Crazy For Tech - Gadgets,Cell Phones,Cameras » Windows

Microsoft Announces Its Back-To-School Promotion: Buy A PC, Get A Free Xbox

Budowniczy425 — Fri, 18 May 2012 23:20:02 +0000

Microsoft, just like Apple, usually runs a major back-to-school promotion every summer that is meant to give students (and their parents) some extra incentives to buy a new computer. The company’s just-announced back-to-school deal for the U.S. and Canada is pretty much the same as last year’s. A year ago, Microsoft gave students who bought a new PC and Xbox 360 and this year it’s doing exactly the same. There are some difference to last year’s program, though. This time around, Microsoft isn’t just partnering with Best Buy in the U.S., but also with Dell.com, Fry’s Electronics, HPDirect and NewEgg.com (its own Microsoft stores , of course, will also honor this promotion. In Canada, students can buy their PCs from Best Buy, Dell.ca, Future Shop, Staples and The Source. The program is scheduled to start on May 20 in the U.S and May 18 in Canada. To be eligible, students need to buy a Windows PC worth at least $699 ($599 in Canada). Apple vs. Microsoft Apple also used free products like an iPod touch as an incentive for shoppers. Last year, however, it switched to handing out $100 gift cards to its digital stores instead . Apple usually announces its annual back-to-school promotion in June. By the end of last year’s summer promotions, some analysts noted that Apple handily beat Microsoft 8 to 2, with around 80% of incoming students opting for Macs instead of a Windows machine. This year, Microsoft hopes that ultrabooks like the Samsung Series 5 ULTRA and the Dell XPS 13 will make students think twice about buying a Mac.

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Microsoft Announces Its Back-To-School Promotion: Buy A PC, Get A Free Xbox

DIY Doorbell Will Send Pictures Of Your Guests To Your iPhone

Administrator — Fri, 18 May 2012 23:12:49 +0000

Say you’re a misanthrope and you’re afraid of humans. What to do? Well, you could cower in the dark when people ring your doorbell or you could laugh derisively at their smug faces in the screen of your iPhone. I’m going for the derisive laughter. This DIY Arduino project involves a simple circuit, a webcam, and a few API calls to PushingBox to enable a truly enjoyable derisive experience. The system works by pushing images grabbed by the webcam through PushingBox to an app like Prowl or Pushme.to . When the doorbell is pressed, it sends a serial signal to the Arduino board which in turn notifies the various services. The webcam picture then gets sent over to you so you can decide whether to let whoever is outside in. It’s probably a little more complex than it needs to be, but if you’re totally into watching the world pass you by it’s a great solution and a fun weekend project. Project Page

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DIY Doorbell Will Send Pictures Of Your Guests To Your iPhone

The X1 Carbon Shows Lenovo Can Think Different

ACMAir — Wed, 16 May 2012 02:55:45 +0000

Lenovo rolled out its latest notebook today. It is, in a word, spectacular. The Chinese company proves time and time again that Apple isn’t the only company capable of producing class-leading designs. Lenovo’s 14-inch X1 Carbon shown here by Engadget is everything an anti-MacBook Air should be. If there was ever a true MacBook Air competitor, or, if you will, a notebook that lives up to the ultra part of the Ultrabook name, it’s the new Lenovo X1 Carbon. This Lenovo X1 Carbon is a refresh of last year’s X1, but it’s more than just a spec bump. The computer is mostly all-new and manages to weigh less than the older version even though it packs a larger, 14-inch 1600 x 900 screen. Packed inside the carbon fiber chassis is an Intel Ivy Bridge CPU, optional 3G connectivity, and Lenovo’s Rapid Charge feature that promises to refill the battery to 80% in just 30 minutes. Lenovo has yet to announce the price or release date, but don’t expect this notebook to have a low price tag. The current X1 starts at $1000, but can quickly climb north once options are checked. Lenovo took the reins of IBM’s personal computer division in 2005. The company wisely changed very little concerning the notebook design. A ThinkPad from 2004 looks very similar to a ThinkPad of today save for a few millimeters trimmed here and there. Everything from the logo placement to the trademark red pointer nipple is in the same spot. Even the casing’s color is the same. But overtime Lenovo’s designers have kept up with the Joneses and added chiclit keyboards, button-less touchpads, and the like. Lenovo changed the minor things while still maintaining the ThinkPad’s trusted identity. Meanwhile the rest of the PC industry seemingly fired their design staff and instead bought a photocopier and a MacBook Pro. It’s hard to look at the rest of the PC notebook scene and not see Apple’s influence. The latest Dell XPS is a Dell-ified MacBook Pro. Vizio’s first notebooks are exact copies of the MacBook Air. Samsung’s latest ultrabooks might as well say MacBook Air instead of Samsung under the screen; they are nearly the same thing. Toshiba, once a staple in the PC world, is even using Apple’s trademark design cues to attempt to bolster sales. HP is the worst offender though. The original HP Envy was a blatant MacBook Pro ripoff when it debuted in 2009 and several generations later it is still hard to deny the influence. HP’s latest model lines still use the MacBook Pro’s design as a springboard. Companies often deflect questions concerning similar designs by saying something about how there are only so many ways to design a thin laptop. That’s pure malarkey and they know it. Design is what sets products apart. It’s the great differentiator and often wins out over even price. When Art. Lebedev Studio introduced the Optimus Maxiums keyboard in 2006, it was instantly praised for it’s forward-thinking OLED keys even though it was projected to cost north of $2000. Design wins when done well and first. History does not care about the clones. While Lenovo is in the minority, the company is not alone at designing notebooks without Apple’s help. Asus knows how to make a good looking kit as well. A designer at Dell clearly managed a sort of coup with the company’s first ultrabook, the XPS 13 . Sony does it model after model, seemingly designing its notebooks in a vacuum, void of any external distractions as they look like nothing else. Right now the new Lenovo X1 Carbon is the only notebook I would get save a MacBook Air. I would opt for this Windows machine over a current gen MacBook Pro. I’m not loyal to either operating system anyway. The Lenovo gets everything right including integrated 3G wireless and high resolution 14-inch screen. But that might change once Apple rolls out its next iteration of the MacBook Pro that’s said to have a thinner design (no optical drive), a super high resolution screen, and an Intel chipset with an Nvidia GPU. That said, even if the next MBP is a sort of wunderkind, Lenovo will continue to find success and fans as long as they stay the course and produce notebooks like the X1 Carbon.

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The X1 Carbon Shows Lenovo Can Think Different

Kantar Worldpanel: Android Dominates Smartphone Sales Overall; In U.S. iOS Closing In

admin — Tue, 15 May 2012 17:15:20 +0000

New figures out today from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech — a market research division of WPP — show that Android is, overall, continuing to make large gains in the smartphone market, accounting for a majority of sales in the 12 weeks that ended March 18. Drilling down, Android is doing particularly well in some places. In Spain, Android is the platform to beat. It accounted for a 72.3 percent of smartphone sales in the period — the highest proportion among the markets analyzed by Kantar. But Android’s domination is not across the board: in the U.S., sales of devices based on Google’s platform actually declined by about 6.6 percent over last year and accounted for 47.6 percent of all smartphone sales in the country. Apple, meanwhile, saw its percentage of sales in the U.S. go up by 12.8 percent to account for 43 percent of all sales. Kantar also says that while now the majority of consumers in the UK and Australia now own smartphones, in other markets that it analyses, the tipping point has yet to be reached. Kantar notes that in Australia, 57 percent of mobile consumers now own smartphones; and in the UK, 53.1 percent own smartphones. But in Germany the percentage is at 32 percent; France at 40 percent; Italy at 39 percent; Spain at 37 percent; and the U.S. at 38 percent. Those figures are a moving target, though. In the UK, for example, Kantar’s analyst Dominic Sunnebo notes that in the next year, 22 million consumers aged over 13 will be buying mobile devices in the next year and some 80 percent of them are expected to buy a smartphone. In Spain, Android also saw the biggest gains in terms of sales in the last 12 weeks: its 72.3 percent share of sales represented a huge rise of nearly 40 percent on a year ago. The platform saw similarly large growth in Germany (up 27.2 percent to represent 61.8 percent of sales); France (17 percent up to 54.6 percent); Italy (up by 29.3 percent to account for 48.5 percent of all sales) and Australia (up nearly 20 percent for 52 percent of all sales). Kantar notes that among the top Android makers in the last quarter, Samsung and HTC were selling the strongest, together accounting for 86 percent of all sales in the the UK, for example. He notes that the HTC One X has been selling particularly well since its launch. In contrast, Sony only had 10.4 percent of Android sales in the past 12 weeks and LG had less than 1 percent in the UK. Among other platforms, Symbian’s share declined across the board: Nokia’s legacy smartphone platform lost between 9 percent and 36 percent sales market share in the countries covered by Kantar Worldpanel. Sales of Windows Phone — the platform that Nokia is now using as its primary smartphone platform — are yet to make up for that. In markets where Microsoft’s OS saw gains (Spain being an exception), growth was in the low single digits in all cases — as was the total share of sales attributed to the platform. Windows Phone’s highest share of sales was in Germany, where it accounted for 6.2 percent of smartphone sales: that’s including all manufacturers building on Windows Phone, not just Nokia.

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Kantar Worldpanel: Android Dominates Smartphone Sales Overall; In U.S. iOS Closing In

Video Collaboration Service TenHands Launches Free Browser-Based WebEx Competitor

bestcbstore — Sat, 12 May 2012 02:40:23 +0000

As the capabilities of modern browsers expand and developing standards like Google’s WebRTC initiative for real-time communications slowly find their way into most popular browsers, we’ll likely see more video collaboration software that’s currently still client-based move to the browser as well. TenHands , which is launching its private beta today (you can request an invite here ) wants to be the first out of the gate in this market and sees itself as a direct competitor to Cisco’s WebEx , Microsoft Lync and other incumbents in this space. The service offers free video conference calls, screensharing, as well as built-in support for sharing documents from your desktop and Box.net . As for pricing, TenHands’ COO and co-founder Jack Blaeser told me earlier today, the company is planning to use a freemium model after the beta phase ends. Users will get three free hours of usage per month and will have to pay $10/month if they need more time. The service currently uses a small plugin to enable WebRTC in Chrome, IE, Safari and Firefox on both Mac and Windows machines. The idea here, though, is to move away from plugins as soon as more browsers support this standard natively. Technically, TenHands’ architecture can handle calls with an unlimited number of participants, but the beta currently has a soft limit of ten. One major advantage of being web-based, TenHands’ COO and co-founder Jack Blaeser told me earlier today, is the fact that this makes it very easy for the company to add support for other web-based services. Currently, TenHands supports Box.net, for example, but the company plans to add more services (think Yammer, Google Drive, DropBox, etc.) in the near future. This approach, said Blaeser, will also allow the team to easily customize the service for large enterprises that want to whitelabel it. TenHands, according to Blaeser, is currently about a year ahead of its closest competitors in moving to WebRTC. It’s worth noting, too, that Blaeser’s co-founder and TenHands’ CEO Mark Weidick was formerly the head of Cisco’s Telepresence Exchange business. As far as the video quality goes – and that, after all, is one of the most important aspects of these kinds of services – the company promises high-quality video – and in my tests, that’s definitely what it delivered. The easy-to-use web interface lets you start and accept calls with just a few clicks. After that, your browser window will be taken over by your contact’s video or screen. For calls with multiple participants, TenHands uses the same “active speaker” setup as Google+, for example, and automatically features whomever is currently speaking in the main window. The Sunnyvale-based company currently has 10 employees and has received funding from Trinity Ventures. The size of this funding round was not disclosed.

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Video Collaboration Service TenHands Launches Free Browser-Based WebEx Competitor

HTC Titan II Review: Sometimes A Win-Win Is A Lose

bestcbstore — Fri, 11 May 2012 23:09:51 +0000

Short Version I’ve been spending some quality time with HTC’s Titan II, and I would never call it a bad phone. But that’s not the question — good, bad, fast, slow, ugly, beautiful… they don’t matter unless I feel that I’d put down money and live my life with this device. And even though I expected this to be one of my favorites, I walk away from my review certain that I wouldn’t exchange cash for this handset. HTC is great at building quality hardware and Microsoft’s new mobile platform is fresh, different, and intuitive. But the way that the duo comes together leaves me unimpressed and disappointed, namely in the camera and the display. Past that, the thickness of the device paired with poor battery life does nothing to make up for these more minor disappointments. In essence, it’s simply not good enough. Let’s talk about why: Pros: Loving the hardware quality and design Windows Phone is smooth as butter The camera is excellent Cons: Pixel density is awful It’s pretty thick Battery life didn’t satisfy me Features: 4.7-inch 480×800 S-LCD display AT&T 4G LTE Windows Phone 7.5 Mango 1.5GHz single-core S2 processor 16-megapixel rear camera (720p video capture) 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera MSRP: $199.99 on-contract Long Version Hardware/Design: I go back and forth on my favorite hardware vendors all the time, mostly because they wander back and forth from a premium feel to a plastic-y disaster, but HTC has always been a constant favorite. They know hardware. The Titan II lives up to these expectations. Even with the downgrade from metal on the original Titan to plastic on the second-gen version, the phone still feels great in the hand. It’s well balanced, has a nice soft-touch finish to it, and has just enough heft to feel like a piece of gadgetry and not a toy. On the other hand, this phone is a bit thick for my taste. I’ve seen HTC put out equally solid and thin phones, like the HTC One S , but the Titan II is simply too fat to hang around with the cool kids. I am impressed with the way that HTC figured out how to make a 4.7-inch display comfortable. I normally draw the line at 4.3 inches, but somehow the HTC Titan II still feels usable with its massive 4.7-inch display. This is likely because the screen takes up much of the entire front of the phone, with very little bezel to get in the way on either side. Kudos on this, HTC. Unfortunately, the Titan II doesn’t have any external memory. You can pop off a little panel on the back to access the SIM, but there’s no slot for microSD storage and no access to the battery. The 16-megapixel rear camera is square in the middle of the back of the phone, in usual HTC fashion, with a small speaker grill to its left. The volume rocker and a shutter button are on the right, and microUSB is on the bottom of the left edge. Software: As I’ve said over and over again, I’m a Windows Phone fan . The platform is really easy to understand, streamlines things like messaging and social networking, and each time I use it I find something new that I like. But, the platform still lacks the app variety found on other OSes. For example, big name apps like LinkedIn, HBOGo, Pandora, Flipboard, and Dropbox still aren’t on the platform. Some of these apps are integral to the way I use my phone, and I can’t imagine being without them. Luckily, the Windows Phone Photo Enhancer app works to balance out the absence of Instagram, another crowd pleaser. It basically offers up filters for your pictures and other little editing tools to make sure each image looks special and unique. The filters aren’t quite as awesome as Instagram’s, but it’ll certainly do as an alternative until the day that slow-moving Instagram heads over to Windows Phone. There’s also an HTC Hub, which looks a lot like Sense 4 and allows for the Sense clock and weather widgets if that’s what you’re into. You can also build up a little mini-reader for the news sites you enjoy reading. Past that there isn’t a whole lot that’s different from the standard Windows Phone 7.5 OS, but the good news is that Windows Phone is good enough on its own. Camera: One of the most stand-out and attractive features of the Titan II is its 16-megapixel camera, fully equipped with an f/2.6, 28mm lens, backside-illuminated sensor and dual LED flash. It’s a mouthful, but it’s a wonderful camera for a phone. The pictures are great, though I’m not sure color reproduction is perfectly on point. I find my iPhone to take rather “cold” pics, but it would seem as though the Titan II leans on the warmer side. On the other hand, the shutter button comes in handy for those who prefer shooting in landscape — it’s in exactly the same place as it would be on a point-and-shoot. And the shutter button also works the same way it would on a DSLR in Auto mode, a half-press locks in the focus and a full press snaps the pic. The camera app also offers a software auto-focus if you tap the area you want to clarify, though it goes a step further and simply takes the picture automatically. Quick and painless, to be sure. As I briefly touched on before, the marriage between HTC and Windows Phone is where things get less hunky dory. I love the Sense camera app — it has all kinds of bells and whistles presented in clean, easy-to-understand format, which happens to be missing on Windows Phone. Sure, there are various settings to tool around with in the standard Windows Phone camera app, but it isn’t quite as in-depth as HTC’s offering. This isn’t necessarily a huge deal, but I’m thinking most of you will consider this phone based on its camera. Why HTC didn’t put the best camera software with the best camera hardware is something I don’t quite understand. Comparison shot between the Titan II (left) and the iPhone 4S (right): Display: If you’ve been stoked about the Titan II, you may be a bit disappointed starting right now. The Titan II isn’t offering HTC’s very best display tech, as its an S-LCD, but it is one of HTC’s biggest displays, at 4.7-inches. That’s actually fine. I’m impressed with the fact that the gigantic display is still comfortable in the hand and I can wrap that thumb around and do just about anything with one hand, despite the phone’s unbecoming stoutness. The problem, however, is that the partnership between HTC and Microsoft simply doesn’t fit. Windows Phone requires a 800×480 resolution across all partners. HTC is going for the whole “titanic” thing, with a 16-megapixel camera and a giant 4.7-inch display. The problem is that you’re left with a pixel density of 199ppi. For a little context, the iPhone’s retina display has a pixel density 326ppi, so the Titan’s isn’t so great. To be clear, pixel density is far more important than resolution or size alone, as it measures where these two dimensions meet. A 800×480 resolution will look far better on a 4-inch screen than it will on a 4.7-inch screen, simply because the pixel density is much greater. On the Titan II, the screen might be big, but it’s far from beautiful. Not only is the display pixelated in many instances, but you can’t even come close to enjoying the images you’re snapping with the 16-megapixel camera on the phone’s display. Sure, you can Facebook share and email and such, but if you can’t show off the pictures from the phone itself it definitely rains on the parade a bit. Plus, white text on a black background makes a poor pixel density even more obvious, which is the default for Windows Phone. Performance: It’s silly to measure the Titan II against the iPhone or Android phones based on the fact that they’re entirely different platforms, at least when we’re doing official benchmark testing. But I will say that AT&T’s 4G LTE network left me satisfied, at least here in NYC. I had no trouble whatsoever placing calls and sending messages, and web browsing was especially snappy (thanks in large part to WP’s IE9 browser). In Browsermark, the Titan II scored an average of 32,982. For perspective, the Lumia 900 ( another one of my favorite Windows Phones ) scored a 28,769, so I’m more than impressed with the Titan II performance. Battery: On the other hand, I’m not too happy with the Titan II battery life. HTC’s One S kicked ass in the battery life department, yet an LTE radio paired with a 4.7-inch display makes for a difficult task for that little battery. We test battery life on handsets by running a program that constantly loads Google Image searches. There’s no break, no auto-lock and quite literally no rest for the device, which usually ends up over-heating a bit. At any moment during the program, I can jump out of the browser and load an app, play a game, watch a video, or (thanks to Windows Phone) do some work in Office for mobile. The official battery test result was that the Titan II can last for three hours and forty-three minutes. Granted, there are things you can do to extend battery life like shutting down various services, but who wants to shut down services? You also won’t be using the phone for four hours straight, but even in real-world usage you’ll be disappointed. I expect that if you’re a general user — meaning some email, some Facebook, some music, and of course texts and calls — you’ll see that flashing red around dinner time. To give you a little extra context, the Droid 4 only hung in there for three hours and forty-five minutes while the Droid RAZR Maxx (Motorola’s battery beast) stayed with me for a staggering eight hours and fifteen minutes. Head-To-Head With The Lumia 900 And One X: Check out our thoughts on this match-up here . Hands-On Video: Fly or Die Conclusion As I originally expressed at the beginning of the review, I love the idea of a partnership between HTC and Microsoft. In fact, the first-gen Titan is a cool handset, as is the little Trophy. But it seems that with the Titan II, neither HTC nor Microsoft were thinking of the entire experience. The hardware is nice, and I’m still a lover of Windows Phone. But the screen resolution vs. size thing really bothers me, and I truly wish that HTC’s Sense camera app was interacting with the 16-megapixel hardware, especially since that camera is one of the phone’s big selling features. Those things are somewhat excusable, but when you lop on a fat body and poor battery life (likely the most crucial feature in any phone), it’s nearly impossible for me to recommend this device. I hope to see more from HTC and Microsoft in the future — I think it’s a match made in heaven. I just think that in this case specifically, a win-win was actually a big lose. Check out all of our Titan II review posts here .

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HTC Titan II Review: Sometimes A Win-Win Is A Lose

Pew Study: 18% Of U.S. Smartphone Owners Use Check-In Apps

admin2 — Fri, 11 May 2012 22:40:47 +0000

According to a new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project , the popularity of check-in apps continues to grow, though it still isn’t quite mainstream yet. Pew’s latest survey found that in February 2012, 18% of U.S. smartphone owners over 18 used geosocial check-in apps like Foursquare. That’s up from 12% in May 2011. Even among adults who said they own a feature phone, 11% said they use check-in apps. This means that 10% of U.S. adults (including those who don’t own a cell phone), have now used check-in services at some point in the past. Sadly, the Pew survey did not ask users about how frequently they use these services. Given the hype around these apps in the past, it would be interesting to see how sticky these apps really are. It’s worth noting that the Pew survey’s question specifically mentions Foursquare (and Gowalla in the March 2011 survey), but doesn’t mention Facebook or other services that allow users to share their location in some form or another. I can’t help but wonder if the number wouldn’t be a bit higher if the question had focused less on Foursquare. Besides looking at geosocial and check-in services, the Pew study also looked at how often U.S. smartphone owners use their phones to get directions or to get general location-based information like restaurant recommendations. There, the numbers are obviously much higher than those for check-in apps. Almost three-quarters of U.S smartphone owners, says the Pew report, now access location-based information from their phones. In a way, it’s actually more surprising that almost 25% of smartphone owners don’t use their phones to get location-based information. Another recent Pew survey , by the way, found that 65% of smartphone owners have used their phones to get turn-by-turn driving directions and 15% do so on a typical day.

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Pew Study: 18% Of U.S. Smartphone Owners Use Check-In Apps

Report: Photo & Video Now The Fastest Growing Mobile App Category

user — Tue, 08 May 2012 23:20:29 +0000

Ever since Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of Instagram, the search for the next “Instagram of [insert app category here]” has been on. One area many pundits have focused on in this context is video and according to the latest data from mobile app analytics company Flurry , that’s probably not a bad bet. Video & Photo is now the fastest growing mobile app category across the major mobile platforms. The time spent on photo and video apps per active user increased 89% to 231 minutes per month between October 2011 and March 2012 and a massive 166% since July 2011. This data is based on Flurry’s analysis of the 180,000 apps that currently use its analytics software on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry and HTML5. Other mobile app categories that, according to Flurry, are currently growing fast are music (72% since October 2011), productivity (66%), social networking (54%) and entertainment (40%). With the advent of affordable phones with built-in HD video cameras and increased network bandwidth, it does indeed look as if the time is right for social video apps. Sadly, Flurry doesn’t distinguish between video and photo apps in its report. The fact that active users now spent an average of 231 minutes per month in photo and video apps, however, clearly shows the momentum that apps like Viddy , Socialcam and Color are trying to capitalize on. The quick rise of this app category becomes even more impressive when compared to how much time users are spending on Google’s YouTube. According to comScore, Internet users in the U.S. watched an average of 425 minutes of video content per month on Google’s site in March 2012 – a number that was actually down from a record 472 minutes in December 2011. This data doesn’t quite make a convincing argument that these mobile video and photo apps are cutting into the time that users’ would otherwise spent on YouTube. As Flurry’s Peter Farago rightly argues, though, “the shift in time spent between these two platforms appears to be a signal of disruption.”

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Report: Photo & Video Now The Fastest Growing Mobile App Category

Give Your Silver Tongue A Workout With GroupCall’s Super-Simple Conference Calls

Budowniczy425 — Tue, 08 May 2012 23:08:44 +0000

Conference calls aren’t always the most interesting things to take part in, but they can be just as much a hassle to set up as they are to sit though. That’s where a new app called GroupCall comes in — developed by the folks over at Parlor , GroupCall aims to make coordinating secure conference calls accessible for folks who just want something that works. What really makes GroupCall shine is how little work it takes to get your conference calls up and running — there’s no signup or registration required. Once you pop into the app proper, you’re given the option to select users to invite to your conference call by picking them out of your contact list or punching in either their phone number or their email address. Once all those contacts are in place, GroupCall sends each person an invitation to the call via email or text message with a number to dial at time of the initiator’s choosing. From there, everyone calls in (or skips the call, as is sometimes the case), and that’s that. Though Parlor is pushing their Android app (their forthcoming iOS version will probably get the same treatment) you don’t even need a smartphone to make use of your gift of gab — conference calls can be set up from the GroupCall website as well. Parlor founder and CEO Joel Schwartz tells me that he and his team are taking things easy with GroupCall at first, locking down the functionality before adding new features to the mix. I’ve been playing with the Android app for a few days now, while GroupCall’s core works very well, he really wasn’t kidding about the dearth of frills. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it can be a tough approach to take when other competitors already have a head start. GroupCall isn’t alone in the simple mobile conference call space — CrowdCall launched earlier this year with the same concept in mind, and has already made quite an impression on at least one prominent unpaid blogger . CrowdCall also packs a few thoughtful additions like the ability to create groups of contacts who frequently engage in conference calls with each other, though GroupCall lets users repeat conference call setups as needed. What could help GroupCall stand above the others are a pair of related applications working off the same robust backend, which Schwartz tells can handle up to 100,000 concurrent phone calls. Take Parlor’s MobiCast for instance — instead of users all being able to communicate with each other at the same time, they’re all essentially muted except for the person who initiated the call. As the name implies, the call’s initiator becomes the center of attention and effectively broadcasts to all the other participants from their mobile pulpit. Rounding out the pack is TopicTalk , which is arguably the kookiest of the bunch. Think of it as ChatRoulette without the possibility of seeing something traumatizing — users can jump into the application and select a topic they want to start talk about. Don’t like what your conversation partner has to say? Just hit pound to skip them and move onto someone potentially more interesting. There’s room for quite a bit of play between these apps — anonymous TopicTalk users can continue their conversations over GroupCall if they aren’t yet comfortable with sharing their actual phone numbers, and popular TopicTalk chatters could host their own show of sorts in MobiCast — but whether or not they’ll stay separate down the line isn’t set in stone. Having the three apps devoted to three separate features of the Parlor platform was done as something of an experiment to see how things play out, but Schwartz tells me that if their users are better suited by one app that encompasses bits of the others, so be it.

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Give Your Silver Tongue A Workout With GroupCall’s Super-Simple Conference Calls

Mobile Component Marketplace Verious Expands, Adds Hundreds Of Windows Phone & HTML5 Listings To Site

A D M I N — Tue, 08 May 2012 22:46:21 +0000

Verious , a new mobile component marketplace (and recent Disrupt finalist ), is announcing an expansion of its service today, to also include components for Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform as well as those for HTML5 mobile apps. The addition means there are now hundreds more components, SDKs, and open source projects available on Verious’s platform, which previously focused primarily on offerings for iOS and Android. According to Verious founder, Anil Pereira, the company made the decision to add the Windows Phone category based on what it was seeing on both the consumer side of things – 80,000 Windows Phone apps, new Windows-enabled smartphones, and positive reviews – as well as on the developer side. Already the company had over 2,000 Windows Phone developers on its site via its Elance partnership , and several were asking about Windows Phone components and code on forums, Q&A sites and elsewhere on the web. Plus, adds Pereira, “we saw that a number of our existing component sellers/partners–as well as other developers and firms out there–have Windows Phone offerings that they are looking to market.” “So triangulating consumer demand (Nokia, for example, has a very strong presence in the next key markets to adopt smartphones), developer demand, partner demand and Microsoft’s consumer and developer marketing efforts, we connected with Microsoft to compile the comprehensive catalogue of Windows Phone components,” says Pereira. The site now offers 200 components for the platform with more in the works. Some of the new additions include Metro-style icons, a physics engine, and Silverlight UI controls. Pereira says that added components will help WP developers address the same pain points that others are also now facing when they move to new platforms. “Getting familiar with programming paradigms and UI standards through open source, SDKs, pre-built components and tools like UI templates and icon libraries is very beneficial, regardless of the level of expertise of the developer,” he explains. It also helps to use these types of pieces to speed up the time to market when porting from other platforms to Windows Phone. To generate the new resource, Verious worked closely with Microsoft, and, in addition, has created business partnerships with many of the established independent software vendors selling Windows Phone components. Microsoft is also promoting the component listings on Verious.com directly from its MSDN AppHub . As for HTML5, the platform has always been on the Verious roadmap – it was Windows Phone that the company had originally planned for a late 2012 launch. But given the (perceived? real?) demand, the company decided to bump up Windows Phone to coincide with the HTML5 addition today. Now, there are 100 HTML5 components on the site and many more on the way. All of the new additions will also be made available on the Verious Mobile Developer Network, announced earlier this year . Today, Verious has thousands of listings on its site, but isn’t currently releasing numbers related to registered developers, downloads, licensing agreements or transactions made. The company also teased more “game-changing initiatives,” which will kick off in Q3 this year. Stay tuned.

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Mobile Component Marketplace Verious Expands, Adds Hundreds Of Windows Phone & HTML5 Listings To Site