The biggest announcement at Apple's recently concluded Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) was something only developers will immediately understand and users only eventually benefit from a new programming language called Swift. There are currently 1.2 million apps available in the iOS App Store. The programming language used to develop most of apps is Objective-C. Objective-C, picked up mostly by those who take up Computer Science in college. iOS apps can also be developed using web languages HTML5, CSS and Javascript. The benefit is that the apps can easily be ported to run on other mobile platforms. With Swift in the market…
Even though the current market is growing more slowly than expected, an eMarketer report predicts that mobile payments in the United States alone will break $1 billion barrier this year and then hit $58 billion by 2017. The study defines such payments as "transactions for goods or services made by scanning, tapping, swiping or checking in with a mobile phone at the point of sale." Currently the restaurant industry is chasing Starbucks dream. Starbucks has recently introduced their own Mobile Payment App. With this app user can pay for coffee, can even give tips also. This popular app now generates about…
Augmented reality (AR) is the live real time direct or indirect view of the real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data. Whereas Virtual Reality replaces the real world with a simulated world. Artificial information about the environment and its objects can be overlaid on the real world. Augmented reality blurs the line between what's real and what's computer-generated by enhancing what we see, hear, feel and smell. Augmented Reality is the future for computer technology where it is changing the way we see this world. This technology is mostly used in Mobile…
While going on a long trip, have you ever experienced the fear of being lost? If so, there is a high chance that you still haven’t used GPS or don’t know how to use it. Global Positioning System or GPS is a satellite based technology used for pinpointing someone or something’s location on earth. Devices which can connect with the satellites and can determine location based on the latitude and longitude of a receiver by measuring the time difference of a signal from the three of the satellites to reach the receiver. There are some other technologies available to find…
Since the advent of iPhone, the smart phone world has changed significantly. Apple app store has changed the way people look at the smart phones. Now the main attraction of smart phones is the apps. Big companies like Samsung, Sony, and HTC are not far behind. They also brought their high end smart phones and a new operating system, Android. Google Play is the door to all the apps for Android devices. Currently Android is dominating with 78.9% market share while iPhone in the 2nd place with 14.9% market share. Now the question is where are we heading in the…
When you take a flight to go to international places, you have seen that the passport office takes your passport and run it under a scanning machine. It automatically input all the data related to you in the system. That’s what OCR is, Optical Character Recognition. It checks the document and automatically input all related field in the system. Other than keypunching, Optical Character Recognition has been the oldest data entry technique in modern civilization. Way before the key-to-disk system of CRT was used; Optical Character Readers were being used in commercial and government EDP installations. The popularity of OCR kept on…
If you are new in the Washington DC area and looking for bus route or metro route you would probably download one of the mobile apps like - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.palta.metro, https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.funforfones.android.dcmetro. These give all the information needed for a better transit around the city. But where do these mobile apps get the data in almost real time? It is the WMATA API developed by WMATA developers. This API is available for nonprofit as well as for profitable apps also. All the developer has to do is register with WMATA to receive a development key and agree to the guidelines outlined in…
A recent press release announced last week that Samsung Electronics and Accenture had teamed up to deliver 3 things – a secure mobile platform, managed procurement of mobile devices and vertical specific apps in a box focused on mobile users. This is a breakthrough that helps corporations to bring in BYOD (Bring your own device). But the more important aspect is this brings the largest selling smartphone and tablet software on the consumer front right into the enterprise level. According to Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research, "Accenture is not only pitching KNOX, Accenture is not only…
So you have an idea, you want to build an application for Android, and you are now trying to find out how much it is going to cost to develop such an application. Developing an app is like buying a custom made BMW car, you get what you pay for. You want to build a high performance, quality app with mind blowing graphics, you have to pay very high price for it. But if you just want to build an app with some basic functionality, it won’t cost you much. The cost of developing an Android app may vary from…
