iphone Archives - Page 2 of 3

Tonchidot is AMAZING

Remember this name.

Ok, you’ll have to take my word on it until you see the video, but a company in stealth mode called Tonchidot / Sekai Camera did a demo at the Techcrunch 50 show in San Francisco and wowed the hell out of everyone. Basically, you take the iPhone’s camera and point it down a street. It picks up the GPS from where you are located and then coordinates with a server, telling you what each store is and what others have said about it (tags). You look down a street and it shows phone stores and videos and restaurants, and then you can read the tags associated with that store that other users have put on.

Imagine your iPhone as a ‘virtual reality’ viewer into a real life street. Aim the phone at a wall of phones and get reviews of the different phones and comparison prices. Aim it at a restaurant and read reviews from your friends.

There website is stealth http://tonchidot.com but that won’t last for long.

As soon as the demo video is up I’ll link to it.

UPDATE: Here is the video of the VC’s talking about it (about 1 minute in).

Here is the Demo Video:

UPDATE 2: A number of people are already asking what is the business model. I can see two right off the bat.

1) GPS based ads. Taxi cab signage companies do this. If a cab drives by a restaurant they display an ad based on the location. Imagine the same here. Aim down the street and get ads for stores that have sales and whatnot.

2) Military. The other market, back to my government days, is military. Imagine if you could integrate something like that with all the ‘red-blue’ data you get from various intel sources so you could aim the phone over a sand dune and get back a real time report ‘Six T-72 tanks-Engage when ready’ and another sand dune that said ‘Local Village–do not shoot’. Integrate electronic intel, drones, human intel all into one network viewable realtime over an iPhone device. The Pentagon would buy it by the truckload.

UPDATE 3

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How the iPhone is changing radio forever.

Steve Jobs doesn't need an anti-satellite missile to knock out XM & Sirius

I’ve already written a bit about my thoughts on the iPhone and how it will kill Satellite radio and a review of the iPhone radio applications, but Doc Searls is writing today about his similar experiences using the iPhone as the radio interface in his car. He raises a number of interesting points including:

4) The cell phone system will become a data system that carries telephony, rather than the vice versa we have now. The same goes for the Net at home as well. What we still have in both cases is dial-up: data piggy-backing on telephony or cable TV. In terms of provider priorities, that’s the way it’s been for awhile, but the flip is going to come, and the sooner we all adjust to that, the better.

5) The iPhone is less a phone than a platform for mobile Internet applications that start with telephony. Voice will always be the primary personal mobile communications activity; but it will be one application, or set of applications, among many. Radio is another of those applications.

Radio has had a decade of on again off again experience with the Internet and streaming, but it’s just never caught on due in large part to the ‘tethered to the computer’ experience that was required. People simply weren’t about to replace their clock radios with a PC and Internet radio devices just never could get a hold into the market (despite a lot of us trying). And on top of that, it didn’t work in the car (where many people do their radio listening). In short, the radio stations had it easy because it was so hard to listen to the competition.

But that’s over. The iPhone changes EVERYTHING. Yea it’s not the first to do streaming, nor is it the fastest of cheapest platform, but it is the first MASS MARKET adaptation of Internet radio to the car and other places that we’ve seen. You take all the Internet radio devices sold from when I came up with the idea nearly 10 years ago to now and you have less than the number of people who downloaded the Pandora radio application for the iPhone in the first six days. There are now nearly 4 million iPhones out there in the last year, with some of the free radio applications being the top downloads. It took XM six years to get to that number of subscribers. Who do you think is going to win the race for a listeners’ ears?

Quite simply, radio stations who are not paying attention will be radio stations who are out of business in the next five to ten years.

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Best Buy to start selling iPhones

Figured folks are tired of talking about the Olympics and Russia, so a bit of tech news.

The lines I saw at the Apple store this weekend are an indication demand is still pretty high, so Apple is now looking to find some additional retailers to carry the hyper-popular iPhone 3G. Today it was announced that Best Buy is going to start carrying the iPhone starting in September. Analysts are now projecting 4.7 million iPhones to be sold this quarter.

I’m still loving my phone. I’ve added a few more applications including Phone Saber and the Paper Football lite games. Pandora continues to be my number one used application.

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WINAMP remote for the iPhone now released

A remote control program for WinAmp fans is now available on the iPhone. It connects by wifi to your computer playing WinAmp and lets you move around your library, see what is playing, along with the bouncing visualization layout.

Of course, the $4.99 price tag might turn some off, but those who are wedded to winamp as a platform (instead of say iTunes) may find this of value. Itunes has its own remote (free) which lets you control the content in much the same manner.

Itunes Store –> App Store –> Music –>

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iPhone 2.1 firmware released to developers

So it looks like v. 2.1 of the firmware is coming very very soon. A new developers release was sent out to a select group of folks today who are making sure it jives with their existing apps and whatnot.

Apple has not announced a timeframe for the 2.1 release, but the included “Push Notification Service” was promised by September. Despite early hints of turn-by-turn GPS and Copy/Paste, further investigation indicates that these may not have been new findings in the 2.1 firmware (and had also existed in 2.0). References to a new iPod Touch model, however, suggests an iPod Touch hardware upgrade in the coming months.

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More on the iPhone's radio applications and the threat to radio.

My posting a week or so ago about the threat to XM and Sirius has been picked up, echo’d a bit, and expanded upon in a few articles this week.

First was Doc Searls who wrote about it in his Linux Journal Blog

Then he had another piece that cited a CBS News guru who discovered much of the same things that I did while playing with radio (i.e. it’s really really cool).

The concept of Internet radio replacing terrestrial radio has been around now for nearly a decade. The hold ups have been many, including the difficulty in bringing in hardware at a reasonable price point. But Apple’s massive power in just ‘adding this’ as a function to the iPhone is going to really shake up the radio industry. I don’t care that uber geeks had this power with a Blackberry or a Nokia–no one really cared or used it. But with Apple making it as easy as a few swishes and viola, the landscape is about to change in ways not many can predict (though I’ve been trying now for nearly a decade).

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iPhone Internet Radio applications – Review

Well it’s been a week and I’ve been playing with nearly every iphone radio application I can get my hands on. I thought I’d take a moment and write down a few thoughts on what is out there.

AOL Radio

This is one of the top free downloads for the iPhone nearly every week. It allows access to AOL’s in-house radio network along with access to CBS’s national radio network, with stations pretty much in every state. The display also pulls up album and song tracks from the meta-data of the stream. It, by far, has the best looking user interface.

My only rub is a) it’s not available internationally last I checked and b) some of the stations are not amongst my favorites. I never used the AOL Radio application as my main player (though I liked some of the stations) so it is going to take me a bit to get used to them and start listening regularly.

Tuner

Tuner is probably my top choice for an Internet radio application. It pulls directly from the Shoutcast.com directory of stations, which gives you access to about 15,000+ stations or so I’d imagine. I’ve been able to find some of my Shoutcast favorites utilizing the SEARCH function they have on the site. You can bookmark and browse by genre or popularity (but not by location).

On the down side, the listings that come up are not separated by your bandwidth capabilities. For example, you can be on an EDGE connection and pull up page after page of 128k or above streams, which are probably a bit too much for EDGE. It would be nice if we could start to see a limiting capability, showing us just the stations we could use given the bandwidth we have.

allRadio

Very similar to the Tuner application, with one major and glaring exception–no search. This is something I hope they sort out quickly or they’ll lose market share to Tuner. One nice feature about this application is the ability to see radio stations by location, such as ‘International–UK’. I’d hope this capability gets enhanced as they get better information about the regional locations of the stations.

Pandora

I’ve had a Pandora account since I first heard of them, and never ever used them. That changed dramatically once I got the iPhone. First, the sound quality, even on EDGE is pretty good. Comparable to FM easily. Second the algorithm they have definitely pulls in content I like from the assorted mass of songs (I have about 6 preset stations right now).

Last.fm

Mac v. Windows, Canon vs. Nikon, and Last.fm v. Pandora. There are so many battles like this. To be honest, I haven’t give Last.fm enough use to comment on it at this point. My database there isn’t as built up so I’m not sure what I’d be hearing.

Random Radio

Several individual stations have small applications so you can listen to their stations. Nice feature, especially when we start to see them for the stations we really like. I suspect we’ll see hundreds of these as the app store grows bigger.

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BBC Radio on the iPhone

Yea, I don’t know how to do it yet either…

BBC Radio has about 80 different channels of content, from the big dozen or so national feeds to zillions of local feeds across the UK. Unfortunately, the BBC is tied up heavily with Real Audio and has recently done (a heavily criticized) deal with Windows for their content.

What this means is that iPhone users, who can handle streaming mp3 content, are currently out of luck for BBC streaming radio on their iPhone.

This is really quite annoying. Granted mp3 is technically a proprietary format as well, but it’s a standard that works on Real and Windows media players (not to mention Winamp, Shoutcast, VLC and nearly all other audio software programs). That the BBC (and NPR and other public radio stations) continue to utilize these locked up formats is a considerable pain, especially as more and more devices and mobile phones have improved playback for mp3 streams.

The BBC has their podcasts in mp3, and they have built a version of the iPlayer that works with the iPhone (alas US people cannot access the videos though). I think it is only a matter of time before the Beeb comes out with an application to put their content on the iPhone and iPod touch.

But wait! There might be hope. Some folks have found a way to create a BBC 1 relay that converts the stream to an mp3 stream.

http://blog.garryrenshall.co.uk/bbc-radio-1-stream-on-the-iphone

Unfortunately I just tested it and it doesn’t seem to be working at the moment.

We’ll keep monitoring this one.

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Why I upgraded to the new 3g iPhone

Because it was free.

I mean basically, that’s it. My old iPhone is making its way on Ebay right now and the current prices they are fetching are incredibly similar to the price of buying a new iPhone (which I did earlier today).

I’m not one to rush and get the newest of the new simply because it is the newest, but with a chance like this to pay $0 and get a new phone I had to jump.

I was in Annapolis on another matter and called the Apple store, which the apple.com computer said was sold out. I spoke to the woman and she said ‘call back in 30 minutes’. The UPS guy at the Annapolis Apple store usually arrives about 10:30 and sure enough, he had a batch of new iPhones with him. The Apple folks told me it took about ‘10 minutes to ‘check-in’ the delivery’ and then they would be on sale.

I got to the store just as the UPS man walked out, and they made an announcement in the store that any customer looking to buy a phone should leave the store and get in line. I was 4th in line.

Unfortunately the people in front of me took a bit of time or had credit problems or whatever. Since I already had an iPhone and ATT account my upgrade and purchase took all of about 10 minutes. Others who were in line before me were still in the store.

The old iPhone went offline about 15 minutes after I left the store. The new one started working shortly thereafter. I’m now in the process of restoring from backup the contents of my original iPhone to the new one. The original is also being cleaned up for sale (note: if you ever buy Apple products, save the original box for resale purposes. Apple products get premium resale value vs. other electronics, and the original box helps).

So the upgrade is going on now and I’m off to get some lunch.

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My iPhone Apps

My iPhone screen is getting filled up pretty quickly with all the cool new applications. At the moment I have:

Tuner (my favorite radio app but still lacking a few features)
VisuaRadio/Allradio (no search makes it difficult to use)
AOL Radio (best radio interface)
Last.fm (need to add more content to my last.fm profile)
Virgin Radio (just one station but quick access to it)
Mandarin Phrase Book
AIM
Remote Control
Currency convertor
Twitteriffic
NY Times
WeatherBug (gives you radar snapshots)
Imaze (game)
Cube Runner (game)

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