London 2012

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.

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.

There’s no arguing that the 2012 London Olympics are the most connected games ever. Via television, Web, radio or Twitter, the up-to-the-minute updates are pervasive. A sheer platitude of Olympic apps and gizmos offer up various bite-sized updates tailored to many tastes. All this, of course, comes courtesy of various APIs from news and other data sources. But are apps alone enough to deliver this data?