Foursquare works!

Via mashable

McDonald’s Foursquare Day Campaign Brought in 33% More Foot Traffic
With so many brands trying their hand at location-based marketing campaigns, one has to wonder: is Foursquare really effective as a platform for bringing in new business? McDonald’s seems to think so; the company’s head of social media Rick Wion recently spoke of the fast food giant’s big wins from a spring pilot program using Foursquare.

At the Mobile Social Communications conference yesterday, Wion shared that McDonald’s was able to increase foot traffic to stores by 33% in one day with a little Foursquare () ingenuity. McDonald’s total cost for the successful campaign was a measly $1,000.

Econsultanty reports that McDonald’s, with Wion driving campaign direction and strategy, opted to try and take advantage of Foursquare Day (4/16) to bring in more business. The company used 100 randomly awarded $5 and $10 giftcards as checkin bait to lure in potential diners. The bait also worked to attract the media’s attention and resulted in more than 50 articles covering McDonald’s Foursquare special.

The campaign worked in both digital and real world capacities. Patrons flocked to McDonald’s restaurants for the chance to win giftcards in exchange for checkins, and 600,000 online denizens opted to follow and fan the brand on social media sites.

“I was able to go to some of our marketing people — some of whom had never heard of Foursquare — and say, ‘Guess what. With this one little effort, we were able to get a 33% increase in foot traffic to the stores’,” Wion explained to conference attendees.

A company of McDonald’s size spends millions on advertising every year, and yet a simple $1,000 Foursquare campaign netted the company measurable success. Of course, the metric here was checkins (not sales), and there were likely several other factors contributing to the campaign’s success, but it’s still a story that many an agency should pay heed to.

McDonald’s is not alone in their Foursquare success. Earlier this year, Domino’s UK attributed social media, and its Foursquare pilot program in particular, as a primary factor in helping the company increase profits by 29%.

Foursquare Launches Location Layers - This is Big

I agree... this could be a huge development. Thanks Josh and ReadWriteWeb

Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick / July 6, 2010 11:44 AM

Looking at life through rose-colored glasses? How about walking through your town and seeing it as the Huffington Post or the Independent Film Channel sees it? IFC announced a new campaign this morning with leading location-based social network Foursquare that will allow you to do just that. The Huffington Post launched a Foursquare layer today as well.

IFC polled its member base for short descriptions of their favorite places in the towns they lived in or visited, then picked the place-descriptions that best suited the IFC's brand ("Always on, slightly off") to upload into a Foursquare database. Foursquare users can now opt-into getting those tips pushed to them whenever they check in near one of the annotated locations. It's a chance to effectively say, "I want to see this town as IFC fans see it." For marketers, this has got to be incredibly appealing, and for urban explorers it could be one of the best examples yet of effective Augmented Reality.

Location as Platform

In January, Canadian newspaper chain Metro did a deal with Foursquare that tied content like restaurant reviews to specific locations as "tips." When we saw that, we said that the era of location as platform had arrived. Then, in April the Wall St. Journal began experimenting with location-based news, adding interesting news tidbits to locations around New York City on Foursquare. That was getting interesting - not just lightweight content like restaurant reviews but things like a note that a terrorism suspect was once arrested in a particular location!

Please Push Me

Now the next logical step is to enable users to opt-in to having a publisher's content pushed to them. That's what IFC and on a smaller scale, the Huffington Post, have done today. Click to follow these publishers, check in near one of the locations they have annotated and your phone will get special tips pushed to it just like you get when near a place where one of your individual friends has left a tip.

A Psychedelic Journey

IFC's crowdsourcing its data set is very cool. It's not hard to imagine any number of organizations mobilizing their constituents to mark-up the physical world like this. Other organizations already have data geo-located. The Huffington Post Foursquare page is very sparse right now, but imagine if stories were parsed for geolocation (Superfeedr now does that automatically, for example) and populated locations by XML. You might check in downtown and get pushed a note from Huffington Post coverage of a protest or other news event a few blocks away. Not into HuffPo? How about a HotAir layer? Why silo yourself? Let's get a Memeorandum layer in Foursquare!

See also: Why We Check In: The Reasons People Use Location Based Social Networks

There may be some technical matters to work out before dynamic content can be fed into Foursquare, but I'm sure the company is working on those. (In response to this article Huffington Post Social Media Editor Rob Fishman tweets that many of the ideas discussed here "are already underway.")

I'm ready to follow the local historical society, an environmental justice organization or two, perhaps an art-graffiti-watchers association - the possibilities are nearly endless. Imagine allowing background location tracking and notification for some layers. "To see the world through the lenses of my favorite organizations" would be a nice addition to the reasons why people say they use check-in apps.

Can Facebook implement this kind of feature once location is rolled into its service? It's a little hard to imagine; this feels like a feature that would best come from a service with location at its core.

In a perfect world, these location-based social networks would act like browsers, able to see and post interoperable location-based data from and to any platform. Don't hold your breathe on that, though. The potential impact of marking-up the world is large enough that single vendors are most likely to try to dominate it all on their own first.

This is a really exciting idea.

Facebook Poised to Take Geo-Networking Mainstream

Wow... been so lazy/busy that i've not posted anything for ages .Anyway going to to try get back into things with this from Adage:

Geo-location and making the real world interactive have long been personal favourite topics of mine, and with this little move from facebook it seems like it's all about to kick off big time. Which while i'm happy about that, i'm kinda pissed (but not surprised) that facebook is making a play here... do they really have to be EVERYTHING on the web?! I'm kinda fond of my geo-location stuff being on nice, not-evil, foursquare

Social Site Announces Location-Based Functionality, Marketers Eager to Leverage 'Check-Ins' Look for Scale

by Michael Learmonth and Emily Bryson York
Published: May 10, 2010

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- This could -- finally -- be the year of mobile marketing. But not exactly in the ways first predicted.

The combination of location and social networking -- once confined to tiny players like Foursquare, Gowalla, MyTown, Whrrl, Loopt and others -- is about to get massive scale in the form of Facebook, which as of last month had 450 million users and is adding a million new users each day.

MAC ATTACK: Facebook is building a location-based functionality that lets users 'check in' at restaurants and share menus with friends.

Facebook is expected to launch location-based functionality as soon as May, according to an exec with knowledge of Facebook's plans. Marketers will be allowed in soon after.

Related Stories

Facebook to Add Location This Month, Integrate Brands Later

Marketers Line Up to Try New Updates That Allow Users to Share Their Whereabouts

Last week Ad Age reported that McDonald's is building a location-based functionality with Facebook that will allow users to "check-in" at restaurants and share menu items with friends. That campaign is expected to be rolled out some time after the consumer launch, when Facebook integrates brands into the system.

The social impact of including a physical location in a virtual sharing app is immense; so is the marketing application as brands are then able to turn their physical locations into media channels connected to real people across Facebook's social graph.

"People talk about location-based advertising, but location removes the need for advertising," said Seth Goldstein, co-founder of SocialMedia.com. "If you know where the consumer is, and that she is physically touching your brand, then you do not need to rely upon traditional mass-media channels to reach her."

Mr. Goldstein sees marketers adding location as a key part of the value exchange with consumers. A store could, for example, offer free Wi-Fi to patrons who share their location to their friends.

McDonald's declined to comment on its Facebook plans, but one can imagine it could allow users who "check-in" the ability to share an offer or promo, as well as their location, with their social connections.

Jumping on bandwagon
Brands quickly recognized the power of location-aware social networks, and Pepsi, Dunkin' Donuts, Starbucks, Bravo, Warner Bros. and others jumped on the bandwagon and did deals with Foursquare.

But location-based marketing is very much in an experimental phase, mostly because the medium is tiny. Foursquare just signed up its millionth user, for example; MyTown has 2 million; Loopt has 3.5 million; and Gowalla still under a million. For a marketer that needs to reach hundreds of millions daily, geolocation social apps just can't provide the scale yet.

"Today no one can do location-based social marketing at scale other than potentially Facebook, should they release something," said Mike Lazerow, CEO of Buddy Media.

But with the proliferation of smartphones and location-aware networks -- including Facebook -- lots of marketers are betting that the sharing of physical location is about to become as natural and ubiquitous as a status update. Indeed, where you are could become the most valuable part of social networking. See a friend is having a coffee down the street? Why not join him?

Budgets devoted to this kind of marketing are tiny, just like social media budgets were a few years ago. But unlike some other recent social phenomenon -- take Twitter, or even Facebook itself -- it didn't take marketers long at all to figure out that the marketing potential is immense.

"We're always looking for the next big thing that isn't just a passing fad, but a viable wave in consumer behavior," said Chris Fuller, emerging media director at Pizza Hut. "Geolocation services appear to be just that." Pizza Hut built a Facebook ordering platform in 2008.

But the greatest opportunity for geolocation apps could be for local businesses, for which scale is less important than reaching the right people to generate foot traffic. "This will be the biggest thing to happen to local businesses since paid search," said Ian Schafer, CEO of DeepFocus, which just launched specialty practice GEOFocus. "It enables people to move in flocks or herds; you create waves of people."

Boon to local businesses
Some local businesses are catering to their Foursquare "mayors" with offers and special services. The Scholastic Store in New York is offering visitors 10% off any purchase, just for checking in while visiting.

Facebook, incidentally, has a self-serve ad platform created for small advertisers, the types most likely to benefit from location-based services.

Still, some wonder if this could be too much. Facebook is a platform that allows people to share their lives, and it makes sense that location would become part of that. But each feature Facebook adds -- such as its recent Open Graph function, which brings its social graph to third-party sites -- brings pushback from users, mostly in the form of privacy concerns.

"Being fully connected and available 24/7 to all your peeps and tweets may not be as healthy as it seems," said Scott Bedbury, CEO of BrandStream. "Not being available, being off the grid and being fully present in whatever moment you're in, and with whoever is with you, is my measure of 'engagement.'"

Gatsby: Connecting Foursquare Friends Who Like Cats and Circuses

Seems like the logical next step i'd say... Thanks Ang via Mashable

Here’s an interesting idea. The recently launched service Gatsby aims to connect locals on Foursquare who share the same interests.

The setup is simple. Sign up for Gatsby with your Foursquare () account, which will add Gatsby as a friend, and tag yourself with your favorite interests — say, “Water Polo,” or “Cranberries.” (Or, as the site’s screenshots suggest, “Cats” and “Circus”.) Then, continue on your merry way.

As you check in at your usual haunts, Gatsby will automatically determine if there are other Foursquare/Gatsby users in your area who share your affinity for cranberries, and attempt to connect you. When a potential match occurs, Gatsby sends a text message to both parties with the first names of each user and a list of the shared interests. If both agree to connect, Gatsby can also set up a temporary SMS relay so that the users can text each other (and potentially meet in person) without revealing their mobile numbers.

The idea is intriguing, and could really take location-based services to a whole new level by bridging the gap between semi-anonymous lists of check-ins and real-time, in-person social networking. However, meeting strangers face-to-face based on scant social network details is sure to turn some more cautious users away.

What do you think? Could this be the ultimate location-based ice-breaking service, or a recipe for a big privacy nightmare? Let us know in the comments.

Rob me please

Makes a lot of sense... Thanks PSFK
February 17, 2010

Aiming to highlight the potential dangers of location-based services, website “Please Rob Me” features a running list of Twitter users declaring they’re not home.

While the setup is humorous, in reality this kind of open physical location sharing could lead to trouble.

They explain:

Don’t get us wrong, we love the whole location-aware thing. The information is very interesting and can be used to create some pretty awesome applications. However, the way in which people are stimulated to participate in sharing this information, is less awesome.

…The danger is publicly telling people where you are. This is because it leaves one place you’re definitely not… home. So here we are; on one end we’re leaving lights on when we’re going on a holiday, and on the other we’re telling everybody on the internet we’re not home. It gets even worse if you have “friends” who want to colonize your house. That means they have to enter your address, to tell everyone where they are. Your address.. on the internet

…The goal of this website is to raise some awareness on this issue and have people think about how they use services like Foursquare, Brightkite, Google Buzz etc.

Wow stuff...

Been busy/lazy for much posting this week, but here are two things that made me go Wow recently...

Nokia's geolocating, Ovimaps interactive billboard (thanks @damjanov for the link to the vid)



And, the totally cool, all-in-one soccer ball, portable generator, community builder and global health tool... Soccket (Cheers Springwise)

Over 1.5 billion people—one quarter of the world’s population—live in areas with no access to electricity, according to a recent UN report. Capitalizing on a sport's global appeal to address this problem, a group of Harvard University students developed sOccket, a soccer ball that turns energy from a kick into electricity.

The portable energy-harvesting device captures the impact energy normally dissipated when the ball is kicked, storing it to charge lights, cell phones and batteries. It works with inductive coil technology, similar to that found in flashlights that power up when shaken. For each 15 minutes of play, it can store enough energy to power a small LED light for three hours. sOccket could eventually help ease the reliance on toxic kerosene lamps in developing nations, thereby reducing the associated health risks.

Currently in the prototyping stages, sOccket has been successfully piloted in Durban, South Africa, and the development team has plans to market a commercial version of the sOccket in Western countries as a high-end tech toy, possibly using a "buy one-give one" model, to subsidize the cost of distributing sOccket in developing nations. Being an all-in-one soccer ball, portable generator, community builder and global health tool, sOccket is another shining example of the functionall trend covered in our sister site’s latest briefing. sOccket has attracted several development funding grants and is now in the process of developing production and distribution partnerships. One to partner with or otherwise get involved in? (Related: Hippo water roller — Single-use toilet bag turns human waste into fertilizer.)

Website: www.soccket.com
Contact: soccket@ideatranslationlab.org

Using Flickr as a Paintbrush

Thanks Flowing Dat afor this cool project that brings a bit of (average hue) colour ot mapping

Posted by Nathan / Oct 28, 2009 to Mapping / Add your comment

Andy Woodruff from Cartogrammar uses average color in Flickr photos to map the colors that people take the most pictures of. The above for example, shows the common colors of Harvard Square. Why all the red? It's because there's so many brick buildings.

So in the end is a map that provides a different geographic view of what we're used to seeing. We're used to seeing the aerials or the designer-defined color coding of roads and land. This however, while portrayed as a view from above, is what people are seeing on the ground.

Augmented Reality & The Web: Present and Future Scenarios

Thanks ReadWriteWeb for this little look at the status of AR now, and potentially in the future

Augmented Reality (AR) is when virtual graphics and/or data are overlaid onto real world objects. Many of you have seen this portrayed in movies such as Minority Report and The Matrix. It still seems a bit far fetched in 2009, yet there are apps that are beginning to make it a reality. One is Wikitude, an Android mobile app that mixes location imagery with information from Wikipedia. We first noticed it back in May 2008, when it was announced as one of the winners of the Android Developer Challenge.

Wikitude is described on its website as "a mobile travel guide for the Android platform based on location-based Wikipedia and Qype content." Essentially it allows users to overlay information from Wikipedia onto a photo of a certain location, via Mobile Google Maps. It currently supports 350,000 locations by GPS or by address. Wikitude was launched at the same time as the G1 phone in October 2008 and is currently available in the Android Market. Here's a video of how it works:

(via Latitude's FriendFeed page)

Wikitude represents perhaps the first stage of what is possible with AR. Microsoft recently released a video that shows other future scenarios for AR:

(via Literanista)

Microsoft's Surface app, released in May 2007, is a pointer to this future.

There are many potential scenarios for AR. A popular one is doing your grocery shopping and checking information on your mobile phone (or AR glasses!) about price, specials, reviews, comparisons with competing products, etc. With the rise of RFID chips and technology such as that being developed by Microsoft, this type of scenario isn't too far away.

Another interesting consideration is that social software will have a big role to play in future AR apps. For example when walking down the street, you could use your mobile phone to point to a restaurant, and overlaid on a photo of the restaurant would be customer reviews, recommendations, and other relevant user generated data. (inspiration from Rafael Torres)

Let us know other apps that are doing interesting things with AR technology mixed with the Internet. And of course we'd love to hear about your favorite future AR scenarios!

For more on this topic, read Alex Iskold's post from July 1007 Digital Life vs Life Digital: Our Inevitable Digital Future and Marshall Kirkpatrick's from March 2008 User Interfaces Rapidly Adjusting to Information Overload.

Twitter Meets Google Street View: Stweet!

Thanks Mashable for this post on a pretty cool idea for a twitter/maps mashup.... nice idea, but not quite there yet.

May 9th, 2009 | by Pete Cashmore11 Comments

We’ve seen plenty of interesting Google Maps mashups over the years, and Twitter mashups too; but rather than just plotting Tweets on a map, why not go even further and show the street Tweets are posted from?

That’s what Stweet, a fun mashup of Google Street View and Twitter (), attempts to do. In an imperfect way, it takes the co-ordinates posted by some Twitter apps, like TwitterFon () (location must be enabled), and uses that data to find the approximate street address the Tweet came from. It then overlays the Tweet on a Google Street View image.

If you’d like to test it out, the best city by far is San Francisco, with a high volume of Tweets. A dropdown menu lets you browse various US cities, and you can see if there are Tweets from countries not listed by changing the end of the URL to “city,country”. For instance, this is the URL for Tweets in London, UK.

Is it any use? Perhaps not, but it sure is an interesting distraction, and raises the question: do I want the world to know what street I’m on?

---

Tags: Google, Google Maps, google street view, twitter

Hyperlinking the Real World (Redux)

Thanks ReadWriteWeb for this redux on a great interactive-real-world phone app...

Written by Sarah Perez / April 5, 2009 6:00 PM / 8 Comments

« Prior Post Next Post »

European researchers working on the MOBVIS project have developed a new system that will allow camera phone users to hyperlink the real world. After taking a picture of a streetscape in an urban area, the MOBVIS technology identifies objects like buildings, infrastructure, monuments, cars, and even logos and banners. It then renders relevant information on the screen using icons that deliver text-based details about the object when clicked.

This project goes beyond today's mapping applications like Google's Street View, for example, which first identifies your location either via GPS or triangulation and then shows you pictures of that area. Instead, MOBVIS actually lets you "see" the world through your mobile phone. This is computer vision, or rather, mobile vision.

Editor's note: During 2009 there have been some posts on ReadWriteWeb that didn't get the attention they perhaps deserved - because of timing, competing news stories, etc. So we're starting up our Redux series again, to re-publish some of those hidden gems. This is one of them, we hope you enjoy (re)reading it!

There are obviously numerous potential applications for such a technology. On the MOBVIS homepage, they offer up some scenarios for how their application could be used, including the following:

Tourism/Augmented City Maps: The MOBVIS technology could be used to inform visitors about the objects in an area be they buildings or landmarks. The images could also be annotated with additional information like history, event information, or information about nearby shops.

Visual Localization: For phones without GPS technology, triangulation could be combined with the computer vision technology to locate a user's position and orientation in a manner that would be comparable to GPS and just as accurate.

Motion Estimation: Also comparable to GPS, MOBVIS could enable continuous position updates to determine the location of objects in motion as well as their speed.

Incremental Map Updates: MOBVIS supports incremental updating of maps which would allow for the automated authoring of the urban infrastructure. No longer would Google need to send their vans around taking pictures of streets - the data could be uploaded from users' phones as they took their photos.

Picture-Driven Search Engine: Because the mobile phone could now "see" the surrounding landscape, the world - reality - becomes the backdrop for a sort of picture-driven search engine in which the objects in the world are all hyperlinked and annotated like a real-life semantic web.

How It Works

The MOBVIS system begins with a pre-populated database of geo-referenced panoramas (such as Google's Street View, perhaps). The objects in the images are then manually annotated with information. Once that's complete, the system is ready for search queries from mobile users. After a user takes a picture, MOBVIS compares the photo to the photos in its database and returns the relevant links.

The challenge here is getting a mobile phone picture to match up with the more pristine photos found in the database. The database photos would likely be clear, crisp, and detailed, but a user's photo could be grainy, taken on a dark and cloudy day, or taken from an odd angle.

The MOBVIS system's main strength comes from its feature-matching algorithm developed by the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, one of the partners of the project. This algorithm can very accurately detect minute differences between similar objects. In real-world tests, it's reported that this system was highly accurate, detecting the right building 80 percent of the time.

Aleš Leonardis, head of the Ljubljana team, believes that number can be improved. He also notes that that the system, though not always right, was never wrong. "It was remarkable that there were no false positives," he says. "Sometimes the system couldn't identify a building, but it never put the incorrect link on a building."

You can read more about the research here on the MOBVIS project's homepage.

The Week in Mobile:

Thanks Next Great Thing for this great sum-up post on some new, cool, wacky and momentus stuff happening in the mobile space

January 22nd, 2009 by NGT

• This Modern Age: The Youth Ball Welcomes Obama with a Sea of Digital Cameras [Gizmodo] - The image really speaks for itself here. Note that it is the Youth Ball. It paints a compelling picture for those companies and brands not sure whether or not to dip a foot in the mobile pool yet. If anything, they should be rushing to populate the space so that, by the time these young consumers reach full consumption potential, they are already used to interacting with those brands that capitalized early.
• I Am Here: One Man’s Experiment With the Location-Aware Lifestyle [Wired] - Another location-based feature from Wired - this time it’s freelancer Matthew Honan’s discovery of just how transparent the world can be through location-based applications. True, some care and some don’t - it’s more of a case study on the potential level of interaction and the decrease in privacy for those who choose to play.
• Sephora launches mobile service to assist shoppers in-store [Mobile Marketer] - Sephora recently rolled out a mobile service that allows in-store shoppers to check customer reviews re: products of interest on their mobile phones. It’s a perfect synthesis of relative and timely content and should ultimately serve Sephora by building customer loyalty.
• Time sensitive mobile contents - Day to Evening deco mail [CScout Japan] - This mobile mall from Gigno System changes its theme depending on the time of day. It’s cute in the morning and afternoon, but at night, the lipstick and eyeliner come out. It’s perfect for those who unwind from the more formal light of day by breaking out the leather and hitting the neon.
• The first live-tweeted surgery [Global Neighbourhoods] - The surgery wasn’t directed via Twitter (thank god, given its history of crashing unexpectedly), rather, the surgery updates were tweeted live to a conference of professionals interested in the procedure in question.
• Arsenal fans could catch replays, live action on Sony’s PSP [Engadget] - Sony is working to develop software that would allow live replays and, perhaps, real-time interaction between fans on their PSPs during Arsenal home games. (British soccer, for those who don’t know) However, given the rowdy nature of soccer games, PSPs brought into the stadium may only provide a high-tech beatdown for those in the way of portable-wielding fans.
• Inside the GPS Revolution: 10 Applications That Make the Most of Location [Wired] - Are you addicted to GPS? Does location-based content make you sweat? Do you spend your nights tossing and turning, wondering which celebrity has the largest chin? If you answered yes to the first two, Wired has got your hook-up for location-based goodness. For the insomniacs, see here.

Bike Thefts? RFID to the Rescue

Thanks PSKF for this post on use of RFID

by Dan Gould

Bicycle usage is up around the world - and with increased amounts of bikes come increased instances of bike thefts. Copenhagen residents alone had 20,000 bicycles stolen last year. Three initiatives from around the globe are aiming to combat and prevent bike theft using RFID (radio frequency ID) tags.

The University of Portsmouth in the UK has begun embedding RFID tags on bikes registered in their WASP (Wireless Asset Security Protection) program. Students can park their bikes in designated safe zones and register their position via mobile phone. If their bike is moved without calling and entering a pin code, cctv cameras will zoom in on the area to see if anything is amiss. Oregon State University takes a similar approach, “bugging” participating student’s bikes with RFID tags. It’s used mostly as a bike recovery and theft deterrent method and the bugs are free to OSU students. And finally, the city of Copenhagen is working with the Danish Technical Institute to create a better chip to help locate some of the city’s many stolen bikes.

ET phone home

I really could have used this new mobile tracking and thief humiliating technology about 5 weeks ago... Cheers to the NY Times for bringing this to my attention despite the poor timing.

Someone Stole Your Cell Phone? Tell It to Phone Home

Maverick Mobile Solutions, an Indian company that makes mobile applications, has a new way to protect your cell phone: tell it to follow the lead of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and “phone home.” Or, to bring E.T. into the 21st century, “text home.”

If your phone is lost or stolen, the application, called Maverick Secure Mobile, encrypts your data, sends you a text message with the location of the phone and, best of all, plays an annoyingly loud siren to torture the thief. The application was unveiled at the DEMO technology conference in San Diego, Calif., this week, where it provided a few minutes of “comic relief,” according to Dean Takahashi of VentureBeat.

The Maverick software is hidden on a phone, so a potential thief can’t tell whether or not your phone has it. You give the company a second phone number — your spouse’s or a friend’s, for example. As soon as a thief replaces your SIM card with his own, the phone encrypts all of your remaining data, like your phone book, photos or text messages, so the thief can’t see them. It also sends that data to your second phone so that you have it.

Then you can start playing tricks on the thief. By sending text message commands, you can see all the phone calls and text messages he sends or receives and any new contacts he enters in the phone book. With a feature called Spy Call, you can call your phone and eavesdrop on the thief’s calls — without him knowing. Then, when you get really exasperated, you can make the phone play a blaring siren. Just when he is about to toss your screaming phone in the trash, you can send him a text message with your name, location and, if you want, a reward for returning the phone.

Although the product is currently in beta, Maverick has a deal with Nokia to begin distributing the anti-theft application on Nokia phones, according to DEMO. Maverick makes other mobile applications, games and content, including popular memory cards pre-loaded with games, applications and Bollywood films.

The company suggests that its new anti-theft application could also be used by parents who want to track their kids. With its eavesdropping and siren-playing capabilities, I’m sure users will come up with many more mischievous uses.

Original article at: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/12/someone-stole-your-cell-phone-tell-it-to-phone-home/?th&emc=th

Android Challenge Pt. I: Balancing the Expected with the Experimental

Thanks Mashabale for this overview of some of the apps soon to be coming out on Andriod. I'll post each part as it comes out.

his week the first round of the Android Challenge drew to a close. And if it hasn’t already done so, Google will be distributing over half of the $10 million cash prize pool promised among Challenge I and Challenge II finalists/winners. Judges of Challenge I settled on 50 finalists, all of whom were granted $50,000 applications. Additionally, 10 were given $100,000 awards each, while another 10 received $275,000 each. Challenge II takes place subsequent the release of the first handset(s) arriving with Android software.

Over the last couple of days I’ve casually observed what has achieved placement on the Android Challenge leaderboard. Many - if not most - applications are devoted very much to location-aware activities. Some are interesting gaming developments. But of course what drew my interest most from titles of the winners and almost-winners displayed are those that will cater social services to users.

Sure, the social apps are but a segment of what will be available come the launch of Android and the Android Market. The finalist labeled PedNav and GWalk, to name two examples, are likely to be useful for city residents or visitors aiming to get the most efficient use of pedestrian infrastructure. Not to mention that City Slikkers could very well be a gamer’s delight if enough first adopters make an effort to partake in the virtual-plus-reality play. We all recognize the popularity bestowed on games within Apple’s own big-selling storefront. Nonetheless, I imagine that the social options will be among those that rank among the most popular for opening day and the weeks that follow. Game reviews

Maverick, for instance, is a local client that allows for the communication of text, location and media (audio, photos, and “scribbles”) through Google Talk. It also allows Blogger users to publish content to the Web and for Gmail users to get notifications about messages in their inboxes. Granted, it sounds very Googley, and it is, but to deliver something so multifunctional, if done right, will I think be very appealing. PebbleBox, alternatively, is central to one’s location. Learn about events, restaurants, and hotels in a given area, and, if you wish, write geo-tagged blogs to share with fellow users. A rough parallel to Loopt on the iPhone, you might say, but a bit more general-purpose perhaps. Just to note, both Maverick and Pebblebox were awarded $100,000 prizes.

Dropping down into the broader pool of finalists, there is Marvin, which according to creator Laurent Pontier will allow users to post “geo-localized rich messages” to one’s friends and/or the wider network. Marvin taps the powers of the Android OpenGL API, Google Maps, and Google StreetView to give the user a virtual 3D representation of the so-called social graph, from Google Earth-like outer space view to one at road level. Visually, it must impress. Whether it’s truly utilitarian, we’ll see. Google Maps Google Earth

LifeAware is one more location-sharing service that automates your interaction with those you know (and maybe those you would like to). There are many similar services already put into play over the past couple of years that exhibit virtually the same capability, but this pick may nonetheless be something proves popular. An application called SocialMonster also draws from your phonebook to keep you and the people in your life in sync.

Again, it is hard to escape the location-smart dimension of many of Google’s picks, which of course falls well into line with some of the items we’ve seen arrive in the iTunes App Store marketplace. And that seems the right direction to take the Android Challenge - at least the first round of it. With more phones equipped with GPS devices or with software capable of gathering rough coordinates from cellular towers in a given area, where you are will determine what you want to do. Which is sensible. Planning outings with friends will not be so tedious.

No mass phone call campaigns or SMS relays. The act of getting together or simply staying in touch will be much less cumbersome. And wonderfully enough, Google has made it a point to incentivize independent developers and small developer teams. Much as the iPhone App Store shows on its own adjoining software platform, the finalists in this event seem to take a very experimental approach. Some of course are quite ordinary. But some stretch one’s curiosity muscle a good amount. Which is unquestionably necessary if progress is to be made. If Google ensures the openness of Android, all the better. The experience may not always be as polished as that of the iPhone. But as with anything in the business, it is the software that makes the star. Android’s star power will be seen in short order.

As for Round 2, there’s still $4.75 million to be distributed. If T-Mobile releases its Android-based device in the fall, as many now assume, the Challenge will continue on schedule. Google offers a rough estimate of “second half of 2008.” T-Mobile

lifeviNe: Automatic, Geo-tagged Lifetracking

Thanks PSFK and Christine Huang for this note on a cool new tool for tracking your own every move.

LifeviNe, which will be making its beta debut in the next few weeks via Nokia’s Beta Labs, is a mobile lifetracking application that lets users geotag every step they make - and the photos, music, and audio clips that go along with the journey. Similar to their Sports Tracker app, LifeviNe offers users a way to map, timestamp, share and tag their day-to-day activities on their phones and the web. As explained in Nokia Conversations:

As well as tagging all your media’s locations the app will track where you’ve been (so you need to be careful when you have it switched on!), and plot your journey on the web based map when you sync it at the end of the day. Uploading is a cinch too, as lifeviNe can be set to automatically upload whenever you’re in a trusted wireless zone.

Online you can look at and share your journeys, filtering by user, place or time. There’s also an online widget which you can place on your blog or Facebook page, allowing others to see what you’ve been up to.

We don’t think lifeviNe is the sort of thing most people would use everyday, but it could be a useful tool for people who likes to keep track of and share what they’ve done/seen (perhaps traveling) but don’t want to stop to write it down.

And no, we don’t get the capital “N” either.

Nokia Conversations: Keeping Track of Life