Planning an Event? Yapp Makes an App in Minutes. Conferences, weddings and parties often have their own websites, but the founders of a new app builder called Yapp want to replace those online pages with mobile apps. "The thing about events by definition is that when you go to an event you're mobile," co-founder Maria Seidman tells Mashable. "You’re not in front of your computer. " On Wednesday, Yapp launched a free private beta version of its event-focused app builder. It allows users to build an event app within minutes by choosing the design template of their choice and then adding key info like addresses, schedules and, in the case of a wedding or conference app, bio pages.
The apps have news feeds where everyone invited can chat or upload group photos. While other DIY app builders such as TheAppBuilder, AppsBuilder, Buzztouch and AppBreeder emphasize their customizable interfaces, Yapp is focused on offering cookie-cutter solutions for the most common app use cases. Yapp is the most basic app builder we've seen. SkyDrive for iPhone: A Poor Man's Dropbox? [HANDS ON] At the end of a huge year for cloud computing, Microsoft just launched a SkyDrive app for iPhone and Windows Phone. SkyDrive, which has been active since 2007, is Microsoft's cloud service, letting users access documents over a network from anywhere — and now, from a lot more devices.
We took the iPhone version of SkyDrive for a quick test flight, and compared it to cloud-storage competitors Dropbox, Box.net and Pogoplug. The verdict: SkyDrive 1.0 is a competent cloud app. But it can be confusing at times, lacks some key features and does nothing better than its competitors — other than offer storage. It's 1.0, and It Shows Let's start with the good. There's some weirdness right off the bat, though. It actually does none of those things. The most glaring problem with SkyDrive is the absence of an option to save or "favorite" a file for accessing it offline. Otherwise, SkyDrive is a pretty good cloud app. The Competition Among rival cloud services, Dropbox and Box.net are my favorites.
Badoo Unveils Features to Help Shy Users Flirt. In a bid to lure in more users in the United States, multilingual social network Badoo has rolled out two "U.S. -friendly" features that aim to help users charm strangers online. The London-based company, which has 130 million users in 180 countries and has recently made a push into U.S. borders, touts its free new features — “Interests” and “Ice Breaker” — as digital aids for users who are concerned about leaving favorable first impressions.
Ice Breaker offers conversation starters, while the Interests component allows users to leave self-generated hobbies instead of pre-defined ones like other dating sites require. Badoo predicts the features "will help thousands of people connect with like-minded friends, hobby partners or potential love interests. " “It’s hard work coming up with lines to impress new people,” says Jessica Powell, Badoo's chief marketing officer.
7 Top Tools for Reading the News Online. The Trendsetter Tech Series is supported by smart. Test drive the space saving, eco-friendly, totally unique, smart. Visit smartusa.com to find a new smart center near you. smart — unbig. uncar. Thanks to the low barrier of entry for online media, as well as an increasing number of channels to access content, more news is being put out across a greater number of platforms every week. For consumers, this is largely a good thing. With that challenge in mind, we've pulled together some of our favorite tools for keeping on top of news of all varieties, whether you're the kind of person who likes to keep up with breaking international news, highlights in your industry or news from your personal networks. Series supported by smart The Trendsetter Tech Series is supported by smart.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, rubenhi. New App Offers Complete Facebook Profile Backup. What if you suddenly lost access to all of the photos, videos, status updates, wall posts, friends’ information, and other data on your Facebook account? It might be time to think about a backup solution. Now there’s two such solutions to choose from. A social media component of SOS Online Backup launched today. The free application competes against Backupify, which debuted almost a year ago.
SOS Founder and Chief Executive Officer Ken Shaw says roughly 8 million of the social network’s 800 million members have been hacked or locked out of their profiles. The things that you can do in SOS Social Backup include: Shaw mentioned a benefit to for brand managers: Backing up pages’ walls preserves written records of customer interactions. And he added that support for Gmail and Twitter will be included in SOS Social Backup by year end.
Pricing for the full package varies depending on the amount of data and the length of the commitment, and up to five PCs are supported. HipGeo Releases Public API to Add 'Where' to Your 'When' Silverlight 5 Goes Live, No Word as to Finality. When Microsoft premiered Silverlight as something called WPF/E in 2007, it was with the idea of enabling developers to build "rich Internet applications," and to conceivably run them outside of browsers, and on platforms other than Windows. The "A" in "RIA" stood for "applications" - the full word, the complete class that also includes data-intensive programs such as Word, Outlook, and Photoshop. Yet such applications required full access to the file system, which was not possible given the limited trust relationship that must exist for a remote application triggered from a browser.
Over four years later, Silverlight finally has perhaps its single most requested feature. Called P/Invoke, short for "platform invocation," it's a system that enables an application to deploy itself remotely, and then implement the safeguards required for it to elevate its own privilege to that of an installed application. By contrast, Metro apps at present have limited access to the file system. New iPhone, iPad and Android Apps for November 2011. We love new apps. It is one of the joys of our life to sift through the flood of apps that are published or updated every month and deliver the best or most interesting to our readers. November had some great apps for Android, the iPhone and the iPad. In our ongoing series of Apps Of The Month, we take a look at what November produced below.
We are continuing for the third month with our list of app updates so you can keep track of what you need to update for functionality and security purposes. The list, as always, is a bit subjective so please let us know in the comments if we missed an app or you have found one that you cannot live without. Cross-Platform Apps A Charlie Brown Christmas - ($6.99 iOS, Android) Who better to tug on the heart strings of Christmas than Charlie Brown? I-Helicopter (Free - iOS, Android) You know those little helicopters you see at Brookstone in the mall? Minecraft: Pocket Edition ($6.99 - iOS, Android) Square Card Case (Free - iOS, Android) iPhone & iPad Apps. At Long Last, Flipboard Launches an iPhone App. For iPad owners, the personalized, socially-curated digital magazine Flipboard is one of the absolute must-install apps for the device. For many, social news-reading apps like this have begun to replace printed magazines and newspapers all together.
Pretty much since it first debuted on Apple's tablet in July 2010, users have been clamoring for an iPhone version of Flipboard. Today, that wait ends. Flipboard's latest update, available now in the App Store, brings the same social media-fueled reading experience to the smaller screen of the iPhone and iPod Touch. More Than a Resize: Flipboard Gets Rebuilt For a Mobile Context The team at Flipboard has done a remarkable job of whittling down what previously occupied a 10-inch screen so that it will properly fit on a smartphone. Rather than flipping horizontally as the app's virtual pages do on the iPad, the iPhone version flips vertically. Flipboard had about 2.5 million users as of this summer, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Flipboard iPhone App Launches. Flipboard, a popular social newsreading app for the iPad, is launching its long-awaited iPhone app Wednesday. The app [iTunes link], which displays feeds from both formal news sources and social networks in a magazine-like format, has been entirely reengineered to serve the unique habits of newsreaders on the iPhone: That is, users who want to access all of their newsfeeds in quick, short spans without sacrificing what Flipboard CEO Mike McCue describes as "the notion of bringing beauty to these posts.
" Flipboard has streamlined its signature tile format into a single stack, which users can move through not by swiping right to left, but from top to bottom. McCue says this is a more natural movement for the iPhone and in our early tests, we have to agree. As they scroll, users can also mark interesting-looking headlines for later reading — handy for quickly gathering must-read material. Next, Flipboard plans to bring Cover Stories to its iPad app. And what about Android? Browse Anonymously on Your iPad and iPhone With Tor-Powered Browser. Whether it's to elude oppressive governments or something a bit less noble, many users have a need to browse the Web in complete secrecy. Tools that enable anonymous browsing have existed for years on the desktop and some have popped up for Android.
There are some for iOS as well, but until now, none of them featured the bulletproof privacy of the Tor network. Enter Covert Browser, which was approved by Apple earlier this week. It uses Tor to encrypt Internet traffic and route it through three different servers to ensure data about users cannot be intercepted by third parties. Such data would include browsing history or, more commonly, one's geographic location. As you might imagine, browsing the Web this way is not quite as speedy as doing so in a normal browser. Common use cases for Tor include activists wishing to elude authorities, journalists hiding their sources and even law enforcement encrypting their own online communication. 7 Million Drivers Combine Forces to Beat Traffic With Waze. If you tote around an iPhone, Android or BlackBerry device, Waze offers an intelligent way to beat traffic. The social navigation application gets smarter with each new driver who passively or actively reports data from the road in real time.
Waze revealed Tuesday that its service has ballooned to more than 7.3 million registered users worldwide. The company also announced that it has raised $30 million in financing in a round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. "We're touching people around the world with something they want and need," says Noam Bardin, CEO of Waze.
Waze first launched its social traffic service in Israel in January 2009. Today, the startup has 1.3 million drivers in the country. Los Angeles, a city with a well-deserved reputation for roadway congestion, accounts for the largest concentration of Waze users in a single metropolitan area. "It takes time for the service to mature," he says of the startup's three-year build-up. BaltTech: Hey Google: Let 410Labs show you how to launch an email app - Technology news: Digital tech, innovation, Apple and Microsoft news from reporter Gus Sentementes. If you're like me, so much of your emailing -- especially quick, short bursts -- is done while on the move, using a smartphone like the iPhone. Shortmail, a new product launched by Baltimore startup 410Labs earlier this year, is all about short, quick messaging while tying together email, Twitter and the public Web.
A few months ago, I remember asking 410Labs' cofounder Dave Troy if they were planning an iPhone app, and he said one was in the works. Lo and behold, today it's here in the App Store. And for comparison's sake, unlike the Gmail app, which was introduced a couple weeks ago, pulled for bugs and then reinstated today coincidentally, I haven't spotted any bugs in the Shortmail app (yet). For starters, I like how you can easily claim multiple Shortmail accounts for your Twitter handles. Also, the app has some fun little sound effects, believe it or not. FYI: My Shortmail is Gussent(at)shortmail(dot)com. Here's a look at one of the Shortmail screens: 4sqwifi App Helps Foursquare Users Find Free WiFi Anywhere. Today two Greek entrepreneurs launched a new iPhone app called 4sqwifi, which uses the Foursquare API to find locations nearby that offer free WiFi, along with the WiFi's passwords.
The app gathers nearby venues, searching for keywords like "wifi" or "password," and then displays only those venues. There are also a small percentage of false-positive tips that might pop up, like "password for men's toilet. " But if you can deal with (read: laugh, man!) This margin of error, then you'll enjoy this app. 4sqwifi works in the opposite way that Yelp does. There are no plans for releasing a similar app Gowalla, which feels increasingly game-ier. Apple and Android Note-Taking Apps Make Paper a Memory. My recorder quickly gathered dust because it was much easier to retrieve ideas and reminders from good old inedible paper. So when I first saw apps like Evernote (free on Apple and Android), PhatPad ($5 for ) and Notability ($1 for iPad) for note-taking and organizing, they struck me as software versions of those old recorders: places where ideas go to die. I was wrong. These and other apps make it so easy to record, circulate and retrieve your most important thoughts that they’re worth far more than the few bucks you’ll spend on them.
As for the other mobile software on this list, they’re headed by the new girl on the block, Siri, and she’s available only to those who bought her shiny new chariot, Apple’s 4S. If you’ve written off Siri as a cocktail party prop, as I initially did, give it another shot. Moments after a conversation in which a friend told me his e-mail address, I knew I’d eventually forget it.
Siri also helps with less time-sensitive notes. Quick Calls.