Tom Thornton calls it the “wow” factor. The third-party applications built for Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch have plenty of it. “It’s ‘Wow,’ I can’t believe a phone can do this now,” says Thornton, a senior research science at usability specialist Perceptive Sciences in Austin, Texas. 
But there’s a dark side to wow moments, too. Thornton had one of those when he was fooling around with MyWeather. He discovered the weather application’s best feature–a nifty, full-screen depiction of the weather–entirely by accident when he inadvertently tilted his phone on one side. That “wow,” Thornton says wryly, More»

Labels: apps, iPhone, usability

The free food days at Google are numbered. Googlers will no longer be getting free dinner, tea trolley, or afternoon snack attack services. Valleywag broke the story and according to their source, “Google has drastically cut back their budget on the culinary program”. As the publication puts it, “Google has long milked its cafeterias for their publicity value; company executives have crowed about the company’s resistance to recessions and its commitment to coddling its employees. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin even promised shareholders they’d add perks, rather than cut them.”
In 2004, More»

Labels: Apple, Facebook, google, iPhone

Apple’s Boss Steve Jobs told the WSJ that iPhone apps are making the company $1 million a day. So far the company has made $30 million over the past month. I is pretty good I must say given that most of the apps are free and only a small percentage actually purchase apps.
If sales stay at the current pace, Apple stands to reap at least $360 million a year in new revenue from the App Store, Mr. Jobs said.
“This thing’s going to crest a half a billion, soon,” he added. “Who More»

Labels: applications, iPhone, Steve Jobs

It seems like everyone is excited about the new iPhone that was introduced by Apple on Monday (many people are actually calling it the Jesusphone) but I think everyone’s missing the big picture.
What triggered those thoughts was yesterday’s blog post from Mashable, discussing what was really revolutionary about the new iPhone:
And, The Really Big Thing About The New iPhone Is… GPS. Global Positioning System . Geo-anything. Location based services. (…) Why hasn’t all this happened before? Three words: ease of use. While you could have done all these things for the Symbian More»

Labels: Apple, GPS, iPhone, Local Search, mobile web

Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo told investors that company would like to act “more like an internet company” than a “traditional manufacturer”. Translation - we have a Google Strategy and an iPhone Strategy.

The company has been on a buying bing very much like AOL has been. However instead of buying into new markets like AOL, the company has been making acquisitions that extend its core products in new markets.
Google StrategyNokia has More»

Labels: iPhone, nokia, web strategy

Infoworld reports that HTC is developing their Android based phone. Initial reports make the Dream look like a very solid competitor to the Apple iPhone. The dream will have both a full touchscreen and a qwerty keyboard. Apple iPhone critics often complain about the lack of a real keyboard, so this may be a key Dream advantage.
Infoworld also reports that Samsung is probably developing a similar phone based on the Android platform.
More»

Labels: android, dream, dream phone, iPhone

Mashup Camp is wrapping up in Mountain View and the votes are getting counted for the best mashup. I was not very impressed yesterday, but today previewed several projects that were both elegant and seemed to have some practical - perhaps even commercial - benefits.
It is not really fair to judge these based on the 5 minute ¨mini-pitches¨ in front of small laptops, but thatś how we do it here at Mashup Camp.
My favorite was Mapdango, which used about 5+ APIs from services like Flickr, Wikipedia, and Google to search city focused information and deliver an More»

Labels: iPhone, mapdango, mashup camp 6, mashups

There are only 4 days remaining until the WebGuild Web 2.0 Conference & Expo on Tuesday, January 29, 2008.
Visit the Bay Area Internet Solutions (BAIS, Inc.) booth, proud sponsor of the Web 2.0 Conference & Expo, to check out their Web 2.0 specific promotions and to enter for a chance to win an iPhone! The winner will be announced at the event.

More»

Labels: iPhone, web 2.0

Want to develop applications for Google’s new Android mobile phone platform and make a cool $275K?! Google has put $10M into a competition to do just that. The idea is to develop a lot of original cool apps that are highly functional as well as usable. The apps need to access core Android functionality like location-based services, accelerometer and always-on networking.
The smartphone market is heating up and Google is looking to the development community to create the killer app that’s going to make people switch to Android. Apple also recently announced that More»

Labels: Apple, google, GPhone, iPhone, Mobile, web applications

Google has made a number of improvements to their Google Apps on the iPhone. Just a month after the launch of its initial version, the Google Apps for iPhone diehards have gotten even slicker. The web applications including Search, Gmail, Calendar, and Reader are now sporting an even more streamlined interface intended to make the applications faster, easier to activate, and improve their overall usability via the iPhone touch-screen interface.
The new features include the ability to customize default tabs for easier navigation, speedier Gmail where new emails automatically appear eliminating the need More»

Labels: Apple, google, iPhone