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Pandora CTO Tom Conrad insists his number one priority is to make the best playlists in the world. But he’s also aware that users increasingly expect more than a simple music-listening experience from their music apps.
Nowhere are these competing priorities more difficult to balance than on the small screen of a mobile device. On Monday, he and Pandora will release their best attempt: Pandora 4.0 for Android and iOS.
Nulpunt, a forthcoming app that allows users to access, highlight, and share every document in use by the Dutch government, could transform how average citizens engage in politics.
No one cares where their cell phone thinks they should eat dinner.
After discovering that gourmands don’t want algorithm-generated restaurant recommendations, CEO Gauri Manglik created a Twitter for food instead.
Ship First And Ask Questions Later: How Fondu Made Its Mobile App More Tasty
Comedy Hack Day, a 36-hour hackathon where participants from both the comedy and tech communities worked together to create some future funny business, appears to have been a crapload of fun.
The big winner of the event is ShoutRoulette, which connects opinionated users to other people with the exact opposite opinion, allowing them to shout at each other. Each member wins a class at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, and entry into the New York Tech Meetup. Other winners include the McKayla Is Not Impressed Chrome Extension (a meme generator), and Spacebar to Money Shot (um, don’t ask.) Even ScatRoulette wins something: The Chris Gethard Memorial Award, which consists of a hug from the judge that goes on for an exceedingly long period.
For the hard-wired and digitally wired baseball fan, the season doesn’t start when pitchers and catchers report to spring training. It starts when At Bat reports to the iTunes store. The wildly popular app, made by MLB Advanced Media (BAM for short), puts live game video, live stats, and the latest news and scores at your fingertips on a smart phone or tablet.
On Wednesday At Bat 12 showed up looking like a perennial All-Star who’d dared to retool his swing in the off-season in pursuit of even better stats.
How do you create an app that helps users discover new foods? In this extended version of the conversation from our latest issue, we chat with Alexa Andrzejewski, the CEO of Foodspotting.
Pic via FoodSpotting on Tumblr.
Tips from an expert on how to master the chaos of smartphone app placement. Your fingers (and brain) will thank you. Read on—>
Co-viewing. Back channeling. Checking in. Double- or triple-screening. Layered content. The increasing symbiosis between good old traditional TV and the social world will be one of the most interesting media trends to watch this year. In this three-part series, Co.Create looks at the world of social TV from a few different angles.
The Race For The Second Screen: Five Apps That Are Shaping Social TV
This to-do list app’s UI breaks some design rules, but I can’t wait to try it out.
Finally, an app that systematically destroys your self-esteem!
This week, she’s launching WotWentWrong, a web app that solves the “mystery of why promising new romances ended unexpectedly or successful first dates vanished.” Rather than let one-time affairs just fade away—which can cause “lasting damage to someone’s self-esteem and future relationships”—Melnik has created a method for receiving customized feedback about what went wrong. “WotWentWrong is the breakup app for couples who never really broke up,” she says. “We’re providing a socially acceptable way to tie up the loose ends, learn from what happened and improve your dating Zen for the next relationship—no stalking required.”
Starting today, the Shoebox app from 1000memories lets you conveniently start digitizing the world’s 4 trillion paper snapshots and slapping them on Facebook. Genealogy freaks, swoon.
Ginger.io just won the $100,000 Data Design Diabetes challenge, because it silently analyzes your phone usage data to figure out if you’re depressed. For diabetes patients, that could be a lifesaver.
“There’s 50 things loaded up on my phone at any given time, and 40 of them I never use,” says Tony Conrad, Partner, True Ventures.
It seems like a waste of such beautiful hardware not to use more apps. App Mania persists much to the benefit of Google and Apple, suddenly the gatekeepers of everything you seek on your phone.
Are apps indeed the future? Will mobile browsing crawl out of infancy and be able to power experiences on a similar scale as applications you’ve downloaded? This video explores what the future of mobile browsing might look like.
See more from our Co.Location series.
