Ran across a nice little mobile app called CauseWorld. Very cool, since the idea is that large corporations have to donate money towards causes help with philanthropic needs (and write it off on their corporate taxes) and this allows people to shift the money towards causes that they believe in.
It’s somewhat like Foursquare, which is why it’s fun since you basically have to go into stores along the way whenever you have your phone with you, and check in at the store. You only get 10 karma per store, and one check-in per day per store. The beauty of it is that for every 10 karma you collect, you can basically use that to donate towards certain types of good things in the world. Perhaps it’s providing books for learning, or clean water, or even planting a tree, but you get to decide where your karma goes.
Best of all? It costs nothing. Basically just a little fun while you’re out. And it helps allocate the corporate funds towards something you care about. It’s almost like you getting to say what you want to say as a shareholder of a company. And we all know that unless you’re a large stakes player in the stock, most shareholders don’t get to do anything with their little piece of the pie.
In my opinion, this has probably been one of the more fascinating apps that I’ve been able to get a hold of on my Droid. It comes on both Android and iPhone and I’m sure more mobile apps to come. Hopefully there will be a lot more badges, charities, and corporate sponsors in the future since this is just one of those experiments that allow everyone to help change the world a little bit at a time.
I don’t know about you but when I was a kid, I really enjoyed the Super Bowl half time shows. But as times progressed, it just hasn’t been quite the same. In fact, these days, I don’t even bother watching it and actually go do something else. I’m going to venture the thought that this year will not be any different. I mean, “The Who”? Couldn’t they have got a better act like Daft Punk, or Black Eyed Peas?
If you actually think about it, the last five years have been acts that were in the prime like almost twenty years ago. Maybe more. When was the last time anyone really listened to Prince?
Don’t get me wrong, I like The Who but it’s not what I consider something that grabs the younger crowds. Heck, where are the singers from like the New Year’s Eve bashes? Those are the ones that are recent and the cool acts. It’s also within this decade of music history.
I think whomever schedules this for the NFL really is living in the past. Next thing you know, we’re going to bringing back the Monkees. Nothing wrong with that, but if you ever wonder why your viewership during that time has drastically dropped off? There might be a good reason for it.
Now that I think about it, perhaps the NFL needs to work with Apple’s iTunes marketing team. They find the greatest music that is absolutely catchy and often bands that no one has heard before. And that’s fresh and new, but what do I know. I don’t have billions of dollars hanging in the balance.
Speaking of Walmart, this ad ran during the AFC Championship game by Walmart. And I have to say that from an advertising perspective, this is very humorous and would definitely stick in the minds of folks. Call me twisted, but every time I see this, I just have to chuckle.
While I know this is a way to protect themselves from fraud, I love it when corporations actually call the billing phone number in the billing information to make sure that a large purchase is indeed made by an individual. Since you never know if you’re going to be taken for a ride by an ID thief.
So I got a call a while back on a gift card I had purchased just to make sure that it was going to the right place and it was a purchase I made. Hey, that’s great! I appreciate that since last thing you want to know is that you’ve been had and the purchase actually went through. I love this about Discover, and I love it about WalMart. Now Bank of America could take a hint here in this department. Last I checked, they locked my credit limit but it’s rather annoying when a bank increases your limit automatically and continue to do it when you tell them to stop. Fortunately, you can put locks in place on those types of things like limits.
So I was voting for the 2010 Bloggies since 8Asians has been nominated again this year and this time for Best Group Blog. I was done with my choices that I wanted to vote for and I scrolled to the end and was amused by the random captcha done by ReCaptcha. I mean, what are the chances that they would pick those two words? Sounds like the name of a new blog in fact… hmm… Amusing.
I agree that Fingerworks has some revolutionary patents and that it could possibly be used for the upcoming iSlate. But truthfully, after reading about how the patent works, I have to say that I don’t see how it’s going to reduce in carpal tunnel or any sort of tension in your hand when you do hand-writing recognition. Don’t get me wrong, the idea is brilliant. But realistic use and ideals are very different.
Here’s where the problem lies. If you read the patent, you basically hold your hand in a form where it rests against the touchscreen like you’re holding a pen. Then you push down like holding a pen with your thumb and index finger which is how the patent image occurs. Just try that on a table. The reason why a pen works, is because of how it rests and you’re not gripping down hard so the force isn’t as much as if you’re not holding anything. Just by doing as such on a table surface, you can feel that there’s more tension in your wrist from the grip.
Now, most people that have written papers at all in their lives with a pen or pencil should understand exactly what I’m talking about since there’s a good reason why they even produce those pens called Rx which are fatter and reduce stress on the hand. This basically goes the other way.
Is this a cool technological advancement? You betcha. But from a health perspective, Apple is looking at creating a whole world of hurt for the iSlate users if it’s implemented as the patent dictates.
If you do a lot of online banking and you happen to use Bank of America, you probably have SafePass activated.
Unfortunately for you, there isn’t a very published method on how to fix your SafePass and gain entry back into your online banking if you have recently switched cellular carriers but have kept the same number. If you’ve changed numbers completely, you’ll have to call customer service to deactivate your old number and sign up your new one. But with an existing number that has been ported from another carrier? Seems like you’re up a creek since the SafePass won’t send to the phone.
What you do is, you take the mobile, and text to: 73981. In the body of the text, just text “help” without the quotes and hit send.
Then you wait about 24 hours because their systems don’t update but once a day I suppose. In any case, if you come back and try your SafePass again, it seems to actually work. Now, there apparently has been this issue on and off with iPhones and the like, but with my Droid, that seemed to do the trick in changing out the carriers.
If you didn’t know already, the encryption for GSM’s antiquated algorithm has been cracked. All 64-bits of it. And guess what…. apparently most carriers haven’t upgraded to the 128-bit algorithm because… well, I’m not exactly sure. I suppose security by obscurity is probably the key reasoning behind this, but A5/1 which has been around since 1988 was replaced by the GSM Association in 2007 with A5/3 but most carriers haven’t bothered to upgrade.
It’s not anything spectacular since the 64bit keys were cracked through brute force, and with the computing power these days along with parallel computing, you can pretty much crack the smaller length algorithms through brute force easily. And this doesn’t allow you to listen in on the calls just yet, it just opens the doors to any of the communication that runs on those bands if the carriers haven’t changed the codes on you not to mention the legality of breaking those codes outside of academic research.
There are a couple ways around this problem. One is to upgrade to a larger key such as 128 bit (which is pretty standard considering many banks run SSL certs on 128 bit encryptions). Not the super-safe, but it does create a lot more combinations to guess through brute force. The other way is through the methodology similar to RADIUS with WPA for Wifi. Wifi keys are easily broken, but if you have a service that continuously rotates those keys and makes it a dynamic password, then any hacker is left with a time limit to break in. From a security standpoint, this becomes a more daunting task.
And as far as iPhones are concerned… oh… if you own one and didn’t know already…(as do most of the world’s mobile devices), they run on GSM carriers. But then again, so will Google’s Nexus One.
If you have a smartphone, I urge you to check out Waze.
The Android client is a bit new and they’re still working on it, but this is one thing that can totally get you to learn the area you live. Or at least drive it. Waze is basically a social geolocation game where you collect points on the streets you drive, and help map the environment by “road munching” new roads. Basically, you think of it as a real-life Pac Man meets Wikipedia mapping. The more users there are, the better it is and what’s interesting is that you can report hazards, speed traps, police, and all sorts of other things.
While based on the economy, I’m not inclined to drive all over jeebus to road munch, but I have to admit that there are a lot of people that are out there that are doing it.
What’s even more interesting is that you can see the business model and where this could really be fruitful. Garmin or Tomtom anyone? This not only makes cartography a lot easier as far as mistakes go, but it also allows you to not have to wait for a company to come out with the next version of whatever software to actually get the right road name (nudge at Garmin for spelling Raleigh – “Raliegh” on the I-40 Eastbound). It’s like Wikipedia but for maps and the more people that use it, the more fun it is.
Not having touched the iPhone app, I’m curious as far as if it’s better and more user friendly than the one for Android. Overall, the map editor on the web, and Android clients are a little clunky, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed easily. It’s the thought process behind this that counts. And if Waze just happens to give out free things for random driving events like their Christmas event? Then you can entirely count on a lot more users playing this game. I mean, everyone loves free stuff.
Oh. And it does integrate with Foursquare, so you can check-in at your local coffee shop easily from the app itself without having to exit. Or Tweet your location, or what not. Facebook anyone? There’s just so much that can be done with this, that I’m excited just thinking about it. Now if only they could make the client a little less laggy…
I have to say that with my first couple days with the Droid, I’ve noticed some things that no one else has really bothered to mention. First, if anyone think that this is a contender for the iPhone, I would say that Apple really has some competition. This is definitely the first phone that I’ve touched that overall has a better feel and the apps actually are close enough to really give Jobs some heartburn.
Likes
Very smooth. If you have it linked to your wifi at home, when the signal disappears, it actually switches off to 3G immediately. No fuss, no muss. The interface moves very well. It does lag sometimes if you don’t have the right apps to shut down the apps that you quit from (why you can’t quit from an app is another annoyance that Google has to fix).
I love the notifications. I mean, that’s one thing that iPhone doesn’t do well, and notifications here are out of the way and are there when you want to look at them.
Maps integration and voice dial? Awesome. The entire Car Mobile feature is sweet and I think Garmin itself might have a contender on its hands. I’ll have to test it out more to find out.
The multimedia station sync is great. Immediately, my phone also became my alarm clock. Will have to note to self not to chuck alarm clock across the room…. not that I do that anyways, but still.
Vibrate function is super powerful. Now this might be somewhat annoying and I sorta wish people would make it so that you could control the level of vibrate sometimes, but a powerful vibrate always helps when you’re in a loud place and your phone goes off. There’s nothing more annoying than waiting for a call and missing it because you didn’t feel the vibrate feature. Entirely useless then, isn’t it?
OpenGL support. Android is basically a flavor of linux (don’t believe me? kernel is 2.6.9….), so we shouldn’t be surprised here but that makes 3D gaming and animation completely possible and with the smaller resolutions, you can guarantee some interesting gaming coming your way.
I’m not fond of keyboards, but the hardware keyboard is actually a nice one and compared to my Nokia n810 Wimax, it feels pretty good. The on-screen one could use a little work when it’s trying to detect what you’re trying to type so it corrects it after learning what letters you hit off in portrait mode.
Android Market is awesome. It might be a little more simple compared to the iTunes store, but when people complain about how there’s just not enough apps? From one geek to another, I’m going to say that there’s plenty out there. Plenty. Sometimes I wish open source apps were this easy to find.
Forget the in-the-box browser. Get Dolphin. Know how iPhone users are all talking about how they can zoom and such? Dolphin can do that. Now if only Google put it in all of their apps like Google Maps and such.
Dislikes
I don’t like the fact that BT headsets don’t have voice dialing. This is a problem of Google’s Android OS, and not the phone itself. Very annoying considering it’s a phone built by Motorola, and every past Motorola phone actually had BT voice dialing. This should have been brought up during testing by product development on Motorola’s side since it’s a feature they’ve had since… well, forever.
Don’t like the fact that you can’t quit from an app. Some apps might need to be persistent but out of the box, there are many that don’t have to run in the background. Very annoying out of the box. Fortunately, I went and grabbed Task Manager, and life is good again.
I also don’t like the fact that you can’t group contacts together from different sources. While an auto-merge might be a little crazy, the fact that you can sync your Facebook contact information with your Google accounts means that you’ll get a lot of duplication. Merging the two in a pseudo-group format would make life a lot easier and provide profile shots for those that you didn’t have profile pictures. Personally, I think the Android is missing out here but then again, somehow I doubt the iPhone can do it too (can anyone tell me one way or another? ).
Camera auto-focus. What? Seriously, the time it takes to auto-focus for certain apps, I’d rather do a manual focus feature. Oh wait, you can’t. But seriously now, this sounds like a fix that can be done via firmware.
In portrait mode, the on-screen keyboard is pretty blech. If you have big hands, it’s hard to type with it on there. Fortunately for landscape mode, eh?
Synopsis
It’s really a blanket bomb of my thoughts, but I really don’t see any reasoning why you can’t send text messages and surf and such while on a call like the iPhone commercial. Having worked in the telecommunications industry for over a decade on the infrastructure side, there’s not really any reason that it couldn’t happen unless the phone itself occupies resources that otherwise can’t be used for a call when on data, or vice versa. Of course, if people wanted to do it, it could still be done by using the same techniques as PTT on CDMA. Think about it.
I still haven’t seen any driving or flying games that require the accelerometer for turning that I’ve seen on the iPhone. But based on the sensitivity of Google Sky, I would say that the Droid can totally pick up the same type of gaming.
Battery life seems a bit lacking, but nothing out of the ordinary with a smartphone. Most of your battery goes to the radio and the LCD in a smartphone anyways. Some power-save features might be nice.
If you get down to the Verizon over AT&T for service? I’d agree completely on voice and data. There’s just no question when you compare the two networks. Part of the reason why I haven’t bothered with an iPhone.
With Google’s coffers, I think the Droid and Android phones in general have a really good shot at taking on the number one smartphone maker. There are a few things that I would start pushing and remind Google that when you’re gunning for the number one spot in mobile devices, your product can’t be in beta. Some of the dislikes that I mentioned above are staples of the mobile industry and need to be patched for all current and future phones. If you just let it be, people won’t want to use your product. Just as RF is finicky, domestic mobile users are finicky. And you just can’t rely on that type of situation when so many vendors are looking to your OS to end the slaughtering.
Ran across a nice little mobile app called CauseWorld. Very cool, since the idea is that large corporations have to donate money towards causes help with philanthropic needs (and write it off on their corporate taxes) and this allows people to shift the money towards causes that they believe in.
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