Mobile-related technologies for the past week, in 3 (or almost) words: Post It, No Ad Please, One King

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THE WEEK IN 3WORDS

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WEEK #40

3. POST-IT
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You too have the wall full of small colored sticky squares? You
use to take pictures of them in order to save a work session, for
example?
Well, no more need to hassle: 3M, the owner of Post-it,
has launched Post-it Plus, an application not only
for taking pictures of Post-it wall, but also for
organizing them and sharing them. The application
recognizes the Post-it and converts them into squares
that can be manipulated through the application.
The application has been referenced as best new app in the
Apple App Store. It is a good example of how augmented reality
can be used to actually digitalize reality (in opposition to put
digital overlay on top of the reality).

5. NO AD PLEASE
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Is it possible to run a social network with no advertisement to monetize it?
That is the question Ello, a fast growing social network (that
actually was there for quite some time, but became very
popular with the recent subscriptions of people not in line
with Facebook real name policy) aims to answer: yes! No
advertisement, no datamining, no algorithms that compute
the user’s activity or post: this is Ello’s contract.
Paul Budnitz, the founder of Ello, is quite evasive in how he plans to monetize
Ello, to, at least, make the network survive. One option he mentioned, though,
was to sell features to users, like an App Store dedicated to the network.
Is it possible for Ello to keep their principles and grow huge without financial
support from advertisement? Facebook was once ad-free as well…

7. ONE KING
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Apple has already shown some quite autocratic way of
managing applications available on its App Store.
Here is another example: Launcher, an application that took
advantage of iOS 8 notification center improvements to actually
let users launch their favorite apps from this center (not needing
to swipe different screens to get to the app) has been pulled
from the App Store. The reasons are not clear, but maybe Apple
is preparing the same kind of feature on their own.
Despite recent moves to open iOS (like the possibility to change
the default keyboard for another one downloaded from the App
Store), Apple still is dictating its rules to developers. Quite
frustrating, especially if they are unlucky enough to have had the
same idea as Apple…