Go ahead and check those work emails on your smartphone: a new study says it's time spent checking Facebook and other "personal" social networks that is stressing you out.
It gets worse: the more times you check your smartphone, the higher your stress levels. The study also suggested people who are used to getting lots of text messages and push notifications on their phones will feel stress levels rise if they hit a stretch where their phones are silent. In the worst cases, study subjects experienced "phantom" vibrations when, in fact, they had not received an alert.
Grooveshark may have been booted from both the iTunes App Store and Android Market, but that's not stopping the controversial music streaming startup from forging ahead with its mobile strategy. Rather than going back and forth with Apple and Google, the company has taken matters into its own hands by launching a Web app that forgoes Flash in favor of HTML5.
The Grooveshark HTML5 app can stream music from any modern mobile browser, including Safari on the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. Until now, the service wouldn't work on (non-jailbroken) iOS devices, since the desktop Web app for Grooveshark utilizes Flash for playback.
Today Facebook announced the comments box plugin for mobile, which will automatically appear on the mobile version of the sites that have already integrated the Facebook comments box plugin. Gannet newspaper sites including the Statesman Journal (Salem, Oregon), Burlington Free Press (Burlington, VT) and the Detroit Free Press are already using the Facebook comments box plugin.
When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone five years ago, it was a happy day for the Apple faithful. Less so for the folks at Palm, whose employer became a ticking time bomb. In one move, Apple leapfrogged its rivals in hardware and software and changed the mobile industry forever. And Palm -- a touch computing pioneer that lost its way -- was toast.
That's just one example of how quickly a company's fates can change in today's fast-moving tech industry. Every company -- even those as seemingly strong today as Apple and Google -- have clear risks and weaknesses. The iPad could drive Microsoft's decline. The government could smother Google's growth efforts. And a mobile player that doesn't even exist could be the one that takes down Facebook.
When it comes to news-reading apps, iPad app Zite is a favorite amongst many of the staffers at ReadWriteWeb. It provides a personalized news feed based on your interests, social graph and the community. Zite will bring you news catered to your interests but also provide serendipitous discovery of new sources and topics that may be of interest. This is all useful and interesting functionality ... but how the heck does it work?
Zite (now owned by CNN), at its core, is a data-parsing engine tied to the social graph. Its roots are buried to a social discovery search engine called Worio that the team eventually folded to create Zite. Article URLs are parsed out of the social graph, mapped and weighted. How does the company pull this all off? Today, Zite gives users a peek under the hood.
One of the biggest detriments to Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet is that it does not support location-based services. This was likely a choice from Amazon to leave GPS hardware out of the device to cut down on costs. The lack of location services on the Fire greatly hinders what kind of apps can run on the device. One company has figured out a way around the Fire's restrictions and is bringing its navigation app to the Fire.
HopStop is a metropolitan navigation app that gives door-to-door directions for pedestrians, cyclists, taxis and mass transit in over 200 cities in the United States and Canada. Without location services on a device, HopStop's app is basically useless. Enter location provider Skyhook with a simple fix to a complex problem.
If you're attending the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) this week and have an Android phone, you'll be able to use Google Maps to navigate inside the Las Vegas Convention Center. Select resorts and casinos on the Las Vegas strip are also covered, as is McCarran International Airport.
Google has also partnered with some Las Vegas-area Best Buy stores, so it can guide gadget-addled convention-goers straight to the cash register. Today's update also releases the floor plans of some of the first locations submitted to Google.
Visa is beginning to make its move in the mobile payments space. While MasterCard has heavily featured its near field communications capabilities and exclusive partnership with the Google Wallet, Visa has been working behind the scenes to set up mobile payments strategy. Visa announced today that its payWave NFC mobile wallet application has been certified for a variety of smartphones giving the payments giant its first real steps into unleashing NFC wallets.
The Visa payWave certification is only coming to a limited of handsets at this point but the bigger news is the certification process itself. Visa is setting itself up to be a ubiquitous mobile payments option. As one of the leading payment processors in the world, this is a major step in the evolution of using smartphones for real world transactions.
A year ago Nokia was talking about hurling itself off a burning platform into a cold and dark ocean. The world wondered if the largest cellphone maker on Earth was committing suicide by phasing out Symbian smartphones and ditching the MeeGo operating system. Nokia, the company that brought many consumers their first cellphones, was crumbling in front of our very eyes.
It was like watching an old friend kill himself through years of alcoholism. Eventually, the bad decisions just start to pile up. But, like many alcoholics, somebody was there to throw a lifeline into that freezing, murky sea. Nokia grabbed onto Microsoft's life preserver and hung on for all it was worth. A year later? Nokia has the one thing that all technology companies crave: the buzz of the masses. People are saying positive things about Nokia again. That is an amazing thing.
Path 2.0 is the first newfangled social app I've been able to get my friends to use since Facebook complacency set in. I had my reservations at first, when I was worried that Path would turn out to be nothing more than a pretty mirror for gazing at oneself. For a while, it was pretty lonely in there, but after using Path to document my week on jury duty, I knew the app could offer something meaningful.
As it turned out, the Path experience wasn't only compelling to me because I'm a professional nerd. Over the holidays, I showed Path to a bunch of my best friends, and they all fell in love with it. Now that I have close people there, Path has become important to me. It's on my home screen, and Facebook is not. Path is not on the Web; it's a place in itself, and that's why it matters.
