It looks as though Microsoft Corp. is moving into a paradigm shift with its move toward a $7 billion acquisition from Nokia to thrust it into the mobile market. Nokia will still remain a company after Microsoft buys the company’s handset business. While Microsoft is acquiring what Nokia is best known for, the Finnish company is holding on to two if its major businesses: networking and mapping. Microsoft has been hoping to take a slice of the mobile market from smartphone moguls Apple and Google, and meanwhile has been partnering with Nokia for three years.
This review in this morning’s New York Times caught my eye – how many times have I wished for some sort of gadget to find my car in a parking lot? I have tied a hiking stick to the roof of my car to make it more noticeable in busy parking lots. But that’s not always so easy. Cars are all created in about three to four colors unless you customize yours with psychedelic magic bus colors or something.
This article cites several new apps for free or at minimal cost that will find your car for you, using your phone’s GPS and some will even work from photos!
I’ve been wondering what would happen with in-car navigation as a result of the new turn-by-turn navigation now available in smartphones. In-car navigation is much more expensive than the $50 app that allows you to use turn-by-turn navigation on your cell phone. The big plus of in-car navigation is the fact that you don’t have to hold your device while trying to navigate busy streets. But the higher price tag of in-car navigation has car manufacturers thinking up ways to utilize the smartphone navigation system.
Solutions are in the works, according to an article in today’s New York Times: Ford has teamed up with the navigation company Telenav to enable Telenav’s Scout software to run on compatible vehicles outfitted with Ford’s Sync system and software called Applink. A $25-a-year app, Car Connect, lets drivers connect Android phones to the dash. (An iPhone version is in the works.)
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, practically announced that Facebook would have a search engine during the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco. He also said that the last two years the company had wasted time building cross-platform mobile apps based on HTML5 rather than snappier, smoother native apps. He believes that more people will be using mobile than desktop applications, and is moving forward with that huge priority. They now have a native iPhone app that is based on code contributions to apps. He said he basically lives on his mobile phone himself.
On Monday Apple introduced a new version of its mobile operating system for iPhones and iPads that will bring a host of new features, including maps that let users soar over a three-dimensional rendering of a city, according to an article in The New York Times.
As was mentioned in this blog of a pre-announcement of Google Earth for mobile “(Pre-announcement of Google Earth for mobile made at Google event”) last week, the new map software replaces Google data with Apple’s own mapping system. This is a big step for a company that has considered Google a close partner up until now. Since Apple introduced the iPhone, it has relied on Google data to drive the mapping software. When Google released its Android platform, however, relationships between the two companies began to disintegrate. Not surprisingly as Android is the top mobile operating system in the world, putting Apple and Google head to head in several different markets.
Recently TomTom introduced the WEBFLEET Mobile Smartphone App, which gives an overarching view of a customer’s fleet to the PC in the office. This can be accessed on any device from anywhere drawing data from the cloud and is particularly useful to small business owners. In an interview with Michael Geffroy, Vice President of Sales, North America for TomTom Business Solutions, he outlined the exciting features of WEBFLEET:
Twenty-three year old Tyler White of Santa Fe, NM won the $10,000 top prize in an international program design contest for iPhone and iPad applications this summer. The iPad app integrates Flickr photos with an interactive satellite map. Basically it is based on Google maps using Flickr photos. About 15,000 users have purchased the Flickr Photo Map from the Apple iTunes Store to date.
In our town, this is a local-boy-make-good story, especially as White is an unemployed college dropout – or was before he began to build apps. He is now making a living off the sales of three Apple iPhone and iPad apps that he designed, one of which was the prize winner.
This type of entrepreneurship is not new – Apple founder Steve Jobs, founder of Dell, Michael Dell, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, all went to founding their own companies without passing through the hallowed gates of college.
To support this type of innovator, Peter Thiel, PayPal cofounder and Facebook backer, established a foundation to administer grants to people under 20 “to further their innovative scientific and technical ideas.” Those awarded grants would not be able to go to school during the two years of their grant fellowship. There are 20 $100,000 grants available.
This offer caused great dissent in the press and among politicians, but on the other hand, with the rising costs of a college education, who is to say this is not a viable option for those talented in this direction?
Announced before ESRI UC, was an iPhone application that provides users with detailed demographic data for any given location. The app, called BAO (Business Analyst Online), will be available for free at the Apple App Store.
Integrity Logic has been busy lately – they have now released Geology WA covering the state of Washington and Oregon. The release “focuses on the physical geography and geology of the Pacific Northwest states, and contains 25 layers of information, which can be superimposed, mixed and rearranged in any desired combination.”
The company also released for the state of Arizona, Geology AZ, a GIS with 23 layers of information focusing on the physical geography and geology of Arizona.
The company also has GIS coverage for the following states:
Geology CA, Geology TX, Geology NY and Geology FL.
“Outbreaks Near Me,” a new iPhone application, created by researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston in collaboration with the MIT Media Lab, gives users the opportunity to track outbreaks of infectious diseases such as H1N1 (Swine Flu) in real time. The power of the online resource HealthMap, is behind the application, which collects, filters, maps and disseminates information about emerging infectious diseases. The application offers contextualized data of a user’s location and can pinpoint outbreaks that have been reported near the user. Users can search for additional information on outbreaks or individual occurrences by location or by disease.
Outbreaks Near Me was developed with support from Google.org and is available at no cost for download in the iTunes App Store.
email
Facebook
Twitter
RSS Feed
