Enkin: Revolutionary GPS Application for Android

If you take two Computational Visualistics students, give them Google Android’s SDK and motivate them with a $275.000 award , you’ll get Enkin, a revolutionary handheld navigation concept.

Here is how Enkin’s creators present it:

“Enkin” introduces a new handheld navigation concept. It displays location-based content in a unique way that bridges the gap between reality and classic map-like representations. It combines GPS, orientation sensors, 3D graphics, live video, several web services and a novel user interface into an intuitive and light navigation system for mobile devices.

What makes Enkin so unique is that it has as “live mode”, meaning that for example when pointing your phone camera towards a building that is in fact an hospital, the interface will indicate so.

The user interface has three different modes:

– Map mode: This is a two-dimensional mode and similar to
classical maps applications. It provides a quick overview of
all active location-based content and lets you easily manage
your data.

– Landscape mode: This mode resembles loosely Google
Earth’s 3D view. It enables your content’s third dimension
by embedding it into a three-dimensional landscape.

– Live mode: This acts as the bridge to reality. Now your content
is displayed extending real physical objects instead of
computer graphics by using the device’s built-in camera.

Watch their video here to see it in action.

Phones equipped with Android haven’t hit the market yet, so when this happens, Enkin will be more impressive than when used from an emulator.

Android proves that it will truly revolutionize the way we search things from our cell phones, especially local information.

Visit Enkin.net for more information. Hat tip to Wireless Watch Japan for the info.

The Associated Press To Launch a Free Mobile News Service

The Associated Press announced yesterday that it will develop an ad-supported mobile service to deliver stories and photos to advanced mobile phones, including the iPhone.

With this service called “Mobile News Network”, people will be able to read local news but also national and international news from AP network.

The service was designed specifically for the iPhone but can be used with other smartphones. Mobile News Network will be organized by ZIP code. I think AP should also think about adding Location Based Services with phones that are GPS-capable, the iPhone isn’t yet, but they’ve been some rumors predicting that Apple will add this functionality in the next generation of this device.

Local ads would be sold by newspapers and also national ads served by ad companies. Mobile advertising companies such as JumpTap, Medio, Google or Yahoo! will be very interested in serving ads on these networks, since the traffic will likely be tremendous.

Each party, news providers and ad sellers will get 50% of the revenue.

This will help struggling newspapers find other sources of revenues.

Via washingtonpost.com

Note Regarding Comments On This Blog

The readers of this blog know that links on comments do not have the nofollow tag. I’ve decided to do so because all comments are manually moderated, and Akismet does a good job of filtering spammy comments. So I find it fair to give credit to people who are adding valuable comments to my posts.

But the thing is, sometimes the comments are valuable, but people use keywords in the “Name” field, for example this guy. These comments will never be approved, sorry. It’s funny to see that the author of this comment is from a SEO company (didn’t even think of using an anonymous email address) whose owner is a writer at SEOmoz…

The Web Analytics Metric You’ve All Been Waiting For, Brought to You By Google Analytics

A new feature on Google Analytics was just announced: it allows you to compare your web analytics metrics against other sites’s ones. Here’s what Benchmarking does exactly:

Benchmarking is an optional Google Analytics service that shows how your website’s statistics compare against other industry verticals. In the beta version of this service, you are able to compare your site’s Visits, Pageviews, Pages per Visit, Bounce Rate, Average Time on Site, and New Visits data against benchmark data from categories of other participating websites. You can use this data to gain broader context for your site so you can identify additional opportunities to improve your site’s metrics.

Of course, this is done anonymously. To be able to use this feature, you need to accept to share yours 🙂 This is explained here.

That kind of metrics will help you measure your efforts, of course it won’t be 100% accurate since they aren’t 2 sites with the exact same profile, but you can adjust your strategy with these data, and see where you are as apposed to your competitors.

Opera Mini Chooses Google as its Default Search Engine (Again…)

Opera Mini announced today that Google will now be its default mobile search engine. A Google search box will be present on top of Opera Mini Start Page. This deal will definitely help Google increase its mobile search market share. Opera said that most of its traffic is generated from the search function on its browser:

Every month, Opera Mini users browse more than 1.7 billion pages, with much of that traffic generated through the search function in the browser.

It’s funny to note that Google used to be Opera Mini’s default search engine, but was replaced by Yahoo! in January 2007.

Nokia to add Google Mobile on its handsets

Nokia has its own mobile search application, embedded in some of its cell phone models. The application currently provides shortcuts to Yahoo! OneSearch, Microsoft Live Search Mobile, Baidu and Yandex.

Today, Nokia announced that it will add Google to the list of search engines that consumers can access from its phones.

Nokia explained that it prefers to gives choices to their customers, rather than just providing one search engine.

“Providing choices for our consumers is an important driver in Nokia’s Internet service strategy,” Ilkka Raiskinen, Nokia’s vice-president of software and services, said in a statement issued at the Mobile World Congress wireless fair in Barcelona.