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PacsWorld/Flickr)
Wilson is "out sick" today, but we're lucky to have Ms. Natali Del Conte nearby to replace him on the show. She was working out of the office last week, so we take this opportunity to update ourselves on all things NDC and you'll be surprised to hear of the changes coming to Loaded. We're so proud of her. Congrats, Natali!
We officially kick off this Monday episode by defining the Web's trendiest new buzzphrase, "augmented reality." We're not sure who came up with it, but it's all the rage in the world of iPhone apps. For example, Yelp built an Easter egg into its app that uses the smartphone's GPS to superimpose digital data onto the world through the camera, making it easy to view restaurants, taxis, bathrooms, and subway information around you. We think it's pretty cool, but Gawker has its own application ideas, like an app called ClubLech, which uses facial recognition and user-inputted data to identify all the singles in a room. Sounds creepy and, like a lot of technology, it takes the fun out of getting to know someone in person. Plus, who wants a digital sign superimposed over their head pointing out their depressingly single relationship status?
Are you having a hard time saying goodbye to "Reading Rainbow?" We are, too. The show has been on the air for 26 years and just recently celebrated its final episode on August 28. We're sad to see a relic of our childhood go the way of the dodo, but it makes perfect sense, since we're pretty sure kids are just illiterate now, so why have a show to promote books? But don't take our word for it; just ask a kid to define the word "Scholastic."
If you want to get your voice mail heard on the air, just give us a call at 1-855-404-CNET and tell us what's on your mind! Could be something about one of our shows, maybe one of the hosts, or just something random that popped into your head. We'll take them all!
EPISODE 415
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Episode 47 of the Digital City, where we install Apple's new Snow Leopard OS update; discuss the current round of game console price cuts; check out some Netbooks with HD displays; and find out why Time Warner Cable's new "Mystro" cable box firmware update makes us want to give up on TV altogether.
Related links:
>>All things Snow Leopard
>>New price cuts upend console value landscape
>>Rise of the high-def Netbooks
>>Watch the Digital City live every Friday at 3pm EST on CNET Live!
>>Subscribe to Digital City on iTunes
>>Join the Digital City Facebook fan page
>>Need more? Follow Dan on Twitter!
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Yelp shows me what's outside my window.
(Credit: Screenshot by Scott Stein/CNET)The hot trend of 2009 has to be augmented reality, particularly with all the impressive tech demos and futuristic games currently in development across the world.
On the iPhone in particular, several companies have promised Twittering, search, and other navigation using layers of real-time data overlaid onto live video from the iPhone's camera. Imagine a heads-up display on reality itself, and that's what augmented reality is promising.
Apple has been onboard with these developments, promising that the upcoming OS 3.1 will provide full compatibility for AR apps. But it turns out we don't need to wait after all. In addition to French and British AR map programs hitting the App Store early, a much better and cooler solution has been lurking under our eyes the whole time.
Called "Monocle," it's an Easter egg within Yelp. As in, Yelp 3.0, the one that's currently available on the App Store. When I first read a tweet about it, I was disbelieving. But all you have to do is shake your phone three times like in some fairy tale to trigger the Monocle button, which suddenly appears on the top of the screen.
Launching it brings up honest-to-goodness overlaid restaurant and bar information that moves as you move, aided by the iPhone 3GS's built-in compass. It resembles the demos seen by the Layar browser.
That compass is key for AR apps to work properly, because it senses direction. GPS alone won't cut it, which means you'd better have a 3GS to pull this off. Give it a try, though, and let us know if your 3G will work on it. And don't forget to update the Yelp app before shaking.
Will we use this? Maybe not so much, but we sure will enjoy showing it off.
(Via Fast Company)
Yelp introduces two ways to voice your opinion on iPhone.
(Credit: CNET)I was lukewarm about Yelp's initial iPhone application, but some new features stitched into Yelp for iPhone 2.0 (and iPod Touch) this week are beginning to stoke my affections.
High on the list of Yelpers' demands was being able to write a review from the iPhone. In addition to any technical impediment Yelp may have experienced here is the fact that typing long missives, praises, and rants on the iPhone's virtual keyboard just plain stinks. To work around this, Yelp now gives you two ways to review a business. The first is through a Quick Tip, where you're encouraged to be pithy above all else. A 140 character cap holds you to it.
If budding novelists don't find that fulfilling, there's also way to draft a review on the iPhone--that includes the star rating--and finish it on the computer. While that's not a terrible method, the bottom line is that you're still not allowed to post a rated review from your iPhone. If I've got an hour to kill and I want to spend it stabbing out a Yelp review on my keyboard, that should be my business.
In addition to review-flavored changes, Yelp for iPhone also acquires a feeds list that aggregates the latest reviews, quick tips, and photos located near you. If you're signed on to your Yelp.com account, separate filters show you friends' feeds and your own activity history, including how people voted on your witty tips.
You can start a new review on Yelp for iPhone, but you can't post it.
(Credit: CNET)Subtler improvements to the app include a sign-up process for first-time Yelpers, a new way to view photos of a business in full-screen mode, and localized spelling and address formatting for British users. I'm still a little miffed that I can't rate and review a restaurant on the spot, but this pack of changes makes the app much more usable than it was before. Since Yelp for iPhone is free and mass opinion isn't a bad jumping-off point, that makes this update a success in my book.
Caroline McCarthy and Tim Geisenheimer join The 404 today, while Jeff pretends to celebrate the Passover with his family. The ace reporter brings in cupcakes made with bacon cream-cheese frosting and beer. Sounds incredibly healthy. Here's the recipe.
Heart attack cupcake.
(Credit: Wilson G. Tang/CNET)On today's show, we cover the news that Yelp is finally letting businesses respond to negative reviews that users write. Did you know that The 404 has a Yelp page? Wilson discovers that you can actually write reviews for almost anything, including homeless people. In the same vein, feel free to write Yelp reviews for your favorite 404 hosts.
In more outrageous news today, PETA is holding an animal protest rally in World of Warcraft. WoW players are slaughtering baby seals in the "Howling Fjord." We think PETA should spend its time trying to stop Tim from killing baby seals on the weekends, rather than virtual seals. Also, a man in Texas got stabbed for farting in the room with his buddies. This happens on a daily basis in Wilson's office. More from Texas: a state legislator says that Asian American names are too confusing. And South of the border, Mexican drug dealers are sending blatant death threats on YouTube.
Thanks for sending in your survival stories. Keep them coming. E-mail them or call us at the usual number. And be sure to RSVP for the upcoming 404 meetup on April 16 next week. Here's the link. Jennifer Love Hewitt and Megan Fox will be there! (Not really, but Natali Del Conte will be.)
EPISODE 318
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In this day and age when every other person is a self-described foodie, finding the best mobile application to point you to a taste bud-bending experience requires as much discernment as finding the authentic voice from among throngs of folks who think they know good eats.
I'd be lying if I didn't claim snobby epicurean tendencies, myself.
This headstrong belief in one's own taste credentials is exactly what fuels the need for informative and well-designed food-finding applications. Too simple and a foodie will shun it. Too esoteric and it could alienate a growing segment of people who really care about the art and science of meal-making.
I've recently studied several restaurant-recommending applications for iPhone and other mobile platforms, including Yelp and Urbanspoon for iPhone and Zagat To Go for Windows Mobile, Palm, and BlackBerry, and wondered how relative newcomers Munch ($0.99) and LocalEats ($0.99) compare to these more established services.
Munch for iPhone turns out accurate results, but what's with the ratings?
(Credit: CNET Networks)There are, of course, things to laud and criticize with each app. Munch's interface has a great method for quick-launching searches for pizza, Mexican, and so on from icons in the screen navigation. You can select other cuisines from a scrolling list. Munch returns wonderfully accurate search results, but is devoid of context. There are no reviews, no Web site listings, and every restaurant we looked at was rated with five empty stars. That's doable if you want a listings app, but for anyone trying to make intelligent choices, it just won't work.
LocalEats fares much better. The app brings you the best 100 (or more) restaurants in 50 U.S. cities as determined by a team of foodie professionals, authors of the online dining guide Where the locals eat. The benefit is that unlike Urbanspoon, no national chain even thinks of making an appearance. You can search each city's highest-rated establishments by alphabetical order, cuisine type, or the best of each category. For larger cities you can also search by neighborhood.
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Yelp on the iPhone maps and calls destinations and provides user ratings, but leaves off other social-networking elements.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Yelp for iPhone contains all the ingredients you'd expect from the well-known site for users to rate local business and restaurant listings--except one. It has a perplexing tendency to space out when loading user reviews. The instability is surely an early bug, but a detraction nonetheless.
Apart from that, Yelp for iPhone features a clear display composed of category listings for nearby restaurants, bars, banks, and so on. Like so many of the other apps that CNET editors have reviewed, Yelp's iPhone offering taps into the phone's GPS receptors to find matching listings in your neighborhood, with further parameters on distance and hours available in the button marked Filter.
Each listing on the results page squeezes in the address, user ratings, distance, and price range. Drilling deeper spreads the information out in a format that lets you map the location, click to call, begin browsing through user reviews, and bookmark the page.
Yelp.com is a data-intensive site bulging with user opinions and social-networking addenda. The iPhone app was clearly never intended as a replacement, but as a companion for the lost or weary to seek out a bike shop or bite to eat. That much is evident by the read-only quality, mobile-specific mapping and call functions, and the de-emphasis on social networking. Still, while the closed, self-centeredness of Yelp for iPhone is somewhat refreshing, certain scheduling capabilities would be welcome--like the ability to invite a friend to lunch.
If I had to describe LightPole in 10 words or fewer, I'd call it an interface for accessing location-aware services from mobile phones. More than anything else, LightPole's downloadable application offers a listings and mapping format that many location-based services, such as Yelp and Yahoo Local, can squeeze into to gain more visibility or avoid creating their own rich cell phone applications.
I added the CNET News.com channel; the rest are LightPole's.
(Credit: CNET Networks)It works like this. Users looking for stuff--a good restaurant, happy hour specials, or Internet cafe--can click open LightPole, select a service (MappyHour and Hotspotr are two more,) and can read about the establishment, call the establishment, and map the results.
New customization features, announced Wednesday, make the application heaps more appealing to the masses because it lets users do what users like to do best--add their own content by creating channels online.
From LightPole's Web site, you input any RSS feed or site URL corresponding to geotagged content into the blank field to transform it into a channel. A Google map and Flickr stream are two examples. A few more clicks and a manual phone update later and the content is ready to access. I'll admit that mapping the CNET News.com feed was a little useless (CNET headquarters doesn't move around much,) but I like the flexibility and relative ease of relying on LightPole's partnerships for my most-wanted content.
Two other announcements join ranks with the news of the now-open channels. LightPole's integration with Yahoo-owned Fire Eagle, a nexus for managing your location information. This integration lets registered users of other Fire Eagle-supported location services, Loki for example, post their whereabouts. LightPole will pick it up from there.
In a final enhancement, two of LightPole's partners, MappyHour and Hotspotr, have added functionality that lets users add favorite happy hour lairs and Internet cafes to the communities' Web sites from the LightPole application. There are still some usability hitches (a few too many menus and clicks for my taste,) but these second helpings already make LightPole more useful.
LightPole doesn't think of itself as a search hub, an RSS reader, a mobile apps platform, or a maps source, even though the mobile app, publicly released on Tuesday, is all these things rolled into one.
LightPole's interface is a bit like Viigo's, but instead of hosting various news channels, LightPole (mostly) hosts channels for interactive services, targeting people on the move who are looking for activities around them.
People seeking a nearby hot spot, for example, would open the channel for Hotspotr, which sniffs out W-iFi cafes and other Internet gateways. MappyHour acts similarly for happy hour joints, and Zvents offers listings of local happenings. Perennial favorites Yelp and Yahoo Local are in here, too. LightPole will search your neighborhhood based on your city or postal code, or by using GPS--whether integrated with the phone or as an external device.
Though dealing with divergent channels, LightPole serves up a unified experience, providing both a map view and list view for each search result. People can exert a measure of control over each view, but largely remain passengers. There's the ability to page through options, sort results, share points of interest with a friend, and switch services--from MappyHour to Yelp, for instance--but you'll find no directions engine here. If you follow LightPole's intentions, you'll stick to the adjacent neighborhood and be proficient enough a map-reader to get around.
Saving a point of interest as a favorite leads to the best feature: the catalog of special spots that is your own personalized channel. On LightPole's channel list, it's called My Places. Here you'll find favorites from all partner services gathered in one spot. Best yet, My Places is the only channel that doesn't include an advertising link up top. The location-based advertising model is common for this type of discovery service aggregator, and, as LightPole CEO Doug Klein confirmed, is an ideal framework for serving call-to-action coupons and ads that help businesses attract patrons by proposing a deal.
With its first public release after a year in quiet beta, LightPole's free app looks promising. While not swimming in features, LightPole is fairly easy to use on any Java-enabled phone and delivers reliably predictable results.
With an emphasis on helping content publishers get in front of users, LightPole should also be able to line up more popular partner services. This, along with giving users a degree more control in programming and deleting relevant channels, is crucial as LightPole expands its partner base. While Yelp and Yahoo Local are big wins, other partnerships such as one with The Bathroom Diaries will fall short in shepherding critical mass.
Download LightPole over the air by signing up on www.lightpole.net.
LightPole's navigational secrets
To zoom in while in map mode, press the center key and jog or scroll the center control to the left. Jog it to the right to zoom out. To reset your location, which is represented on a map by a red balloon, pressing the star key (*) will let the balloon follow your navigation to anywhere else on the map. Press the center key again to make the location your new nerve center.
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