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Siri hasn’t been caught cooking dinner yet, but hackers worldwide have boldly taken Apple’s personal assistant to a whole new level by incorporating its functionality with a plethora of different devices. We’ve seen Siri use custom commands, change the temperature in your house, and even allow select car owners to utilize their automobile’s Bluetooth integration. Nifty, no doubt, but this assistant’s evolution towards greater heights isn’t over yet. Vimeo user toddtreece has whipped up a slick demo of the iPhone 4S’ right hand gal (or guy) taking command of his television set. From changing channels to turning off devices, with the help of a proxy and a few parts, you can get your own home setup running on voice activation. Feeling a bit guilty for your sudden interest in slothfulness? Fret not — Siri’s apparently quite good at calling you out. Have a look just after the break.

[Thanks, Jesse]

Continue reading Too lazy to grab your TV remote? Use Siri instead

Too lazy to grab your TV remote? Use Siri instead originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 30 Nov 2011 21:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Well, Xyologic, a mobile app search firm, has come up with what it says is the first break down of mobile advertising on Android apps, showing that Google’s AdMob is well ahead of rival ad providers. Xyologic found that half of the top 1,000 apps in Android Market use an advertising SDK and 22 percent of all apps use more than one advertising SDK. Of those apps that use advertising, 89 percent of the apps use AdMob, well ahead of any other challenger. These apps also represented 89 percent of all downloads in October for the top apps with advertising.

That AdMob does well on Android may not sound too surprising considering Google owns both Android and AdMob. But I’ve been told before that AdMob sees Android as just another platform and doesn’t provide any special functionality for Android devs. And AdMob was the top mobile advertising network before it was purchased by Google.

The second most popular mobile advertising provider was Millennial Media, whose SDK was used in 34 percent of the top 1,000 apps, which represented 48 percent of all downloads in October among the top apps. It was followed by InMobi, which had presence in 22 percent of the top apps that use advertising. These apps represented 26 percent of all downloads of top apps with ads in October.

AdMob’s ad exchange AdWhirl was fourth with 19 percent presence on Android apps that utilize advertising followed by Mobclix with 15 percent. The overall numbers don’t add up to 100 percent because apps can work with more than one advertising company.

The rest of the market includes mobile ad exchange networks AdMarvel, Smaato, Burstly, Mopub, Nexage, Fiksu, and mobile ad network Jumptap who each make up less than 3 percent of the overall market share. They serve the remaining 15 percent of the top apps that use advertising. This group represented 26 percent of all downloads in October among the top downloaded apps with mobile advertising.

Xyologic said it came by its numbers by evaluating the top 1,000 most downloaded apps on Android for October and screening these apps for advertising SDKs. These apps have more than over 340 million downloads in total, representing 54 percent of the downloads in October.

It’s hard to know if these numbers are completely accurate. IDC tried to make some estimates in 2009 on the overall mobile ad market and who the biggest players were but it was criticized for its methodology. But the fact that AdMob is used in so many Android apps shows that the purchase of AdMob was worth it, especially now that mobile advertising is expected to grow to .6 billion by 2015, according to Gartner.

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EBay, which owns RedLaser, last week showed off how a consumer can scan a product, find the lowest price from retailers from participating businesses, and then buy the product right through the latest version of RedLaser using PayPal. The implementation is still limited with Toys-R-Us being one of the few retailers to partner with RedLaser on the service. But eBay expects to get more retailers to sign on. Users can’t buy things on eBay or through the eBay app, just though RedLaser.

Now ShopSavvy, which competes against RedLaser and has just raised million, is bringing similar functionality with ShopSavvy 5, the latest versions of its iPhone and Android apps. Users scan a product and see a better deal from retailers like Walmart.com, Target.com, BestBuy.com and BN.com. Then they can buy that product directly through the ShopSavvy app, which is due out Thursday, and have it delivered to them. If customers have set up a ShopSavvy wallet, they can make a purchase with one tap. ShopSavvy introduced this scan-and-buy functionality earlier this year in a limited beta but the service is now expanding nationwide. ShopSavvy 5 also brings a bunch of other improvements like better keyword search, improved comparison shopping and more local deals highlighted on its deals tab.

The rise of instant scan and buy raises the stakes for retailers. They have always had to worry about their prices relative to the competition, but now the consequences of being overpriced can be felt instantaneously. For retailers who integrate with these tools, there’s the opportunity to pick off a consumer instantly right from the aisle of a competitor. They don’t have to lure them over to their own mobile site or into their store. They can seal a transaction immediately. But they do have to price aggressively. Retailers who stand to lose a sale can also respond by price matching.

For consumers, scan-and-buy is another sign of how smartphone apps are making shopping even simpler and how it’s empowering users to always find the lowest deals from retailers. As Om wrote, consumers are becoming smart buyers who are armed with a wealth of data at their fingertips. Now, the next step for mobile commerce is to remove any remaining hang-ups in the buying process. If people want to buy, especially quickly, purchasing through these apps can be a big help.

This comes at a perfect time for the holidays when shoppers will be stressed and short on time as they look for gifts. As we’ve written, mobile shopping is going to be big this holiday season and the addition of instant scanning and buying will only add to that.

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But my former piece of advice for publishers – to pull their apps from the App Store – doesn’t seem to have resonated much, as many publishers keep pushing out their respective iPhone and iPad apps. That said, I’m betting this trend is a short-term fad that will eventually reverse, and here’s why:

The fragmented app world is a drain on development resources

The beauty of the Web is that it standardized access to information across machines, operating systems, and browsers. No more rewriting code to be Mac-, PC- and Unix-compatible, etc. Publish once on the Web, and the information will be accessible by all of humanity regardless of any configuration they might use to access it. Recently, the various app stores have again started fragmenting a world that had largely become defragmented. A fragmented dev world imposes costs and headaches on those that choose to support the various apps. That might not be a huge tax on tech companies, per se, but for publishers, supporting multiple apps will become a headache and a totally unnecessary tax, which leads me to my next point.

For most websites, the ROI of an app is unclear

A native app is a great way for developers to create functionality that’s not possible with a web page (or that might otherwise require the use of Flash in a web page). Games are a perfect example of this. For a publisher whose product is words and pictures, it is unclear what additional functionality an app can provide that a well-designed Web page cannot. Sure, it’s always possible to slap some artificial stuff on an app (and The Daily is a great example of things that can be done on a publisher app), but the question is whether those things are done because it’s possible to do them, or because they are actually useful.

I’d argue that the most useful mobile reading experience is on Instapaper, which is a clean presentation of the text with proper typography — attributes that are all perfectly achievable in a well-designed mobile website. The only two exceptions here might be: a) video and b) offline reading. The gap on both is closing with HTML5, and soon even these “app excuses” won’t be a valid reason for justifying development of proprietary mobile apps.

You can’t link — or, at least, link easily — to apps

When deciding to publish content in an app rather than a mobile website, it’s important to understand that the value of links, as we know them on the Web, is greatly diminished. Because an app is a standalone program, not a part of the open Web, linking to other pages is clunky at best. You cannot link to content on other apps. And links to websites, while possible, require switching the user to another application (AKA a mobile browser) and disrupting the user experience between articles.

You’re being held hostage on someone else’s platform

Lastly, and possibly most importantly, is the ownership of the platform on which you publish. No one owns the Web, and therefore no company can impose new rules, pricing, censorship or other surprises along the way (FCC regulation aside, of course).

When developing a mobile app, a publisher technically becomes a node within someone else’s platform — namely Apple or Google — and is bound by their rules and whims. Apple’s decision to impose a 30 percent tax on all publisher subscriptions done within apps is just one example of this. The Financial Times created a lot of buzz with their decision to fully withdraw from the App Store and go all-in with their mobile Web app. Developing an app for someone else’s platform might give the illusion of a new marketing channel, but in reality it means becoming a node in someone else’s business model.

All that said, a mobile app can be a decent marketing channel, and there is value for publishers in having a presence inside the various app stores. But if you peel away all the other layers of what an app can be and focus on it exclusively as a marketing channel, then the conclusion is that an app for publishers is basically a bookmark on people’s phone screens. That’s it — a reminder to consume the publisher’s content, and a quick link to do so.

I urge (and predict!) that publishers stick to these principles after the “we need to have an iPhone/iPad/Android/WebOS/Win7/etc. app” hype passes:

• Use limited dev resources to build a single, great mobile Web version of their website.
• Submit a bookmark version to all the app stores of an app that launches the Web browser with their mobile Web site.
•  Use services specific to mobile, which provide readers a superior browsing experience, tailored for the mobile Web.
•  Alter monetization strategies for the mobile environment, opting for revenue generators that are perfected for mobile consumption.

Mobile is putting pressure on publishers to quickly adapt and successfully deliver. In a “sink or swim” environment, the hype of apps is ultimately going to weigh publishers down. There is no real reason for publishers to spread their dev resources thin, supporting multiple proprietary apps that break links and really serve someone else’s strategy more than their own.

Yaron Galai is the CEO and co-founder of Outbrain, a web-based recommendation engine. 

We’ll discuss the app economy, its rise and possible fall, and the opportunities presented by HTML5 at our annual Mobilize event in San Francisco, September 26 and 27th.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Sean MacEntee.

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Developers will, for instance, be able to integrate videos from sites like Vimeo into Hangouts and allow users to watch them simultaneously. This could not only be a big boost for Hangouts and Google+, but also take social video watching online to the next level.

The API was announced on the Google+ platform blog:

“Today we’re launching the Developer Preview of the Hangouts API, another small piece of the Google+ platform. It enables you to add your own experiences to Hangouts and instantly build real-time applications, just like our first application, the built-in YouTube player.”

The current developer preview limits access to apps to a pre-defined group of users, and a few first examples include simple apps like a voting gadget. However, one only has to take a closer look at the built-in YouTube player to get a sense of how powerful this API can be. The player synchronizes YouTube videos, making it possible to watch clips with friends while also video chatting with them. If a user skips to the next video, that action is automatically relayed to the other participants.

Of course, the same functionality could also be utilized by other video platforms, or even by third-party developers who could make use of publicly available APIs to show videos from sites like Vimeo within Hangouts. Asked about this in a Google+ comment thread today, Hangouts API Product Lead Amit Fulay said: “Yes, you can write an app for Vimeo videos.” He added that apps have to comply with the Google+ developers terms of service, which forbid the use of some types of content.

The implications of this are pretty profound. I’ve long argued that Hangouts could take social interaction around online video to the next level by allowing users to talk to each other in real time, just as you would with family and friends in your living room. The Hangouts API now makes this possible for a wide range of video services, which could bring live sports streams hosted on Ustream or similar sites, or even TV content from sites like Hulu to Hangouts.

Of course, services would have to agree to work within the Google+ framework, but that shouldn’t be a show-stopper for many. Facebook is expected to launch social video integration with Hulu and other partners on Thursday, and it would only make sense for video platforms to embrace Google+ as well.

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True to Monday’s teaser, Nokia unveiled its latest update to the Symbian OS as well as a few new devices. Belle is indeed coming, and it’s heading to the Nokia 700, 701 and 600 in the third quarter of this year. The successor to Anna brings NFC sharing and pairing functionality to the table, along with three additional home screens (bumped up to six), live widgets in five different sizes, and a pull-down taskbar and notification menu. Fortunately, the new handsets announced today aren’t the only beneficiaries of the upgrade: the N8, E6, E7, X7, C7, C6-01 and Oro will all get Belle at a yet-unknown later date.

Developing…

Continue reading Nokia announces Symbian Belle running on three new devices

Nokia announces Symbian Belle running on three new devices originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Aug 2011 08:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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