The AppsLab

Paul (@ppedrazzi) is right, Google Now looks insanely cool and borderline creepy and invasive all at once. It only makes sense that the next wave of innovation will be focused on harnessing all the noise created by social tools and intelligently determining what matters most to you. I guess Robert Scoble (@scobleizer) is referring to… Read More

Over the years, this blog has been dominated by yours truly. For better or for worse, I account for nearly 90% of the posts here. I’m hoping to change that over the coming months by offering (read begging) some Friends of the ‘Lab to let me repost some of their best content here and ideally,… Read More

When Noel (@noelportugal) and I were at jQuery Conference last month, we had dinner with ‘Lab alumnus Rich Manalang (@rmanalan), now a developer advocate at Atlassian. Rich mentioned that he got a Nexus S Boot to Gecko (now Firefox OS) phone from Mozilla at JSConf. I guess he got bored with B2G and wanted to… Read More

From the what-if department comes an interesting question: what field would you study and pursue if you could travel back in time? Would you follow the same route, make minor changes, or make a radical change? I enjoy technology and building software quite a lot, but over the past half decade or so, I’ve been… Read More

I’m stoked to report that the Most Useless Machine has been productized and can now be bought, in kit form, from Think Geek. Here it is in action. I wonder how hackable it is . . . Noel (@noelportugal) could do some interesting things with this. Enjoy.

Did you know we have a Facebook page? Have for a while now. Not that much really happens over there, other than reposting the content you can get here. Well, Noel (@noelportugal) and I hope to change that by uploading content there, e.g. you can watch the Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots video and see Noel’s interview… Read More

I have a huge nerd crush on Hans Rosling (@hansrosling), and this video is epic. I give you the one-minute TED talk (h/t Flowing Data).

Reading The Connected Viewer: More Than 50% Of Cellphone Owners Now Use Their Phones While Watching TV reminded me of a modern problem I’ve been meaning to discuss, i.e. the value of doing nothing. Specifically, these piece of information rang the bell: 58% of smartphone users said they use their phones to have something to do… Read More

So, this is a happy coincidence. Remember how Noel (@noelportugal) built Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots controlled by phone, specifically using Twilio (@twilio)? Well, apparently, great minds hack alike or something. Jonathan Gottfried (@jonmarkgo) a developer evangelist at Twilio, built a robot controlled by Twilio too, the TwilioBot (h/t TechCrunch). I love this stuff.

My wife just bought an app for her iPhone. I asked her if she liked it, and she replied that it looked good, but she was still trying to figure out how to use it. Given how far down the feature set of most apps is distilled, this is a disastrous statement. There should be no figuring… Read More

Robert Scoble (@scobleizer) is a gadfly, but he’s also smart and dialed into technology and trends. If you can get past the jargon, his long-winded post about Mobile 3.0 and the future of the phone is definitely worth a read. Mobile 3.0 arrives: How Qualcomm just showed us the future of the cell phone (and… Read More

The only reason I clicked through on this post was to see what data were used to support the obvious claim that UX matters to users. UX a ‘critical’ concern for mobile, enterprises say | ZDNet What I found was a strange mix of statistics. On the one hand: Sixty-four percent of the approximately 200… Read More

It’s not to early to start thinking about Oracle OpenWorld 2012 (@oracleopenworld), which will be September 30 through October 4. Actually, if you want to get the Early Bird pricing, you’d better act fast, since it ends this Friday. If you want more, Kellsey has a great rundown of the event and the WebCenter activities. I’ll be… Read More

Interesting story on how Klagenfurt, Austria is using QR code and NFC-chipped stickers to point people to public domain books. Austrian city builds public library with nothing but QR codes, NFC and stickers — Engadget I like the idea of using breadcrumbs around a city to point to interesting information for adventurous tourists, like a… Read More

After a bunch of travel and short hiatus, I’m back in the saddle. In case you were wondering, I had three conferences in a two-week span, GSummit, Kscope 12 and jQuery Conference. Since I got back, I’ve been taking it easy and manning the grill, as is the custom for Summers in America. Anyway, before… Read More

If you’re attending Kscope (@odtug, #kscope12) next week and don’t have plans for Monday at 4:15 PM, plan to be at our session. If you have plans, break them. Noel (@noelportugal) just gave me a live demo of the fun stuff we’re going to show. Here’s the promo: It’s Arduino, meets Oracle Social Network (OSN), meets robot violence,… Read More