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- Fwix Brings Hyperlocal News Feed To The iPad
- With Or Without Yahoo, An iPhone App For Upcoming Made It To The App Store
- Amazon’s Second iPad App: IMDb
- Footage Of Crysis Running On The iPad
- The Smartphone: A Shackle Once More
- Sentiment Is Split On The iPad: People Either Love It, Or Hate Others For Not Shutting Up About It
- Help Key: Everything You Need to Know About the iPad
| Fwix Brings Hyperlocal News Feed To The iPad Posted: 04 Apr 2010 08:13 AM PDT
Fwix aggregates news articles and blog posts that are relevant to a certain region (the site now features support for over 80 cities in the United States and Canada). To do this, the Fwix team selects news sources and blogs that it thinks are related to each city, and also uses automated algorithms to determine when other content might also be relevant. Fwix has also recently tweaked its algorithm and offerings to include “nearby” local content features. So content on Fwix displays relationships between both topics and nearby location. For example, after reading a story about a robbery that took place in the Mission district of San Francisco, you’ll be able to find any other crime and or stories about the Mission neighborhood. The app aims to simulate reading your local newspaper. Fwix’s app allows you to view news stories in a map format, showing you the exact geographic location of news. You can access news by your location and then filter stories by subject (i.e. sports, arts, politics, crime). And you can share all content on Facebook, Twitter or via email. While the app itself could be useful for finding local news, Fwix’s realtime API is being actively used to incorporate hyperlocal news streams into content. For example, Fwix recently struck a deal with The New York Times to license its feed to the publishing company’s 15 regional news papers.      
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| With Or Without Yahoo, An iPhone App For Upcoming Made It To The App Store Posted: 04 Apr 2010 06:05 AM PDT
Enter developer Nik Fletcher, who has spent about a year developing one dubbed Happening to “scratch his own itch”. Version 1.2 is available in the App Store right now (iTunes link). It’s essentially the Upcoming app Yahoo should have built – and at the very least they should have made it easier for the man to develop it for them. With the tagline ‘Nearby Events in your Pocket’, it’s easy to guess what the app is all about: it accesses the wide range of events listed on Upcoming, and lets you look up events nearby based on your location or simply by searching the database. Once you authorize the app to access your personal Upcoming settings (which took an awfully long time in my experience), you can also use your iPhone or iPod touch to browse your saved events, RSVP to them in-app, see what your friends are planning to attend and more. The app costs $1.99 in the U.S. App Store – we should note Yahoo offers a mobile-optimized website for Upcoming too. Fletcher also told me an incredible story about his dealings with Yahoo to get the app cleared and live. Rather than recount the story, here’s his version of the facts:
Makes me wonder how Yahoo is going to act if the app becomes a major hit. If at all. (Full disclosure: I’m a partner in a company called Oxynade, which has developed a similar solution for looking up nearby events from your iPhone (iTunes link), albeit mostly for events going on in Europe – the majority of events listed on Yahoo’s Upcoming are in the United States or the UK. You might want to give both a whirl.)      
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| Amazon’s Second iPad App: IMDb Posted: 04 Apr 2010 04:37 AM PDT
With all the talk about Google and Amazon versus Apple, both Internet companies have been quick to release custom applications for the latter’s freshly launched iPad device. Amazon.com had already introduced its Kindle app for iPad, and over the weekend added a second one to the stable: an IMDb (Internet Movie Database) app (iTunes link). The Amazon.com subsidiary, which offers a ton of information on movies, TV and celebrities, has actually not released an entirely new app but simply altered its iPhone app to optimize the experience for the bigger screen. According to the company, the IMDb Movies & TV App for iPad lets customers access more than 1.5 million movie and TV titles with information on 3.2 million celebrities, actors, actresses, directors and crew members. Users can also use the app to watch movie trailers in HD, find localized movie showtimes in the United States, browse photo galleries and shop for DVD and Blu-ray releases. The app is free of charge – it hasn’t garnered any reviews on iTunes so far. IMDb’s website welcomes over 57 million unique visitors per month, although it looks and feels incredibly old school to me. No doubt, iPad owners with even the slightest interest in movies, TV or celebrities are going to want this app. Be sure to check out our complete list of the best iPad apps at launch.      
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| Footage Of Crysis Running On The iPad Posted: 03 Apr 2010 08:26 PM PDT
No, Apple hasn’t secretly packed a state-of-the-art desktop graphics card into the groundbreaking device. We’re told the game is running on OTOY, a service that uses extremely fast computers in the cloud to handle the game’s graphics rendering and then streams the output to your computer via the web (which means your computer, or in this case, iPad, needs a relatively small amount of processing power to run the game).
In some senses, this isn’t terribly novel — last summer, we posted a video showcasing Crysis and Grand Theft Auto 4 running on a Samsung Omnia, and OTOY competitor OnLive has shown similar demos in the past. But games running on those small form factors have always seemed like impractical tech demos. This iPad footage, on the other hand, shows that the device has plenty of screen real estate to make gaming feasible. That said, there are still many questions about this cloud-based gaming model. We’ve reached out to OTOY for more details (and hopefully more footage).      
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| The Smartphone: A Shackle Once More Posted: 03 Apr 2010 12:46 PM PDT
Why is this? It’s actually pretty simple: once a tool reaches a certain level of integration with the social and communication norms of a person, it receives the same level of cognitive consideration as, say, speech. Do you wonder whether you should end a text message with an exclamation mark, a period, or nothing at all? This is because texting and email are approaching the same level of integration with our daily lives as the speech and gestures we’ve been using for millennia.      
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| Sentiment Is Split On The iPad: People Either Love It, Or Hate Others For Not Shutting Up About It Posted: 03 Apr 2010 11:57 AM PDT
Now that the iPad is here, and everyone who waited in line has one in their hands, the opinions are coming in from actual consumers and everyone else. All of this iPad mania is splitting people into two even camps: either you are one of the few who is lovingly stroking one in your hands right now (or wish you were), or you don’t get what the fuss is all about and just want to stop hearing about the stupid iPad. If sentiment on Twitter is any guide, people Tweeting about the iPad either love it or hate it. And the haters are a slightly larger group at 51 percent. TweetFeel is showing 59 percent positive Tweets rights now. Most of the positive Tweets are along the lines of “Man, this iPad is sweet!” or wishing they had got one today. The negative ones are more like this one:
Or telling everyone to shut up about it:
Or this one:
The iPad is so stupid, apparently, the guy had to make a comic about it. Oh well, love it or hate it, everyone’s still searching for information about the iPad it seems (it is also a trending search term on Google).
     
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| Help Key: Everything You Need to Know About the iPad Posted: 03 Apr 2010 11:08 AM PDT  When will I be able to get one? If you hit the stores, I suspect your local Apple store may have some in stock. This isn't iPhone level hysteria. If you order one now on-line, though, you won't get one via UPS until April 12. If I go today, will I still be able to get one? Call first, but I doubt they're totally sold out everywhere. WiFi/3G or WiFi-only? I'd say 3G, but that's just me. I'd love to be able to use this at press events without WiFi. Your mileage and use case will vary. Can I jailbreak it? Not yet, but GeoHot has been working on a method that may soon work.
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Earlier this evening, as early adopters across the country started getting acquainted with their iPads, a very interesting (albeit short) video landed in our inbox: Crysis running on the just-released device. We’ve embedded the video below.
Here’s a phrase many of you will remember, probably from the late 1990s: “Yeah, I’d get a cell phone, but I don’t want to be on, like, an electronic leash, you know?” People had land lines, pagers, car phones — the pocketable mobile phone was still a luxury and, to some, an unwanted responsibility. Over the next 10 years or so, the mobile phone gradually reached such high levels of market penetration that it’s quite difficult to find anybody without one. It is simply too practical and affordable to refrain from at this point. However, in the last few years, as smartphones and texting have become the default mode of communication for many people, the tone has changed again; the electronic leash is returning.
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