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App: The First Second Screen Film

Second screen comes to the movies with an app-enabled film, appropiately named APP.  The film is about a young psychology student Anna Rijnders who, after a dramatic accident in which her ??younger brother has become partially paralyzed, goes completely into her own virtual world. 

Before going to see the film, moviegoers are asked to download a free app (available for Android and iPhone) to enhance the plot. Moviegoers are advised to leave their devices on their laps during the film. When additional content is available on the second screen, audience members are notified by their vibrating phones.

www.appdefilm.nl

As the days go by and developers get their hands on Glass, the basic apps that we need to survive in the wild and share our photos are popping up. Today, Glass To Facebook is available for those who want to post the moments captured with Glass to the social network. It’s the first third-party app that allows you

The setup is similar to that of other third-party apps like GlassTweet, but requires you to give Facebook permissions to post to your timeline. It only takes a few seconds to get going:

After you’ve turned on the Glass To Facebook sharing contact within MyGlass and approve the permissions on Facebook, you’re ready to start posting:

Just take a photo and choose the Glass To Facebook option:

The nice thing about the app is that it creates a photo album for you that will start piling up your Glass-taken photos:

Your photo shows up like any other one would in your friends’ News Feed, too. This means that all of those annoying baby pictures that you see on the daily will now come from the vantage point of the parent’s face. Exciting, I know. On a serious note, it’s nice to see photos from Glass being brought to networks other than Google+, which was the only out of the box option.

While we haven’t heard anything recently about an official Facebook Glass app, we’ve heard that there’s a team of four working on something. What could Facebook look like for Glass? We know that there won’t be ads, since Google isn’t allowing them on the Glass platform as of right now. Aside from that, I wouldn’t mind seeing a Poke pop up on the device.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

As time goes on and more Google Glass developers start tinkering around with their Explorer kits, we’ll start seeing all types of apps pop up for the device. The fun part about this is that we’re going to see all of the very basic, and necessary, apps being built first. You can share photos to Google+ out of the box with Glass, you can tweet them with GlassTweet, but a new service called Glassnost wants to break those photos outside of those networks onto its own site.

The name of the site, Glassnost, is a send-up to the Russian phrase “glasnost,” which is loosely translated to openness. The app connects to your Glass device, allowing you to share photos to the site, while visitors can “like” them. The killer part of the app is that once your photos get enough “likes,” your Glass device will start getting alerted that what you’ve shared has struck a chord.

That complete feedback loop is a perfect demonstration of why Glass is so interesting. Sure, you can send out photos and videos, see what the weather is and maybe send a text message, but doing something on the device and then getting some sort of feedback as you go about your day is awesome. This social feedback is a first for a Glass app built by third-party developers. Once you start getting likes, a card will pop up in your Glass timeline, showing you which photo got a “like” and when:

It’s basic, but it’s kind of fun to get that immediate feedback on a shot that you just took. Notifications are going to be a sticky situation for developers, as nobody is going to want to know about every single like or comment that they get on a service, since that defeats the whole purpose of the “calm technology” that Glass brings. Glassnost tries to intelligently alert you on the traction of your photos, giving you aggregated like numbers as your photo gets more popular.

Considering that a lot of smartphone users constantly check their device to see how many likes their Facebook status or Instagram photo got, this approach to sharing is a breath of fresh air.

As with any early service, there won’t be a ton of content on Glassnost until it has more users. The Glass community does, however, need a third-party to share their photos with the world, which is a way to cut through all of the noise of whether Glass is the second-coming of Jesus devices or a complete bust. The apps that get bult for Glass and the experience that people have will be the deciding factor on all of that, not the typical and predictable rushes to judgement of the tech press.

I hate using email. I get an average of 60 to 70 emails every day, and only one precent of them are from people I actually care about. Using email today is all about sifting through the clutter. Dextr is an app that helps you accomplish that by filtering your inbox to only include emails from your friends and family.

Dextr is an email client for Android that functions a lot like Priority Inbox for Gmail, only it’s a standalone app. Once you’ve downloaded the app to your phone and signed into your email account, it presents you with a list of your contacts. Here you select your closest friends, family, or associates – basically, the people you’d actually want to receive email from. Once you’ve done that, Dextr only shows you emails from this list of persons who are important to you.

So while Dextr won’t (and probably shouldn’t) be replacing Gmail as your primary email client on your Android phone, having your inbox stripped down to nothing more but your own personal interactions is strangely refreshing. I abhor all the crap that ends up in my inbox, and being presented with one made up only of emails that I would actually care to read just felt nice. This is what email used to be before it became a firehose.

And yet, the fact that Dextr functions less like an email client and more like a messaging app says a lot of about how we use email today. The moment I opened up Dextr, I was struck with this sudden urge to start emailing my friends and having epic threaded conversations again. That’s where Dextr succeeds, but it falls short once I realize that this is in fact, email. I rarely if ever communicate with my friends via email anymore. Messaging apps, Twitter, and Facebook have pretty much taken over that space. And although Dextr has one of the prettiest interfaces I’ve ever seen in an Android app, email at the end of the day is still email.

Dextr is a little strange. It’s too bare bones just yet to function as a fully realized email client. You can’t send attachments (only view and download the ones that are sent to you), and threaded conversations are still a no-go. On the other hand, it’s a beautiful app, and perfectly performs the function of filtering your inbox down to the people you care about.

For me, that feature alone is enough to keep it on my phone. At least I won’t get any crap from my friends for accidentally grouping an email they sent to me along with my spam. Dextr is a $0.99 download at the Google Play Store.

Bing has quietly released an update for the Bing iPad App, adding new features and making optimization improvements to the app. The app can be downloaded for free over here in the app store. The changes, as listed in version 1.3 include: Bookmark Web/Image/News Search Query Provide Daily Trending…



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Yahoo has acquired 4 million user to-do app Astrid, which allows users to create task lists on Android and iOS phones and tablets, as well as the web. No financial details were released.

Astrid announced the acquisition itself on its blog, saying that “we are thrilled to announce” that the company has been bought by Yahoo.

Users of Astrid might possibly be less than thrilled, however, as the service will only be maintained as it currently exists for 90 days, after which changes might be made. Users, however, will be able to download any data they have input into the service, if they wish.

CEO Jon Paris thanked Google Ventures and Startup Lab as well as investors Nexus Venture Partners and TMT Investments, but said that Astrid will no longer be accepting premium subscriptions. Users who have paid for annual subscriptions that overlap that period will be getting refunds.

With the purchase, Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer continues to deliver on her promise of more mobile and more acquisitions. Yahoo has also recently acquired mobile video platform OnTheAir, social curation site Snip.it, location discovery app Alike, and mobile recommendations site Jybe.

Paris’ entire statement:

Friends of Astrid,

We are thrilled to announce that we have been acquired by Yahoo!. When we set out to build Astrid, we sought to help as many people as possible become happier, healthier and more productive. We’re really excited to join the mobile team and continue this work with Yahoo!’s goal of “making the world’s daily habits more inspiring and entertaining.”

Over the next 90 days, Astrid will continue to work as is, and we will no longer be accepting new premium subscriptions. To make future changes as easy as possible, we’ll be in touch with users shortly to share how to download data.

We are grateful to the more than 4 million of you who have downloaded our apps, to those who have shared Astrid with friends, family and co-workers, and to all who encouraged us with your kind words along the way. You honored us in so many ways, and we won’t forget you.

We are also grateful to our many mentors and investors:

• Thomas Korte and AngelPad for your sage advice and assembling a tremendous community of entrepreneurs.
• Google Ventures and the team at the Startup Lab for teaching us so much.
• Nexus Venture Partners, TMT Investments, and the amazing angel investors who provided the resource and support we needed to build our products and company.
• Jump Associates and LUXr for helping us understand our users and build products people love.

To all of you, in both big and small ways you have helped us achieve the success we enjoy today. It is our sincere hope that our work will help you come closer to your own dreams.

Warmly,

Jon Paris & the Astrid Team

*Note: Yahoo! will be administering refunds to eligible users who have paid for annual subscriptions, Power-Pack and Locale Plugins.

Hat tip: The Next Web

Filed under: Business, Deals, Mobile

It’s only a matter of time before Twitter releases its own Google Glass app, as Kleiner Perkins’ John Doerr dropped the hint that the company was looking into building one during this month’s Glass Collective announcement.

A tweet from an official Twitter Glass app has been spotted, interestingly enough by the gentleman who brought you the first unofficial Twitter app, GlassTweet.

The user that it came from had no information in their bio when I looked at the profile, but it has since been deleted, along with the tweet below:

Is @MogroothMuddler beta testing an official Twitter for Glass app? Certainly looks like it. http://t.co/lWyZaM6v20

—
Jonathan Gottfried (@jonmarkgo) April 29, 2013

You’ll notice the “Twitter for Glass” label, which denotes which app the tweet came from. That, coupled with the fact that the account has since been deleted, shows that somebody might have let the cat, or Glass, out of the bag a little too early.

I reached out to Twitter, but the company provided us with no statement or comment on its intentions for Glass. It will be interesting to see what an actual Twitter Glass experience will be, as I can’t imagine that anyone would want to see every single tweet from their stream pass before their eye. I could see the utility of getting direct messages, perhaps replies and mentions and most certainly sharing pics and videos.

Expect to see a lot of Glass apps popping up from companies like Twitter and Facebook in the next few months, as the companies are trying to figure out how best to tap into a device that could increase usage and let users share a brand new perspective with media.

The example that I always use with people is that Glass will be really fun at a concert or other live event, where I don’t have to take a phone out of my pocket and remove myself from the situation. It will be natural to snap a shot without disrupting my field of vision and attention.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

During their work with patients, doctors will frequently contact colleagues with questions, trade horror stories, or converse about treatment methods. There isn’t really a technological solution to streamline this daily back and forth, but that’s what Share Practice aims to bring.

Founders Dr. Andrew Brandeis and Benoit Carrier built an easy-to-use mobile app to serve as a sort of Wikipedia-meets-social-networks. Share Practice, just announced at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013, allows doctors to ask questions and receive feedback quickly from other verified doctors in their field rather than having to take out their phone to just call, text or email someone one at a time.

The San Francisco-based company raised $750K, and I spoke with Dr. Andrew Brandeis about why he built it and what the opportunity to disrupt the industry was. There is a lot of good that an app like this can do, but I had some questions around the privacy and security aspects of a service like this, to which Dr. Brandeis shared his thoughts:

TC: Can you tell us a bit about your verification process for bringing Doctors onto the app? Of course, you’d want the best weighing in on these very important issues.

Dr. Brandeis: We’re using Doximity.com to verify doctors.

TC: Do you have any concerns about the potential of bad information being passed around? This is an issue for any social service, as we saw with the AP’s Twitter hacks, but this could be life or death.

Dr. Brandeis: Doctors are not anonymous on Share Practice. they will have a reputation. If they promote good stuff, they have a better reputation. The opposite is true, as well.

TC: Do you have any plans to get this in the hands of medical students or perhaps create a version just for them? Perhaps they can read information only and not share until they are finished with school.

Dr. Brandeis: Medical students are important as they are thirsty for this tool. Yes, we plan to give them access to consume the data, but not contribute it. Residents, however, are our most valuable demographic. They are doctors, learning and sharing rapidly. We’re working with groups to figure out the best way to include them.

TC: Can you share an experience where this app, while testing it, has actually saved you hours of research, or did something that you didn’t think about when first creating it?

Dr. Brandeis: Absolutely. I have a patient with recurrent UTIs; none of our treatments worked. I went to Share Practice and learned about Fosfomycin, a powdered antibiotic rarely used. I Rx’d it to my patient, and it worked perfectly. She’s happy, I’m happy, and I upvoted it on Share Practice. Then a friend of mine learned about it for a similar patient situation and emailed me to thank me. Worked like a charm.

TC: Will there be a version for patients to see how their doctors fare in interacting with the community? Meaning, could a doctor participating in Share Practice become a badge of honor?

Dr. Brandeis: We may eventually open it up to patients to consume the data, only if it won’t dissuade doctors from producing it as they are. That’s our priority. We’re a doctor-focused app, not another consumer one. For now.

TC: Talk about the business model. Will doctors pay for this?

Dr. Brandeis: It will be free for doctors. We monetize by learning what doctors think, why they think it, and what they are saying to each other. For example, every Walgreens knows that Dr. A Rx’d Lipitor for high cholesterol, but they don’t know why he chose that over another choice. We do. That info is valuable to drug companies, but it’s also valuable to insurance who can make coverage better if they know one treatment is more effective than another. That is especially important in the world of professional supplements, where we have a hard time making heads or tails of popular therapies.

TC: Will this data be turned into market research reports or become available for scientists who are looking for the latest diseases and health issues to focus on?

Dr. Brandeis: Absolutely. If we can spot trends and see what is working where and why, why not use that to direct research dollars. There are all kinds of off-label uses for drugs, herbs and supplements that will get proper research dollars when we learn that 10,000 doctors are using them in the same way for the same thing. Imagine that world.

The alpha version of Share Practice is in the hands of 200 users, with the team tweaking the app along the way. Dr. Brandeis tells me that the company is about six weeks away from a formal launch, but once it’s available, it’ll be filled with information about as many illnesses and their diagnoses as possible.

While at first blush this seems like a “Facebook for Doctors,” there are bigger opportunities with Share Practice. When you bring together smart and talented people and have them interacting in real time, the data collected along the way could make an actual impact in the world. Imagine if you’re suffering from a new strain of the flu with the same symptoms seen in most patients — if your doctor hasn’t encountered someone with the strain yet, they might not know how to treat it. This app could change that almost overnight.

During today’s demo at Disrupt NYC 2013, Brandeis showed the app off and fielded some very interesting questions from the judges. It seemed like they were pleased with what they saw:

Sure, Share Practice will require a lot of trust from the participating doctors, as well as actual usage, but if anyone knows what doctors truly need during their on-shift hours, it’s another doctor.