Since announcing it would boot Google Maps from iPhones last year at WWDC, Apple has struggled to keep its maps product competitive with that of Google’s. Apple’s results have been a mixed bag, with a handful of publications arguing its superiority over Google Maps, and a majority of others complaining loudly enough to necessitate an apology from CEO Tim Cook.
Now, as Apple works to improve and expand its mapping service, The Wall Street Journal is reporting a $20 million acquisition of indoor GPS startup WiFiSLAM — undoubtedly a move to challenge Google’s indoor mapping initiative.
Indoor Mapping At The Moment
While the user experience will ideally be the same for consumers, there are many different ways to bring GPS-like functionality indoors. Clearly, traditional GPS technology isn’t an option, but there are various techniques in bringing accuracy to this emerging space.
Google and Apple aren’t alone in this fight…
Indoor Google Maps reportedly utilizes a combination of data sets, including nearby WiFi hotspots, cell tower data and manually uploaded floor plans. While asking merchants to upload their own floor plans appears to be a cumbersome and time-consuming process, Google appears to have done well so far, with over 10,000 floor plans charted across the US, Canada, UK, Spain, Germany, Singapore and more.
It’s noteworthy that Google’s street view mapping process was also cumbersome and time-consuming, but it certainly paid off.
A detailed look at WifiSLAM’s own techniques aren’t available publicly, but the company claims it can achieve “2.5m accuracy using only ambient WiFi signals that are already present in buildings.”
Google and Apple aren’t alone in this fight, either; Nokia, Samsung, Sony Mobile and nineteen other companies formed an “In-Location Alliance” last year to boost indoor positioning technologies. The alliance appears to be evangelizing a combination of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi network data for generating accurate indoor maps.
There’s territory left to conquer, but Apple has a long way to go…
Microsoft has also developed indoor solutions within its Bing Maps product, and announced 3,000+ indoor venue maps back in October of last year.
Various other emerging startups also exist in this space, including ByteLight, which raised $1.25 million last year to fund its LED-powered location system. The Wi-Fi-focused Aisle41/WiLocate, radio-based Qubulus and CMS-focused Meridian serve to further complicate this industry as potential competitors and acquisition targets.
Apple Has A Ways To Go
There’s plenty of territory left to conquer, but Apple has a long way to go if it wants to dominate indoor mapping. Google has major partnerships with the likes of IKEA, The Home Depot and Mall of America; Meridian has deals with NY’s MTA and The American Museum of Natural History; and Microsoft claims relationships with nine of the largest US malls.
WifiSLAM, on the other hand, has kept quiet in terms of its current and potential reach — its entire site has been taken down following the acquisition.
Apple’s struggle in the mapping space isn’t encouraging, but indoor mapping is still very much a developing technology. Jumping into the indoor game now could prevent Apple from falling too far behind to catch up.
Apps for mobile devices are a surprisingly robust source of jobs in the United States, according to research from TechNet. Since 2008, apps have created 466,000 American jobs. TechNet estimates that about 155,000 of those tech-related jobs are related to app development and tech support, while the remaining 311,000 jobs also require tech skills but include things like app marketing and art design.
Of those jobs, the highest percentage (23.8 percent) of the total are located in California. Other app hot spots include New York (6.9 percent), Washington (6.4 percent), Texas (5.4 percent) and New Jersey (4.2 percent). Central Florida doesn’t want to be left out, as the Orlando Sentinel reports; local universities and training institutes are high on app development learning programs for would-be developers.
These numbers include not only jobs created for iOS apps, but also those triggered by the development of apps for Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, and Facebook.
[via The Loop]
Apps have created 466,000 U.S. jobs in four years originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
While pursuing our passion for making things that bring value to millions of people, we built mobile apps to address the needs of non-profits, open government initiatives, etc. We realized that the apps we were thinking of creating, were in the same class as the millions of next-gen mobile apps. These apps are going to use backends because they will upload/download data, use location and social information, and buy and sell things. To do all this, the mobile app has to connect to a backend stack, but building a backend stack sucks. We decided that we were going to make it ridiculously easy for developers to set up, use and maintain backends for mobile and tablet apps. We call it Backend as a Service.
-Kinvey Founder and CEO Sravish Sridhar
Kinvey is one of the brand new companies about to launch out of TechStars, an incubator program in Boston (MA), Boulder (CO), New York City (NY) and Seattle (WA) that has helped numerous companies attract over $25 million in venture capital and angel investment. Kinvey, a company that has created a cloud backend service for mobile apps, will be graduating from this spring’s Boston class.
Kinvey pronounced like convey is a “Backend as a Service” that makes it incredibly easy for mobile app developers to focus on making beautiful, user-friendly apps. Kinvey is betting that the next generation of wireless devices and apps will empower billions of people across the world in ways that will change the face of learning, communication and commerce and that Kinvey will be the hub of that change.
Sridhar and his co-founders came up with the idea in September 2010 and started building the first version. They spoke to hundreds of mobile app developers for input and found that every mobile developer just wants an API. They don’t want to figure out platforms, stacks and tools and how to put those things together. They want to focus on the application and user interface.
Let’s say you’re a mobile app developer who wants to create a fictional app called Videogram. The developer would tell Kinvey, I want the app to take video, upload it, geotag it and then allow it to be pushed to social networks with commenting features. The developer has a a choice on whether he or she wants to store that video on Amazon, Rackspace, or any other cloud service or leave the decision up to Kinvey. In 10-15 minutes, Kinvey sets up a backend to Videogram. The ability to auto-generate those APIs from models is Kinvey’s secret sauce.
Imagine you want to paint your home. With Kinvey, you’d pick the colors, click on the walls and all of a sudden you’d see your house in various colors. Kinvey lets developers focus on writing beautiful client applications by providing a dynamic backend including data storing, location and social networking tools.
Watch Kinvey’s video for more:
“I completely bought into the fact that mobile applications are going to change the world that we live in and what mobile technology in general can do for the developing world,” says Sridhar. “Myself and my cofounders knew we wanted to take this company to the next level from day one so we decided that an accelerator program would be the best way. We got so excited when we found TechStars. The best thing about TechStars is [Director] Katie Rae. She is absolutely amazing. World-class entrepreneurs and investors in Boston spent a lot of time working with us to help accelerate our business, in large part, due to the respect they have for Katie and the reputation she has in the Boston startup community.”
The Kinvey team was new to the Boston area. In a period of just a few months, they built a network of a few hundred technical, marketing and startup gurus, who have all helped them personally and professionally. In the future, Kinvey wants to be the de facto data hub for all mobile data. Once they accomplish this, Sridhar says there will be plenty of monetization routes.
Previous to Kinvey, Founder and CEO Sravish Sridhar was a part of the founding team at United Devices and wrote software that harnessed computing power on over 3.5 million PCs to conduct cancer research. He is also the founder of We Flap, a non-profit that helps other India-based non-profits tap into the social graph. Sravish, who grew up in India, met his CTO Morgan Bickle and Creative and Marketing Director Ryan Light at the University of Texas.
So far, over 100 developers have signed-up for Kinvey’s private beta. For now, the service is free for private-beta users and they will announce pricing after going live in the fall, which could be anywhere from a few thousand dollars a month down to a dollar a day depending on the complexity of the app. Developers will only start paying when their application goes live. Not wanting developers to ever feel stuck, Kinvey will always have the option for a one click “export all data” in multiple formats, allowing the developer to delete their account (thus losing backend support) and walk away with their app, completely free of cost.
Interested in joining the closed beta? Sign up here.
TechStars’ Demo Day in Boston will take place on June 15th, 2011. As the guys have coined this term “backend as a service,” expect quite a bit of humor during their presentation. TNW’s Brad McCarty will be there to report.
Read more on TechStars, don’t miss:
An interview with: TechStars’ David Cohen on startup rockstars.
TechStars: The next great incubator unleashes 11 startups in NYC.
TechStars Boulder: Inside the magic and mentorship of the top startup accelerator.
I don’t know about you, but the term ‘cyberspace’ brings to mind a time when AOL stuffed free trial CDs into PC magazine sleeves and Netscape Navigator was pretty neat, really.
The U.S. government today outlined its strategy for ‘cyberspace’. I guess that shouldn’t be surprising. Governments are meant to be, of course, twenty years behind everyone else.
But despite the nostalgic flashback, its interesting to note that the government’s strategy is based on principles of freedom of expression, innovation and economic growth, according to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Less surprising are the references to strengthening security. That’s fairly neutral in its own right and, couched in terms that emphasize consumer security, actually sounds like a good thing, but anyone with dark skin and a moustache who has been through a U.S. airport recently knows that the government’s euphemisms come before widespread harassment and overbearing Big Brother-style laws and practices.
Still, the rhetoric about openness and fighting tyranny continues, with Reuters quoting Clinton as saying, ”While the Internet offers new ways for people to exercise their political rights, it also, as we have seen very clearly in the last months, gives governments new tools for clamping down on dissent.”
With parts of the government fighting for stricter controls on the Internet and others teaching activists how to evade foreign government controls, it seems like a case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is thinking or even believes in. It remains to be seen whether this new stated strategy will prevail over moves to tighten controls and censor the world’s biggest network.
What if the next time you watched an episode of Law & Order, the suspect’s guilt wasn’t confirmed by DNA evidence or witness accounts, but through an incriminating Facebook photo? In much the same way that DNA analysis revolutionized forensic science only a few decades ago, social media is changing the ways that police officers serve and protect.
Instant Information Sharing
Websites like Facebook and Twitter can help law enforcement officials quickly share information with a large audience. Instead of waiting for the local news channel to cover a story, police departments can instantly post important alerts online for users to view directly. Police websites display various types of media, from surveillance video footage to photographs of wanted suspects.
“[Using social media] is so much easier and so much more effective,” said Constable Scott Mills, Social Media Officer for the Corporate Communications Toronto Police Service. He cited an incident in September 2010, when gunshots were fired at Central Tech high school in Toronto. As soon as he established contact with officers on the scene, Cst. Mills began tweeting updates with the hashtag #CTGun. Anxious parents could follow the situation, quickly receive reassurance that everyone inside the school was safe.
“In the traditional way of doing things, you’ll get a major incident like a school shooting and the phone at the police department is ringing off the hook, with media as well as concerned members of the community asking the same question: ‘What’s happening?’ Now, I can tell them to start following a specific hashtag, and I take control of the virtual scene. We’re saving parents hours of worry, and we’re not getting deluged at the scene with people asking us what’s going on,” said Mills.
By using an open forum like Twitter to provide real-time updates on breaking news, law enforcement officials are further able to reduce instances of misreported information. “Before, police officers would get extremely frustrated because the local TV station didn’t cover something important, or maybe they got something wrong,” said Lauri Stevens, founder of LAwS Communications, a consultancy that specializes in advising law enforcement agencies on how to use social media. “Now if the news gets something wrong, the police can just point to their own efforts in social media.”
Helping Cops Connect with the Community
In addition to sharing urgent updates, social media engages the community, and encourages better interaction between law enforcement and civilians. Many police departments have set up Facebook pages or Twitter accounts that provide information about outreach programs or local events, in addition to soliciting for witnesses or information related to ongoing investigations. The Santa Cruz Police Department recently launched an iPhone app that lets users view Nixle alerts and submit crime tips directly from their phone.
“The major goal is to help prevent and solve crime together,” said Cst. Mills. “But if you don’t have an engagement strategy driving people to your website and driving people to follow you on Twitter and Facebook, you’re just talking to yourself.” In an effort to develop their own engagement strategy, the Dallas Police Department became one of the first in the United States to employ a social media officer. In February, Sr. Cpl Melinda Gutierrez was tapped to manage the department’s Facebook and Twitter accounts, which had over 5,700 “likes” and 3,700 followers, respectively. This is tangible evidence of a more gradual shift: as law enforcement agencies realize that social media provides the unique opportunity to open up a dialogue with the community, they’ve taken steps to make their online voices heard.
New Investigative Tools
But perhaps the most transformative effect that social media has had on law enforcement comes from the new ways that police are using platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Myspace to actively aid in investigations.
Traffic police in Delhi started a Facebook page that allows civilians to become digital informants, encouraging residents to post pictures of traffic violations that are reviewed for possible citations. Recently in Massachusetts, one student found his stolen laptop by remotely hacking into its hard drive and posting a video of the perpetrator to YouTube. In the United Kingdom, law enforcement officials are cracking down on cyber-bullying by issuing online warnings to offenders, based on tips from teachers. Some police officers are even creating dummy profiles on Myspace to infiltrate street gangs. By posing as fellow gang members, they are able to gain access to photos, videos and profile information that sheds light on possible criminal activity.
This particular practice could become even more effective with the advent of new technology. In June 2010, the United States Air Force requested bids for the development of a “Persona Management Software,” which would let an individual manage a unit of up to 10 fake identities on social media sites. These non-existent personas would have background, history and supporting details, allowing the controller to seem legitimate when “friending” targets in order to gain access to private profile information.
Modern Technology = Modern Concerns
If the prospect of being fake-friended by a government agent made you break out in a cold sweat, you can take some comfort in the fact that you’re not alone. Nearly all of the tools and opportunities provided by social media are accompanied by potential safety concerns, both for law enforcement and civilians.
One dilemma surrounds the user’s reasonable expectation of privacy. Without a warrant, what information should law enforcement be able to access? In potentially life-threatening situations, should social networking sites provide private information and personal details to police?
According to a spokesperson from Facebook: “In very rare instances our policies and the law (ECPA) allow for emergency exemptions. One hypothetical is a kidnapped child where every minute counts. It is in this type of instance where we have verified an emergency that we feel a responsibility to quickly share information that could save someone’s life. However, the sharing must in our judgement be in the best interest of the user.”
Another chief concern involves the balance between protecting the identity of police officers and allowing them to directly interact with the community. Cst. Mills is a firm advocate of maintaining a visible presence on social media, although he cautions officers to maintain separate professional and personal profiles.
“In the same way that you go out on street patrol, this is patrolling the virtual world,” he says. “And in the same way that we show our faces on patrol, we need to show our face online.”
But officers still face risks: in October 2010 during a DUI traffic stop, Phoenix police recovered a CD with the names and photographs of over 30 police officers and civilian employees, including several patrol and undercover officers. All of the information on the CD had been obtained from Facebook profiles. For the same reasons that many police officers have unlisted phone numbers, there is a level of danger associated with law enforcement officials posting information on social media that is accessible to the public.
For most law enforcement officials, however, the biggest hurdle presented by social media stems from lack of education and fear of accountability. “I think in the beginning, police officers heard a lot about stupid cops who got into trouble or got their department in trouble because they said embarrassing things,” said Stevens. Stevens is also the creator of The SMILE (Social Media in Law Enforcement) Conference, a seminar that helps law enforcement officials incorporate social media into their processes.
“But it’s definitely easier than it was even a year ago,” she said. “There is less debating about whether or not to get on social media. Now it’s about – we understand we need to do this, so how do we go about it?”