GVSU Mobile Applications and Services Lab

This research proves once again that social media has penetrated parts of the business world at a tremendous speed. It also indicates that corporate familiarity with and usage of social media within the Inc. 500 has continued to grow in the past 12 months.

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.

So over 10% of the world’s professionals are already on LinkedIn. And with the social network now signing up a new member every second of every hour of every day, it shouldn’t be too long before the other 90% of the world’s business professionals eventually wind up in the LinkedIn universe.

I am excited to announce that the Android SDK now supports Android 2.0 (also known as Eclair).Android 2.0 brings new developer APIs for sync, Bluetooth, and a few other areas. Using the new sync, account manager and contacts APIs, you can write applications to enable users to sync their devices to various contact sources. You can also give users a faster way to communicate with others by embedding Quick Contact within your application. With the new Bluetooth API, you can now easily add peer-to-peer connectivity or gaming to your applications. To get a more complete list of the new capabilities you can add to your applications, please go to the Android 2.0 highlights page.

Basics Of Social Media Roi

One of the biggest selling points of the Moment is its speedy 800MHz processor

The keyboard on this device is a series of contradictions. Actually, it really all boils down to one: it's generously large, hampered by a somewhat strange layout that makes mistypes a more frequent occurrence than they should be. On the left side, for example, Samsung has elected to make room for the Function key by pushing the letter keys to the right, meaning that A is further right than Z -- something that takes some getting used to. The space bar interrupts the lower row, placed between V and B, and the Enter key is to the right of the Up key, which is next to P in the top letter row. We're sure we could get used to all of these quirks, but why should we have to? Why couldn't have Samsung just come up with a more typical layout? Anyhow, once you get past that, the keys are generally easy to type on -- they're not particularly three-dimensional, but they're spaced far enough apart (and each one is large enough) so that finding them and hitting only the one you intend to is a pretty straightforward process, they're very clicky, and the dedicated numeric row is certainly a plus.

ShopSavvy on iPhone...

With an Apple® iPhone™, iPod Touch® or any other web-enabled mobile device, MobilEdu users can navigate campus/school maps and course catalogs, get real-time updates on sports teams and special events and even e-mail instructors and classmates. Branded uniquely for each institution, MobilEdu can be accessed by users who download their institution’s iPhone application from the Apple AppStore to their iPhone, iPod touch, or by using any mobile web browser.

The app will be able to scan barcodes and deliver a summary of the ingredients in a food item, along with when it was manufactured. That data is usually on the food label, but Breadcrumbs goes a step further - it can provide extra information such as product recall data. If a product has been recalled in the past, this app will tell the consumer all of the relevant details.

The number of people who use social networks from their smartphones skyrocketed 187%, to 18.3 million unique users, in July, compared with the same month a year earlier, says Nielsen. Social networking is among the fastest-growing activities on mobile devices, along with search and checking news, says Jon Stewart, Nielsen's research director for technology and search.

About 65 million of Facebook's 300 million members are mobile users. Eight months ago, it was 20 million. Of MySpace's estimated 125 million members worldwide, about 25 million use mobile devices. A year ago, it was 6 million.

“Every Google phone works differently, and you have fragmentation,” he said. And indeed that is a common worry among developers who don’t want their applications to be incompatible with certain phones that have unusual screen sizes or features. But then again, Windows Mobile, which has been around for nearly 10 years, already has that same problem, and one of Microsoft’s chief goals in upcoming versions is to rein in the variations between Windows Mobile handsets.

“You will see a speedy set of innovation for us in the next 6, 12, 24 months,” said Robert J. Bach, president of Microsoft’s entertainment and devices division at a news media event in New York to introduce a quick revision of the operating system called Windows Mobile 6.5. “Should we have picked up on the trends a little sooner? It’s hard not to say we should have,” he added.

n fact, 84% of respondents said they don’t currently measure the ROI (return on investment) of their social media programs.

Motorola Droid makes an official appearance on Moto’s U.S. site. It just might be that we were sent this direct link which isn’t mean to be public, but… you know how that’s going to work out. In any case, the Motorola Droid, which we have torn limb from limb (check for our preview tomorrow) is indeed a bad ass mama jama, but if you don’t want to wait for our preview, hit the jump for some screenshots!

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.

BUG gives you all the tools you need to build your dream gadget -- a collection of electronic modules you can easily snap together and program to make any device you want. Best of all, it's open source.