Posted by The Blogging Desk on Mon, Dec 20, 2010 @ 07:48 AM
I feel like everything I say after that will fall flat. Just go watch the video again. This changes everything we know about lame international tourists. Well, they will most likely still be lame, but they can at least find their way around town a little bit better.
The future!
Yowza. Augmented reality at one time held the promise of something special. It's great to finally see those things come to fruition.
Posted by The Blogging Desk on Thu, Dec 16, 2010 @ 03:00 PM
Techcrunch:
For a couple of days now, we’ve been hearing rumors that the Yahoo layoffs included the entire Delicious team. Now Former Yahoo employee and Upcoming founder Andy Baio has tweeted out the above Yahoo! product team meeting slide that seems to show that Yahoo! is either closing or merging the social bookmarking service as well as Upcoming, Fire Eagle, MyBlogLog and others.
In some kind of weird founder solidarity, the slide was originally posted on Twitter by MyBlogLog founder Eric Marcoullier.
Listed under the ominous “Sunset” are: Delicious, Altavista, MyBlogLog, Yahoo! Bookmarks, Yahoo! Picks
Oof. Not sure what is going on over at Yahoo. My final remaining prayer is that they don't touch Flickr. Or if they do, sell it back to the original founders to do as they will. It took ages for Flickr to finally release their iPhone app, and in the time it's been released, updates have been few and far between.
In the time it's been released, Instagram has taken the iOS world by storm. It's a free app that adds a social following feature revolved entirely around taking photos. It's only available on iOS and has no web version. It's been downloaded millions of times! Can you imagine if Flickr had the foresight? Their app is a poor social alternative.
So sad.
Posted by The Blogging Desk on Mon, Dec 13, 2010 @ 11:00 AM
Techcrunch:
One of the most successful mobile games right now is Angry Birds, which has been downloaded more than 30 million times across different mobile platforms, with 12 million of those being paid downloads on iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches. But on Android, the game is free, and is supported by advertising. Angry Birds has been downloaded more than 5 million times on Android since that version launched in October. “By end of year, we project earnings of over $1 million per month with the ad-supported version of Angry Birds,” says Peter Vesterbacka, the “Mighty Eagle” behind the game at Rovio Mobile.
This news shatters the idea that the Android platform isn't a viable alternative to the iOS App Store. Sure, Angry Birds is essentially this generations Pac-Man, but this is surefire proof. The Android ecosystem is still fragmented, but there is a growing audience looking for apps. Whether it be Google Apps, or a fun game to pass the time.
Posted by The Blogging Desk on Tue, Nov 23, 2010 @ 02:00 PM
MacWorld:
One of our favorite iOS 4.2 features is AirPlay, which lets you stream media from your iOS device to an AirPlay-compatible component such as the latest Apple TV or an AirPort Express. But we also want to be able to do the opposite: stream media from a source to our iOS devices. For example, a 32GB iPad can’t accommodate the 85GB of music and movies you’ve accumulated on your iMac. But if you couldaccess all that media from your iPad by streaming it over your Wi-Fi network, you might find that arrangement to be just as convenient. (In fact, the Apple TV lets you do exactly this, as does iTunes’s Home Sharing feature on Macs and Windows PCs.) Similarly, we’d love to be able to play, on our iOS devices, music and video on network drives—such as, say, a hard drive connected to an AirPort base station.
Posted by The Blogging desk on Fri, Nov 12, 2010 @ 03:00 PM
BGR:
If you’ve heard about the Kik messaging app, or as some would call it, “the new BBM”, you probably sat at the cool-kid lunch-table at school. Kik, a multi-platform messaging app designed to do one thing — communicate instantly and effortlessly with buddies — has absolutely exploded over the last few weeks. Originally on track to launch an innovative (and pretty cool) music-sharing, remote-controllable service, Kik soon found themselves creating a messaging app with some of their existing technology while the music service firmed up behind the scenes. After a pretty poor original launch (I tried Kik back then and the beta was definitely a beta — I uninstalled it soon after it was first installed), Kik stripped away almost everything until they ended up with one of the quickest and most reliable messaging apps around.