A new app called “Drawnimal” encourages “i-generation” kids to think outside of the screen, literally.

Users are encouraged to encorpate the screen into drawings of animals, that both encourage and respond to the child’s creations.

I think it’s particularly interesting today, when everything is being transformed into the world of touch-screens, to incorporate this traditional art form: paper and pen is required to use the app.

The creators of the app have also mentioned that the app will hopefully aid kids to learn the alphabet.

You can see a demonstration of the app below:

http://designtaxi.com/news/357278/Drawing-App-Encourages-Kids-To-Think-Out-Of-The-Phone/

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Whilst the homepage is limited to photos and text-only status updates, rumours have it ads will soon appear. Is this too much? As David Progue suggests, is the sole purpose to “save you one tap” that would occur when opening the original Facebook app? Or does Facebook have sneakier plans to take over your home screen, and soon the world?

One would think, it’s the latter.

Read Progue’s article for more info on Home.

Article  by David Pogue and originally published in NYTimes.com

Facebook, man. Unbelievable. Second-most-visited Web site in the world. Frequented monthly by one-sixth of the earth’s population. Primary source of news for half of America’s young people.

So vast and powerful is Facebook that it didn’t seem implausible when the rumors began: Facebook was about to introduce its own cellphone. Look on our works, Apple and Google, and despair!

The rumors were wrong. The new “Facebook phone” isn’t a phone. Instead, it’s a set of apps for phones running the Android operating system. Starting Friday, you can download them from the Google app store onto certain phones from HTC (One and One X) and Samsung (Galaxy S III, S 4 and Note II). More Android models will be compatible in the coming months, Facebook says. These apps also come preinstalled on the new HTC First, which costs $100 with a two-year AT&T contract.

This software suite, called Home, replaces the standard Home screen and Lock screen of the phone.

In their places, what you see is a slowly scrolling parade of full-screen photos from your Facebook news feed. Text-only posts appear, too, using your friend’s primary profile picture (cover photo) as the photographic background.

The company says that at the moment, the Cover Feed — this parade of images on your Lock screen and Home screen — represents only about 80 percent of what you would see on the actual Facebook Web site.

What’s missing? Video posts and ads. Both, Facebook says, are coming soon. Yes, you read that right: the latest billboard for advertising is your own cellphone’s home screen. Are you ready for this?

You can have all kinds of fun on the Cover Feed. If the stately scrolling is too slow for your tastes, you can flick to the next photo, and the next, and the next.

You can double-tap the screen to “like” a post. You can hold a finger down on the screen to see the entire photo, smaller; big parts of it are generally chopped off in the process of enlarging it to fill the phone’s screen. And you can tap a tiny speech-balloon icon to read people’s comments, or to leave one of your own.

Facebook correctly points out that this sort of newsfeed screen saver is an excellent time killer when you’re standing in line or waiting for someone. At the same time, the Home software replaces the Home and Lock screens that Google or your phone maker designed. Unfortunately, you lose some good features in the process.

For example, for most people, the entire purpose of a Home screen is displaying app icons. But there are no icons on Facebook’s Home screens; Facebook thinks you’d rather use that space for reading Facebook updates.

The only icon that appears is your own profile photo. You can drag it to the left to open the Facebook Messaging app, to the right to open the last open app — or upward to open a grid of app icons on a gray background. Ah, here are the apps. But it’s awfully sparse; where are the rest?

They’re on a screen off to the left. Swipe your finger to see, on a black background, the usual Android “all apps” screen. From here, you can hold your finger down on a particular app’s icon to install it onto the gray-background launcher screen, which can have multiple pages.

If it sounds confusing, that’s because it is. In removing the app-launching function from the Home screen, Facebook has wound up having to reinvent the way you open programs on your phone, and the result feels like a hack. The black-background screen to the left lists all of your apps, and scrolls vertically; the nearly identical gray-background screen lists only your favorites, and scrolls horizontally. Got it?

Let’s hope you don’t use Android widgets much, either — those small windows on your Home screen that display news headlines and new e-mail messages. Facebook Home relegates them to Android’s traditional Home screens. They’re still accessible, though buried. (They appear when you tap the More button on the black-background app screen.)

Wallpaper is gone, too; you can’t dress up your Facebook Home screen with photo backgrounds of your choice. So is the status bar at the top of the screen that usually displays the time, your signal strength, battery life and other gauges. That bar appears only when you’re in other apps.

Home offers a few other Facebook-centric features. For example, that gray-background launcher screen offers buttons that let you write a new status post of your own, take (or choose) a photo to post, or “check in” (announce your location).

Notifications appear in a new style, too. When one of your friends posts an update, or someone comments on one of your posts or sends you a message, a small white bar appears on your Home screen to let you know. You can tap the notification box to view the corresponding post or message, or you can hold your finger down and swipe to dismiss all of them simultaneously.

If you get Home preinstalled on the HTC First phone, other kinds of messages appear this way, too — notifications about battery life, missed calls, calendar appointments and so on. If you install Home yourself, though, only Facebook notifications appear like this.

The last new Home feature is the endearingly goofily named Chat Heads. When someone texts you or sends you a Facebook message, a round icon appears on your screen, displaying that person’s face (it doesn’t matter what app you’re using). Tap the Chat Head to reveal the new message on a screen that also displays, screenplay-style, all previous back-and-forths with this person.

Chat Heads are fun and effective, but Facebook’s engineers appear to have overlooked one small detail: Chat Heads are useful only when you receive a message. How are you supposed to initiate a conversation?

For that, you have to duck into your app-launcher screen and fire up the Facebook or Facebook Messaging app, just as you did before you arrived at Home.

Everything in Home is attractive, smooth and quick. At the same time, there’s something vaguely incoherent about the whole operation.

First, there’s the “what is it?” thing. It’s not a phone, not an operating system, not even an app, really. Instead, it’s Facebook’s commandeering of the whole Android home-base design.

Is this going to be a new thing, replacing your Home screen with a favorite company’s custom version? Will there be a Twitter home screen, a Pepsi home screen, a Justin Bieber home screen?

And there’s a more troubling question: Why?

The Facebook apps for both iPhone and Android are outstanding. They’re full-featured, beautifully designed, extremely popular. What does Home add, really? Yes, the ability to see incoming posts on your Home screen; you save one tap. But is it worth losing widgets, wallpaper, app folders and the Android status bar in the process?

Then there’s the weird new phone that comes with Home preinstalled — the HTC First. What’s the deal with this phone? It’s plastic, dull, uninteresting. It’s so generic, it should come in a plain white box that says PHONE on it.

It’s especially unimpressive compared with HTC’s other new phone, the spectacular HTC One, which I have reviewed online on my blog, Pogue’s Posts.

Facebook’s answer to “why” seems straightforward enough; its research shows that Americans spend 25 percent of their cellphone time in Facebook. (Seriously?) Why wouldn’t we want to save the trouble of opening an app to stay in touch?

Of course, there may be other answers to the “why” — like those ads. It probably means a lot to Facebook’s advertisers to know that their commercial messages can now appear on your phone’s screen even when it’s locked.

What’s Facebook up to? Is Home part of some elaborate sneaky long-term sideways plot to stab Google in the back and take over the world?

Or is it just a kind of weird, nebulous programming experiment that doesn’t entirely succeed?

Facebook, man.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/11/technology/personaltech/facebooks-grab-for-your-phone-what-gives.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0&ref=technology

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KIK

LINE

GOOGLE VOICE

Shared via: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323478004578302382005160380.html

SÃO PAULO—Brazilian regulators on Wednesday rejected Apple Inc.’s AAPL -0.19%request to register the iPhone name in that country, setting up a potentially costly legal dispute in one of the world’s fastest-growing smartphone markets.

The agency overseeing patents in Brazil said Wednesday it denied Apple’s trademark application because Brazilian electronics maker IGB Eletrônica SA, better known by its brand name Gradiente, already owned rights to the name.

Marcelo Chimento, spokesman for Brazil’s National Institute of Industrial Property, or INPI, said Apple is contesting the decision, charging that Gradiente failed to make use of the trademark within a five-year window, as required by Brazilian trademark law. An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment.

Unlike in the U.S., Brazilian trademark regulations stipulate that registrations be rewarded on a first-come, first-served basis, regardless of which party used the trademark first, or which party brings more value and recognition to the brand.

Gradiente applied for the IPHONE trademark in 2000, more than six years before Apple submitted its own application and announced its hot-selling device. The Brazilian company won the trademark in January 2008, giving it exclusive use until 2018 under local regulations so long as it produced a product bearing the name within five years. But the company didn’t appear to release a qualifying product until December, just weeks before the deadline, when it announced a smartphone called the “IPHONE Neo One.”

According to Gradiente, the IPHONE Neo One is only available on the company’s website or at one store in a shopping center in São Paulo. Gradiente’s IPHONE runsGoogle Inc.’s GOOG +0.28% Android operating system and is listed at about $304, while Apple’s iPhone 5 starts at $1,220 in Brazil.

INPI is now evaluating Apple’s challenge, Mr. Cimento said. “Gradiente has to prove that it used the brand” in the allotted time, within 60 days, Mr. Cimento said. Meanwhile, INPI has awarded Apple the “iPhone” trademark in four other categories such as software development and clothing.

If INPI rejects Apple’s challenges in 60 days, the Cupertino, Calif.-based company would not have to immediately halt sales of iPhones in Brazil, but would be vulnerable to a fresh battle over intellectual property rights. Legal experts say such disputes are costly and can drag on for years.

Gradiente said in December that it would take “all the measures used by companies around the world” to preserve its intellectual property rights. But a Gradiente spokeswoman declined to comment about the dispute on Wednesday, and declined to say how many of its IPHONEs have been sold since the launch.

Apple has warned in its annual reports that “as the company has grown, the intellectual property rights claims against it have increased and may continue to increase.” In the worst case for Apple, regardless of the validity of infringement claims, the company may be required to pay damages or royalties, or may be subject to injunctions prohibiting the marketing or sales of its products.

Apple doesn’t report its iPhone sales figures in Brazil, but the country is expected to become the world’s fourth largest smartphone market by unit shipments in 2016, according to research firm IDC.

Apple, which has no retail stores in Brazil, sells iPhones here through authorized resellers, mobile operators and its own website. Apple has been working to open its first retail store in Brazil in Rio de Janeiro.

Apple has faced similar disputes before.

Last year, it paid $60 million for rights to the iPad name in mainland China after a series of lawsuits and countersuits with a Chinese company that had registered the trademark first.

In Mexico, a telecommunications equipment firm registered its company name as iFone in 2003, four years before Apple registered the iPhone trademark there. Apple has thus far been unsuccessful in efforts to invalidate the Mexican firm’s name.

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Creating a Consumer Social Media Strategy & Online Crisis Management DAY 1: DEVELOPING A HIGHLY EFFECTIVE CONSUMER SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY DAY 2: CRISIS MANAGEMENT IN SOCIAL MEDIA, PROTECTING BRAND EQUITY • Having a purpose rather than just ‘doing’ social media • Time saving tools and techniques to help small teams produce killer content daily • Developing a multi-level strategy to maximise online buzz and chatter • What are the most realistic social media threats to a business? • Best practice guidelines on responding to crisis situations • Developing company-wide social media guidelines MELBOURNE, 14-15 MARCH SYDNEY, 21-22 MARCH BRISBANE, 25-26 MARCH PERTH, 18-19 APRIL CANBERRA, 8-9 APRIL

How to Develop an Integrated Online and Mobile Marketing Strategy DAY 1: CREATING AN INTEGRATED ONLINE MARKETING STRATEGY DAY 2: MOBILE MARKETING MASTERCLASS • Aligning digital marketing plans with business goals and objectives • Resourcing and budgeting digital and mobile activity • Ensuring integration across online and offline marketing • Cost effective tools and techniques for developing mobile apps/websites • Ensuring your social media and mobile activity work together in harmony • Mobile commerce, QR Codes and NFC; the future of online payments MELBOURNE, 12-13 MARCH SYDNEY, 18-19 MARCH BRISBANE, 27-28 MARCH PERTH, 15-16 APRIL

B2B Social Media Masterclass & Online Crisis Management DAY 1: CREATING A WINNING B2B SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY DAY 2: CRISIS MANAGEMENT IN SOCIAL MEDIA, PROTECTING BRAND EQUITY • Integrating social media into a broader B2B marketing strategy • Utilising social media to become a trusted business thought leader • B2B lead generation using social media • What are the most realistic social media threats to a business? • Best practice guidelines on responding to crisis situations • Developing company-wide social media guidelines MELBOURNE, 14-15 MARCH SYDNEY, 20 & 22 MARCH BRISBANE, 25-26 MARCH PERTH, 18-19 APRIL CANBERRA, 8-9 APRIL

ABOUT THE TRAINER James Fitzgerald is Executive Director of Programming at Social Media Knowledge (SMK). Between his work in Australia and in the UK James has trained over 3,000 senior marketing professionals and business decision makers on how to use social media more effectively. PAST ATTENDEES: Fairfax, Deloitte, Jetstar, McDonald’s, Pfizer, NAB,ABC, Subaru, Panasonic, Transurban, Medibank,Betfair, Disney, Tourism Australia, News Magazines, Johnson & Johnson, Foxtel, Jurlique, Commonwealth Bank & more. James, our presenter, was knowledgeable and engaging. The real life examples of how social media can impact and enhance your brand were great. Subaru, Marketing MORE TESTIMONIALS >

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There is no shortage of cooking apps in the market, making it more difficult to stand out from the crowd. However ChefDay have taken it a step further beyond recipe inspiration and instructions. They offer great recipes from a celebrity chef with the added option of having all the required ingredients delivered to a user’s house!

Why just provide the advice when you can also provide the product? This type of vertical integration begs the question of how many other apps could take their service offering to the next level? Some food for thought…

http://www.springwise.com/food_beverage/recipe-video-service-delivers-ingredients-door/

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With rumours swirling around the possible launch of a plastic-encased budget iPhone to be announced this year, it begs the question: why would Apple’s marketing team perform such a drastic about-face? Sure, a brand’s market strategy should evolve over time, but this approach seems to contradict the single-minded focus that has made the iPhone a world leader to date. Fighting over raw market share can’t take priority over profitability and long-term sustainability, or can it?

Assuming the rumours are true, this infographic is my attempt to make sense of how the iPhone’s market segment strategy has changed over the years.

The post iPhone Lite Market Segment Strategy appeared first on Chrysalis - Digital Blog.

Navigating museums, airports and railway stations or finding shops, ATMs and even your car in shopping centres will soon be as simple as firing up an app as GPS moves indoors.

“Anything that’s identifiable as a destination we can help you find it from where you are now … whether it’s a disabled toilet, a Westpac ATM or a store that is selling Xboxes.”

Paul Pettersen, Abuzz

Google has thrown its weight behind indoor navigation and says the technology is reaching the tipping point, while Australian firms have developed competing technology that they say could roll out in shopping centres like Westfield and QIC within six months. Australian researchers are also using it to try to give independence back to the blind or visually impaired.

Abuzz has offered its technology to current partners Westfield and QIC; it can direct users to shops and remember where their car is parked.

The technology is sometimes called “indoor GPS” but it does not use satellite navigation as this doesn’t work indoors and struggles even in urban environments where large buildings block the signal.

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Instead of satellites, Wi-Fi has become the standard for companies such as Google to locate the user within five to 10 metres through Wi-Fi access points. Researchers at universities including the University of NSW have tapped other sensors on the phone such as the gyroscope, accelerometer and magnetometer to bring the accuracy down to within three metres.

Google has launched indoor maps in eight countries – the United States, Japan, Canada, Switzerland, Britain, France, Denmark and Sweden – and has more than 10,000 venues mapped including airports, shopping centres, hotels, universities and libraries (see videos).

Google has rolled out indoor maps in eight countries and has 10,000 floor plans covered already.

Google software engineer Waleed Kadous, an Australian who studied at UNSW, leads Google’s indoor mapping effort from California.

He told an indoor mapping conference at the University of NSW this week that the technology was approaching the tipping point of mainstream adoption.

“Are we right where we were with the web in 1997? I think we have some problems we need to address but we might very well be because in my view there’s no fundamental technical obstacle now,” Kadous said.

Abuzz and Google’s apps support multiple levels.

Google has already covered large airports like Atlanta, Chicago and Narita, the entire Las Vegas strip, the Mall of America, Ikea and Macy’s stores and the giant Shibuya and Shinjuku railway stations in Tokyo.

Business owners – or anyone – in Google’s launch countries can upload their own floor plans and add detail to the map and customers can search for specific types of shops or products and be directed there.

Kadous showed off an example of an application that is still in development at Google that allows people to see where their friends are in the mall and easily meet them without communicating. The technology can also make Google searches more context aware such as by delivering the correct results when you search “painting” while in a hardware store.

Abuzz’s technology will direct you to the store you want and pop up deals along the way.

“For all of the nice things we’ve done so far I still see some major flaws and there’s still a lot of areas for additional work,” said Kadous, adding that one of the major problems was filling out all the “metadata” on the maps.

“My goal is people should expect and have high quality indoor location [maps] in venues the same way that they expect a business to have a website.”

Google would not say when indoor maps would launch in Australia but there are already a number of Australian firms competing in the same space.

Australian firm Abuzz already has just under 400 interactive wayfinding kiosks in 50 of Australia’s largest shopping malls as well as Sydney Airport and hospitals and museums in Sydney and Melbourne.

The company is adopting indoor navigation to bring the functionality of the kiosks to smartphones, which mobile product manager Paul Pettersen said was a logical next step. It has already conducted trials at QIC Castle Towers in Sydney in May and is now in talks with Westfield and QIC about a broader rollout via the shopping centres’ own apps.

“The intention is that in a large built environment – and typically we’re talking about a shopping centre but it equally works for a hospital or an airport – anything that’s identifiable as a destination we can help you find it from where you are now,” said Pettersen.

“Whether it’s a disabled toilet, a Westpac ATM or a store that is selling Xboxes.”

With the Abuzz app – which will be tailored for each shopping centre – when users park their car they can register it using the app with one button push and can easily then navigate back to their car when they’ve finished shopping. The app could also offer location-based deals from nearby stores.

While Google is trying to map the world, Abuzz is focused on mapping 80 shopping centres in Australia in high detail, which Pettersen says will mean it can be rolled out to customers within six months to a year and “we’re not going to direct you to a store that closed two months ago”. It will even support keyword searches for those who want to find specific products.

UNSW is working on indoor maps applications for the blind and visually impaired, allowing them to more easily get around chaotic settings like airports without assistance. It has already developed the technology including a user interface that supports Braille and will be conducting trials by the end of this year or early next year.

“GPS has already completely revolutionised their lives because it’s giving them a lot more independence and they’re a lot more confident moving around by themselves in the city,” said researcher Thomas Gallagher.

“Of course if you can bring these guiding technologies indoors it’s a really good application.”

Another UNSW team is using autonomous robots to virtually reconstruct indoor environments. Similarly, researchers in Japan are experimenting with Nintendo Wii remotes and Microsoft Kinect to map floor plans.

Canberra-based Locata deploys ground-based local positioning systems for military and commercial applications like mining, where satellite navigation is flaky or non-existent (e.g. underground). It is more expensive but more reliable and accurate than using Wi-Fi and smartphones as base stations and antennas need to be installed.

Another Australian company, Smarttrack RFID, has developed indoor positioning technology for museums and art galleries to track their collections. Visitors can take advantage of the technology to find any artwork or piece including background information and customise their own guided tours. The technology is already installed in Otago Museum in New Zealand.

http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/smartphone-apps/indoor-gps-every-step-you-take-every-move-you-make-googles-got-maps-for-you-20121115-29e1b.html

Scalado Rewind is a feature that guarantees the perfect group shot every time through an innovative combination of facial recognition and a timeline controller. The results seem pretty amazing.

The video above depicts the app being used on an Android phone… the only problem is that the app is no longer available on Android. Or iPhone. Where did it go?

The plot thickened when RIM recently revealed a suspiciously similar feature at the recent Blackberry World conference. The feature was touted as one of the most exciting new features of the upcoming Blackberry 10. Yep you guessed it, they had been working with Scalado to bring this feature to their new flagship handset.

In the background, however, Nokia bought the entire company, including Scalado’s technology, apps, IP and team. This means we will see a rash of Windows Phones hitting the market with the best of what Scalado has to offer, including Rewind as well as a whole host of existing as well as yet-to-be-invented features.

So while Blackberry 10 will most likely ship with the “Rewind” feature, did RIM miss a beat by letting Nokia (and by association Windows Phone) take control of the company that delivered one of their most exciting features to date?

http://greenlimeshake.tumblr.com/post/22201129088/rim-camera-app-scalado

I’ll start by assuming you don’t know what “sexting” is. Wikipedia defines it: Sexting is the act of sending sexually explicit messages or photographs, primarily between mobile phones

Sexting is daring and impulsive, but leaves a ridiculously insecure paper-trail that can easily ruin your life when things get in the wrong hands.

So when you MMS your sextually explicit material (boom tish) you are absolutely asking it – if you ever get on that person’s bad side.

Enter SnapChat.

This friendly little ghost here (clearly a product aimed at kids) allows you to send a picture message with a time expiry. BOOM! You just got your Safe-Sext on! This digital condom is a godsend for anyone who loves to text, but doesn’t want to find they’ve given birth to a meme.

All the sextually explicit material now has a self-destruct timer built straight into it.

What do we think about this kind of product? Is it ethically inappropriate, or is it a brilliant form of innovation for a market that is clearly in need of a product like this?