Yes, this is what I look like when I'm having fun.

ISITE Design created a fun iOS app, Photoblast (best on iPhone, but you can run it in pixel-doubled mode on your iPad too) that lets you add bling, facial hair, luchadors, and the like to your photos for extra impact. Forget Instagram, ours has a pimp cup!

The app itself is free, and comes with a few standard packs, but bonus packs are available (in-app purchase) for $0.99. (I’ll be first to say it: bonus packs are the new ringtones).

Related posts elsewhere:

• Instagram filters not cutting it anymore? Maybe it’s time to bring the bling with PhotoBlast (Silicon Florist)
• A Recipe for Innovation (ISITE’s Gene Ehrbar in ISITE Insight)
• Photoblast App (ISITE Design’s Petra Gregorova on building the app’s marking site with responsive design)

Try it out, and let me know what you think.

24% of US Adults are Active App Users (figure from PEW report linked above)

Interesting research from the PEW Research Center and Nielsen on The Rise of Apps Culture released earlier this month.

Key insights:

Of the 82% of adults today who are cell phone users, 43% have software applications or “apps” on their phones. When taken as a portion of the entire U.S. adult population, that equates to 35% who have cell phones with apps. . . . Of those who have apps on their phones, only about two-thirds of this group (68%) actually use that software. Overall, that means that 24% of U.S. adults are active apps users.

So nearly 1 in 4 U.S. adults report that they are actively using apps, which the report authors seem to think is low, noting that:

Broadly, results indicate that while apps are popular among a young, tech-hungry segment of the adult cell phone using population, a notable number of adult cell phone users are not part of apps culture. Many adults who have apps on their phones, particularly older adults, do not use them, and one in ten adults with a cell phone (11%) are not even sure if their phone is equipped with apps. Moreover, apps use ranks fairly low when compared with the use of other cell phone functions such as taking pictures and texting.

I guess this is a classic glass-half-full versus glass-half-empty scenario. Is it discouraging that only 1 in 4 US adults participates in “apps culture,” or is it encouraging that 82% of US adults are cell phone users, and nearly 1 in 4 are actively using applications on those phones?

Further, the data shows that age is the strongest predictor of app usage:

While 79% of 18-29 year-olds who have apps on their phones say they use them, that figure drops to 67% among 30-49 year-olds and just 50% among adults age 50 and older.

There’s lots more useful stuff in the report, which is available freely: download it and check it out.

Survey from ChangeWave Research: click through for details

(via MediaPost)

I’ve been thinking that when my current contract is up this holiday season I would move to an Android-based phone. I’ve loved some things about my iPhone – it has essentially sold me on the utility of touch-based interfaces – but other things about it drive me batty, and the constant upgrade-jailbreak-restore dance just isn’t worth the trouble.

Apparently I’m not alone. According to this survey from Change Wave:

Among consumers planning to buy a smartphone in the next 90 days, 37% say they prefer to have the Android OS on their new phone — a 7-pt jump since our previous survey and a new all-time high for the Google operating system.

Add this to the data from earlier this week that developers are betting on Android as an OS:

What’s different is that percentage of developers who consider Android’s long-term prospects to be brighter than those of iOS has increased by about 10% in the past three months. In June 2010, 54% of developers said Android had the best long-term outlook, compared to 40.4% who believed iOS would do better over time. In September, 2010, 58.6% of developers saw a better future in Android, compared to 34.9% who rated iOS’s potential superior.

Of course folks have been predicting “the death of Apple” as long as the company’s been around – I’m sure they’ll do just fine without me. But it does feel like the ground is quietly shifting a bit.

Photo by Chris Harrison - http://www.flickr.com/photos/cdharrison/4992493250/

Got an email in late August that Square, the iPhone mobile card reader / payment acceptance application founded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, had begun shipping readers again.

Mine came this week – 2 of them actually. I’m pretty certain I only ordered one, so I’m not sure where the other one came from – both had the same address and name on them.

Square’s going to have a huge impact on independent vendors: artists who sell at street fairs, bands selling merchandize at shows, stalls at farmer’s markets, etc. The mobile application is free, the reader is free, and Square takes only 2.75% plus $0.15 per transaction when the card is present and swiped. I can even see this approach getting used in more traditional settings (think high end retail stores) in order to free the staff from the old point of sale terminal. (Not sure if Square will offer better percent-of-transaction terms to enterprises who do a certain volume once the rush of free accounts settles down, but I would if I were them).

Tested it out by paying myself $5. The app is fantastic (they were used to sell shirts at Drupalcon San Francisco so I’d already experienced the end user portion): easy to set up, easy to use, clear, and quick.

Here’s the main screen when you launch the app:

Enter the amount to paid, and an optional note- including a photo if you like

Once you’ve entered the amount and associated note, you can swipe the paying party’s credit card through the reader, and the Square app checks for authorization, and allows the user to sign:

Sign using your finger (No, this is not my real signature).

Once the person has signed, Square gets authorization, and allows the user to send herself a receipt. Here are the receipts for charging party (right) and paying party (left):

Note that the link goes to a page on square where the user can see full info about who they paid – including a map of where the transaction happened. The charging party can log in to Square and review all the transactions.

Square takes 2.75% of the transaction plus 15 cents, if the card was present and swiped, or 3.5% plus 15 cents if the card number was typed in. (Yes, you can set up an account and use Square even without the reader by typing in credit card numbers manually – you can also use it in this mode to accept cash, in which case Square keeps track of the transaction but doesn’t charge anything).

Generally this means being dropped off and picked up at the commuter rail station, but every once in a while I drive and park there.

Today was one of those days, and my first chance to try out the new “pay for parking from your mobile phone” approach.

First, I signed up for an account at ParkMobile, setting up a username & password, license plate information, and a credit card.

Then I headed off to Swampscott station with the iPhone app downloading to my phone as I drove. Once I got to the station, all I had to do was note the “zone number” for the station (1212), log in to my account on the phone, and click the “start parking” button.

ParkMobile does charge a $0.35 service fee, which for someone who parks as infrequently as I do is well worth it (for not having to worry about finding four singles or appropriate change and getting it in the paybox while running for the train).

Happy to see commuter rail moving into the 21st century!

How to Be Useful (Photo by Robert Banh, cc-by license)

I used to be fond of saying that the best advice for content-centric businesses on the web was a simple commandment:

Above all, be interesting – everything else will follow from that

Being interesting is still necessary, of course – if you’re trying to create a content-centric business and your content isn’t interesting, you’re in big trouble.

But is being interesting sufficient? In an attention economy, where interesting content is ubiquitous, and what’s truly rare is the users’ attention? In an era where every company is a media company?

In the era of the Assembled Web, where consumers expect to find content, community, and commerce pervasively and persistently throughout their online experience, is it enough to just be interesting?

I think we’ve got to set our sights higher than just being interesting, and aim to be useful. The new commandment might be something more like:

Above all, be useful. Provide value – what your audiences understand as utility on their terms – and everything else will follow from that.

This applies to companies which are only now realizing they are media companies as well as formerly-only-media-companies who are now realizing they need to be more. Put differently, if every company is a media company, that those businesses which were already media companies also need to think about what other utility they provide above and beyond the experience of interesting content.

This Shop is Useful (Photo by Robyn Gallagher, cc-by license)

Two quick examples, from the world of iPhone applications. (The same tenet – above all, be useful – would apply equally well to Facebook applications, iGoogle widgets, and plain old web applications).

Whole Foods’ recipes application not only uses the phone’s location to do traditional store locating, it also allows you to search recipes based on what ingredients you’ve got at hand.

Whole Foods' recipes application provides a store locator, but also lets you locate recipes matching what you have on hand

Sit or Squat (sponsored by Charmin) also takes advantage of location to help you locate the nearest public restroom, but adds community in the form of user ratings and comments. If you’ve ever been traveling in another city and in search of a clean bathroom (maybe even one with a changing table) you can imagine how useful such an app can be.

Charmin's sponsorship of Sit-or-Squat provides a branded presence for them but also adds value for the user

Both applications also, of course, provide a branded presence on the users phone to their sponsoring companies – but that’s secondary to the primary utility they provide.

As you evaluate web strategies and offerings, what role does utility play? What difference would it make for content-centric businesses to shift focus from “create compelling content” to “be useful”?

Useful Arts (Photo by dipfan, cc-by license)

The goal of the presentation- a sanitized (client references removed) version of one given to a client this week – was to talk about:

• Social Media (and specifically how to get started with it)
• Facebook (and other social network applications)
• The iPhone (and other mobile platforms)

It certainly loses a bit in not having the voice over – sorry I couldn’t record it but much of the discussion was really client specific and less useful outside their context – if I get time maybe I’ll do a walk through and record a voiceover.

I tried to place the requested agenda items in the context of what we’ve been calling “The Assembled Web” for the past couple of years, connecting the specific social computing initiatives in a broader framework, one which involves:

1. The convergence of content, commerce, and community – as they grow out of the previous web eras
2. The notion of the Digital Footprint – taking your brand presence (across all three Cs) to where users are, and engaging them throughout the Internet

I hope you find it useful – please do comment here or on SlideShare.

• comment moderation – including batch edit
• page editing – creation of new pages as well as changes to existing pages
• Landscape mode – the wider keyboard is much easier for fat-thumbed typists like me
• Easier link creation – separate entry of link and title so you don’t have to do the whole <a href="url" > title </a> nonsense while writing

The app already does basic post creation with photos (from library or upload from phone), local draft mode, and scheduled publish.

Here’s a video preview of 1.2:

Best of all, the app itself is open source – and they’re looking for help testing. So go get the SDK, which lets you run the simulator, and check it out.