message to promote T-Mobile’s free VIP Zone was mistakenly sent to certain customers and appeared on the notification bar for some Android devices. After T-Mobile was made aware of this mistake, the company stopped the notifications. T-Mobile apologizes for the inconvenience this may have caused customers.

The company sent as an apology to TmoNews who broke the story. Sadly, this isn’t the first time that T-Mobile has done this, nor will be their last. This time they where trying to push their VIP Zone.

T-Mobile isn’t the first to push Spam via the notification on Android. Numerous reports are other applications have as well. Yet time and again users praise Android not Apple either though one OS has always issues of Spam and malicious Apps while the other doesn’t.

Source: The Verge

Meshin Recall: A Valuable Tool For Startups, Business And Everyone Else

Meshin, a Paolo Alto based s tart up and part of Xerox’s Paolo Alto Research Center, has released a valuable tool for startups, business and everyone in between. The tool called Meshin Recall, is currently available for Android smartphones and is in beta for iPhone.

Meshin Recall leverages your calendars and Evernote and ties them together to give a consistently flowing, easily indexed and accesible way to recall your notes in Evernote. By tying Evernote notes to your calendar you have an organized way of recalling the notes later, and of course that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Meshin’s founders Chris Holmes and Kristen Galliani, are doing vast amounts of research on semantics and the way people use the tools that they use everyday and making them more productive. Categorizing notes may seem like a menial task but so far it’s been the most effective. Everyone can tag notes in Evernote but the tagging system in Evernote is about as effective as hashtagging on Twitter. What do I mean by this? Well with Evernote you can tag a not any way you’d like, but once you have the freedom to so broadly tag your notes, it gets as hard to recall as the note itself.

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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”)