Twine is the simplest possible way to get the objects in your life texting, tweeting or emailing. A durable 2.5” square provides WiFi connectivity, internal and external sensors, and two AAA batteries that keep it running for months. A simple web app allows to you quickly set up your Twine with human-friendly rules — no programming needed. And if you’re more adventurous, you can connect your own sensors and use HTTP to have Twine send data to your own app.
Say hello to Whim - a new app that launched today by my friend Ben Bloch. Whim lets you quickly start a discussion around a get-together. Something like, “Who’s up for drinks in an hour?” becomes an easy real-time conversation with friends who may be interested in joining.
Not only does Whim make it easy to kick off plans, it also shows you what friends nearby would like to do. You can choose to receive notifications for your friends’ public whims or simply access a list within the app of your network’s gatherings close by.
Don’t have an iPhone? Whim will be released for Android as well in the near future, but friends who don’t have iPhones can still be a part of the conversation by using the mobile-optimized web view.
Whim is free and available at the app store here. Follow Whim onTwitter and Facebook for more updates and announcements.
The Commonwealth Bank has recently won numerous awards for it’s augmented reality property app that has been around for almost a year. Now, claiming a “worldwide industry first”, the Commonwealth Bank has run a mobile-driven, augmented reality press ad in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane mX titles. The ad required a 3D reader iPhone app aims to help explain how to use its property guide app. The app lets you access Cherryford Hill, a 3D virtual town where users can interact, move around and experience the features of the CommBank Property Guide app. It’s great to see big banks looking for new and engaging ways to interact with their customers. With this latest campaign they are blending traditional newspaper ads with an innovative and engaging Augmented Reality experience. But what will the uptake be? (via digitalbuzzblog)
What is Color? At first glance, it looks like another mobile photo app - you take snapshots with your mobile phone and they appear in a stream of photos. But the beauty of Color stems from what it’s doing differently. Unlike Instagram and Path, there isn’t an explicit friend or following system — you don’t browse through lists of contacts and start following their photo stream. Instead, all social connections in the application are dynamic and established on-the-fly depending on whom you’re hanging out with. And your photos are shared with everyone in the vicinity. In some senses this is the Twitter of photo apps — it’s all public, all the time.
In a crowded area these streams of photos will get noisy, so Color also has some grouping features. Tell it which four people you’re eating with, and Color will create a temporal group with a stream of just the photos you and your buddies have taken. But here’s the twist: because everything on the service is public, you can also swipe to view other groups, to see what the tables next to you are snapping photos of. And you can always jump to the main stream, which shows a mishmash of photos taken by everyone. First are the social connections, called your Elastic Network. All of your contacts are presented in a list of thumbnails ordered by how strong your connection is to that user. Whenever Color detects that you’re physically near another user (in other words, that you’re hanging out), your bond on the app gets a little stronger. So when you fire up the app and jump to your list of contacts, you’ll probably see your close friends and family members listed first. But if you don’t see a friend for a long time, they’ll gradually flow down the list, and eventually their photos will fade from color to black-and-white. The future is unclear, but promising. And with this much money in the bank ($31 million in funding) and a staff of 27, Color has plenty of time to hone in on what works. (via TechCrunch)
An interesting experimental augmented reality mobile campaign for Qualcomm was premiered at a recent Mobile World Congress is Barcelona, Spain. They invited 4,000 VIP’s from the 60,000 attendees to an exclusive party, where they prompted attendees to download the dragon catcher app and compete in a live augmented reality game to capture the most virtual dragons during the party.
The app had a live leader board for people to check their score/position, and with about 30% of the attendees downloading the app it looks to have been a huge success. A great way to promote their leading chipset. (via Vitro)
Shazam has carved out a name for itself by allowing smart phone users to identify almost any song they hear in the world just by having the app “listen” to it. Now this handy service is dipping its toes into the social media landscape. A new update allows users to log into their Facebook accounts through Shazam and begin sharing the music they’ve tagged with their friends. This will let people see what people have heard, show off their own playlists, and even buy tracks through iTunes. These features are similar to iTunes’ Ping but with a nice twist: the songs being shared aren’t from someone’s computer, they’re from their day-to-day life. iPhone owners can check out the update now, while Android users should receive one in a few weeks. (via business insider)
Spotisquare is a mobile mash-up and Foursquare client that lets its users attach music to specific Foursquare venues. After checking in throughm.spotisquare.com, users can look for music attached to the venue. If music exists, users can stream the playlist via the Spotify mobile app. If no music exists, users can attach a song or playlist that helps other users to experience that venue via the attached music. In order to use Spotisquare, users need both a Foursquare account and aSpotify account. In addition, the Spotify account must be a Premium account to work on mobile phones and songs/playlists can only be added via a laptop computer. While Spotisquare is currently limited (no mobile app and adding of songs/playlists only by computer), it clearly represents a step towards a future in which music is used (like other data – check-ins, tweets, etc.) to mash-up and socialize online and offline experiences via the mobile phone. (via @spotisquare)
IOGraph is a software application that turns the continuous tracking of computer mouse movements into modern art.
The basic concept is that people just “run” the application in the background, and then accomplish their usual activities at the computer. After a long day of hard work, a beautiful image is then created by cumulating all mouse movements and representing them as continuous paths. For people who work in a single application for a considerably long time, IOGraph could even provide potentially interesting usability data when overlayed on a screenshot of the actual window configuration.
You can check some past mouse-tracking art work at Flickr.
(via @infosthetics)
Now that Square is publicly available for the iPhone and Android OS, with millions of card readers being shipped free of charge, Jack Dorsey tells Fast Company how his business model will disrupt the way that you pay.
(via laughingsquid)
