Avis, the global car rental company is testing an RFID technology that will enable it to keep 5,000 of its cars at the parking lots of client businesses. Clients will be able to use a PIN with their mobile devices and pick up a car kept on their own premises.
Avis teamed up with RFID manufacturer I.D. Systems of New Jersey to launch the technology and will roll out the service in the US and Canada next month.
A big problem for the nearly half a million apps available in the Apple App store is that they each lack an easily shareable social narrative that would empower users to buy.
San Francisco-based Kinetik, is trying to solve that problem and today launched an app-sharing application for the iPhone that looks at what your friends and potential friends are using and makes suggestions based on those apps to you.
Older Internet consumers are very low users of smartphones and online media, states a new report from McKinsey. To analyze this more, we decided to compare the youngest and oldest groups surveyed: "Digital-media Junkies" (average age 28) and "Traditionalists" (average age 48).
McKinsey states that "Digital-media junkies" are three times more likely to be early adopters of new technologies. This segment makes up 19% of McKinsey's survey, up 7% from 2008. The "Traditionalists" meanwhile make up 24% of the survey respondents, the same as in 2008. Traditionalists overwhelmingly do not own smartphones. They also have not yet adopted online media devices, such as tablets and e-readers.
I had one of those terrible and all-too-typical experiences yesterday. I had to call a customer service number. I called, struggling with the voice-activated answering system, cursing vociferously in hopes of triggering some sort of special mechanism to connect me directly to a real person. Finally my turn in the phone queue came and - of course, this is always how the story goes - the customer service rep was able to pull up my account information, verify it, answer my question, mail me the necessary paperwork (seriously, in 2011) and tell me to have a nice day. I waited on hold for about 20 minutes; talking to someone took about four minutes.
As I sat on hold, an automated voice reminded me that there were many things I could do if I went to the organization's website instead. Alas, not in my case. The website had some forms and an FAQ, sure, but much to my chagrin, I had to call the toll-free number.
The current Internet era is characterized by multiple devices, including mobile phones, tablets, Internet TVs, netbooks, laptops, and of course the good old PC. One of the key services needed in this multi-device online world is reliable synchronization. Yet faulty or not-quite-optimal sync is one of the problems I experience the most these days.
Just before I started writing this, I was attempting to sync data from the online note-taking app Evernote. I had made some notes on my iPad Evernote app while in a cafe, where I didn't have Internet connectivity (I'm a premium subscriber to Evernote, so I have offline access to my data). When I attempted to sync up that content to my Evernote desktop app in my home office, it didn't immediately update. I refreshed... then again... no sync. Perplexed, I moved onto another activity and then checked again 5 minutes later. By then the changes had synced up, but the delay was disconcerting.
Perhaps you won't believe me since it's my job to spread the gospel of curation as the Chief Evangelist of Pearltrees, but I think curation is here to stay. These are the reasons why I believe this is the case.
This year there has been a tremendous amount of buzz in Silicon Valley about curation. Magnify.net CEO Steven Rosenbaum recently published a book, Curation Nation that has sparked a tremendous amount of conversation on the topic. Likewise a post by Brian Solis has been retweeted thousands of times. My company, Pearltrees has just surpassed 100,000 curators and 10 million page views a month, and in the past two years nearly a dozen companies that incorporate digital curation into their models have launched.
Online reputation has been measured by in-bound links through Google Ranking, RSS and feed subscribers and now, the number of social media shares on services like Klout and Echo apps. As new reputation systems have emerged, an army of deceptive users have risen up to game them via link farms and exchanges, fake profile generators and most recently, Twitterbots.
It's no question that social media reputation has become the influencer metric du jour, but we've yet to see an all encompassing platform that isn't gameable. Social stock market site Empire Avenue is certainly no exception.
Moleskine, the traditional maker of high-end notepads, released an iPad app last week that brings its distinctive, black and historically famous notebook to the realm of digital applications.
Basically, it is a note-taking application that is customizable and can be used with a stylus. Like physical Moleskines, writing interfaces come in plain (no lines), lined or squared; you can also change the color themes and add pictures. Tied to this is the ability to use Facebook and Twitter from the app and geotag all your posts.
The app that Moleskine has come up with fits in with how they think of themselves - the professional note-taker's notepad. Yet, the execution leaves a touch to be desired.
Half the discussion surrounding the digital world seems to revolve around its utility in the real world. How does digital life produce wealth? How can it be used to increase political participation? Can art be made from or in it? It's no wonder that some digital citizens throw up their hands and write the questions off as the carping of eternal grandparents.
Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, a non-profit in San Francisco, has chosen a different route, neither exegesis nor abandonment. Instead (get ready for the sexy), they are the Large Hadron Collider of the digital world, banging people, ideas, approaches, concerns and populations together for the sheer joy of seeing how bright a flash and big a bang they can make.
