The iPad almost better than a newspaper

After having over 100 days the iPad, i would say am a big fan of it. when i would ask 100 people some of them would say the iPad is better than newspaper and some would say they prefer real paper.

But one thing an iPad can't replace is showing below. Have fun with this ad from Newsday.

The ARDrone at home

Sound is the new click and touch

The world is changing and smart phones are helping a lot to change the world.
More and more applications for the iPhone and Androids are using sound for interaction instead of touching or clicking on banners.

Last night I watched one of my favorite shows "Eureka". During the show an ad came up to tell the audience to start their Shazam application to get exclusive videos from the show.
Shazam is an app which listen usually to music and gives the user the name of the song and author back. It is a pretty nice app, for people like me, who never know any songs. It is easy to use, you start the app hold the phone in front of a speaker and hit the button. 10 seconds later the info is on the phone screen.
This time, with Eureka, it gave me much more info back and worked perfect.







Pretty amazing how advertising is combining TV and smart phones and using sound for this.

If would have to put in a code or scan an image on the TV it would have been too much work, but starting an app without leaving the bed is perfect.

This is not the first time that an app is using sound to tricker certain things on your phone. The first time i saw, was with the Best Buy movie mode app. The app will translate the hilarious minions talking, when you run this app in selected 3D cinemas. The translation is text only that other movie visitors don't get disturbed.

Sony has for their 51 blue ray video an app which will give the user specials when watching the movie.

And then there is kickbucks. An app to collect points in stores. You can either get points by scanning barcodes or through sound.
The idea is that certain stores have multiple speakers installed in different places of store. The app will collect points, whenever the user is close to one of the speakers. The person might go to the dressing room and gets 50 points. These points can be redeemed through the app at the offered stores.



The idea with sound is great because it has better proximity than GPS. GPS is only as good as 20 meters and not working well in buildings. With sound you can get better results.
The application works impressive well, however you can fake the system if you have two iPhones. One is using iAnalyzer to record and play sound and the the other is running kickbucks. However it only works if you are in or close to the store.
But I was able to collect 1200 points instead of only 50 points.

Bottom line is, that companies are understanding that there is much more possibilities than just clicking on a screen or typing with keyboard to interact with customer or target audience.

The next iPhone will have a RFID reader which opens much more for the world, especially for retail stores.

The Internet stores started to take consumers away from brick and mortar stores. Smart phones and their apps will take the consumer away from the Internet stores but bring them back again to the b&m stores.

Smart phones are helping to combine online and offline into one new type of shopping experience.


- Posted using My iPad

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Spring Hill,United States

ARdrone - coolest toy on earth

I ordered 6 weeks ago the ARdrone (parrot.com) from brookstone. Today it arrived and it was like Christmas.
My wife actually did send me during the day a picture of the box to let me know I have a new cool toy.
I opened the package, put the ARdrone out and attached the battery (lucky it was charged).




Then I downloaded to my iPhone the remote control software. Yes, your iPhone is the remote.




I saw the ARdrone the first time at the CES in January and I felt in love.
The software for the phone is still buggy, it crashes a couple of time when starting the app, the app is stable as soon it is connected over wifi to the ARdrone. Before you can pair with the ARdrone (helicopter), you need to connect with your iPhone to the ARDrone wifi. It is not password protected, but I believe always only one phone can connect to it. If you have like me a lot of wifi router, you should be far from them, they can interfere.
The heli has two cameras, one in front and one on the bottom. You can switch with the app the camera image you want to see on your screen.
Controlling the ARdrone takes a few minutes to understand, but the cool part is that it has a safety control. As soon you take your fingers from the phone the heli stops and stands still in the air.
You have two buttons to control. One for left, right, forward and backwards and one for turning the nose around, up and and and down.
I was not able to get the heli higher than 20 feet but I might have done something wrong.
You can switch between indoor and outdoor flight. The indoor modus has a proximity meter that you don't hit walls. The iPhone shows the battery charge of the drone and will land the drone when battery has less than 5% power.

You can even play against another ARdrone. If you do so, you can simulate a shooting fight and you will see on your iPhone every hit as explosion.

Below is my first flight video, i had nobody to tape for me, therefore the view of the camera is off. I will make more videos in the near future (weekend is coming :) )



Some statistics:
top speed is 12 miles an hour
Weight 500 gram
Range of wifi around 150 feet
Flight lengths with one battery charge about 7 minutes
Recharging 90 minutes.

Overall it is a very cool toy and from technology and programming aspect an amazing execution. It is much much easier to fly the ARdrone than any other RC helicopter.

Pretty sure there will be soon an update with speakers that you can talk through the iPhone to somebody.

Taping the video which the ARdrone transmits would be nice too. Parrot made their software open source. I have no doubt that somebody will come up with some fancy stuff.

- Posted using My iPad

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Spring Hill,United States

iPhone update 4.1 at glance

Apple released today a new iOs update for iPhone and iPhone touch. Touch can now do face time. The user has to set up an email for face time and verify it before using facetime.
After this is pretty simple, gist dial a phone number of another face time person and it dials. The connection over wifi is perfect. A good way to avoid carrier costs for call.

Game time:
Apple extended their social effort with game time after starting to go into social with ping in iTunes.
I am not sure if Apple does the right approach to build their own social network instead of using established players.
With game time you can play your games like farmville and socialize with other game time users. This is a clear attack against facebook. Apple might did read that most activities in Facebook are games.
With game time you can play your games, as soon they are mapped to game time, against your friends and keep track on your scores and listings.




Camera update:
you can now tame pictures in HDR (high dynamic range). Which is not new, for the iPhone. There has been some app out there using HDR but only 2 instead of 3 images.
An HDR image is made by taking three photos of the same scene, each at different shutter speeds. The result is a bright, medium, and dark photo, based on the amount of light that got through the lens. A software process then combines all the photos to bring details to the shadows and highlights both. This helps to achieve the same task in the final photograph that the human eye can accomplish on the scene.
The iPhone will keep original and HDR image in case the image looks too fake.




Video
iPhone users can now upload their videos to mobile.me and YouTube in HD.

ITunes
iTunes got updated that you can rent shows for $0.99 and use the famous "ping".

Some bug fixes
Apple supposedly fixed problems with Bluetooth connectivity and the iPhone's proximity sensor. Customers have hammered Apple over the proximity issue, saying that the sensor didn't deactivate the touchscreen when the smartphone was held up to their faces, causing dropped calls, muted calls and "face-dialed" numbers.

Apple also patched 24 vulnerabilities in iOS with the update, including 19 tagged with the phrase "arbitrary code execution," Apple-speak for a critical vulnerability. Unlike other operating system makers, like Microsoft, Apple does not rank flaws with a threat-scoring system.

Over 80% of the bugs were in WebKit, the open-source browser engine that powers the mobile version of Safari integrated in iOS, as well as Safari on the desktop and Google's Chrome browser.

The following is not an iOS update but was released at the same time.

IMovie update:
IMovie has now a few more themes and crashes less, but still the location part is so bad. I used a theme which shows my location as Disney Orlando, which is 70 miles away from my location. I can change the location using search but can't create a new location. The closest one to the place where we took the video is Tampa, still 40 miles away.

- Posted using My iPad

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Spring Hill,United States

Google instant search

Google unveiled on Wednesday its Google Instant, a search engine display that shows results as you type, even predicting what you want before you’re finished writing .Google is now a step ahead of bing again.
However the instant results are different.
Typing a company name (triad digital) took at google only three letters till the company appeared but 7 letters till the company appeared in bing.

Google says that an average search takes 25 seconds (9 seconds to type, some millisecond till result comes back and up to 15 seconds to scan through the results).

Google Instant, said Mayer, saves an average of two to five seconds per query. Applied to the billions queries Google processes per day, that translates to 350 million hours of users' time per year.

This means google makes the world greener. This is 350 million hours less using computers.

An average American household uses 2900 KWh a month and a computer around 100KWh (middle between notebook and PC).
Take 100KWh x 350.000.000 \ 2900KWh = 1.2 millions households a month or 100.000 households a year in energy saving.

Promoted as "faster than the speed of type," Instant will also be a game-changer for many doing business on the Internet. Google is using new caching systems and JavaScript to help browsers keep up, and displaying relevant research as typed so users can click through content and scroll through predictions. For the last few days, Google has been using bouncy dots and light gray text with cursor to highlight the new service.

Although handy for most people, real-time search results will create a whole new plane for search-engine optimization.
"Google Instant means no one will see the same Web anymore, making optimizing it virtually impossible. Real-time feedback will change and personalize people's search behaviors," says PR pro Steve Rubel, on his blog.

This means that businesses will have to rethink their SEO and Web strategy to work the new system, even if Google states that it won't change its rankings. Google is also trying to reassure advertisers that Instant will improve the "quality" of clicks on ads but promises nothing, saying overall that it may increase or decrease impressions.

Company names would benefit from shorter sobriquets or abbreviations, because if a user can get to Amazon.com in one letter (that's "a,") your business may be best served with as few words or letters as possible. Those companies gifted with only one letter on the stock exchange will also be easily found. That means SEO could rely on letter rankings rather than word rankings in the near future.
The bigger the company is the most likely they appear by typing one letter, like amazon or aol for letter A or Walmart and wachovia for letter W.

Aside from saving users two to five seconds in search time, Google's search tool may be creating a whole different climate for businesses, especially for those involved in e-commerce and online marketing. Expect to be hearing more as marketing professionals learn the new system and find ways to effectively use SEO. Surprisingly the new search is available on iPad even if google said it will be not available for mobile before November.

The really good part on the instant search is for mobile users, where we have problems to type full queries. The instant search will come handy.
Bing does actually a really good job on the iPhone with their search results and input.

Everybody is now talking how new and genius this instant search is, but we should not forget bing which had it before.



- Posted using My iPad

Please don't forget to visit my blog http://justhiswords.blogspot.com or follow me on twitter schlotz69

Location:Spinning Wheel Ln,Spring Hill,United States

Google is showing off

If you use today google in the USA or UK and you are not using the safari browser, you will see a funny google dot logo which is floating around when you shake the browser ( move your browser window around by clicking in browser bar and then move the mouse) or if you go with your mouse close to the logo, like two magnets with same charge.




A lot of people are guessing if this logo related to google birthday. Usually Google does change their logo for certain holidays.

I don't know, but I know that google is showing off how JavaScript, jquery and some HTML5 can be used to do something cool (not on Safari there it is the normal logo)

I love this, it tells us we don't need flash to build motions. And really cool is that it works just fine on IE 8. On google chrome it looks even much more impressive, almost like 3D, same at Firefox, the dots are getting bigger to give this effect.



Well done google. I usually use bing and I did not know about it, if my coworker would not have told me.

BTW there is so much discussion about this logo going on, that when you google for "google dot logo", you will find 248 news and over 4 million search results about this topic.

And for Tuesday September 7th, number 12 in top search results was google logo.
Unbelievable how much impact such small change can have.

I am just wondering why this logo is not showing on Safari, is this a sign?

Correction:
Safari is displaying the google dots as well if you have the latest safari version on Mac or Windows. But does not work with iPad or older Safari versions on Windows.

- Posted using My iPad

Location:W Laurel St,Tampa,United States