HP’s got plenty of products out there using their TouchSmart software, but now it’s finally hit their consumer-focused line of notebooks with the Pavilion dv6. It’s also part of a broader, metal makeover for the Pavilion line. More »
HpPavilion – HP 3000 – HP – Hardware – Hewlett-Packard
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The latest Windows Phone 7 ROM has already been unlocked and has plenty of cool new stuff to check out, including call history and notifications, dialer interfaces, and Office, which we caught a tantalizing glimpse of last week. More »
Microsoft Windows – Operating system – Microsoft – Windows – Windows 7
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Location, one of the hottest segments in mobile, is a key component not just in navigation apps but also social offerings such as Foursquare, Google Buzz and even Twitter. The nascent space still has plenty of wrinkles to iron out, of course, including thorny privacy concerns and the technical shortcomings of GPS and other positioning technologies. But even though some business models have yet to emerge, there’s plenty of opportunity in mobile location. And there will be for quite some time.
That’s one of the takeaways from our GigaOM Bunker Series event this week (watch the video here) that looked at some of the challenges and possibilities in mobile location. Unlike some other white-hot segments in high tech, location is a wide-open field with relatively few legitimate players, said GeoDelic’s Rahul Sonnad.
“There’s only a handful of quality location companies out there,” Sonnad said during a panel discussion on location business models. “This market is in a hyper-expansive, universe-type mode. I think even for newer people coming in, you’re going to get this massive new market and, if you have something that works properly, you can get traction.”
Here’s a look at several specific opportunities discussed at the event:
The App Revolution: As hot as location is now, it’s positioned to explode in the near term as new applications come to market and more users become willing to share their whereabouts via the handset. Foursquare, for instance, remains a forum for early adopters to advertise where they’re eating or what their favorite nightclubs are –- a pretty slim value proposition for most of us, to be sure. But as mobile social networks gain popularity, they enable users to instantly form communities based on location.
Augmented Reality: Augmented reality (AR) is currently a novelty but holds enormous promise as a way for users to access information about their surroundings with applications that use location information to deliver web-based content to end users. The emergence of AR will usher in a host of new applications and services, from local search offerings (which are already coming to market) to mobile games and other forms of entertainment.
Vertical Markets: Some vertical markets are fertile territory for location-based applications. Developers hoping to leverage location should consider building health and fitness apps that could combine location information with vital statistics, enabling users to track how their bodies respond to workout routines. Retailers, too, can leverage location not just to woo potential customers nearby but also to deliver sales information and other content to boost revenues and create customer stickiness.
Improving Accuracy & Specificity: Michael Liebhold, of the Institute for the Future, bemoaned the inability of GPS to pinpoint location close than 10-20 meters or to locate users indoors. That lack of precision can be partially mitigated by leveraging the positioning of other technologies (including cell networks and Wi-Fi), but more accurate positioning could open the door for a host of more targeted offerings. Other participants spoke of a lack of the kind of geodata that could be used both to identify specific places (such as GigaOM’s offices, which are on the fourth floor of the building) and to provide location-based histories (such as every important event that occurred at a specific address).
Other hurdles will surely emerge as location moves further into the mainstream and becomes a component of a wide variety of apps and services. But if 2010 is truly the year of location, as Om predicts, it will only provide a taste of what we’ll see in the coming years. And that means plenty of opportunity for developers and everyone else looking to tap the booming segment. Read my full analysis here.
Photo by Flickr user Rubin110.
Related Research Briefings & Analysis
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Match.com has sent a strongly worded letter — written by the company’s lawyer — to competitor Plenty of Fish, accusing the free dating service of making unsubstantiated claims about its traffic and number of users. The letter, which Plenty of Fish founder Markus Frind has posted on his blog, lists a series of almost a dozen claims that the site makes about how many dates its members have been on and how many people sign up every day (20,000 people, according to Plenty of Fish). Match.com’s lawyer Marshall Dye in the letter alleges that these claims “cannot be supported and are misleading and/or false.”
The letter from Match.com — which is owned by entertainment and media giant IAC — goes on to demand that Plenty of Fish “immediately cease and desist from making these false claims.” But then it takes a dramatic shift in tone, with the Match.com lawyer offering an olive branch to its largest competitor:
If your position is that these claims are substantiated, please promptly provide me with substantiation for each of these claims by return letter. If disclosing the substantiation data concerns you, Match.com is open to entering into a confidentiality agreement.
Judging by the tone of Frind’s response on his blog — not to mention the posting of the letter itself — there doesn’t seem to be much chance of such a friendly and confidential meeting. He notes that Match.com tried to launch its own free service called Down to Earth to compete directly with Plenty of Fish (which has always had a free service), but that it has since backed away from that attempt. Frind has also posted what he says are the comScore metrics for the top dating sites worldwide, which puts Plenty of Fish in the No. 1 spot with 1.2 million average daily visitors, almost twice Match.com’s average of 680,000.
As one commenter noted on the Plenty of Fish blog post, the letter from Match.com is very similar to one that Quicken sent to competitor Mint last year asking for proof of its claims. Could the letter to Plenty of Fish be a prelude to a marriage of some kind between the two sites? Match.com has been expanding recently, and acquired Singlesnet in February. Plenty of Fish, which Frind started in his Vancouver, British Columbia apartment and still runs with only a handful of people, is by far the company’s biggest competitor, and reportedly gets over a billion page views a month.
In an ironic twist at the end of his blog post about the Match.com letter — which refers to claims about how many users of the service eventually marry one another — the Plenty of Fish founder notes that he doesn’t have a lot of time to pay attention to his competitor’s threats because he’s tying the knot this weekend.
Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Why New Net Companies Must Shoulder More Responsibility
Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Mark Sebastian
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We had to temporarily take down the comments system because a certain post is setting our servers on fire, but there’s plenty of commenting to be done on our Facebook page. Head on over and join the party. [Facebook] More »
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Bluetooth controllers? Meh. Why reinvent the wheel when the tire just needs new treading?
Take the Motorola Droid. With its big ol’ physical QWERTY keyboard, it has plenty of buttons for gaming (read: playing ROMs) — it’s just that they’re not very conveniently placed. Enter the GameGripper, a snap-on accessory that converts your Droid’s old, boring keyboard into a full fashioned game pad.
Here’s whats going on: You slip the GameGripper over your Droid’s keyboard, and the buttons on the GameGripper line up with those below it. It’s only going to work for those games where key mapping can be redefined — but given that key mapping support is pretty much standard for emulators (which I’d imagine will be the most popular use case), that shouldn’t be an issue for most.
The GameGripper will set you back $15 bucks (plus $5 for shipping) — which, given that it appears to be a fairly independent operation (read: Guy. Garage. Go!), seems plenty reasonable. Not touting a Droid? Don’t sweat it. Plans are in the works to make GameGrippers for the BlackBerry Bold, Moto Devour, and Palm Pixi, and they’re open to other devices if enough people request it.
Check out the GameGripper here.
[Thanks Hyrum! Good luck!]
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I’ve got plenty of questions about this report (like, who the hell is Apple Daily?), but a lot of the pieces fit: rumor has it that Core i5 and i7 MacBooks are coming this month. This would be great news, for people who want MacBooks! Alternately, this would be sad news, for all us morons who bought a MacBook after the last refresh. They’re also claiming across-the-board HDD upgrades (up to 640GB) and SSD options (up to 248GB), with 8-hour battery life for all models. Why hasn’t it happened sooner? Manufacturing delay for 32nm Arrandale parts! Which kinda makes sense, but didn’t seem to stop a plethora of other i5/i7 notebooks from launching in the meantime. More »
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We had plenty of complaints about the QWERTY remote for the TiVo Premiere, but it turns out that any ol’ USB and “most standard IR or RF HID-compliant wireless keyboards” will work with the device. Dave Zatz proves it: More »
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