Originally developed for the Department of Defense, acoustic shockwave bearing estimation was designed to help soldiers locate snipers. The technology takes advantage of the properties associated with gunfire – the initial flash of the muzzle blast and the shockwaves that follow. The supersonic speeds and whizzes of bullets can be tracked with microphones and a really precise clock hooked up to a microprocessor. These sensor nodes communicate with smartphones via Bluetooth; data from a few differently placed sensor nodes are required to triangulate the location of the gunshots.

The sniper location system was built into combat helmets, but the research team has now updated it for smartphones with funding from DARPA. Some nodes are still required, so civilian use may not be practical. But the researchers think security details or police squad cars could make use of the smartphone version.

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Research into optimal keyboard layouts is as old as QWERTY itself, a legacy inherited from 19th century typewriters. Thumb typing with QWERTY is notoriously inefficient on touchscreen tablets and phones. Starting from the basics — how a touchscreen device is held in one’s hands — an international team of researchers drew on user behavioral data and computational models to develop the new layout. The lead investigator, Antti Oulasvirta of the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, will officially unveil this research at CHI2013 on May 1.

Theoretically, the model predicts that users should be able to reach 49 words per minute with KALQ, and because the study’s subjects were non-native English speakers, typing speed could conceivably be even better in natives. KALQ was designed so the most commonly used letters are clustered, which means the travel distances are short and both hands work roughly equally and alternately. Most of the vowels are positioned near the space bar and are handled by the right thumb, while the left thumb takes care of most of the consonants and most of the first letters of words. For lefties, the orientation can be reversed, and the key size can even be scaled for different hand sizes.

For KALQ to work, tablets should ideally be gripped horizontally, with the corners cradled in the valley at the base of the thumbs. On a 7-inch tablet (the researchers used the Samsung Galaxy Tab), test subjects had the fastest movements times and best thumb mobility with this configuration, though the grip gave them access to less tablet surface area overall.

Based on this tablet gripping strategy, the researchers used computational techniques to determine the optimal key assignments. Their model of thumb movements was trained on millions of English-language tweets that originated from mobile devices. The end result, KALQ, minimizes movement times, and worked even better when users were trained to move their thumbs simultaneously and anticipate moves by hovering the thumb over the next letter.

Novice tablet users reached typing speeds that eclipsed those achievable with QWERTY after about 10 hours of training, and continued to improve, reaching 37 words per minute. This is the fastest thumb typing speed ever reported, according to Oulasvirta and colleagues, and is 19 percent faster than typing speeds found in previous studies. The end result represents a 34 percent improvement over baseline QWERTY performance in this study’s subjects.

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As my colleague Eliza Kern noted in her post on the new features, Twitter has given third-party apps the ability to add “deep links” to content inside a tweet, so that — for example — if a user includes a link to a photo from Path or Flickr and someone reading that tweet has the Path app or the Flickr app installed on their device, clicking the link launches that app and takes them directly to the content (a link to a download page for the app can also be included).

Twitter can help with app discovery

The benefits of these new features are clear, as Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures (one of Twitter’s backers) and others have noted. For services like Path, one of the hardest problems is discovery — in other words, letting people know it exists, and also making it easy for users to find interesting content within the app. Twitter’s new Card features provide a potential solution for both of those problems, and since the social network has an active-user base of close to 250 million, it could give some services a substantial boost.

Really excited to integrate the new @twitter cards into @circa. This will be a game changer for app distribution.

—
Matt Galligan (@mg) April 03, 2013

The downside of this approach should also be obvious, however, especially if you notice that among Twitter’s partners for these new features there are names like Path and Flickr, but no Instagram. Why isn’t the largest photo-sharing service included? Because it is owned by Facebook, and Twitter cut off the app’s access to a key feature last year — namely, the ability for users to find Twitter friends who also use the service — and Instagram subsequently removed Card support. The company also cut off Tumblr’s access to the same feature, even though Tumblr was an early partner on the Cards rollout.

This is the fundamental difference between Twitter’s current approach to being a platform and its previous approach. In the early days of the service, up until mid-2011, Twitter seemed happy to be at the center of a more or less open ecosystem — one which allowed virtually anyone to make use of the company’s APIs to display or make use of tweets. Many services and apps (including Instagram) grew by piggy-backing on the network in this way.

Then came what one Twitter investor has called a “holy s*** moment”: Bill Gross — founder of what was then called Uber Media — started buying up Twitter clients (including an attempt to buy Tweetdeck, which Twitter ultimately acquired) and appeared to be preparing to launch his own network, one that would make use of tweets combined with a third-party advertising model.

Twitter’s control is a double-edged sword

These moves by Gross and others posed a clear threat to Twitter’s ability to monetize its growing user base — something that was becoming more and more crucial given the multibillion-dollar market value the company had developed after several rounds of financing. So the company started tightening the screws around its network: restricting access to the API, changing what were display “guidelines” into “requirements,” and generally exerting much more control over who got access to the company’s data.

Such decisions caused a firestorm of controversy in the third-party developer community, with some complaining that Twitter had “killed” their businesses. Now, the company is clearly trying to repair some of that damaged goodwill by offering third-party apps and services preferential access to the network, and features like Card deep links — replacing the open ecosystem approach with one that is more a velvet rope: only official partners allowed.

This approach makes sense for Twitter, since it needs to generate revenue from its network, and presumably intends (or theoretically could) collect fees from partners for the additional features they are getting with Twitter Cards, which can also include music links and other content. And as noted above, it makes sense for apps and services like Path to cut a deal in order to get more reach — but just like building integration into Facebook or Apple or any other controlled ecosystem, developers should be aware this is a double-edged sword.

In other words, such an arrangement will likely look like a win-win so long as Twitter thinks you are beneficial to its network. The minute it sees you as competition, it will suddenly become lose-lose — and whatever you have invested in that ecosystem will vanish.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Ljupo Smokovski and Flickr user Rosauro Ochoa

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On Wednesday, the FT rolled out a new version of its iPad offering that lets readers toggle between a live version of the website and a static view that resembles the morning newspaper. The new “app” also allows readers to clip articles to read later and features a personalized reading history and financial portfolio.

“It’s a much superior second-generation web app based on the latest HMTL5 implementation out there,” said FT.com’s Managing Director, Rob Grimshaw, in a phone interview. He added that it’s only on the iPad for now, but will soon be available on other devices like the iPhone, the Chromebook and Android devices.

While the new version of the web app is nice enough aesthetically (you can see screenshots at right), its real significance remains on a symbolic level. In deciding to bolt Apple altogether last year, the FT took up a vanguard position in the web vs. app debate – standing for the position that improvements in HTML5 means native apps have become unnecessary. Other premium publishers, such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, have so far resisted the FT’s “all-in on web” approach and continue to design apps specifically for Apple and Android devices, and sell them through app stores. (We’ll be digging into the web vs. app debate with three influential publishers at paidContent Live later this month.)

The FT’s decision to quit the app stores meant it would no longer have to fork out a 30% commission to the likes of Apple, but also raised a risk that readers would fail to find the publisher on smartphones and tablets. Grimshaw says this”discoverability” concern is not an issue for major brands, and that the FT’s tablet traffic has actually risen 70% since leaving iTunes.

“If you are a big brand, why not use that? We don’t need Apple or anyone else to say what the FT is,” said Grimshaw.

He did acknowledge that collecting payments from mobile devices are still a challenge for publishers; unlike iTunes, which already has a user’s credit card on file, the web doesn’t offer a quick and easy way for people to pay. Grimshaw added, though, that a solution is coming soon.

“Players like Amazon are opening their payment plan more,” he said. “There’s Amazon, PayPal and one or two others. It’s problem that’s about to get solved.”

For now, Grimshaw says that 15-20 percent of new digital subscriptions are coming via a mobile device and that he expects that number to rise. Like its sister publication, The Economist, the FT has unbundled digital access from its print subscriptions and is offering a variety of price points: a premium online subscription is $8.49 a week while a standard one is $6.25 (Grimshaw says a third of subscribers buy premium); a print and digital subscription is $11.49 while print-only is $7.25.

The FT has become something of a poster child for the idea that news that a bright future in the digital era. It recently announced that it had “crossed over” with its audience, amassing more digital subscribers than print ones. But, as we’ve noted before, the Financial Times‘ distinct audience and product make it more of an outlier than a model that lots of other news publications can replicate.

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For skeptics, apps amount to a temporary — and increasingly unnecessary — technology. But this is hardly the only view. Many in the publishing
community still thinks apps will deliver on their initial potential to provide deep reader engagement and handsome ad revenues. Now, with the arrival of more tablets and smartphones than ever, the debate over apps becomes more acute: should publishers turn away and rely solely on HTML5 or instead double down on these new app opportunities?

These are some of the questions we’ll explore during “Are Apps or the Web the Future of Mobile Content?” one of many discussions that will take place during paidContent Live on April 17 in New York City. Our guests include Jason Pontin of MIT Technology Review, whose widely read 2012 essay made him a leading voice in the counter-revolution against app idealism. He will be joined by ESPN’s Ryan Spoon and Nick Alt of Vimeo – two mobile experts who offer other alternative app narratives.

Here are more of the topics we’lll be exploring during the panel (feel free to propose more in the comments below):

• Is the payoff worth the cost?: Apps are nice in theory but they cost a pretty penny to build and maintain – especially as the number of platforms grows. Is the return worth it? Or should publishers plow that money into other parts of their editorial operation?

• Platform proliferation: The initial promise of apps appeared brightest on Apple’s iPad. But now dozens of tablets, from the Galaxy to the Kindle Fire, are emerging – and consumers are finally picking them up. Do all these new screens present a new opportunity? Or another reason to escape apps once and for all?

• Nice app, where do I find it? Those who want to wash their hands of apps are faced with a powerful counter-argument: You need to be where your readers are. As the mobile market grows, are the app skeptics confident their readers will find them on the mobile web?

• Does sub-compact change the app game? The arrival of so-called sub-compact publishing offers a way to create light-weight and relatively inexpensive apps. Examples like Marco Arment’s The Magazine and The Awl also show how these new species of apps can deliver both a beautiful reading experience and an ongoing stream of subscription revenue. Do these offer an opportunity that the mobile web cannot?

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Not the same opportunity as the creators of Angry Birds, or any number of design shops that popped up to help stores, online publications and everyone else build apps. No, these five founders — who met in a an aviation club at the University of Texas at Austin — saw in mobile the chance to make substantive changes in how enterprises do business. So they founded a company — Mutual Mobile — to do it.

The bootstrapped startup has built a successful business developing mobile apps for companies as varied as Google and Adidas. Companies such as this one, a quiet success that has gone relatively unheralded in the press, are defining our shift to mobile, as much as the obvious hits are. Here’s how it did it.

Lesson 1: Find your passion, then follow it

Mutual Mobile made its debut in April 2009 in Austin and two months later signed PeopleFinders.com as its first client. It wasn’t an enterprise company, but it was money in the bank, and the resulting app (Are They Really Single?) was more than just porting that company’s website to a mobile platform. Instead it took the premise behind the site — doing background checks and lookups on people — and packaged that expertise into a single purpose mobile app for checking out if that person you just met at the bar was really single.

It took one month for PeopleFinders.com to recoup the cost of developing the app. “That’s how powerful a mobile experience done right can be for a business,” says John Arrow, the CEO of Mutual Mobile.

Several other clients soon followed until the firm was doing well, with about 75 employees by the end of 2010 and 100 revenue-generating clients. But with the launch of the iPad that year, and some self reflection from Arrow, the team realized that the consumer business might be big, but it wasn’t what they cared about. So Mutual Mobile started firing its clients.

The result was those two dips in revenue as it ditched lucrative consumer-facing customers, including its last holdout Adidas, so it could focus on the enterprise and what they needed. “It was a tough decision to make, but it was the right one for us,” Arrow said. “And while it was hard to see those dips in revenue, we knew where we wanted to go.”

Today the firm only has 48 clients and $26 million in revenue — all from enterprise companies — at the end of 2012. Plus, it has 375 people who are thinking about mobile computing as more than just apps, but as an overall trend toward computing everywhere.

Identify the real trend

What does Arrow find so compelling about developing mobile products for enterprise customers? It’s not the devices.

“Apple isn’t going to make an iPhone 15,” Arrow says. “If you think that, you’re not thinking about mobile in the right way.” For him mobile is shorthand for adapting the computing to our daily lives and habits as opposed to expecting us to adapt to them. Sure, we may still need desktop computers, but Arrow is confident that computing will be everywhere.

The Briggo coffee-making robot lives inside that cube.

For example, his firm last year built an application for a robotic coffee kiosk on the University of Texas campus for a company called Briggo. Students and professors can order their coffee through their phones or at the kiosk and pick up a made-to-order beverage on the way to their class. The app tracks their location and gives the wait time for their coffees based on where they are as well as how busy the machine making the coffee is.

Other examples are further out there, such as the research Mutual Mobile is doing on haptics — the vibrations your phone makes are an example of haptics — as a source of ambient information. Arrow wonders if it might become a type of code for conveying information, akin to Braille. He sees it having potential in places like airplane cockpits or other information-dense environments, but stresses that its use in an actual product is at least six months out.

No VC means no one to break your fall

In the meantime, Arrow’s staying focused on the business, which he said he wants to grow to $100 million in revenue by 2015. This is a big number for a company that is entirely bootstrapped and has no venture capital investment. Arrow says he’s well on his way to achieving that goal. But to get to this point he’s had to do some detective work in the early days trying to find enterprise customers — or partners with enterprise customers — that were ready to change the way they did business with regard to mobile computing.

His first enterprise client came really early on, and is still with Mutual Mobile. The customer, Greenway Medical wants to help doctors use mobile devices when completing rounds and to access patient records. But getting Greenway as a client was more about Greenway seeing the iPod touch as a potential solution and seeking someone — anyone — who might be able to help, and stumbling on the young Mutual Mobile.

The Greenway Medical iPad app.

It was also important that they would trust an unnamed startup headed by a 20-something CEO. When Arrow co-founded Mutual Mobile he was 21. This week he had his 26th birthday. That was one reason that Mutual Mobile veered into serving consumer clients such as PeopleFinder.com or Gowalla. Those clients were eager for mobile apps and trusted startups.

“Back in 2009 there weren’t enterprises betting on mobility and we had to figure out how to bootstrap this company when there wasn’t even an addressable market yet,” Arrow said. “We knew consumer was our only option … and when Philips and Google and Verizon came around later we were able to apply all that we had learned. If we had started this company in the early part of 2011 or late 2010 we would have lacked credibility and had no infrastructure and no skillset to help, and clients would have been right to avoid this immature company.”

Arrow also thinks that if he had VC backing he wouldn’t have been able to pass up the lure of easy dollars from more consumer-facing clients. Those dips in revenue may never have happened. He probably would have also been asked to move his company from Austin to the Bay Area. So far he’s content to stay VC free, but given the appetite VCs have for putting dollars into older companies with big sales in hot markets, someone may convince him.

In the meantime, Arrow and Mutual Mobile are content to ride a massive wave of interest in enterprise mobile. One of the strongest signals for Mutual Mobile may have come last month when IBM announced its mobile first initiative, validating the type of experience and work that Mutual Mobile has been pushing on its clients since 2009.

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The group is called the Article 29 Working Party and, while it doesn’t make laws, it does have a great deal of influence over those who do, and over the way in which privacy laws are interpreted. Its opinion (PDF warning) on mobile apps will be unwelcome in many quarters because it states that just about everyone in the mobile industry — app developers, app store proprietors and even OS and device vendors — has a range of legal obligations around protecting and properly collecting and processing user data.

Compliance with E.U. data protection law means sticking to several principles. First and foremost, the user needs to give full and unambiguous consent to having their data processed. Data processing has to be for a legitimate purpose — like the app’s stated use case — and everyone has a responsibility to keep personal data secure.

Even those mobile players who are trying to stick to the rules may find the task more complex than they first imagine. Here’s an example given by the regulators (with bold type reflecting my emphasis):

“An app provides information about nearby restaurants. To be installed the app developer must seek consent. To access the geolocation data, the app developer must separately ask for consent, e.g. during installation or prior to accessing the geolocation. Specific means that the consent must be limited to the specific purpose of advising the user about nearby restaurants. The location data from the device may therefore only be accessed when the user is using the app for that purpose. The user’s consent to process geolocation data does not allow the app to continuously collect location data from the device. This further processing would require additional information and separate consent.

Similarly, for a communication app to access the contact list, the user must be able to select contacts that the user wishes to communicate with, instead of having to grant access to the entire address book (including contact details of non-users of that service that cannot have consented to the processing of data relating to them).”

How about app stores? Here, the working party recommends that apps “should not just be rated by users for how ‘cool’ they are, but also on the basis of their functionalities, with specific reference to privacy and security mechanisms”.

These kinds of recommendations may seem a tall order, but they are doable. However, the working party seems under no illusion about the challenge it faces. Here’s the whole problem with ensuring the rules get stuck to, distilled into a single passage:

“A high risk to data protection comes from the degree of fragmentation between the many players in the app development landscape. A single data item can, in real time, be transmitted from the device to be processed across the globe or be copied between chains of third-parties. Some of the best known apps are developed by major technology companies but many others are designed by small start-ups. A single programmer with an idea and little or no prior programming skills can reach a global audience in a short space of time. App developers unaware of the data protection requirements may create significant risks to the private life and reputation of users of smart devices. Simultaneously, third-party services such as advertising are developing rapidly, which, if integrated by an app developer without due regard, may disclose significant amounts of personal data.”

There’s the rub. The creation and distribution of apps can involve many, many parties, with services interlinked in a way that’s hard to keep track of — especially since one of the fundamentals of EU data protection law is that the user is kept fully informed of what’s happening with their data, the likelihood of proper compliance breaks down on that point alone. That’s before we even get to the thorny issue of who is situated where and whether sending data to that location means breaking the rules, or how many opportunities for a security breach get opened up by having so many links in the chain.

It’s one thing imposing these rules on a big cloud provider, but what about the one or two-person team that comes up with some app that taps into multiple APIs linking to services around the world? Are they supposed to have a designated data controller within their organization, keeping an eye on compliance? That’s hardly going to be top of their agenda when their app may have been created and set live practically on a whim.

What the Article 29 Working Party is doing here is noble — and I don’t mean that dismissively. We should all be thinking about this stuff. Low barriers to entry shouldn’t be an excuse for ignoring a cumulative effect of privacy erosion.

The question is, are these guidelines going to stay a wishlist, or are we going to see Europe’s regulators enforce them? That’s what these opinions often presage, so we may soon find out what privacy regulation really means in the mobile age.

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The updated Timeline, originally launched in September 2011, will allow users to designate their favorite books, movies, and music, which makes sense as the updated news feed has specific tabs where users can view recommendations and news related to categories like music (Om wrote last week that he thought adding an emphasis on music was a smart element to the re-design). Clearly, Facebook needs more users thinking of the site as a place to talk about music, and emphasizing this on Timeline could help.

If users see a book or movie that a friend has marked as a favorite, Facebook will make it easier for the user to mark it as their favorite as well.

When asked about the influence of the news feed changes on the Timeline updates, a Facebook spokesperson replied that “The new News Feed and timeline work together to now show a more visual experience. Both make you and your friends’ activity and app stories more prominent,” and it’s hard not to draw a link between the timing and similarities between the two changes.

Users will also have a dedicated space on the Timeline to show their activity in other apps, and Facebook used Instagram as an example in announcing the Timeline tweaks. While CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last week that Instagram wouldn’t receive preferential treatment on the Facebook platform, it’s clear that the new Timeline is a way for users to incorporate their photos on the site, a feature that didn’t get much mention last week. And it could encourage other third-party developers to integrate more heavily with Facebook’s platform.

The Timeline is also getting an updated design that’s more in line with the new news feed, with a cleaner look and simpler layout. The company said it would be rolling out the changes over the next few weeks.

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Fantastical has set the bar for iPhone calendars; for simplicity and ease of use it’s one of the best and basic ways of adding events to your calendar — for a price ($3.99). Sunrise is the most fun and easiest on the eyes and, crucially, it’s free. Both were released in the last three months. The App Store is littered with lots of not-so-great calendar apps, but there are several other really good ones too.

On Wednesday comes another entrant; this one is simply called Calendars. This effort is from one of the most popular iOS productivity app makers, Readdle. That’s the same Ukrainian development shop behind Scanner Pro, Remarks and PDF Expert. Readdle gets good exposure in the App Store and its apps are often among the top downloaded, so if you’re in the habit of scanning the iOS App Store, you’ll likely see this one when it goes live on Wednesday.

Calendars is free and works on the iPhone or iPad. The interface isn’t anything fancy but it’s easy to understand if you’ve ever used Google Calendar. The app isn’t the best I’ve used in the category, though you can’t argue with the price. It supports either your iPhone calendar or a Google Calendar — but only one at at a time. If you want more, you can upgrade to a more feature-heavy version.

Yes, Readdle actually already has a calendaring app, called Calendars by Readdle. With the introduction of the new, free app, the old paid app will henceforth be called Calendar+. It costs $6.99 and has a lot more features, such as text or email alerts for appointments and the ability to invite attendees to meetings. That app already has 500,000 users, according to the company.

But just as the market for well-designed calendar apps is growing, Readdle is introducing a free version. As for why something as perfunctory as mobile calendaring seems so hot right now, Readdle’s Denys Zhadanov says it’s because the perfect formula hasn’t been found yet and developers are striving to make the interface as easy as possible to use and “natural” for users.

I’ve heard the same from the makers of other popular calendar app makers: that even now after many years and many other more interesting capabilities of the iPhone already conquered, one of the most basic things is still not as good as it could be. So developers are going back to the basics of what these devices in our pockets are primarily supposed to do. (You could say the same dynamics are at work with iPhone email, which partly explains the recent flurry of activity around mail with apps like Mailbox, Tempo, Taskbox and others.)

The idea that the iPhone calendar could be improved isn’t exactly new. Two years ago, some saw basic functionality missing: it didn’t have a week view option, which prompted the developers at Week Cal to make an app to fill in that gap. It’s now one of the most downloaded iOS calendaring apps.

Based on the recent calendar apps efforts we’ve seen, the improvements left to make today are more granular: improving ways to add events, creating the least overwhelming way to view multiple calendars, or combining appointments with other needs like task management, location information or social networking. It’s not the sexiest app development work out there, but it’s the kind of improvement that make the iPhone a real tool for work and not just an entertainment device.

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First off, it’s launching a new iOS software developer’s kit (SDK), which allows app makers to code PayPal’s payment processing tools directly into their apps, instead of opening up a PayPal authorization and payments page. PayPal devs can also embed credit card scanning software from Card.io, which PayPal bought last summer. While it’s starting with iOS, PayPal said it would expand to other mobile platforms “soon.”

For quick integration, PayPal has developed Javascript buttons that can be embedded into a desktop or mobile website by adding five lines of codes. The payment feature can also be programmed into a QR code, allowing retailers to trigger transactions from outside of the device. Finally, PayPal is also retooling its application programming interfaces (APIs) around more modern and open frameworks such as REST, OAuth and JSON.

Previously, PayPal’s development platform ran over parent company eBay’s X.commerce, but PayPal is taking its developer efforts independent, launching a new development website that houses its sandbox, tools, documentation and other resources in a single location.

“This is just the beginning,” PayPal CTO James Barrese wrote on the company’s blog. “We will be releasing new APIs and capabilities throughout 2013, while continuing to support our existing developer tools through this evolution. We will continue to listen to the developer community and rapidly respond to their feedback.”

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