The mockups are more interesting than the supposedly legit (and extremely blurry) pics of the new Maps app. The mocks seem inline with what I had heard about the 3D element of the revamped Maps app: “Cool, but you’re not going to use it that often.”
Source: bgr.com
Employees of Facebook and several engineers who have been sought out by recruiters there, as well as people briefed on Facebook’s plans, say the company hopes to release its own smartphone by next year. These people spoke only on condition of anonymity for fear of jeopardizing their employment or relationships with Facebook.
Nightlife guide map of Paris indicating relative levels of danger.
From the guidebook ‘Wagamama Aruki: Paris’, 1997. Reprinted in ‘World Diagram Collection’, Pie Books, 2006.
Source: Flickr / tradies
You can never tell what message a city sends until you live there. You won’t know whether its message will resonate with you until you hear it. And you’ll probably have to find the city where you feel at home to know what sort of ambition you have.
Amber Rae on the people you’ll meet, the places you’ll go
Amber’s post today rang all kinds of bells for me. Since Sunday, I’ve been quietly in New York—taking exams from my computer in the morning, running errands in the afternoon, letting the city sink in every evening. Thursday, it’s back to Boston to tie up loose ends and then a week with Erik. Then come June, I’ll be here all summer.
It’s only been a few days. But already, I can’t deny: a part of me feels at home here. And I think that part has something important to tell me. I’m glad I have a whole summer to listen.
I’m a big fan of how Amber and Diana see the world. Happy I’ll be nearby to have some run-ins with Diana this summer. :)
(via rickwebb)
Source: heyamberrae
Almost three-quarters (74%) of smartphone owners get real-time location-based information on their phones as of February 2012, up from 55% in May 2011. This increase coincides with a rise in smartphone ownership overall (from 35% of adults in 2011 to 46% in 2012), which means that the overall proportion of U.S. adults who get location-based information has almost doubled over that time period—from 23% in May 2011 to 41% in February 2012. (via As smartphone ownership rises, almost three-quarters of smartphone owners use their phone to get real-time location-based information, and almost one in five use a geosocial service like Foursquare | Pew Internet & American Life Project)
Source: pewinternet.org
According to Romer, becoming a wealthy country requires better-run cities because that’s where people are headed. Cities might offer horribly paying jobs in factories and domestic service, but many families make the move because they’re still earning far more than they can make by farming. In 1900, nearly 90 percent of the world’s population was rural. By 2000, three-quarters of people in the United States, Western Europe and other wealthy countries were city dwellers. In the next 40 years, the United Nations estimates, the world’s urban population will grow by nearly three billion, largely in poor countries.
So what does Facebook get out of the deal?
Facebook is getting its own app store for all devices, all platforms, all prices | VentureBeat
Rafer sez:
Facebook gets a highly trafficked app store pre-built before their phone/AndroidFork comes out.
Source: venturebeat.com
hey, it's noah: What Ecosystem?
After reading about Apple iOS VP Scott Forstall selling off almost $40 million in shares I was curious to learn more about him. I found this BsuienssWeek profile from last October that had an interesting tidbit about the Apple ecosystem:
Yet even critics don’t deny his accomplishments or…
Source: heyitsnoah
The mapping industry, without picking on any specific group, is in the habit of bundling things together. If you use any part of the stack you have to use the whole stack. And that’s not what developers want,” said Scott Rafer, CEO of Lumatic.
Thinking Too Big By An Order Of Magnitude
Google planned to take 33% of the total tablet market in 2011. Yet they barely have 33% of just the Android tablet market.
Source: parislemon
Build-Measure-Learn: The thinking behind our latest app release
This week we released a new version of our Lumatic City Maps Android app. This was a major milestone for us, introducing an exciting shift in the user interface paradigm of the product. We also added New York City!
Our product development philosophy is heavily influenced by the principles of ‘Lean User Experience’ : Iterate quickly, validate with real users often, take those learnings and iterate again. In that context, here’s more on the learning that led to our new UI.
Amazon’s Kindle Fire now makes up the absolute majority of the Android tablet platform in the US, comScore found in a fresh study. The e-reader and tablet crossover represented 54.4 percent of all Android tablets sold in the country. At second place, the entire Samsung Galaxy Tab lineup comprised just 15.4 percent of Android slates.
No other manufacturer got above 10 percent, with Google’s reference tablet, the Motorola Xoom, stopping at seven percent. Despite its size as a company, Sony only netted 0.7 percent for the Tablet S.
