MapmyIndia launches NaviMaps, A Navigation App With In-House Addresses

MapmyIndia launches NaviMaps, A Navigation App With In-House Addresses

Tuesday, July 1, 2014 / No Comments

GPS navigation and location app for consumers and enterprise MapmyIndia has launched a ‘glocal’ navigation app on Android. The app follows freemium model — while maps and directions are free for life, voice guidance in several regional languages will require some bucks.

Users will also be pleased by automatic traffic based re-routing, and real time journey updates on Facebook. In our brief testing, we didn’t find the app lagging, which is quite nice.

Features

The app features several more exciting features, as mentioned below.

• NaviMaps offers maps for Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal.
• While commuting you will be pleased by the real time turn-by-turn voice guidance, NaviMaps offers Furthermore, the guidance is available in 10 regional languages.
• The app features auto re-routing which will help you find the best route to your destination.
• Social Navigation with Real-time journey progress updates on Facebook.
• Realistic 3D landmarks and house number search on maps.
• Superfast navigation with single line predictive destination search.
• Instantly check for traffic delays along your regular routes before you start out.

The app touts that it will work even when the network is poor. Android users can download it from here. Windows Phone and iOS users can expect the app soon.

Google Shames Apple’s iOS For Adding What Android Did Years Ago

Google Shames Apple’s iOS For Adding What Android Did Years Ago

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Apple’s Tim Cook insulted Google at WWDC earlier this month saying “Android dominates the market in malware”, and quoted an article calling the fragmented open operating system a “toxic hellstew of vulnerabilities.” Well Google punched back this morning at its I/O conference when Sundar Pichai put up a slide showing Android’s progress over the years, noting “If you look at what other platforms are getting now, widgets, custom keyboards, many of these things came to Android four, maybe five years ago.”

And the Google fanboys and fangirls went wild.

Pichai never said Apple, but he was clearly jabbing at the recent announcement that iOS 8 would include widgets and custom keyboards. And to play a little defense, Pichai then described how Google was fighting Android malware by forcing all security updates to be pushed through Google Play so hackers can’t send them straight to unsuspecting victims.

For years, the fight between Apple and Google on mobile has been about iOS’ beauty vs Android’s power. But now Apple is opens up more developer flexibility, and Android is getting the new “Material” design overhaul. As the two mobile operating systems converge, expect this fight to get even dirtier. “Android is for robots!” “iOS is for toddlers!”

And poor Windows Phone wishes someone would at least make fun of it

Pipes Is A Clever App That Lets You Track Any Topic You Care About

Pipes Is A Clever App That Lets You Track Any Topic You Care About

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Prepare to further isolate yourself in a world containing only the news and information you care about. A new mobile application called Pipes has just launched a simple tool to help you find and follow any topic, from Apple or Google to the FIFA World Cup, or whatever else you want.
The app is similar in some ways to short-form news reading apps like Circa or Yahoo’s News Digest, or alerting tools like recent TechCrunch Disrupt participant Notivo, as it’s also designed to offer mobile-friendly access to news and information. But in Pipes’ case, the app isn’t about offering you bite-sized summaries, but instead provides feeds of popular articles on the subject matter at hand, as well as tweets, and even the item’s Wikipedia page, for reference.
According to co-founder Vinay Anand, who built Pipes along with Siddarth Goliya and a small team of mainly 20-year-old engineers, Pipes’ backend today crawls data from over 10,000 sources every hour, allowing you to track just about anything.
“The two of us really felt the need to personalize news,” explains Anand. “We really feel that people have specific things they want to track and want to be alerted on it and that’s exactly what Pipes allows you to do,” he says.

How It Works

Pipes is well-designed and straightforward to set up and use. From the main screen, you just click a plus (“+”) button to add a new pipe (aka, topic). You then enter your search term or keyword, and tap to add it to your homepage. You can also shake your phone for a suggestion of trending pipes to add, which is fun, if a bit less practical.
After adding your topics, each appears in its own section on the main page, waiting to be explored. You tap into these for lists of links to news articles, which pull in the full article’s text in most cases via RSS feeds. From here, you can also bookmark items as well as share them via text, WhatsApp, Email, Google+, Twitter and Facebook.

You can also customize push notifications for your pipes, while controlling their frequency.
Separate sections point you to the topic’s Wikipedia page and related tweets. I don’t care for the decision to only pull in hashtagged tweets here, however, as I find there’s a lot more content discussed on Twitter than the tweets from those devoted to hashtagging everything they say. Plus, Pipes’ selection of tweets feels curated and stale, as it didn’t update with a pull-to-refresh gesture during testing. The tweets aren’t time-stamped either, so their only purpose now it seems is to give you a sense of the conversation, or to point you to other articles that may have been missed in the “News” section.
Meanwhile, a “Top Stories” section on the Pipes main screen lets you break out of your own little world a bit to see other popular news items.

 

The overall look-and-feel of Pipes and the functionality it provides is compelling. However, ultimately the app will have to face down other more popular competitors like Flipboard or Bloglovin for casual news readers, or RSS feed-reading utilities like Feedly or Reeder for hard-core news consumers.
The co-founders have worked on several business ventures together in the past, including two that failed, one that Anand describes as a “moderate success” and now Pipes, their fourth venture. This time around, they’re funding development through money from Doodle Creatives, their Mumbai-based design and development shop, but have not taken in outside funding.
Pipes is a free download on both iOS and Android.

Microsoft May Prioritize The Desktop In Windows 9

Microsoft May Prioritize The Desktop In Windows 9

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The latest rumor from the Microsoft community is confusing: Microsoft may disable, by default, the Metro-defined Start Screen on desktop-based computers in Windows 9, what is currently referred to as “Threshold.”
According to Neowin’s Brad Sams, in some Threshold builds, users must “manually turn [the Start Screen] back on, but this is situation dependent, if you wish to access the live tile environment.”
ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley has a slightly different take on the situation:

Users running Threshold on a desktop/laptop will get a SKU, or version, that puts the Windows Desktop (for running Win32/legacy apps) front and center. Two-in-one devices, like the Lenovo Yoga or Surface Pro, will support switching between the Metro-Style mode and the Windowed mode, based on whether or not keyboards are connected or disconnected.
The combined Phone/Tablet SKU of Threshold won’t have a Desktop environment at all, but still will support apps running side-by-side, my sources are reconfirming. This “Threshold Mobile” SKU will work on ARM-based Lumia phones, ARM-based Windows tablets and, I believe, Intel-Atom-based tablets.

All of the above makes sense, so let’s synthesize. We’ve known a few things for some time now: Microsoft wants to re-prioritize the desktop Windows environment, because for all the talk of a post-PC world, people are still wildly dependent on their trusted computing configuration; and Windows is going to become a more unified system across discrete screen environments, eventually becoming a functionally dual-version operating system that works from phones to desktops.
I doubt that Microsoft will ever disable the Start Screen on PCs that are desktop-focused. But that doesn’t mean that the company wouldn’t build a flavor of its core operating system that has the desktop experience greatly favored.
Here we reach a point of dissonance: If Microsoft is hellbent on building share for its Windows Store, which resides in the Metro side of Windows 8.x, how the hell could it afford to essentially push that section of the operating system aside? It’s actually made the proper concession: The Windows Store’s icon has been moved to the desktop-side of the operating system.

And if you can run Metro apps in the desktop environment, ahem, you can Windows Store for days without needing the Start Screen.
Anecdotally, and I know that means we’re speaking with a skewed sample set, I’m recently seeing folks in my life that have purchased Windows 8.x PCs that are enjoying the new form factors, and touch, but are not too enthused about using the Start Screen on a chronic basis. Make of that what you will, it’s merely something that I’ve noticed and heard.
Foley has an interesting thought:

Microsoft is basically “done” with Windows 8.x. Regardless of how usable or functional  it is or isn’t, it has become Microsoft’s Vista — something from which Microsoft needs to distance itself,

perception-wise. At this point, Microsoft is going full steam-ahead toward Threshold and will do its best to differentiate that OS release from Windows 8.

I think that’s actually a savvy take. We’re in a potentially Office 2007 situation, when Microsoft shook up the paradigm, took a number of potshots, managed to keep the bulk of the work intact and push out Office 2010 to massive success. Provided that Microsoft can keep that which is good in Windows 8, and blend in a host of strong desktop-focused updates, prioritizing each in different weight based on device form factor, the company could have a pretty solid operating system on its hands.
However, it’s no simple task: If Microsoft instead manages only a muddle of updates that are disparate in nature and are even less cohesive than Windows 8.0, the company could tilt the entire PC market south, past the point of stability in the 300 million units per year mark