360 DEGREES Weblog

It never fails. You forget to check the weather, and your alarm goes off in the morning at the same time as always. Then you get up, grab a cup of coffee and look out the window to see it. Snow. Lots and lots of snow. Quickly, you throw on your clothes, pull on your boots, gloves and hat, and grab the shovel, in hopes of getting your driveway cleared before you have to leave. And even if you manage to get all of that done, you’re still late to work because of the bad roads. Wouldn’t it be great if your alarm was smart enough to wake you up early when it snows? Now it can.

Thanks to the Winter Wake Up app, you can be sure that you’re ahead of the curve when there’s snow on the ground. The app keeps an eye on your location, and checks the weather in your area. If it detects that there has been frost or snow overnight, it will wake you up a bit earlier, so you can clear your driveway and scrape off your car. You can choose just how early you want to be woken up for each of these events. And if the weather is too bad, you can choose to not be woken up at all. Though I would use that setting with caution unless you have a really cool boss. This free app is available on both Android and iOS platforms.

It’s hard to think of a better way to showcase augmented reality technology than by making use of it to undress models. Case in point is the latest marketing push by outerwear retailer Moosejaw. Last month they released an iPhone app that works in conjunction with their print magazine. Get the mag, download the app, and point your camera at select pages on the magazine. While the boring old dead tree reality would show you the models fully clothed, they’d appear in their skivvies on screen. From the video below, the technology works quite well. What seems to work even better is its effect on the company’s bottom line as they’ve seen a 37% increase in sales from the same period in November last year. Other retailers have tried similar products before but Moosejaw seems to have seen the largest impact on sales. What’s more, Gary Wohlfeill, the company’s creative director, said that although they’re pleased with the increased ROI, their ultimate goal was to delight their subscriber base and build long term loyalty.

Nearly naked models will do that!

Moosejaw X-Ray App from Gary Wohlfeill on Vimeo.

Nearly naked models will do that!

Online retailing leader Amazon is to make a compelling offer this coming Saturday – use their smartphone app to compare prices, and they’ll effectively pay you $5 to walk out of the store. It is an historic move in the evolution of retail sales. As smart phone penetration heads for ubiquity, the price comparison app might go mainstream quite quickly from here. For the customer, it means getting accurate comparison information before a purchase. For the shopping app provider it means an opportunity to make a bid on a customer’s patronage at the time- and point-of-sale, inside a competitor’s bricks and mortar, at the same time as creating a marketing intelligence tool par excellence. A bold move indeed.

Revenge is sweet. Once as a 13 year old i was badly treated by a New York cabby who felt my 50 cents worth of change wasn’t enough and through all of it out of his window. So taxi drivers: If they’re not sneaking in a few extra miles by taking the long way round, or so intent on chatting to their friends via Bluetooth headsets that they miss your street, then they’re probably just scheming up their next antisocial move. If only there was an easy way to report these bad apples.

Now there is. ReportATaxi is a free app that lets you report bad drivers to the New York Taxi and Limousine Commission, right from your phone.

The app makes a chore (calling up to complain) into a fun and easy piece of vengeance. You enter the cabbie’s medallion number (or just snap a photo of it), enter the problem (overcharging, nattering on a cellphone, smoking) and add the time and date.

Then, the really neat bit: the app can automatically place you on a map so your incident report is good and accurate.

Submit it and rest happy that the idiot in the seat in front of you will have a black mark against his name. And if you get a really great driver (it happens, apparently) then you can use the “Praise an Angel” function.

This is probably the way all crime and incident reports should work. I’d love to be able to report drivers of cabs and commercial vehicles when they cut in front of me or park in the bike lane, and the various enforcement agencies get their data in a standard format. Everyone’s a winner. Except the bad drivers, that is. Yes!!!

ReportATaxi is currently available for iPhone, and is coming soon to Android and BlackBerry.

Oh, man. Bricks’n’mortar retailer are going to love this. Amazon has launched Flow, an app which not only scans a product’s bar code, but can even identify items just by pointing your camera at them.

It then uses augmented reality to overlay pricing, reviews and availability (at Amazon, of course), and even gives you a “buy now” button.

The app doesn’t just work with books and movies. It uses “continuous scan” tech from Amazon-owned A9 to recognize pretty much anything that comes in a package. Thus it will happily ID a box of cereal or a video game (like you buy those in boxes anymore anyway).

This pretty much destroys any reason not to use Amazon, especially when coupled with Prime’s next-day delivery. Imagine you’re in a store checking something out. It’s too big to carry home, or you just don’t want to carry a package with you when you go out to dinner later. Just point, click and the exact same item shows up on your doorstep the next morning. And probably tax-free.

Flow is currently available in the U.S, and works with the iPhone.

While the MP3s have replaced the need for audio cassettes, that doesn’t mean the ancient format has to go away forever. A lot of people, myself included, enjoy the retro vibe that they get from putting a cassette tape into a hi-fi system or Walkman, especially when you get to see the dials turn and the tape transfer from one end to the other.

Well if you’re one of those people who miss the audio cassette and wish that there was some way to relive those years on your iPhone or iPod, you’re in luck. The folks over at Majasalami have just released an app called AirCassette which you can use to replace the look of your default music player with a classic tape deck.

Track information is written on the cassette label, and the tape spins realistically while the music plays. The app also contains sharing features that lets your friends know what you’ve been listening to, and you can also save your queues as mixtapes. And if you’ve got compatible accessories – the app supports AirPlay as well. But all that is essentially icing over the app’s sweet interface which is what makes this player stand out from other apps out there.

AirCassette is available now from the Apple App Store with a price tag of $1.99. It works with your iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.

BBC fans with iOS devices and Apple TVs rejoice. The British broadcaster has just rolled out a significant update for its iPlayer app for iOS devices. The updated iPlayer app now introduces AirPlay support so you can stream content from your iOS device to your HDTV via Apple TV. Since not everybody around the world gets BBC content delivered to their home TVs, AirPlay support will allow more people to enjoy BBC shows on their big screen TVs: the way video content ought to be enjoyed.

The app is free, and some content is also available for free, but most of it will require a monthly subscription of $7.99 to be enjoyed. Grab the latest version of BBC iPlayer from the Apple App Store now (iOS 5 and Apple TV required for AirPlay support).

We all know that Adobe and Apple do have their spats, never mind that they share the same first letter in their 5-letter names. While one of the major weaknesses of iOS devices would be the lack of native Flash support and playback (whom Adobe owns), it is nice to see such minor disagreements do not come in the way of the bigger picture. Adobe has just released an iOS version of Adobe Reader, which has been a long time in coming, I must say.

What does Adobe Reader do? A whole lot, really, where you are now able to view PDFs, including encrypted files, while using it to print and share files with others. You cannot, however, edit PDFs, as those remain off limits. Better late than never to the game Adobe, and even better news is, this app is free.

Weary travellers looking for a good night’s kip have another aid in their quest for the perfect hotel room. Online room booking experts eBookers have today announced the launch of the eBookers Hotels app for iPad.

Plenty of clever features built in here to make nabbing a quality room a breeze; GPS functionality locates nearby hotels automatically, while you can also search by postcode or specific address; thousands of hotels are listed, rated, and photographed with high quality pictures, while the grid-like interface is perfect for quick browsing on the iPad, retaining eBookers knack for tracking down the best value-for-money rooms in town.

“The launch of our Hotels iPad app is another exciting step as we look to strengthen our mobile offering, and continue to help travellers to ‘book easier and travel happier’ with us,” said Tamer Tamar, President of ebookers.

“Designed from the ground up to take advantage of the iPad’s format and interface, the ebookers Hotels app for iPad is fast, fun to use and streamlined, allowing customers to book a hotel in just three simple taps. With an extensive choice of hotels from around the world, travellers will always be able to find somewhere to stay with ebookers, wherever they are in the world.”

Get the free app by clicking here.

The automatic garage door opener is one of those under-appreciated gadgets that—as far as I can tell—hasn’t gotten a serious upgrade since the mid 70s. Seriously. You show me a cellphone, I can give you a rough idea of how old it is. You show me a garage door opener, and I’d have a hard time knowing if you installed it yesterday, or 30 years ago. So it’s nice to see Craftsman bringing their AssureLink Garage Door Opener into the 21st century, allowing you to open and close it from an app on your smartphone. Instead of a giant, clunky remote that looks like it predates even the VCR.

From what I can glean from the Craftsman website, the AssureLink opener connects to your home’s wireless network using their “MyQ Technology” which appears to provide similar connectivity to other devices around your home. So not only can you use your smartphone to open or close the door, but you can remotely monitor its status, and close or open it while away. If a friend was stopping by to borrow a ladder, you could even program it to open and close the door for a set amount of time. Handy! It’s also got the requisite safety sensors so it won’t come down on something or someone when being closed from afar. So as a tool for tomfoolery, it seems limited. The Craftsman Garage Door app is of course free, while the actual opener is slightly less free, at $275.49.