New Technology News

Thursday, January 30, 2014

Seamless and GrubHub have partnered with location-based check-in service Foursquare to help you retain your precious pear-shaped physique and avoid exerting even the bare minimum of effort: You can now order delivery from restaurants near you right from within the app, on the Android, iOS and web-based versions of the Foursquare app.

Over 20,000 restaurants that fall under the combined GrubHub Seamless umbrella are available to U.S. Foursquare users as a result of the new partnership, covering hundreds of cities across the country, according to Foursquare’s official blog post announcing the news.

foursquare-delivery Participating restaurants will show an “Order Delivery” menu item alongside links to view the restaurant on a map, call or see its menu in the in-app listings. The best way to find restaurants that feature this integration is to search for the type of cuisine followed by “delivery” within Foursquare, the company notes.

Previously, you could check-in to restaurants where you’d ordered food with Delivery.com, as Engadget notes, but you still had to go somewhere else to get the job done. Now, you can virtually go somewhere you never actually were, and also stuff your face with its consumables, all while only partly clothed. Nirvana, I am in you.

Photo courtesy flickr user Mark Turnauckas.

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Foursquare Can Now Satisfy Your Appetite At Home With Integrated Seamless And GrubHub Ordering

11:54 AM

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Seamless and GrubHub have partnered with location-based check-in service Foursquare to help you retain your precious pear-shaped physique an...

Screen Shot 2014-01-30 at 11.10.04 AM

Indie music? Pffft. Indie music is way too main stream, man. All the cool kids are into music that no one has ever heard.

Meet Forgotify. Forgotify tears through Spotify in search of songs with zero plays, playing only the songs that no one else has ever listened to.

Certainly, there can’t be many of those, right?

Wrong. According to data that Spotify released in October of last year, 80% of the 20-million-or-so songs on Spotify have been listened to at least once. That means 20% of the songs have not. That’s 4 million songs with zero plays.

Of course, there’s… probably a reason that most of these tracks have zero plays. Spotify isn’t necessarily known for setting the bar to entry very high, so a number of these tunes sound like amateur covers of a KidzBop cover that was, itself, based on a rough recollection of a song given by someone who’d heard it once, years ago. That is to say, most are not very good.

Some, though, are perfectly fine. When you find the (increasingly rare) gem, it’s like a teeny, tiny victory over the universe. You’ve found the signal drowning in the noise.

One crazy thought: when you listen to a song on Forgotify, it increases that song’s play count… meaning that, if this thing is working correctly, no one will ever hear it again. Each experience becomes ephemeral.

A crazier thought: Forgotify itself is, in a way, ephemeral. If the rate at which people are using Forgotify exceeds the rate at which Spotify adds new tracks, Forgotify is theoretically eating itself with each new listen.

You can find Forgotify here. If you actually want to listen to a track, you’ll have to be signed in to Spotify.

[Meanwhile, the radio in my room is playing "Royals" by Lorde for the 87th time this morning.]

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Forgotify Only Plays Spotify Songs That No One Has Ever Played Before

11:54 AM

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Indie music? Pffft. Indie music is way too main stream, man. All the cool kids are into music that no one has ever heard. Meet Forgotify...

Google on Monday announced that it had hacked together five simple games that take advantage of the unique features of Glass. The company presented a brief demo of the five-title mashup as Mini Games Glassware, and it encouraged Glass developers to offer feedback.Google emphasized that voice commands could minimize the time it would take a gamer to get into the action. The sensors in Google Glass were used to create a playground for an intuitive user experience, the company said.

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This Is Your Game on Glass

11:09 AM

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Google on Monday announced that it had hacked together five simple games that take advantage of the unique features of Glass. The company ...

In a blog post today, Betaworks CEO John Borthwick announced that Branch founder Josh Miller would be joining the technology studio as a part-time venture partner. There he will “be focused on working with seed-stage companies in New York,” according to Borthwick.

Miller, in case you forgot, is the guy who successfully “negged” Facebook. As founder of Branch Media, he had written a few critical words about Facebook before, you know, being acquired by Facebook. But he’s also widely regarded as a pretty awesome and thoughtful product guy, which is no doubt part of the appeal for Betaworks.

Betaworks, which bills itself as “a company of builders,” is a technology studio and investment firm that finds, builds, and invests in a wide range of interesting products. It’s home to products that include Digg, Instapaper, Dots, Bitly, and Chartbeat — some of which it acquired, some of which were built in-house.

Betaworks also makes investments in other companies in the New York ecosystem, which is how Borthwick and Miller came to know one another. Branch was one of the companies that Betaworks had invested in, and it even spent nine months working out of Betaworks.

We’ve reached out to Borthwick to find out more about how Miller will fit in with the team and what his role will be, and will update when we hear back.

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Branch Founder Josh Miller Joins Betaworks As Part-Time Venture Partner

10:53 AM

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In a blog post today, Betaworks CEO John Borthwick announced that Branch founder Josh Miller would be joining the technology studio as a pa...

Human is a slickly designed fitness tracking app that works without any hardware devices. You just launch the app, set it up and you’re all done. Launched in September, the app received its first major update.

“First and foremost, the update is a massive upgrade to our tracking system,” co-founder and CEO Renato Valdés Olmos told me. “Apart from improved accuracy and battery life, Human now also tracks indoor and stationary activity, as long as you have your phone on you.”

At heart, Human remains a passive iOS app designed to help you stay healthy. The goal is to move for 30 minutes every day, and to keep up with this simple habit. The company calls it the ‘Daily 30′. As it is extremely simple, keeping up with Human is easier than with competitive fitness systems.

After setting up the app, you can forget about it. Whenever you reach the goal, you get a push notification alerting you that you are staying healthy today — it’s as simple as that.

But there was a flaw. Until today, only outdoor activities were tracked. You could dance all night long without reaching the Daily 30. Now, Human tracks indoor activities and adds them to your Daily 30. You don’t need an iPhone 5S, as long as you have an iPhone 4S and up, you are good to go.

Other refinements came with the update as well. There are a few more stats now, you can see your streak and get badges. And of course, you can still tap on the big number to get more details about your activities. For example, as Human works with the phone’s GPS, you can even see where you ran last night.

While Human is much simpler than Fitbit and others, it all comes down to staying healthy — and it actually works. “The metric we’re really proud of however is qualitative,” Valdés Olmos said. “Humans move 40 percent more 6 weeks after downloading the app, a steady habit change.”

The next step for Human is to go beyond the Daily 30. You can reward users for some activities for example, and Human users should see that in future updates. As long as the emphasis remains on design and simplicity, the app will still be different enough to convince casual fitness app users.

Human 2.0

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Human Revamps Tracking System For Its Fitness Monitoring App

10:53 AM

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Human is a slickly designed fitness tracking app that works without any hardware devices. You just launch the app, set it up and you’re all...

Roaming is the worst, but a new plan from Canadian network operator Wind Mobile, which is one of the few carriers not a part of Canada’s big three telecommunications companies, is going to start offering subscribers an unlimited roaming plan beginning Monday, February 3rd for just $15 per month.

The roaming plan inconceivably comes with unlimited talk, text and data across the U.S. Rogers, one of the leading Canadian service providers, offers a paltry 500 MB of data, along with unlimited sent texts and 100 minutes for $80 to compare (and that’s the most you can get). Bell offers 500 MB for $50, with an extra $30 required for talk and text (so same as Rogers) and Telus offers 300 minutes and unlimited text, with only 300MB of data usage for $65.

It doesn’t take a comparative mathematician to figure out that Wind Mobile’s deal is a heck of a lot cheaper than anyone else’s. In fact, as a frequent U.S. traveler myself, I’m tempted: I generally pay at least that much, and usually a bit more picking up a prepaid sim card from a U.S. carrier when I pop over for a work trip. Of course, to make that work, you need to sign up for a Wind plan to begin with, which has its own limitations because of the network reach of the alternative carrier, and the wireless frequencies used by its network. Also, it’s worth keeping in mind that Wind’s main roaming partner in the U.S. is T-Mobile, and that it’ll provide either 2G or HSPA (3G) speeds for data. Also, just like Wind’s unlimited plan at home, the roaming one will be subject to throttling depending on usage.

Wind Mobile had to withdraw from Canada’s wireless spectrum auction earlier this month, after it essentially decided it couldn’t pony up table stakes to compete with the big boys. This new move should attract at least some switchers who were on the fence, especially among the frequent travellers, but overall the picture is still a bleak one for anyone trying to break the rule of the big three in Canada’s wireless industry.

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Canada’s Wind Mobile Offering Unlimited U.S. Talk, Text And Data Roaming For $15 Per Month

10:24 AM

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Roaming is the worst, but a new plan from Canadian network operator Wind Mobile , which is one of the few carriers not a part of Canada’s bi...

Flink Screenshots

Meet Flink a brand new mobile app that will become the perfect time waster for fashion enthusiasts. It’s a well-designed app to browse new looks on your favorite fashion blogs in a native app. The overall experience is very addictive.

When you first open the app, you can instantly follow a selection of some well-known fashion blogs. After that, it works a lot like Frontback and Mindie. You are immersed in the picture. It fills up the entire screen.

With one swipe, you get to see another look, and another, and another. Maybe you really like what this woman is wearing. So you can swipe right to see other pictures. With one tap, you can see where this dress or this handbag come from.

But contrarily to Frontback or Mindie, it isn’t a social app — it’s a content app. Flink has made a beautiful fashion blog reader for mobile, a sort of Flipboard for fashion.

You can like and share a look, but what’s interesting is how you can get lost in the app. Every now and then, a button appears saying “3 new looks available”, you just have to tap it and you will get brand new professional pictures.

And of course, you can spend countless of hours looking for new fashion bloggers and tweaking your list of bloggers to what you really want. When you like a look, it is saved in a separate tab, so you can always go back and find it later.

Comments are public and Flink could end up creating a community of passionate fashion curators.

What about copyright? Flink has reached out to dozens of popular fashion bloggers, and they were eager to see their content in the app, except a couple of people. Flink bets on fair use to show the pictures. With each post, there is a link to the actual blog post — it works a lot like an RSS reader or a read later service in the end. If a blogger complains, the team promises to remove its content from the app. This strategy worked well for Pinterest, and there is no reason that it won’t work again.