Yes indeed, the iPad 3G is already jailbroken
Looks like the 3G version isn’t very different from the non-3G version. The old jailbreak method should work… but back up your blobs.
Questionable keyboard hack: glow-in-the-dark key toppers
Got an old laptop or a netbook without backlit keys? So inconvenient! How did we get by for 20 years without them? If they’re truly indispensable to you, there are a number of hacks you can undertake, but wiring power and lighting and all that can get mighty complicated, and of course every laptop is different. But if you’re slightly less scrupulous about your methods… these stickers ought to do the trick.
I know, I know. Pretty weak… but they’re no worse than the keys you already have, and under the right circumstances they might be a little better. I do have to say, though, if you have light around to “charge” the keys, why are you typing in the dark? Not quite as nonsensical as the submarine screen door and other inventions, but all things considered, actual backlighting is probably the superior option.
[via Gadgetmix and Lilliputing]
The best reason to get a Sharp QuadPixel TV: tech support
Sharp QuadPixel TVs, just hitting stores now, take the usual three colors found in LCD-screen pixels — red, green, blue — and add a fourth: yellow. According to the company, this has the effect of producing images with more vivid colors, reducing power consumption and a slightly boosting resolution. QuadPixel's benefit over competing sets is debatable, though in a demo yesterday Sharp had me convinced that the tech support is the absolute best aspect of these new TVs.
Next challenge for location industry: mapping the great indoors
We can already navigate the outside world using our cell phones or GPS devices to a high degree of accuracy, but what about indoor locations? Mapping the giant, labyrinthine shopping malls, airports and convention centers of the world is a daunting task, but something that presents a huge business opportunity for that very reason.
Accessing the indoors has its problems. First of all, there is no universal data source for indoor maps. With the outdoors, there are GPS satellites to rely on, and companies who have done your work for you (which is what Nokia figured when it bought Navteq.) Secondly, indoor maps tend to be quite dynamic. Think of a trade show floor, which only ever has a temporary layout with all the booths that come in and go out from one expo to another. All this makes indoor mapping very labor-intensive.
But the demand is there. Companies like Yelp and Geodelic, which provide reviews of restaurants and bars, or Milo, which points to the best deals, could do with more precise directions. Right now, the information can point consumers to the entrance of a shopping mall but won’t tell them how to find, say, the the specialty cosmetics store inside it.
Some companies are trying to provide maps of the indoors — Mall Maps, FastMall and Point Inside are all doing this in various ways (e.g. working from blueprints or measuring locations themselves). But these approaches are difficult to scale. How do you produce these maps not by the hundreds, but by the thousands (the United States alone likely has over 40,000 “places of interest”) quickly and cost-effectively, and then maintain them?
Micello, a company based in Sunnyvale, Calif., claims to be doing just that. (Micello was a DEMO fall 2009 company.) It says it can provide a map of an indoor space quickly (the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto with its 1.4 million square feet and 140 retail stores took just four hours to complete) and scale the production to meet demand. According to founder and CEO Ankit Agarwal (pictured), producing a map with is “almost an assembly line operation, with 10 steps anyone can do.”
And the assembly line seems to be a fitting metaphor, as Agarwal refers to his 10-employee operation in Chennai, India as the “factory” that churns out the maps. At the time of our interview, Micello had over 500 live maps, with another 400 waiting to be published. A sample map of an IKEA store is pictured above.
Micello starts with a map the proprietor provides (public places usually have public maps, but they are not standardized, nor necessarily drawn to scale, which means they need lots of work) and builds its own from that. The end result is a map that can be superimposed on Google Maps. When users zoom in on the location, they get a map of the indoors showing where the individual stores are situated within the mall.
“We want to own the indoor maps, and we believe we can do it,” says Agarwal. As a “family and friends funded” company, with a total of 17 employees, Micello sure has its work cut out for it. But isn’t Agarwal worried that giants like Google and Microsoft will soon claim this market?
“The way we see it, Google and Microsoft are not content providers, they acquire things. Google Earth was an acquisition, and so was StreetView. A lot of the other providers’ data comes from Navteq and such places.”
This is not to say that Google and Microsoft are sitting idly by. Google has started a worldwide project (25 pilot locations in the U.S., 6 in Australia, 2 in Japan) to photograph business interiors to give customers more information when choosing from local businesses. Google is getting a “lot of interest” from business owners and consumers, and is working hard to develop useful tools for local businesses, according to a company spokeswoman. In other words, putting more information out there for the pundits, including photos of store interiors and products.
And Microsoft, which has demoed some very impressive stuff with PhotoSynth, the software that recreates exteriors and interiors from photographs (pictured below is a reconstruction of the Christmas indoor market in Zürich, Switzerland), is looking into giving users an immersive experience when visiting a location online. Indoor mapping is “absolutely crucial”, according to David Gedye, a Group Program Manager at Bing Maps and PhotoSynth.
“Vector maps [basic maps that show locations in a grid style] are a low-tech solution, and a number of small companies are trying to harvest those and make them available in an integrated way. This is a fine approach, but providing an immersive experience is a bigger challenge. Really, as commerce has taken to the Internet, the reason for physically visiting a place is to have an experience you can’t have online. Immersive representations of interiors can provide strong visual and emotional cues for customers,” says Gedye.
Another company in this space is Zerista. It is providing indoor maps for visitors to places like convention centers, but building ad-hoc social networks on top of those, so the map is only part of the service’s underlying infrastructure. Zerista, too, acknowledges a need and an opportunity for a middle-man company able to provide aggregated indoor maps and distribute them for other developers. If there was a place to get these maps in a uniform and consolidated way, we would absolutely take advantage of it and build value on top of that,” says Zerista president John Kanarowski.
[This story is part of a weekly series on location-based services, written by VentureBeat's JP Manninen. If you have an idea for a story you would like to see in this series, drop a line at jp@venturebeat.com]
Don’t miss MobileBeat 2010, VentureBeat’s conference on the future of mobile. The theme: “The year of the superphone and who will profit.” Now expanded to two days, MobileBeat 2010 will take place on July 12-13 at The Palace Hotel in San Francisco. Early-bird pricing is available until May 15. For complete conference details, or to apply for the MobileBeat Startup Competition, click here.
Companies: Google, Micello, microsoft, Zerista
Create-your-own-chocolate-bar startup Chocri aims for US sweet tooths
Retailers have been using the Web as a way to let shoppers customize their products for a while now, most notably in the jewelry industry with companies like Blue Nile. A German startup called Chocri is taking a similar approach in a less obvious market — chocolate. And now it’s looking to expand to the United States.
The interface is pretty straightforward. Users just go to createmychocolate.com, then choose from menus of chocolate types, fruits, nuts, and so on. Everything you add contributes to the price — for example I created a basic chocolate bar with almonds and gummy bears, and the price came out to $11, plus $6 for shipping. Once you’re done, Chocri builds the bar in its facility in Germany, then mails it to you. So you get a chocolate bar that hits your exact sweet spot — so to speak — and it’s probably fresher than what you’d buy in the supermarket.
Chocri launched in September 2008 and first launched for US consumers back in January. Carmen Magar, who’s leading the company’s US efforts, acknowledged that the product hasn’t taken off as quickly here as it did in the Germany. That’s because the customization market as a whole isn’t as far along here, she said.
Magar’s thinking of creative ways about how to change that. For one thing, she was at the South by Southwest conference last month in Austin, where she gave out promotional chocolate bars designed by tech celebrities like entrepreneur and former Facebook platform evangelist Dave Morin and social media expert Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV. (The Dave Morin bar is pictured above.) That’s definitely something I heard other conference attendees talking about. And to really ramp up its visibility, Magar said Chocri should partner with other other custom retailers, such as design-your-own-shirt site Blank Label.
Meanwhile, the company is still improving the product, mainly by offering even more customization possibilities. This week it began offering the ability to combine different layers of chocolate, starting with white and dark chocolate.
Chocri is self-funded, and Magar said there are no plans to raise venture capital.
Companies: Chocri
People: Carmen Magar
