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Apple Patents Travel, Hotel and Fashion Applications

Three new patent applications which just became public on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) website reveal that Apple is now patenting ideas for mobile applications. Specifically, these patents applications describe iPhone apps that would aid in making travel arrangements, booking hotels and shopping.

The patent applications were uncovered this morning by wireless news site Unwired, which called the development "scary" and equated Apple to a patent troll. If granted, these apps would allow Apple to patent ways in which mobile applications function, including everything from mobile boarding passes to store locator functions.

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Here's what each app would do:

Travel

The travel application would help users make reservations, create an itinerary, view airport guides and information, use mobile boarding passes, check-in to flights remotely, access in-flight services, send and receive automatic arrival notifications and browse and send travel guides and promotions. The app would also have built-in social networking to aid in finding nearby friends or others in the vicinity interested in socializing.

Hotels

The hotel application would allow a user to check in and check out via the app, order hotel services (e.g. making reservations at the spa, ordering or pre-ordering room service, scheduling wake up calls, etc.) book tickets for nearby attractions, schedule reminders and control room settings even when away from the room (think AC, audio/video equipment, etc.). The app could also be used as a universal remote control for the hotel room's TV and video equipment and could suggest programming choices based on stored user profile information. 

Shopping

The mobile shopping application focuses on connecting users to high fashion. The app would send invitations and reminders regarding fashion events, display fashion ads, allow the user to browse through inventory of stores, offer a store locator function, recommend items and check for availability, and display ratings and reviews for stores. Social networking is incorporated into this app, too, allowing friends to provide feedback on fashion items. The app could also provide details on items snapped using the phone's camera.

Why is Apple Competing with Its Developers?

While on the one hand, the above applications sound fantastic and certainly like things we would want to use, the fact that the patents are coming from Apple and not some enterprising startup is somewhat unsettling.

It's not unusual for Apple (or any company) to patent its ideas, but most of Apple's previous patents have been for technology improvements, like using wireless sensors as heart rate monitors, tracking sports in real-time, allowing iPhones to "socially network" with each other when in proximity with one another or modifications to the iPhone's homescreen. Apple has not been in the habit of patenting actual mobile applications.

What does this mean for companies already building applications similar to these? For example, OpenWays, which has already built mobile applications that allow smartphones to work as hotel room keys or Socialight which can be used to build a "virtual hotel concierge" service, among other things? What of the fact that multiple airlines already have their own mobile boarding pass applications? What of the universal remote apps like FLPR, Bobby, L5 and RedEye, to name just a few? And the list could go on and on.

Does Apple want to compete with these developers with its own native apps or does it just want license this technology to others building related services? Are these patents defensive maneuvers to block Google from providing services like these on its Android mobile operating system?

News like this is one of the reasons why so many in the technology industry are so vehemently against the idea of software patents. Foundry Group's managing director Brad Feld, for example, recently called the litigation surrounding patents "a massive tax on and retardant of innovation." Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady agreed, saying "it is not reasonable to expect that the current patent system, nor even one designed to improve or replace it, will ever be able to accurately determine what might be considered legitimately patentable from the overwhelming volume of innovations in software."

Philosophical arguments aside, given Apple's cryptic ways and its behavior when dealing with competition (see: Adobe, AdMob, Flurry Analytics), the idea of Apple venturing into its developers' playing field is one that could greatly affect the innovation in mobile applications for years to come. Discuss

What If You Could Reduce Service Time By 75%?

Wouldn't it be great if you could reduce service request processing time by 75%? That is what Marsh Insurance achieved with Oracle's industry-leading CRM On Demand. By leveraging Oracle's cloud-based, enterprise grade insurance CRM and analytics, Marsh managers were able to gain new insight into service request volume and aging. Consequently, staff now complete requests within 3 days instead of the previous 12 day average -- increasing customer satisfaction and retention, which is so important in this economy. Congratulations to Marsh on this achievement! Watch Janet Muse, VP of Operations, explain more in this 3 minute video.

Webilder

For Ubuntu Hardy (i386, amd64, powerpc of sparc):

deb http://debian.websterwood.com/ hardy main
deb-src http://debian.websterwood.com/ hardy main

   For Ubuntu Feisty (i386, amd64, powerpc of sparc):
   deb http://debian.websterwood.com/ feisty main
deb-src http://debian.websterwood.com/ feisty main

In terminal:

sudo apt-get update

apt-get install webilder webilder-gnome



   

The British Are Coming! (To Serve Google a DMCA Notice)

The music and movie industries have been on a quest to place blame ever since they realized they were losing sales to Internet piracy. The RIAA in the United States went as far as to sue and fine individual users for downloading songs on peer-to-peer services like Napster and Limewire, or websites like The Pirate Bay or SendSpace. Others went after the services themselves, and in most cases were successful, though many others still exist. Now, BPI (British Recorded Music Industry), the U.K.'s version of the RIAA, is going after the middle man, Google, by serving the search giant with a DMCA take-down notice.

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"Part of our work involves monitoring the internet and taking action against persons that use, facilitate, enable and/or authorise the use of material in a manner that infringes the rights of the members of BPI and [Phonographic Performance Limited]. We have identified the following links that are available via Google's search engine, and request the following links be removed as soon as possible as they directly link to sound recordings owned by our members," the notice says.

The BPI identified 38 links to 17 songs that they found from Google links to various file sharing services, including works from Christina Aguilera, Lady Gaga, Michael Bublee, Usher, Ke$ha and the cast of Glee to name a few. They even went as far as to identify the 38 various search terms that could lead one to find these files, including phrases like "lady gaga alejandro zippyshare," and "the pretty reckless make me wanna die free download."

Google has been quick to remove copyrighted material from services like YouTube where it hosts the content, but it has not been so quick to remove infringing sites entirely from its search index. Google has, however, removed the 38 requested links at the behest of BPI, but many other file sharing site links remain among the results. In the image above, the third page of results for "dizzee rascal dirtee disco" shows Google's notice that the requested results have been removed. This, of course, is displayed directly below results where the song can be found at other sites.

In section 4 of the DMCA notice, BPI lists 9 different sites that contain these copyrighted files. BPI should have sent 9 different DMCA notices to these sites, not to Google. For better or for worse, Google has become a launch pad from which many people surf the Web. We learned this the hard (and amusing) way earlier this year when a story of ours displaced the typical top result for "Facebook login" on Google, sending wayward Web surfers to our article.

When Googling something is the equivalent of entering the URL in an address bar for many people, you can't place the blame for illegal content on Google. If BPI wants to sue someone over illegal access to music, it should be the sites providing that service, not those simply linking to it.

Skygone Launches Marketplace for Cloud GIS Apps

Skygone, an GIS cloud computing company, has launched a marketplace today for pre-configured GIS applications hosted on their cloud infrastructure. TheGISMarketplace.com allows users to search, compare, and buy hosted solutions from many leading GIS vendors.

Currently, the software offerings include MapServer, ArcGIS Server , and GeoServer. Skygone says its working with other GIS software vendors and will add new apps to the marketplace as they become available.

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The pricing includes hosting, but in some cases the apps are proprietary and additional licensing fees apply.

Skyline offers a number of enterprise services, including SaaS and system design. Part of their focus is on GIS services, including hosting, map caching, and app-enablement for GIS developers.

With the increasing interest in and capabilities of GIS technologies, many GIS services are moving to the cloud to solve both hardware and software needs. And in response, many businesses are offering simple deployment tools and turnkey solutions for cloud-based GIS services. ReadWriteWeb reported last month, for example, that ESRI was offering a bundle with its ArcGIS Server instance launched on Amazon's E3 infrastructure.

Only Three Days Left to Save $100 on Real-Time Web Summit

ReadWriteWeb's first East Coast event - the Real-Time Web Summit - will be taking place on June 11 at the Metropolitan Pavilion in New York City. Be sure to register now as we are extending the $395 ticket price until Wednesday, May 26.

The Real-Time Web is a set of technologies that impacts almost every service, activity and application on the Web. Come to the summit to understand how it impacts you, your business and your next development.

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Attendees already include thought-leaders like John Borthwick of betaworks, Alex Iskold of Adaptive Blue and Anil Dash of Expert Labs. ReadWriteWeb also has a special rate for students. If you are a student and would like to participate, please email us at students@readwriteweb.com.

Why We Use the Unconference Format

Watch live video from ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010 on Justin.tv

"[The Mobile Summit] was the best best best event I've been to in years, and I mean it. To be frank, I almost left ten minutes after I arrived, thinking that I was completely out of place. Turns out I was exactly in the right place all along. I left feeling completely energized about media, innovation, women in tech, new social models, and have so many new ideas about what I want to do next and what I want to get involved in. What I really didn't expect was to walk away with a pretty clear picture of what the future of mobile media (and social media) looks like. Now I'm staring at invites to keynote at a couple of tech events this year and hoping they're a fraction of the win that was RWWMS." - Violet Blue, sex educator and author

An unconference is a free-flowing, organically generated series of group discussions agreed on and led by attendees.

To get a feel for how thoughtful discussion happens at these events, check out the comments by Ted Morgan, Chris Saad and Ben Metcalfe in this video by Evelyn Rusli from TechCrunch:

We were one of the first news outlets to analyze the Real-Time Web and we've since written extensively about it. We also published a premium report on the subject last year, which featured interviews with 50 companies, developers and executives building or leveraging real-time Web technology.

If you're a company in the Real-Time Web market, you may be interested in helping to sponsor this event. Please contact our COO Sean Ammirati for more information.

The ReadWriteWeb team is excited about our first New York event on June 11th, so we look forward to seeing you there!

Perfect game earns virtual pitcher $1 million

Can the Web Depend on Facebook? Ongoing API Outage Worries Developers (UPDATE)

The Facebook OpenGraph Search API is experiencing an outage that began last night somewhere between 7 PM EST and 8 PM EST, as best we can tell. After receiving a tip from a Facebook developer who noticed that his social search engine built on top of the Facebook platform, Booshaka, stopped updating with fresh content, we began investigating. This morning, we performed several searches against the API including queries for popular words like "graduation," and found that although the results displayed show a recent "updated" timestamp, the "created" timestamp is now pushing 15 hours old. Surely, someone on Facebook has mentioned "graduation" in a Facebook update after 7:18 PM EST last night?

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Tracking the Outage

The OpenGraph Search API is a part of Facebook's newly launched developer API, an interface to the social network which allows developers to access (with permission) users' profiles, friends, status updates, etc. for use within Facebook applications and external services built on top of Facebook's platform.

The search API in particular allows developers the ability to search all public objects available in the social graph, including posts, people, pages, events, groups and even an individual user's New Feed as documented here on the Facebook developer site.

In Facebook's provided example query, the search term used is "watermelon," which may or may not be a very popular topic, so we used keywords that we were sure had been posted publicly somewhere, at some point, by at least one of Facebook's 400 million users.

For instance, in a query for the word "graduation," the most recent result result was a status update from 23:20 GMT (19:20 EST military time or 7:20 PM EST). The "updated_time" of that post was this morning, but that only refers to when a user comments on a post according to Facebook's developer documentation.

In other words, around 7:20 PM EST last night, the OpenGraph API stopped pulling in new public status updates.

According to the developer who reported the issue, both his forum posting and bug report have, so far, been unanswered. We have also reached out to Facebook's PR team and have yet to receive a response. (We will update this post if we do).

Facebook Outage Raises Questions

The larger issue here isn't just that a portion of Facebook's platform has gone down - numerous web services have issues from time to time, including everything from Gmail to Twitter. An outage of this length, however, with no official communication from the company itself is disturbing.

With Facebook's new "Open Graph" initiative, the network has launched an incredibly ambitious plan to socialize the entire web by way of publisher plugins, APIs, "like" buttons, instantly personalized websites like Pandora and Yelp, "login with Facebook" boxes, live streams (like those found on CNN during live events) and more.

The social network is weaving itself into the very fabric of the web which means publishers, developers and users now depend on it to stay up-and-running at all times. If it's not able to do so, then it essentially becomes a single point of failure for a number of web sites and services.

Today, only Facebook applications and services requiring access to public streams have been affected by the outage. Tomorrow, who knows? You can no longer "like" something or login to your favorite website? How will Facebook communicate its outages going forward? What will this mean for developers whose apps rely on Facebook's platform?These questions remain unanswered. We hope that Facebook is thinking about these things too as it struggles to fix its broken API this morning. We hope it will have an answer soon.

Also, they would like us to know it's called the Graph API, not OpenGraph API.

Frequently Asked Web Design Questions

Exadata a kiskereskedelem (retail) számára

Egyik kedvenc blogomban a Rittman Mead honlapján hasznos el?adásra jelent meg infó és letöltési lehet?ség. (Lásd a jobb oldali Top Tags dobozban a "blog" kulcsszót, és a legalsó bejegyzést.)
Az el?adás címe: Exadata in the Retail Sector, azaz Exadata a felhasználása a kiskereskedelemben. Ezt az el?adást Jon Mead tartotta 2010. március 23-án Londonban az Exadata V2, Oracle Extreme Performance Data Warehousing Seminar rendezvényen.
Mint láthatjuk, szinte minden gyümölcsr?l beszéltek az Oracle adattárház és üzleti intelligencia virágzó gyümölcsökertjéb?l az Oracle BI, 11gR2 adattárház tulajdonságai és más témákban. Az el?adások a következ? területekr?l szóltak:
- Exadata techikai ismertetés
- ügyfél sztorik: LGR, Allegro, és nagy-britannia egyik legnagyobb online elektronikai kiskereskedelmi cége
- Oracle BI
- GoldenGate (adatreplikáció)
- advanced compression (tranzakciós adatok tömörítése)
- particionálás
- OLAP
- adatbányászat, Oracle Data Mining