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Firefox Mobile Is Almost Here.

Posted on 23. Dec, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

It’s been the Year of the Apps.  There’s an app for everything:  from the alarm clock to running trackers to maps and shopping engines, going through e-readers, music players and restaurant finders. For every minute of your connected life, for every activity there is an app.

Each app is a new world of ubiquitous possibilities. But as with everything, there is a price to pay: fragmentation and closeness. Each platform has its own store, and owns your apps.  Add that app stores have been built without much of an “intelligence”, besides the top and new charts.

So what are the alternatives?

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2009 Legacy? Privacy As The New Scarcity

Posted on 12. Dec, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

According to new figures released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers, U.S. online ad spending in the third quarter was down 5.4% from the same period a year ago.

Is the economic downturn the only culprit? It might.  But it is also a testament to the failure of online advertising to deliver innovation, which leaves the web powerhouses scrambling to find effective ways to monetize their traffic.

So what happens when all Beacon-like models fail? If Mohammed won’t come to the mountain, the mountain must come to Mohammed. Wave your Online Privacy Good-Bye.

The facts.

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FoodSpotting. Put Your Gourmet Goggles On!

Posted on 08. Dec, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

It used to be that if you wanted to pick a place for eating out, a fair amount of planning had to be factored in. You had to find a connection, check Yelp or Zagat, sift through the results and try to find the right inspiration among hundreds of reviews. Let’s even pretend that all this excruciating research payed back and it helped make all your dinners-out a fantastic, or rather a predictably fantastic experience.

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Why You Should Love Instapaper.

Posted on 04. Dec, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

There are services and products that radically change our experience. Google. RSS. Twitter. The Iphone. The Kindle. FourSquare… But there’s also another category of less hyped, but not less relevant services, that help make our lives better. Think Dropbox or Evernote. Instapaper is one of these wonders.

What is it? The idea is simple: we all find ourselves in a situation where we really want to read something, but we don’t have the time. Some of us will keep 100 tabs open, in the hope to find the time later, others will bookmark it. Either way, that post is gone. Chances are you won’t read it.

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Location and Mobile Augmented Reality Are The 2009 Game-Changers. Will Voice Be Next?

Posted on 01. Dec, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci.

FourSquare, SimpleGeo, Layar, Junaio are the start-ups of 2009. Amen! This is good, this is beautiful, and this is the promise of mobile coming true.

But there is an area that is still under-rated and under-hyped, and that is as needed as geo-location and mobile augmented reality for mobile to come full circle. That area is Speech Recognition. 2010 could be the year when it eventually hits mainstream, the year when voice becomes the “next touch”.

Why would that be?

The foundations have all been laid out: advances in speech technologies, speech recognition APIs, faster networks, broadband, cloud computing, better devices with user-friendly interfaces, compelling applications.

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