When we posted about RoadRunnerGPS, a lot of BlackBerry Cool readers recommended using Gym Technik for weight training. At first, this app was a web-based client but a few weeks ago they went native, which really helps if your gym is in a basement.
Gym Technik will be launching their popular fitness tracking app for the BlackBerry Storm in two weeks. To find out when Gym Technik for the Storm goes live, you can register at their site.
© Kyle for BlackBerry Cool, 2009
App Store developers now have more to contend with than just the fickle tastes of the humans Apple has reviewing submissions. Now, submissions also go through an automated filter that determines whether or not the app is obeying the rules and not using any of Apple’s private APIs, which is a no-no, according to the developer agreement.
The news comes via a conversation that occurred between developers on Twitter. Craig Hockenberry, best known for Twitterific, guessed that the App Store now contains a mechanism to check submitted code against proper framework use, and John Gruber responded that Apple has in fact recently begun to do just that.
The specific function of the new automated component is to check submissions for private API calls. If it finds any, the app is rejected outright. Presumably, such a check would be run at the beginning of the review process, thereby cutting down a lot on the number of submissions that must be reviewed by actual human beings. In other words, it’s a volume compensation strategy on Apple’s part.
It’s also technically fair, since Apple has said all along that private APIs are off-limits. The published reason being that Apple can’t confirm that said APIs will remain stable from release to release of the iPhone OS, meaning that something based on them might break every time an update rolls out. By forcing developers to stick with the public APIs, Apple is trying to ensure that some stability exists for end-users who depend on the hundred thousand apps or so available now in the App Store.
Despite being technically fair, the move feels a little unfair to developers, since Apple hasn’t exactly been consistent about enforcing the rules regarding private APIs up till now. One reason could have been that spotting their use just isn’t that easy, which the computer filter now rectifies. But it seems clear that Apple also looked the other way in at least a couple of cases when it suited it to do so, like with Google’s mobile search app, hence my suggestion that this has more to do with reducing workload using a non-arbitrary filter than anything else.
While the introduction of an automated layer does, on the surface, seem to guarantee a level of fairness, it also probably isn’t very encouraging to developers, who now essentially face a firewall before they gain access to individuals they can actually talk to about what’s wrong with their submission. Expect more headaches for the App Store team as the fallout for the implementation of this measure.
Nearly a year ago, we questioned whether or not Hulu could survive. It’s not that we don’t think the product is well done or well liked. Other than the annoying regional restrictions which pisses off lots of people, the overall service is quite nice. The problem is that there are just way too many conflicts to deal with. The company is owned, in large part, by the networks, and that’s leading to all sorts of pressure and complaints about how ads are sold and whether or not there should be a subscription service. From what I’ve heard, the folks at Hulu understand quite well how an internet-age company should act. The company’s rather honest explanation for its fight with Boxee certainly suggested the problem was at a different level than with Hulu management. But… with Hulu having most of its ownership from legacy industries, combined with having so many different players involved in the ownership, it shouldn’t come as a surprise at all that the company is now coming under pressure to do things (subscriptions, limits, etc.) that will certainly kill off whatever good has been done. And, since some of the pressure is actually coming from the cable guys as well (who view Hulu as a huge threat), this will only get worse if, as is widely expected, Comcast completes its purchase of NBC Universal.
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Thieves in Willebroek, Antwerp cut a hole in the roof of an electronics warehouse and stole 3,000 to 4,000 iPhones, one of the greatest heists of its kind in history. The phones were headed to Belgian Mobistar and are estimated to be worth $3 million.
The news article noted that the thieves made a hole directly over the iPhones which suggests they knew exactly where the phones were being kept.
The phones can be feasibly tracked and can only be activated through jailbreaking, which could put a damper on their online sales. Also, this comment was funny:
Haha, geen medelijden mee. Mobistar is zelf een dief als het op abonementen aankomt.
Which roughly translates to “Don’t pity them. Mobistar is the thief when it comes to subscriptions.”
Bloomberg has a great article about the use of BlackBerrys and Twitter in Venezuela. The combination of a BlackBerry and Twitter, is apparently a crucial traffic tool in a country with shoddy road work and hectic driving conditions. Under a group called Trafico, Venezuelans flag potholes and vent frustrations about local infrastructure.
According to RIM, Venezuela’s per- capita use of smartphones outpaces Europe’s. Under Chavez’s currency controls, Venezuelans are allowed $400 annually for online purchases. It seems that they are spending this $400 on a new BlackBerry because it’s a status symbol.
© Kyle for BlackBerry Cool, 2009
Today, Adobe has made the betas of AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1 available for download for Windows, Mac and Linux.
The big features in AIR 2 were shown off at Adobe MAX in October, and they include: Support for USB mass storage devices, support for multi-touch and gesture-based input, improved support for local peripherals and native application processes, improved performance, and peer to peer and UDP networking.
Flash Player 10.1 adds a host of functions designed with the mobile device in mind. Even though today’s beta of 10.1 is not available on mobile platforms, Adobe says it will be available “across a broad spectrum of smartphones and other Internet-connected devices in 2010.” Already, it includes support for Android 2.0, Windows Mobile 6.5, Symbian S60 V5 and Palm WebOS.
In order for Flash Player 10.1 to be “ready for mobility,” Adobe says it has made a number of tweaks to run on constrained systems, which include performance improvements, rendering, scripting, memory, start-up time, battery and CPU optimizations.
Like AIR 2, Flash 10.1 supports multi-touch, gestures, accelerometer and mobile input models which will bring rich Flash interaction to mobile platforms. Going further, however, it also adds support for screen orientation changes, sleep mode, adaptive frame rate streaming, and graphics hardware acceleration.
Here’s something yourself or your sister might be particularly interested in: A digital camera that helps you to pretty up pictures taken with it on the go. The so-called Love-Digi Moving Photo Camera [JP] is made by Japanese toymaker Takara Tomy and based on the cultural phenomenon of Purikura, photo booths in Japan that especially teenage girls use to create decorated snaps of themselves.
All you need to do is to take a picture (just with a regular camera) first and then add a total of 40 different backgrounds, 30 different frames and about 120 different stamps to it. The 2MP camera has a 2.34-inch LCD with 480×234 resolution, 1GB of internal memory, a microSD card slot and a battery life of 2.5 hours. It’s called “moving photo” because the decorations in the pictures are actually GIF animations that you can view on the camera’s LCD screen. Now the only thing that’s missing in order to really call this a portable photo booth is a built-in printer.
Takara Tomy will start selling the Love-Digi in Japan on November 21 in blue or pink. The Japan Trend Shop already offers the device for everyone living outside this country for $168.
Here’s the super-cute commercial for the camera:
Via Akihabara News
The BitTorrent peer-to-peer technology has been around for quite a few years; its huge popularity ensures that it will be around for at least as many. Anyway, the BitTorrent protocol has evolved over the years to the point where BitTorrent trackers, the sites which managed the initial communications between clients, are now useless. In fact, the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker, the Pirate Bay, is shutting down for good, but users of the site have nothing to worry about, for the most part they shouldn’t even notice the change.
“TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It’s the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date. We have put a server in a museum already, and now the tracking can be put there as well,” the Pirate Bay announced. “By moving to a more decentralized system of handling tracking (DHT+PEX) and distributions of torrent files (Magnet Links), BitTorrent will become less vulnerable to downtime and outages.”
As the Pirate Bay puts it, it’s “the end of an era” but the fact is that for the user little will change. Up till now, in order to download a file through BitTorrent, the client software had to first connect to a tracker server, which would then give it the necessary info to find peers. After this, the actual … (read more)
ARM and more than 35 other companies have banded together to create an alliance dubbed the Solution Center for Android, which is aimed at increasing the resources available for developers trying to build for the relatively young OS on top of ARM hardware. Android, an open-source, Linux-based OS pioneered by Google, is the underlying operating system in several popular smartphones such as those from HTC and the Motorola Droid. However, as computer companies plan netbooks based on the ARM architecture (known as smartbooks), ARM and several other companies, including Texas Instruments and Mentor Graphics, determined that the Android OS needed more infrastructure to support these more complicated consumer devices.
The Solution Center will serve as a go-to place for developers to get information on development tools, as well as resources and services optimized specifically for Android on the ARM platform. The end result should be better devices that are able to get to market quickly. And because ARM is so prevalent in other consumer gadgets scattered around the home, it’s possible that the alliance will help bring Android to more devices.
This isn’t breaking news as it went live about a month ago, but it slipped under my radar and I have to post it. The Canadian Wilfrid Laurier School of Business and Economics in Waterloo, Ontario (near RIM headquarters), offers an MBA BlackBerry pilot program. The program puts a BlackBerry Curve 8900 in the hands of every student, as well as provides them with education and collaboration tools for their device.
The faculty even talks about using push technology to push content to their students’ BlackBerrys, and will be recording metrics to gauge which content is being accessed.
So if you’re a student in this program, feel free to hit up BlackBerry Cool for software and accessories. I have no problem giving you some cool applications for the device to test what it can do.
© Kyle for BlackBerry Cool, 2009
In this column for Kaiser Health News, Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer write about the swine flu. “If any public health message has alarmed Americans in recent weeks, it is the repeated claim in the media that healthy young people are dying of 2009 H1N1, or swine flu. … The response has been predictable: frantic parents clogging waiting rooms in pediatricians’ offices, lining up for hours to get their kids vaccinated, and rushing to fill prescriptions for anti-viral drugs before the local pharmacy runs out” (11/17).
Kaiser Health News offers a humorous look at health policy developments with Clay Bennett’s “The Blue Dog.”
Interest groups, including business opponents, are ramping up spending on advertising.
“Business foes of health care overhaul legislation are outspending supporters at a rate of 2-to-1 for TV ads as they grow increasingly nervous over a final bill,” The Associated Press reports. “Led by the giant U.S. Chamber of Commerce, opponents of the Democratic health care drive have spent $24 million on TV commercials over the past month to $12 million spent by labor unions and other backers. That’s an abrupt reversal from the vast spending advantage supporters enjoyed most of this year, according to Evan Tracey, president of Campaign Media Analysis Group, which tracks political ads. More than half the opposition spending has been by the chamber.” The chamber has also “circulated an e-mail to other business groups asking them to help fund a $50,000 study by a ‘respected economist’ of the proposed health care overhaul. The study would be used for a letter, ads and other lobbying efforts to argue that the bill ‘will kill jobs and hurt the economy,’ according to the e-mail” (Fram, 11/17).
CongressDaily: “Interest groups are ramping up spending on nationwide advertising as Senate Majority Leader [Harry] Reid prepares to bring his chamber’s version of healthcare reform legislation to the floor for debate. The Employment Policies Institute, backed by Republican lobbyist Rick Berman, announced today it is adding $2 million to its healthcare ad budget, bringing total spending to more than $12 million. The campaign is running ads in eight states warning about the bill’s cost and its potential consequences for jobs and the economy. Plans for print and radio advertising are in the works.” The ads target senators from swing states who are key to passing health reform legislation in the Senate (Hunt, 11/16).
Meanwhile, “On the White House’s official blog, Nancy-Ann DeParle, the director of the Office of Health Reform, rebuts recent claims by the insurance industry that the proposed health care overhaul would actually increase the cost of premiums,” The New York Times reports. “‘Despite being roundly and thoroughly debunked,’ she writes, ‘the industry lobby continues to release these studies and push their bogus conclusion about cost increases.’” DeParle also cites “an analysis by Goldman Sachs about the possible impact of any overhaul on the for-profit insurance companies. The companies’ ‘earnings could be cut by 50 percent over the next decade if the Senate Finance Committee version of health reform passes,’ she said” (Abelson, 11/16).
The Seattle Times reports on seniors who are skeptical of a health overhaul. The health bill passed by the House “would bring about some unmistakable benefits for seniors,” yet “many seniors remain unconvinced that health reform would be good for them.” Polls show that “Americans 65 and older are less likely than younger people to support President Obama’s health-care efforts and more skeptical that changes would benefit them personally. According to the September 2009 Kaiser Health Tracking Poll, people 65 and older were evenly split over whether they would be better off with an overhaul, while among those under 65, twice as many believe they would be better off than worse off.” (Kaiser Health News is a program of the foundation). Many of those opposed are concerned about the “nearly $500 billion in spending cuts that are designed to keep Medicare solvent longer by reducing fraud, waste and excessive spending” (Song, 11/17).
In a collaboration between Kaiser Health News and The Washington Post, Elizabeth Olson writes about how emerging technology is helping older people stay in their homes and can, in some instances, offer mechanisms to improve patient outcomes and reduce health care costs. “Every morning at 10 a.m. sharp, Juanita Wood, 87, taps “okay” on a screen to start up a device that takes her blood pressure and transmits the information to her medical clinic. At 10:30 a.m., her husband, Arthur, 91, touch-starts his own device, neatly lined up next to hers. The machine calculates his blood pressure and weight and sends them off, along with a blood sugar count that he enters by hand” (11/17).
It’s a good time to be an airport Wi-Fi advertiser. According to a study just released by JiWire, the folks behind a lot of airport Wi-Fi, most people that use airport W-iFi are loaded and spend a good amount of time online while waiting for their flight. This means, of course, that Mr. Money Bags has plenty of time to click on the flashing banner ads that airport Wi-Fi generally sports. But check out these stats, I’m in the wrong game. I should be selling airport Wi-Fi ads.
Seventy-two percent of the airport audience is business travelers with highly desirable demographics:
• Fifty percent travel at least once a month.
• Over half hold an executive or management position.
• Over half have annual household incomes of over $100,000.
• Seventy-five percent of all airport Wi-Fi customers plan to make a big-ticket purchase in the next 12 months.
Sure, it’s all good for advertisers and access providers, but airport Wi-Fi is about the worst access you can get. It’s generally slow and burdened-down by tons of ads. Even if it’s free, I generally won’t use it unless it’s an absolute emergency. If a user agreement page loads, I close my notebook and grab a magazine.
There are reports all around that the BIS is down across North America. Personally, I never notice these things when they happen because I’m on a BES, but I feel for everyone affected. The outages are reported with AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. Again, there are so many reasons why the BIS might be down that it’s impossible to speculate, but if multiple carriers are affected, it’s probably a node somewhere in RIM’s network.
Are you experiencing an outage? Where are you and who is your network provider?
© Kyle for BlackBerry Cool, 2009
This is embarrassing. Not only are the Microsoft Stores a clear copy of Apple Stores, but now the employees are trying to be spontaneous and stir up customer reactions with a weird bastardization of Improv Anywhere.
Despite widespread debate, abortion restrictions in the House health reform bill could affect only a small number of women. Meanwhile, Catholic bishops weigh into the debate and abortion rights group plan a rally to contest the restrictions.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the restrictions were included “to ensure that no taxpayer dollars fund abortion. To that end, the government-run public insurance plan set up by the House bill wouldn’t cover abortion, except in the rare cases of rape or incest, or when the pregnancy endangers the woman’s life. Individuals getting federal subsidies to buy insurance on a new health-care exchange — a potentially large group, reaching from the working poor well into the middle class — also would be barred from buying policies that cover abortion, unless they do so with their own money. Supporters of legal abortion fear that insurers will stop offering abortion coverage for all their customers to streamline their plans, meaning millions of women could lose benefits they currently have.”
“Just 13% of abortions nationwide are billed to private insurance, according to a 2001 study by the Guttmacher Institute … More than 90% of abortions take place in the first trimester, at an average cost of $413. For some women, that would be a staggering sum. … But for many women who have private insurance, losing abortion coverage and having to pay out of pocket for the procedure wouldn’t be an insurmountable burden.” However, “late-term procedures, which account for just 1% of all abortions, take several days and can cost $5,000” (Simon, 11/17).
Related KHN story: How The House Abortion Restrictions Would Work (Appleby, 11/10)
Politico on Catholic bishops weighing in: “The bishops can make a strong case that the anti-abortion language inserted into the House health care bill extends only this central principle: Federal health dollars can’t go to pay for abortions. And for 12 years, these same restrictions have applied not just to fees for abortion services but also to any federal contributions to health plans that cover elective abortions” (Rogers, 11/17).
Meanwhile, Roll Call reports that “[a]bortion-rights groups and other progressive lobbies are organizing a post-Thanksgiving assault on Capitol Hill to press lawmakers to keep restrictive language on abortion out of the final health care package.” The organizations have are organizing a National Day of Action on Dec. 2 “that will include a rally at the Capitol as well as visits by activists from around the country to lawmakers’ offices. The event comes as abortion-rights groups seek to regroup and energize their members after being blindsided by the House decision to add anti-abortion language to its health care bill. They are now figuring out how they can keep similar language out of the Senate bill” (Roth, 11/17).
“Congressional Democrats’ intensifying efforts to pay for their healthcare overhaul and provide more relief for consumers are threatening to unravel a White House deal with the pharmaceutical industry and turn one of Washington’s most powerful lobbies against the legislation,” the Los Angeles Times reports. “Drug makers, which have already spent $110 million lobbying Congress this year, are preparing to make a stand in the Senate,” where a health bill is expected to be unveiled this week. Senior administration officials “are warning members of Congress not to antagonize the deep-pocketed industry at a time when a major victory appears to be within reach, according to Democratic aides.”
Under a deal struck between the White House and drug makers this summer, “companies pledged to support an overhaul and provide limited discounts to Medicare patients in exchange for a promise that no other controls would be imposed on pharmaceutical prices.” But the House legislation challenges that deal by forcing “drug makers to provide bigger discounts when the federal government buys drugs for low-income senior citizens on Medicare. The bill also would give the government new authority to negotiate lower prices for all seniors on Medicare.” Now, it appears a bipartisan group of senators “wants to open the door to lower-priced prescription drugs from other countries. Still other lawmakers want to speed the development of cheaper generic versions of biologic drugs, a new class of pharmaceuticals” (Levey and Hamburger, 11/17).
The latest comScore report concerning the search market has arrived, and although it may not cause too many jaws to drop, there are some interesting tidbits contained within. It seems that Google hit its stride again in October, and Bing continued to make some impressive gains.
Google experienced a couple months’ worth of shakiness earlier this year, failing to win any share between May and June, and then actually losing a little heading into July and August. But between September and October, Google moved its needle from 64.9 percent to 65.4 percent, which is fairly impressive.
In fact, according to comScore, the search giant managed a 17.4 percent year-over-year increase.
Bing, for its part, did even better, pulling off a 30.8 percent gain in the same time span. And in terms of just the last little bit, Bing bumped its share from 9.4 percent to 9.9 percent between September and October. Not bad at all.
It’s Yahoo fans who have cause to be disappointed. Yahoo’s share of the search market has sunk 0.7 percent on a year-over-year basis, and comScore determined that it dropped from 18.8 percent in September to 18.0 percent in October.
Related Articles:
> Bing Gets A Bunch Of New Search Features
> Microsoft Bing Goes Live In The UK
> Bing Managed Big Gain In October
