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How Crowdbeacon is Mobilizing the iPhone User Community
Earlier, I pointed out an emerging recent trend in apps: community-assisted recommendations. Recently, I got a chance to talk with the CEO behind one of these apps. Crowdbeacon is a free iPhone application currently available through the App Store that provides location-based recommendations and answers to questions sourced by the app’s user community.

Crowdbeacon works by allowing users to ask questions about specific services, businesses and locations in their area, and then seeking answers to those questions from other users and businesses using Crowdbeacon, and from other services. It also lets you answer questions in your vicinity, and includes a gamification element to promote user interest through leaderboards.

In my previous article, I mentioned Locamind, a web-app currently in beta which offers similar functionality. Aside from being iPhone-only for the moment, Crowdbeacon also offers some interesting additional differentiating features, like the ability to narrow your query results by category, and tie-ins with other services like Foursquare and Yelp to help augment the number of potential sources of information a user can access. Right now, the UI could use a little more polish, but in major metropolitan areas, it does what it claims to, providing answers to questions that are thoughtful and timely from others using the app via push notifications.

Here’s what Crowdbeacon CEO Rob Boyle had to say about his app, their plans for future releases, the iOS platform, and the future of community-assisted apps in general:

TheAppleBlog: What do you see in the future for community-assisted apps?

Rob Boyle: We might be biased, but our perspective is that the future for community-assisted apps is bright. As smart phone adoption increases and the consumer-web evolves to become more custom and data-driven, being able to plug into existing communities for advice and perspective provides a practical benefit that just flat-out wasn’t possible 24 months ago. And we’re excited about the potential that this type of interaction provides as both a business and as people who benefit on a daily basis from being able to plug into these communities.

TAB: What does Crowdbeacon ultimately hope to accomplish, for its users and as a business?

RB: We started Crowdbeacon with one (simple) goal in mind: to create a location-based app that wasn’t a game or a check-in service (which Foursquare so successful commoditized), but one that actually helped regular people and local businesses alike. And ultimately if our platform can accomplish this feat — which only user adoption and validation will show — we will be thrilled. As a business, we would be very happy creating a brand with long-term equity, that helps establish location-based communication as an important part of commerce and daily life. And no one is ever against a successful exit, so there’s that too.

TAB: Why iPhone for launch? Any plans to expand to other platforms?

RB: As any bootstrapped startup, we had to make the hard choice of which platform to start building with since we didn’t have a million dollars and institutional funding… and we ultimately chose the iPhone for a bunch of reasons. Most important though was the fact that when we started development we felt that the the iPhone SDK was the most mature (this was just after the iOS4 was released) OS on the market… and our CTO Luca Columbu was excited about the possibility of building an iPhone app. That said, we are working this very moment on our Android app, which we hope we can release in the next 3-4 weeks, which will be followed by a Blackberry app after that. And we’re really excited about these platforms as well.

TAB: Does iOS offer advantages for community-assisted apps that others don’t?

RB: When we started development of Crowdbeacon, the iOS may have had an advantage but in reality I think that now all of the major players have strengths and weaknesses when it comes to community-assisted app develoment. For us personally, we like the device standardization that the iOS brings with it, but since we haven’t finished building Crowdbeacon for Android I can’t truly compare so I probably shouldn’t try — lest I inflame Android developers everywhere.

TAB: How are you currently funded and what are your plans for future funding?

RB: We are proud to say that we are a fully-bootstrapped startup that was incubated, designed and built entirely by myself and the team at Squeaky Wheel Media. That said, we have been meeting with VCs on both coasts for the past 6 months to determine who we like (and who likes us) so that when the time came for us to raise our Series A — which will be soon — we were prepared. And we’ve got some great firms who are interested so that’s very exciting from our perspective.

Right now, Crowdbeacon is in a good place on the cusp of an emerging trend, but I expect the field to get a lot more crowded in the near future. A lot of people already use Twitter to solicit these kinds of recommendations, but the service isn’t geared toward providing them specifically. Will we see ever a major player with a focused, hyper-local mobile Q&A service? Probably, since it seems a natural extension of existing ones like Google Places, but for now the startups are free to lead the way.

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How to Backup Your DVD Movies for Mac, Apple TV, iOS and iPod
Creating an image file of a data disc is straightforward. Preserving music CDs on a Mac is only challenging if you wanted to get it just right. While somewhat forbidden, it’s still possible to tame Blu-ray on a Mac as well. That just leaves your DVD-based movie collection to conquer.

Surprisingly, I’ve found DVDs the most challenging of all disc formats to preserve and back up. The variety of software available for the task is overwhelming, and the success rate of said solutions is far from 100 percent. Sometimes you have to try different software, or tweak certain in order to get the desired outcome. Here’s a guide to using some of the best current Mac software available for DVD archiving.

Keeping Your Discs Clean

For whatever reason, DVDs tend to be the most fragile of the optical disc formats that I’ve had to deal with. Beyond keeping a soft cloth nearby to wipe down each disc before decrypting and decoding, I’ve found that more serious means of cleaning disc are often times necessary. Generally speaking, Aleratec’s DVD/CD Disc Repair Kit for about $40 on Amazon gets the job done. You’d be amazed at how many failed rips can be resolved just by cleaning your disc.

Decrypt and Copy to Hard Drive

Once you have a clean disc, the next step is to get its contents onto your hard drive. On the Mac, there are only a few good options to consider for doing this. Longtime favorite MacTheRipper has all but disappeared, as has the open source Fairmount. That leaves Pavtube and The Little App Factory’s RipIt. Since I already covered Pavtube when working with Blu-ray on the Mac, this time I’ll focus using RipIt.
1. Download, install and launch RipIt.
2. In the Preferences (Ripit > Preferences in the Menu Bar), under General, set the destination for the extracted files.
3. Also in General Preferences, make sure that “Use .dvdmedia Extension” is not selected. This will make sure your movies are saved as a standard VIDEO_TS folder, which can be read by many applications.
4. Insert a DVD and click Rip.
It’s that easy. And once you set the location where you want to store the decrypted movie files to, you don’t have to change your preferences unless you want to select a new destination. Just insert the DVD and click Rip.

Encode for Apple TV

While both Pavtube and RipIt offer the ability to compress the DVD’s content into various other formats directly while ripping, I prefer to use Handbreak on the Mac and its built-in preset list of supported device targets. Encoding from a DVD that has been copied to the hard drive is also much faster then encoding from the original disc. To encode your video files with Handbreak, all you need to do is:
1. Download, install and launch Handbreak.
2. Click on the Source icon in Handbreak’s toolbar and navigate to the location where you ripped your DVD’s VIDEO_TS folder to using RipIt (which you set in step 2, above).
3. In the drop-down menu labeled Title, select the title you wish to encode. Handbreak usually does a pretty good job at automatically selecting the actual movie title, as it is typically the longest running video on the DVD.
4. Toggle the presets and select Apple TV as the destination device.
5. Select a destination and file name.
6. Click on the green Start button.
Encode for Everything Else

Unfortunately there is not one best encoding format for all devices. If you encode to the lowest common denominator (likely an older iPod), you’ll notice serious quality problems on larger HDTVs. You can certainly follow the exact same steps above in Handbreak and select different destination devices each time, but there are two other more convenient options available to you:

iTunes Conversion: In Advanced menu in iTunes, you will notice two options: ”Create iPod or iPhone Version,” and “Create iPad or Apple TV Version.” This works great for turning files in your library that you’ve created using Handbreak for Apple TV into ones that work with your iPhone or iPod. This process tends to take a very long time to complete.

iSquint Conversion: Like MacTheRipper, iSquint has fallen from grace and is no longer supported. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t still work. Once you’ve created a version of the movie file created via Handbreak, all you need to do is drag and drop your media files onto iSquint’s single screen. iSquint is great when creating versions of movie files for older video iPods and iPod Classics.

Unfortunately, from time to time you’ll encounter a DVD that just wont rip using either iRip or Pavtube. In these cases, if you have access to a Windows machine (virtual, Boot Camp, or physical) either AnyDVD or DVDFab should help you resolve the problem. Converting your DVD movies to Apple device-friendly formats may not be easy, but once it’s done, you can sit back and enjoy your film collection however you choose, which feels pretty good.

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Microsoft/Nokia Partnership Not Enough to Challenge Apple
Early this morning, Microsoft and Nokia announced a partnership that will see Windows Phone 7 become the primary platform for Nokia’s high-end smartphones. It’s a bold move that will help solve Windows Phone 7′s small market share problem in one fell swoop if it goes as planned. But is it enough to seriously challenge Apple, arguably the two companies’ most entrenched competition?

In a word, no. Bobbie Johnson argued in his piece that just combining two companies with flawed strategies does not necessarily mean that each will shore up the other’s weaknesses. That’s true, and it’s the weaknesses of both that left the path open for Apple to gain and keep its significant advantage in the high-end smartphone market. Here are the core advantages Apple’s mobile products have that Nokia and Microsoft playing nice simply won’t solve.

No Devs, No Dice

Windows Phone 7 has had some success attracting developers in the short-term, but there are indications this might have had more to do with grand gestures and publicity stunts, and less to do with the long-term viability of the OS’ app platform. In the very early days, prior to launch, Microsoft was said to be offering cash to potential devs to get them on board. And even as recently as November of last year, some were claiming Microsoft is offering comped devices to make WP7 development more appealing.

Despite a promising start, it’s not all roses for WP7 development. One successful (top 50) developer for the platform recently revealed his sales figures, and they were dismal. The revenue from the sale of his app was barely enough to keep the lights on, let alone build a business on.

Of course, Nokia, as the biggest smartphone maker in the world, should have a healthy developer pool to draw from. It should, but it doesn’t. Even before the move today, developers had been frustrated with Nokia’s development platform efforts. Now that the company is basically telling devs they should throw out what they’ve learned and switch to a completely different set of tools (since Nokia’s cross-platform Qt development framework isn’t part of its WP7 strategy), I wouldn’t be surprised if most just throw up their hands and move to a stable model with a proven ability to generate revenue, like iOS.

App Gap

The app gap is oft-cited as a prime reason behind Apple’s success, but it bears repeating. iOS currently has almost 350,000 active apps available to consumers through the App Store. Windows Phone 7 has about 8,000 apps. Even with a growth rate of 125 apps each day, Apple’s advantage at this point may be insurmountable. Each Apple iOS device averages more than 60 downloaded apps, and the App Store remains the top destination by a huge margin in terms of time spent browsing app marketplaces by consumers.

In terms of making users feel like they have a financial stake in a mobile platform, little else compares to apps. Changing platforms means buying all new apps, so if a platform is good at selling software, it’s more likely to result in subscriber lock-in or loyalty. Apple has the added advantage of offering multiple, non-phone platforms that also use and encourage the sale of apps (iPod touch and iPad), which adds to the perceived value of software purchases for consumers. Try as it might, Windows can’t gain purchase in the personal media player market, and WP7 doesn’t seem poised to make the jump to tablets anytime soon.

The Holistic Approach

Under the new arrangement between the two companies, Nokia builds hardware, and Microsoft builds software. Apple builds both. The advantage of having both hardware and software teams constantly working together to deliver the best possible consumer experience as a total product cannot be overemphasized. Any partnership between two companies, no matter how closely it may resemble an actual merger, isn’t one. Corporate cultures, offices and ultimate goals remain distinct. In this case, that’s especially true, since Microsoft announced this was a non-exclusive deal, and it would still be working with other hardware partners (though their history of doing so isn’t exactly encouraging).

Apple’s ability to pair the hardware and software development sides of making a smartphone not only allow it to win the UX game, but also advantageously affects cost and the pace of breakthroughs and advances, and downplays the importance of internal specifications. It’s why an iPhone that’s almost a year old can still compete with just-released hardware from competitors in terms of real-world performance, and it’s a big part of why Apple enjoys the high margins that it does on the sale of each piece of hardware it makes.

Because Nokia and Microsoft aren’t starting from scratch, it’s most likely that the partnership will bear all the earmarks of success, at least from the outset. If they do it right, we’ll see the simultaneous release of a bunch of shiny new handsets sporting WP7, and these will be decently well-received by Nokia’s existing customer base. But without significant changes from either camp in the way they think about how to make phones and software, Apple doesn’t have to worry about being knocked off its rock just yet.

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Cheaper, Smaller, Dual-Mode iPhones on the Way?
Apple is working on a smaller, cheaper iPhone, according to a report by Bloomberg. Also in development is an iPhone model that would be easier to use on wireless networks from different carriers, according to unidentified sources, like the one we speculated might exist on Monday.

Bloomberg’s sources are light on details, but the smaller, cheaper iPhone is said to be about 30 percent smaller than the iPhone 4, and is on track for a mid-2011 release, though that timeline could be “delayed or scrapped.” The source apparently got eyes on the new device sometime last year, which uses technology found in the current iPhone to keep costs down. If and when such a smaller iPhone model hits the market, those components will be older and cheaper than those used in the construction of Apple’s iPhone 4 successor. Using older components will help Apple offer the device for the low price of around $200 off-contract, which could pave the way for carriers to offer the alternate iPhone for free with contract subsidies.

Separate unnamed individuals talking to Bloomberg revealed that Apple is also working on a dual-mode iPhone that would be able to work with both GSM (like that used by AT&T) and CDMA (like the one used by Verizon) networks. As we suggested, network cross-compatibility would be made even easier thanks to the presence of a universal, built-in SIM, and updated iPhone software that would allow customers to switch networks and configure devices to work on those networks themselves, without the need for Apple or carrier staff assistance. Whether this tech would make it into the small, cheap iPhone models isn’t known.

While this isn’t the first time rumors of a “mini” or smaller iPhone have circulated, it is the first time it’s happened since the rise of Google’s Android mobile operating system, which is challenging Apple’s footing in the smartphone market. If Apple can do a cheap phone well, it’ll do a lot to help counter Android’s recent gains, some of which are coming from low-priced handsets as inexpensive as $149 without subsidy.

The Bloomberg report also has a lot of the hallmarks of an intentional leak. It’s written by two authors, doesn’t reveal anything too specific, and even builds in easy deniability (suggesting that the release could be delayed or cancelled entirely). I’d argue that it’s almost a certainty Apple’s working on such a device, and that this is an intentional float to gauge public interest. If that’s indeed the case, color me interested.

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So You Got a Verizon iPhone. Now What?
Maybe you just wandered into a retail store, since lines apparently either remained small, never formed or quickly disbursed, or maybe you pre-ordered your Verizon iPhone and it arrived today. However you got it, you’re now the proud owner of an iPhone 4. What now?

Initial Setup

Presumably, you’ve already activated your iPhone in-store or at home by plugging it into a computer and opening iTunes. Once that’s taken care of, you can get started making the iPhone your own. The following is pretty basic information, so feel fee to skip ahead if you’ve already performed your first sync with your new iPhone.

When you first plug your iPhone into your computer using the USB cable that came with it, you’ll be asked to register the device. Doing this will make it easier to get support for your device should you need it down the road. Go ahead and follow the on-screen prompts in iTunes to register your device.

iTunes should ask you to specify a name for your iPhone, and let you choose what to sync from your computer to the device. You can choose to sync music, videos, photos, contacts and calendar information from your computer. If you’re not sure you want to sync something, make sure the box is unchecked before proceeding, since you can always opt back in after the fact.

Note that if you’ve previously synced another iOS device with your computer, iTunes may ask you if you want to use backups of that device to set up the new one. This is fine if your device has the same storage capacity and you want all other settings to remain the same, but if it’s a backup of your spouse or partner’s phone, or you’re not absolutely sure you want the same settings on your new iPhone, choose to set yours up as an entirely new device.

Once your iPhone is set up, you can specify what content you want to sync from your computer to your device. Navigate through the tabs on your iPhone’s screen in iTunes to choose which apps, photos, books, music and videos you want on your phone. If you need more information about basic setup, consult Apple’s official support resources on the topic.

Syncing Email, Contacts and Calendars Over-the-Air

You can do this through iTunes, as described above, but there are also untethered solutions that will work wirelessly over the air. Basically, you can either sync using Apple’s MobileMe, which requires an annual $99 subscription, or you can use Google, which is free.

The MobileMe method is probably the easiest, but it’s also costly. Decide whether or not you need extras like an online gallery, cloud disk storage, and personal website hosting before choosing this option. If you do go the MobileMe route, follow these directions to get email, contact, calendar and notes syncing set up between your iPhone, other iOS devices and your computer(s).

With Google, things are a little trickier. Luckily, Google provides great step-by-step instructions for getting email, contact and calendar syncing between your Gmail account and your iPhone running smoothly. This will also work if you’re using Google Apps with a third-party domain, so long as your Google Apps administrator will have to have enabled Google Sync.

I’ve seen some wondering how to copy over contacts from BlackBerry devices. Unfortunately, this isn’t a straightforward process. There’s a method involving Outlook as a middleman (which should now work for Mac users, too, if you have Microsoft Office 2011), and one from TiPB (save yourself some scrolling and search the page for “blackberry”) that involves using a temporary hosted Exchange account to move over your data. The good news is, once you switch from BlackBerry, you’re not likely to want to switch back.

Apps, Apps, Apps

Much of the fun of owning an iPhone comes from being able to use apps. To start with, there are a few essentials that I think everyone will use and enjoy:
- Facebook. Free and provides access to Facebook. Recent additions brought location check-in features, complete with special deals.
- Twitter. Like the above, it’s free and provides iOS-optimized access to one of the most popular social networking tools around.
- Reeder. A great RSS reading application that links to your Google Reader account. This is almost exclusively how I read blogs these days.
- Skype. Free, and now with video-calling capabilities between other iOS devices, computers, and even TVs. FaceTime is built-in and does the same thing, but Skype will allow you to talk with a wider potential group of people.
- Flashlight. I use this anytime I need to get up during the night to use the bathroom. It turns on your iPhone 4′s camera flash, making it usable as a flashlight.
There are no shortage of suggestions for great iPhone apps, but these are some that I think almost every user will get plenty of use out of. For more, check out some of our app and game roundups and reviews. And if you’re already well-versed in the ways of iPhone, feel free to share your own suggestions for new Verizon iPhone owners in the comments.

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