Group items tagged

Google showed off on December 7 a prototype of its mobile tagging technology. The company is “QR” barcodes to more than 100,000 local businesses in the U.S. Mobile users can snap a picture of the bar codes and obtain information about that business — including reviews, coupons, and other information. (Smartphone users need an app on their phones that can read the QR codes.) In January 2009, Microsoft launched a beta of its own bar-code search technology, known as Microsoft Tag. It also introduced a free mobile tag reader. Microsoft, being Microsoft, couldn’t simply rely on the QR standard. Instead, it announed it was creating its own bar code technology that stores more information, more dynamically, offering more user choice. It’s cool that Microsoft Tag allows developers to determine the content and experience users will have by allowing choices of text, video, maps, discounts, promotions. But the lack of QR support is a deal breaker for some.

In this post I’ll show you a better way: building two versions of your app from the same xcode project using targets and some other magic. Source code for the sample project is available here: twoForOne.

This project is a port of Facebook Connect for iPhone to Android platform.

Open Data Kit (ODK) is a suite of tools to help organizations collect, aggregate and visualize their data.

Google provides a Java version of his App Engine solution (GAE). It is a PaaS (Platform as a Service) solution that offers massive and flexible scalability for your Web applications by hosting them on the Google cloud (based on Google computing infrastructure). For more details, you can read our blog post with the official announce. Due to the restrictions of the GAE, we need to provide an adaptation of Restlet for this environment. GAE is based on Java 6, with a restricted list of APIs. See GAE developers documentation for details.

A start-up called Shopkick Inc., for example, has signed up Best Buy Co. and Macy's Inc. as launch partners for a new kind of app for iPhone and Android handsets that detects when shoppers are in or near stores and offers rewards targeted to them. Shopkick exploits the phones' location-sensing abilities—and cameras that customers can use to scan bar codes on items—to offer product information, coupons or other marketing offers when shoppers are in a convenient position to buy.

This document will cover the Restlet edition for Android, which is a port of the Restlet Framework to the Android mobile OS.