Hasta La Gadget!

Adapted from Always On: How the iPhone Unlocked the Anything-Anytime-Anywhere Future — and Locked Us In, © Brian X. Chen, to be published by Da Capo Press, A Member of the Perseus Books Group, on June 7.

For more discussion of the book, visit the Always On book page on Facebook.

One Saturday afternoon in January 2009, Rose Maltais picked up her granddaughter Natalie in Athol, Massachusetts for a short weekend visit. Just before she drove off, Maltais reportedly told Natalie’s adoptive parents that they would never see the nine-year-old again. But just one night later, police officers found Maltais at a Budget Inn in Virginia and arrested her. They didn’t use the traditional process of tracking down a suspect — interviewing witnesses and following clues — to find Maltais and her grandchild. Instead, they tracked Natalie’s smartphone and used a bit of clever technological sleuthing to follow their trail.

Unbeknownst to Maltais, the Federal Communications Commission has required cellphone carriers since 2005 to provide a way for police to track most phones within a few hundred meters, and the GPS technology embedded in all smartphones has been a crucial tracking tool. To narrow down Maltais’s location, officer Todd Neale of the Athol police department called the child’s cell phone provider, AT&T, which provided approximate GPS coordinates every time Natalie’s smartphone connected with a celltower to get a signal. Then Neale contacted Athol deputy fire chief Thomas Lozier, who had experience using GPS for guiding firefighters through forest fires and finding lost hikers. Lozier plugged the coordinates into Google Maps and used satellite imagery to home in on where Maltais might be hiding. Jiggering around in Google Street View, Lozier saw a road sign for the Budget Inn in Natural Bridge, Virginia. Neale contacted Virginia state police, who arrived at the motel and found Natalie and her grandmother.

This GPS-assisted arrest offers a peek into the future of policing in an “always-on” society, where we are all constantly connected to the internet via incredibly-capable handheld gadgets with access to data everywhere. Smartphones already include a stunning amount of computing power, and an array of advanced sensors, such as gyroscopes, accelerometers, magnetometers, not to mention GPS, cellular, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi radios. The constant connection these devices offer, and the amount of information they are constantly collecting and transmitting is set to change much of our lives. In law enforcement, that data-driven revolution is already underway.

The information collected and stored on an iPhone can be more revealing than a fingerprint and a face scan, and police officers are already taking advantage of this. Security researcher Jonathan Zdziarski regularly teaches forensics courses focused on the iPhone. Police officers learn how to recover sensitive data from the device to help them build cases against suspects. That includes information that a suspect has attempted to destroy — deleted text messages, voicemails, contacts can be recovered with some clever hacks; officers can also learn how to crack pass codes of an iPhone and bypass encryption. Zdziarski admits that from a user’s perspective, it’s unsettling how insecure the iPhone is, but says he’s somewhat “divided on it,” because “at the same time, it’s been useful for investigating criminals.” iPhone forensics techniques have helped officers successfully gather evidence against criminals later convicted of rape, murder, or drug deals, according to Zdziarski.

Of course, it’s possible that some day, someone might clear themselves of a crime using their phone (See, I posted to Twitter from miles away when the crime was committed!). For now, however, these devices are more of a help to cops than suspects.

But what’s good for law enforcement might not be good for our privacy. Just how much information are our smartphones broadcasting about us? To find out, German politician and privacy advocate Malte Spitz sued his phone company, Deutsche Telekom, to get information that the company had about Spitz’s movements. It turns out that between August 2009 and February 2010, the carrier tracked and stored his location 35,000 times. That was enough data for German newspaper Die Zeit to compile a detailed interactive map that showed Spitz’s every move over six months.

Never before had a mobile phone company been shown to have such a detailed log on a single customer. Already, Spitz’s story has created ripples reaching the United States, where congressmen Edward Markey and Joe Bartain have sent letters to AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile demanding disclosure on their data collection and storage practices. “Location, location, location may be the favored currency of the real estate industry but it is sensitive information for mobile phone users that must be safeguarded,” said Rep. Markey. “Collecting, storing and disclosing a consumer’s exact whereabouts for commercial purposes without their express permission is unacceptable and violates current law.”

Incidentally, federal prosecutors in New Jersey in April 2011 issued subpoenas to makers of multiple iPhone and Android apps, accusing them of transmitting personal customer data such as location, age and other identifiable information to third-party advertisers. The federal investigation stems from an ongoing study by The Wall Street Journal, which tested 101 iPhone apps and found that 56 of them transmitted unique device identifiers (UDID) — a 40-character string of letters and numbers tagged to each iPhone — to third-parties, including advertisers, without the user’s awareness or consent. While an iPhone does not transmit a user’s real name, a company could combine a UDID with other personal information collected from the device, such as location, age and gender data to determine a customer’s real identity.

One target of the subpoena is popular music-streaming service Pandora, which the WSJ found to be sharing UDID, age and gender without user permission. Also, independent programmer Anthony Campiti received a subpoena regarding his app Pumpkin Maker, a kiddy app for carving virtual Jack-O-Lanterns, which the Wall Street Journal found was sharing UDID and location data with advertisers. Notably, neither of these apps ask customers for permission to share this data, and neither of them provides services related to location. “These unique identifiers are permanent social security numbers in your phone in that they’re freely submitted and they can’t change,” says Justin Brookman, director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Project on Consumer Privacy. “You can’t go in there and change your UDID like you could go out and change a cookie [on a PC web browser]. It presents a lot more of a problem.”

“I’m glad this is coming to light, because we’ve seen for a while that with smartphone apps there’s a significant lack of transparency,” says Sharon Nissim, consumer privacy counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “I think consumers are waking up to the tracking that’s going on with a computer, but I think there’s an extreme lack of knowledge about the tracking on your iPhone or your iPad.”

Barnes and Noble’s Simple Touch Nook is not a reinvention of the e-reader in any way. It’s a refinement, and a very good one at that. More »

E-readers may not be good enough for Princeton’s hallowed halls, but students and professors at Oklahoma State University seem to have fallen head over heels for their iPads. Last fall, the school introduced the tablets in a handful of lecture halls and classrooms, as part of its iPad Pilot Program. Teachers involved in the study said they benefited from all the educational software available on Apple’s App Store, while students appreciated not having to spend their life savings on traditional textbooks. At the end of the pilot program, a full 75-percent of collegians said the iPad “greatly enhanced” their classroom experience, though we’re guessing that much of that enhancement came from their newfound ability to check TweetDeck between lecture notes. Opinion was noticeably more divided, however, on the device’s value as an e-reader. Some enjoyed having all their books in one place, whereas others were a bit disappointed with the experience, saying they didn’t use it to read as often as they expected to. Our former undergrad-slacker selves can totally relate. Video and PR await you, after the break.

Continue reading Shocker! College kids like having iPads in the classroom

Shocker! College kids like having iPads in the classroom originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 04 May 2011 14:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink MacNews  |  BusinessWire  | Email this | Comments

Former Apple engineers Kimon Tsinteris (left) and Mike Matas teamed up with Al Gore to create a new publishing platform called Push Pop Press. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

What do you do after working for Apple, a company whose mission seems to be nothing less than disrupting entire industries? Easy. You start a company to create your own ding in the universe.

That’s the idea behind Push Pop Press, a digital creation tool designed to blow up the concept of the book. Frictionless self-publishing is a fertile new space, but this particular startup got a little help from former vice president Al Gore, whose exacting demands on an app version of his book Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis gave this would-be company its first real boost.

Developed by former Apple employees Mike Matas and Kimon Tsinteris, Push Pop Press will be a publishing platform for authors, publishers and artists to turn their books into interactive iPad or iPhone apps — no programming skills required.

“The app is the richest form of storytelling,” Matas said. “[Push Pop Press] opens doors to telling a story with more photos, more videos and interactions.”

This article is part of a series of profiles about hit apps and the successful programmers behind them.

See Also:

• App-Powered Car Service Leaves Cabs in the Dust
• How Angry Birds Is Becoming the Next Super Mario
• How Flipboard Turned Web Noise Into iPad Gold

Push Pop Press is pushing into a widening niche within the print industry, which is scrambling to produce digital versions of books, magazines and newspapers in hopes of reversing declining revenues.

The platform comes as a slew of competitiors seek to upend the book publishing business, a shift that once seemed improbable but now inevitable, thanks to the success of new devices such as the iPad, Kindle and Nook. Notably, Amazon began selling more e-books than printed editions just 33 months after its Kindle launched.

If e-books have been flying off the “shelves” for years, Push Pop Press aims to bring a new dimension to the platform, adding high-end graphics to the largely unadorned text offered in popular e-book editions like the Kindle. It’s the latest bet — still unpaid after some 25 years of digital publishing– that plain old text is about to undergo a major evolution as authors and readers demand more interactivity.

For magazine publishers and newspapers, one of the trendiest technology solutions involves creating iPad or Android editions of publications — for which advertisers, so far, seem to pay at rates which rival print dollars instead of web pennies.

The 800-pound gorilla in this digital space is Adobe, whose tools are used to create some tablet periodicals (including the iPad version of WIRED magazine). But the complexity — and expense — of Adobe’s Creative Suite is an opportunity for new entrants in the self-publishing game.

Problem is, it’s neither easy nor cheap for dead-tree publishers to hire app programmers, or to purchase the resources necessary to digitize their publications with sexy code. And after factoring in the hefty costs of development and time spent on production, mobile apps have hardly proven a goldmine for major publishers.

If successfully scaled, Push Pop Press could become the easiest and quickest way for publishers and independent artists to turn their media into iPhone and iPad apps and take a whack at making money in the App Store.

Book apps created with the platform can take advantage of the iPad’s and iPhone’s advanced sensors, touchscreen gestures, microphone and powerful graphics chip to turn reading into a rich, interactive experience, Matas said. Videos, interactive diagrams and geotagged photos are just some elements that can be embedded in a book produced with the tool.

Not impressed with words alone? Check out Gore’s tour of his book produced with Push Pop Press, embedded in the video below.

Al Gore’s Our Choice: Guided Tour from Push Pop Press on Vimeo.

Gore’s App Mission

The former vice president’s production company Melcher Media approached Matas in September 2009 to create an app version of Our Choice. Gore wanted his book app to contain videos, diagrams and other forms of multimedia that would flex the iPhone’s muscle.

Matas sketched a concept and later discussed it with his former Apple co-worker Tsinteris. During his time at Apple, 25-year-old Matas focused on human-interface design for the iPad, iPhone and Mac OS X. And 30-year-old Tsinteris was deeply involved in developing the Maps app for the iPhone 3G, as well as some aspects of OS X.

After discussing the project, Matas and Tsinteris realized that in order to reproduce Gore’s book, they needed tools that didn’t exist yet.

“Kimon took a look at [the concept] and said that in order to build it we need to build a whole publishing platform,” Matas said.

And if you’re going to put that much effort into the tools, why stop after making just one book? The result of the project was Push Pop Press, a full-on publishing platform that the pair have been developing for about a year-and-a-half.

Gore’s book, which goes live in the App Store on Thursday morning, is in part a demonstration of the capabilities of Push Pop Press.

It’s a bit like walking through a digital museum. When you first launch the app, you see a cover of a 3-D animation of a spinning globe with the title superimposed over it. Tapping into the intro plays a video of Gore introducing the book’s topic.

From there, you swipe through a visual table of contents, and when you select a chapter, the chapter title appears on the top three quarters of the screen. A timeline at the bottom allows you to swipe through the pages. To start reading, you touch a page with two fingers to pop it open.

Diagrams embedded inside some of the chapters are interactive, inviting you to swipe the illustrations or even blow through the iPad’s microphone to move a windmill, for example.

Photos are geotagged, so when you select an image and tap on a globe icon, you can see a world map with a pin showing precisely where the photo was taken.

For the pair, geotagging was one of their favorite features to add, because at Apple, they worked together on integrating GPS in the Maps application for the iPhone 3G.

“It’s crazy how much context this brings to it,” Matas said about the geotagged photos in Gore’s book.

Every element inside Gore’s enhanced e-book is composed of native iOS toolkits and APIs (e.g., Core Animation, Core Text and Objective C) to make the experience extremely smooth and fast.

“This speed is something you can’t approach on a web browser,” Matas said.

After having already penetrated the UK’s e-book market last year, Amazon has now launched the German Kindle Store, bringing more than 650,000 titles to Europe’s most populous country. With today’s launch, the German Kindle Store instantly becomes Germany’s biggest e-bookstore, with some 25,000 German-language titles, thousands of free classics, and a similarly bountiful collection of independent newspapers and magazines. Customers will also be able to purchase the latest Kindle and Kindle 3G models directly from Amazon.de, along with a whole new suite of free, German-language Kindle apps for iPhone, iPad, PC and Android platforms. Germany’s writers and publishers, meanwhile, can use the Kindle Direct Publishing service to make their works instantly available on the new store, where, if they’re lucky, they may get to pocket some handsome royalties, as well. Full press release after the break.

Continue reading Amazon launches German Kindle Store with 650,000 titles and lots of long words

Amazon launches German Kindle Store with 650,000 titles and lots of long words originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 21 Apr 2011 08:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Kindle Store  | Email this | Comments