Author: Wade Roush

Wade Roush wrote:

Cambridge, MA-based Metacarta, whose software searches digital text for references to place names and addresses, has been acquired by Nokia, the Espoo, Finland-based mobile hardware giant announced today. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, and it’s not yet clear how Nokia will integrate Metacarta’s technology into its mobile offerings, which include navigation services through the Ovi Maps application. Nokia’s terse press release said only that the 30-person startup’s technology will be “used in the area of local search in location and other service.”

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Wade Roush wrote:

As far as anyone knows, it’s a first in movie history: a location-based iPhone application has been accepted as an entry at a major film festival. Walking Cinema: Murder on Beacon Hill, an app built around a 43-minute series of interactive videos, will appear on the big screen at the AMC Loews Boston Common theater on Sunday, April 18, as part of the Boston International Film Festival (BIFF).

The app, it turns out, has local roots. It was produced by Boston-based Untravel Media, whose founder Michael Epstein calls it “a page-turner mystery powered by your feet.” The app tells the story of George Parkman, a wealthy Bostonian who disappeared in November 1849 and whose dismembered body was eventually discovered under a dissecting vault at Harvard Medical College. Harvard instructor John Webster, who owed Parkman money, was convicted of the murder after a sensational trial and publicly hanged.

Normally, viewers experience the story of the murder as they travel a mapped route around Boston’s Beacon Hill, watching sections from the video at eight different stops. At the film festival, though, audiences will stay firmly in their seats, watching all 33 parts of the video in continuous order. “We were just blown away at how watchable the story is in a theatrical setting,” BIFF director Patrick Jerome said in a statement. “It’s quick-paced, full of juicy details, and, to our knowledge, it’s the first location-based application to screen at a film festival.”

Epstein says the film’s acceptance at BIFF is a sign that the filmmaking community is gradually waking up to the possibilities of transmedia storytelling—in particular, storytelling that immerses viewers in a thoughtful way in real geography.

“Everything in media now is naturally prone to become transmedia, as content is shared across networks and people view it on different kinds of screens,” he says. “But what is important is that you bake the transmedia thinking into the project, so that there is stuff on the Web that you don’t get on the broadcast, and stuff on mobile that you can’t get on either. With historical subjects, the geography can almost become a character.”

Though Walking Cinema is the only Untravel project that’s been developed into a self-contained mobile app, it’s one of about a dozen location-driven mobile tours developed by Untravel. Other tours, which are distributed as video podcasts, focused on Boston’s West End, the Big Dig, Harvard Square, the MIT Stata Center, and the Salem witch trials.

The Beacon Hill app includes video material from Murder at Harvard, a PBS documentary created by Arlington, MA-based director and producer Eric Stange. Epstein says part of the challenge of the project—which was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Office of Digital Humanities—was to adapt Stange’s made-for-television film into a non-linear walking tour without losing the storyline and without sacrificing video and sound quality. The iPhone was the perfect vehicle for the project, he says.

“For a few years now we’ve been talking about doing more than your typical audio guides and walking tours,” Epstein says. “With the iPhone, apps can be fairly rich, so filmmakers know their stories won’t be reduced to little clips, but that the actual story can be expanded and become more engaging.”

Epstein thinks such efforts will win greater recognition over time at film community events like BIFF. “Mobile content is becoming ever more sophisticated,” he says. “The judges on the boards of the film festivals know that filmmakers are trying to figure out what we can do to tap mobile channels, and I think that any mobile project involving the iPhone or iPad that is watchable, they are interested in putting up.”

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UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS

Wade Roush wrote:

I may not be the CEO of Xconomy (that title belongs to our founder Bob Buderi), but at least I’m the Mayor.

I won that distinction last week by checking into Foursquare from our office on Rogers Street in Cambridge, MA more times than anyone else. If you haven’t heard of Foursquare, you’re in a vanishing minority: the location-based social game is this year’s Twitter, in the estimation of Pete Cashmore, founder and CEO of the social media blog Mashable.

Foursquare players win points, badges, and mayorships by going to destinations such as coffee shops, bars, or museums, and opening the Foursquare app on their mobile phones to let Foursquare know where they are. So far the startup has versions for iPhones, Android phones, and BlackBerry devices. On the social side, players get to see where their Foursquare friends have checked in lately, who else has checked in at their current location, and what those visitors recommend seeing or doing.On the game side, many users make a point of visiting new places or visiting old haunts more often in order to unlock badges, win points, and beat their friends.

Launched 13 months ago, Foursquare now has almost 1 million users, according to CEO and co-founder Dennis Crowley. Twitter didn’t reach that point until it was close to two years old. But as Crowley was the first to admit during a recent appearance in Cambridge, the New York-based startup’s fast growth is in large part thanks to Twitter itself: the microblogging service has trained many people to share quick status updates with their friends and followers whatever the time, and wherever they may be.

Foursquare is also a product of the spread of the iPhone and other smartphones with location-finding abilities, which spare users from having to specify their locations manually. That’s how Dodgeball, Crowley’s first company and Foursquare’s direct predecessor, used to work.Users manually reported their locations to a central server via text message, then received replies that said which friends were nearby. Mainly used in big cities like New York and San Francisco as a tool for meeting up with drinking buddies, Dodgeball was acquired in 2005 by Google. The search giant never really invested in growing the service, and shut it down in early 2009.

Foursquare is not just Dodgeball reincarnated. The badges and points and mayorships are all new, and to hear Crowley tell it, they’re a fundamental part of the service’s appeal, both to players and to potential business partners. And while Foursquare is far from the only social network built around the promise of rewards for local check-ins—competitors include Brightkite, Booyah, Gowalla, Loopt, and Whrrl—it’s fair to say it’s the current darling of the social media elite, not to mention Silicon Valley venture firms, who are competing to invest more cash for equity stakes in the the startup.

In fact, Crowley was on his way home from a series of Bay Area venture meetings last weekend when he stopped in Boston to take in the Red Sox season opener against the Yankees. On Monday, he checked in at the Microsoft New England Research & Development Center in Cambridge for a talk sponsored by the Ad Club, the trade association for Boston’s advertising and marketing industry. I was the moderator at that event, and I got to ask Crowley about Foursquare’s origins, its business model, and the allure of location-based social networking. You can hear the whole conversation, which I recorded on my iPad, by clicking on the audio player above. (You can also download the original 55-megabyte MP3 file to your computer by right-clicking here.)

In preparation for the Ad Club event, Crowley and I also spoke by phone on Sunday, and I thought I’d pull my notes from that conversation together into the following writeup. It’s a short alternative to the recorded interview, which is an hour long.

Xconomy: How is Foursquare different now than what you envisioned it might be 13 months ago?

Dennis Crowley: The big difference from last year to this year is that it’s evolved into a game. When we started it, it was just a reaction to Google shutting off Dodgeball, which was the way me and my friends hooked up and coordinated meetings. The thing we learned after Dodgeball was that …Next Page »

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UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS

Wade Roush wrote:

How do you sell 300,000 of anything on the first day it’s in stores? By convincing people that it’s going to be even cooler than the last incredible thing you built. Steve Jobs and his crew pulled that off with the iPad, which has been breaking the sales records set by the iPhone in 2007. Now all of us brand-new iPad owners have to decide whether we’re still convinced.

I’ve spent three solid days with my iPad, including one work day, and I’m still a believer. For sheer whiz-bang amazement, this machine (which I’m using right now to type this review) definitely represents the best $499 I’ve ever spent on a computer. It has its flaws and weaknesses, which I will gladly enumerate in a moment. But I think it has to be acknowledged up front that the hype about the iPad was largely justified; that the device is useful in a genuinely new way, and represents the beginning of the end of the mouse-and-keyboard era of personal computing; that for Apple, lightning can strike five times (IIe, Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad); that if there were a Nobel Prize for product engineering, Jobs would be on his way to Stockholm.

There, I said it. I laid my fanboy credentials bare. Now let’s talk about the real question, which is, should you get one? Assuming that you’re in the market for a computer, and you aren’t one of those early adopter alpha geeks like me who has to get an iPad just to maintain his street cred, what compelling advantages does the product have over similarly priced machines—which, at the moment, means netbooks and low-end laptops?

I think that is the operative question. I don’t see much point in the debate, taken up by Jobs himself in his January 27 iPad debut speech, about whether there is room for a “third category” of devices between netbooks and laptops. Yes, the iPad belongs to a new category, but average computer buyers don’t care about categories: they just need to get stuff done, and between projects they want to be entertained. What’s important is whether the iPad helps with those things, and does so better than an equivalently priced netbook or laptop. I believe that it does, and that it will only get better over time.

Work

For all the talk about the iPad being a media consumption device, it is also a pretty good information management device. The built-in apps, such as Mail and Calendar, take the tasks knowledge workers do all day long and make them more fun. I am already very fond of the Mail app, which, like most iPad apps, resembles its iPhone counterpart but has many improvements that take advantage of the iPad’s larger screen. In landscape mode, for example, Mail lists incoming messages in the left pane and shows the full text of those messages in the right pane.

There’s nothing revolutionary about panes—until you realize that this arrangement, together with multitouch, lets you plow through your inbox and deal with each message with two-handed efficiency. With your right hand, you can …Next Page »

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UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS

Wade Roush wrote:

In the 15 months since its launch, Boston-based Apperian has won a reputation as a leading creator of sophisticated business-to-consumer iPhone apps such as Timberland Expedition, Intuit’s TurboTax TaxCaster, and American Greetings’ e-card app. But the startup didn’t set out to be just another mobile app studio: the real vision of founder and CEO Chuck Goldman, a former Apple exec, has always been to bring the power of the iPhone (and now the iPad) to the enterprise and business-to-business worlds. And this summer, his company is going to make the leap.

Apperian won’t stop building custom apps for clients, “because that’s such a great learning environment for us,” says Goldman. But at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in California this June, Apperian will launch a software platform meant to help big companies create, deploy, and manage iPhone and iPad apps on their own. Called the Enterprise Application Services Environment, or EASE, the platform could fill a huge gap left by Apple—namely, the lack of any framework to help companies experiment with internal applications for the iPhone and iPad. It could also put Apperian in position to dominate the nascent market for enterprise iPhone/iPad application development tools.

Goldman says EASE will supply software components that Apple doesn’t put into its own software development kits—for example, “connectors” that let apps tap into enterprise databases. (Imagine, to use a hypothetical example, a FedEx iPad app that lets drivers access the company’s package-tracking database wirelessly.) But just as important, EASE will provide a way to distribute apps to employee’s iPhones or iPads, and keep them updated once they’re installed.

Right now, there’s no way within Apple’s iTunes ecosystem to do those things. Getting enterprise apps onto iPhones is an entirely manual process—which is obviously a problem for companies that might want to deploy the devices to thousands of employees. Goldman says EASE, which will be sold to companies on a subscription basis for about $2 to $3 per device per month, automates the distribution process by communicating with each employee’s copy of iTunes, in effect creating a kind of enterprise app store.

Once EASE is launched, Goldman says, Apperian will turn its attention to raising a proper Series A funding round. So far, the company has been subsisting on $1.5 million in seed funding from Lexington, MA-based CommonAngels, supplemented by $1.2 million in services revenue from its first year of app-development work. “We’ve been using the services business to go out and learn the market and be talking with the big brands,” says Goldman. “That was always the strategy. Now we’re probably looking to raise $3 million to $5 million, in July or August.”

On Wednesday, Goldman walked me through the details of the EASE platform and the company’s vision for the future of enterprise applications on Apple’s mobile devices. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.

Xconomy: Most people see the iPhone as a consumer device. What makes it attractive for business?

Chuck Goldman: It’s true, the more enterprise-level, transformative apps haven’t really hit the mainstream yet. When I say transformative, I mean moving the business process to a mobile platform. We’ve started doing that with clients like Progressive in the area of mobile claims processing and roadside assistance with AAA. But the next wave of apps, I think, is going to come from mobilizing sales forces, from internal apps that transform the way workers work. But the first challenge is …Next Page »

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UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS

Wade Roush wrote:

I’ve returned home victorious after my morning adventure at the Apple Store in Boston’s Back Bay. As I write this, my new iPad is synching with iTunes–a process that takes some time, if you have a lot of apps, music, and photos that you want to transfer over to your iPad. So I haven’t yet really tried it out.

Being at the local Apple Store opening on the day some fantastic new product comes out is a ritual no geek can forego. So I set my iPhone to wake me up at 5:00 a.m. this morning, chugged some coffee, and rode my bike over to Boylston Street. The line was short at that point, which gave me time to stop at Dunkin Donuts for more coffee. Starbucks was still closed—a sight I rarely see, as I’m not a morning person. When I finally rolled up to the store at 6:19, I snagged the 20th spot in line, which I felt was a credible showing. Hey, I’m no Scoble. (The uber-tech-blogger was first in line at the Palo Alto Apple Store, just as he had been for the launch of the iPhone 3G.)

This was the line outside the Boston Apple Store when I arrived at 6:19 a.m. Sleepy was right.

Though it’s a gorgeous warm day in Boston, it started out chilly, and the section of Boylston Street in front of the Apple Store, being so close to the Prudential Center, was a wind tunnel that my fleece wasn’t built to weather. So I shivered along with my line buddies. One was a guy named Nick, a Boston University sophomore studying computer science. Nick explained that he actually works at the Apple Store—in fact, his shift started at 11:00 a.m. today—but that Apple employees weren’t allowed to pre-order or reserve iPads for purchase. He wanted to make sure he got one, so he decided to come out and stand in line with everyone else. Nick is studying all the languages you need to build iPhone and iPad applications, and he was bubbling with anticipation.

I was, too, and we had a great conversation about what it’s like to work at the Apple Store. At this point I should confess that I actually did pre-order an iPad, but it’s the 3G version, which won’t be delivered until late April. I realized at some point this week that there was no way I could wait that long, and that I’d just have to buy a Wi-Fi iPad this week, use it until the 3G version comes, and then sell the used one. (I’ve already got potential buyers lined up, so don’t bother making me an offer!) When I explained this plan to a friend a couple of days ago, her reaction was, “You know you’ve got a problem, right?”

That's me, trying to keep warm. Nick, the Apple employee who goes to BU, is at right.

Yeah, me and the thousands of other people who camped out in front of Apple Stores around the country this morning. Anyway, right behind Nick was a woman named Tina who lives in rural Connecticut and happened to be staying at a nearby hotel in Boston this weekend because her teenage kids are attending Anime Boston, the giant Japanese animation convention going on at the Hynes. (With the PAX East gaming festival last weekend, Anime Boston this weekend, and the Comic Con comic book convention next weekend, you’d think that somebody would have figured out a way to offer a three-for-one discount.) Tina didn’t know much about Apple gear, but she though the iPad sounded cool, and she said there wasn’t much else to spend her money on in the Connecticut farmlands.

Around 7:00 a.m. Apple folks came out and set up the crowd-control barriers, dividing us into two lines—those who had reserved an iPad for pickup at the store today, and those who hadn’t. At that point both lines started growing fast, up the street and around the corner. Before long I started running into people I knew, including Greg Raiz and his crew from Brookline-MA-based mobile app development studio Raizlabs; they were picking up iPads today so that they could test their new iPad-only game, Ploid (more on that below). I also got a visit from …Next Page »

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UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS

Wade Roush wrote:

More newsprint and pixels have been sacrificed to iPad punditry than to any other tech subject in recent memory. I’m responsible for a good deal of the carnage myself (here, here, here, and here). With the device finally hitting stores tomorrow, though, there was no way my column today would be about anything else. The difference this time is that I’m going to highlight the voices of Xconomy readers, rather than my own idisosyncratic opinions or those of my fellow journalists and bloggers. (If you’re dying to see some early iPad reviews, though, you can’t go wrong reading Walt Mossberg, David Pogue, or Ed Baig.)

Earlier this week I posted an online survey asking you, loyal readers, nine questions, ranging from the simple and factual—for example, whether and when you’re planning to get an iPad—to the ideological (what do you think of Apple’s culture of secrecy and control, and how does it influence your behavior as a buyer of Apple products?). A boatload of you responded, and your answers were fascinating and, in some cases, unexpected. The full results are reproduced here. I’m especially grateful to those of you who went beyond the multiple-choice questions and shared your write-in comments; I’ve included the most interesting ones on these pages.

If I had to sum up the attitude captured by the survey in a phrase, it would be “cautiously welcoming.” Overall, a hefty 56 percent of you said that you’re planning to get an iPad at some point, whether that means this weekend or at some point in the future. But you’d like to spend as little as possible—the cheapest version, the 16-GB Wi-Fi model for $499, turns out to be the most popular. And you’re not quite sure whether the device is going to be as groundbreaking as Apple claims. About 46 percent of you called the iPad “evolutionary” while only 35 percent said it was “revolutionary.” (To be fair to Apple, technologies that turn out to be genuinely transformative, such as the Internet, aren’t usually seen as breakthroughs when they first emerge, as my colleague Greg Huang observed this week.)

At the same time, a vehement 25 percent of you said you’d never buy an iPad. And from the comments, it was clear that Apple has a ways to go to convince some critics that the device isn’t just an oversized, overpriced iPod Touch with more “cool factor” than true utility. “I’ve never owned a Mac and have no desire for more over-hyped gadgetry,” one respondent wrote. “In my view Apple fans appear ready to buy anything and everything that Mr. Jobs cares to develop. What’s next, the iToilet?”

Interestingly, more than half of you felt—sight unseen—that the iPad will be a better e-book reader than Amazon Kindle and other devices that use electronic ink displays. Only a small minority predicted that the Kindle will remain the pre-eminent e-book device. Of course, the answers to this question (as with all the others) may have been skewed by a self-selection bias, as it’s possible that Apple fans were more likely to participate in the survey to begin with. Still, Amazon is probably smart to be working on a Kindle iPad app, so it can still sell e-books to people who prefer iPads.

The write-in answers to Question No. 9—”What impact will the iPad have on consumer expectations about personal computing?”—were the most numerous, extensive, and interesting, so I urge you to read all the way to the end. The answers that received the most votes are highlighted in bold. For the items with totals that exceed 100 percent, respondents were invited to pick as many answers as they liked.

CONTINUE TO SURVEY RESULTS >>

Or jump to individual questions:

1. Are you planning to buy an iPad?
2. If you are planning to buy an iPad, which version do you prefer?
3. Which features of the iPad appeal to you most?
4. Which missing iPad features would you most like to see added in a future version?
5. Where do you see yourself using an iPad?
6. Will the iPad be a better e-book reading device than the Amazon Kindle and other electronic-ink-based reading devices?
7. Some observers condemn Apple for the restrictions and secrecy it imposes on third-party app developers. Do you generally agree with this critique?
8. Has your opinion about Apple’s culture of control influenced your decision about buying an iPad?
9. The big picture: What impact will the iPad have on consumer expecations about personal computing?

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Wade Roush wrote:

Executives at Boston’s Skyhook Wireless, which supplies the GPS- and Wi-Fi-based location-finding technology used by dozens of mobile device makers, are convinced that mobile app developers have only begun to explore the uses of location data. To help that process along, they’re about to introduce a software toolkit called “Local Faves” intended to help iPhone app developers add location-based elements where you might not expect them, such as in music, wine, food, or reference apps.

“There are lots of apps that use location already—it’s about 12 percent of the apps in the iTunes App Store—but they are the apps that you would expect, like navigation, travel, weather, news, and social networking check-in apps,” says Kate Imbach, Skyhook’s vice president of marketing. “But we’ve started seeing a lot of interest from developers of apps that aren’t really by nature location-based. We’d talk to the makers of a cooking app and they’d want to be able to add location tags so that useres can see the most popular recipes in their area.”

Local Faves—which is really just a few lines of code that developers can embed in their apps—will make it easy to add location functionality, Imbach says. “It could be a bird-watching app that lets you say ‘I saw this bird here,’ or a wine app that lets you say ‘I drank this wine here,’” she says. “Any digital content gets more interesting if you can talk about where you are when you’re accessing it.”

Skyhook announced Local Faves this morning at O’Reilly Media’s Where 2.0 conference in San Jose, CA, and plans to release it by mid-April. Where 2.0, launched in 2005, is the country’s largest tech gathering focused on location-based services, which are especially hot this year with the spread of location-aware smartphones and apps that exploit location information, such as Yelp and Foursquare.

The Local Faves code pulls latitude and longitude data from iPhone’s core software, and makes it easier for app developers to use that information. For example, an app incorporating Local Faves might allow users to broadcast their location to social networking services, or tag a piece of information with a location. Those are tricks that developers of navigation- or social-networking-related apps mastered long ago, but they aren’t as familiar to makers of apps where location isn’t core to the experience, Imbach says.

Green Mountan Digital in Woodstock, VT, for example, plans to use Local Faves to improve its Audobon Guide series of iPhone apps, which provide photographic catalogues of …Next Page »

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