Photo: Neven Mrgan / Flickr

We’re often amazed by the many brilliant applications developers are coming up with for contemporary smartphones. Fitness apps that can map your running routes, GPS device replacing navigation apps, to applications that scan barcodes and log the price/product you purchase. Word Lens, a new application for the iPhone and iPod Touch 4G is one such app that blows the mind, because it translates words in real time using just the camera on your device.

This is truly spectacular

So, basically, what Word Lens does is it has character recognition software built into it that identifies the words in a ‘shot’ your camera is pointing at. Once these characters are identified, the application references its locally stored dictionary for the appropriate translation.

Once the translation is sourced, the application then translates the words/phrases in real time overlaid over the original image you’re pointing your iPhone or iPod Touch 4G’s camera at. What’s even more remarkable is it doesn’t need an internet connection to do so – it all happens on your phone. Seriously, words (erm…) do very little justice to how remarkable this application is, so you would be best served to just check out the video for yourself.

English-Spanish dictionary for now

The application is currently freely available, but it only has support for an English-Spanish dictionary so far. With time, the developers intend to add support for more languages, with the revenue model being to charge for certain language packs.

More so than any application that has come out for iOS devices in recent months, Quest Visual’s Word Lens reaffirms the belief that a smartphone’s usage is only limited by the applications you have installed, and the applications developers can think up. For frequent travelers, Word Lens alone could be invaluable enough to own an iPhone 4 or an iPod Touch 4G, and that speaks volumes to the value of the developer eco-system built around any mobile OS platform.

Photo: marcopako  / Flickr

After a year-long wait, Apple have finally approved the Google Voice app for iPhone, and users have been able to download the application at no charge. The app is able to do everything that Google Voice was capable of before, with one exception: the iPhone version is not able to make internet phone calls.

Before, to use the program for anything other than text messaging and receiving voice mail, one would have to link the phone numbers with Google Voice. Since August, Google have changed all that by adding voice calling to their own email system, Gmail, as a separately installed chat browser for Mac, Windows and Linux.

Call hub

The Google Voice iPhone app remains a control panel rather than a calling program, albeit a highly powerful control panel, allowing you to recommend that your friends, family and contacts to phone your Google Voice number. Google Voice then acts as a hub, where you connect all the numbers in your database and then prioritise them to handle incoming calls more smoothly. These numbers are divided along lines.

The lines in your database can all ring at once, and the handy call screening option can alert you to any unwanted calls. Outgoing calls are treated differently; either by using the Google Voice portal and choosing which line you want the call routed to, or by logging into Gmail and using a headset.

Redesigned

The application has been redesigned, allowing for simple transitions between text messaging and phone options, and includes four main tabs in total: Inbox, Dialler, Contacts and Settings. The dialler contains both texting and calling options within one menu, while notifications will alert you of any incoming messages, found in the inbox.

Lastly, Google Voice handles text messages and voice mail with ease. Text messages are free to send from your end, although your contact on the other side needs to pay whatever their server charges. Voice mails are automatically recorded, transcribed and accessed using the application.

Photo: osh Bancroft / Flickr

Two free fresh applications are available for iPhone in time for the holiday shopping period, so either scan barcodes in the store with ScanLife, or let Black Friday check ads before their release. We look at both apps.

ScanLife

ScanLife changes your camera into a barcode scanner, checking the code in the shop and giving your information on the product from Amazon.com. The application then provides price comparisons between different shops in your area using Milo.com, while Coupons.com is also checked to help you find the best price. Food Essential’s database is also available to provide nutritional facts when scanning food produce.

The barcode reader can handle various different types of codes, including ordinary bar codes and QR codes. The manufacturer behind the app, ScanBuy, is releasing an updated version in time for the holidays that will improve the application image when scanning barcodes.

Black Friday

While scanning products looking for the best deals, the Black Friday app will help you look into the future for a potential deal on a product, saving you money. Not only free, it also has access to a large database of information from various stores, all advertising their products over this holiday shopping period.

The application gives you the lead over other shoppers, as it features ‘leaked’ information on goods and adverts that are released early, letting you have access that others won’t have when they open up the newspaper.

Alcove

While you’re doing all this hunting for good prices, make use of Alcove, a search application for iPhone that works in a similar way to Google. When doing a search, Alcove will scan for photos, videos and even tweets, looking for relevant finds and listing them in a ‘book shelf’-type display.

The search is displayed in different shelves, each separated by type of search, making wading through the searches similar to looking through your bookshelf at home.

Photo: .jens / Flickr

You know how Post-its work? Imagine how cool it would be to be able to add a digital Post-it to just about any object. That’s what Stickybits allows you to do.

What is Stickybits?

Stickybits is a new application available for iPhone and Android devices. The amazing little invention allows you to produce and print barcodes in sticker form, to which you can attach various types of digital content such as text, video, pictures and PDFs. It really is quite unique. All you do is download the app, design your barcode sticker on the website and then print it out. The barcodes can be scanned by any iPhone or Android phone as long as Stickybits is installed. The content can be viewed via the smartphone device.

Clever uses

Stickybits can really be quite useful for certain purposes, such as attaching your resume to a business card or having pictures or a promotional video that you could view on a particular product. The options seem endless and really quite fun. Friends can upload pictures and personal messages onto birthday cards. The app not only allows you to create barcodes but to use already existing ones to attach your content to.

The future

Imagine life when pretty much any barcode can be scanned to find something interesting within its little horizontal lines. The uses really do seem endless.

Photo: Gioxx / Flickr

The popular media player VLC will soon be available for iPhone and iPod Touch, after the programme’s manufacturers Applidium announced that they have submitted it to Apple to be reviewed. As the iPad version has already been approved and is now available on the App Store, it is highly likely that VLC will be approved for the iPhone and iPod Touch, too.

The popular programme has support

Being capable of supporting many different movie and audio files that QuickTime cannot play, many are eager for VLC Media Player to become available for iOS devices. VLC was already made available over two years ago as an unofficial port after strong demand from iPhone users.

Early reviews have already been favourable, with users calling VLC simple and versatile. Applidium have also enabled low-level assembly optimisations so that the Apple A4 processor will run efficiently. Many more video extensions will be supported and, on request from users, email attachments can be opened easily using VLC. Other bugs have been fixed, and the overall speed of the programme has been improved, too.

VLC does have issues

VLC is still not perfect. The older iPhone 3G will not be supported, as most movies cannot play because of its low processing power. 720p videos won’t be playing too smoothly, either, as the hardware video decoder is still not possible to use. Videos can be played in both landscape and portrait mode, but playing big files causes problems, with the user receiving a message warning that the video will play too slowly.

Playing a movie with VLC is as simple as dragging and dropping the files from the iTunes 10 programme in VLC Media Player. Providing VLC Media Player is approved by Apple, it should be available soon. However, a beta version is available for your jail broken phone, for a small donation. Once the official version is released, you will be able to download it for free.

Photo: Tsutomu Takasu / Wikimedia Commons

Sometimes some headlines just write themselves. They sound like hyperbole, throwaway fabrication to get clicks. But they’re not. World Cup 2010 is, officially, the biggest online event of all time. And you know who is slacking the most at work during this period? Yep, us Brits are.

Akamai prepared for this

Akamai, which is one of the world’s biggest content distribution networks and supplies many large websites with its interconnecting servers, resulting in content being closer to the end user, beefed up its network in anticipation of the World Cup. The company predicted that 2010 South Africa would be an ‘Internet milestone’ and it was proved correct.

If you want an indication of just how big a deal the World Cup has been, and how much content Akamai is relaying through its network, taking one look at the company’s World Cup tracking site, especially around match times, will give you an indication. At peak, Akamai was processing 425,000 impressions per second, during the South Africa versus Uruguay game. It’s a pretty safe bet the final will exceed that number, too.

Broke Twitter

Photo: South African Tourism / Flickr

Not only is Akamai saying its tracking more volume than ever on servers it mirrors, Twitter announced at the beginning of 2010 South Africa that it expected to bulk under the pressure. And so it did. Many people have been claiming downtime and instability. The company recently wrote a blog post stating that, at peak (during goals), they saw 2,940 tps (tweets per second). Which, when compared to the daily average of 750 tweets per second, represents a major spike.

The Apps rush

In addition to 2010 South Africa being the biggest event on the Internet, smartphone app developers have taken to the World Cup in droves. Various apps ranging from tourist destinations in South Africa to the very popular (and very annoying, depending on who you ask) free Vuvuzela app available for the iPhone. Quite simply, the world, developers, and even us, are completely enraptured by the World Cup. If only England could figure out a way to win.

Photo: Apple

With the app store, Apple all but introduced an entirely new marketplace for developers to sell their wares. An early gold rush set in with some developers raking in millions of dollars from single apps that often cost a mere $2 and even $0.99 in the most extreme cases.

These developers helped fortify the iPhone’s dominance in the high-end smartphone category and every other mobile OS has now realised they need a similar bustling industry.

The developer’s conundrum

The developer’s conundrum is quite simple: devs want a platform with mass scale to build for that is not saturated by other developers, so as to ‘guarantee’ the mega returns that were experienced in the early days of the iPhone. But the paradox is this – consumers are becoming savvy to the need for a bustling app developer community around a mobile OS platform, but app developers want consumers to be there before they commit – a classic chicken and egg scenario.

The incentive

As such, the onus falls on the platform provider to entice developers to jump onto the bandwagon if they want to stand a chance of even competing in the smartphone market. Here we’re talking specifically Nokia, webOS and Windows Phone 7 Series, since iOS (Apple’s mobile OS) and Google Android are now proven entities.

Photo: Nokia

Microsoft has tried this recently by waving money in mobile games developers’ faces so that they port their popular iPhone games over to Windows Phone 7 Series. This, from early reports, has seen moderate success, since the incentive doesn’t necessarily exceed the effort to do this porting. And Windows Phone 7 Series is still unproven.

Our recommended solution

Another solution, one we haven’t seen practiced but could work, is a riff on Microsoft’s solution. Instead of getting developers to port their games for money, give an incentive to developers to develop original content by having a competition of sorts wherein each device shipped ships with those apps already on it. Bake the price of the game into the wholesale price of Windows Phone 7 Series device so that each game shipped earns each developer a dollar. The prospect of 10-50 million dollars from one remarkable game will incentivise the very best the industry has to offer. And the green lining? Well, those mobile apps and mobile games that don’t ship stock standard with the phone will be available on your market place day one, too.

How’s that for some early momentum? Think about it: team Windows Phone 7 Series, webOS and Nokia Ovi. It could work. 100,000 plus apps on Apple’s app store is a lot to compete with, but a small fraction are any good. If you had a bunch of very good apps early on for your mobile OS platform, perhaps people will take note.

Photo: Stock.Xchng

The Mobile apps market is a booming business that, in the beginning of the iPhone apps rush, made many independent developers overnight millionaires. Now, with mobile apps having gained mass market traction on other mobile OS patforms like Android and beginning to gather momentum elsewhere, analysts predict the overall market could top £22 billion by the year 2015.

Educated guesswork

TechRadar wrote on Juniper Research’s forecast that by the year 2015, the revenue derived from mobile apps – a combination of paid apps, advertising revenue and revenue from services built around apps – will total £22 billion. This number is around three times the £7 billion derived presently.

From early indications, these Juniper numbers are bang on the money, but it is possible the company has underestimated just how big the burgeoning app market can get. Smartphones still account for less than 30 per cent of all mobile phones in the world, and, as smartphones eat up more market share, so too will the absolute number of mobile apps users increase. In addition, as people become increasingly more comfortable with the concept of buying apps, so too will the absolute revenue derived from each user increase. And if these variables add up nicely, the market could be worth considerably more than £22 billion.

Who gets the biggest pie?

Photo: Apple

But Dr. Windsor Holden, who authored the report, warned Apple could lose its market dominating role if they didn’t adopt a more open model. She says that if this model of revenue derived from applications is to continue to grow, then ‘the mobile industry must ensure that those applications are accessible by a wide range of handsets ranging from smartphones to mass market devices’.

Quite frankly, Ms Holden is wrong. The only reason the iPhone and the latest crop of Android apps work so well is because they’re built from the ground up for that operating system. Yes, mobile OS platforms should not fragment more, we agree, and cross OS-communication needs to become a possibility – in the cloud, perhaps – but if we go back to making apps for the lowest common denominator, the market will suffer drastically because of it.

Photo: Square

The Square online mobile payments app system is finally available for the iPhone.

iPad first, iPhone second

Though the service’s lead development platform was the iPhone, it was launched on the iPad about a month ago, and is finally making its way to the iPhone. The service includes a dongle you connect through the Apple’s universal port wherein users will swipe for a transaction, which will then be processed online.

Quick payment

The platform was developed so as to facilitate easy payments between people using only their smartphones. In this regard, Square is to mobile payments what Paypal was/is to online transactions. The company, founded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey got off to a blisteringly fast start, with early venture rounds valuing the company at $40 million prior to even launching. In addition to the sky high valuation, Square also has all-star team of investors and advisors including Ron Conway, Kevin Rose of Digg, and Marrisa Mayer from Google.

Not all smooth sailing, though

Photo: Apple

But, on the heels of Square’s announcement, VeriFone announced its own mobile payments solution, PAYware. Not only did VeriFone support PAYware with a heavy marketing campaign in New York City cabs, it also beat Square to market and partnered up with Apple’s retail store to get its device into consumer’s hands.

Wait and see

Now that Square online mobile payment is available to the masses, it will be interesting to see what adoption is like. One can easily see delivery services adopting the product so you can swipe for your pizza on the same phone each driver has on him. Once off fundraising events seem like a compelling prospect, too. Market fares are also a very compelling market.

But, for the Square online mobile payments service to reach its valuation, it needs to be able to process significantly more than fringe markets as viable mobile payment solutions.

But who is willing to bet against Jack Dorsey and that rockstar team? He, better than most, knows all about getting products to scale and Square’s allure is that the value proposition is self evident. How it fairs against PAYware should also prove very interesting.

Photo: Apple

The iPod’s tube applications have already made navigating the tube and getting your train on time a whole lot easier for many tube transport users, but now a new app is set to take things a step further: it allows you to get a refund on tube tickets, in a process that would previously have involved a whole lot of forms to be filled out and administration to be completed.

What’s it replacing?

The Tube Refund App allows Londoners to claim refunds for tube tickets that they haven’t been able to use due to various problems that tend to arise with tube transport, from strikes to track closures. The usual method for making these claims is to fill out a refund application when tube trains were more than 15 minutes late, but taking advantage of this service was often too tedious a process to complete every time it happened. This iPhone app should change that all for the better.

How does it work?

Photo: Presselite

The iPhone app allows users to fill out the same forms that they would have used previously, but by storing user details and filling out the forms automatically for them, it makes the process a lot quicker and easier. An added bonus is that travellers won’t be wasting time while they’re delayed – they’ll be using it to fill out refund forms from their mobiles.

The iPhone’s London Tube app

London Tube is an application that’s already been improving the tube transport system for Londoners for some time now. Its uses include showing users where disrupted lines are, and the number of lines that are disrupted at any given time, and showing the tube routes. It can still provide notifications when the application is closed by working in the background of the iPhone, keeping its user informed about the little disruptions that could throw off a whole day’s schedule if left unnoticed.

Getting it

Photo: Apple

Downloading the app works just like downloading any other iPhone application, and costs only 59p – a cost that any regular tube transport user frequently spends on tickets that go unused. As well as working on iPhones, the app can also be used on an iPod touch. One thing to keep in mind is that the app only supports Oyster and Travelcard at the moment, but that looks set to change in coming months, so tube transport users might want to keep an eye out for National Rail Functionality.

Is it worth it?

If this all sounds like a silly idea, this fact might change that: the creators of the refund app have said that around 1,996 delays took place on the London tube last year. It’s not likely that this is the kind of app that will be wasted, and it’s probably the only one that’ll actually make back the price paid for it. If the idea just doesn’t appeal, and for those who don’t own iPhones, the option remains to fill out the form online from a PC.