1. Google just launched earlier this week the new google mobile app with voice search. Now, we always went extatic in this blog, whenever a new web-based app with text-to-voice or voice-to-text features would come around. We all remember the twitterfone and the cinch blogtalkradio concepts and we're still thinking on how huge their impact will be in the info-included community.

    It's been over a year since Tim O'Reilly, the great web2.0 visionary and O'Reilly media books founder, noted that google was actually harvesting and harnessing precious voice-recognition data from their Goog-411 phone search. It's also been a year since Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, warned that 2008 was all about "mobile, mobile, mobile". Well, all those signs were foretelling the biggest thing I've seen ever since google reader and twitter came along: voice-search in your mobile web-able phone, voice-search in your iphone that is. Frankly, if anyone was doubting between getting a blackberry, a nokia or an iphone for christmas, just go and get an iphone, really. Or maybe an Android device, if you like to take chances.

    But enough, here's my quick review:

    Voice searching is lightning fast like 1-2-3. One, slide and tap on the google mobile app icon from your iphone launcher. Two, raise your phone near your ear, wait for the sound signal and voice your query: "lolcats". Three, wait a few seconds, get the results, tap on the image tab and be amazed with those cute furry cats. PERFECT!!



    More below, you get a full screenshot tour of the voice-search experience! On the left-panel, you can see how the goog mobile app keeps a quick list of your past frequent queries for a quick tap; otherwise, voice and text searching are easily accessible. On the middle-panel, you can also quickly access to all your other google services (Google earth too? Yup, google earth too). On the right panel, you can see how voice search is optional and how you can add your google domain, in case you have one.



    On the triptic below you get a 1-2-3 a-few-seconds experience. One, talk. Two, wait. Three, done. It should take in all, oh, about less than 7 seconds.



    The next triptic below shows you the type of instant results you might expect. The green text string is google's voice-to-text resulting query. Below you can see the results. Note that you get a one-tap refinement if you're looking for images, local search or news. Easy. Pretty slick, don't you think?



    The texting search is also top-notch, while google suggests and provides with different kind of contextual search related to your iphone contacts (synced with gmail), to your location on the map, or simply to regular search. Here's a contact search from my over 500 contacts for a quick call or email.



    And below, here's the local search experience for the nearest new pizza place in photos. Note how in the middle-panel google suggests me with relevant keywords for my search, thus saving me my precious thumb-typing energy:




    Even though mobile search on the iphone is really like riding a rolls-royce, there do are some relevant details that can be improved:
    1 - Voice search does not relates with the text search contextual results, thus I cannot call for "Johnny" from my contacts, or do something like a "Call Johnny", or even a "Find Johnny".
    2 - While searching for pizza near lisbon, or for the weather in lisbon, I must explicitly call for "pizza lisbon" or "weather lisbon". That's dumb, the google app should implicitly provide me first hand with pizza within my current location whenever I voice "pizza", or "weather", respectively.

    So, the google mobile app is GREAT, it's game-changing, it's disruptive, it's clean, it's slick, it just works, even my mother or my 3 year-old nephew will be able to use it, and it's going to set the new standard of mobile search. Mobile searching is going to be even more contextual and relevant relative to who I am and where I am, because it has close access to my most personal stuff like my contacts, my recent phone-call history and my present location. The next step could be ... where my friends are? IMO, the next big thing coming soon, will be the pocket-pc/phone ubiquitous experience. Google, Apple... thank you.
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    Labels: app google iphone transit

  2. Last week I went to codebits, the 24/3 hackers contest organized by the portal sapo.pt. And it was awesome! I had loads of fun, learned tons of stuff, met a bunch of new and interesting people, worked on my tech social network, etc, etc...



    The organization was perfect (some sapo team members are the organizers of the famous Shift conference). We had free wifi, free pizza for lunch AND for dinner, 24/3 free fruit, candy bars, chips, sodas, water, all inclusive and in abundance. Never was I found short on anything of those precious resources. That's pretty impressive in my book. Loads of puffs, loads of tables and chairs. We had xboxes, playstations and wiis to relax. All that with cool lighting in an open-space environment. All you had to do was to bring your laptop. Heck, that's a programmers paradise. The only single itch was that there only was two internet wires available per tables of six laptops. That combined with frequent wifi jams. But still, that wouldn't stop us from coding hard.



    The main buzzwords that got wired into my brain were xfn, xmpp, couchdb, erlang and javascript. The talk that impressed me and inspired me the most was Mario Valente's talk über server sided javascript.



    Over 580 participants presented roughly 80 projects built during the 24 hour contest. I met and teamed with @arturmartins and we built an xmpp bot which can be invited to chat with at codebits@jabber.cc. We called it "Codebits spy, #27". The bot yields the latest rfid location of the participants at the event, provided the user inputs a name or an id. It works quite nicely IMO, but sadly another participant also presented the exact same concept. I guess that was a pretty obvious and rather easy thing to do... Another easy and obvious thing to do was the codebits buzz page, which I implemented an iPhone version, only to find out later that the codebits organization already had a web-based identical version of it...

    A lot of projects were really fun and interesting. Loads of rails web2.0 apps, a cool miniature remote truck commanded from a web interface with a camera-mount; powerful apps containing data-harnessing algorithms; mashups; a million-dollar world app; and so many other cool stuff I can't remember...



    I think I'll integrate all the xmpp bots I'll build into @als and @rubenfonseca's github served modular xmpp bots project in the future... By the way, @rubenfonseca developed an historical database of the participants' rfid location. So, kudos to him.



    Some easter eggs found were the Magellan laptop cluster, the chumby column, the Meo box-tv with messenger functionality, the arcade workshop, #anita became the fastest twitter meme ever,and more, many more...

    All-in-all, it was great. And I'll be there next year!
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    Labels: chumby codebits couchdb erlang magalhães magellan xmpp

  3. Here are some location based tools that I use on the iPhone. Some are social canvas, some are useful tools.

    Google Maps

    I use it to:

    • Locate me.

    • Search places.

    • Bookmark places.

    • Find routes.

    • Navigate.



    Unique features:

    • Built in iPhone.

    • Street view (coming to Europe, one country at a time).

    • navigation system.



    Google Earth

    I use it to:

    • locate me.

    • search places.

    • do 3D earth exploration.

    • browse nearby Wikipedia and Panoramio entries.



    Unique features:

    • 3D flight mode.

    • Gyroscope sensor view tilting.

    • Wikipedia and public Panoramio layers.



    Firefone

    I use it to:




    Unique features:

    • location brokering service. "Update once, update many" feature.



    Here I Am
    I use it to:

    • Mail my location.

    • Keep a mail record of my tracks.




    Unique features:

    • Sends an email with my textual gps coordinates from the touch of a button.




    Wizi

    I use it to:

    • Locate me.

    • Bookmark places (private).

    • Add friends (private).

    • Share my location (mail, friend, friends or public).

    • Locate friends.

    • Send direct messages. Reply.

    • Navigate (to places and to friends).

    • Journaling (Picture, text. Private and friends-only).





    Unique features:

    • Know how distant I am from my friends and from my places by looking at the timetag.


    Wizi tries to do everything: Social networking, instant messaging, journaling, navigation. This approach can be risky though, as other more specialized tools may out-perform it. It started as a navigational tool to reach friends by leveraging on user-provided tracking data. This is still, by far, it's greatest asset. A distinctive approach would be to add value to my iphone/gmail contacts, by providing my current location to my contacts and by providing the current location of my contacts. This is what I'm really excited about Wizi. But the Wizi team has to slowly adjust and fine tune their service as they need to compete with traditional navigation systems and typical conversational journaling services. If they want to compete with Brightkite and Loopt, they also need to refine their conversational canvas so users can engage more. So far the Wizi client still isn't released on the App store, and I only got access to it as private beta tester. But you can download it on many other platforms such as windows mobile and blackberry. An Android version is also being developped.

    Brightkite

    I use it to:

    • Locate me.

    • Bookmark places (private, friends-only, public).

    • Add friends (private, friends-only, public).

    • Locate friends.

    • Share my location (private, friends-only, public).

    • Conversational journaling (text, picture. Private, friends-only, public).





    Unique features:

    • Best UX for a micro-blogging/journaling platform.


    Brightkite does one thing and does it well: it's a location based micro-blogging/journaling platform with a clean interface and a good user experience. It provides a conversational canvas to engage with the community. It's biggest threat is the fact that it doesn't works two-way on the importing/exporting of data. Neither with location, neither with pictures, neither with micro-posts. Thus, I'd rather send a tweet with a link to a picture to engage conversation, than make a brightkite journal entry. However, it does provides an RSS feed for the journal so you can still pipe it to Twitter, to Facebook or to Friendfeed.

    Loopt

    The problem with Loopt is that it isn't available out of the US (and perhaps Canada). So I really can't go in depth with it. For all I know, it's very similar to Brightkite and, thus, it's based on the journaling concept. However it integrates with Facebook quite nicely (two-way) and it also integrates with Twitter while providing an RSS feed. These features alone make Loopt more "data-portable" than Brightkite. This is very interesting, as my main social-networks are Facebook, Twitter and Gmail contacts (so it's 2 out of 3 ducks).



    Unique features:

    • Facebook and Twitter integration

    • U.S (& Canada?) only.




    Plazes

    Plazes isn't available yet for the iPhone, though an iPhone app is rumored to be underway anytime soon. The interesting thing about Plazes is that, beyond conversational journaling, it also adds a whole new social object: the conversational agenda. It's basically an agenda/calendar where you share/appoint events. The events that you actually attend get lit up, and you and your friends can always comment on them. It potentiates an integration with your calendaring tool.


    Concluding remarks

    So I just went through the list of location-based apps I use the most on my iPhone. We must retain that the basic social features are locating, routing, navigating, sharing location, locating friends and journaling. Each of these features have several degrees of security -private, friends-only, public-; and several radius of proximity -exact location, neighbourhood, city-. Plazes goes a step further by adding the events agending feature.

    I feel most of these applications are still transient, and I still have this need to import/export my tracks data. I really think those services should work more tightly with fireeagle. Brighkite does update fireeagle, but that's it. There are also other location baseds services like Zintin and Cence me. So please let me know if you're interested to learn more about those. But I'm curious, what location-based social apps do you use?
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    Labels: brightkite iphone loopt plazes wizi
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