In the pre-Uber days of New York City, if you needed a ride to show up at a certain time and location, you’d call a car service in your neighborhood (everyone had their favorites) and arrange for a livery driver to pick you up, instead of risking it and trying to find an available yellow cab. Some of those local car service companies are now turning to their own new technology, introducing smartphone apps to try to compete with the growing presence of Uber. [More]
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Adidas Group Pays $240 Million To Download Runtastic Forever
By 8.5.15
Earlier this year, fitness gear maker Under Armour bought fitness-tracking apps MyFitnessPal and Endomodo for a total of $560 million. Now Adidas has decided to keep up with its competitor by downloading its own set of fitness apps, buying the eighteen apps in the Runtastic family for about $240 million. [More]
Target Testing System That Sends Customers Notifications On Deals While They Shop
By 8.5.15
Target wants to track your every move while shopping at its stores. Or at least that seems to be the gist behind the retailers’ new test of transmitters – known as beacons – that link to shoppers’ smartphones through the company’s app, sending coupons, deals, product recommendations and recipes based on their location inside the big box store. [More]
Subway Launches New Mobile Payment, Ordering Options
By 7.29.15
Now that nearly every American has a smartphone permanently fixed to their hand, a long list of restaurants including Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts, Taco Bell and Dominos have upped their mobile presence by way of ordering and payment apps, and now one of the largest chains in the country is joining the ever-growing list: Subway. [More]
eBay Shutters Same-Day Delivery Service eBay Now
By 7.28.15
Three years after eBay launched its rapid delivery venture, eBay Now, the company is nixing the service as other e-commerce companies and retailers like Amazon, Uber and Whole Foods continue to dip their toes in the fast-delivery market. [More]
T-Mobile Launches Advanced Messaging: Texts With iMessage Features
By 7.22.15
Over the years, the creation of messaging apps and their plentiful features – read receipts, quick responses, the ability to send large photo and video files – have cut into the territory once occupied by traditional SMS texting. While standard texting isn’t exactly dead, its prospects aren’t looking super sunny as T-Mobile announced it would be revamping its messaging to offer more features. [More]
Instagram Is Down, People Forced To Look At Own Lunches
By 7.16.15
Time to brace ourselves, Internet: image-sharing site Instagram is down. While as of right now you can still view pictures and feeds directly, users can’t log in if they aren’t already logged in, and can’t like or comment on photos if they are logged in. Update: Instagram is working again: you’ll be able to browse your friends’ farmer’s market hauls with no problem. [More]
Uber Testing Feature That Suggests Safe, Convenient Pickup Spots When Customers Request A Ride
By 7.8.15
While car service customers have the power to set their pickup location as precisely as they want to — either by entering a specific street address or dropping a pin on the mobile app’s map — that doesn’t mean it’s always a safe or easy place to get picked up, depending on traffic, or a place with space for a driver to wait. After some prodding, Uber will now implement a feature that recommends safe and convenient pickup spots when riders request a car. [More]
Amazon’s Roving Treasure Truck Delayed In First Weekend Of Business
By 6.29.15
After more than a week of cruising the streets of Seattle, Amazon’s Treasure Truck was supposed to start handing out goods on Saturday. But that didn’t happen, as the company announced in the early hours of the weekend that it would postpone its big debut. [More]
You No Longer Need A Facebook Account To Use Facebook Messenger
By 6.24.15
Because we all needed another avenue to converse with friends and acquaintances other than actual face-to-face conversations, Facebook has opened its Messenger to people without an account on the social media network. [More]
Apple Adds Menstrual Cycle Tracking To HealthKit App
By 6.8.15
Around half of all humans, at some point in their lives, experience menstrual cycles. Keeping track of different parts of that cycle is part of paying attention to general health, and there are plenty of mobile phone apps designed for that purpose. That’s why when Apple announced that a central repository for health information, HealthKit, would be part of iOS 8, many people assumed that menstrual cycles would be in there, right along with blood glucose levels and blood pressure. It wasn’t, until today. [More]
Worker’s Lawsuit Claims Company Fired Her After She Removed App That Tracked Her Location 24/7
By 5.13.15
It’s perfectly acceptable for a company to want to know what its workers are up to on the job, but one woman in California says her employers took it too far when they allegedly required her and others to not only keep their phones on around the clock, but submit to GPS monitoring via an app she says had to install as a condition of her employment. [More]
Apple Bans Time-Telling Apps From Apple Watch
By 4.29.15
When it comes to telling the time with an Apple Watch, there’s only one king of the roost so far as the company is concerned, which means any other developers trying to enter the App Store with watch apps for the Apple Watch will get roundly rejected. [More]
Amazon Shuts Down Service That Let Users Test Apps Before Buying Them Because No One Was Really Using It
By 4.17.15
If you haven’t used — much less heard of — Amazon’s TestDrive service, designed to let customers check out how an app works before buying it, you’re not alone. The company says it’s shutting the program down due to “a significant decline” in usage, among other factors. [More]
Study: Some Popular Android Apps Tracking User Location Once Every Three Minutes
By 3.24.15
While it can be very useful to have say, a weather app on your smartphone that knows where you are when you want to find out current conditions for your location, does that mean that those apps should be able to know where you are even when you aren’t using the app? That’s a question raised by a new forthcoming study that found about dozen apps for Android smartphones are not only tracking where you are right now, but three minutes from now. And three minutes after that. And so on. [More]
Nintendo Announces Plans To Make Games For Mobile Devices
By 3.17.15
Have a hankering to play Super Mario at the bus stop but don’t have the portable gaming console to satisfy that urge? Soon video games from Nintendo will make the move from consoles to mobile devices, as the company announces a partnership with an online gaming firm to develop and operate new apps. [More]
Google Play Search Results Will Now Feature Sponsored Ads
By 2.26.15
The next time you visit the Google Play store to download an app, you’ll likely be greeted with an ad or two. [More]
Feds Warn: These Melanoma Detection Apps Aren’t Supported By Scientific Evidence
By 2.23.15
Early detection of cancer can help save lives and make treatment easier, so the idea of mobile app that can spot possible skin might seem like a godsend… if there were any science to back it up. [More]
