So say you’re really into Jersey Shore . And you want to make a phone like the duck phone in the show. And you’re like “Why not make an app that quacks like a duck and makes your phone quack like a duck?” Heck, it’s a free country, as far as you can tell. This is what our grandfathers fought the Battle of the Bulge for, right? Well the cheese-eaters at Apple will say that your dumb quack app “contains minimal user functionality” and, as a result, deny your application to rock out on their App Store.

Say you’re planning that next camping trip and you need to know whether you’re going to be able to incessantly check your work email every 10 minutes — do you trust a carrier’s coverage map of unknown age, origin, and honesty, or real-world experience? If French firm Sensorly has its way, you’ll soon be able to answer the latter thanks to the deployment of an app for your phone that continuously measures cellular and WiFi signal strength at your location and silently reports it back to the company’s servers where it’s compiled into color-coded maps predicting your ability to connect. The concept’s very similar to that being undertaken by another up-and-comer that’s been getting a good deal of coverage lately, Root Wireless, but the key difference is that Root’s system is still in private beta — Sensorly’s mobile app is available right now to anyone who’d like to download it and participate (albeit only for Android; iPhone and WinMo are in the pipe). It seems unlikely that they’ve got critical mass to provide meaningful feedback in most areas at this point, but if marginal boost in battery drain is tolerable for you, it might be worth giving it a whirl. Sensorly aims to keep coverage maps honest originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 05 Feb 2010 05:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink    |  Sensorly  |  Email this  |  Comments

Big news for doubleTwist , the iTunes alternative that allows you to manage media for hundreds of devices, including Android phones, the Palm Pre, and BlackBerry. Tomorrow, the company will announce that it has forged a partnership with T-Mobile, which is now promoting it as the supported way to sync media to its line of Android phones. As part of the deal, T-Mobile will begin displaying doubleTwist banners in their retail stores and on T-Mobile.com . And perhaps most important, doubleTwist will come pre-installed on some Android devices, including the new Fender/Eric Clapton myTouch 3G handset. For those that haven’t used it before, doubleTwist is a media management program that’s both visually and functionally similar to iTunes in many respects, but with one big difference: it will work with nearly any device (iTunes only plays nice with iPods and iPhones). You can drag and drop songs to playlists, sync music, photos, and video to your devices, and share your media with friends using integrated Facebook and Flickr support. In effect, doubleTwist can serve as an “iTunes for Android”. The software is impressive in its own right, but the company has also gotten quite a bit of attention because it was co-founded by DVD Jon , who serves as CTO. This is a smart move by T-Mobile. One of the most jarring experiences when moving to an Android phone is figuring out how to sync media to the device. First, you have to manually mount the SD drive from the phone’s screen. Once that’s done, you may find yourself half-expecting iTunes to cheerily pop up to help transfer your media, but nothing happens — it’s up to you to drag and drop media from your computer to the appropriate folder on the phone. There are plenty of applications out there meant to help you do this, but it’s a poor experience for users who are trying the platform out for the first time. doubleTwist makes this much easier for new Android owners (it even shows you how to mount the SD card). It may not be quite as robust as iTunes, but it’s going to be good enough for most people. If this proves to be successful for T-Mobile, it wouldn’t surprise me if doubleTwist was adopted by other carriers as well. One downside to the T-Mobile version of doubleTwist is that it’s missing one of the app’s best features: integration with Amazon’s MP3 Store. The feature, which launched in October, allows users to purchase music from directly within doubleTwist, much as you would with iTunes. doubleTwist wouldn’t comment on why T-Mobile decided to omit the feature, but the company is planning to further expand the software, so hopefully it’s in the pipeline. In any case, you can still download the fully featured version at doubleTwist.com . Money is changing hands in the deal. Co-founder Monique Farantzos declined to comment on any specifics, but says that doubleTwist licensed its software to T-Mobile and that it’s a “significant source of revenue”. We should also note that while it was previously known that doubleTwist would come preloaded on the Fender myTouch phone, the full extent of the partnership hadn’t been announced before now. doubleTwist isn’t the only company looking to establish itself as a viable alternative to iTunes. Earlier this month Songbird , an open-source media player/browser hybrid landed a deal with Philips to come bundled with some of its MP3 player devices. CrunchBase Information doubleTwist T-Mobile Information provided by CrunchBase

Last night, 200 entrepeneurs and investors from around Silicon Valley convened for the Founder Showcase , a quarterly startup event for seed stage companies that’s put together by Adeo Ressi’s TheFunded . The winner of the event, as voted on by the attendees is a new startup called MightyMeeting . MightyMeeting allows you to use your smartphone to host a PowerPoint presentation while you’re on the go, and also lets you manage your library of Office and PDF files from your phone. The application seems best suited for people who often have to give presentations at a moment’s notice, but don’t want to be chained to their desks. Here’s how it works: first, you upload your presentation files to the service, which supports PDF and PowerPoint files. You can upload through a web interface, or via Email using a secret Email address. Once you’ve got your presentations in the cloud, you can easily share them directly from your phone using a native iPhone application or a web app (each meeting participant receives a link via Email or SMS message). But unlike a standard file sharing service, the link you send from MightyMeeting isn’t just a link to the file — it’s actually a link to a presentation that you can control remotely. Clicking the link brings the attendee to a browser-based viewing window on their PC or mobile phone. Then, when you flip to the next slide on your phone, the change will be made on the screens of everyone else in the presentation. You can use a simultaneous voice call to communicate, or an integrated chat function. You can conduct the presentation from either 3G or a Wi-Fi network. And if you want your presentation to go viral for some reason, you can share it with Twitter and Facebook directly from your app. MightyMeeting sounds like it could be a lifesaver for last minute meetings, but you’re going to have to remember to keep your archive of uploaded presentations current — it would be nice if there was some way to tie this into Google Docs and similar cloud based services. Also see Fuze Meeting , which offers support for mobile presentations. Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Bad news, Droid owners. Android OS version 2.0.1, which all up-to-date Droids are running, has a bug that makes it fairly easy to bypass the phone’s screen-lock security mechanism. The security feature, when working, requires users to input a pattern using onscreen dots before they can access most of the phone’s features (the iPhone offers a similar option). Exploiting the bug is fairly simple: while receiving an incoming call on a Droid that has its Lock screen activated, you can simply hit the dedicated ‘Back’ button to bypass the lock and jump to the homescreen. This, of course, gives access to the owner’s Email account, cookied web pages, phone directory, and everything else stored on the phone. You can take a tiny bit of solace in the fact that the thief would have to know your phone number or wait for someone to call your phone to exploit the bug, but that’s not particularly reassuring. The issue was first reported earlier today by The Assurer , which says that it is apparently only affecting Android version 2.0.1 on the Droid (which already represents a large chunk of Android’s userbase). We reached out to Google about the issue, and a Google spokesperson gave us the following statement: “We are aware of the issue and we’re working to deliver a fix to Motorola Droids shortly.” Android isn’t the first smartphone OS to fall prey to security bugs like this. In August 2008 a similar flaw with the iPhone allowed people to easily bypass the phone’s lock screen. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0