When we last wrote about Poynt and BBM 6 integration, the app wasn’t yet available for download with the implementation. Poynt let us know that the app is now fully integrated with BBM and available for download. There new features are awesome so read on.
Continue reading ‘Poynt Local Search App Updated With BBM 6 Integration and More’
Tag: location based servicesPage 2 of 12
This screen would look much cleaner if the font size wasn’t set so high.
When we announced the BBM Hackathon winner for BlackBerryCool was Smarter Apps, we didn’t mention what the app actually was. Well the app was hacked together at the hackathon and will be going live in App World soon. The app is called Who’s Around and the concept is really awesome and simple. The app duplicates the BBM experience but uses the BBM Social APIs on top of location to make BBM location aware. This is just like what Wikitude does for Augmented Reality but instead of needing OS 7 and Augmented Reality, you get a similar experience on a wide range of devices.
Once you have downloaded the app and connected it to BBM (make sure you have BBM 6), you can now set your name, avatar and preferences. Everything about the app is intuitive because it’s made to look just like BBM. The major difference in your profile settings is that you can tell the app what you’re interested in, whether it’s sports, business, investment, dating, drinks, movies etc. You can select from a list of preset preferences or customize it with your own interests. The app will then let you search for other BBM users that have the same interests. This is going to be especially cool when we start to see the overlap with BBM and Twitter and connecting users by hashtags. Are you at a conference with the hashtag “network2011″? Then set that as your profile preference and you can search for others at the conference on BBM.
Continue reading ‘Coming Soon: BlackBerry Messenger + Location = Who’s Around? By Smarter Apps’
Sympatico has launched their mobile portal app on BlackBerry App World. The free, bilingual app delivers Sympatico’s Canadian users access to news, music and entertainment stories, similar to what’s found on their Sympatico.ca portal. Sympatico’s mobile portal app also features a number of mobile features like location-based content including local weather, as well as push notifications for breaking news, a built-in QR code reader and the ability to share news items over social networks.
Download the Sympatico.ca mobile portal app for free in App World.
It’s always important to find a good WiFi spot with your PlayBook and the Find Near Me app can help you do that and more. The Find Near Me app for the PlayBook helps you find ATMs, Banks, Restaurants, WiFi spots and more. The app uses the built-in GPS in the PlayBook and plots pointers as overlays on a map to show points of interest in the vicinity of your current location. Find Near Me also allows you to find other locations and search for places around them. It even remembers the locations you have previously searched in. Features of the app include:
- Automatically finds your current location and plots it on a map.
- Find interesting and useful places such near you from a predefined set of commonly used keywords.
- Customize the application to include custom search terms.
- Search around other locations. Find Near Me remembers the locations you have previously searched.
- Find details such as distance from your current position, address, contact numbers and street view of searched locations.
- Use it on-the-go to search for places of interest and to plan your trips to new locations.
YouTube link
The BlackBerry Bold Touch was a pretty cool smartphone that we got our hands on back at BlackBerry World. It was nice how the light device fits into your pocket and you almost forget that it’s even there. With a built-in-compass (magnetometer) that supports location-based services and augmented reality, the device looks like it will be a decent stepping stone until the following year when the QNX smartphones come out. From the demo, we see the app’s ability to bring up information from a variety of sources including BBM and Foursquare, and bring them on a map or into the Augmented Reality view in the camera. It’s too bad that you can only see your current BBM contacts in the Augmented Reality view though. It would have been really cool to see other BBM contacts who at least also have Wikitude.
At the Where 2.0 conference it was announced that Apple was secretly collecting the location of every iPhone and weren’t telling users. This led to a Senate hearing of Apple and Google execs who had to explain themselves and answer to why they are collecting the data without the user’s knowledge. Recently, SmrtGuard decided to do some digging around to see if RIM collects this same data for a BlackBerry, and yes they do. The difference is that RIM does it in a very transparent way that users can opt out of, which is exactly how Apple and Google should have done it.
Many of you have noticed this option but in case you haven’t, go to Options > Device > Location Settings and scroll down a little. There, you’ll see the Enable GPS option with a message that says: “Anonymously collects data to improve the speed and accuracy of future location services.” The intent is pretty clear and RIM is building a database of location data in order to be able to improve their software. RIM is explicit that the data is anonymous and give the user the ability to disable. Again, if Apple and Google had been this open about their location data collection, it probably wouldn’t have turned into such a debacle.
Read more over at SmrtGuard’s Resource Center where they’ll have regular content in the mobile security space.
