It Can Wait Hackathon
Tomorrow night is the AT&T It Can Wait hackathon in Santa Monica, California. AT&T is sponsoring this event to discourage texting while driving to reduce distractions and make us better drivers. How often have you seen erratic drivers on the road fumbling with their smartphones? AT&T has created an app that helps you avoid ever receiving a distracting text while you’re behind the wheel. When enabled, the app sends a customizable auto-reply message to incoming texts, letting your friends know [...]
Washington Post: App Developers Wary of Child Privacy Law
Washington Post: App Developers Wary of Child Privacy Law Dan Russell-Pinson has designed some of the top educational children’s apps for the iPhone and iPad. Monster Physics is a game that lets kids build virtual contraptions, operated by a customizable furry monster, to complete missions — clearing debris using an electromagnet, for example — while teaching them common physics terms. One of his other apps, a geography-focused game called Stack the States, was voted the “Best Kids App for iPad” [...]
Washington Post: Happtique helps doctors prescribe apps to patients
Washington Post: Happtique helps doctors prescribe apps to patients Doctors may soon be prescribing smartphone apps to their patients along with their medication. There are thousands of health-related apps available for download today on smartphones and tablets (by some estimates there could be as many as 40,000, though no formal count has been done). These apps are as varied as programs that make it easy to count calories, monitor diabetes, or check heart rates. The sheer number of what are [...]
Apps to Navigate the Conventions
Around these parts when we talk about the dynamism and explosive growth of the apps economy, we note that this is an industry that didn’t even exist four years ago. Which means that the last time the Republicans and Democrats gathered for their nominating conventions, very few people were carrying smartphones loaded with these newfangled things called apps. And look at us now. Convention-goers and –watchers at the Republican National Convention this week are using an AT&T-developed app—Tampa 2012—to keep [...]
Apple Patent Victory is a Good Thing for the Tech Industry
Apple patents being upheld will force industry toward innovation and differentiation. That's a good thing. Patents not only protect the investments of innovators, they create incentives for the rest of the industry to innovate instead of copying the work of others. Apple's win today reaffirms the importance of patents to the future of innovation. Today's ruling is a clear message to the rest of the industry to get busy licensing or get busy innovating. Patents are essential for the enormous [...]
Mobile App Education Resources for NTIA Stakeholders
In the discussions at Wednesday’s NTIA multistakeholder meeting, considerable time was spent hearing alternatives to the process outlined by the agency. There were a small number of participants who participated reluctantly, feeling they lacked sufficient technical understanding of the app marketplace to provide a valuable contribution. As the trade association representing app makers, ACT agrees that stakeholders should have a thorough understanding of the technical issues underlying our marketplace before considering regulatory steps. We are pleased to provide our assistance [...]