The iPhone has been a dating tool for a while, but Loopt's putting their technology to more... immediate uses with a new app called Loopt Mix. Warning: Finding love the Loopt way may involves waking at 7 a.m. in a strange bed, pulling on last night's clothes and taking the proverbial walk of shame.
Mix is a spin-off of a feature included in the original Loopt app that lets you see the profiles of people around you and gin up instant-message conversations. The app lets you choose what you're "interested in" from other Mixers, be it dating, networking, friendship, or "anything," the latter option reminiscent of Facebook's "anything I can get" relationship status. There are even push notifications built-in, so you know the moment that someone nearby wants to be your "anything."
Loopt Mix isn't quite as salacious as purpose-built sex-chat apps like theXchange, which allows you to trade (presumably gross) naked pictures with other users as you chat with them. But the push notifications add a sense of urgency not otherwise found in apps like Match.com's. The app is free in the iTunes Store and available now.
Even coffee makers are making like the iPhone and getting all touch-friendly. Lest we end up in a world of fingerprints and head-colds, it's worth asking: does everything that plugs into the wall need a touch screen?
The latest case in point is Lexmark's new Interact printer, which has a little iPhone-sized touch screen build into its face. There, you can noodle your way between all the usual print-copy functions, and since it's a WiFi printer, you can also see the weather. And the answer here is most decidedly, yes: This is one case where touch can finally make a difference.
I have a Lexmark multi-function printer from last year; it feels as if it has 7,000 buttons on its face (and by printer standards, it's easy to use). This Interact printer, by contrast, presents its options neatly and readably, with dummy-proof icons and big gorgeous touch-surfaces. It's not very often you can get excited about a printer, but the Interact takes another iPhone cue: you can set up Web-enabled apps to automate your most common workflows.
Last week, Wal-Mart cut the price of some popular new books to just $10, a slice of over 60%. Not willing to be out-done on home turf, Amazon matched them. Wal-Mart went down to $9. Amazon went to $8.99. Target jumped in tardily at $8.99. Then Sears jaunted into the battle and dropped some serious knowledge: books for free.
How? Buy any one of those deep-discounted books at Target, Wal-Mart, or Amazon, and send Sears the receipt at [readamerica@customerservice.sears.com], and they'll give you a credit of $9 towards anything you buy from Sears online.
Sears says this is part of some campaign called "Keep America Reading," which would be more appropriately called "Keep America Buying Books." And buy books they'll do, if the $10 price point sticks past the holiday rush.
So what does this do to indie bookshops, struggling as they already are? Well, it might actually help them, according to PubLunch, which reports:
"Boulder Bookstore buyer Arsen Kashkashian has suggested via Twitter that fellow indies cancel their publisher pre-orders on these deep-discounted forthcoming titles and take advantage of their competitors' loss leaders. Bookstores will save money, he reasons, while helping Amazon and Walmart.com lose more."
Glamour shots of this concept cell-phone wristwatch have been bouncing between design blogs, and Samsung announced recently that it would release a real-life analog in Europe by the fourth quarter of this year. But the wrist-mounted communications device has real roots--and I'm not talking about Dick Tracy.
In 1990, Motorola presented the world with this: the pager-watch, which it said would be the "personal communications tool for the 21st century." Developed in conjunction with Timex, the pager watch took "a long time" to develop, according to this AP newspaper article from 1989. It carried a "three-digit price tag."
Of course, it was doomed for replacement by the mobile phone, which was already in a useful (if clunky) incipience by 1990-1991.
With bargain-basement subscription prices and free Web articles, magazines have spent the last decade acting like startups who care for nothing but eyes. But unlike Twitter, publishing companies need revenue--and not just from ads. Fortunately for them, the iPhone might become the next conduit for profit, thanks to a little-utilized feature in iPhone OS 3.0: subscription pricing.
The textbook case: the McSweeney's app, which sells for $5.99. Instead of giving away their app for free, ala The New York Times, and stuffing it with ads, McSweeney's has chosen to sell their app for a relatively steep price--but built in is a half-year subscription to iPhone-only content that readers can't get on the Web. Once six months is up, users are asked to re-up their subscription for $5 for another six months.
The genius here, according to Harvard's Neiman Journalism Lab, is the app's use of push notifications. Every time a new weekly iPhone-version goes to "print," a users iPhone is sent a push notification that, when opened, jumps to the app. The iPhone imprint, which McSweeney's is calling Small Chair, lets some content (like humor) stay accessible even after a subscription lapses, encouraging app owners to see what they're missing from the rest of the content, and re-subscribe.
The best part: it's relatively easy--even easier than the Neiman Lab suggests. "With push notifications, updates are handled by the app's developers, not Apple--which means companies need to invest in hardware and prepare for the scale issues that arise when registered devices and custom content need to be matched," the lab's article says. But several one-man developer operations have made clever use of push, not least of all Zachary West, the developer of Prowl, a notification app. Once the developer figures out how his severs can "talk" to Apple's push server with an appropriately-formatted message, the notification process is straight-forward.
There is a multitude of Firefox extensions out there, but few are as useful as iCyte. iCyte allows you to save sites (or text from sites) in an archive, instead of just bookmarking a URL. Better yet, it lets you arrange those snippets into projects so that you don't end up with a million-link bookmark menu.
Even if the site or text you archive gets deleted, iCyte saves it--that's crucial for research projects and other messy bookmarking endeavors. A lot of people use note-taking desktop software like Evernote or VoodooPad for work like this, but for most people, those apps are a little too complex and heavy. iCyte lives inside your browser (Firefox or IE), allowing you to add things quickly and view them just as fast. You can also tag and add notes to your pages, keeping everything organized for big projects.
If you're working with other people, you can invite them in on a project so they can see your archived sites and add or edit them.
If you're too attached to your bookmarks to let go, there are other solutions. The best: Mozilla Weave, another Firefox add-on, which syncs not only bookmarks but history, tabs, passwords and other useful junk--so wherever you use Firefox you get all your stuff from home.
KaChing is a new startup that allows you to bet alongside top investors, so that every move they make can be duplicated in your portfolio. VentureBeat likens it to "fantasy football for investing junkies," but its effect is more subversive than that; it makes amateur day-trading into a guided art, in which small time investors can bet their eggs alongside the site's best performing members--for better or worse.
If you're a good investor, why let the rabble tag along? Because every investor that follows you pays you a fee between .25 and 3% (though KaChing takes a quarter of that).
KaChing calls the members of this leaderboard "geniuses," and they have to go through a vetting process before other customers are allowed to invest alongside them. (They have to be on the site for a year, and they also have to sign legal agreements that precludes them from front-running.) Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen is one angel involved in the project; another is OpenTable CEO Jeff Jordan.
So what's the inevitable downside? Betting on someone else's savvy takes personal research out of the equation. Services like E-Trade provide their customers with detailed analyst reports from outlets like ThomsonReuters, and anyone with money to lose makes it their business to read those reports for basic red flags (How much debt? When does it come due?). Though it's worth mentioning that KaChing doesn't see itself as an affront to services like E-Trade; instead, it hopes to disrupt the other "guided day-trading" market, otherwise known as the world of mutual funds. Competitors like Covestor are also vying for the same disruption.
KaChing's "investing IQ," a score assigned to each "genius," presents investors with a mental short-cut to doing their homework. A great time-saver if that genius bets right; a real face-palm inducer if they're wrong.
To check out KaChing for yourself, be ready to pony up a minimum of $3,000 and click here.
Seventy-five percent of people feel it's just fine to use computers and cell phones on the toilet, according to a new Intel survey conducted by Harris Interactive, despite what the survey calls "hygiene considerations and awkward explanations."
So why do we care? Dr. Genevieve Bell, Intel's director of user experience, says this kind of information is all part of understanding how technology has become "increasingly engrained [sic] in our daily lives," and how we hapless toilet-texters are supposed to set boundaries on accessibility.
The study continues: "[M]any online adults view the need for constant connectivity as a function of expectations set by the current business culture, with 55% agreeing that the nature of business today demands people always be connected...even if it means taking a laptop on vacation or answering a call during a meal."
The study also quotes an etiquette expert from that bastion of manners, the Emily Post Institute, on how holiday situations will make our need for techno-etiquette even more acute. It is becoming "more challenging to discern appropriate behavior from potentially offensive behavior," says the expert.
And why does Intel care? Perhaps because the closer it gets to designing purpose-built chips for things like netbooks and smartphones, the more it will need to consider usage scenarios as a guiding light. "Intel has been tracking emerging mobile etiquette as part of our larger efforts to make sense of the ways in which new technologies are adopted and used," Dr. Bell told FastCompany.com. "Clearly etiquette is a playful angle, but one I would argue is an important indicator of the increasing centrality of new technologies in our lives."
Should you temper your Internet consumption while on the can or at a party? Are some things better left to tradition? According to the study, at least one in three adults will probably be offended by some of your holiday behavior: using a cell phone in church, sending a gift wish-list, or multi-tasking on an airport line, for instance.
Sir Groovy, a just-launched iTunes-like music store, lets TV and movie producers browse a library of pre-approved songs they can license and use in their media. Instead of first choosing a song and then securing a license to use it, producers can now fast-track the process with considerably less cost by browsing the library's pre-approved songs. The site has been in R&D for several years, according to Variety.
Naturally, there's a catch. Sir Groovy isn't the first outlet to conceive of a library of license-ready media--stock image companies like Getty have been doing it for years. And as anyone who's used Getty can attest, there's always the chance that the photo (or song) you pick ends up being featured in a competing product, and that consumers catch on to the fact that it's pre-selected. It's equivalent to showing up at the prom and seeing someone else mirroring your outfit: embarrassing.
Still, for upstart or pilot projects that don't have the budget or the time for a drawn out licensing courtship, it could be a boon. Learn more about opening a Sir Groovy account here.
Ranking a company's influence in the iPhone universe is no easy science. That's why FastCompany.com has partnered with YouNoodle in an effort to mine the 25 companies that are fast becoming the power players of Apple's mobile world.
The rankings below aren't meant to tell you which apps are most useful or appealing--that's another story. The companies here are ranked by an algorithm that digests a different kind of data: it measures the traction of iPhone companies, the money they're making and their brand buzz.
The criteria are varied. Some are bottom-line: how many app downloads? How much revenue? How much venture funding? Others try to measure a different kind of relationship: how many iPhone developers have built on a company's API? How many times is this company mentioned alongside the iPhone in the press?
Think of this list as a way to understand who will get to shape the personality of the iPhone as it grows. It also explores all the different currencies that have grown up around the platform; the App Store isn't just about dollars and cents, but also branding, advertising, engineering and design. Apple's popularity lists only scratch the surface.
Of course, there will be contention. Right now, we've limited the list to private companies, and we haven't differentiated between developers like Smule and Ngmoco, and platforms like Twitter and Facebook. As we update this list, we'll add more ways to slice the rankings and more data to mash up. We'll also be evaluating how we weigh the criteria above. As always, we welcome your comments and your suggestions.
The genius here, according to 
Ranking a company's influence in the iPhone universe is no easy science. That's why FastCompany.com has partnered with 
