Daily Bits

Survey Says: Smartphones are Being Used for Travel

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Today’s smartphone will not be called as such if  it isn’t smart enough to perform day-to-day functions that affects our lives. One proof? – the plethora of mobile applications available on various platforms. These mobile apps vary from the most useful to the most absurd ones. One  app which smartphones are supposed to come in handy is for travel purposes.

There are various travel-related apps available on various smartphone platforms. But are these applications being maximized by users? Compete’s analysis of available data shows that indeed, smartphones are being used for travel purposes. The bad news is, the usage is not significant enough, leaving more room for, growth perhaps?

Compete’s study utilized behavioraly targeted surveys that asked smartphone users whether they use their smartphones for travel research and booking.  Surprisingly, 69% of the respondents to Compete’s survey said that they do not use their smartphone’s for travel purposes and 78% said they don’t use smartphones for travel booking as well.

Quite interestingly, the survey also revealed that respondents see their smartphone’s usage more for post-travel bookings. These pertain to following up room availability, check-in time and other travel-related activities that you need to do.

The survey thus revealed that smartphones are not replacement tool but rather additional tools that aid users in their travel-related needs. And smartphone’s usage to follow-up bookings and other travel-related purposes are still growing despite the relatively low usage.

The fact is smartphones can be used in various ways that we can possibly imagine. And one of these is for travel bookings and other related information.

via Compete

Google Redesigns its Image Search for Android and iPhone

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How often do you search for images on Google mobile? Well, if you do this a lot, you would have been annoyed by how hard it is to scroll through image thumbnails on your Android 2.1 phones or iPhone. Well, say goodbye to the old ways and welcome the newly refurbished Google Image Search for mobile which was just rolled by Google.

So now when you see the thumbnail images, you’d noticed that these were squared to maximize the number of images that can be displayed on the small screen of the iPhone or any Android 2.1 devices. In addition, you can also now do the swipe gesture to scroll through the next or previous pages of search results. Or even tap the large, stationary “next” and “previous” page buttons. Finally, the speed at which images appear were also enhanced display them as quickly as you browse.

Meanwhile, as you view the images on the mobile search results pages, this is now made larger through a special image viewing page wherein a black background image emphasizes the image and the buttons fade after a few seconds. This allows you to see images with little distractions. And you can also easily browse through the images by swiping from picture to picture, just like how you normally do it when browsing for photos on your iPhone Camera library or Android photo gallery.

To try Google’s new image search for mobile, simply point your phone’s browser to google.com and tap on the “images” link. This feature is available in 38 languages worldwide.

Firefox aka Fennec for Android Looks Good, Saves Web Pages to PDF Too

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Although it is just a “pre-alpha” build you can see outright that Mozilla’s browser for Android phones nicknamed – Fennec or Firefox for Android has the makings of a pretty good if not great mobile phone browser.  One of Fennec’s developer’s slipped out some details about Fennec for Android and while it’s full of precautionary statements, I went ahead and installed the browser on my Nexus One.

The download and installation process went well without any hitch. Right after installing, I immediately fired up the browser – puff!  My phone’s screen goes blank. So, I rebooted my phone and fired up Fennec again.  Then there it was, rendering the startup page for Fennec on my Nexus One’s screen. I immediately type it some sites and noticed how fast the pages loaded up considering that it was still a “pre-alpha” release.

Now for some key features of Fennec or Firefox for Android that we should all look forward to:

Saving web pages into PDF – This is something that caught immediately caught my attention. This would come in handy for some offline reading of pages later on.

Tab Browsing History – You’d see this pop out from the left-most side of your screen. A pretty neat way of saving your browsing history and accessing them again later on.

Weave Sync – This looks like a pretty interesting feature. It will let you share bookmarks, browsing history, tabs and password between your Fennec on your mobile phone and Firefox on your desktop.

Some bugs

Fennec for Android is still buggy at this stage and that’s pretty understandable since it is just a pre-alpha release. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t use and evaluate how good it is right now.

One thing that I noticed that the browser lacks and which I hope the developers will work on before the public release are pinch-to-zoom and +- controls for zooming on web pages.

Overall, Fennec for Android is a promising mobile browser that could give Opera Mini and the others a good competition.

To download Firefox for Android pre-alpha release, scan the QR below.

AdMob: 11 Phones Account for 96% of Android Traffic

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Mobile analytics firm AdMob has just released its March 2010 Mobile Metrics Report and I can’t help but cringe over the fact that while the Android OS is enjoying significant traffic it is still falls inferior over the iPhone OS. According to AdMob’s report, while the Android OS is steadily gaining traffic while it tries to reach the iPhone’s status, the fact still remains that there are more mobile phone helping the Android OS achieve this feat.

In fact, 11 Android devices account for 96% of the Android platform’s overall mobile traffic. Total Android phones currently available in the market is around 35 handsets from several phone manufacturers. In contrast the iPhone is running on devices developed by one manufacturer.

Looking at the specific Android platforms and their share of market will give us the Android 1.5 with 38% of market share, Android 2.0/2.1 gets 35% of the share and Android.6 getting 26% of the market share.  In terms of manufacturers, both Motorola and HTC tops the list with 44% and 43% of March 2010 mobile traffic.

Other key results of the AdMob report include:

  • Motorola Droid was the leading Android handset in March 2010 generating 32 percent of Android traffic, while the Google Nexus One drove only two percent of Android traffic.
  • At least 54 percent of Android traffic came from devices with a QWERTY keyboard.
  • Three devices – the iPhone 3GS (39 percent), second generation iPod touch (25 percent) and iPhone 3G (20 percent) – generated 84 percent of total iPhone OS traffic.
  • iPhone 3GS traffic share has increased from 30 percent in September 2009 to 39 percent in March 2010. The 1st Generation iPhone only generated 2 percent of iPhone OS requests in March 2010.
  • Total worldwide traffic in AdMob’s network increased 18 percent month-over-month.

BloggingPro Launches Free Blogger Job Board

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After many years of existence BloggingPro has become one of the major blogs in the blogging and blog software scene. Of course we plan to continue expanding our horizons and deliver you more blogging news and tips, but that is not all and we here at BP want to deliver our users even more.

In our continuing effort to offer more to our readers, I am happy to announce the addition of the BloggingPro Job Board to the site.

Free Blogger Job Listings

Jobs can be added in three different categories: blogger jobs, blog designers needed and developers needed.

Free as in Beer

Jobs can be added in three different ways:

  1. Free Listing: Your job will be listed for 15 days after approval. Free
  2. 30 Days Listing: For those who want their job listed longer, without needing to refresh their listing. $10 [Read more…] about BloggingPro Launches Free Blogger Job Board

3 Reasons Why Foursquare Should Not Sell Out

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With its userbase already reaching 1 million this week, coming from a 170,000 membership during the last quarter of 2009, there’s no doubt Foursquare is the hottest and fastest growing location-based social networking service right now. With 20 employees running it, it is not so surprising that talks are already popping out regarding possible sell-out.

And if you’re still doubting whether Foursquare is hot right now, what if we tell you who the rumored buyers are. Well, some of the major players who are reportedly eyeing Foursquare include Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook. Yahoo was rumored to be willing to buy Foursquare for $100 million. Now, the question is not whether Foursquare will sell out, but rather should Foursquare sell out?

I don’t think so. And here are 3 reasons why Foursquare should not sell out.

1. Location-based social networking is hot and still growing

Both three major social media players namely, Google, Twitter and Facebook are gradually exploring the location-based social media sphere. Google is slowly evolving its Buzz service to have the same cool features as Foursquare. Twitter has activated geolocation of tweets and Facebook has been trying out these feature as well. As for Foursquare, it’s the very essence of its existence – location aware social sharing and networking. Foursquare just need to ponder on why the three major players are wanting to have Foursquare feature’s to understand that it’s going to be the next big thing in the social media ecosystem.

2. Along with growth is the commercial revenue potential

Foursquare currently offers free advertising to small shops and restaurants as it generates revenue from selling ads business chains. It recently launched Foursquare for Business where it gives simple self-service tools that would allow business manager to cook up various kinds of special gigs that would attract customers to business establishments. This is a good start at trying to tap on a business model. Once this service goes viral and businesses spread the word out how Foursquare is helping out drive in customers, you can just imagine how big it will be for Foursquare. Location-based social networking and recommendation site has all the potentials to bring in revenue whether be it for ads or other means. And Foursquare is already ahead of the game. [Read more…] about 3 Reasons Why Foursquare Should Not Sell Out