This iPhone App Knows What You Like -- Before You Ask It A Single Question

Google CEO Larry Page and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer agree on one thing: the future of search is tied in with artificial intelligence.

Page has talked about the ideal search engine knowing what you want BEFORE you ask it, and Ballmer recently explained Microsoft's multibillion dollar investment in Bing by saying that search research is the best way to progress toward artificial intelligence apps that help you DO things, not just find things.

So both companies will probably be taking a very close look at CleverSense, which launches its first iPhone app, a "personal concierge" called Alfred (formerly Seymour), today.

The app analyzes data from around the Web to figure out what you will like, based on similarities with other people. It's similar to the recommendation engines pioneered by Amazon -- "other people who bought X also bought Y" -- or the Music Genome Project that eventually grew into Pandora. Only it's applied to the real world.

CleverSense CEO Babak Pahlavan explains that the company grew out of a research project into predictive algorithms that he was working on at Stanford three years ago. The technology crawls the Web looking for what users are saying about particular products, and is able to categorize the results into between 200 and 400 attributes and sentiments for each one.

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Motorola Droid Bionic Dwarfs iPhone 5 in Every Aspect

The smartphone market in the U.S. is mostly dominated by Apple, Samsung, Motorola, HTC and RIM’sBlackBerry. And the most anticipated devices from the beginning of this year include Apple’s iPhone 5 and Motorola Droid Bionic.

Motorola Droid Bionic will come with several enhancements, including expanded features, functionality and an improved form factor. The latest photo leaks revealing Motorola Droid Bionic showed that the smartphone looked very similar to Motorola Droid X2, another powerful dual core smartphone without 4G support.

The design changes from original Droid Bionic, which looked similar to Motorola Atrix, surely is one of the biggest enhancements in terms of form factor. It seems Motorola, with its failed attempt to impress consumers with Motorola Atrix, has allowed the Droid Bionic to undergo changes in order to pick up the momentum with the release of the upcoming smartphone expected to be launched in August.

One of the several leaked images supporting the looks of Droid Bionic to that of Droid X2 showcased version 1.3.0 Webtop application support. With Webtop application, Motorola brings mobile computing allowing users to experience cloud-based computing with easy-to-use docking stations. The ease of docking allows users to get online just the way they would with their regular laptops or office desktops. It provides full Firefox browser, doc editing and multimedia access on a large screen almost anywhere.

Here is a look at the comparison between Motorola Droid Bionic and most speculated features of iPhone 5.


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CNN Starts Live Streaming to the Web, iPad & iPhone

Select cable subscribers will be able to access 24-hour live broadcast streams from CNN and HLN on CNN.com, the CNN App for iPad andCNN for iPhone, CNN has announced.

Right now, the live access to CNN is only available to AT&T, Comcast, Cox, DISH Network, Suddenlink and Verizon customers. That leaves out some of the major cable providers, like Time Warner Cable and Cablevision.

CNN, a Mashable content partner, is joining the ranks of other cable networks like ESPN in providing access to its live broadcast content on a multitude of devices and platforms. In the industry, this is widely known as TV Everywhere. For cable companies and networks, TV Everywhere is perhaps the most potent answer to online subscription streaming services like Netflix and Hulu Plus. The idea is to give cable subscribers additional platform options.

For content companies like CNN, it also means more potential eyeballs. In a statement, Jim Walton, president of CNN Worldwide said, “A principal goal for CNN is to make more of our content available to more people on more platforms, and CNN’s participation in the TV Everywhere initiative is another step forward in that effort.”

Last week, I spoke to Ron Frankel, the CEO of Synacor, a company that powers TV Everywhere portals for various ISPs, including Suddenlink. Frankel told me that TV Everywhere is already showing real promise with consumers.

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iPhone 4 captures magical guitar string wiggles

Kyle Jones of Nashville, Tenn., stirred up a YouTube comment storm with a recent video showing some wild and wacky guitar string action.

Jones slipped his iPhone 4 into the sound hole of the guitar, arranged it with the tip of a pencil, and recorded video of himself playing from the inside out using the forward-facing camera. The video shows dramatic oscillations of the guitar strings.

Some commentators questioned whether the video was a product of post-production manipulation. The real reason seems to be the way the iPhone's camera works.

The rolling-shutter camera doesn't capture an entire image all at once. Rather, it captures images line by line. That slight time difference can cause the strange oscillation effect seen in the video.

A quick poke around YouTube nets similar videos in which the rolling-shutter effect creates some bizarre-looking videos of propellers and other fast-moving subjects. You can even replicate it just by moving your iPhone back and forth quickly while filming something with distinct lines.

No word on just how long it took Jones to get his iPhone back out of the guitar again.

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Gigwalk Signs Up Microsoft to Provide Thousands of Paid Tasks for iPhone-Carrying Part-Timers

Gigwalk, a service that offers a variety of paid odd jobs via iPhone, announced that it now has more than 100,000 “gigs” available or completed and has signed up more than 50,000 people to perform work in eight U.S. cities.

The service is getting a huge boost thanks to Microsoft, which is tapping iPhone-toting workers to take panoramic images of restaurants and other businesses for its Bing service.

“By combining Gigwalk’s tech-savvy mobile force with our popular Photosynth app, we’re able to add immersive panoramas to Bing local search results, so people can accurately see the details of a business such as a store or restaurant,” Bing Mobile lead program manager David Gedye said in a statement. “Gigwalk’s network delivers high-quality results, often within 24 hours, and that’s hard to beat.”

Microsoft did a trial in New York and has recently ramped up to provide work in all the cities where Gigwalk is operating — New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Miami and Seattle.

“This proves we can handle the scale,” CEO Ariel Seidman said in an interview, noting that one of the big questions when Gigwalk launched was whether it could generate and handle enough gigs to make it pay off for both those assigning and those performing tasks. About 20 percent of those doing tasks are what Seidman calls “professionals” that have come to view Gigwalk as a serious second paycheck, while the remainder are more casual users of the service, performing tasks on occasion.

“The casual folks give you the coverage, but the professionals give you the power to do thousands of gigs per day in an area,” Seidman said. In addition to Microsoft, TomTom and Menupages are among the companies that have provided work for Gigwalkers thus far.

Although the service is iPhone-only for now, the company expects to add an Android version later this year. Expanding to other platforms will be critical as the company moves into cities with a lower number of people with iPhones, Seidman said.

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Google's Eric Schmidt slams Apple iPhone lawsuits

GOOGLE has launched a stinging attack on major mobile phone rival Apple, saying its smartphone lawsuits are inspired by jealousy and a lack of innovation in its own iPhone.

The criticism, by former Google CEO and now executive chairman Eric Schmidt, follows the US International Trade Commissions initial ruling that HTC infringed two of Apple's phone patents in its Google Android-based phones.

If upheld, the decision could see Apple force other Android phone makers to pay significant royalties to their main competitor.

Speaking at Google's Mobile Revolution conference in Tokyo, Mr Schmidt said Apple's case was inspired by jealousy and designed to shut down its fastest-growing rival.

"The big news in the past year has been the explosion of Google Android handsets and this means our competitors are responding," he said.

"Because they are not responding with innovation, they're responding with lawsuits.



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Top 100 Real Estate Apps for Android, Blackberry, iPhone and iPad

Alameda, CA (PRWEB) July 19, 2011

Inman News™ released a special report that lists the most popular and highest rated real estate-related mobile apps designed for Android, Blackberry, iPhone and iPad devices - "100 Must-Have Mobile Apps for Real Estate."

The report is based on App rankings and ratings at TopAppCharts.com, Apple's App Store, The Android Market Site and the Blackberry App World site. All of the featured apps received at least 5 user ratings.

The report includes the following:
1. Top 10 most popular free Android real estate apps
2. Top 10 most popular paid real estate-related apps for Android
3. Top 10 most popular free and paid Android foreclosure apps
4. Top 10 most popular free and paid iPhone real estate apps
5. 5 foreclosure apps for iPhone (ranked by user rating)
6. Top 10 most popular free and paid iPhone mortgage apps
7. Top 5 most popular free and paid panorama photo apps for iPhone
8. Top 10 most popular free and paid iPad real estate apps
9. Top 10 most popular free and paid iPad mortgage apps
10. Top 10 most popular free and paid BlackBerry real estate apps
11. Top-rated free and paid BlackBerry mortgage apps

The purpose of the report is to help identify the business and consumer tools related to real estate that are gaining the most traction among users.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/07/19/prweb8650897.DTL#ixzz1SaqVZwSX

iPhone 4 survives 13,500-foot fall from skydiver's pocket

After slipping out of a skydiver's pocket, one of Apple's iPhone 4 units survived a 13,500-foot drop and can still make and receive calls.

Jarrod McKinney said he was in such a rush to "get out the door" of the plane on a recent skydiving trip that he forgot to secure his iPhone 4, CNN reports. "I just knew it was gone. Falling from that height? (What are) the chances of you finding something like that or even knowing where to look?" he said.

But, after touching down, McKinney used a "GPS tracking app" to locate the device, which had landed on the roof of a building roughly a half-mile away.

Skydiving instructor Joe Johnson called the phone as a joke and was surprised when the call actually went through. The device, which had been cracked once before after a tumble off a bathroom shelf, is still able to make and receive calls, despite the fact that its front and back glass surfaces had shattered. The handset had been protected by a Incipio-branded case that was broken on impact.

McKinney plans to fix the screen, but, for now, uses the BlueTooth connection in his truck to make calls.

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Swell season: iPhone 5 enters prime as 46% of consumers on board

Nearly half of all consumers say they plan to buy an iPhone in the next three months, which works swell with Apple’s plans to launch the iPhone 5 within that same prime season. It’s not a bad welcoming party for a next gen device which, aside from some broad strokes from its companion iOS 5 operating system, Apple hasn’t even shown off yet. And yet according to a recent survey, forty six percent of folks say they’ll be buying. The numbers are stunning, as that’s not out of all current iPhone users, or out of all current smartphone buyers – it’s among the general population. Suddenly the discrepancies in marketshare between Apple’s iPhone line and its other lines like the iPad and iPod, the latter two of which have overwhelming majority marketshare even as the iPhone has yet to even so much as conquer a simple majority of the smartphone market, may be ready to resolve themselves as Apple’s original vision of an iPhone in every consumer’s hands sounds like it’s about to come at least halfway true according to ChangeWave as reported by Betaews. So why the sudden change heading into the land of iPhone 5, after years of the iPhone not being able to score marketshare numbers anywhere near that? Factors from iPhone 5 carrier expansion to Verizon (and quite possibly T-Mobile and Sprint), to the various reasons the iPhone 4 era was skipped by many consumers, to the weak retention rate on the competing Android platform may all come into play.



First and foremost there’s the arrival of the iPhone 5 on Verizon. Sure, there was a Verizon iPhone 4 a few months ago. But that arrived at a time when those who knew anything about the iPhone knew that the iPhone 4 era was mostly over, and that there would be a Verizon iPhone 5 before long. So even as the Verizon iPhone 4 managed to rack up one-third of all iPhone 4 sales despite coming on board so late in the game (the other two-thirds having been scored by AT&T during its twelve-plus month iPhone 4 run), the bulk of the first-wave impact of the Verizon iPhone will be felt with the iPhone 5 launch. Some in this survey may have also been answering “yes” based on their expectation that the iPhone 5 will also expand to their preferred carrier, be it Sprint or T-Mobile, or their resolve to switch to Verizon at the launch of the iPhone 5 if their preferred carrier doesn’t begin offering it. Carrier expansion alone has the potential to double iPhone marketshare by the time the iPhone 5 era comes and goes, but there has to be more to it. 

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Apple Profit Seen Rising on Record IPad Sales

Apple Inc. (AAPL) is set to post a 69 percent jump in quarterly profit when it reports results today, after record buying of the iPad and Mac computer made up for weaker demand for its aging iPhone 4.

Profit rose to $5.5 billion in the fiscal third quarter, which ended June 25, according to the average prediction of analysts in a Bloomberg survey. Sales gained an estimated 59 percent to $25 billion.

While Apple won’t release a new iPhone -- its best-selling product -- until September, the company benefited from the March debut of the iPad 2. According to analysts surveyed by Bloomberg, Apple sold 7.7 million units of the tablet last quarter, topping the previous three-month sales record of 7.3 million, set during the holiday shopping season.

“All I had to do is walk past the Apple store on my way to work each morning and there were lines down the street for at least a month after the iPad 2 launch,” said Charlie Wolf, an analyst at Needham & Co. “This quarter may end up being fairly mild for the iPhone.”

As customers await the next iPhone, sales of the handset may drop 8.3 percent to 17.1 million from the prior quarter, according to the average estimate of 16 analysts compiled by Bloomberg.

Faster Chip

Apple is set to introduce a new iPhone with a stronger chip for processing data and an 8-megapixel camera in September, two people familiar with the product said last month. The iPhone 4, with a 5-megapixel camera, sold 1.7 million units in its first three days on sale at the end of the June quarter a year ago. Unit sales have risen four straight quarters and in all but three of the past 10 quarters.

Steve Dowling, a spokesman for Cupertino, California-based, Apple, declined to comment.

Demand for iPads hasn’t been hurt by the release of rival tablet computers from electronics companies, including Samsung Electronics Co., Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. and Research In Motion Ltd. (RIMM), Wolf said. In fact, global personal-computer shipments came in less than forecast during the second quarter, in part because of consumer demand for Apple’s iPad, according to market research firms Gartner Inc. and IDC.

Apple’s Mac computers were an exception, as sales of the iPhone and iPad brought in new customers. Apple leapfrogged Acer Inc. and Toshiba Corp. to become the third-largest U.S. maker of PCs in the second-quarter, according to Gartner. Tony Sacconaghi, an analyst at Stanford C. Bernstein & Co., predicts 4.26 million Macs sold, more than the 4.13 million record set in the fiscal first quarter.

IPhone Boost

A new iPhone will provide a boost to Apple, especially among users switching to a smartphone for the first time, Wolf said. In the three months ending in May, 76.8 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones, up 11 percent from the previous three months, according to ComScore Inc. Overall, some 234 million Americans use mobile phones, ComScore said.

“The iPhone is likely to capture a significant percentage of feature phone users who migrate to smartphones,” Wolf said. “That is where the iPhone share should rise.”

Investors also will focus on gross margins, or the percent of sales remaining after deducting the cost of production, said Andy Hargreaves, an analyst at Pacific Crest Securities in Portland,Oregon.

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