The final chapter of the Carrier IQ saga has yet to be written, but at this juncture, even the rosiest of rose-tinted observers would be hard pressed to find a silver lining. The specter of federal investigation looms larger by the day. Implicated carriers and manufacturers are washing their hands with Macbethian fury. Al Franken is on the verge of going Al Franken. And at the epicenter of all this sits Carrier IQ — a California-based analytics company that has already gone to great lengths to defend its innocence. First, it sought to discredit Trevor Eckhart’s ostensibly damning research with a cease-and-desist letter. Then, CEO Larry Lenhart flatly denied Eckhart’s findings with an impassioned YouTube address. In recent days, the company has markedly softened its stance, arguing that its apps are only designed to meet operator demands and to “make your phones better.” Now, Carrier IQ has elaborated upon these arguments with a more detailed breakdown of how its software functions, and a more substantive defense of its practices. Head past the break to read more.

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The Guardian, one of the world’s most forward-thinking newspapers, has been conducting some interesting online experiments recently, including a cool little tweetbot that answers your questions by finding stories in the news, and its attempt to open up news production.

But one of the most interesting trials could be a new hyperlocal service called n0tice that the company is putting through its paces.

The site, which is currently running in invite-only beta, is an attempt to create a publishing platform based on location — and it uses the metaphor of a community noticeboard to get there. People can sign up to create their own board, customize it, leave messages, place small ads, anything they like. In a way it harks back to the days of BBS, but with all the bells and whistles you might expect from a website in 2011.

Testers, mainly in the U.K. where most of the focus is, are starting to use it for a range of different things: whether it’s existing local bloggers giving it a trial run, people selling items, listing events in their community, reporting road closures, and so on.

And there’s a business model too: while small ads are free to run, companies that want to target users pick a location and pay depending on how far they want their message to spread.

It’s certainly a departure for The Guardian, which has largely focused on content over platforms — and the end result is a hybrid with some serious potential. It’s part blogging platform, part Craigslist, part communal Twitter stream, part forum, part event listing. Work clearly needs to be done on some areas, and the emphasis is likely to shift over time, as more and more users come in and shape it — but the real question is whether it becomes more than the sum of its parts, or less.

Hyperlocal has long been something media companies have talked about as a way to save themselves, yet in reality it has struggled to really make its mark. On a micro scale, a number of local media properties have done this very well over the years — sites like McKinney, Texas’s Townsquarebuzz or Howard Owens’s The Batavian, say — but in order to be sustainable for a large media organization, hyperlocal needs to scale. That’s part of what convinced MSNBC to buy and relaunch EveryBlock, a data aggregation service that promised to make important local news available to you.

But where EveryBlock was all about data, n0tice is about people.

“I love Everyblock, it’s a real inspiration, actually,” explains Matt McAlister, who is running n0tice from his lofty perch as director of digital strategy for The Guardian‘s parent company, Guardian Media Group. “But I wanted to go as far in the opposite direction as I could in terms of aggregation, at least at the start. We may be wrong about that choice, but I’d like to think that people will be interested in participating on n0tice in part because it’s their space to make.”

He adds that it’s also different from other services that it shares similarities to, such as AOL’s often-derided Patch.

“It’s different from Patch in lots of ways, but one significant difference is that anyone can own a noticeboard, kind of like WordPress. It’s totally open that way. It’s different Craigslist in that it feels like a more holistic view of what’s happening the local area, not just things that people are trading.”

Still, with The Guardian behind it, a lot of people are going to be watching n0tice to see what happens. There are a few things that are worth thinking about that should be taken into account, though.

First, the UK classifieds market is far more disjointed than, say, America. Craigslist — so often invoked as the scourge of the U.S. news industry — is not just weak, it’s more or less non-existent. Sites such as the eBay-owned Gumtree are more powerful but not entirely embedded.

Second, the idea that newspapers have failed to compete with Craigslist — as posited in this piece at the Nieman Journalism Lab — also carries less weight in the U.K. Britain’s Daily Mail, for example, has been active in the small ads online for years with the likes of loot.com and has a growing property website empire.

Third, the real competition for a service like n0tice may ultimately be from social networks like Facebook or Twitter, where communities of interest already coalesce. McAlister’s argument here is that n0tice doesn’t have to beat social networks, it just has to be open enough.

“We haven’t really viewed what we’re doing in a competitive landscape, but rather approaching a common real world problem that doesn’t seem to have been solved yet. Given the open nature of the platform we’re building, I imagine we’ll be able to do a lot with WordPress and Twitter and Foursquare and any other open platform.”

Some seeds of where this thinking might go can be traced through his own work. Before being catapulted to run group-wide digital strategy, McAlister helped architect the Guardian Open Platform system — which attempts to turn the news into an API. Prior to that he was director of the Yahoo Developer Network and at the intersection of publishing and the web with The Industry Standard and Infoworld.

He confirms that combining with other services will be important as n0tice grows. A read API is about to be launched and they’re working on a write API too. Meanwhile, it will be important to connect to existing social networks and sources of activity. “We have done some lightweight hooks so far, but clearly there will be some fun things we can do with Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook et cetera,” he says.

Staying power needed

Still, even if n0tice gains traction, the longer term issue may be whether it has support. After all, The Guardian‘s approach to the local market and small ads has lurched one way and then another over the last few years — it sold off its regional news operation for £44m, sold half of its sizeable classifieds business Trader Media, and launched and then closed a series of local blogs.

It’s not the only one: large news organizations including the New York Times and Washington Post have launched attempts at hyperlocal platforms or services, only to shut them down soon afterwards. Even with support from the top, does the company really have the willpower to get stuck into hyperlocal and stay there?

“My hope is that the advertising model we’re working on will support the investment people make in n0tice,” says McAlister. “If that’s the case then it will at least be sustainable, if not actually a generative platform — something that gets stronger the more people use it.”

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On my last visit to New York, I stopped at apparel maker Bruno Cucinelli’s store in the West Village. In a city of opulent, luxury-brand outlets, this tiny outpost was perhaps one of the most ideal and idyllic shopping experiences. I go there again and again. There is little or no clutter, a limited set of apparel options and more importantly, everything is laid out for maximum impact.

You enter the store, walk down an aisle looking at the clothes hanging on your right (men’s wear), reach the end of the store, turn around, check out the middle aisle, and take in what’s on display. The whole process takes a few minutes. Once you’re done with the walk-through, you zero in on one or more items on display, and engage with the sales person. If nothing catches your fancy, you move on.

It doesn’t take much time, and more importantly, it involves fewer decisions on my part, making shopping less of a chore.

That Cucinelli store is a great metaphor for what I think is a good mobile app experience. Why? Because the store had little or no friction when it comes to the shopping process. Similarly, in order to be successful and stand out among the growing number of mobile apps demanding our attention, the mobile apps have to have little friction.

There are few ways an app can work toward a better experience. It all starts with overcoming three major constraints with today’s mobile and smartphone experience:

1. Network speeds, despite all the talk from carriers are limited and thus not conducive to heavy download activity.
2. Limited screen real estate, which puts premium on every pixel.
3. Finite number of mobile gestures (that don’t involve using the keyboard.)

Faster Is Better

The same demand that makes smartphones an exciting opportunity also turns into a liability. It doesn’t matter what device you use; even the best of 3G networks has bandwidth challenges. And while at some point in the future, the faster wireless broadband technologies are going to solve the problems, today as an app developer, you have to keep the challenges of network speeds in mind.

What you have to do is build apps that are fast. By that, I mean not only does the app load fast, but also has a lightweight experience. It’s optimized less around cool features and more around the speed with which you can use an app’s core value proposition.

Kevin Systrom, co-founder of Instagram, recently told me one of the crucial product decisions his start-up made was optimizing around speed. Knowing upload speeds on wireless networks were bad, they decided to limit photo size to small enough for a quick upload, yet looked gorgeous on the smartphone screen. The speed, he contended, would make for happier customers, who in turn would use the app more. And they were right.

Other app companies are finding out that faster execution is key to higher engagement. Foursquare Co-founder Dennis Crowley, speaking at a recent event, said the company was building a lighter version of the app for faster check-ins and to reduce the check-in time from 20 seconds to five seconds.

The easier and faster it is to check-in, the more likely one is to use Foursquare. This isn’t a radically new notion; Google has used the speed with which it can serve up search results as a lure for getting people to use its search more often. Since the search results show up blazingly fast, one is likely to search again, even if the first try doesn’t yield results.

Size Matters

A couple of months back, I wrote about what makes a hit (consumer) Internet service. Of the three reasons I listed, “clear purpose” and “simple to use” were ones that make perfect sense for mobile apps, given the limitations of screen size and touch-screen gestures. A good example of an app with clear purpose and simplicity? Instapaper: the save-and-read-later app.

That simplicity and clear purpose begins from the very second someone opens the app after downloading. Signing up for your app/service should be done within seconds, not minutes. One of the reasons why I loved Beluga was that it probably had one of the simplest sign-up processes. Not many questions asked — enter an email, get a username and password, and you’re ready to go.

Better yet, use Facebook Connect, which removes any friction that there is in terms of sign-ups. There is a big risk of you being logged out of all these apps if your account gets hacked, like mine was a couple of months ago. But app developers are embracing the Facebook Connect, and are well aware of such risks.

Daniel Raffel, co-founder of a yet-to-be-named stealth mode company, described Facebook Connect as the “K-Y Jelly of the mobile web.” By now, most, if not all, people have Facebook accounts, so by entering their username and password, the hassle of signing up a service and remembering another password is also eliminated.

This is crucial. Too much typing on a smartphone can be arduous and time-consuming, no matter how deft you are. The less time spent between download and using the service, the faster customers can start to experience your offering. Remember, there are no second chances in today’s app-infested world.

A few days back, I wrote about why apps (and other products) have to start building the idea of “happiness” into their offerings. Speed, simple and easy sign-ups, and single focus on core values only add to that “happiness.” Those three qualities are the reason why I keep going back to that Cucinelli store. On my last trip, I almost bought a cardigan — but they didn’t have it in my size.

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‘Firework’ is one particular of my favored Katy tracks she’s carried out yet. It is lyrically deeper, presenting an inspirational concept by means of the colorful metaphor of a firework, which paints a great photograph along with the unexpected orchestral arrangement. Total, the tune just provides a lot more depth to Katy’s up-’til-now one particular-dimensional pop star picture “Katy Perry Firework mp3 download“. It is undoubtedly her strongest tune vocally she’s ever carried out with vocals that build to a chorus that will have persons jumping and singing along. She could struggle to execute this one particular reside, but I’m quite pleased this will be the 3rd single and expect an brilliant video clip to go along with it.

“Firework,” on which Perry urges the listener to “make ‘em go ‘oh, oh, oh!’” and puts an impressively intense vocal effectiveness, does certainly try out for a deeper emotion. But thanks to a Coldplay-esque string area and a euphoric chorus that gets gloriously harmonic therapy in the direction of the song’s climactic finale, Perry’s sincerity stays believable “SEO Forum”. Much more “ay”s and “oh”s comply with on “Peacock,” in which she encourages her guy to “let me see what you’re hiding underneath.” Atop a beat awfully reminiscent of Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl”, the tune is about as subtle as a swift kick to the groin.

By the time Perry returns to the giddy teenage pleasure of “Hummingbird Heartbeat,” one particular can’t assist but be sick of her gauche prolonged metaphors. “I’ve flown a million miles just to discover a magic seed” is the least sexy birds-and-bees reference I’ve heard in some time, and on a tune that consists of other gems like “Let’s pollinate to develop a loved ones tree,” that’s saying anything.

Closer “Not Like The Movies” is inoffensive, but Sarah Bareilles has previously carried out it superior. Had been these last songs intended to represent the inevitable comedown from the erotic highs of the normal teenage romance? If so, I want they were as clever and inventive as the album’s bubbly dance numbers as a substitute of merely weepy and worse boring.

On an album that began off on this sort of a wonderfully dreamlike note, the onslaught of tired cliches and forgettable melodies that constitutes its 2nd 50 percent leaves the listener anxious to wake up from this “Micro Niche finder“. Stick to the enjoyable stuff, Katy no one travels to the Golden Coast to have a poor time.

Initially, information of his arrest for cocaine possession in Las Vegas, then the release of “Liquor Save Blues” with Damian Marley, and now a leak of a heartbreaking new ballad named “Grenade.”. It is the initially track on Bruno’s upcoming album, Doo-Wops & Hooligans, due out October fifth.The unstoppable 23-year-previous debuted this music last month at a display at New York City’s own Bowery Ballroom. Heres the obtain hyperlinks for Bruno Mars Grenade mp3 download.

Bruno says of the music: “It’s a heartbreaking, heartbreak music and I think everyone can relate to that. You’re so in enjoy with this girl and you don’t recognize. ‘What am I performing mistaken? What am I not giving to you? I’ll go as far as placing a bullet in my brain for you, and why can’t I get that kind of enjoy in return?’”

There was a reside edition floating about last month but right here we have the studio edition of “Grenade” and all of the digital manipulation that entails. From a production standpoint, I want the reside edition. This is like polyester music; not a normal note in sight, but that how we get down these days of Niche Finder Software.

There’s a easy intro, just a piano and Bruno’s voice giving us the play by play on a romantic relationship he’s getting with an ice queen. He gives. She takes. He loves. She takes. He would die for her and well… she would let him.The music builds, incorporating a tribal drum and some layered track record vocals co-signing his never ending devotion to a girl who naturally doesn’t give a rat’s ass about him. Did he say she beats him? Damn. Or maybe the tail stop of that metaphor got lost in all the synth. I’m not certain.

He would catch a grenade for her. He would throw his head on a plate for her. He would even bounce in front of a practice for her, even although she wouldn’t piss on him if he was on fire. It’s a bit dramatic, but Mars has never sounded superior. He brings the melancholy from the initially note and grows from there delivering a passionate efficiency superior than something I would have anticipated from him. Here’s the other music that you may well want to obtain Katie Perry Firework mp3 download.

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