Welcome to the new Apps of the Week, where we give you all the cool apps we came across in one place. Android folks, iOS folks, and Windows Phone folks, now you can all come together and live in peace, sharing in the joy that is a cool new app.
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The Moto X camera fix that hit T-Mobile handsets last week is now rolling out to AT&T versions of the phone. Rejoice smartphone shutterbugs.
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An anonymous, underground drug trafficking web site Silk Road has been busted and the founder has been arrested, effectively shutting down a $1 billion+ revenue business after two years. And in softer tech news, Instagram has revealed plans to put ads in the stream over the next couple months. Meanwhile, BlackBerry continues to be in shambles, with BBM for Android and iOS delayed and the Z30 reportedly not going on sale in the company’s home country of Canada on Rogers.
We discuss all this and more in this week’s episode of the TC Gadgets Podcast, featuring John Biggs, Matt Burns, Jordan Crook, Chris Velazco, Darrell Etherington, and a special guest appearance by Chris Nesi.
Enjoy!
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You wait ages for a lost-item tracker hardware startup, and then loads and loads pile on at once. There have been a spate of such startups cropping up on crowdfunding sites in recent times — notably Tile, which raised $2.6 million via Selfstarter back in July, although it won’t be shipping product until next year. Others hoping to attack the space with similar Bluetooth-powered tags include the likes of Button TrackR, Lapa and Protag (with its next-gen Elite offering), to name just a few. And now Locca has just kicked off a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo for a pair of item trackers, the Locca Phone and Locca Mini (pictured above left), that incorporate a range of tracking tech to offer longer distance real-time item tracking.
The latest low-powered flavour of Bluetooth, colloquially known as Bluetooth Low Energy or BLE, is undoubtedly encouraging more startups to try their hand at item tracking. But Bluetooth has its drawbacks for an item-tracking use case — notably it has a pretty limited range of around 30 meters.
Tile is hoping to get around that by leveraging a community of uses to create a distributed network effect, so that the proximity of your lost Tile to another passing Tile user can be used to cast its item-finding net wider. But that’s only really going to happen if its product takes off in a big way. In the meantime, all these Bluetooth trackers can only really offer a limited use-case scenario of finding stuff you’ve lost in your own house, say, or sounding an alarm when you stray a few meters away from your bag.
That’s why Locca reckons there’s room for another player in this space — one that can track items over much greater distances. Unlike its Bluetooth tag-touting rivals, it’s sticking a SIM card inside its trackers so it can draw on a range of location pinpointing technologies, including GPS, to boost tracking range and enable live tracking of lost items even across international borders (its service will initially cover the U.S., Canada and Europe and expand to more countries in 2014).
“Locca locators have integrated five of the best locating technologies: AGPS, GSM cell-triangulation, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth low-energy and FSK. Therefore the positioning is very accurate and fast, and tracking is possible worldwide, e.g. your lost luggage with a Locca is in Madrid, and you can see where it is from London,” the startup tells TechCrunch.
Items are viewed on a corresponding Locca app that displays the real-time position of tracked items on a map, and offers additional functionality such as setting up different zones where you might want the system to behave differently toward tracked items.
However there’s a cost to Locca’s more comprehensive coverage: Locca plans to charge buyers a monthly service fee for the data they’re using. Both Locca’s forthcoming devices — the smaller, lower-cost Locca Mini and the full-fat Locca Phone (which can also be used to make and receive calls) — come with a built-in SIM. The monthly cost of keeping each tracker active is €9,90 ($13,50) per month for the Locca Mini; and €14,90 ($20,30) per month for Locca Phone.
Battery life is another cost of this type of tracking option. Locca says it’s developed its own energy-saving algorithms to help improve this but while the larger and more expensive Locca Phone will have a guaranteed ‘more than one month’ longevity, the smaller Locca Mini looks to require a lot more juicing. Locca says the Mini’s battery is good for “7 days active time”, perhaps longer depending on your usage.
“Depending on which technology is used the battery lifetime is shorter or longer. E.g. a Locca is fixed on your dog. At home the device is connected to FSK, when the dog enters the garden GSM is turned on and when the dog runs away you could even switch on in addition the APGS to see the exact position,” it says.
An item tracker with a flat battery is no longer an item tracker — which does give the Bluetooth tracker startups an edge in some respects: for instance, Tile boasts a year-long battery life. In fact, Tile owners will never have to charge the device — instead, they get an email reminder towards the end of the battery’s life to send Tile back and purchase a replacement (costing $25). That yearly fee for Tile is still cheaper than a year of Locca’s service (albeit, you can start and stop the Locca service whenever you like within the app, with no contracts required).
There are other GPS trackers on the market, but Locca claims its Mini device is “the smallest with so many locating systems.” It’s also relatively lightweight (23g) — affixing it to your dog’s collar is one use case they envisage. Other use cases could include fixing it to car keys, putting it in your handbag or tagging your bike.
The larger Locca Phone tracker, which can also make and take calls, thanks to a built-in microphone and speaker, is being marketed as something to give to an elderly relative or your kids. (Locca co-founder, Albert Fellner, is also founder and owner of Austrian mobile maker Emporia, which makes mobile phones for older people — likely explaining this portion of Locca’s focus.)
Calls can be put through to the Locca Phone via Locca’s app, giving parents an alternative channel to speak to their kids or check in on elderly relatives. Another use for the Locca Phone is as an in-car safety device, as it will incorporate crash sensors and can be set to automatically make a phone call in the event of an accident.
Locca is offering Indiegogo backers a variety of options to bag its hardware. The Locca Mini can be picked up from €99, with six months of service included in that price. And the Locca Phone from €149, also with six months of service. It’s also offering a range of accessories, such as cases to fix the trackers to your pet’s collar or a bike kit to mount it on your bike.
The startup is focusing on getting the Mini delivered first, with an estimated ship date of December, while the Locca Phone is slated for February next year. Locca said it has been bootstrapping the project up to now — and is hoping to raise €75,000 via Indiegogo – although it has also previously taken in an angel investment of €150,000.
While demand for the gold-colored iPhone 5s seems to have been high the world over, the oddest cultural response continues to be in China, where the device is given the nickname “Tyrant King.” It’s there also that some of the highest prices have been demanded, with some 3rd party sellers taking the opportunity to follow […]
San Francisco-based startup Coin may not have launched yet, but it has created a hardware platform that others can use to build their own products in the process of developing its own. Today, Coin announced that it will offer up an Arduino Bluetooth Low Energy module that’s designed to be small and easy to integrate into hardware hacks and products of all kinds.
The $22 kit includes an Arduino-BLE board and 6-pin header that should be fairly broadly applicable for building Arduino-based hardware that can communicate with iOS devices. That means you’ll be able to talk to Apple’s new iBeacons service, which uses BLE to perform a number of functions, including ones that people normally associate with NFC like tap-based payments, in theory.
In developing its own product, Coin found that it was very challenging to find an easy way to integrate BLE into products in terms of figuring out wiring schematics, board layout, bulk manufacturing and coding to connect the chip to the Arduino processor to the iOS app itself. The Coin Arduino-BLE kit is designed to simply that by offering a pre-rolled solution, completely with open-source software that will go up on Github in December, which is when the boards should ship.
The applications are many: there are tons of devices like Tile that use BLE to serve lost-and-found functions, for instance, and increasingly health and fitness wearables employ the low power tech. Home automation devices like Nest could make use of it to become even more intelligent in terms of determining people’s proximity to in-home heating or lighting systems, and there’s security potential as well as ways to use it in ecommerce and in physical retail stores, like Estimote is doing.
All of that opportunity still requires that people build things to take advantage of the tech first, and that means either tackling the difficult process of putting it together on your own, or looking around for off-the-shelf solutions. Coin is among the first with such an offering, and one which covers both the hardware and software side, so they could stand to gain a lot from an early position of influence in what’s likely to be a booming market now that Apple is all-in on BLE.
Microsoft has reached out to HTC to see if the company would be interested in adding Windows as a second OS to its Android handsets, a new report by Bloomberg claims. It isn’t clear exactly how the two operating systems would share the handset, in terms of allowing dual-booting or making a user choose a default at device setup, but it’s a sign Redmond may be thinking about pulling out all the stops to get people using its mobile OS.
These talks are in very early stages, according to Bloomberg’s sources, and there’s a possibility that Microsoft may even reduce or eliminate its licensing fee for Windows Phone to make it more attractive to HTC. HTC seems to be a target because it’s a former partner that has already built both Windows and Android hardware (though it doesn’t seem to be too keen on delivering more on the Windows Phone side). Microsoft’s head of Operating Systems Terry Myerson is said to be heading to Taiwan to discuss the arrangement in further detail with HTC, says Bloomberg.
There are a couple of reasons this makes sense, including some information TechCrunch has heard about Microsoft and its organizational sentiment towards Android. First, HTC has been one of Microsoft’s few hardware partners for Windows Phone, and that relationship is likely strained given the Nokia hardware division purchase. Second, HTC is in a bad way in terms of continuing poor financial performance, and in terms of device sales, so it’s probably very willing to consider unorthodox models to help it gain some unique appeal for users.
As to what we’ve heard about internal feelings on Android at Microsoft, a source suggests that there are contingents of younger engineers at the company who pushed hard to have Android/Windows dual-booting on Surface tablet devices, so there’s a willingness to experiment with things very much like this HTC dual-OS smartphone. Those ideas, TechCrunch has been told, came from younger elements within Microsoft’s mobile engineering team, and were not embraced by the older, more established elements of senior management.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is leaving within the next year, he announced back in August, and there have been other big executive shifts at the company lately, too, including the departure of Xbox head Don Mattrick and Windows lead Steven Sinofsky. This may have changed the culture enough at Microsoft to allow some of the more radical new ideas to gain better purchase, which could result in an HTC device that lets users choose not one, but two mobile operating systems with one device buy.
Dell had an event this week, which is in itself noteworthy regardless of what they launch, but it turns out there were Android tablets there! We talk about those for a while, as well as the Elliptic Labs ultrasound gesture control SDK, Android in the Car, Amazon’s four-camera phone plans, and briefly the Kindle Fire HDX.
This week on the show prodigal son Chris Velazco returns from his many travels (we held the podcast a whole day to make sure he could come), and we’re joined by Natasha Lomas as well. I nearly forgot to mention that we also chat briefly about BBM for Android, and it must be forgettable because BlackBerry itself seems to have forgotten about it as well.
We invite you to enjoy weekly Android podcasts every Wednesday (or Thursday this week) at 5:30 p.m. Eastern and 2:30 p.m. Pacific, in addition to our weekly Gadgets podcast at 3 p.m. Eastern and noon Pacific on Fridays. Subscribe to the TechCrunch Droidcast in iTunes, too, if that’s your fancy.
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Research by U.K. telecoms regulator Ofcom has found that tablet usage among children is on the rise, with growing numbers of younger kids, especially, turning to tablets to watch videos, play games and access the Internet.
The annual report into children’s media consumption habits also records a drop in the overall number of children between the ages of 5 and 15 who own a mobile phone, with the percentage falling from 49% last year to 43% in 2013. It’s the first such drop since the survey began, back in 2005.
Ofcom says this decline is mainly down to a steep fall in the proportion of younger kids (8-11) owning a basic mobile phone (as opposed to a smartphone). Basic phone ownership among the latter age-group stood at 28% last year and has fallen steeply to 15% this year. Bottom line: you can’t even flog feature phones to tweens.
But, while basic phones are being ditched by kids, tablets usage is rising across the board. Among the younger kids’ age group, 18% own a smartphone, and the same proportion own a tablet. However the report notes that while the smartphone figure is “largely stable” year-on-year, tablet ownership has grown four-fold since last year, when it stood at just 4%.
As you might expect, smartphone ownership is much higher among older children (12-15) than 8-11s, with the older group being likely to be more interested in using connected devices to communicate, rather than primarily looking for a gadget to watch audio-visual content and play games (likely why tablets, well suited to the entertainment use-case, are doing so well with younger kids category). But even among the older group, the report found that tablet usage is on the rise.
The majority (62%) of 12-15-year-olds own a smartphone, according to the research – a proportion that Ofcom said is unchanged since last year — vs just over a quarter (26%) who own a tablet computer. The latter figure is up considerably on last year when just 7% said they had a slate.
Ofcom said the use of tablets has tripled among 5-15s since 2012, rising from 14% to 42% over that period. While just over a quarter (28%) of infants aged 3-4 now use a tablet computer at home (albeit, this age group is likely using a tablet owned by their parents).
Similarly, tablet usage is rising rapidly among 5-7 year olds (now at 39%, up from 11% last year) and 8-11 year olds (at 44%, up from 13%). The report notes that these very young Internet users are five times more likely than last year to mostly use a tablet when accessing the Internet at home (at 19%, up from 4%).
“Tablet computers are growing fast in popularity, becoming a must-have device for children of all ages,” it adds.
As tablet usage grows, more traditional devices are inevitably being used less to go online. The report found that the proportion of children mainly using a laptop, netbook or desktop computer to access the Internet has fallen to 68% — down from 85% in 2012. While twice as many children as last year are mainly using other devices to go online, with tablets (13%) and mobiles (11%) the most popular device choices.
As the number of Internet-connected devices continues to proliferate, it’s also no surprise that the traditional TV set is becoming less of a focal point for kids’ entertainment too. Compared to last year, the report found that children are more likely to watch programmes on devices other than a TV, such as a laptop, tablet or mobile phone. Nearly half (45%) of children aged 5-15 are doing so, up from 34% last year, it notes.
Interestingly, the research flags up an apparent change in social media habits among kids. For the first time, fewer children have online social media profiles, with 12-15s much less likely to say they have a profile on any device (68% this year, down from 81% last).
“The mix of social media used by children is evolving. While nearly all 12-15s with an active online profile continue to use Facebook (97%), they are now less likely to have a profile on Bebo (4%, down from 8% last year) and more likely to have a profile on Twitter (37%, from 25%),” the report notes.
Other social networks with a growing profile among this age group include YouTube, Instagram and Tumblr:
Instant messaging is also rising in popularity with this age group. The research found that 12-15s are now less likely to go online weekly to visit social networking sites (67% vs 75%) and more likely to go online for instant messaging (55% vs 45%).
Kids with smartphones send an estimated 184 instant messages in a typical week, according to Ofcom’s data. One bright spot for carriers: traditional text messaging (SMS) remains a highly popular way of communicating for youngsters, especially those aged 12-15. These teenagers send on average 255 SMSes per week, up from 193 last year.
What are younger kids generally using the Internet for? Schoolwork is the most mentioned activity carried out at least weekly by 8-11s (75%), followed by games (54%) and finding information (45%), according to Ofcom’s data.
Weekly use of the Internet for telephone or video calls is also on the rise among children vs. last year’s research (now at 10%, up from 5%), as is going to photo-sharing websites (at 5%, up from 2%).
Already wildly popular amongst younger users, picture sharing app Snapchat is launching the next phase of its app today, and for the first time it’s bringing a feature to its iOS and Android apps at the same time. Snapchat’s claim to fame has always been that it shares images or short videos from one person to another, that disappear after viewing instead of living on in infamy (our early Tweets are a constant source of embarrassment). Now, the new Stories feature gives each user a feed similar to those on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr that all of their friends (instead of just one) can check out, but with a familiar hook — the Snaps disappear after 24 hours. Another interesting element is that, like Path, it also displays a list of who viewed each Snap.
In a blog post, the company touts the ephemeral nature of the feature, noting that “The end of your Story today is the beginning of your Story tomorrow.” To some, the service’s reputation is only for how it helps the Anthony Weiners of the world, but the introduction of Stories may change that — and introduce more competition for other social networks where users are wary of how long even casual posts could live to haunt them. The feature hasn’t popped up on either app store yet, for now you can check after the break for a few videos showing the stories users might tell — if they were in one of those bands the young folks are listening to.
Filed under: Cellphones, Software, Mobile, Apple
Source: Snapchat Blog
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