Mobile

With almost a million apps now available worldwide, a new project has begun to measure the app economy in Europe and help guide stakeholders towards success. The ‘Eurapp’ project was launched by the European Commission, and is being run by the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at NUI Galway in conjunction with leading tech industry analyst firm GigaOM Research. The project kicks off with a working workshop in Brussels on 14 June, “Shape the Future App Economy of Europe”, featuring leaders from the app industry.

An Irish Government minister has recently announced that every home in the country will have to pay a TV license fee regardless of whether they have a TV or not. He is quoted as saying;

“In short, everyone benefits from the availability of these services, regardless of how content is accessed or relayed to the public and, therefore, it is my view that the cost should be borne by society as a whole.”

There are two implied premises to his argument: The first is, that people are watching more programming on their mobile devices or computers to the extent that the relationship between broadcaster and viewer has changed in some fundamental way.

Second, that watching television is not only beneficial in itself but is of benefit to society as a whole.

Ted Vickey (on right) with John Breslin and researchers from NUI Galway.

Can your mobile phone help you get fit? A researcher at the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUI Galway) and former White House fitness expert will pose this question at the 5th Annual Medicine 2.0 Congress which opens in Harvard Medical School, Boston, tomorrow.

Image adapted from Wikipedia.

Seamus Blackley, co-creator of the Xbox, has a theory. The new arcade is the tablet, the mobile, the app-powered touchscreen device of today. What we are seeing today in games apps has all happened before: we just need to look back to the arcade games boom of the early 1980s, in particular their adoption by a widespread demographic. But we also have to learn from the arcade games crash and make sure that the same doesn't happen to the games apps ecosystem.

Citizen sensing applications range from public health to disaster relief.

In 1999, before the advent of Foursquare, mobile Twitter clients or sensor-enabled phones, a somewhat prescient Neil Gross in Bloomberg Business Week said: "In the next century, planet earth will don an electronic skin. It will use the Internet as a scaffold to support and transmit its sensations." A new area of research called "citizen sensing" has emerged since then that aims to derive collective knowledge from the actions and reactions of individuals armed with internet-enabled mobile devices.

As mobile phones grow smarter every day, the consequences of losing them become more severe. As well as friends’ and contacts’ phone numbers and personal text messages, phones can contain potentially sensitive emails, access to online banking as well as photographs which may not be easily replaced.

Recent research speculates that based on current trends over 44 billion apps will be downloaded in the next five years

Report by Ina O'Murchu.

NB: Some wind noise in parts.

The recent proliferation of affordable and easy-to-use smart phones has resulted in many children having unlimited access to the Internet and potential exposure to unsuitable content which is beyond the reach of any parental supervision.

Mobileminder is a product from Dublin-based start up Associate Mobile which allows parents to monitor their children’s mobile-phone activity, and to also utilise their phone’s technology to ensure their safety. The product is currently available for Android smart phones.

For more background to this story you can read this article: "iPhone: Tracking or Logging?"

With the imminent arrival of iPad 2 into our stores, the team here at Technology Voice began discussing what it is about the iPad that has made it such a success. Despite its perceived flaws (namely the lack of Adobe Flash or a USB port), Apple reports that it sold 7.33 million iPads in the last 3 months of 2010. Why?

In answering this question, the room was divided between those who regard it as merely a scaled up iPod Touch and those who view it as a can’t-live-without device. With this divergence in mind, we decided to investigate how iPad users interact with the tablet and what its true benefits are.

One of the main benefits appears to be the simple user interface which is quick to power up and allows instant access to items including emails, news, pictures or Facebook.