While we are on the subject of cars...  This talk of the American car makers asking for $25 billion to bail them out yet again is complete hogwash.  They are also saying that they can't go bankrupt. Rubbish.

This is not a financial or political site so we won't bore you any longer with the topic.  This is exactly what needs to be done though if you are interested (see NYT article by Mitt Romney below).  

Let Detroit Go Bankrupt   

Here is a iPhone app scheme that is trying to save the environment, reduce traffic, save commuting costs and ... scare the hell out of us.

First here is the quote from their website:  

"Avego.com is where travelers cooperate to make the whole transport system more efficient, saving us all money, wasted time and reducing pollution.

A 5-seat car traveling with only a driver is inherently inefficient, and yet 85% of the time, that's how cars travel in much of the world. With our iPhone GPS technology, web services and your participation, we can fill up those empty seats."

This is just creepy.  What actually happens is the app tracks your movements through GPS and builds a profile on the route and area that you are traveling often.  It does the same for all the other users.  Then it matches people up looking for a ride.  Yikes.  I don't want to be tracked.  I don't want strangers knowing my route and most of all I don't want to matched up with anyone for "rides" or carpooling.  This is inviting the trouble of wackos, criminals, stalkers and lowlife characters to do something dangerous.  

There is a video on their website if you want to find out more, the app is called Rideshare and will be live in 10 days.  Screw the environment, give me a V12 gas guzzling car, a private jumbo jet and coal fired heating any day over this crazy scheme.  This app won't be coming with reach of a 10ft pole of my phone, that is for damn sure.

Today another search application for the iPhone is under review.  This one is called Searchme and has a sexy coverflow type interface where you can flip through the search results just like in iTunes. 

When you open the app, it is quite straight forward and you are greeted with a search bar at the top at the top of the screen.  Lets do some searching.  We searched for London hotel.  The coverflow interface loaded up and some results started to appear.  You can see a miniture version of the web page of the search results in front of you and you can drag it off the screen to the left to see the next web page screen shot come in on the right.  Cool.  The search results were relevant and about my search topic.

Along the top there are several buttons such as Travel, Restaurants, Theatre and Product reviews.  You can click on these to get info on those subjects.  I originally thought that the app was only searching those subjects until I tried another search. 

Opensocial.  This time a pop up came and asked me "did you mean open social" (with a space).  I said no and carried on.   The first results were some Opensocial articles and blog posts from news.com, techcrunch, cnet, linux.com etc.   I was actually looking for the Opensocial pages on google but I guess can't complain, maybe I should refine my search.  I guess we all get used to the results when googling. 

To my surprise, along the top were new categories that were relevant to my search.  Web development, software, blogs etc.  It knows the area that I am searching which is great. 

To view the web page, you can either double click for that page to open up in a safari window or you can do pinching gestures to zoom in right in the app and look at the web page in detail.  You can also turn the phone and change from portrait to landscape viewing mode at anytime. 

Another nice feature is that in portrait mode, under the thumbnail of the website picture is a three line description of the site.

The next search was

Ducati monster.  (a motorcycle for those not into motorcycles).  The first result was an enthusiast forum site which was followed with 12 or so sites that had something to do with this particular motorbike.  The problem is that I was looking for info at ducati.com on this bike and ducati.com was not until about the 14th result and even then it was ducati.com/uk.   Anyway, not too bad, all the results were relevant (and the categories along the top as well).

One quirk about flipping through the results.  If you "flip" each picture too hard, more than one will pass.  I would rather have the next one snap into place so as not to pass several results by accident. 

Overall, it is functional.  It isn't really that helpful with having the thumbnails though, they are really too small to see any text on them.  The "pinch to zoom" function is good if you only want to look but you can not interact with the page once zoomed in.  You will have to launch the site in safari to do that.   One thing that the visual view does give you is you can tell right away if it is a site you recognize or if it is a really crap website. 

Speed.  Here is the downfall and I don't really think it is Searchme's fault.  I was testing on a 2G iPhone over the EDGE network.  It was too slow for daily use for sure.  In a pinch MAYBE I would use it sometimes.  But then again maybe not, google might be faster, more familiar and easier to just read the text results. 

I will keep it on the iPhone for now, but probably it needs 3G to speed things up and make it more enjoyable.  If anyone tries it on 3G, let us know your experience in the comments.

Searchme application for the iPhone is available HERE

Well I have to say that I was excited to try out Google's new voice searching tool on the iPhone.  I downloaded to iTunes and synced the phone and saw the google app sitting on my phone's screen.  So far so good.  

After opening up the app it greets you with a google search text box at the top and three tabs at the bottom, Search (main page), Apps and Settings.  I didn't see a way to do voice search so went directly into the setting to see if something needed to be set up.  Sure enough there was a voice search on/off switch.  Once that was set, I noticed another setting for search filter, it defaulted to "moderate".  I wondered why anyone would want their search filtered for a brief moment and then promptly set it to off / unfiltered.  Maybe for kids?

Now that voice search was switched on, back to the search tab.  A new icon in the top right appears saying that voice search is available and there is a button to see a help video of some kind.  No need for manuals or videos, I wanted to get straight into it.  I put the phone to my ear and the phone's sensor recognized and had a soft double beeping sound, quite pleasant and functional, this beep sounds like "ok ready to start".  So I started testing, "Thailand"... the phone said "working" and I waited for about 10-15 seconds only to be greeted with "we didn't catch that" and a choice between cancel and "speak again".  I tried again.  Another 15 seconds and the same result.

I then tried:

Apple.  The first two times didn't work and the third try worked and a search results page came up.  45 seconds or so later (after the unsuccessful tries), not great but It worked!  Lets try again.

San Francisco.  First try!  Some search results appeared and then a google map of San Francisco started to appear.

New York hotel.  nothing
Hotels in New York.  nothing

Paper supplier.  bingo first try.

Opensocial.  again first try!  sweet. 

London hotels.  wow on a roll here

Chigago.  Nope no dice again. 

Hmm.  by this point the fun and games were over and my excitement had fully deflated.  Lets see how the text search works.

I thought that by searching in the app that the search results would be fast and in-app.  Nope, for every search that is made it kicks you out of the google application and launches safari and tries to go to the regular search results page on google (mobile version).  Well, over edge this took ages to even start to load and I was fed up, had enough. 

The fun and games are over for this iPhone user.  Sorry google but I have to say, it is a brilliant idea but not ready for prime time.   Suggestions to improve:

- make voice recognition more reliable.  I understand if it doesn't catch something once and a while but all the time is annoying and frustrating.  It is easier to type into the google bar in safari. 
- don't kick me out to safari to get search results.  The voice search is in-app, why not text search results in-app?
- one way that you could make the voice search more accurate is to ask for each search (or every fifth or so search) if the app recognized the right words that you spoke.  It could use the data to "teach" the system and it would get more and more accurate over time. 

For those interested, the google voice search app is available for free in the iTunes store HERE .

For me, I will wait six months or wait until I hear that it has improved considerable.  I am sure google will make an amazing product out of this eventually.  Hats off to google for their innovation.

A really cool iPhone app is coming out soon. Voice search. Tired of typing searches into your tiny phone keyboard? Soon we will be able to just say what we are looking for and google will come back with results. Probably won't be perfect on day 1 but this is a huge leap forward in technology that is available to us on a daily basis. Even if it takes one more year to get it tuned and working well, who cares. We are willing to wait!

Here are some excerpts from an article in the New York Times:

Users of the free application, which Apple is expected to make available as soon as Friday through its iTunes store, can place the phone to their ear and ask virtually any question, like “Where’s the nearestStarbucks?” or “How tall is Mount Everest?” The sound is converted to a digital file and sent to Google’s servers, which try to determine the words spoken and pass them along to the Google search engine.

The search results, which may be displayed in just seconds on a fast wireless network, will at times include local information, taking advantage of iPhone features that let it determine its location.

...

The service can be used to get restaurant recommendations and driving directions, look up contacts in the iPhone’s address book or just settle arguments in bars. The query “What is the best pizza restaurant in Noe Valley?” returns a list of three restaurants in that San Francisco neighborhood, each with starred reviews from Google users and links to click for phone numbers and directions.

...

As with other Google products the service is freely available to consumers, and the company plans to eventually make it available for phones other than the iPhone.

...

An intriguing part of the overall design of the service was contributed by a Google researcher in London, who found a way to use the iPhone accelerometer — the device that senses how the phone is held — to set the software to “listen” mode when the phone is raised to the user’s ear.

Google researchers said that another of its advantages over competitors was the billions of queries its users have made over the years.

The full article can be seen here on the New York Times website .

MySpace has launched an application for blackberry. Smart move to try and get all the business users onto myspace. One problem though... Are there even any business users on myspace?

The app has access to your friends, photos, inbox, friend requests, and comments.

You can download the myspace app for blackberry at  www.blackberry.com/myspace   or http://m.myspace.com/

If you have a chance to check it out, let your fellow twittown users know how it is in the comments!