Archive for the 'Internet' Category
Verizon Wireless, the nation’s leading wireless service provider, and Loopt® announced today that Verizon Wireless customers can now access Loopt’s interoperable location-based service.
Loopt allows friends who opt in to be located by other friends to show where the friends are located and what they are doing via detailed, interactive maps on their mobile phones. Loopt helps friends connect on the go and navigate their social lives by orienting them to people, places and events. Users can also choose to permit sharing of location updates, geo-tagged photos and comments with friends in their mobile address book or on online social networks, communities and blogs.
“Loopt helps Verizon Wireless customers stay connected to friends and share their location in a fun and interactive way,” said Ryan Hughes, vice president of digital media programming for Verizon. “Loopt enhances our customers’ real world experiences by helping friends stay informed of their friends’ lives.”
“We are on a mission to deliver Loopt to consumers everywhere, and by offering our service to Verizon Wireless customers, we’re significantly closer to achieving that goal,” said Sam Altman, chief executive officer and co-founder of Loopt. “With Loopt, Verizon Wireless customers now have a powerful tool to navigate their mobile lifestyles and easily connect with people and places around them.”
Loopt, the social mapping industry leader, offers the most intuitive and effective privacy controls and security features for end users. Loopt is 100 percent permission-based and users share location information only with their known friends via private networks. In addition, Loopt users can easily turn location-sharing on or off at any time on a friend-by-friend basis or for all friends at once. Loopt regularly works with organizations such as the Family Online Safety Institute, ConnectSafely.org, the Center for Democracy & Technology, Progress & Freedom Foundation’s Center for Digital Media Freedom, and the Internet Safety Task Force.
Loopt is available today on select Verizon Wireless phones for $3.99 monthly access in the Tools on the Go, Featured Applications and Community shopping aisles in the Get It Now® virtual store. Customers need a Get It Now-enabled handset and Verizon Wireless digital service to access the Get It Now virtual store.
[Picture courtesy ronbailey’s weblog]
sipgate Inc. today announces the immediate availability of a free application for the iPhone, which, for the first time allows consumers to natively use any VoIP service which uses the industry standard SIP. Consumers can now use their iPhones to make and receive VoIP calls from their devices over a Wi-Fi Internet connection using a wide variety of VoIP providers. The VoIP-enabling software is available from sipgate’s website
www.sipgate.com.
With the sipgate service, users can dial any number without using minutes from a wireless plan. This is particularly useful when calling to or from other countries, as call costs can be as high as $3 per minute. However, when using a VoIP service, costs can be kept as low as $0.01 per minute. sipgate is giving new users 111 free minutes for domestic calls for users to test out VoIP usage on the device*.
Another benefit of sipgate is that consumers can use any domestic or international number provided by their VoIP service on their iPhone. This means that they can make and receive calls from different domestic and international numbers, all on a single device.
Thilo Salmon, CEO of sipgate commented: “We love VoIP and we love the iPhone so we are giving people like us who always wanted VoIP on the iPhone the ability to use any SIP-based VoIP service they want. We are thrilled that Apple is opening up the iPhone and we look forward to taking part in future application development.”
Salmon continued: “As a company we strive to make useful services accessible to everyone. There will be more innovation for businesses and consumers coming from sipgate this year, so keep your eyes open for more news.”
A.D.A.M., Inc., the leading provider of high-quality health information and benefits technology solutions, today announced the A.D.A.M. Symptom Navigator web application for the iPhone. An industry first, this interactive tool helps consumers match medical symptoms with relevant assessments and appropriate treatments. Symptom Navigator empowers consumers to make the best use of the healthcare system and understand when self-care or a doctor visit is appropriate. To access the Symptom Navigator on the iPhone, visit http://iphone.adam.com. The tool offers possible causes of the symptom and medical condition, how to self treat, when it is an emergency, when you should call a doctor, and how to prevent it in the future.
“Consumers expect information at their fingertips, at all times, and being able to deliver healthcare information to mobile devices is of real value to users,” said Greg Juhn, senior vice president of product development at A.D.A.M., Inc. “Whether you are travelling on vacation with your kids or on a business trip and feeling ill, an extensive library of symptom guidance will now just be a tap away on your iPhone.”
A.D.A.M. engineered this web application version of its Symptom Navigator for optimal display on the iPhone, taking full advantage of its revolutionary Multi-Touch interface. Using the Symptom Navigator, consumers are presented with an image of the human body and they click on the affected area of the body to receive a menu of related symptoms. After selecting a symptom, the user is walked through the possible causes, home care, when to consult your doctor, and what to expect from your doctor. This data is provided by A.D.A.M. from their medically reviewed, evidence-based and URAC accredited Health Encyclopedia. A.D.A.M. owns one of the largest consumer health libraries in the world.
“Healthcare information on-the-go is important to today’s increasingly mobile society. A.D.A.M.’s Symptom Navigator for the iPhone brings high-quality medical information to consumers anytime, anywhere,” said Dr. Alan Greene, FAAP, chief medical officer of A.D.A.M., one of the “Top 25 Most Influential Forces in Healthcare IT” (Advanced for Health Information Executives), author and popular health commentator for national television. “A.D.A.M.’s new Symptom Navigator for the iPhone represents the wave of the future for mobile healthcare technology applications, which will help transform the consumer-directed healthcare experience over the next several years. Everyone should have Symptom Navigator as a home button on their iPhone.”
The Symptom Navigator for the iPhone was adapted from A.D.A.M.’s popular standard edition of its Symptom Navigator, which is available on such prestigious medical Web sites as Duke University Health System, Loma Linda University Medical Center, Methodist Medical Center, the University of Wisconsin Health and thousands of Benergy employee portals. The iPhone version can be branded by A.D.A.M.’s clients and used to drive loyalty, retention, and traffic.
For more information about Symptom Navigator for the iPhone, please visit http://www.adam.com/iphonesn.
Do you find yourself often wondering where a good place to dine or maybe where to get some great souvenirs in a city you may be visiting for work or leisure would be? Is your GPS just not cutting it for you? Too timid to ask a local for suggestions? But wait! You have an iPhone and Google Maps seems to be working for you. Well, kind of. No worries, mate, SvenOnTech just discovered Schmap! While the name makes me think of having a shot of peppermint schnapps, the new city guide made just for the iPhone goes live with its public beta Monday that’ll help you with all your city guide needs.
With Schmap, you’ll be able to find a nice place to dine, attractions, stores, and many other easy to find items from the simple laid out iPhone-like interface. Drilling down to a place that fits your desires, you’ll be able to find the address, phone number, email address, and web site of the place all with a tap of your finger. Tap on one of the items and the corresponding iPhone application opens it. From dialing the number to showing you where the place is on Google Maps, you’ll be quickly on your way to your new found Point of Interest, or POI as us geeks call it. 
If you’d rather stay in Safari, just turn the iPhone onto its side and Schmap presents a map of the POI right there befor you! It looks just like Google Maps on your desktop computer. Reason being is, well, it’s powered by Google Maps. Nice! You will also be able to do local city searches once the service is fully initialized.
What I really liked about Shmap is how light-weight it is. EDGE connections are not spiffy by any shot and thankfully the folks at Schmap not only gave us a familiar interface but one that loads quickly, too. Anytime you tap on a form element that needs a number only, a keypad comes up, not the regular keyboard. Yes, a basic thing for any iPhone developer, but man, I can’t even begin to tell you how many iPhone “ready” sites are missing this little thing. Schmap didn’t forget us keypad tapping folks.
Overall, the site offers some useful information for the average tourist but I did find some more mainstream names missing such as Starbucks and Peet’s from the Coffee/Tea category. Donald McMillan of Schmap explained this is because, “The current content does tend to focus on more unique/independent locations”. Don’t worry though, you coffee snobs, McMillan said the local search will kick back your well branded caffeine hits once it is up and running. I noted that also omitted from the Shopping category is malls. I was told by McMillan that malls can be found in “Stores & Arcades”. Both Sacramento and San Jose did return a good sized list for the “arcades”.
Schmap is in beta, so this means things can change, be added, removed, or just plain fixed if there are bugs found. Give it a spin on Monday (www.schmap.com) and be sure to let the Schmap team know what it can do to improve the city guide experience. Until then, take a look at the preview page on your big boy Safari (or other browser.)
Now I need to satisfy this peppermint craving….
What can you say, when you move from the high through put of 5 Mbps of cable modem to iffy fixed wireless of the country, you become excited for anything close to reliable Internet. This weekend I surprised a friend in San Antonio, Texas for his 40th birthday and when I popped open my MacBook Pro yesterday to download Firefox’s latest beta, I was stunned to see the download ticker hit the 800 Kbps. I quickly went to Speedtest.net and was nearly floored when the connection tested at no lower than 7.9 Mbps. I looked to my buddy and asked him, “Dude, what are you connected to out here?” “Fiber,” was his response. “Fiber?! Out here?” was my shocked reply as they live about 30 minutes north of San Antonio.
Yes, it was fiber. Lucky for him, he just got it dropped into his home a few months ago and man, what fiber can do for you. Yes, I would agree that fiber indeed makes on regular. I’d use his connection regularly. So last night I was downloading everything I could. His upload speeds weren’t fantastic at 800 Kbps, but it was solid and latency was low enough that it still seemed blazing when compared to my crappy connection at home.
So, I’ve experienced a blessed experience on true broadband of fiber (though this fiber optic use is kinda interesting, too) and hope that one day I too will have the availability of fiber. But for now, I’ll be happy with my forthcoming T1 install and enjoy the 1.544 Mbps upload speeds (which will better you Rog’ ) as well as down at the same. Consistent, low latency, reliable Internet will be nice to have but dang, 8 megs was grand!
Continuing to raise the bar in file transfer technology Interarchy 9 introduces over one hundred new and improved features, including a brand new protocol built upon SSH, numerous enhancements to the product’s interface, plus much more.
“For close to 15 years Interarchy has led the way with its advanced file transfer capabilities,” said Matthew Drayton, founder and CEO of Nolobe. “Interarchy 9 builds on this by adding a number of exciting new features to enhance our customers’ productivity.”
The new SSH protocol is a major addition to Interarchy’s already comprehensive set of supported protocols. SSH provides a number of advantages over incumbent protocols such as FTP and SFTP. Not only is it faster than SFTP but it offers much greater flexibility.
“Interarchy’s SSH protocol offers significant speed improvements, especially when mirroring. We are talking seconds versus minutes for large websites. This is a big deal.” adds Drayton. “Better yet, SSH puts us in the driving seat. Users will no longer will we be shackled by the limitations of SFTP or FTP.”
Pricing and Availability
Interarchy 9 is available at a suggested retail price of US$59.
Interarchy 9 can be purchased directly from The Nolobe Store:
A US$29 upgrade offer is available to all registered owners of
Interarchy 8.5.4 or earlier.
http://store.nolobe.com/upgrade
Volume discounts are also available. For details visit The Nolobe Store at http://store.nolobe.com/ or send an email to
sales@nolobe.com.
Interarchy 9 requires Mac OS X 10.4.11 or later.
Orange Madagascar S.A. has released its new Orange World portal powered by Greenlight Wireless’ Skweezer technology, which optimizes Web pages and searches for mobile handsets.
Orange World is a mobile Internet portal that provides Orange Madagascar’s 1.4 million customers with access to Web content, such as news and sports scores, from their mobile phones and PDAs. Skweezer Private Label has been integrated into this portal so that Orange customers will be able to browse off-portal and visit any Web site on the Internet, whether it’s mobile-friendly or not.
“Orange Madagascar has chosen to work with Greenlight Wireless to integrate Skweezer into its WAP portal because of Greenlight’s experience, knowledge and expertise in the technology of reformatting pages to adapt them to the screens of mobile phones,” said Orange Madagascar Product Manager Tohiniaina Raherimanantsoa.
Approximately 24% of all Skweezer users are from so-called “emerging markets”. The growth in this sector is an ongoing tend that became apparent in mid-2005, when Skweezer penetration in Latin America, China, and India began to accelerate. Skweezer Private Label is also used by Orange Dominicana’s 850,000-plus customers, with further Private Label implementations due to be deployed in upcoming months.
Orange Madagascar is using Skweezer Private Label, which is a carrier-grade solution that optimizes Web content for PDAs and cell phones. Skweezer compresses and reformats content being downloaded, so that it loads faster, looks better, and is easier to navigate. Skweezer has introduced many mobile browsing innovations and has won several awards in 2007, including a Gold Star in the Mobile Star Awards and Best Web Compression Service in the Smartphone and Pocket PC Magazine Best Software Awards. Skweezer is completely platform-independent and can be accessed from Pocket PC, Palm, MS Smartphone, Blackberry, iPhone, Symbian, PSP2, and WAP 2.0 compliant devices.
mobilePeople’s award winning liquidTM mobile search platform now supports the iPhone, extending new monetisation opportunities for directory publishers and directory assistance companies. This news comes swift on the heels of Apple’s announcement that the majority of mobile internet usage in the US is conducted on the iPhone and Google’s announcement that it monitors multiple searches from the iPhone compared to other mobile handsets.
mobilePeople provides a user interface optimised for the iPhone’s Safari browser to search Yellow Pages, White Pages and other content published using the liquid platform. Functionality includes a click to call option, the facility to get directions to a desired address, save any business search to contacts, the facility to send results to a friend and the function to see results on a map. The mapping experience on the iPhone Safari browser is superior to other browser based map solutions because mobilePeople’s solution allows the user to interact with the map. Raster maps in combination with layering technology allow for user touch interaction.
The local search experience on the iPhone is now fast and cheap. The search itself requires less data traffic, which means lower costs for the user. Thanks to AJAX technology which exchanges small packets of data with the server it is no longer necessary to reload the entire mobile pages at all times.
Jens Andersen, CEO and co-founder of mobilePeople commented: “The fact that so many US mobile users are using their iPhones to surf the web is a wake-up call to directory publishers who haven’t yet got to grips with the handset’s monetisation opportunities. With liquid now available on the iPhone, this is too good an opportunity to miss. The web is an integral part of the iPhone experience; mobilePeople is commited to ensuring that great local search functionality is a part of that iPhone experience.”
mobilePeople is also set to introduce a client based mobile local search for the iPhone based on Apple’s recently announced iPhone software development kit (SDK.)
mobilePeople’s mobile search solution has the largest footprint across all handsets, platforms and operating systems. liquidTM is platform agnostic and supported on: Java, Symbian, Windows mobile, Blackberry, iPhone, imode, mobile carrier specific markup languages and Brew. In addition, liquidTM runs on the following handset manufacturers: Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Motorola, Blackberry, iPhone, LG, NEC, HTC among others.
With Apple’s announcement and details of the SDK yesterday at its Cupertino headquarters, many are now on the speculation path. The power of the SDK gives a slew of possibilities from voice activation, to video recording, to video streaming. No one seems to do the latter better then Slingbox and with its experience of the SlingPlayer on Windows Mobile devices as an example, its hard not to say the iPhone is next in line for a SlingPlayer.
For those unfamiliar with Slingbox, the technology is one that connects a box to your DVR (TiVo, ReplayTV, DISH, DIRECTV etc.), satellite receiver (DIRECTV, DISH, etc.), cable set-top box (Comcast, Cox, Time Warner, Cablevision, etc.), DVD player or VCR. Once connected, you have full access to any of these devices content from either your PC, Mac, or mobile device such as a Pocket PC, Nokia, or Palm. You can watch live TV, change channels, view recored content from your VCR or TiVo or play a DVD, all remotely from the actual video device. Adding the iPhone to the line up will only bring more customers to Sling Media’s door.
Sling Media’s Brian Jaquet, Director of Public Relations, has told SvenOnTech that Sling Media is indeed excited about the new SDK. Sling Media announced Blackberry support at CES and told SvenOnTech, “Before the BlackBerry announcement, the most requested two platforms were BlackBerry and iPhone/iPod Touch.” Jaquet went on to say, “We think the iPhone platform has a lot to offer and is ideally suited for mobile TV via its WiFi capabilities and to a lesser extent (today) its EDGE cellular capabilities.”
Sling Media already has a fully functioning Mac OS X client of SlingPlayer which would take little effort to add the CocoTouch interface to the SlingPlayers OS X client. Sling could either use streaming via Wi-Fi or EDGE or add the content right onto the iPhone itself using it’s newly announced SlingSync feature.
With the Slingbox ability to connect to a TiVo or even an AppleTV, millions of iPhone users could watch a movie, sporting event, or the latest news anywhere an Internet connection exists. With SlingSync, one could then watch prerecorded programming anywhere at any time.
While Sling Media cannot comment further on a SlingPlayer for the iPhone, SvenOnTech was told that its engineers have already downloaded the SDK and, “Are already taking a look at it.”
John Gildred, President of SyncTV (read SvenOnTech post SyncTV Embraces Multi-platform IPTV Scheme to Draw Larger Crowd), is just as keen to the possibilities of what the iPhone SDK could mean for mobile media. Gildred elaborated in his blog saying, “It means that consumers could get ad-funded, subscription and premium downloads from SyncTV in the not-too-distant future.”
And now for our really bad pun: Stay tuned media fans, you may just be Slinging the Summer Olympics on your iPhone from Beijing if all goes well.