Tag Archives: Social media
What are those entrepreneurs up to?
Forbes recently held a contest for startups, each company making an elevator pitch of their product. The winner gets some furniture or a computer. You might think, given such low incentives, the best and brightest might want to sit this one out, and you would be mostly right. The ideas are uninspired and what you might expect from tech Cloud computing comes up a few times in the entries, as does social networking and apps. Ideas include information for mapping the human genome uploaded into a cloud, social networking for parents, a retraining program for use on apps, an app for organizing your emails so you receive less spam and promotional emails, and an app that listens to what you’re saying and searches the web for words you bring up and weaves that into a story somehow.
You get the sense that the real prize here is entrepreneurs exposing their ideas to readers of Forbes, trying to get investment and exposure for generally uninspiring ideas (a spam filter, in the form of a third party’s app? Who wants to use that?). But everyone has to be thinking about Instagram. Years ago, if you told me that an app that applies Photoshop filters to Photographs was a billion dollar idea i should really get in on the ground floor on, I would have politely declined and looked to invest in someone that had a good or service they could charge money for. And I would have then gone into a mighty depression some time later, looking at what I spend on lunch everyday know that that wouldn’t even be an issue if had believed in Instagram back in the day.
The judges at Forbes agree with hypothetical me from years ago, and pick for the winner ‘Axonify,’ the program that wants to provide an innovative and quick way to train workers. A service people want, and would pay money for? Makes sense, but someone there is looking at ‘afterschool.me’ and wondering if providing a social network service for parents, and having revenue come later, is the real safe thing to invest in.
Read the article here.
TOP 50 PICKS OF ANDROID APPS
TOP 50 PICKS OF ANDROID APPS
SOCIAL
ANDMADE SHARE Free
FOURSQUARE Free
GLANCEE Free
GOOGLE+ Free
PATH Free Instagram for Android has only just been announced.
LINKEDIN Free
WHATSAPP MESSENGER Free
ENTERTAINMENT
7DIGITAL MUSIC STORE Free
ESPN GOALS Free This sounds too good to be true for football fans, but it isn’t. ESPN’s app delivers video highlights of Premier League goals just minutes after they’re scored, as well as live scores and stats. It’s free, and funded by ads.
SHAZAM Free Are you listening to a tune on the radio or in a club, but can’t quite place it? Shazam is your friend. It identifies tracks, then enables you buy them, watch the YouTube videos or start them playing in Spotify. It can also display lyrics.
SKY GO Free to Sky subscribers Sky’s live TV app offers up to 23 channels, although how many exactly depends on which you have access to through your home subscription. They stream over 3G or Wi-Fi and you can register up to two devices.
TED Free Californian conference Ted is famous for its thought-provoking technology talks, as big thinkers grapple with the future of… everything. Its Android app serves up its archive of videos, many of them genuinely mind-changing.
GAMES
ANGRY BIRDS RIO Free You can’t escape Angry Birdson any smartphone these days. The game sees you catapulting the miffed birds at nefarious pigs, with the addition of characters from animated movie Rio and boss battles to spice up the action.
WHALE TRAIL £1.49 Another excellent iPhone game that has found its way on to Android. Willow the Whale soars through the clouds as he seeks to escape the evil Baron Von Barry. The soundtrack comes from Super Furry Animal Gruff Rhys.
WORDS WITH FRIENDS Free Words With Friends is basically Scrabble under a different name: you make words with tiles on a board with rows and columns. Here, though, you’re competing with your Facebook friends, taking turns at your leisure.
WORLD OF GOO £2.99 Having started life as a PC game,World of Goo has become one of the stickiest Android games. It sees you squeezing and stretching goo balls to build objects to get you through a succession of puzzle levels. Tactile and wonderful.
READING
THE GUARDIAN Free Excuse us this one self-interested entry. This app puts a slick, mobile interface on theGuardian website, complete with podcasts, videos, the ability to save articles for offline reading and customise the homescreen categories.
PULSE NEWS Free Pulse is one of a clutch of news aggregation apps for Android. You tell it what websites you like and it pulls down the latest stories, while also letting you search for keywords of specific topics you’re interested in.
LIFESTYLE
AA ECO DRIVE Free An app that aims to save you money while also helping the planet? That will be AA Eco Drive, which uses GPS to track your driving style, then provides useful tips on how you can be more efficient at conserving fuel.
ANDROIDIFY Free One of Android’s strong points is its striking robot logo, something capitalised on by Google’s own Androidify app. It lets you create your own Android avatars, complete with accessories, to store and share with friends.
BUILDAPP Free This app is still in beta, but if you are thinking of moving house or redecorating, it could still prove invaluable. Buildapp enables you to design your rooms in 3D and then move virtual furniture around to see how it might look.
GOOGLE MAPS Free Google Maps remains, hands down, the best maps app for Android. Hardly surprising – it’s easy to use and the maps are clear and detailed. Although built into Android, this standalone version is updated more frequently.
MET OFFICE WEATHER APPLICATION Free The UK’s Met Office has an official Android app and it’s very good indeed. It provides five-day forecasts and daily weather maps, as well as severe weather warnings and favourite location forecasts.
TOUCHNOTE POSTCARDS Free Picture messaging, Facebook and email might be good ways to share your photos, but sometimes you have to get physical. Touchnote turns your pics into postcards, sent to any address for £1.49 a time – in the UK or beyond.
SHOPPING
BARCLAYS PINGIT Free Barclays’ new mobile payments app is an innovative and impressive idea: send money direct to friends’ bank accounts from your phone. For now, only Barclays customers can send, but that will change in the future.
APPSFIRE Free Appsfire is an app to help you shop for… apps. It lets you browse your own collection and, crucially, recommends other app downloads you might like, based on your tastes. Appsfire offers a good way to keep on top of the latest apps.
AMAZON MOBILE FOR ANDROID Free Still think people won’t shop on a phone? They said that about websites once. Amazon’s app is fast and efficient for browsing and buying products, with barcode scanning to get more details on something when in a real-world shop.
TESCO GROCERIES Free Tesco’s shopping app is a model of simplicity and effectiveness, as you create and manage shopping lists, book delivery slots and switch between the mobile and web shopping services. You can also scan products in-store to add them to your list.
TOOLS
ADVANCED TASK KILLER Free If you’re experiencing performance issues with your Android smartphone, it may be because too many apps are running in the background. Advanced Task Killer is the antidote, helping you shut down those you don’t need.
DROPBOX Free Wonder why there’s so much excitement around cloud services? Dropbox should help you understand. When installed on your computer and Android, you can swap files between the two at will – photos, videos, documents…
EVERNOTE Free Another good advert for the power of the cloud, Evernote wants to help you “remember everything across all of the devices you use”, storing and synchronising notes and to-do lists, while adding photos for visual memory aids.
GOOGLE DOCS Free It should come as no surprise that Google’s own online office suite works very well as an Android app. You can create, edit and share Google Docs with it; it also uses the camera to convert snaps of printed text into documents.
ONAVO Free You may know that your mobile tariff provides 500MB of data a month, but do you know how that data gets used by different apps? Onavo will show youhow, monitoring data traffic and displaying it as easy-to-understand charts.
OPERA MINI Free Looking for an alternative to Google’s preloaded Android web browser? Opera Mini is well worth a look. It uses compression technology that ensures websites load faster and cost you much less in data usage – a godsend when roaming abroad.
SKY MAP Free Originally made by Google, this app has just been open sourced for other developers to work on. It’s an excellent showcase for Android phones: point your device at the sky and it will tell you what the various stars are.
Face book
A little girl not more than 7 years old approaches me and says: “You want to see my face book?”. I was struck wordless, thoughts rushing by me as to what this world had come to, awaiting my response as I rubbed off my shocked expression, she hands me a handmade book with a couple of recycled computer pages and childlike drawings on the cover, crayon all around, with the title: Face Book. All the letters were different sizes, and with all fonts imaginable, from Arial to Wingdings. She turns the page and it is in fact a book of faces! She drew the face of every person she knew (and liked) with their respective nickname.
And I was forced to wonder:
“If only FACEBOOK was just a book of faces…”
Anyone else feel the same?
