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.

Of Yo, Unbundling And Simplicity : Welcome To the New App World.

Of Yo, Unbundling And Simplicity : Welcome To the New App World.

Sunday, June 29, 2014 / No Comments

Over the past week or so, an app called Yo has been making the news because given its “stupidity”, it has managed to raise $1.2m. All it does is allow you to send a “Yo” to a friend. Its like Facebook Poke, but even dumber.
The app has no icon and only one screen. It was created as a side project by a few folks working on an existing app start up. Noted tech analyst Robert Scoble has described Yo as ”the stupidest, most addictive app I’ve ever seen in my life”. The makers claim the engagement metrics on it are unlike anything they’ve seen before, and they could have raised even more money than what was offered to them. Still sound stupid?

Without going into whether Yo actually offers a legitimate value proposition, it represents a growing trend seen in the past 12 months: a mobile app is meant to do only one thing. Facebook started the process of “unbundling”, splitting up functions of the service into different apps with Messenger and Paper, and then of course they also own WhatsApp and Instagram. Foursquare followed soon launching Swarm to enable discovery, and last week Path split its messenger service into Path Talk. And then just yesterday Marc Andreessen went on one of his Twitter rants talking about the history of unbundling.

Anyway, whichever way you look at it, the way mobile apps are being used has changed, or rather, matured to suit the form factor. Back in 2010, the idea was to put as much functionality in one app with the assumption that the inertia to download multiple apps was too high. It was the desktop web approach.
While the general problem of getting people to download apps has only gotten harder (app discovery challenges and all that), the 4” screen means you can only have limited functionality on it without compromising user experience. Over time, users have gotten used to going back to an app to complete the one key essential task that it merits. Apps are now being used more as “applets”, especially how they are interfacing with the rest of the ecosystem:

With the OS: The iOS 8 notification center and extensions will enable you to complete tasks without even going inside an app. This, of course, already exists on Android, and I’m sure the L release will take it to the next level.

With Other Apps: App to app linking is gradually becoming common practice, especially among services that are unbundled. A classic example is the Facebook app, and how clicking on the messenger icon now takes you to the Messenger app instead of opening the message inbox right there.

With the Web: Google App Indexing is the first step in getting the web and app world to talk to each other. You search for something, and along with web link results, you get shown app link results. Clicking on one of those takes you inside that app to the particular content you were looking for.

What does all this mean for app developers? I think Benedict Evans articulates it well in this post a couple of months back: In mobile, everything is still wide open. There are still so many mobile first problems to solve, more so in emerging markets like India. Idea should be to keep it simple, integrate it deep within the existing ecosystem, and solve one core problem that makes users come back again and again.
[About the author : The article is written by Aakrit Vaish, founder of Haptik app. Reproduced from author's blog.]