There is a lot of buzz these days about apps like Foursquare or GoWalla, location-based applications that let you publicly share your location and keep track of places you visit more often.

Application like those take advantage of the ability of last generation smartphones to give a detailed information about your position, through a built-in GPS as well as cell triangulation (less accurate, but accurate enough). As long as you visit new places, you can fill these apps with your discoveries and “check-in”. The more you check-in, the more you are likely to become the “major” of that place.

I’ve been using Foursquare for a while here in Italy and I can definitely say it’s far from being sticky for me. The point is: why should I add new locations when I have apps like Google Maps where I can likely find the location I’m in with very accurate details about it? Second point: why should I use yet-another-app when I use both Twitter and Google Maps pretty much everyday?

Google Maps can tell me where I am pretty much accurately (without the risk, as in Foursquare, to find lots of duplicate places added by different users) while I don’t want to have another set of friends in the Nth app/service when I already have Twitter or Facebook and, while on the go, I use Twitter intensely.

A few days ago TechCrunch wrote about FourWhere, an intersting mashup between Google Maps and Foursquare. Definitely a good starting point, but, in my opinion, not enough. I’d like to see an app that makes use of the location information associated to any tweet (released a few days ago) and could be able to ask me if I want to “check-in” in one of the places (taken from Google Maps) nearby (from where I’m sending the tweet). And I should be able to make the app do that automatically, so that as soon as I send the first tweet from my office, I automatically check-in there, without the need of doing anything else. Here it is, a sort of Foursquare at the Nth degree. Why not?

In conclusion the potential of apps like Foursquare and GoWalla is enourmous, from many different standpoints, but I’d love not to have to use yet another app on my phone and re-build the Nth friend list to maintain… What do you think?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Check.in: finally, a unified check-in for Foursquare, Gowalla and Brightkite (downloadsquad.com)
• Twitter and Facebook follow Foursquare – 2010 is the year of location-based social media tools (freshnetworks.com)
• FourWhere.com – Mashing Up Foursquare With Google Maps (domainmacher.com)

I‘m happy to inform all the fans of our Twitter game Tweefight that an iPhone/iPod Touch app is now available at the App Store on iTunes.

It’s the first attempt to bring the “twitter fights” to the iPhone and there is still lot of work to be done. Next version will include lots of new features that will make the game even more exciting and addicting.

If you enjoyed fighting against your Twitter followers / friends on Tweefight.com, you should check the iPhone version out now.

Related articles by Zemanta

• SwipSwap 3.0 Free Contact Sharing for iPhone – See it, Share it, Done (themactrack.com)
• First Google Buzz iPhone App Hits The Store – It’s Buzzie! (thenextweb.com)
• More Fun Than Unfollowing, Now You Can Sh*t On Twitter With the Bird Turd iPhone App [IPhone Apps] (gizmodo.com)

Since the launch of Chrome for Mac, it quickly became my favorite browser. Lightweight and very fast, it’s a mixture of ingredients that, in my opinion, make it the perfect browser. Moreover, the availability of  browser extensions help you forget all the additional features you can get with browsers like the popular (but very heavy and slow) Firefox.

All that said, I find myself spending more and more time with the browser than any other app in my Mac, I basically use the browser for almost everything.

Here is my basic toolkit:

Mail: Gmail

Calendar: Google Calendar (in sync with iCal)

Contacts: Google Contacts (in sync with my Droid)

News: Google Reader through Feedly

Twitter: Hootsuite / CoTweet / Seesmic Web

Facebook: Facebook

ToDo: Remember the Milk (in sync with my Droid)

Notepad: Evernote

Chat/IM: Meebo

Can I call Chrome a sort of OS in the OS? Last but not least, Chrome threats tabs as independent processes so you can kill one without having to shut down the entire browser, something other browsers can’t do.

Unfortunately, there are still some apps I can’t replace easily, like Lightroom, Espresso (CSS/HTML editing for my blog), LittleSnapper (screenshots) and a few others. But it’s pretty clear that I’m already using Chrome OS (sorta) and it works very well.

What about you? Would you use Google Chrome for everything?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Remember The Milk for Gmail… for Google Chrome! (rememberthemilk.com)
• Got Milk? Using Remember the Milk for Task Management (profhacker.com)
• Feedly + Google Buzz + Conversations ” Building Feedly (dccrowley.posterous.com)
• 18 Must Have Google Chrome Extensions (maketecheasier.com)

Since I got a Motorola Droid last month, like many other Doird’s owners, I’ve been fighting against its very short battery life. The first days of usage I had to charge it by lunch time, something very annoying and not really suitable with an heavy business usage.

Since then, I read a lot of forums and articles online trying to find a definitive solution to this issue. I was also thinking of buying this ugly and bulky battery to replace the original one…but I was convinced there could have been a much better alternative.

OS Update

First of all, the improvement brought by the 2.0.1 Android OS update was huge and the battery started lasting way, way longer than before (the Droid shipped with 2.0), roughly 30% more. While it was an important step ahead, it was not enough.

Multitasking

After digging more into the problem, I realized that the main cause of the short battery life was one of the features that Android fans usually mention as the main advantage against the iPhone: multitasking. Well, that’s actually the MAIN cause of battery life’s drop. During the startup, the system loads lots of apps, even many apps you will never use. Moreover, all the other apps you use often usually keep working also when you switch to another app and rarely shut down.

The solution

The main solution to the problem is made of two little apps: Advanced Task Killer and Automatic Task Killer. The former lets you quickly kill the apps that you are not longer using and you can do that through a simple click. The latter, instead, lets you choose the apps you want to be shut down automatically when the phone is idle (i.e. when the screen is automatically turned off). You may want to leave out apps like Google Maps, Evernote (if you use it) or Remember the Milk, for example, that you are likely to use during meetings or looking for a place, so it’s better you keep the full control over them and decide when they have to be quitted.

Result

After having installed and configured the two apps mentioned above, the results are IMPRESSIVE. I can easily get 16-17 hours of battery life with heavy usage, lots of phone calls, twitter, facebook, many hours of Wifi on and not renouncing to things like automatic brightness setup and the complete set of Android animations during screen transitions. Once I turned 3G off, I got 19 hours…

You can easily find those apps on Android Market. What’s your experience?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Motorola Droid To Get Android 2.1 Update? (ubergizmo.com)
• Google to Developers: “Have an Android phone, please make games” (mobilecrunch.com)
• Is There App Multitasking in Windows Phone 7? (Hint: It’s Just Like the iPhone) [Windows Phone 7] (gizmodo.com)
• Enabling USB Host mode on the Motorola Droid (makezine.com)
• Motorola Droid gets official multitouch support — in Google Maps, anyway (engadget.com)

No, I’m not referring to the luggage that two friends of mine lost during their trip to San Francisco, but rather to the service they are trying to launch and fund from there, “WhereIsNow“.

Marcello and Daniele are two young italian entrepreneurs (young because they are my age, of course…) who are now in Silicon Valley trying to make their service better and learning how to raising funds and make it a successful product. In a nutshell, they are trying to make their dreams come true…

First and foremost, let’s go back in time. A few months ago they were chosen for the final phase of the annual business plan competition from Mind The Bridge, an italian foundation whose goal is “to create the conditions to foster a sustainable Italian entrepreneurial eco-system, spur more ideas, and subsequently reinvigorate the complex new-venture economy, providing new entrepreneurs with direct exposure to potential venture capital investors from the most experienced, entrepreneurial eco-system in the world, the Silicon Valley.”

The latest part of the competition consists in spending a few weeks in Silicon Valley to refine their business plan, focus on the right target market and learn how to pitch potential investors and convince them to bet on their service.

Marcello and Daniele just setup their little corner at the Plug&Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale, a place I enjoyed a lot during my latest visits to the Bay Area. I bet Shobeir, Saeed and all the P&P and Amidzad team welcomed them and made them feel home, as they did when I had the chance to deal with them.

They are also writing a blog where they keep their friends and fans updated about they adventure, a blog that I’m enjoying reading everyday trying to share with them my little tips and tricks on how to survive to Silicon Valley’s life.

All that said, they have in their hands a very promising service that just needs to be polished and refined. When I met Marcello (who kindly came to visit my company in January) I already shared with him my thoughts on it and I think that one of the main challenge for them is to get as much feedbacks as they can and start their work from there.

Silicon Valley also means networking and there are lots of people they shouldn’t miss to meet as soon as they can, starting from other italians who did the same in the past. From Fabrizio Capobianco, to Franco Folini, from Matteo Fabiano to Pierluigi Zappacosta. All of them have certainly something important to share, something that can make their stay over there more effective, less difficult and help them to add value to what they are creating.

Two other people they should meet? Ed Prentice and Larry Lisser. From different standpoints, they gave me lots of useful recommendations, all very important when you are alone in a foreign place with an important goal to achieve. Plus, the football match Ed invited me to attend was priceless…

But it’s not enough. There are tons of networking events that could keep them busy all day, every day. Some of them are must-attend ones and I can assure you they need a new backpack just to bring back to Italy all the business cards they’ll collect!

In conclusion, I recommend to keep an eye on “Where is now” and if you are in the Bay Area, don’t miss the chance to meet them and say hello, even better if in front of a real italian coffee at “Caffe Del Doge” in Palo Alto…

Related articles by Zemanta

• Do We Really Want Another Boom in Silicon Valley? (svmoms.com)
• Silicon Valley faces rough road to recovery (news.cnet.com)
• Report: Silicon Valley risks losing foremost tech status (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• ReadWriteWeb Events Guide, 6 February 2010 (readwriteweb.com)

A few months ago the popular service Feedburner, which manages millions of blogs/websites’ RSS feeds worldwide, decided to include all the users following a certain blog on Friendfeed in the blog’s subscribers count.

According to the same principle, since you can push the content of your blog to Google Buzz, your followers on Google Buzz should be considered RSS readers, hence included in your Feedburner ’s readers count. One more reason for this to be true is that Buzz is a Google service, like Feedburner, while Friendfeed is not!

Here is the number of my blog’s subscribers this morning:

I haven’t seen any relevant change since I joined Google Buzz and my current 171 followers on Buzz are not certainly included. What do you think?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Google Buzz monitoring (tins.rklau.com)
• Solving Feedburner Feedsmith plugin problems with Wordpress 2.9 (thewayoftheweb.net)
• Google Buzz: Social Sharing by Google (techie-buzz.com)

A few days ago I updated my Motorola Milestone to Android 2.0.1. Lots of improvements, in particular extended battery life, something everyone who uses a smartphone is looking forward to. It also seems that Motorola is going to push Android OS 2.1 for Milestone in Europe before the end of March.

There is a huge problem, though. Lots of users are reporting problems with the Android Market, the store when everyone can download / buy apps for their smartphone. Many different types of issues have been reported, the worst one being the complete inability to access the Market anymore after the update. Bad one. Me affected

The only viable solution, according to the forums, is wiping the smartphone, resetting it to factory default settings. This means loosing every app you installed plus all the configuration data and so on. This is exactly what I did (and many others did as well) and it solved the problem. After 20 minutes I got my phone configured again and with all the apps I was using before. Fortunately all the important data (contacts, emails, calendar) get synchronized again through your Google account, so everything went smoothly.

All that being said, I see a huge problem here and this is a clear sign that Android phones and the iPhone are not really targeted to the same market. Would my wife, who owns an iPhone, ever deal with a problem like the one I just solved? Is it tolerable by a “normal” user that the Market, an app that should be used daily to find new and useful apps, could screw up so easily? But, more than this, could “normal” users deal with a hard reset and everything related to it?

Using my Motorola Milestone I quickly realizing that it’s not for everyone. Multi-tasking not available for iPhone? Ok, but on Android it kills your battery so you must install a task manager that kills unused processess to save battery. Open Source and ability to “root” your phone and install custom versions of the OS? Yes, but do “normal” users really care?

I conclusion, I just wanted to point out that some users just want a great smartphone experience without the hassle to solve problems that shouldn’t occurr with normal usage. And the Nexus one is certainly not left out of this. Yesterday I received this tweet:

Isn’t updating an app a normal activity everyone do everyday on their smartphone? Looks like that person got a new Nexus from Google, but it’s a clear sign there is still lots to do from the big G and any phone brand that embraced Android. At the end of the day, probably the “closed “and “hyper-controlled” environment by Apple is the one that, in the long term, will be the only one capable of preventing users from incurring in such problems. And making users happy is all that matters.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Android 2.0.1 is coming to a Motorola Milestone near you (thenextweb.com)
• Droid Touchscreen Less Accurate Than iPhone’s (hardware.slashdot.org)
• iPhone Beats Droid, Nexus One And Droid Eris In Touchscreen Performance (techcrunch.com)
• 10 Android Reads for Today (techstartups.com)

Gmail App for Android is a wonderful application and, for someone like me who comes from a BlackBerry, provides something I was used (addicted) to, that is push email.

On the other side, there are a few usability issues that have been resolved in the mobile version (from the browser) that is, actually, better than the standalone app (despite, and this is the reason why I’m not using it, it doesn’t offer push email). My question is: how much does it take to port them into the standalone app?

Here are a few examples:

- coloured labels: while labels are available in the Gmail app, those are all the same color, something that makes difficult to distinguish one from another at a glance

- reply / reply to all / forward:  on Gmail App I have to go down to the end of the message in order to find those very commonly used commands. No way to access them from the menu

- formatting: on the web version, many emails are formatted in order to be easily viewed from the small screen of the phone, while this doesn’t happen

- last viewed message: this is actually a problem in both clients. When I receive a new message of a long thread, when I click on the thread I want the last new unread message to be shown, not another one (last read?). Does anyone know how to solve this?

I hope a new version of Gmail App will be released soon since while apps like Google Maps are getting updated continuosly (latest v4.0 includes Google Buzz and much more), the widely used Gmail App is left without updates since many (MANY!) months ago.

Yesterday I installed on my Motorola Droid what I can definitely consider the most innovative application that should be available by default for any touchscreen smartphone: Swype.

What is Swype? From Wikipedia:

Swype allows a user to enter a word by sliding a finger or stylus from letter to letter, lifting only between words. It uses error correcting algorithms and a language model to guess the word intended. It also includes a tapping predictive text system in the same interface. The creators of Swype predict that users will achieve over 50 words per minute, with the CTO and Founder Cliff Kushler claiming to have reached 55 words per minute.

It’s basically an input method that makes way easier and faster to type a text in any edit box. Here is a video that shows how it works.

You know what? After I installed it yesterday I’m still wondering why it is not the default input method. You need just a bit of practice (really a bit!) and it works great (both in English and Italian). If  you want to get it for your Android phone (OS < 2 ) you can easily get it from the Android Market, while if you have a Droid/Milestone or a Nexus One, you can get it from the following link:

Swipe for Motorola Droid and Nexus One

Related articles by Zemanta

• Swype: Splendid! (technologizer.com)
• Swype: a faster way of typing comes to Android devices (downloadsquad.com)
• Swype on Verizon Omnia II (ubergizmo.com)
• Leaked Video: Swyping Versus iPhone Typing. (Swype For Android Is Next). (techcrunch.com)

As many of you maybe don’t know, my background as an engineer is in the field of video coding and digital communications (ten years ago I also published an article on “fractal video coding”, not sure anyone ever read it…) , so I always kept an eye (in particular in the past) on everything related to research and development in the field of video technologies.

Since the  years spent at the University in the 90’s, both the israeli Radvision and the italian Aethra were two companies students watched carefully, both deeply involved in designing and developing innovative solutions in this field. Now it looks like a consolidation process is going on, since Radvision announced yesterday that they bought some important assets of the company, in particular related to intellectual property and technology. Here is what Radvision’s CEO Boaz Raviv actually said:

First, it is important to understand that we are not buying an operating business because Aethra has not been conducting any business for many months due to their financial difficulties. Rather, we are mainly buying intellectual property and technology assets. We plan to integrate these into our existing product portfolio to create a more complete solution portfolio. Based on this, we expect to start shipping products based on the Aethra technology at the end of Q2 2010 after we have integrated the endpoint technology and product designs with our SCOPIA product portfolio, completed testing and certification, and ramped up operations.

On one side, I’m very happy about the deal (around $10 Million). I always admired Radvision, a company built around a mix of innovation, strong technology and smart minds, a company that, when I was a student, I was definitely looking forward to working for. On the other side, I’m sad to hear that a very smart and innovative italian company like Aethra (actually a 30+ years old company!) was struggling due to financial difficulties, something other “old” companies in the field of telephony / telecommunications are dealing with. The cause? Lack of a strong and differentiated customer base and, sometimes/probably, managers with lack of vision. I don’t know much about this specific case, but sometimes being a 30-40 years old company doesn’t help. And they have been lucky enough to have Radvision as a partner already.

In conclusion, I look forward to watching what’s next and what new innovative products this deal will bring to the market. If you are either into the video communication business or a seasoned user of video conferencing solutions, stay tuned

Related articles by Zemanta

• Cisco launches telepresence interoperability standard (v3.co.uk)
• RADVISION Enhances IBM Lotus Sametime 8.5 with High Definition Multiparty Conferencing and Telepresence Connectivity (eon.businesswire.com)
• Radvision Waits as Cisco and Tandberg Tango (seekingalpha.com)