I was surprised at how little time Apple Maps got in the iPhone5 launch event, but then again they had a lot to cover. Below are the features they presented. Thanks to The Verge’s live coverage! (Great artists steal right?): Apple Has Built a Local Search Engine “We’ve built a search engine in to find POIs — we have over 100m points of interest.” Turn by turn directions in landscape and portait mode. 3D satellite imagery with flyover mode. Apple…
or something like that. I am not even 100% sure what it is yet other than a place to store all of your tickets and promotions, but I am pretty sure it becomes the de facto local payments system for anyone with an iPhone. And speaking of payments, check out Your guide to SEPA Direct Debit (German version)
Just checked out the new Google Places Iphone App – “now with Hotpot!”. It’s a nice enough local reviews service The UI is simple and looks good. Besides being able to review a business, which is nothing new these days, perhaps the biggest thing the app has going for it is the aggregation of all of the other review sites’ reviews. It’s not clear to me that sifting through 50 reviews from various sites on a Google Places App is…
Just caught up with Kent Lindstrom, founder of PlacePop and former CEO of Friendster, a new “lightweight” local search app that has a kind of Twittery feel to it. The service encourages users to “share where you go with friends”, “see who else goes where you do” and follow activity that occurs at different places (aka businesses). The way it works is you add a place to the site by searching for it in the database, selecting it and then…
according to TechCrunch. The update now allows for writing reviews from the Iphone so get ready for a lot of “I am writing this while drunk!” type stuff. I use the current Yelp App once in a while but I find that it becomes frustrating pretty quickly once you try to use the map to find stuff. The new app is no better. This is likely a limitation of the available iPhone map tools more than anything else though.
I always thought that Google Sitelinks were sort of useless, but now I get it. If the iPhone is how we are going to experience mobile search for the near future, Google Sitelinks can be really helpful. For example, today I was looking for a phone number of a company I was going to see and searched for them on Google on the iPhone. The result came up but I thought the number they displayed was wrong. The “contact us”…
I downloaded Yellowpages.com’s iPhone App this weekend and was psyched to give it a test run after hearing Frank Jules speak about it at Kelsey DMS last week. The executive summary: not bad but needs work. It does its main function of allowing you to search for businesses fine. And this may almost be enough – While driving with my wife I asked her to find the number for the local pizza place. She immediately went to Google and it…
I have been using an iPhone for the past two weeks and it’s pretty clear to me that the only thing that is going to stop me from using it more and more to find things is a fatal car crash. That’s why my loved ones and I are glad to hear about a number of voice search services that are starting to emerge. Here are two iPhone voice search services due out soon: AT&T (thanks Dick) Say Where (thanks…
The AimClear blog has a great overview of the top location-based iphone apps.
The CPC for the keyword “iphone” in the UK is 15 times more expensive than it is in the US. “smartphone” is 13 times more expensive. Check them out at www.spyfu.com and their newly launched www.spyfu.com/uk.