apps

Smartphones and tablets continue to top Christmas lists this year, as the mobile revolution sweeps into 2013. But Santa is increasingly fielding app requests, too, since even smartphones aren’t terribly bright without quality content.

Are you scrambling to finish (or start) your holiday shopping? Don’t worry! These apps can help you select, buy and save money on perfect gifts for your family and friends.

If you’re stumped about what to get your adolescent nephew, for example, El Gifto can make your life easier. The free app suggests presents based on age, gender, interests, and yes, even the recipient’s ego. It lets you set price limits too so you don’t accidentally fall in love with an $800 purse you never knew you needed.

Amazon and Facebook recently announced new developer tools.   Amazon now offers free A/B testing capability for Kindle Fire developers and Facebook’s changes made it so their developer documentation automatically generates from its source code.   

Did you know that your digital data isn’t just for those you follow on Twitter or people on your friends list on Facebook?  There is a large, growing and yet unregulated market for your digital information. It’s not uncommon for data about you to be consumed by your doctor’s office, your car or even your refrigerator.

An interesting infographic came out this month on the trajectory of iOS devices in today’s higher education institutions. The Australian think tank Open Colleges culled the core set of global data available on how far up the ivory towers we now find Apple fan boys, fanatics and fellows.

About 122 million Americans are expected to shop online today, otherwise known as Cyber Monday, according to Shop.org, the digital division of The National Retail Federation, which coined the phrase in 2005. 

In the era of huge holiday sales Christmas starts earlier every year. With Thanksgiving this Thursday, retailers are gearing up for the now infamous Black Friday Sale, the busiest shopping day of the year.

It’s been just over a week since the election and we were privileged to have a conversation with the Obama for America campaign CTO Harper Reed (LinkedIn title: Amazing), Director of Engineering Dylan Richard (LinkedIn title: NERD!), and Engineer Ian Dees (LinkedIn title: Engineer).

The typical stereotype of a Hakathon is a room full of mostly male developers building a mixed bag of hacks, with no specific theme, through a patchwork of APIs and resources.  These stereotypes were shattered at the espnW hack day which combined women, technology and sports, November 9-10 at Stanford University.

Superstorm Sandy has created a wide path of devastation, floods and fires.  People have lost their lives, whole cities are flooded and millions are without power.  The damage is estimated at 20 billion dollars, making it one of the worst storms of all time, according to Forbes.

Halloween is just around the corner, and with it comes the start of the holiday season. That means more of everything: more sitting at the table, more sitting on planes, and of course more food - we all know the holidays aren’t the easiest time to eat healthy and exercise.

APIs are here to help! APIs can funnel all of your personal data into health-savvy apps to help you fend off the festive few extra pounds.

When the App Store first started in the summer of 2008 it was a huge game changer. Now, for those of us with smartphones, apps are pretty commonplace. Apps help us do daily tasks and make our lives easier. Many of us feel very lost without our phones since they store all our information and entertainment. This of course poses the problem of forgetting, losing or leaving your phone somewhere. We all know that helpless feeling. Well, what if all your apps and all your information weren’t stored in a device, but were with you all the time?

At this moment, we’re in the thick of the U.S. presidential election season—the Republican nominating convention is about to start and the Democratic one is just around the corner. Only a few weeks ago, the world was abuzz with the London Olympics, and now many of us are thinking about Labor Day, Back to School, NFL games, elections, and on to Thanksgiving and Black Friday, into the holidays.

Friday we reflected on multichannel expansion as a key business driver for retailers at eTail Boston this month, by comparing it to the technology recommendations of the analyst community. One fantastic point that Brian Walker touches on in his talk is that businesses in general cannot keep up with all of the emerging digital touch points in today’s market. Retailers are looking for strategies to reach customers across the rapidly growing array of channels most consumers touch daily: mobile, social, word of mouth, as well as traditional Web and traditional channels.

In the past year, we’ve seen a surge in mobile devices and smartphones plunging into mainstream, giving millions of people the capability to browse the Internet, watch movies and stream music anywhere, without ever having to find a place to sit down and boot up a laptop or desktop. In fact, in a recent Gartner report, worldwide sales of mobile phones to end users reached a whopping 419 million units in the second quarter of 2012, where open OS smartphone devices made up over 36.7% of all mobile device sales.