@sidin @raytida They ask you to take a number to download their application but I found the latest build here - DON'T

Over the weekend, Nokia launched a suite of casual games developed at Nokia Research Center which are meant to demonstrate how NFC can enable new forms of mobile gaming. The three new games include Nokia World Flags, Nokia Shakespeare Shuffle and Nokia Nursery Rhyme Shuffle. All can be played now on any Nokia Symbian NFC-enabled phone including the Nokia C7 Astound, C7-00, 600, 603, 700 and 701.

Nokia calls the games “tangible” mobile games because of the way they interact with physical objects in the real world using NFC tags. The games don’t have to read or write to the tags in order to work – they only need to detect the tags’ presence. That means they will work with blank NFC tags or even “contactless” credit cards, transit cards or ID cards, the company explains.

Frankly, the user interfaces for the games are only so-so, but to be fair, these are more akin to demo apps than “real” games meant to attract thousands of users. Instead, it’s the idea behind these games that’s meant to be the focus of this news.

For example, one game involves NFC-tagged playing cards which are used to play a digitized version of a child’s simple matching game. Traditionally, you would play this game by flipping over cards to find the matched pairs. With the NFC game, however, you tap the card with your phone. While I’m not sure if a game like this is screaming out for NFC, the concept of combining playing cards with NFC in new ways has some appeal. Imagine playing a NFC-enabled version of one of those “Magic: The Gathering” type games where with a tap you could actually see the battles between wizards animated on your phone’s screen, while the mobile app also kept score for you. That might be cool (well, for nerds, wink wink).

The two other Nokia games now available involve tapping cards to mix up either nursery rhymes or Shakespeare quotes. They look pretty boring.

In a video, Nokia shows off a fourth concept (not available) where you tap different parts of a stuffed animal with an NFC phone to launch different games. That could provide toy makers a new avenue for upselling that was previously limited to ads that appear on their toys’ boxes and in their instruction manuals. Still, as much as I personally love technology, the idea that my child’s teddy would simply serve as an avenue to toddler’s first gaming addiction kind of makes me sad. Whatever happened to actually playing with your toys? (Maybe I’m just getting old.)

Nokia, it should be noted, is not the first to have ideas about NFC-enabled gaming. One high-profile example comes from Rovio, which, launched an NFC-enabled version of Angry Birds called Angry Birds Magic earlier this year. That game also works on Symbian.

Widespread NFC adoption is several years out, and is still waiting on Apple’s participation. That means opportunities for NFC-enabled gaming are few and far between today.

Nokia is often early to the smartphone space with innovative concepts, but it’s not until Apple executives upon them do they really reach the mainstream. Something tells me that NFC mobile gaming will be just another example of this ongoing trend.






Crunchbase





NOKIA






Company:
Nokia


Website:
nokia.com


IPO:

NYSE:NOK



Nokia is a Finnish multinational communications corporation. It is primarily engaged in the manufacturing of mobile devices and in converging Internet and communications industries.

They make a wide range of mobile devices with services and software that enable people to experience music, navigation, video, television, imaging, games, business mobility and more.

Nokia is the owner of Symbian operation system and partially owns MeeGo operating system.






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Developer Steven Troughton-Smith has been working with 9to5Mac exclusively to port the iPhone 4S Siri voice command system to the iPhone 4. Troughton-Smith was able to get the beginning steps of a full port rolling after installing the iPhone 4S Siri and Springboard files onto an iPhone 4. As you can see in the video, Siri’s interface loads up with all the features from the iPhone 4S implementation.

Siri running on an iPhone 4 (video). Update: Faster version below fold.

Siri on the iPhone 4 can recognize spoken commands in both the standard Siri view and the keyboard Dictation view. The only issue at this point is that Apple is not authenticating (obviously) commands to its servers from iPhone 4 hardware. The Siri port to the iPhone 4, at this point, also has the ability to speak back to the user. You may notice Siri and the iPhone 4 acting very sluggish in the above video. The issue here is not Siri, but is that a special GPU driver for iPhone 4 is needed; and it is obviously not included in the iPhone 4S binary cache – where the Siri files are located.

Perhaps the biggest news here is that we’ve determined that there is no technical reason for Apple not to allow Siri to run on the iPhone 4. The iPhone 4 hardware can support the Siri artificial intelligence system, as the A4 processor is said to be powerful enough. We are not entirely sure why Apple is making Siri an iPhone 4S exclusive but it could be due to special microphone support, or because the A5 may allow it to run slightly quicker. After all, Apple is the company who blocked custom wallpapers on the iPhone 3G because the animation is slightly slower than the animation on newer iOS devices.

We are, of course, working with Troughton-Smith to improve the Siri iPhone 4 port. Stay tuned.

I caught up with Peter Vesterbacka, Mighty Eagle at Rovio, the creators of the successful Angry Birds franchise, yesterday at the Planet Of The Apps conference in London.

It wasn’t a huge secret, but I certainly didn’t know this: Vesterbacka tells me you will soon be able to buy Angry Birds-themed cookbooks; actual physical books and ebooks for Kindle, Nook and iPad.

Full disclosure: I got one of these limited-edition Angry Birds cookbooks for free (hence the pictures above and below). Also, I’m not much of a cook (hence why I accepted the book in the first place).

In all seriousness, Vesterbacka tells me there have been 400 million downloads of the Angry Birds apps to date, and that its merchandising business is chugging along nicely as well, with about 10 million plush toys having gone over the counter already. I also bought two for our baby boy recently.

Rovio is on a mission to turn Angry Birds into a brand as iconic as Nintendo’s Mario and Mickey Mouse, Vesterbacka adds. Gotta love ambitious (European) startups.

Enjoy the interview:






Crunchbase





ROVIO MOBILE
ANGRY BIRDS






Company:
Rovio Mobile


Website:
rovio.com


Funding:
$42M



Rovio is one of Europe’s leading independent developers of wireless games with an ever-growing portfolio of award-winning titles spanning many genres from casual to core next-gen console IP. Their studio has developed games for some of the biggest names in the mobile space, including Electronic Arts, Nokia, Vivendi, Namco Bandai and Mr. Goodliving/Real Networks.

The seeds of Rovio were sown in 2003 when Helsinki University of Technology students Niklas Hed, Jarno Väkeväinen, and Kim Dikert participated in a mobile game...






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Product:
Angry Birds


Website:
rovio.com

Company
Rovio Mobile


Angry Birds is a puzzle video game developed by Rovio, a developer based in Finland. Since its release for Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch devices, over 6.5 million copies of the game have been purchased, and versions have appeared for other touchscreen-based smartphones.

In Angry Birds, players take control of a flock of birds that are attempting to retrieve eggs that have been stolen by a group of evil pigs. The pigs have taken refuge on or within structures made...






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The Facebook iPad application has become a hostage in a tense negotiation between Apple and Facebook.

The Google+ team has just announced that you can now share your favorite Circles with anyone you like, publicly.

Part of the allure of Google+ Circles was that they were hidden, so it will be interesting to see what kind of traction this gets.

Obviously if you’ve created a master circle of funny people or tech bloggers, they’re perfect to share with a friend. If you’ve created a circle of ex-girlfriends, perhaps you won’t want to share that. This is very similar to Twitter’s list feature, and of course Facebook’s latest list upgrades.

Here’s the video from the Google+ team explaining the Share a Circle feature:

Owen Prater, Google Engineer explains:

From your circles page… select the circle you want, add a comment, and then share it.

When your friends receive your circle, they can then pick and choose who to add to their own circles.

Note that when you share a circle, you’re only sharing its members at that time. The circle name is always private to you, and any changes you make to your circle afterwards are private as well.

Will you be sharing Circles with your friends?

UPDATE: Google says the new feature should be available to everyone within the next few hours.

Among the news announcements at Facebook’s giant f8 developers conference on Thursday (we’ve collected the news in one place if you want to catch up) was the launch of social apps for media consumption. This included music apps like Spotify and video apps like Hulu, but also news-reading apps from a series of media players — including newspapers such as The Washington Post and The Guardian, as well as digital-only outlets like News Corp.’s The Daily and Yahoo News. Although Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg championed these apps as “rethinking the whole way the news industry works” through social sharing of content, it seems more like those media outlets have signed over a big part of their destiny to something that feels like an AOL-style web “portal.”

The apps themselves are very similar to what the Wall Street Journal recently launched with its “WSJ Social” app (the Journal wasn’t part of the official Facebook launch, and says it came up with the app on its own). It’s a digital reader that lives inside the social network and allows logged in users to read stories (unless they happen to be behind the Journal’s paywall, of course) and also lets other Facebook users follow that reading activity — turning their friends into real-time “editors” of the content they see. As with the other apps Facebook announced, that reading behavior will also show up in the new “ticker” view of users’ activity (if users agree to allow this to happen).

A cross between a Facebook page and a newspaper
So the Washington Post social app, for example — known as Social Reader — looks like a cross between a traditional Facebook page and a stripped-down version of a newspaper page, with blocks for articles and images, and then beneath that the faces of people who have shared an article (the articles also have the time that they were published or updated in red, which is unusual for a newspaper website). And the app features a “trending now” box that shows which articles are the most read or shared at that time, and the stories that appear in the newspaper view are chosen based on algorithms powered by Trove, the news-recommendation service the Washington Post launched earlier this year.

Among the obvious reasons for media companies to hitch their digital wagons to Facebook’s star are the sheer quantity of potential readers who are using the network: According to Zuckerberg’s keynote on Thursday, Facebook recently crossed a new milestone when over 500 million used the site in a single day. As Alisa Bowen, general manager of the WSJ Digital Network put it, the newspaper created the app so that it could “reach people where they are” — and the sharing that’s built into the platform can accelerate that process immensely. Media companies could also theoretically learn things about what content their readers prefer (as well as what times they like to read, etc.) by looking at the analytics that Facebook provides about users’ behavior.

Those benefits, however, would be just as available to media companies without having to create apps that live inside what Ethernet inventor and web guru Vint Cerf recently called Facebook’s “walled garden.” In fact, if there’s one thing that makes the current partnerships between content companies and Facebook different from the deals they struck with AOL and CompuServe and other online “portals” in the early 1990s — a comparison some made when the WSJ launched its app — it’s that most of them already have full-fledged and highly trafficked websites of their own. In the early 1990s, one of the reasons to hook up with AOL was simply that no one really understood the web at that point.

And as The Huffington Post and some other new-media entities have already shown, many of the advantages Facebook was selling with its app pitch — the sharing, the analytics, the user experience, etc. — are already available with the Facebook open-graph API and platform, which the social network launched at its last f8 conference. In addition to the ubiquitous “like” button and other widgets, that allowed the Huffington Post and other sites to show who among your friends had read or commented on a particular article, and made it easy for users to share those articles themselves as well, including posting that activity back to their Facebook wall as status updates.

Not everyone wants to play inside the walled garden

It’s interesting to note that one media partner announced by Facebook has taken a very different approach from the social-reading apps that live inside the social network: Yahoo News — which just happens to be owned by another large (if somewhat faded) web portal — chose to use the new Facebook social platform to do something very similar to what the Huffington Post and others have. So instead of forcing users to remain inside a Facebook page, clicking a Yahoo link takes you to a webpage at Yahoo’s site with social features embedded in it, such as a filmstrip-style view of all your friends who have clicked the same link. That way, Yahoo keeps the traffic and engagement.

So what do the new social apps offer that the existing platform doesn’t? The most obvious answer is that it pulls all that reading and sharing activity back into Facebook’s garden. Instead of readers just browsing through the Washington Post or Guardian site and links appearing on a Facebook page when they “like” something, users are now being encouraged to go to a specific Facebook page and spend all of their time inside that page, reading and sharing and commenting. That activity exists only inside Facebook (for now, at least) and is only visible to logged-in Facebook users.

That’s an awful lot of power and control to hand over to a service that holds on fairly tightly to the data produced by its users. Yes, Facebook provides huge potential audiences, and there are benefits to knowing who your readers are at all times — just as there are benefits to handing over control of the comments on your newspaper’s website to Facebook. But there are risks to doing this as well, as I’ve pointed out before. Facebook can be a very powerful friend for media companies in all kinds of ways, but they need to remember that this power exists for the benefit of one company: Facebook.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Giuseppe Bognani

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
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Apple's CEO always wanted to get something great to the customer without any obstacles – except that they should pay
Ten years is, of course, a long time in media. Ten years ago, if you wanted to download some music, your best bet was Napster or one of the filesharing systems such as LimeWire or KaZaA. There were legal services, but they were so dire they wouldn't pass much muster today: there was PressPlay and MusicNet (from rival groups of record companies), which required $15 a month subscriptions for low-quality streaming (when most people had dialup connections, not today's broadband). You couldn't burn to CD. They were stuffed with restrictive software to prevent you sharing the songs.
What happened? Steve Jobs happened, mainly. The hardware and design team at Apple came up with the iPod (initially intended to be a way to sell more Macintosh computers), and then followed the iTunes Music Store – a great way to tie people to Apple by selling music. In 2003 Jobs persuaded the music companies – which wouldn't license their songs to bigger names like Microsoft – to go with him because, he said, Apple was tiny (which it was, at the time). The risk if people did start sharing songs from the store was minimal, he argued. The record labels looked at Apple's tiny market share (a few per cent of the PC market) and reckoned they'd sell about a million songs a year, so they signed up.
Apple sold a million in the first week of the iTunes Music Store being open (and only in the US). It sold 3m within a month. It's never looked back.
Nowadays Apple sells TV shows, films, books, apps, as well as music. We take the explosion in available content for granted. But without Jobs, it's likely we wouldn't be here at all; his negotiating skill is the thing that Apple, and possibly the media industry, will miss the most, because he got them to open up to new delivery mechanisms.
Content companies have been reluctant to let their products move to new formats if they aren't the inventors, or at least midwives. Witness Blu-ray, a Sony idea which wraps up the content so you can't ever get it off the disc (at least in theory); or 3D films. Yet neither is quite living up to its promise, and part of that comes down to people wanting to be able to move the content around – on an iPod, iPhone, iPad or even a computer – in ways the content doesn't allow. Apps downloaded directly to your mobile? Carriers would never have allowed it five years ago. Flat-rate data plans? Ditto. But all good for content creators.
Jobs pried open many content companies' thinking, because his focus was always on getting something great to the customer with as few obstacles as possible. In that sense, he was like a corporate embodiment of the internet; except he thought people should pay for what they got. He always, always insisted you should pay for value, and that extended to content too. The App and Music Store remains one of the biggest generators of purely digital revenue in the world, and certainly the most diverse; while Google's Android might be the fastest-selling smartphone mobile OS, its Market generates pitiful revenues, and I haven't heard of anyone proclaiming their successes from selling music, films or books through Google's offerings.
Jobs's resignation might look like the end of an era, and for certain parts of the technology industry it is. For the content industries, it's also a loss: Jobs was a champion of getting customers who would pay you for your stuff. The fact that magazine apps like The Daily haven't set the world alight (yet?) isn't a failure of the iPad (which is selling 9m a quarter while still only 15 months old; at the same point in the iPod's life, just 219,000 were sold in the financial quarter, compared with the 22m – 100 times more – of its peak). It's more like a reflection of our times.
So if you're wondering how Jobs's departure affects the media world, consider that it's the loss of one of the biggest boosters of paid-for content the business ever had. Who's going to replace that?
Steve JobsAppleComputingAppsDigital mediaMedia businessCharles Arthurguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Start Yep for the first time and it automatically shows you all your PDFs, iWork and Office documents. The strength in Yep is being able to see your documents and search through them with out needing to worry where exactly you saved it to.

An awesome app for your iPad to aggregate links, photos, videos, etc. posted by your friends on Facebook and Twitter. If you don't have an iPad yet, check out the video. As an advertisement, it is as cool as it can get. I'll try it out and probably post a review.

"Dockless is a little app that does what some people have always wanted - remove certain applications from their dock. Dock real estate can become precious, and some apps don't make a whole lot of sense sitting there. That's where Dockless comes in. With Dockless, any OS X application can be made to show in the Dock or not."

"What’s the difference between the new version of YouTube’s mobile Web site and the Apple-created YouTube application that is installed on every iPhone? The Web site is a lot better." So much for that native apps are better than web apps. I assume now there is no reason to complain about the locked-down app store if you can make web apps better than device apps.

"With so many apps to choose from, it can be overwhelming to sift the wheat from the chaff. With that in mind, we put together this short list of iPhone apps that a man might find particularly useful (and sometimes entertaining)."

Isolator is a small menu bar application that helps you concentrate. When you're working on a document, and don't want to be distracted, turn on Isolator. It will cover up your desktop and all the icons on it, as well as the windows of all your other applications, so you can concentrate on the task in hand.

"We’ve compiled an enormous list of 100 amazing free Mac applications that you can download and start using today. These apps span multiple categories and offer an incredibly diverse pool of functionality so there’s definitely something here for everyone."

"Ego gives you one central—and lovely—location to check web statistics that matter to you. You can quickly view the number of visits to your website (including daily, hourly and monthly numbers), feed subscription totals and changes, how many people are following you on Twitter and more."

"The iPad App Store is open! Here are the best of the apps so far—the ones you'll actually want when you finally get your iPad."

Cryptor has a simple, easy-to-use interface which makes securing files a pleasure. The built-in 'String Utility' let’s you encrypt/decrypt a string in an instant, without the usual hassle of using command-line tools.

"CloudApp allows you to share images, links, music, videos and files. Here is how it works: choose a file, drag it to the menubar and let us take care of the rest. We provide you with a short link automatically copied to your clipboard that you can use to share your upload with co-workers and friends."

Foursquare offers new opportunities to promote your business and build stronger relationships with your customers.

A visual record of beautiful software

"AppSlice data indicates that only 16,700 iPhone apps have been certified as iPad-compatible so far."

SecondBar is a Tool which allows you to have more than one menubar in Mac OS X. This is useful if you have multiple monitors connected to your mac

Like Knox, Espionage uses encrypted disk images to store sensitive data. However, Espionage performs a bit of Finder trickery to give you the illusion that you’re interacting directly with a protected folder, instead of a disk image—the program does all the disk-image work for you, behind the scenes.

Attic is a slick music controller for all those unplayed albums that are collecting dust sitting in your iTunes library. Listen to, create playlists of, and shuffle through your forgotten albums.

Turn your iPhone or iPod Touch into a wireless multi-touch TRACKPAD, KEYBOARD and fully customizable and programmable REMOTE CONTROL for your PC or Mac! It does EVERYTHING all the other remote control apps does - AND MORE!

You can walk into a Barnes and Noble and buy a copy of Maxim, but you won’t find a copy of Hustler. Not because Hustler wouldn’t sell, but because selling pornography goes against the Barnes and Noble brand.

If you have an iPhone or iPod touch, then you know how helpful some apps can be—like the one that makes navigating public transportation easier than navigating through your own house! Well, these aren't those kind of applications. These are the ones that do little more than give us a good laugh. Poke around our picks for the best of the worst.

Papershow, a tool for interactive presentations from Canson, will soon be available for the Mac. The kit, which is making its debut at Macworld Expo this week, includes a Bluetooth-equipped pen, a USB key for your computer, and special paper that transmits your handwriting to a screen.

In fact, lots of software has lower quality because of the App Store process. Developers can’t easily get bug fixes out and they certainly don’t release new versions as often as they otherwise would. This harks back to the era where software was really cumbersome to release on CDs, so you did it much less frequently.

To a Mac user, the difference between one application and the other is, in part, how well it is represented. Even though several useful applications have simplistic sites, in the vast sea of websites that we have today, looks make a difference.

app.itize.us is a painstakingly curated presentation of the best produced and designed iPhone applications that are available for download via the App Store

Google's end run around Apple's App Store is complete: Google Voice is ready as a Web application.

Fever takes the temperature of your slice of the web and shows you what's hot.

Users spend an average of $10 on apps every month? I'm definitely not an average user then.

To quote Brent Simmons, the application’s author, “NetNewsWire was designed to be read with a cup of coffee in one hand while the other drives the keyboard.”

Droplr is the best way to share files from your Mac on the internet.

it's your one-stop for all your Mac software needs.

Keyboard Maestro is a powerful macro program for Mac OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard which has received glowing reviews. Keyboard Maestro will take your Macintosh experience to a new level in “Ease of Use”.

Delibar focuses on giving Mac OS X users an easy and quick tool for searching, managing and sharing their Delicious bookmarks.

RT @adbert: RT @soniamarras: 99 Essential Twitter Tools And Applications

"Twitter started off like a confusing but fun way to keep up with what your friends or favorite bloggers were doing. Slowly more and more people started using Twitter and with that, many applications were built to accompany it. I call them courtiers. Here