Mappiness iPhone App Maps Happiness (Say That Three Times Fast) Officially launching today is Mappiness, a UK iPhone app that “maps Happiness” by pinging users with a survey in order to plot out their feelings during the day (happiness, in this case, is apparently user-defined). Using LBS, the app links responses and response locations to environmental data in an attempt to, according to lead researcher George MacKerron, “better find answers on the impacts of natural beauty and environmental problems on individual and national well being.” MacKerron, based at the London School Economics, elaborated on the idea of tracking happiness, “In the 19th century economists imagined a ‘hedonometer,’ a perfect happiness gauge, and psychologists have more recently run small scale ‘experience sampling’ studies to see how mood varies with activity, time of day and so on.” Mappiness is the first project of its kind to add location to the mix. Now, thanks to the iPhone, we might get a better grasp on humanity’s happiness habits.
Unleashing Creativity: Greg Kulowiec App Smashing - from Beth Holland Greg Kulowiec begins his session by asking, “Why limit our students to one tool at one time?” With App Smashing, students can create content with a variety of apps and then publish it to the web – don’t let content “die on your iPad.” The general concept between App Smashing is merging content from a variety of apps. Greg likes the word App Smash, but Lisa Johnson (@techchef4u) calls it App Synergy. Toolkit for App Smashing – keep it simple! The key to App Smashing is the camera roll – use apps that can save to camera roll or take screen captures and bring them in. While the concept is to create content, get it into a central location, and make something with it, now, what can you do???? App Smash Creations Create a multimedia book about whatever concept, topic or idea is happening in class. Create a published web-book that can be exported to the web as a PDF. “Making books if fun, but advanced video can be more fun,” says Greg. The ThingLink Smash is one of Greg’s favorites. Related Save
mappiness, the happiness mapping app stickybits / explore & score™ The Great Location Land Rush Of 2010 Back in November, at our Realtime CrunchUp event, I sat on the geolocation panel with members of Twitter, Foursquare, SimpleGeo, GeoAPI, Hot Potato, and Google. At one point, I raised the question if location was going to be the next battleground between startups large and small, much like social identity plays (Facebook Connect vs. Google Friend Connect) and status updates (Twitter vs. I’m sure some of them would counter that because location data is fairly standard right now, and moving easily between services, all of them will win. Twitter co-founder Evan Williams writes today that “We will be looking at how to integrate the work Mixer Labs has done with the Twitter API in useful ways…” and notes that they’ll be working on adding contextual local relevancy to tweets. What Twitter likely won’t be doing is getting into the core location platform business anytime soon. Going forward, however, Twitter is likely to try and position itself as the main syndicator of location. Game on.
L’Internet européen, à la carte Collecte des IP, protection de la vie privée, inefficacité des dispositifs de filtrage, dernières nouvelles d’ACTA: voilà tous les thèmes dont vous n'entendrez pas ou peu parler lors de l'e-G8. OWNI vous les présente, dans une carte des Internets européens. Collecte des IP sous contrôle du juge, inefficacité des dispositifs de filtrage, “amis” du copyright, dernières nouvelles d’ACTA… Voilà, entre autres mets, tout ce à quoi vous ne goûterez pas lors de l’e-grand-messe qui se déroule en ce moment à Paris. Afin que le festin soit complet, OWNI propose d’enrichir le tableau du réseau dressé par Nicolas Sarkozy, Publicis et autres nababs du web présents à l’e-G8, avec une carte des Internets européens, qui replace l’utilisateur au centre de l’attention. Le rapport à Internet des 27 pays de l’Union Européenne, ainsi que de la Norvège, de l’Islande et de la Suisse, a été scruté à la loupe. La palette de critères, non exhaustive, est appelé à s’enrichir, notamment grâce à votre contribution.
SimpleGeo Locates $1.5 Million And Many Big Name Investors There is a lot of buzz around SimpleGeo right now. The service, which participated in our RealTime CrunchUp earlier this month, also took home two prizes at the Under The Radar conference just prior to that. And that was a big deal for the company considering it won the audience award even though it’s not exactly the most consumer-oriented project. But people seem to understand that the location space is getting really hot right now, and SimpleGeo, which provides its geolocation infrastructure to other companies, offers one of the best models to capitalize on that. SimpleGeo has just closed a $1.5 million seed round of funding, we’ve confirmed. The two founders, Matt Galligan and Joe Stump, who are both based in Boulder, CO, used their time in San Francisco this month to close this new round. SimpleGeo is not the only company working to provide an easy way for others to tap into the location craze. SimpleGeo remains in beta for the time being.
Editor e gravador de áudio livre The GeoAPI Launches For Places, Tweets, Flickr Photos, And More Location, location, location. With the growing ubiquity of GPS-equipped phones, there is a virtual land rush going on right now to put geolocation capabilities in every mobile app. Today, Mixer Labs, the folks behind TownMe, introduced the GeoAPI, aimed at developers who want to add geolocation features to their apps in a plug-and-play fashion. The GeoAPI is built on top of what was previously called the TownMe GeoAPI, which offered a reverse geo-coder for lat/long coordinates and geo-database of 16 million businesses and points of interest. So a developer who wants to build their own Foursquare/Gowalla-type mobile app with check-ins and geo-Tweets can build it on top of the GeoAPI instead of assembling all the underlying data from scratch. To get a basic feeling for how this works, check out these simple demos for geo-coded Tweets and Flickr photos in San Francisco. Mixer Labs co-founder Elad Gil was the first product manager for Google Mobile Maps.
GISS (IS NOT) TV GoWalla Worth Nearly $30 Million After Financing. Time To Make Your Move, Facebook. If you were gettin’ all antsy in the pantsies about yesterday’s launch of the LG Expo and it’s detachable projector accessory, you might be a bit bewildered right now. A full day later, AT&T’s still showing no sign of the handset. WMExperts did a bit of digging, and found out that the Expo has been delayed for at least “a few days” due to shipping issues. When this sort of stuff happens, it’s generally because a cargo ship coming from Asia had to turn around for one reason or another, or otherwise never left the port. There’s no word just yet on a new ETA for the handset – we’ll let you know if that changes.
Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software by Richard Stallman When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users' essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.” These freedoms are vitally important. Tens of millions of people around the world now use free software; the public schools of some regions of India and Spain now teach all students to use the free GNU/Linux operating system. The free software movement has campaigned for computer users' freedom since 1983. Not all of the users and developers of free software agreed with the goals of the free software movement. Some of the supporters of open source considered the term a “marketing campaign for free software,” which would appeal to business executives by highlighting the software's practical benefits, while not raising issues of right and wrong that they might not like to hear. “Free software.” Conclusion
Location Is The Missing Link Between Social Networks And The Real World Imagine a world where you sit at your computer and you never go outside. Where you never see another human being. This is the world that sites like Google and Facebook want you to live in. Though they’d never admit to such a thing, the reasoning should be obvious: The longer you’re at your computer, the more time you’re spending on their sites. Thankfully, we don’t quite live in that world yet. Social networking has been perhaps the most popular trend on the Internet over the past several years. Ever since the term was born, countless people have debated the implications of taking social interactions virtual. If you’ll allow me to be embarrassingly obvious for a second: Sitting in a chat room all day, even if all of your friends are in it as well, is not the same as being in the same physical room with them. That’s where location comes in. To the masses, most of these services still either don’t make sense, or are way too creepy. Social networking up until this point has been great.