When we talk about mobile apps today, chances are that we are mostly talking about apps for cell phones and – maybe – tablets. The latest trend in mobile apps, however, is apps for cars. One of the companies leading this trend in the U.S. is Ford, which just unveiled a number of apps that students at the University of Michigan created on top of Ford’s platform.

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Making Mobile Apps Work at 70 mpg

Earlier today, we got a chance to talk to K. Venkatesh Prasad, the group and technical leader of Ford’s Infotronics Research and Advanced Engineering team. Ford unveiled its SYNC AppLink technology for controlling Android and Blackberry mobile apps through Ford’s voice-driven SYNC interface last month, but as Prasad told us, the company is obviously also looking at mobile apps that are developed specifically for the car.

Cloud Computing in the Commute

As Prasad stressed when we talked to him, developers have gotten very good at developing apps that work well at 0 mph, but interfaces that also work well at 70 mph are still in their infancy. Apps that run in cars obviously have to overcome a number of issues – especially with regards to safety – that aren’t normally an issue for developers of mobile apps.

In order to tap into the creativity of students who grew up with mobile apps and social networks, Ford, together with Microsoft and Intel, teamed up with the University of Michigan and the university’s professors and Ford’s engineers taught a 12-week course entitled “Cloud Computing in the Commute.” The students developed their apps using a Ford Fiesta with a built-in touch screen running. The software platform for these projects was Windows 7 and Microsoft’s Robotics Developer Studio. On the cloud side, the students used Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform.

Over the course of the semester, these students created six different projects, ranging from a gesture-driven Waze-like app that allows drivers to alert others of traffic jams, accidents and police cars along the road, to a ride-sharing app that taps into Facebook and an app that automatically uploads your fuel economy data to a cloud server. Some of these apps use Ford’s SYNC for voice recognition, while others use gestures that drivers can draw on the car’s built-in screen.

Caravan Track

From these six app, Ford, Microsoft and Intel chose Caravan Track as the best app. Caravan Track allows clusters of vehicles traveling together to track each other during the drive – which sounds like a great application for anybody who has ever been on a road trip with more than one car. The app uses vehicle telemetry to track each vehicle, maps routes and sends alerts about stops and road conditions. The winning students will take a car that runs Caravan Track on a two-week road trip from Michigan to the Maker Fair in San Mateo on May 22.

Cars: The Next Big Market for Mobile Apps?

Even more so than just these apps, it’s exciting to see how cars are finally becoming a part of the mobile app ecosystem. While there are still many user interface issues to deal with, systems like Ford’s SYNC could potentially give developers the same kind of resources and computing power as a modern desktop machine.

Today, most car buyers assume that their experience with the car won’t change much over the next few years of ownership. Once we get to the point where a lot of cars can run mobile apps however, we might see regular software updates that could greatly change the user experience at intervals that are currently unheard of in the automobile industry where upgrade cycles are usually measured in years.

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Twitter has released its first official application for Android 2.1 and Google will be open sourcing the code in the app soon. 

Twitter for Android app features a share button in your favorite applications for sharing links and images via Twitter.

The Twitter Blog provides more details. "Reading tweets is easy in a bunch of places on your phone. Quickly access your timeline with the home screen widget, view a tweet location on a map, and see your friend’s latest tweet in your phonebook, GoogleTalk list or any application that uses Android’s QuickContact bar."

"We had a great time working with the Android team and are thrilled that Google will be open sourcing the code used in this app in the near future. We look forward to the amazing experiences developers will create using Twitter APIs in their upcoming Android apps."
 

Google’s acquisition spree continues with its latest pickup – BumpTop, makers of the BumpTop desktop environment, which is designed to bring a more 3D and "visceral" user interface to the operating system. The product has been available for Windows and Mac, but Android is the likely destination for its technology in Google’s hands.

Google has remained tight-lipped about what it actually plans to do with BumpTop, but as with some of the company’s other recent acquisitions, competition with Apple’s iPhone and iPad devices is likely the driving motivation behind the purchase, and Android is Google’s most significant weapon in that battle.

Android is expected to make a big splash at Google I/O (the company’s developer conference) later this month, with Android-based TVs expected to be revealed. Given the new trend of 3D television, BumpTop could play an interesting role here.

Financial details about the acquisition have not been revealed. Other recent acquisitions by Google include Agnilux, DocVerse, Plink, Episodic, and Aardvark.

While not all of these are directly related to Apple competition, some of them clearly are. Apple has been on its own acquisition spree as well. Most recently, the company picked up Siri and Intrinsity.

(Hat TIp to VentureBeat)

Apple plans to shut down Lala, the cloud-based streaming music service it bought in December 2009. Lala stopped accepting new users today and will close on May 31. Thanks to its unlimited music locker and innovative pricing scheme, Lala had long been a favorite of ours. Rumor is that Apple will revive the service is some form under the iTunes.com label, but as with all things Apple, this is just a rumor until Steve Jobs walks on stage and announces it.

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Given the date of the shutdown, we assume that Apple will make an announcement about its plans for Lala/iTunes.com at it’s annual WWDC developer conference, which is set to begin just a week after Lala shuts down.

Until then, here are 5 online music services that either allow you to stream your own music collection or give you access to large libraries of streaming music. Some of these even allow mobile streaming, which is something Lala never offered.

Streaming Music Locker

MP3tunes

If you don’t want to be limited to playing the music that the music industry made available for on-demand streaming and you don’t mind paying a monthly fee, MP3tunes is also worth a look. Just like Lala, MP3tunes allows you to upload all your music to an online music locker and then stream it. MP3tunes offers a web interface, mobile apps and support for a range of other devices like the Chumby, Wii and Logitech Squeezebox. As we noted earlier this week, MP3tunes now offers up to 10GB of free storage.

Streaming Music Services

MOG

For $5 a month, MOG’s users get access to more than 5 million songs on demand. At this year’s SXSW festival in Austin, MOG also announced that it will offer mobile apps for the iPhone and Android platforms in the next few months. The service also offers artist-based radio stations that are similar to Pandora’s and Slacker’s offerings.

Napster and Rhapsody

While the name harks back to the early days of illegal MP3 downloads, Napster is now a pretty standard MP3 store that also allows you to stream any of the 9 million songs in its library. For $7 per month, you can stream all the songs in Napster’s library and download an additional 5 DRM-free MP3 files (more if you sign up for an annual plan).

Rhapsody also offers 9 million songs for on-demand streaming ($10/month), but unlike Napster, it also offers mobile apps (iPhone and Android).

Do-It-Yourself

Sockso

You can, of course, also use your own computer at home to stream music over the Internet. Simplify Music used to be our favorite service for doing this, but the company shut down last month.

A good alternative to Simplify Media is Sockso, an open source program, that can be installed on any Windows, OSX and Linux machine with very little effort (though you will need to set up the port forwarding on your router). The application gives you total control over your music experience and you can even share your music with anybody else on the Internet if you feel like doing so (and, of course, you have the legal rights to do so).

For a simplified version of this, also have a look at Opera Unite, which offers a built-in streaming music server for all Opera users.

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It’s no secret that Google has, on a very steady basis, dominated its competition and managed to return big profits.  And Carol Bartz may be in no position to question the company’s methods.  But Yahoo’s CEO nonetheless chose to point out a potential weakness today, and she may be on the right track.

Bartz told Jonathan Fildes, "Google is going to have a problem because Google is only known for search.  It is only half our business; it’s 99.9% of their business.  They’ve got to find other things to do."

Also, in terms of how Google will be judged as it attempts to find those other things, Bartz observed, "Google has to grow a company the size of Yahoo every year to be interesting."

The 99.9 percent figure is obviously an exaggeration.  Still, if you figure that Google has a market cap of around $169 billion and Yahoo’s market cap is closer to $24 billion, the second remark doesn’t seem too inaccurate.

So as Bartz indicated, that puts a lot of pressure on Google to succeed at something other than search.  Whether that something’s Android, Google Apps, the TV Ads program, or a different product doesn’t matter, but in this light, Yahoo’s rather scattered network of properties starts to look a little more attractive.

Dutch mobile augmented reality (AR) developers Layar announced today the launch of the world’s first mobile marketplace for AR content, bringing a new model for the monetization of mobile AR to the Android and iPhone platforms. Anyone looking to take advantage of the excitement behind AR experiences can now create AR content, syndicate it on Layar’s platform and benefit from its use by charging users a small one-time fee to access it.

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The Layar Reality Browser is accessible on the iPhone 3GS and eleven different Android devices, and has been downloaded over 1.6 million times. Users of the application can select from various content layers, such as nearby tweets, Wikipedia articles or even local businesses, and can locate them by holding their phone in their field of view. Using the phone’s GPS, accelerometer and compass data, the application can place markers on the screen to show where various objects exist based on their locations in the real world.

Previously, these various content layers have been entirely free to use, but now with the implementation of a content marketplace business can create branded AR experiences and sell them through Layar. The application uses PayPal to process the transactions, and right now the buying of layers is only available in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.

Some of the paid content layers launching with the platform include tour guides, home buying guides and augmented greeting creators. One layer, which sells for $1.95, displays recent criminal activity from SpotCrime.com in over 300 U.S. cities, and another provides an augmented park map for Disneyland and Disney World at a price of $3.45.

One of the more unique layers available on the platform allows music fans to discover the actual geographic locations where some of the most famous album covers were photographed. Perhaps this layer will help fans of the growing “sleeveface” photography meme take their creations to the next level.

Layar is taking a cut of each sale – 40% to be exact, which is actually higher than the 30% Apple takes from purchases made in the AppStore. The company sited “the costs for the platform, legal, administration, banking and others” in Wednesday’s press release as the reasons for the 60/40 deal with developers.

The introduction of a marketplace into the mobile AR space could be an enormous boon to the community as it will incentivize companies to create layers. The possible influx of content into the Layar store could work wonders for expanding the AR user base, but the company’s 40% cut off the top could also prevent some developers from using the platform.

Either way, Layar’s content store is a big leap forward for mobile AR developers who have been searching for better ways to monetize their products. Desktop AR is years ahead of mobile in terms of revenues, but as more computing moves more onto portable devices, stores like Layar’s could lead the way toward reversing that trend.

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According to a number of well-informed sources, Apple just acquired Siri, the personal mobile assistant that won the SXSW BizSpark Accelerator competition last month. Nobody at Siri is allowed to talk about this acquisition before Apple makes its own announcement, but our own sources confirm that this acquisition has indeed happened. These rumors are also substantiated by this recent FTC disclosure (PDF) by Apple and Siri.

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The first person to notice this acquisition was Robert Scoble, who found a reference to it in this FTC document (PDF). While we are still waiting for official confirmation, our sources tell us that the acquisition is basically a done deal at this point.

Why Apple?

For Apple, this acquisition makes perfect sense. Siri was spun out of SRI International, and its core technology is based on the ambitious DARPA-funded CALO artificial intelligence project. With VoiceOver, Apple already features some voice recognition in its projects. This acquisition, however, will allow the company to take it to a completely new level. You can, for example, ask Siri – by voice – to check for a dinner reservation through OpenTable at a local Italian restaurant nearby or check on local movie listings.

When we first looked at Siri in February, we described it as one of the “most ambitious mobile services we have seen in the last few years.” Siri’s ability to understand natural language will give Apple a major advantages over other players in this market.

It remains to be seen, however, if Apple will continue to develop Siri in its current form, or if the company is mostly interested in Siri’s intellectual property. When we first talked to Siri about its roadmap, the company’s CEO, Dag Kittlaus, told us that Siri also planned to offer an API and versions for other mobile operating systems in the future. After this acquisition, it is probably safe to say that we won’t see Siri for Android anytime soon.

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MP3tunes, which was launched by tech entrepreneur Michael Robertson in 2005, allows its users to store their own music in the cloud. Until today, however, the amount of free storage on MP3tunes was limited to a relatively meager 2GB. Now, however, the company has decided to up the ante and plans to give its users 10GB of free storage which can be accessed from virtually anywhere (browser, iPhone, Android, Wii, Playstation, Chumby etc.). MP3tunes already has a backlog of invites, but the company graciously agreed to give 150 of our readers priority access to its expanded music lockers. Read on for more details about how to claim yours.

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As Robertson told us earlier this week, the average MP3tunes locker currently hosts about 1,452 songs. 10GB should be enough to host about 2,000 songs. MP3tunes currently has just under 500,000 users and offers a free API to developers who want to integrate their services with MP3tunes.

Getting Started

To get started with MP3tunes (even if you don’t have the 10GB upgrade yet), simply sign up for an account and download the company’s desktop software, which is available for Mac and Windows. The desktop software will upload your music to the cloud (and watch for new music on your desktop as well). MP3tunes also offers a nifty browser plugin that allows you to send MP3 files from music blogs directly to your locker.

Once you have uploaded some music, MP3tunes biggest advantage quickly becomes clear: you can now listen to your music on virtually any device. We tested the Airband app for the iPhone, which actually feels a lot like the native iPod app. Unless you are offline, it’s easy to forget that all your music is actually streaming over the network. We tested Airband on a slow Edge connection, as well as over 3G and WiFi connections and didn’t run into any issues.

MP3tunes also offers a nifty web interface that is somewhat reminiscent of iTunes and MP3tune’s competitor Lala. Just like iTunes Genius mixes, MP3tunes also organizes automatic playlists for you.

Competition

MP3tunes closest competitor is currently Lala, which was bought by Apple in December 2009 (we actually called Lala the reincarnation of Robertson’s early my.mp3.com music locker when we first reviewed it). Currently, it is not clear what Apple’s plans for Lala are, but the service remains online and doesn’t have an upload limit for its music locker, which makes it a nice alternative if you just want to stream your music over the Web. Unlike MP3tunes, however, Lala doesn’t offer any mobile clients.

Invites

MP3tunes will give the first 150 ReadWriteWeb readers who use the invite code ‘RWW’ access to the expanded lockers today. You can sign up here. The next 150 people who use the code will be in the first batch of additional invites that MP3tunes will send out soon.

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Google has acquired widget developer Labpixies, which developed some of the first gadgets for Google’s personalized homepage iGoogle. It also develops apps for Android and iPhone.

"Over the years, we worked closely together on a variety of projects, including the launch of a number of global OpenSocial based gadgets. Recently, we decided that we could do more if we were part of the same team…" says Don Loeb of Google’s iGoogle team.

"We are looking forward to working with Labpixies to develop great web apps and leverage their knowledge and expertise to help developers and improve the ecosystem overall," he adds.

"We both felt the time was right to come together," says Labpixies in its announcement. "We started LabPixies to create a truly personalized online experience and develop fun widgets that people find useful every day. Working at Google will help us scale to more users as well as giving our team greater opportunities. Google and LabPixies teams have worked on many projects together including the launch of global OpenSocial based gadgets. The acquisition is an opportunity to learn from each other to bring more apps to users, help developers and improve the overall developer ecosystem."

The Labpixies team will be based out of Google’s Tel Aviv office, and will anchor the company’s iGoogle efforts across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

This is only the latest in a string of acquisitions from Google. Other recent acquisitions include Agnilux, Plink, Aardvark, and Episodic.

Earlier today, reports indicated that Google Maps Navigation (an Internet-connected GPS nav system) would become available on the iPhone, and while some people viewed this a nice peace offering, others thought Google was damaging its mobile business.  Only it turns out even more cynicism was appropriate, as no such move is guaranteed to occur.

Yes, sorry iPhone owners, but Google hasn’t decided to forfeit one of Android’s advantages.  The company’s instead asserting that a corporate representative was misquoted, and although it might allow Apple devices to use Google Maps Navigation at some point, no promises were made.

"We did not say we would bring it to iPhone, we said to date we’ve had it on Android and that in the future it may come to other platforms but did not confirm this will be coming to iPhone at all," a spokesperson told Daniel Ionescu.

So it looks like the introduction of Google Maps Navigation in the UK and Ireland that occurred on Wednesday will be about the only big news on this front this week.

We’ll definitely keep an ear out with regards to what those "other platforms" are, though, since that issue still hasn’t been clarified.

Despite the now infamous absence of Adboe’s Flash, video aggregator MeFeedia says that video on the iPad is a flourishing and growing trend according to the data the company has collected over the past three weeks.

The company offers a few stats and postulates that, among other reasons, the “lack of distractions mean people watch more video, for longer.”

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MeFeedia added HTML5 video support earlier this month – one of several alternatives available for video on the iPad – and says that its internal numbers show the iPad to clearly be a media consumption device, moreso than other users.

The company offers the following observations on its blog, noting that the “iPad was only launched a few weeks ago & this sample is for MeFeedia and MeFeedia Network only.”

• iPad is now the 5th most popular mobile device*
  *In terms of unique users, trailing only iPhone, iPod Touch, SymbianOS, and Android (in that order)
• iPad users consume 3X as many videos as web users (up from the 2.5X number that we first reported a few weeks ago)
• iPad users spend 4X as long watching videos as web users (up from 3X)
• iPad users consume 5X as many videos as iPhone users (up from 3X)

We think that the lack of multitasking as a reason for people to watch more video, longer, is likely a fair point. And, as we’ve previously argued, the iPad makes a great media consumption (rather than creation) device.

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More than 15 weeks after the Nexus One launched in the US, it looks like our friends in the UK may finally get an opportunity to buy the Android smartphone.  Late yesterday, a "coming soon" page set up by Vodafone briefly changed to describe the release window as April.

Credit goes to EuroDroid‘s Gary Cutlack for catching the change, and assuming the update wasn’t incorrect, it pretty much guarantees that Nexus One sales will begin sometime in the next week (since April of 2011 is an unlikely release date for a cutting-edge device).

Offering the Nexus One to consumers in the UK would be a big step for Google, too, since it hasn’t yet tested its online-only sales model anywhere outside the US.

It might be wise not to expect a whole lot to occur as a result of this development, though, considering how Nexus One sales have disappointed analysts so far.  Also, Google admitted Wednesday that it was more or less giving up on improving the Nexus One’s 3G performance, and that won’t help move the product.

We’ll see what happens.  At least it won’t take too long to see how the situation turns out.

Thanks to voice-controlled systems like Ford’s Sync, drivers don’t have to take their eyes off the road if they want to place a call or switch to the next track on their playlists. Today, Ford announced the next step in the company’s roadmap to connect mobile phones and cars. With Sync AppLink, Ford is introducing a new platform that allows developers to offer voice controls for their mobile apps on Sync-enabled cars. At first, AppLink will only work with Android and BlackBerry devices, but the company plans to offer support for Apple’s iPhone OS and other smartphone platforms next year.

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The first Sync-enabled applications, which will be available later this year, are Pandora, Stitcher, and Orangatame’s OpenBreak Twitter app. Even though Sync is based on the Microsoft Auto platform, Ford did not announce that it plans to support the upcoming Windows Phone operating system.

Drivers will be able to control AppLink-enabled mobile apps through voice commands that will be routed through the Sync system, as well as from buttons on the steering wheel. The first car to feature this new service will be the 2011 Ford Fiesta. Ford plans to offer AppLink on all Sync-equipped cars next year. Existing Sync users will be able to update their car’s software at a later point as well.

Same Apps – Just Controlled by SYNC

From the user’s perspective, installing a Sync-enabled app is no different from installing a regular app on their mobile phones. The only difference is that the car will notice when you start a Sync-enabled app and allow you to control the app’s function with your voice. This allows Ford to plug right into the existing developer ecosystems and distribution channels for all of these platforms and developers only have to make relatively minor updates to make their apps compatible with Sync.

It’s important to stress that these applications are running on the user’s phone and not on the car’s built-in Sync hardware. Sync only passes the voice commands on to the application but doesn’t interact with the app beyond this. In Ford’s parlance, these are “brought-in” apps, as opposed to “built-in” apps (like Ford’s Vehicle Health Report and 911 Assist) or “beamed-in” cloud-based apps that send traffic information and turn-by-turn directions to the car.

Sync AppLink for Developers

Ford is currently working with a small group of trusted partners and plans to open up the Sync API and software development kit to a broader selection of developers later this year. Ford also announced the launch of a Sync developer community that will give developers a pathway to partner with Ford on Sync-enabled applications.

Image credit: Flickr user Jim Trottier

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Even though the myth of the paperless office has been with us for as long as we have had personal computers and printers, most of us still have to print a document here and there. Yesterday, Google announced Google Cloud Print, its new plan for enabling printing from its cloud-focused Chrome OS, mobile apps and browser-based web services. Google essentially plans to outsource most of the software infrastructure for printing to the cloud and establish a standard protocol that every Internet-connected printer will soon be able to understand.

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Cloud-Enabled Printers

In Google’s ideal world, every new printer will soon support the Google Cloud Print protocol. Under Google’s model, these cloud-aware printers will be standalone devices with an Internet connection. Older printers, in Google’s vision, will be able to access these cloud-based printing services through a proxy on a desktop computer. This proxy will – at some point in the future – ship with the Google Chrome browser.

Once every printer is cloud-enabled, Google envisions that users will simply connect their printers to the Internet, register, and start printing from Chrome OS or any other service that supports this new and open protocol. You can find more details about how Google expects this system to work here.

Free and Open Standards

According to Google, the standards and protocols for enabling this service will be open and freely implementable. It’s important to note that this means that other vendors will be able to offer similar services that should work with all cloud-enabled printers. Thanks to this open protocol, the barrier of entry for supporting these services should also be very low.

One of the most interesting aspects of this service is that it will make it very easy for developers on mobile apps on devices like Android and the iPhone/iPad to enable printing from their apps. Right now, printing from mobile devices is almost impossible without resorting to specialized apps that connect to software on a local machine.

It’s worth noting that Hewlett-Packard announced a similar initiative in the past (CloudPrint), but this service never materialized.

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