Author: Andru Edwards

Navteq and their parent company Nokia believe that LBS or Location Based Services are going to be a $7 billion dollar industry by 2013. This is due to an increase of mobile connected devices and their ability to receive targeted advertisements when they are near a specific location.

Navteq currently has 80 people globally in their sales force, working with mobile operators as well as smaller application developers to help sell the data that they collect about locations.  They warehouse this information by deploying “data collection trucks” which have high definition cameras mounted on the rooftop and drive most all of the major cities roads .  These cameras take photos and collect other data such as elevation as they drive through the streets.  Company spokesman and presenter Shawn Gunn said future unknown applications will leverage this.  To seed such innovation, Navteq has a location based challenge that they run annually and several augmented reality projects are frequently presented from that.

Continue reading SXSW 2010: Location-based Marketing and Advertising: Targeting the Mobile Consumer

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For those of you out there who have spent the greater part of the last few years since the release of the Xbox 360 in a dark hole yelling ‘PWN’D!!!’ at 11 year-olds via the interwebz there is nothing more face-punchingly painful than the 3 Rings of death.  For the uninitiated, the 3 Rings of Death (or RROD( on an Xsox 360 mean that the machine has eaten itself and you are now left with a very expensive bookend.  For the you, avid gamer, this is a truly traumatic experience.  You are forced—for a couple of weeks at least—to shuffle your way outside, blinking 12-inch-wide gollum-eyes at the sun all the while, and to begin socially interacting with people.  An event this traumatic deserves to be memorialized, forever etched in the asocial fabric of the basement of your parent’s house where you live, yes?  Well look no further, fearless devourer of the Hot Pocket, your savior has arrived in the form of an artistically morbid coffin for your Xbox.  Created by Australian designer Alexis Vanamois, this sleek little number can serve to either a) memorialize your crawling out of the dungeon of social leprosy and beginning a new life, or b) as a badge of honor mounted on your wall and waiting for more XBoxes to be memorialized along side it as you travel down the road to becoming the comic-book guy from The Simpsons; the choice is yours.

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alexis vanamois,
coffin,
microsoft,
red rings,
rrod,
rrod coffin,
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xbox 360,

3D was a fad that died a well-deserved death during the 90s. Of course, the flame was kept alive by evil, evil hipsters who swapped between polarized lenses and shutter shades for a while, but only recently has it come back in a big way (thanks to new glasses, new technology, and the ability for us as a culture to forgive transgressions for existing as fads before being properly implemented.)

Sony is apparently on board with the 3D revival, and they had a bunch of games and TVs showing off their 3D technology at the GDC. Hit the jump for our hands-on impressions.

Continue reading Hands-On with Sony’s PS3 3D Games

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3d,
3d gaming,
gdc,
gdc 2010,
hdtv,
ps3,
ps3 3d,
reviews,
sony,
sony 3d tv,

If you’re an iPhone OS developer who has been hard at work on getting an app ready in time for the lainch of the iPad, now is the time to start polishing it up if you want Apple to consider it for inclusion for the grand opening of the iPad section of the App Store. Basically, just log in to iTunes Connect, submit your app, and you’ll receive feedback on its readiness for the grand opening. We know, it’s difficult to fully debug an app when you don’t even have the actual hardware that you are developing for, so our guess is that Apple is running submitted code on actual iPads, and if things work nicely and the app is up to snuff, you’ll be in. You’ve got until 5:00 PM PDT on March 27th to submit your apps.

Oh, and in case there was any doubt, yes; the iPad App Store will open the same day that the iPad goes on sale. April 3rd can’t come fast enough.

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app store,
apple,
ipad,
ipad app store,
ipad apps,
iphone os,

I know, the title is a little mundane; it was either that or ‘how to torture others with your terrible taste in music’ but that wasn’t very product-descriptive.  Not only can you use this shirt, complete with embedded speaker and pocket-remote, as an attempt to turn yourself into Jack Spade from ‘I’m Gonna Get You, Sucka!’ but you can also use their pre-loaded sound-effects to pepper your work-day with fart noises and boing-boings.  It’s all your choice.  Only $30 and 4AAA batteries and you’re off to the very annoying races.

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battery powered,
clothing,
mp3,
music,
personal soundtrack,
shirts,
sound,
speaker,
t-shirt,
the big bang theory,
thinkgeek,

Have you ever wondered what Manhattan would look like from the perspective of a Nintendo RPG in the mid-80’s?  No?  Then you’re either a commie or were born too late to get my clever Breakfast Club John Bender impressions; either way, you’re a neo-maxi-zoom-dweeby.  For all of you who answered ‘yes’ to my previous query or at least started reminiscing about that time that you beat Mike Tyson, then this little time waster is for you.  Brett Camper, an MIT alum and a true friend to the geek in all of us if there ever was one, has created an 8-bit map of NYC’s 5 Burroughs at 8bitnyc.com.  So dig out your Dr. Mario shirt, press up-down-up-down-left-right-left-right-b-a-select-start and go get functionally lost in what Mapquest would’ve looked like over a 1kbps dial-up modem circa 1985.

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8bitnyc.com,
brett camper,
bronx,
brooklyn,
games,
gaming,
graphics,
harlem,
manhattan,
map,
mod,
pixel,
queens,
staten island,
vector.io,
video games,

My friend Jeff Pulver commandeered a room on the 4th floor at SXSW and had several people who he has met around the world present what they believed were success stories about the Twitter service.  This goes hand in hand with the 140 Conferences that he is throwing around the world.  One such speaker, Bowen Payson, was from the airline Virgin America that has been using Twitter to outreach to their customers.

Bowen began his session by speaking about the differences in their airline from a physical experience.  From the black leather Recaro seats, to the mood lighting.  Their on-demand in flight entertainment is just as high tech as their communication strategy.  The Twitter story began without a strategy and unfolded and matured into more than
60,000 followers as I write this.  Their main social contact, Nick Schwartz is the voice of the airline and loves social networking, partially because of his age.  They try to keep a consumer centric voice and mind set, and work to make the experience better incrementally.

Continue reading SXSW 2010: Twitter and an Airline: A story

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free wi-fi,
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sxswi 2010,
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wifi,

The Sunday SXSW 2pm keynote was from Valerie Casey, a consultant who works with entities as large as the government to up and coming Louisiana food startup Naked Pizza.

Valerie is part of a group called Designers Accord who has a mission to use the skills and talents of this team to give back to the community and ultimately Mother Earth.  Her profound opening statement was “When will we start thinking that less bad is good?”  The example shown was a Dell studio PC, a small desktop computer with an optional bamboo case that adheres to the highest levels of green standards for office computers.  Yet, it is still another computer, which has components inside which will ultimately end up in a landfill and be harmful to humans or the environment.  A heart-wrenching photo was shown of a child living an an area of China whose community cannot even drink their local water due to contaminants from the e-waste trade; where components are stripped from circuit boards over fire pits for their little precious metal content.

Continue reading SXSW 2010 Keynote: Systems Design and Inspiration

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valeriecasey,

You know, when I look at the Nintendo DSi XL, I can’t help but notice the similarity in form factor to Apple‘s iPad (though the DSi XL was released first – thanks for catching that, astute readers!). Nintendo recently announced the US release of the n-th iteration of the DS, now focusing on a bigger screen. Come to think of it, both companies have a penchant for constantly releasing new SKU’s of existing hardware every few months with minor tweaks to inexplicable demand by an attention-deficit public, all while making the people who just bought their newly-outdated hardware feel small and relatively ashamed.

Either way, we got our hands on one at the GDC in San Francisco. Hit the jump for relevant deets.

Continue reading Nintendo DSi XL: Hands on

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consoles,
ds,
dsi,
dsi xl,
gdc,
gdc 2010,
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hardware,
nintendo,
sidefeatured,

Yes, the title is a Veruca Salt reference; deal with it!  If you need 16 USB ports for your desktop then my making vague Gen-X references to underachieving bands that never quite made it is the least of your problems—concentrate, Pvt. Pyle!  Jeez, do I have to do everything for you?  Yes?  Okay then: ThinkGeek has the cure for what ails you.  Well, only if what ails you is your desk’s lack of a tangle of sprawling USB cables that would embarrass an Octopus—two of them, in fact!  The USB Super 16 Port Hub sports its own internal power supply and can turn the most modest of desks into a cutting-edge tangle of fiber-optic cables.  Another spec benefit is that up to two PC’s can hook up and share the Port Hub at the same time.  This means that you can play dueling banjos with your work PC and your MacBookPro without fear of choosing which nerd-demographic you’re going to piss off, Switzerland!  Also, at $159 it’s cheaper than buying 10 t-shirts that say ‘There’s no place like 127.0.0.1’ on them, will still up your geek cred and will not have the un-wanted side-effect of getting you punched in the face, unlike the former.

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16 port usb hub,
16 ports,
accessories,
thinkgeek,
usb,

Above you’ll find a demo that Wired magazine gave during SXSW 2010, showing off what they figure their app will look like on portable tablets like the iPad and HP Slate. As you can see, it’s more than just a color PDF reader, as they have video elements and animated images in the magazine content, so they’ve actually taken the time to tailor the reading experience to the device. Consider us subscribed once this is available.

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hp slate,
ipad,
ipad apps,
sxsw,
sxsw 2010,
sxswi,
sxswi 2010,
tablets,
videos,
wired,
wired magazine,

Just in case you’ve blown out a shoulder or three lugging around your insanely large laptop with the 10-key, Thule has come up with a solution: the Crossover Backpack.  Amongst the goodies that this bit of nerd-ware boasts, its padded, integrated notebook compartment is able to hold up to a 17-inch MacBook Pro and it has a heat-molded, crush-proof SafeZone compartment that protects your smartphone, sunglasses, and other fragile gear; now all that you have to do is carry it on your pigeon-shoulders without crushing your 92-pound Weezer-fueled skeleton beneath it.  Off to the comic-con with you, Thomas Dolby.

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backpacks,
bags,
carrying case,
crossover,
crossover backpack,
laptop bags,
safezone,
thule,
thule crossover,

I’ve been playing with the Sprint Overdrive 4G mobile hotspot device that the company sent me a few weeks ago, and I’ve gotta say, this thing has come in handy way more often than I thought it would. So much so, in fact, that I find it to be an essential tool and I carry it around in my left jacket pocket everywhere I go at this point, and charge it over USB when I am in the car driving somewhere. I’ll be giving a few examples of how the 4G Overdrive device has come in handy over the next few days, but I wanted to start with this one because I know so many iPhone, iPhone 3G, and iPhone 3GS owners out there that cry to the heavens to be saved from the vile clutches of AT&T and their constant network FAIL.

Continue reading Sprint Overdrive 4G mobile hotspot rescues iPhone from AT&T hell

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3g,
4g,
att,
clear,
clearwire,
iphone,
iphone 3gs,
mobile hotspot,
seattle 4g,
sprint,
sprint overdrive,
sprint overdrive review,

Okay, so ChatRoulette is all the rage right now (although, admittedly, I have yet to give it a try,) and we think we found someone that you’ll want to be on the lookout for when you are randomly talking to um, random, individuals. If you come across Merton, the improvising piano player, give him a moment. Hit up the video above to see why. He definitely had us laughing with some of his classic lines.

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chat roulette,
chatroulette,
freestyle,
humor,
improv,
merton chatroulette,
music,
piano,
youtube,

Rovi Chief Evangelist, Richard Bullwinkle had an afternoon session at SXSW 2010, dealing with convergence in the living room, “From Hulu To Yahoo Widgets: Will The Internet Transform The TV?”

He started the session with the statement “It is difficult to upgrade your television because it is affixed to a wall.”  With computers, you can go to a new website, such as moving your social network from myspace.com to facebook.com.  With a mobile phone you can delete the location centric Loopt app and load Foursquare or Whrrl.  But your
television cannot be updated and it is typically maintained by someone who put it on the wall.

With the American market being spread out over thousands of miles, broadband penetration and the speed of those connections becomes the next issue.  Music and streaming television is not a problem with existing bandwidth; be it via cable, to the house or Wi-Fi within.  As we get to HD quality, few have the capacity to our homes to achieve this rate.  I know of this pain point personally and have solved it by running three networks at the house, one for devices like the iPhone and Chumby at 2.4 GHz and the others for high definition video distribution over Gigabit Ethernet and 802.11N at 5GHz.

Continue reading SXSW 2010: From Hulu to Yahoo Widgets: Will the Internet Transform the TV?

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convergence,
facebook,
future,
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hulu,
richard bullwinkle,
rovi,
social networks,
sxsw,
sxsw 2010,
sxswi,
sxswi 2010,
twitter,
yahoo widgets,

Looks like Google is finally ready to be serious with the Nexus One. As of today, the device is fully compatible with AT&T 3G, as well as Canada’s Rogers Wireless 3G bands. Previously, you could use the Nexus One with those carriers, but you wouldn’t be able to get 3G speeds, so you were relegated to the much slower EDGE network. You can purchase the new model, which is the same as the upcoming Verizon and currently available T-Mobile Nexus One units in every other way, as an unlocked device without a service plan, directly from Google for $529.

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android,
att,
google,
nexus one,
rogers,
sidefeatured,
smartphones,

Three years after the Twitter 2007 launch at South by Southwest, Evan Williams announced @anywhere pages at SXSW 2010.  This service allows web publishers to enable OAth Twitter logins, much like the Facebook Connect strategy.  They are not the first web service with hundreds of millions of users to attempt this tactic.  Hotmail users were able to use that log on on other sites via the Microsoft Passport service, after the software giant bought the first web mail provider in 1997. This account was used across all Microsoft platforms like Expedia and even shopping sites like Buy.com until it was ultimately removed from service in 2009.  Today, Facebook Connect allows their 300+ million users to log on and make comments on thousands of sites and blogs. Twitters user base is much lower and they are a bit late to this strategy so it will be interesting to see how many sites will employ the service.

With a 10’s wide and thousands deep line to get in, the SXSW day three keynote of Evan Williams, one of the founders of Twitter was off to a rocky start.  He started with an awkward announcement their latest service offering via a video demo and audio problems with the mic of the moderator Umar Haque.

Continue reading SXSW 2010: Evan Williams Twitter keynote

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sxswi 2010,
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umar haque,

Katheryn started off the session giving us geo location coordinates that only a machine would love.  Her followup to this was the context matters; our location around a place and who is around that space with us.  There is also excitement around discovery with geo.  An example could be geocache games which created back in the old old black and white LCD “latitude and longitude” GPS units and have worked their way into the App stores of the iPhone and Android handsets.

Although location is in its infancy, Foursquare has opened their APIs and sites like gatsby.com are using location data + user preferences to send SMS messages to those who are in proximity with one another and could potentially benefit in meeting up in real life.  While this leads to privacy issues, it is opt-in and could let “regular strangers” connect and communicate in ways that they might night work up the courage to in the physical world.

Continue reading SXSW 2010: Playing with Place – Location-aware games

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android,
foursquare,
gps,
iphone,
location,
location aware,
playing with place,
playingwithplace,
scvngr,
social,
social networks,
sxsw,
sxsw 2010,
sxswi,
sxswi 2010,

Those are some strong words, but if CNBC journalists and analysts are to be believed, the relationship between Apple and Google is so strained as they both compete to win in the mobile space that it has come to a point where “Steve Jobs simply hates Eric Schmidt.” Hey, if that hared fuels the fire of innovation and competition, then it’s the consumers who will walk away the winners in this battle. Amiright?

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android,
apple,
apple rumors,
cnbc,
eric schmidt,
google,
iphone,
iphone os,
mac rumors,
rumors,
steve jobs,

This cleverly named, yet light hearted SXSW 2010 panel of Greg Storey, Will Reynolds, Greg Hoy, Tracey Halvosen and was narrated by Kevin Hoffman. Panelists told stories that technology consultants must deal with every day through interactions with their clients.  Most of the stories told were a bit sensationalized around a client’s unrealistic
expectations, mostly in regard to time to complete a project or disagreements of which technology to base a project on.  It seems that clients always want it faster, and typically more complex that it needs to be – something that is typically mutually exclusive.

Consultants are not perfect, and testing new features or methods on a client may prove to be disastrous when you work outside of your scope of expertise.  For example, one consultant on the panel said that they could help a client deliver an email message to their customer, and took on the project of developing the mailing system in house.  Rather than send a unique email to each user, or blind copy the customers, every email address in the client database was sent within the “To” field, something that one of my companies has been guilty of, albeit during the early Web 1.0 days.  This made all of the other client email addresses viewable from any one of the customers who received the message.  For this example, the client re-issued an apology offer, along with a discounted offer and the consultant ultimately paid a professional email marketer to re-send this message using their technology and expertise to avoid the snafu of sharing private email addresses.  As an aside, I received some marketing emails from SXSW film presenters who too left email addresses visible in the “To” field.  That is unacceptable in 2010.

Continue reading SXSW 2010: We F*cked Up: Happy Cog and Friends Exploring Failures Together

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