Starbucks are known as being one of the huge retail success stories, you can scarcely look round and not find one within a 100 yards of you.

They also have an app.  The Starbucks app is both simple and functional. Starbucks have stayed away from the temptation to pack it full of features and instead it does 3 things really well:

Loyalty

Every time you buy a coffee, you get a star added to your cup.  Starbucks have used the gravity sensor in the phone to allow you to roll the stars around your screen. An experience that is quite hypnotic and quite pretty.  

Payment

They are also one of the first companies to give mobile payments a go through their app. The famous Starbucks cards have gone digital.  Using specially mobile friendly  scanners at their cashdesks,  they allow you to scan a special barcode on your phone which deducts the money from your mobile wallet.  You can also top up the payments here too.  

Store Locator

The need for a Starbucks store locator for most people is irrelevant as you just close your eyes and turn around.  Where this store locator excels is that it allows you to see not only where the nearest Starbucks is, but whether its open too.  Brilliant! 

By keeping things simple, Starbucks have managed to make their app the fastest way to order your coffee and at the same time kept it simple.  I think this is why its one of my now favourite apps.   Now if they can only do something about the queues…..

You can get hold of the Starbucks app from the Play Store.

Facebook held their largest ever Facebook mobile conference in the world in London today with over 400 mobile developers in place to hear the latest from the social network.  Facebook said that the event  confirmed London and Europe are at the heart of their long term mobile plans for their platform.

1. Facebook as gone though a massive  transformation in the last few years.   Last year Facebook announced it was going to be a mobile company and its now been nearly a year since Facebook launched their next generation mobile native apps last Summer, which have skyrocketed their ratings and engagement levels on mobile.
2. Re-training literally hundreds of developers and re-tooling to refocus a business the size of Facebook  was no simple challenge.  They needed to put hundreds of developers through native development training, rethink strategies and in some cases create brand new tools to deliver their mobile apps.

Europe and London are big for Facebook in stats

1. Simon Cross, UK Developer Relations with Facebook was keen to share some staggering stats about Facebook in Europe:
2. Europe has more developers integrating Facebook in their products than North America.
3. London has the 2nd largest number of developers ( outside of San Francisco ) who are implementing Facebook in their apps and web sites.
4. Facebook’s London office is the only engineering hub outside of the USA.
5. The new Open Graph Search API, one of the cornerstones of the Facebook platform,   is going to be led and built out of their London office by a team led  by Lars Rasmussen.

Facebook the social layer across devices

Facebook’s key message behind the conference was that not matter what technology or device people use to connect,   Facebook wants to be the social layer that connects them all.   Social is not going to be social by design, its going to be assumed by users to be included by default.

Rise of the mobile only customer

Facebook have over 1.1 billion users daily active users of which 751 million are on mobile.  There are also a lot of users who are mobile only users and have never used a desktop.  (189 Million users to be exact which is up from 83 million  just a year ago). James Pearce (Facebook  Head of Developer Relations ) believes that getting it right for for these mobile only users is key to capturing the “next billion” users of Facebook.

Facebook’s Developer Community Focus

Despite being a large company it’s really heartening to see that they are maintaining their developer focus.  The changes in tooling that they needed to start building mobile apps have been open sourced eg XcTool, Buck for Android.  A full list of their open sourced products are here

Facebook see their key selling point as being able to help developers to reach audiences and create richer apps that will catapult up the Native App store charts.  Large companies like Rovio and apps like Candy Crush, Soundcloud, Deezer, Spotify, and  Zeebox were here at the event to inspire developers as to what success looks like on Facebook.
Currently Facebook is driving over 263 Million monthly referrals as new installs into the google play store.  With over 71% of Android apps in top 100 incorporate Facebook, its clearly becoming the weapon of choice.    With their acquisition of  Parse.com a sign of where they are going to make it easier for developers.

I am sure plenty of us are looking forward to helping the next billion users get great mobile, social experiences and be the next on the list to have a million selling app.

If you want to find out more – make sure you head over to Facebook developers portal

Check out the Vyclone of the event:

As the days count down until the next Android iteration releases, Key Lime Pie, it’s interesting and perhaps heartening to note the relative lack of rumours, leaks and conjecture surrounding the release.

It’s not even confirmed when the new Android OS will be rolled out. There were rumours that Google will launch their next Android 5.0 at Google I/O however it now seems more likely that it will be version 4.3 (aka Jelly Bean) .  Android 5.0 could be a few more months away.

The smart money is that Google will drop some hints as to what’s coming up in Key Lime Pie  during Google I/O on 15-17 May – where the search giant unveiled Jelly Bean last time out.  

But what new features should be on Key Lime Pie? For a lot of bloggers in the community, the list is refreshingly small:

Unified Messaging-  Rumours of a remade Google talk app which has been dubbed Google Babel hitting overdrive, especially given a recent screenshot,  which features the word Babel.  Better messaging, and translation will likely be in there.  I personally would be delighted if they just let me backup my sms to my cloud account.

Battery life – a new colour scheme migh be coming.   Using a lot more of the famous “card Interface” made popular by Google Now.  Higher resolution and cleaner design with larger images and content playing a large part of the os much like seen on the HTC One blinkfeed. 

But what will the new Key Lime pie mean for the apps business?.

Hopefully more users, less fragmentation and a lot more powerful handsets. 

I will be going along to attend Droid World conference at Apps World on 22-23 October 2013 in London, featuring the now famous Android man, and will look at Key Lime Pie extensively, examining its important features and how the OS will help app development.

Fragmentation continues to be the name of the game, with latest Google stats showing that two in five active Android devices run on Gingerbread, 30% operate on Ice Cream Sandwich and a quarter run on Jelly Bean.

With Key Lime Pie weighing into the mix by the end of Q2 2013, it’ll become more difficult to stay ahead of the pack.

I am looking forward to  Droid World; if you want to go along,  register for free here.

For those of you interested in going to hackathons, please join our meetup.com group: UK Hackathons and Jams.

Yahoo was one of the first companies to embrace hackathons as an innovation mechanism. They believe they are so valuable that they already run them both internally and externally at events like #yahoohack.  The last time they ran the event there was a lighting strike on the building.  This year they have robots, sweet carts, games and a lot of tech training talks.

OpenSource and tools

Like Android, Yahoo really focuses on the power of open source to build their products.      They have a huge suite of developer tools that they have shared to the community to use.  Built for scalability and for speed, they are really powerful and are supported by Yahoo.

The main tools that they showed off today are:

YUI – the visual frame framework that Yahoo use

BOSS- Build your own Search service!

Mojito- Part of Yahoo Cocktails, helps you build high performance apps using Node.js

YQL- Yahoo Query language for querying the web as though its a database

You can find out about these tools by visiting the Yahoo Developer Network

Other Companies too

Its not just Yahoo that’s showing off their developer tools, there are others like

BBC Labs- showing off their cool new tools

Telefonica Digital – showing off the work they are doing with Mozilla on the Firefox OS

Twilio- Showing off their SMS and telephone api changes.

Looking forward to seeing what wonderful hacks go on to hit the market off the back of this.

If you are looking to find out more about Yahoo Developer Tools – head over to the Yahoo Developer Zone:

I was taking a moment to reflect on how much change we have gone through over the past few years in my lifetime.  This evolution has been even more  profound than that of man through the ages, from the grunting Neanderthal to the gawky Sheldon from the TV show, the Big Bang Theory. Since their first notable forays into the public realm, mobile phones have done an awful lot of growing up, and even more shrinking down.

From the addictive bliss that was Snake. to the magic of 3G and now to the rehab inducing Candy Crush Saga join us in the looking at the family tree of your mobile phone.

The Brick Age (1970s)

Motorola chief ‘John F. Mitchell’ was the first pioneer in mobile, spurring on his colleagues to create the unwieldy ‘Brick’ model. You could have robbed a bank with this incarnation, but more likely by smashing it through the front window
and threatening to use it club staff.

The Wall Street Whopper (1980s):

Ahh the 80s…an era that gave us legwarmers, massive glasses and of course the ‘yuppie’ and a wrinkle-free Michael Douglas.  Everything was larger in the 80’s : electro pop, hairstyles and of course mobile phones proved to be
no exception to the rule. The phone to epitomise this era was much akin to the original ‘Brick’.
Launched 1983 by Dynatac, it found a niche with customers in spite of whopping 10 hour charge time.

The First Finnish Age (1990s):

Finnish company Radiolinja totally changed the game with the early
nineties launch of its second generation mobile technology. A little Scandinavian design flair went a long way to turning mobiles from hulking lumps to the sexy pieces of kit we use to organise our lives.

The Text Revolution (Late 1990s/Early 2000s):

The world changed forever over the turn of the Millennium, as young peeps started to SMS each other.    No longer were we using mobiles to communicate about business deals. We were using them to chat about the latest Spice Girls song, to share jokes, gossip and  to socialise. Phones were global and must haves!

The Diet Age (Mid 2000s):

The brilliant scene where Derek Zoolander  answered an implausibly tiny mobile phone was a spirit of the 2000 shrink-a-thon.
Phones were fashion – perhaps some kind of Freudian over reaction to the earlier ‘Brick’ phase’.  Phones now came in any colour and if you couldn’t lose it down the back of your chair, we didn’t wanna know.

The Smarty Age (2010s):

O brave new world! With its super-smart mobile phone technology, and the welcome arrival of Android, the present day sees us with beautifully designed mobiles that can do practically everything short of doing the dishes. You can’t turn on a music channel without seeing Lady Gaga plugging these devices, every man and his dog have their own apps that let you do pretty much anything.  

We are doing more and more on mobile, I used my phone to pay for my coffee using the Starbucks app.( i am a coffee addict),  I  paid for by car parking using a carpark app, and can even play Springbok Casino slots whilst I was waiting for the bus. ( heck I am South African!) 

A kid’s christmas list is not complete without a toy that has an app or integrates with your trusty mobile.  Cool toys like the Sphero and AR Drone are taking over.   Its all very exciting. 

Where to next? – well that’s a subject of another post!

At a swanky nightclub in central London, yesterday O2 announced its brand new play in trying to win over customer’s hearts and minds in the form of O2 refresh.  A tariff that splits apart the air time and phone portion of the contract and essentially makes you always eligible for a phone upgrade. ( as long as you can afford it)

The Launch Event

O2 pulled out the stops for the event, holding it at one of London’s coolest venues, Circus, and pulling in the likes some amazingly talented acrobats and the supremely gifted magician Oliver B.

Oliver B wowed the crowds by doing several amazing jaw dropping tricks including mind reading.  I was lucky enough to be called up on the stage too, and Oliver B managed to predict what colour clothes I  was drawing on a piece of paper behind his back.  He then blew my mind and the crowds by showing the crowd that he was actually wearing the same coloured clothes when he removed his jacket.   Amazing to see such new fresh talent.

( If you don’t believe me- then there is a video coming soon!)

Oliver B shocks the crowd with an amazing mind reading trick. He’s wearing the same colours as the picture I drew!

New awesome phones come out every year!

( anyway –back to phones!) O2 have picked up on what a lot of people are saying about mobile tariffs (and one of my own personal gripes):

If you want to buy a phone, you are lumbered with a 24 month contract, which you are locked into.  That means for a whole 2 years you have sit and drool over what you friends and family  have whilst you count down the months until your upgrade.  Mobile moves on a LOT in a year.

With O2 refresh, O2 they seem to have thrown this model thankfully out of the window.

How it works

In the words of O2 as they say it quite succinctly:

When a customer signs up to O2 Refresh, they choose a Phone Plan and an Airtime Plan. By signing up to and paying separately for their phone and airtime, customers are given complete transparency, while paying the same overall as they would on a standard 24 month Pay Monthly tariff.

For those customers who want a new handset before the end of their contract term, O2 Refresh enables them to pay off the remainder of their Phone Plan and end their Airtime Plan with no termination fee. To make it even more affordable to get the latest smartphone, customers can trade in their old mobile for cash using O2 Recycle, getting up to £260 to put towards their new phone

O2 Refresh is available on most leading handsets from the main manufacturers

Check out the O2 refresh page for more information.

Image Credits: Casey Gutteridge/CPG Photography.

The hardest bit about reviewing Sphero, is actually being able to describe what it is.  To call it just a plastic ball is the same as referring to a tennis racket as just a piece of plastic. Its all about how you use it that really brings the fun to life.

What is it really?

Two shakes of the Sphero, brings it to live.  I can gently feel the vibration of the internal bits whizz to life and it immediately starts shining its “name” in colours, flashing red, white, red.  Its ready to go! Tapping on my Sphero app, the ball flickers to live and I jam the control forward and see it take off down the office corridor at huge speed.  This is when I realise that I am rubbish at remote control and in the vain attempt to turn it round, I sent it crashing into my friend Carol’s handbag which elicits a squawk of surprise.  Clearly she was not expecting this morning to be run over by a remote controlled robot.  What fun! I have got to try this at home!

The premise behind Sphero is simple:

Remote Control+ Multiple Apps+ minicomputer+plastic ball+ sensors + ability to change colours= a lot of fun+ more

Lots of fun

and its this simplicity that really makes it fun.  Once you pick up the app, and start driving your Sphero round the room, the skill game becomes the thrill as you do your best to navigate round, desks chairs (and in my case) babies and their toys.  It took me about 20 minutes before I got going properly, but once I did I was doing all sorts of crazy turns and wacky spins.

Controlling the Sphero

There are a few ways to control the toy, you have a blue circle which you can gesture around using your thumb which will turn and move the the sphero around the room.  Handily the Sphero has a blue LED tail light so if you are trying to do a tricky maneouver (such as moving along a tv desk, you can easily make sure its going to move in the right direction.  For those of you brave enough, you can switch the app to use your phone’s gravitational sensor which really gets the adrenaline going when racing at full speed.

Developer Smart

Once of my favourite tricks I loved was the “Macro” mode, which allowed you to tap and make the sphero do all sorts of tricks and shapes. This simple application belies the real potential that is the Sphero, in that its programmable.  Anyone with a bit of programming experience can create some really cool things with it.  I already can’t wait to build an app or game for android.

There is a  lot of excellent documentation on Sphero’s developer portal including some sample apps. Currently they support Android, IOS and even the Unity game engines for building apps.

Lots of Games

Because Sphero are so developer focused there are already a lot of really great games on the market and the list is growing.  The majority of the games are still IOS based, but there are lots coming up on Android already.  The full list of games can be found on the sphero games site.

Sphero is available from the main  Sphero site, and from retailers like Firebox.com

Over in the USA this week, Mark Zuckerberg, (Facebook’s head honcho)  announce Facebook Home, the new replacement Android launcher that they are launching on April 12.

People Centric User Experience

It seems that the clever bods on the facebook team, have taken the opportunity to rethink exactly what a mobile experience should be like and their answer (unsurprisingly) is: People!

Facebook are going to be launching the app with the following key features:

Cover feed
From the moment you wake up your phone you become immersed in cover feed. Cover feed replaces the lock screen and home screen. It’s a window into what’s happening with your friends – friends finishing a bike race, your family sharing a meal or an article about your favorite sports team. These are the beautiful, immersive experiences that you get through Home.

Chat heads
With chat heads you can keep chatting with friends even when you’re using other apps. When friends send you messages, a chat head appears with your friend’s face, so you see exactly who you’re chatting with. Messages reach you no matter what you’re doing – whether you’re checking email, browsing the web, or listening to music.

Notifications
Cover feed is great for seeing everything going on in the world. But when something happens that’s more important and directed at you, like a friend posting on your timeline, you’ll receive notifications with their profile pictures.

Apps
It’s as easy to get to your apps in Home as it is on any other phone. Swipe up to see your favourite apps in the launcher. There’s also a screen containing all of your apps, and you can drag your favourite apps to the launcher.

I must admit its a really delicious idea, and something that is clearly missing in a lot of mobile experiences.  People isn’t just an app, its a whole lot more than that, its a cornerstone of the mobile ethos.Facebook has built their whole business around allowing people to connect and by expanding the context of their app to sit across the whole operating system is a delicious thought.

This will be particularly exciting by facebook addicts( like my Mrs)  and early adopters as facebook will be adopting the agile method to develop the app and have promised fixed monthly releases when they will be pushing out new updates. ( a model that others will no doubt follow) The genius idea of this is that facebook will now have a safe proving ground to test new features on people who are already engaged and likely to feedback on what works and what doesn’t.  Whilst I think the main facebook app will always exist, I wouldn’t be surprised if facebook home becomes the proving ground for many of these new features.

The HTC First will be the first phone to come with Facebook home installed

Attacking Google? Don’t be silly

A lot of the press articles are calling Facebook home the first shot on the attack on google and interestingly Android.  What they are not researching and reading is that Android’s greatest strength is that it can be customized to a huge degree by almost anyone.

There are already a multitude of launchers on the Android market and guess what Google is still there.  I am sure the Google guys are paying really close attention to this key moment in mobile and the disruptive features that Facebook are talking about.  I think there is definitely a demand for tighter integration of people and social content into Android.  I would love to see Google rolling some of these features into Android proper and allowing twitter and linked in to also add their content.

The real winner

A Facebook only launcher is not a long term winner for me, but for some it is.  The real winner for me is when I can have a Facebook/ Twitter/ Google plus / linked in integrated Launcher because mobile is about connecting everyone,  work, friends and your family

Find out more about Facebook Home: www.facebook.com/home

Checkout the new HTC First- The first Android phone with Facebook home installed as standard Htc First Home

Since our review of the android bluetooth speaker way back in 2011, a lot has changed in the mobile handset market.  There are also a lot of great new software tools out there like Google Music, Spotify, We7 and even O2 are advertising their new O2 tracks app which gives us access to the latest and greatest music tracks.

The kit

Out of the box, already you can see the new speaker is a vast improvement on the older version.  Soft rubbery green skin and rubbery ears give this kit a much more rugged feeling, especially with something that gets carried around a lot and needs to take a kicking here and there. The head of the android turns left and right which allows it to be used as a volume control.  At the back it has a micro USB socket for charging directly from your Pc, or in my case using my car charger.

One great addition is the inclusion of a line in cable into

Battery life and Sound

Battery life is pretty solid, I managed to get a good 3 hours out of it, from my initial charge.  Apparently if I charged it for 1.5 hours, then can last up to 4 hours of playback  ( Great for the park in the summer)  Range and quality are really impressive on the new version. I was able to stream my copy of Rocky horror Show ( best soundtrack ever!) up one flight of stairs and still  manage to get great sound (4 ohms,3 Watts)  without any distortion breaking up the time warp.

Connecting up

The speakers use Bluetooth to connect to your phone.  The pairing process is really easy. Just press and hold the speakers head for a bit and eventually it makes a tone.  It can then be connected  using your standard bluetooth menu in Android.

Handsfree speaker phone

Android Speaker being “road tested!”

A nifty feature, which I don’t use a lot is that you can also use the Android speaker to answer your calls and act as a desk speakerphone without reaching from your phone. Just press the head when you get a call, and you will be able to speak to your friend Dave straight from the Green Android on top of your desk.

Overall a massive improvement on the previous speaker and even compared to some in the market is a great addition to a quality Android handset.  I love my little Android Speaker and I am sure you will too.

Get it direct from Amazon here.

The latest version of the Moga Pro controller is set rock Android gaming to a new level. Power A, the company behind the mobile controller, is showing off their creation at the PAX East 2013 convention.

Moga Pro Features

The latest version of the controller still has Bluetooth and brackets to support Android phones as large as the  Samsung Galaxy Note 2 but they have made a lot of improvements design wise to make it look more like that of an Xbox 360 controller, with a familiar button layout and a comfortable rubber back grip.

In addition to these features, the Moga Pro has a rechargeable battery with an impressive 15 hour lifespan.

The Moga Pro currently won’t fit a tablet into  its bracket but it will still work with them to give you that HD gaming experience.

Which games are compatible?

Not all game titles on your mobile device work with the Moga controller, but the current range of games is wide enough and of a high enough quality to be worth checking it out.

To make it easier, there is now an app that is pre-installed into the controller which will tell you all the currently available and future games which will work with it.

The great design and functions of the controller is also attractive to  Android game developers who will hopefully  to create more games for the Moga Pro in the future.

Amongst others, the top games playable on the Moga Pro include:

• Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
• Asphalt 7: Dead Heat
• Modern Combat 4: Zero Hour
• and the zombie shot ‘em up that was taking the PAX East show floor by storm, Dead Trigger.

You can check out a more comprehensive list and more information on www.mogaanywhere.com