Waze Makes Its First St...

The makers of traffic app  Waze  are the latest company wanting to go beyond the phone and integrate more deeply with car hardware. It’s a natural move — if you use Waze, you use it when you’re driving. However, the whole dealmaking and integration process with automakers is long and complicated, so as a first step, Waze is looking at the “aftermarket” of devices that people can add to their cars. And it’s starting with  Pioneer’s AppRadio . We wrote about AppRadio in more detail last year, but basically, when you connect your Android or iOS phone to the radio, a limited set of your apps will be accessible through the radio touchscreen. Now that set of AppRadio-enabled apps includes Waze, at least if you’ve got the Android version. (AppRadio integration is coming for Waze’s iOS app too.) VP Community Geographer DiAnn Eisnor says Waze’s AppRadio functionality is essentially the same as the smartphone app’s — you can still get directions, look at real-time traffic data, and also let Waze collect data as you drive. However, the interface has been tweaked. For example, instead of simply freezing the keyboard when you’re driving ( Waze is big on hands-free interaction ), the AppRadio display makes the keyboard disappear altogether. Eisnor also says that real connected car integration is coming soon, perhaps as early as this fall. From her perspective, the exciting thing is the ability to tap into all of the car’s other sensors, so it’s not just tracking where you are and how fast you’re going. “This is milestone number one,” she says. Here’s the latest AppRadio ad, where you can see brief glimpses of the Waze integration. (If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, or you miss the Waze cameos, they start at 0:15 and 0:44.)

Motion-Tracking Swivl S...

The Swivl motion-tracking smartphone dock has always seemed like a nifty piece of kit, but its $179 price tag didn’t exactly bring the device into “I can do something cool with this” impulse buy territory. Fear not though, you penny-pinching video buffs — the team at Satarii have just revealed that a more basic version called Swivl-it is now available, and it costs $50 less than its more feature-packed brother. Here’s how the Swivl works, in case you need a quick refresher — once you pop your smartphone into place, you grab hold of a small marker device (which also has a built-in microphone for iDevice owners) and get to business recording yourself or video chatting. As you move around, the dock rotates and pans vertically to follow that marker, all with some pretty impressive results. Of course, Satarii had to excise a few features to make that smaller price tag work. The new, more basic Swivl-it forces users to tilt the dock up and down by hand, and the marker that you hold on to no longer has a microphone so you’ll have to sit within range of your smartphone’s built-in mic. If you’re really desperate for the extra bit of audio freedom that the external mic provides, you’ll soon be able to purchase a microphone-packing marker, but really — at that point you should’ve just bought the original Swivl and called it a day. The Swivl-it is available now from Satarii’s online store, and feel free to check out our Fly or Die for a few extra opinions on the unit that started it all.

RIM To Developers: We’l...

With the release of their BlackBerry 10 beta development tools and Dev Alpha devices earlier today, RIM has made it very clear that they want to build up as much developer love as possible before BlackBerry 10 officially launches. Well, as it turns out, that’s not the only thing they’re doing to attract devs. Alec Saunders, RIM’s VP of Developer Relations, revealed at BlackBerry World that RIM will guarantee developers of quality apps a minimum of $10,000 in annual earnings — if developers come in under the $10K mark during their first year, RIM will actually pay them the difference. Ah, but there’s a catch (isn’t there always?). In order to qualify for RIM’s generous offer, the apps in question must meet a strict new quality certification program whose standards have yet to be laid concretely laid out. One thing is known for sure though — once an app has been officially approved for sale in the App World and nabs that new certification, it has to generate at least $1,000 on its own before RIM swoops in and cuts the developer a check. Translation: the apps can’t completely suck. Sorry fart app devs, that means you. It may not be the most novel approach — hell, just look at Microsoft’s track record — but it certainly drives home their developer-focused point. Frankly, it also smacks a bit of desperation. The one-time king of the smartphone realm now seems so hard up for more good apps that they’re willing to pay developers to build nifty things for their new platform. Then again, with all of mud that’s been flung at RIM in the recent past, I can’t really blame for turning to payouts to make their platform a safer bet for developers. Creating rich, meaningful mobile content takes plenty of time and effort, and RIM is clearly doing whatever they can to make sure their app store gets some of that good stuff. Now the big question is whether or not RIM will be able to keep the momentum from this program going after they blow through their budget.

Samsung Is The New King...

Sammy is now the big kahuna of cell phones. Today’s Juniper Research and comScore reports indicated that Samsung kicked Apple from the top spot in regards to smartphones. IDC also released a report today indicating the same thing while noting that Samsung kicked Nokia from the top of total phone shipments. This comes just days after another analyst firm questioned Nokia’s current title as reigning king. Samsung happened to be at the right place at the right time — but only because the company positioned itself properly. Five years ago, Nokia was the world’s dominant cell phone maker. It held a commanding slice of the pie. Profits were soaring on the wings of cheap devices. RIM was nearly as dominant in its smartphone arena. It was hip to have a crackberry addiction. Then things began to change. Now, five years later, both companies are in nearly equally precarious positions, priming the companies for utter failure or rise-from-the-ashes success. While Nokia and RIM fell from grace, Samsung and Apple rose to the top. Apple had the benefit of being new to the space. Samsung had the tougher task of retooling its existing line to keep pace with new devices from Apple and HTC. But now, after just a few quarters of neck-to-neck racing, Samsung overtook Apple to become the largest smartphone vendor and overtook Nokia to be the largest vendor overall. Samsung had a blockbuster first part of the year. It shipped a whopping 42 million smartphones, and per IDC’s research is the only Android vendor on an upswing. The rest of the players are seeing a steady decline in shipments. Samsung’s Galaxy line of smartphones are Android’s only bright spot right now. RIM is also on the decline. The once-king of smartphones dropped more market share during the first part of 2012 and only accounted for 6.8% of the smartphone shipments in the first quarter of 2012. However, while I still believe RIM can turn things around, the Canadian-based company is in a very tough spot after failing to innovate fast enough to compete with iOS and Android. BlackBerry 10 is a great start. Nokia and RIM’s decline was caused by sheer arrogance . The two companies rested on their respective successes. Failure to innovate and sell existing supporters on changes is a recipe for disaster. Instead of following the market toward high-end devices, both companies dove headfirst toward the low-end, leading the race downmarket. Samsung went the other way. The Korean company followed Apple upmarket. In fact, they may have followed a bit too closely. Remember the never-ending patent battle over the striking similarities between Galaxy smartphones and Apple’s iPhone? The first line of Galaxy S smartphones were haphazard at best, but they set the stage for the fantastic Galaxy S II line. Now, as Samsung is the new king of mobile, the third generation is set to launch within the coming weeks. Samsung is succeeding because it kept moving. The mobile phone wars are far from over. Apple and Samsung will continue to fight it out. The Samsung Galaxy S III will launch this month but the iPhone 5 (or whatever it’s to be called) is coming soon as well. These reports also indicate that other smartphone vendors, being Android supporters or not, are seeing steady declines in shipments. It might soon be a two dog race.

Last-Minute Booking App...

HotelTonight , the smartphone app that lets you book same-day hotel rooms, is moving into international markets for the first time. It now supports bookings in Toronto and Vancouver, and it plans to add other Canadian and international cities this year. The app is built for those moments when you suddenly realize that it would be nice to have a hotel — say if you’re visiting San Francisco from somewhere else in the Bay Area, and you decide to stay in the city for the night rather than head home. Instead of popping into a random hotel and possibly getting ripped off or finding it full, you can open the HotelTonight app, which will offer three curated hotel deals in the area — one that’s “Hip”, one that’s “Luxe”, and one that’s “Solid”. (The deals first become available at noon local time, and can be purchased until 2am.) Co-founder and COO Jared Simon says the company has already started to build an audience of devoted fans, who are attracted not just by the deals (hotel rooms can be discounted by up to 70 percent), but the app’s high-quality experience and glossy look (the company hires a professional photographer to take pictures of every hotel in the system). “Our goal is that HotelTonight becomes a verb — wherever you are, if you want a room, you’re going to ‘HotelTonight it’,” Simon says. “In order to do that, we need to be ubiquitous.” HotelTonight already offers rooms in a number of major US cities, but obviously, international expansion is a big part of achieving that goal. For this expansion, the app also supports payment with Canadian dollars, Euros, and British pounds. However, this doesn’t mean that the company is opening offices internationally or hiring salespeople in Canada — Simon says that in order to build a unique company culture, everyone is still located in the San Francisco office, and all the hotel deals are negotiated from there. The company’s investors include Battery Ventures, Accel Partners, and First Round Capital.