iPhone
Bump App
Most people have seen or have done the standard fist bump when greeting a friend. The Bump App for the iPhone adds a new dimension where the same gesture, while holding the iPhone will enable two people to easily transfer contact information. Better yet, the technology is being used by PayPal to initiate money transfers.
Tags: app, bump, iPhone, paypal
#Canucks Take Top Spot – In Canadian App Store
The Vancouver Canucks iPhone App reached the top spot in the Canadian App Store. The App features include, exclusive news, photos, video, an interactive schedule, access to message boards, scores and stats. This is a great way for the Canucks and fans to be connected. (Source)
Tags: app, canucks, iPhone, Vancouver
Strangers Chose What I Ate for Dinner
I was at a friend’s place last night watching some Olympic Hockey. Eventually the group of us got hungry and decided to order in some Chinese food. Problem: none of us knew of any good and/or nearby Chinese restaurants.
This photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinkmoose/
Within seconds, two iPhones came out. We ‘UrbanSpooned’ a place nearby and then hopped online to read more reviews of the food. Within 10 minutes we had 6 dishes chosen based on favourable reviews. Without even consulting the restaurant’s menu, we went ahead and ordered based solely on the opinions of strangers.
Dinner arrived. Every dish was a winner.
After that, some of us contributed our own reviews, and added the restaurant to our mobile contact lists.
The irony is, if this restaurant had a website, we wouldn’t have easily found it. Yet, there were multiple sources in which to find information about it and its dishes. The point here is if you don’t take control of your online strategy, others will.
Swap out this restaurant for any other kind of business – say an airline, or a financial institution and you can quickly see how joining the online conversation already happening about your brand or product is critical. The goal isn’t to stop people from talking about you. (Quite the opposite in fact.) The goal is to listen. Be a part of the conversation. And be responsive.
Think of it not as being in the driver’s seat, but as drawing the map people follow.
What’s your experience?
Tags: chinese food, iPhone, mobile, online reviews, online strategy, peer reviews, urbanspoon
Coffee Orders by iPhone
There are lots of people spending enormous amounts of time making apps that help us run our lives more efficiently. Like the new app Dunkin’ Run (US only) – which obliterates wasting a half hour walking around the office gathering coffee and tea orders and making chit chat. The idea is, you use the Dunkin’ Run app to send out an alert to your friends. Then they log on to dunkinrun.com and place their coffee orders, which are then sent to your iPhone. So you and the donut shop have record of the order, and no one forgets the double sugar!
Convenient, yes, but what are the possibilities of an app like this? An app that alerts, initiates action, then gathers information, putting you in motion, saving time, avoiding idle chatter. Pretty soon, we’ll have iPhone apps that remind us to pay the bills, go to the dentist, and visit with our mothers. We’ll program our lives through our phone, tossing our paper daytimers out the window. Already you can adjust your household thermostat, pre-heat your oven, start your car, track flight arrivals and spy on your babysitter, all in a matter of minutes. And although it is possible to read bedtime stories to our kids using Skype on our iPhone, is that going too far? What the iPhone will never achieve is that feeling of warmth as you hug your child after a long day. There will never be an app for that.
As for organizing and streamlining our worklives and managing household tasks, iPhone apps are already proving extremely useful.
Mashable has some great lists of iPhone apps here http://mashable.com/category/iphone-lists/
Katy
Tags: app, household, iPhone, time management
