When it comes to smartphone purchases, men and women want the same thing: not too expensive, intuitive features and holds a charge like a champ.
However, there are subtle differences between men and women's preferences in a new phone. According to a new Nielsen survey conducted in more than 58 countries, female respondents cared more about price, contract terms and camera capabilities; men gravitated toward attributes such as operating system, screen size and processor speed.
Most designers today create static mockups to communicate app ideas. But increasingly apps are anything but static, which means as designers we need a better tool for interaction design.
Origami is a free toolkit for Quartz Composer—created by the Facebook Design team—that makes interactive design prototyping easy and doesn’t require programming.
Energy bills will carry QR codes which will allow consumers to easily see how much gas and electricity they use and shop around for the best tariffs, under plans outlined by the government.
Sharing photos online is great, but you can’t hang an iPad on a wall, you can’t look at two photos at once on a phone, and sometimes it’s nice to turn your screens off.
Unfortunately printing photos is expensive, quality is hard to guarantee, and styling options tend to be limited to rectangles with or without white borders.
Flag is an app for iPhone and iPad designed to change that.
That's not to say that print will knock out computers, or anything like that, but that mobile devices are quickly eating into desktop dominance. The statement came as Mr. Sulzberger and Times CEO Mark Thompson talked at a Media Minds breakfast about the new subscription products and mobile apps they hope will refuel digital subcription growth at the company.
Blippar's print app lets readers of this ad from Maybelline try on virtually every color shade in the Color Show line of eye shadow.
Until now, Blippar was targeting magazines and brand agencies as it sought to establish its platform. Today, that target audience is expanding—newspapers and print shops, in particular—are in their sights. The company is now going to the publishers who have advertisers participating in campaigns, looking to form partnerships that will bring the technology and possibilities to more brands. And printers have a unique opportunity to introduce the platform to all the jobs that walk in the door—there are very few types of print jobs that couldn’t benefit from Blippar’s technology. Even editorial departments are finding new ways to bring their stories to life with instant reader engagement opportunities such as polls or animations that delve deeper into a subject or illustrate a point.
Trulia sure knows how to appeal to the real estate voyeur in all of us.
The online real estate company’s new iPhone and Android apps, launched yesterday, put gorgeous photos front and center. The goal: to help you figure out if a listing is good for you even faster. The changes are most noticeable in Trulia’s list view: Instead of just a boring, text-heavy list of available properties, the new Trulia apps put photos right behind every listing. Now, using Trulia’s apps feels more like browsing a real estate magazine, rather than an online search engine.
Despite the ubiquity of smartphones and the forecast that global mobile traffic will grow exponentially over the next five years, PCs are still the device of choice for ecommerce in the U.S.
According to a Q4 2013 study from Monetate, 73.2% of visits to online shopping sites come from PC users, as opposed to 14.6% and 12.2% from tablets and smartphones, respectively.
We’re experimenting with just that in partnership with Layar, a free augmented reality app available on Apple iOS and Android devices. To start, we’ve enhanced all 42 Lonely Planet European city guidebooks (city guides, pocket city guides and Discover city guides) to work with the Layar app. Simply by scanning the cover through the app, travelers can enjoy live weather feeds, exclusive videos and photos, transport planners, activity ideas and hundreds of bookable hotel and tour listings – all for free. All you need is a book and a phone.
HONG KONG: A shop selling the virtual Bitcoin currency has opened in Hong Kong, as fresh concerns grew in Asia over the currency’s viability and security. Touting itself as the world’s “first” physical Bitcoin retail store, Hong Kong-based exchange ANXBTC said it could help raise the popularity of the crypto-currency.
Amazon has added augmented reality technology to its main iOS app, allowing shoppers to scan for more products using their iPhone cameras.
Amazon has long been developing this tech, released in 2011 through an app called Flow. The feature lets users snap a photo of a product instead of scanning the barcode or typing the name of the item into a search bar. It will then pull up the product from the photo, so customers can purchase it instantly.
Blippar is an advanced advertising tool that presents additional information and extra features to users using augmented reality and smart devices. Jessica Butcher, co-founder of the app, demonstrated the service at PSFK London. Today, the AR startup introduced a new feature that extends the app’s capabilities to Google Glass, making it even easier for people to recognize product images and receive more information about them on the fly.
Augmented reality—a technology that enables mobile devices to recognize live objects and then activate video or graphics—has been stuck for years in new-tech purgatory, where ideas loll in the hope of finding mainstream applications.
That may be changing, at least in the eyes of marketers, print publishers and retailers, who are testing new ways to promote their brands on ever-present mobile devices.
Startups like Blippar, Layar and Daqri are beginning to make inroads, offering technology that lets people point their smartphones or tablets at objects—whether a can of soda, a magazine cover or an in-store display—and then watch video or high-tech graphics unfurl on top of the objects on screen.
Go back to the newsstand and pick up these magazines to play with their new mobile activations:
> Men's Heath--Layar/Shop Advisor
> Parent & Child--Digimarc Discover app
> Redbook--Shop Redbook/Layar
> More--Bilppar
> AllRecipes--Blippar
> Cooking Light--Watermark/Digimarc
> Glamour--Glamour Shopper App/AHALife inventory
> Woman's Day--Access WD/Nellymoser/Digimarc
Phonebloks is a concept for a phone that works on a modular system, allowing you to customize the features of your phone by simply removing and adding parts when you feel appropriate. Thus enabling you to prioritize certain elements over others; camera, processor, battery etc. It also provides you with the ability to upgrade/update these parts when you want or when they are available. A fresh and innovative idea from Dave Hakkens.
It deals head on with the problem we have with electronic waste (there is a lot of it!). When our phones and our other electronic devices break, usually for one individual reason (screen breaks, too slow etc), we throw out the whole device; working parts and all. The Phonebloks concept will reduce the wastage simply because you can replace that individual part. Quickly and easily. Check out the videos at the bottom of this article.
Imagine a member of your target audience standing in a crowded store aisle, feeling overwhelmed by all the choices. What if you could just reach out and give him or her something to help with the decision — a coupon, product information, discounts — right at that moment? Content marketers will soon have the ability to do this, and a whole lot more, now that iBeacon has arrived.
Included as part of Apple’s iOS 7, the iBeacon feature uses Bluetooth location-based technology to allow a sensor to communicate with a nearby device. Tiny transmitters can be placed throughout a building to determine visitors’ locations and send targeted alerts to their phones as they move about.
Silk Air, Singapore's regional airline, uses QR codes and their website for ticket giveaways. The airline's slogan also changed from "Feel at Home in the Air" to "A Joy to Fly".
This video shows how augmented reality is being put into play with InAir entertainment. The system does the background googling and investigating that the user would normally do on their phone. Instead, the options are automatically displayed as options on the screen. It's success would depend on in practice fluidity of the movement back and forth between content and supplemental information.
Taco Bell is the latest chain to introduce a smartphone app that will make mobile ordering and payment easier. It will let customers place an order, customize it and pay with a credit card or gift card. Once the user enters a restaurant location for picking up the order, a nifty GPS locator in the app tells the kitchen when to estimate the customer’s arrival so the food is fresh and hot. Upon opening the app, guests are greeted with a message that is tailored to the time of day. It then presents the menu and immediately allows users to find the Taco Bell closest to them. Pricing, hours and directions appear for the specific location chosen.
Taco Bell saw the app as a way to be extraordinary and stand out to millennials. The app will be “a portal to Taco Bell in 10 million people’s pockets.” There are opportunities for upsell with desserts and drinks. After the revival of Taco Bell with the Dorito’s locos taco, it maked sense that they are trying to stay relevant and on the cutting edge.
As in previous years, the study found continual and steady growth in the mobile activated space, but 2013 also saw an explosion in the range of technologies used to deliver activations. Compared to a total of 8,448 activations in 2012, 2013 saw 13,088 activated pages in the magazines surveyed. The top activated magazines included Marie Claire, Esquire, Redbook, Cooking Light and InStyle, showing the range of readership target demographics that are participating in mobile programs.
The primary activation type was Image Recognition (IR), followed by QR—taking second place for the first time in the history of the study, and watermarking in third. The most represented segments were Fashion & Style (3,893) and Lifestyle & Leisure (3,196) followed by Home & Gardening (855), Home & Cooking (816), Entertainment & TV (750), and Fashion & Beauty (704).
Some of the striking results include: