6tindr Pulled From Windows Phone Store As Per Tinder’s Request

6tindr Pulled From Windows Phone Store As Per Tinders RequestThe other day we reported that 6tindr, the unofficial Tinder app for Windows Phone, had been released. The app was developed by Rudy Huyn, a developer well-known in the Windows Phone circles for creating and releasing unofficial apps for the Windows Phone platform, apps that the original developers might have forgotten or not bothered to release for Windows Phone. In any case it looks like Tinder is not too happy about Huyn’s activities and have since requested the app to be removed from the Windows Phone store after complaining to Microsoft about it. Granted that 6tindr is based on Tinder, we guess the developers aren’t too thrilled about unofficial versions which could have the potential to tarnish their reputation.

However according to Huyn who wrote a short letter to Tinder, “If you want me to remove 6tindr from the Windows Phone Store I will respect your wishes, however I appeal to you that we work together so we can provide your new Windows Phone users – who are clearly passionate about using your service – with an awesome Tinder experience. I request that you please allow me the pleasure of helping you grow the popularity of Tinder within the Windows Phone community. I feel that together we can do great things for Windows Phone users, and I’d love to assist in any way possible to help bring an official Tinder app to Windows Phone.” Fair enough, don’t you guys think?

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    Startup Makes App to Help People Evade Traffic Laws

    Startup Makes App to Help People Evade Traffic Laws

    Never, ever forget: the Silicon Valley insider crowd is exempt from the rules and norms of the rest of the citizenry. TechCrunch excitedly reports on a new app called "Fixed," which will help San Franciscans automatically kill parking tickets, whether or not they deserve it.

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    WunderBar Is An Internet Of Things Starter Kit For App Developers

    wunderbar

    European startup relayr, founded in January last year and currently based at the StartupBootcamp accelerator, has kicked off a crowdfunding campaign for a hardware kit for developers aimed at making it easier for them to experiment with building apps for the long-promised Internet of Things.

    Apps that can notify you when someone opens the office beer fridge, for example, or share temperature data as part of a global network of sensors.

    Relayr’s answer to simplifying the marriage of software apps and discrete hardware sensors that can be located in all sorts of places is a chocolate box of sensors that developers can wirelessly tap into, and integrate into software developed for the Android, iOS or Node.js platforms.

    It’s calling this kit the WunderBar — the configuration of which has in fact been designed to look like a bar of chocolate, with seven snap-off-able pieces, and (at certain pledge levels) chunky 3D casings for each to make it easier to stick individual sensor modules where you want them.

    The aim of the WunderBar is to keep things simple by getting rid of the need for app developers to connect sensors via wires. Relayr is also providing libraries, tutorials and examples to help developers start building apps that make use of the data generated by the sensor hardware.

    The idea is to free software developers to quickly and easily play around with bits of hardware, allowing them to snap off a section of the WunderBar to use its particular sensors in a location where they want to gather data; no soldering mess, no fuss.

    “On the hardware level there are a lot of maker-oriented projects out there, but our research shows that app developers struggle when asked to ‘think hardware’,” says relayr co-founder Jackson Bond. “Our Starter kit requires no hardware knowledge to get started — making a really easy-in for the 4 gazillion app developers out there.”

    Bluetooth Low Energy and wi-fi are used to transfer and upload data from the sensor modules, and there are SDKs and an API to make it easier for developers to plug into the WunderBar hardware. Individual sensor modules contain LEDs, buttons and their own battery.

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    The bar’s six “smart modules” currently include sensors to monitor temperature, proximity, light, colour, humidity, and movement. A fourth sensor lets you control a home entertainment system with an infra-red transmitter. The sensors the last two modules will contain will be determined during the crowdfunding campaign by a vote.

    As well as the sensor modules, the WunderBar kit includes a main module with an ARM microprocessor and a Wi-Fi chip, and which talks to the sensor modules via Bluetooth, allowing their data to be relayed from local environmental placement back to relayr’s cloud platform where developers can start playing around with it.

    The WunderBar isn’t the first hardware sensor starter kit I’ve seen — for instance, there’s the BITalino bio-sensor kit (also from Europe). That kit is aimed at supporting development of medical devices and health tracker apps. But the WunderBar has a less specialist hardware feel, with an eye on helping app developers generally start thinking about how to extend the capabilities and reach of their software with the help of a little extra sensor hardware.

    “The aim of the WunderBar is for play, experimentation and rapid prototyping,” says Bond. “The WunderBar is not just a bootstrapping product for that, but pretty much embodies how we feel the IoT will grow: by giving developer entrepreneurs access to the right tools to make it easy for them to build the products that we as consumers will want to own.

    “We are planning to Open Source the PCB layouts and the Firmware, making it easy for hardware developers to take our designs and incorporate them into new products or enhance existing ones. We want  to create a fertile ground for app and hardware developers.”

    “The hardware startups of today are just a start, given the right tools, bringing products to the IoT market will become comparable to getting an app in the App Store today,” he adds.

    The WunderBar was priced at $119 for early backers on Dragon Innovation – but the handful of kits at that price have already been snapped up so it’s now $149 or more. The estimated shipping date is May.

    Relayr has raised 250,000 euro in a friend and family round of funding to date, and is in the process of closing a further 500,000 euro from undisclosed tech investors. It was also pitching for Series A funding in front of 400 investors today, as part of the StartupBootcamp DemoDay.

    Nintendo Confirms Wii U Has Flopped, Slashes Sales Forecast By ~70%

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    Nintendo has confirmed what we knew already: its unhappy controller/console combo, the Wii U, is a flop. The company said hardware sales of the Wii U had failed to reach its target during the year-end, pushing it into a third consecutive annual loss, Reuters reports.

    “We failed to reach our target for hardware sales during the year-end, when revenues are the highest,” said Nintendo’s president, Satoru Iwata, at a shareholder briefing on the sales figures.

    With the Wii U failing to shift off shelves — and that despite a $50 price cut last September, to $299 — Nintendo has slashed its global sales forecast for the device for the year to March 31 by almost 70%. It said it’s expecting Wii U sales to number just 2.8 million units over that period. It also cut its sales forecast for its handheld 3DS console to 13.5 million units from 18 million.

    Both Nintendo’s devices are facing fierce competition from non-specialist consumer hardware fuelled by thousands of often inexpensive games apps — aka the smartphones and tablets running on platforms such as Google’s Android OS and Apple’s iOS. Ownership of app-supporting mobile devices has exploded since the original Wii’s hey-day, of circa 2006, shifting the gaming goalposts from the living room to people’s pockets.

    Meanwhile, the home console market has been increasingly dominated by Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s PlayStation — leaving Nintendo to be squeezed out by those more powerful home consoles at the higher end, attracting pro gamers with huge franchise titles such as Grand Theft Auto, and driven out at the lower end by the consumerization of portable gaming via mainstream mobile devices. Talk about a rock and a hard place.

    The other point to note is that the Wii U itself just isn’t very good. It’s neither fish nor fowl, so to speak. As TC columnist MG Siegler put it back in September, it’s ”a poor concept accentuated by poor hardware”. He also described Nintendo as being “in the beginning of a death spiral”. Today’s  sales forecasts pour more fuel on those flames.

    Nintendo said it is now expecting an operating loss of 35 billion yen ($335.76 million) this business year vs its initial forecast of a 100 billion yen profit. It also warned of a net loss of 25 billion yen for the year ending on March 31 — having previously projected a 55 billion yen profit. And expects revenues of 590 billion yen, down 36% from its prior forecast.

    Update: Nintendo appears to be mulling a new smartphone-focused business strategy, according to comments reported by Bloomberg. “We are thinking about a new business structure,” Iwata is reported as saying at a press conference in Osaka, Japan.

    “Given the expansion of smart devices, we are naturally studying how smart devices can be used to grow the game-player business. It’s not as simple as enabling Mario to move on a smartphone.”

    It’s unclear exactly what Nintendo is considering but it appears to be reluctant to allow its flagship gaming franchises to simply be unchained from its own hardware and offered as apps on other platforms.

    “We cannot continue a business without winning,” Iwata added. “We must take a skeptical approach whether we can still simply make game players, offer them in the same way as in the past for 20,000 yen or 30,000 yen, and sell titles for a couple of thousand yen each.”

    FTC Commissioner Disagrees With FTC’s Decision To Punish Apple

    FTC Commissioner Disagrees With FTCs Decision To Punish AppleIn-app purchases are fine if you know what you’re doing and what you’re buying. However children might not necessarily know that they are spending money, or might not think that purchasing something at $0.99 100 times will amount to a lot of money, which is why Apple was recently ordered by the FTC to reimburse parents whose kids made accidental in-app purchases, with the refund expected to sit at a minimum of $32.5 million.

    For those who did not claim their refunds, the remainder of the $32.5 million will be going to the FTC. In a way we guess this makes sense as some parents believe that there wasn’t enough controls in place to prevent kids from overspending, but at the same time there are those who felt the ruling was unfair. One of them is actually part of the FTC, Commissioner Joshua D. Wright. (more…)

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    Make Memes On iPhone With Imgur’s New MemeGen App

    Make Memes On iPhone With Imgurs New MemeGen App

    One can’t simply underestimate the popularity of memes on the internet. There are a plethora of websites that let people spends hours and hours scrolling through a wide variety of memes, which have been made by the people, for the people. They are often quite hilarious, which is primarily the reason why they’re so popular. You can now make memes on iPhone, on the fly, thanks to the new MemeGen app from Imgur. If you know memes, you definitely know Imgur, it is one of the most widely used image hosting service online, normally playing host to the most viral memes.

    (more…)

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    How Beats’ New Music Service Plans to Crush Spotify

    How Beats’ New Music Service Plans to Crush Spotify

    Instead of simply offering more music, Beats new streaming service will woo new listeners with a potent mix of smarter algorithms and human curation.

        



    Apple And Google Remove Plastic Surgery Game From Their App Stores

    Apple And Google Remove Plastic Surgery Game From Their App StoresThere are game which seem like a good idea at the start, but turn out to be extremely bad ones. Plastic Surgery for Barbie has to be one of them. As the name implies, this is a game about plastic surgery in which it targets young children to play as plastic surgeons. Well it seems that both Apple and Google thought it was a horrible idea for a game and has since pulled it from the iTunes App Store and Google Play store. Basically what the game was about was that it tasked players to perform plastic surgery on a female character, such as liposuction for example, and finally comparing the before and after results.

    According to the game’s description, “This unfortunate girl has so much extra weight that no diet can help her. In our clinic she can go through a surgery called liposuction that will make her slim and beautiful.” While Google did not comment on the specifics of why the app was pulled, they claimed that it breached their guidelines. Mattel too issued a statement claiming that the Barbie branding was not sanctioned by the company and that they will take action to prevent their brand from being used by products that might be unsafe or inappropriate for children. What do you guys think? Was this game a harmless one or do you think that it might have influenced young children negatively?

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    Baldur’s Gate 2: Enhanced Edition Arrives On The iPad

    Baldurs Gate 2: Enhanced Edition Arrives On The iPadA couple of years ago, Beamdog announced that they would be reviving the Baldur’s Gate franchise through “Enhanced Editions” of the game and its expansions. This basically meant that the developers would be updating the graphics while maintaining the tone and feel, while adding new characters and new quest lines, so that players who have gone through Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 will have some fresh material to play with. Well the good news is that if you’re already gone through Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition, you might be pleased to learn that Baldur’s Gate 2: Enhanced Edition has officially been released for the iPad!

    The first Baldur’s Gate was released for the iPad awhile back to relatively positive reviews, so we expect that the second should fair relatively well as well. Just like the first game, Baldur’s Gate 2: Enhanced Edition will include features such as multiplayer mode, enhanced graphics, and various improvements spread throughout the game, as well as new quests and characters that players can interact with along the way. Priced at $14.99, it is more expensive than your typical iOS RPG, but if you grew up playing the game on the PC, you know that it will probably be worth it. For more information or to purchase the game, head on over to the iTunes App Store.

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    iTrace App Teaches Kids The Importance Of Handwriting

    iTrace App Teaches Kids The Importance Of HandwritingGiven that we’re used to writing up reports, sending out messages, clocking in reminders, and more using our electronic devices, the skill of penmanship could slowly become a thing of the past. I remember back in the day where schools taught kids how to write not just normally, but had classes where we were taught how to write beautifully as well, such as the intricateness of cursive writing, for example. Well it seems that handwriting is still an important skill to possess as one dad claims through his creation of the iTrace handwriting app. Developed by Michael Bogorad, he claims that the app was born from his need to teach his children how to write properly. (more…)

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  • iTrace App Teaches Kids The Importance Of Handwriting original content from Ubergizmo.