While many techies aren’t sports fans (and vice versa), lots of us are enthusiasts of both ones and zeros and X’s and O’s. And for those who are into both football and geekery, tomorrow is kind of like the Super Bowl. Well, technically speaking, I guess tomorrow is like the Super Bowl for everyone. Anyhoo. For everyone looking for some tech to go with their gridiron, there are lots of options. First of all, NBC is streaming the Super Bowl live over the Internet, for those who can’t make it to a television or want a second screen to enjoy even more of the action. ESPN president John Skipper said at D: Dive Into Media that he thinks giving away the game for free is a bad idea, but NBC paid for the rights, so they get to do what ever they want. Verizon is also broadcasting the game live to the smallest of screens via its NFL Mobile service. Second, there are a ton of Super Bowl apps, including the official ones for both iPhone and Android, as well as a game program. Peanuts are still not downloadable, but content-tagging app Shazam is offering a variety of commercial tie-ins. Check here for even more game-day apps. And of course, the big game will be the talk of Twitter, to be sure. Lastly, as a special treat, AllThingsD will be offering live coverage of the game, the commercials and the social-media hoopla. We had so much fun in January with Footballmer, our liveblog mash-up of Steve Ballmer’s final CES keynote and the BCS championship, that we decided to do it again. This time, though, I’ll actually get to watch the game, rather than having Ballmer duty. I’ll be commenting on the game, the commercials, the tech and the Twitter commentary. Check Read More
In case you missed it, NBC has announced that the Super Bowl will be livestreamed on the Web, because, as my AllThingsD colleague Peter Kafka points out, the network expects you to watch it on TV. NFL.com will also carry NBC’s livestream, as will NFL Mobile through Verizon Wireless. But for those more interested in the postgame highlights and analysis, the inaugural Super Bowl XLVI app from NFL Magazine might do the trick. The tablet app is meant to be more commemorative than anything else — think of those dust-gathering magazines you collect each year — and it won’t stream the game live. The app will offer image-rich season recaps for both teams, player highlight reels, polls and Super Bowl history. (No word on whether it includes a slide show of Tom Brady’s hairstyles throughout the years.) After the game, the app will be updated with 15 to 20 minutes of highlight clips, breakdowns of key plays, interviews with players, NFL.com articles on the game and 360-degree photos. The video available on the app during and after the game will be “clean” game highlights from NFL Network. Later on, extended highlights from NFL Films, with NBC logos and graphics, will be made available through the app. The app, which is available on the iPad and on Android tablets, is selling at a pregame discount of $2.99 — which is less than half of the postgame price. “We’ve seen a lot of fan demand for this,” said Jeff Berman, general manager of NFL Digital Media. “We plan to keep the app fresh for several weeks as we introduce new content, and ultimately provide a kind of lifetime digital keepsake.” Nielsen data shows that 70 percent of tablet owners and 68 percent of smartphone owners use their devices while watching TV, and I’m Read More
Health-and-fitness-tracking devices have become all the rage lately. But one fitness-tech CEO dares to say many of them aren’t much more than glorified accelerometers, adding a note of skepticism to the excitement surrounding these gadgets. Andy Smith, CEO of IAC-owned DailyBurn, says that the benefit of fitness-tracking tools goes away after the first few weeks, and users ultimately fall into the same activity — or inactivity — patterns as before. “They do help a small subset of people,” Smith said. “You find that there are type-A personalities that like to track everything, and that’s great. For others, it might give them a little jump start. But the value proposition of those devices after the first few weeks goes way down.” DailyBurn is a fitness-data-tracking company that is now focusing on fitness content. The company pivoted partly because data-tracking wasn’t all that effective, Smith said. Last week, Nike introduced a $150 lightweight wristband with a tri-axis accelerometer for gauging activity levels; earlier this week, Fitbit — maker of the popular Fitbit device — announced that it had raised $12 million in Series C funding to continue making fitness products. Nike’s FuelBand just became available for preorder, so it’s too early to tell how enthusiastic consumers are about that particular device. And while it’s unclear how many Fitbit units have sold since it hit the market in 2009, the newer Fitbit Ultra is listed as one of the top 50 products in the health-and-fitness section on Amazon.com. Another wearable fitness device, the Jawbone UP, is currently in production limbo as the company deals with technical and hardware issues, but the wristband was initially received with excitement from some consumers. “I feel like these are not quite a gimmick, but are close to it,” Smith told AllThingsD. “You get people to spend $100 to Read More
Does your mobile address book need an overhaul? Xobni’s Smartr Contacts app became available on the iPhone today, a platform the company had previously neglected while it launched on Outlook, Gmail, Android and BlackBerry. Smartr Contacts aggregates and maintains email and phone information, conversation history and social media presences for each contact. It orders people by relevance, rather than the alphabet. Read More
Online Doggy sets up kennel-cam systems at pet-boarding facilities across the country, allowing dog owners to view real-time streaming videos from the pet-care playground. And the Colorado-based company took helicopter pet-parenting a step further this year, creating ODoggy apps for iPhone and Android. “It was something we had to do,” Online Doggy owner Blake Walliser said of the new apps, which offer streams from more than 400 pet-care providers in the U.S. The company found that the customers who were most enthusiastic about video streaming were also more likely to be tethered to their smartphones than their laptops. “Mobile is built into our demographic,” he said. Round-the-clock surveillance, streamed right to your phone — it’s apparently a dream come true for the severely paranoid, or those who feel naked without a dog in their purse. But there are relatively few of those types in Walliser’s demographic. Most viewers are not necessarily pet-owners checking in on their canine’s caregivers — many are commuters who access the site out of boredom, curiosity or for a spot of amusement. Patricia Minger, a pharmacy technician who boards her Icelandic sheepdog five days a week at Happy Hound in Oakland, said she visits the site “at least once a day, probably more like twice or three times a day,” to check up on her dog, Gimli. She also uses the iPhone app when she’s out and about. “I like the security of knowing that this is all what it seems to be — that I can check in on him and there’s nothing hidden,” Minger said. The ODoggy apps are free to download, but subscriptions to each facility’s video stream costs $1.99 a month or $4.99 a year. The iPhone app, released in April, currently has about 40,000 subscribers. The Android app came out in August, Read More
You watch a lot of Web video, and you will watch a lot more. Who will serve as your TV Guide? There are a whole lot of people who want to be in that game, and Blair Harrison is one of them. His Frequency, which launched last year, has gone through an overhaul, but its gist remains the same: It wants to let you pick and choose feeds of stuff you know you like. It also wants to show you stuff your friends like, too, by incorporating cues from your social networks. Harrison, who made his money and reputation building iFilm and selling it to Viacom during the beginning of the Web 1.0 boom, raised $3 million last year, and since then has rounded up another $1 million. More important, his new Web site is slicker, and now features a dashboard that you can program with feeds you select, along with ones that use suggestions from Facebook, Twitter et al. And the service now offers an iPad version, as well as one that will be featured on some Samsung TVs. Here’s what it should look like on the big screen: Harrison’s challenges also remain the same: He needs to convince people that they should use a Web video hub, period. Facebook already does a great job of surfacing cool videos my friends think I should see (thanks for the Wilco clip, everyone), and Twitter is getting better at it. And if I am inclined to use a Web video hub, chances are I’m already doing it via Google, at YouTube. Google is particularly interesting for Harrison, since it’s both competition and de facto partner. YouTube is in the process of dividing itself up into niche channels that will work particularly well with Frequency’s new scheme — if you like the indie music Read More
Despite the fact that I live and work near Times Square, and that around a million people gather annually in the heart of New York City to ring in the New Year, I’ve never been inspired to stand outside till midnight to watch the ball drop in person. Now — whether you can’t make it to Times Square or just don’t want to — there’s an app for that. (Obviously!) First introduced last year, the Times Square Official New Year’s Eve Ball App — 2012 shows a live stream of the Times Square Ball atop One Times Square, as well as video content leading up to and during the event. I’m told there will also be a live stream of Lady Gaga flicking the switch with Mayor Mike Bloomberg, to get the ball rolling, literally, at 11:59 pm ET. With the app, users can share photos of themselves via Facebook and Twitter. They can also vote on photos — the photos with the most “likes” will be showcased on the giant Toshiba sign in Times Square that night (so if you’re at home partying in your pajamas and snapping self-portraits, you might want to think twice before sending your photos through the app). The free app runs on iOS and Android devices, and was created by the Times Square Alliance and Countdown Entertainment, along with Toshiba and Livestream. And because few things are ever truly free, ads will run at the bottom of the app interface. Last year’s inaugural Times Square New Year’s Eve app was downloaded 174,000 times by users in 163 countries, during a two-week period. An estimated one billion people worldwide watch the ball drop on television each year. And 30,000 New Year’s Eve kiss photos were sent through last year’s version of the app. Unless you’re certain Read More
When the early social search engine Wowd started to wind down last year, its assets were divided among three parties: Facebook, which “acqhired” seven of its engineers and licensed its technology; Jildy, a new start-up created by a Wowd co-founder and backed by Wowd’s venture capitalists, that also licensed the technology; and a “large public company” that bought the patents outright. Public records now show the buyer was Google. So yes, indeed, there is a body of social search intellectual property — around things like user-driven ranking of Web pages and a distributed file system — that three companies have the rights to use: Google, Facebook and the virtually unknown start-up Jildy. Last week Jildy released its very first product: An iPhone app for clustering and sorting Facebook friends and status updates. The Jildy interface is rudimentary and so far only includes Facebook data, but it already provides some interesting tools to those who want to slice and dice their social streams. Jildy gives users tools to monitor four types of lists: Then, Jildy tries to find out the top five to seven people or topics within each of those lists, so a user can quickly dive in and see what’s happened recently. In the next couple of weeks, Jildy plans to add notifications. So for instance, said Jildy’s Mark Drummond (the co-founder and former CEO of Wowd), a user could be alerted every time a friend mentions a term like “skiing,” “snowboarding” or “Tahoe,” the better to facilitate serendipitous meet-ups on the slopes. Other upcoming additions should include Twitter and LinkedIn data. Drummond said he also thinks it’s important to help users edit their friend lists to stay updated as social circles change. On a larger note, the patent wars that plague the mobile device industry haven’t crept into social Read More
Ho ho ho. The latest and greatest in silly phone apps have arrived just in time for the holidays. This one is probably the most fun: Take short videos and overlay explosions and other disastrous effects with the new Action Movie FX app for iOS from J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot Interactive. Action Movie FX is missing a few features I’d like, such as sharing on Twitter and YouTube, and also the ability to add effects on videos taken outside the app. But it’s free (extra effects like a tornado and an airstrike cost $0.99 for a pack of two) and destructive, and only slightly likely to bring out the sociopathic tendencies in your little ones. Next, Jimmy Fallon will wake you up with a variety of silly alarms, each featuring a wacky ringtone and the voice of the late night host cracking jokes told directly to you. Keep in mind, it’s Jimmy Fallon, so the jokes are more goofy and cute than funny — but they’re better than the awful default iPhone alarm clock sounds. Jimmy Fallon’s Wake Up Call is only for iOS and costs $0.99. The Onion also wants to be of service. The comedy gods created a gimmick app called “Onion Magic Answer Ball” that responds to shaking with informative answers like “No, and stop tweeting about it,” “You’re one stabbing away from all that you desire” and “You will continue to make everyone miserable for many years.” A good party trick, I suppose, but it also costs $0.99 and is only for iOS. What’s a holiday app list without a mention of NORAD Santa? Better grab it quick before Mr. Claus makes the full global circuit. Available for both Android and iOS. Lastly, and this requires no other device than whatever you’re using to read this post: Watch Read More
When Apple launched its Newsstand feature in iTunes this fall, the idea was that giving newspaper and magazine publishers their own dedicated shelf space – for those who signed on to Apple’s subscription program – would boost sales. And perhaps it has. After the feature launched in October, there were a flurry of press releases and reports about increases in downloads and activity, though every report I saw listed percentage increases, not actual numbers. But here are some from Bonnier’s Popular Science mag app, in convenient chart form. The jump you see in the second week of October corresponds with the launch of Newsstand: The chart comes to us courtesy of Mag+, Bonnier’s tablet publishing software business. And as Mag+ CEO Staffan Ekholm points out, the really promising indicator for Pop Sci isn’t the one-week sales leap of 13 percent — it’s that the the magazine’s growth picked up after that week, with more velocity. It’s very easy to caveat this report – the most obvious thing to point out is that Pop Sci is a title that resonates particularly well with the iTunes market. But it’s still nice to see actual sales data, no matter how anecdotal. The next thing I’d love to see, though I’m not sure how easy it will be to suss out, is how often readers return to Newsstand apps. In my personal experience, I find that I end up visiting the New York Times’ app much less frequently now that it’s stored in the Newsstand. I wish I could pull it out on its own, so it could sit next to stuff I use all the time, like Instapaper and Twitter. If anyone wants to offer up usage stats, you’ve got an open platform here. Read More
