The Austin, Texas-based company has adapted its MapMyRun software, combined with RFID and GPS tracking of runners, to allow marathon enthusiasts (and friends of competitors) to track their favorite runners. The software was used at the recent New York City Marathon and this past weekend at the San Francisco Marathon.

The software provides a variety of race information, including a map of the course, and allows runners to track their own progress and send out alerts on Facebook and Twitter.

For San Francisco, MapMyFitness offered a free iPhone app; an app for tracking individual runners was available as a $1.99 in-app purchase.

That said, my colleague Liz Gannes found that the marathon-tracking features could use a little more training. Gannes said she tried to track friends running the San Francisco half and full marathon, but found the app crashed often, demanded unnecessary personal information, and required payment for any of the tracking features that would have made it interesting.

It’s the latest expansion for MapMyFitness, which offers run- and ride-tracking apps available for the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry, with a companion Web site that lets one view all their past runs and rides. The company raised $5 million in Series A funding last November from Austin Ventures.

Coincidentally, just as the marathon was taking place in the city, I was about 25 miles south, rollerblading through Half Moon Bay, and I used MapMyRide to track my workout for the first time. The free program let me track my 5.9-mile ride along the coast, see how fast I was going, and annoy my friends via Facebook and Twitter. A $1.99 “plus” version removes the ads, allows one to take geotagged photos during the journey, and offers iPod integration to allow music to play while the app is running.

The company is one of many in a growing class of fitness apps, including Strava, which announced last week it has raised $12.6 million in Series B funding.

What makes Dragon Go a bit different is the fact that the new iPhone app often knows what to do with a specific query. Say “Play R.E.M.” and it opens Pandora. Say “buy tickets for Bridesmaids” and it will open Fandango. But say “Reviews for Bridesmaids” and it will open IMDB instead. Meanwhile, asking for a review of a restaurant should bring up Yelp while a query for reservations for that same restaurant polls OpenTable.

Nuance, which created the free app, has built an open architecture aimed at including all manner of vertical queries. At launch it supports more than 180 options from the aforementioned sites to services such as Yelp, Wikipedia and Google. And Nuance expects that number will continue to grow.

“We’ll see what kinds of things that people are interested in that maybe we didn’t anticipate,” Chief Creative Officer Gary Clayton said in a recent interview.

It’s the latest iPhone app from Nuance, which also offers the Dragon Dictation transcription program and Dragon Search, a more generic voice search application.

I played with Dragon Go some this week. It’s pretty easy and works much of the time, but the promotional video below overstates things a bit. The app can be amazingly adept at searching what one wants much of the time, but there are certainly times where it simply does a Google search for something close to — but not exactly — what one is searching for.

While there are plenty of apps that simulate Warhol-esque pop art on the iPhone, a new app from the artist’s namesake museum takes things a step further, educating users on the true process used to create such images.

Like other filters, the Warhol D.I.Y. Pop app works with either a photo in one’s library or with an image taken from the iPhone. Unlike other apps and filters, though, the Warhol app takes users through the real-world tools and techniques used to create such images, mimicking the silkscreen process on the phone.

“If inspired by the existing Warhol-esque apps, it was only due to our disappointment in them,” museum communications manager Rick Armstrong told AllThingsD. “Without the human interaction and creativity the results are not very exciting. The fun educational opportunity to expose Warhol’s process along with user interaction and creativity was what interested and inspired the project for us.”

The app starts by allowing users to crop their photo. From there the app asks users to create a film positive of their image, then expose the silkscreen, create an underpainting and then pull a squegee over the top of the virtual silkscreen to finish the effect. With each step, more detail on how the real-world process works is only a click away. While much of the work on the iPhone is automated, it gives users a feel for the process they are emulating.

Tresa Varner, curator for The Warhol, said in a statement that she feels Warhol would have embraced and celebrated technology like the iPhone.

“He often said he wanted to be a machine,” Varner said in a statement. “In a 1960’s interview, Warhol was asked how he would meet the challenge of automation, and he replied, ‘By becoming part of it.’”

The Pittsburgh, Pa.-based museum teamed with nearby Carnegie Mellon University’s Professional Software Engineering Program to engineer the app, which took 14 months to create and is now available on the iPhone App Store. It is priced at $1.99, though it is being discounted to 99 cents for the launch.

Fernando Pizarro found his while nursing a hangover at an International House of Pancakes. The former Yahoo business development manager was there this past January, struggling to find his credit card after a night of drinking with other entrepreneurs at a Palo Alto bar.

Finishing up his Rooty Tooty, Fresh ‘n Fruity, it slowly dawned on Pizarro what had happened. He’d been with a bunch of classmates from the Founder Institute and had left his credit card–and an open tab–at Antonio’s Nut House–a bar frequented by techies, including Marc Zuckerberg. Why, he thought, didn’t he have an app on his iPhone to remind him to retrieve his credit card before he exited the bar?

“I thought, there has to be something that would prevent me from leaving the bar,” he said.

But, search as he might, Pizarro couldn’t find a program that would remind you to do something before you leave a certain place. So, he had one built.

The result is Remember It App, which has just hit Apple’s app store. The 99-cent program is remarkably simple. The user sets a distance–from 50 feet to 500 feet–and when the iPhone goes that far from its present location, an alarm sounds. It’s essentially the digital equivalent of tying a string around one’s finger.

There are a couple downsides. First, the app only sounds an alarm, so one does have to recall what it was they wanted to do before leaving the place. Also, it naturally won’t work if the iPhone itself is the thing one leaves behind.

But Pizarro, who worked at Yahoo in Southeast Asia before quitting in 2008 to travel the world, hopes Remember It will help others avoid slip-ups similar to his. He also hopes the app will help fund his bigger project, a social video creation app.

“It requires cash and for the moment I’m bootstrapping,” Pizarro said.

That is all changing this week. On Monday, Microsoft announced a Photosynth app for the iPhone that lets users snap multiple still images in rapid succession. Meanwhile, Boston-based Everyscape plans to announce later on Wednesday a free iPhone app called Uscapeit that builds an immersive view from video clips taken in a particular manner.

Such photography, says Everyscape CEO Jim Schoonmaker, lets someone experience what it was like to be somewhere as opposed to just see a glimpse of the scene.

“It’s a much more emotive sense of content,” Schoonmaker said.

The new iPhone apps join Occipital, which pioneered the category with its 360 Panorama app for capturing panoramic views.

Each app takes a somewhat different approach and has its pros and cons as far as ease of use and quality.

Occipital’s approach is perhaps the easiest, allowing users to slowly pan around as they see on screen what they have captured and what remains. The downside is that this can lead to seams as well as some repeats of anything that is moving in the image.

Photosynth works by letting a user take multiple still images that can be stitched together to create the panorama. Unlike a Photosynth made on the desktop, however, users can see what it is they are capturing and how well it is overlapping with what they already have. Also, Photosynth can capture almost all the area around a camera, meaning you can see not only all the way around, but also up and down, provided you take the time to get all the necessary shots.

Uscapeit, meanwhile, builds its image off of a video clip that is uploaded to a cloud-based server system that renders the panorama. The downside is that the user can’t tell how well (or if at all) their image is coming out until they get the results several minutes later. There were several occasions when I learned only belatedly that my images hadn’t uploaded at all.

They also vary in the ways in which one can share the captured image. Occipital makes it easy to tweet or e-mail a link, but has yet to integrate Facebook sharing, which is included in both the other new entrants.

Microsoft has been telegraphing its plans to enter the area for awhile, having shown last year a plan for integrating panoramas into the Bing iPhone app.

Everyscape, meanwhile, has been at this for eight or nine years. In the past, it focused on certifying professional photographers to shoot the footage needed to scape the interiors of restaurants, hotels and other spots. The company already has several city dining guides using those professionally made images.

However, the company has long aimed to get the technology in more hands, Schoonmaker said. Over time, the company wants to expand to Android phones and even allow those with just a camcorder to upload their footage via the Web. That, Schoonmaker said, should allow its technology to reach far wider than approaches that rely on smartphones.

“We want to get to hundreds of millions,” Schoonmaker said. “That’s really when big things happen. I don’t know how many iPhones there are in India or parts of Africa.”

To get a sense for each of the apps, here are shots I did of the old school Taco Bell in Palo Alto using both Occipital and Photosynth. Sadly, my Uscapeit version there didn’t turn out, but the company has several good examples of what it can do on its Web site.

While time will tell which approach and results people appreciate most, the early winner here is Apple, whose iPhone now has several options in a category of photography in which most of its rivals don’t have a single program.

Intuit executives tell Mobilized that the company has seen 350,000 downloads for its SnapTax app in less than three weeks since the app was made available. SnapTax allows users that qualify for the simplest of tax returns to complete and electronically file their documents all from within a single app on their Android phone or iPhone.

The program uses the smartphone’s camera to take a picture of a person’s W-2 form and then pops the scanned information into the app, asks a series of about 10 questions and, voila, the return is ready for Uncle Sam.

Carol Howe, the product manager for SnapTax, said that the tax app was a good fit with highly mobile users, who tend to be younger and less likely have a complicated return.

“They don’t [own] a home, they don’t have dependents,” she said. “They just basically have a job.”

Users don’t pay anything to download the app, but do have to fork over $14.99 if they decide to go ahead and file from their phone. On the iPhone, it’s handled as an in-app purchase. On Android, users are prompted to upgrade to the paid version just as they go to file their return. The team said it was excited to hear about Google’s plans for in-app payments and looks forward to switching over to that, more straightforward, option once it is available.

So far, Intuit says it has seen 2.5 times as many downloads for the iPhone as for the Android version.

“It is a little bit of a surprise,” Howe said, though she noted the app has gotten strong promotion in Apple’s App Store.

To be honest, some of the folks on the team were surprised consumers were willing to file taxes on their phone at all. However, after Intuit began studying the issue two years ago it found that a number of consumers, particularly young people, had no problems putting their social security number and other information into their phones.

“Having their taxes on the phone isn’t any worse than all the private information that’s already on the phone,” said lead designer Alan Tifford, noting that the app tends to be popular among the same set that has their whole life stored in Gmail. What the team did do was add new layers of security, encrypting the tax data as it is being sent to and from Intuit’s servers and also requiring users protect the app’s data with a password, whether or not they use a password to secure their device as a whole.

Intuit tested out the idea of a phone app last year in California and has spent the last six months finalizing its plans for SnapTax and making sure it is ready for prime time. Howe (pictured above with Tifford and engineering manager Amir Eftekhari) said that while the downloads are a promising start, it’s too soon to gauge how many people will actually file their returns via the app. Howe said that Intuit will wait until all the filings take place in April to decide where to go next with the tax-preparation app.

SnapTax is just one of several mobile initiatives at Intuit. I spent several hours with CEO Brad Smith and other top executives at the company’s Mountain View, Calif., offices on Thursday and will have a follow-up post on the broader mobile strategy next week.

ThePlatform, a subsidiary of the cable giant, plans this week to launch a program that will allow workers whose job it is to post video content to use their iPhone to manage certain functions.

Workers will still have to use a PC or Mac to do the main work, but the iPhone app will allow basic tasks such as publishing a previously hidden piece of content (or taking down a piece that got published inadvertently).

“With the iPhone being a fairly ubiquitous device for media consumption, we felt it was also the perfect platform for media management,” said Ian Blaine, the CEO of thePlatform, which Comcast acquired in 2006. “It’s usually along with people wherever they are.”

Though clearly a niche product, it is the kind of application that many expect to see more of as businesses find ways of incorporating mobile devices into their office worfklow.

“I think what we are doing is a harbinger for others if they are not doing it already,” Blaine said.

Mpx, the main program developed by thePlatform, is used by Comcast itself and also sold to other cable providers such as Time Warner Cable, Cablevision and Cox, as well as by individual content producers such as NBC, PBS and Canada’s CBC. Mpx is used to edit and prepare video for sending to various devices, including phones, computers and set-top boxes.

“We’ve always been in the game of publishing to mobile devices, but being able to take advantage of the platform for actually publishing is pretty great and we are excited about it,” Blaine said.

The company has been testing the product with a few of its customers. Among those excited about the new mobile version of mpx are the folks at Time Warner Cable who use thePlatform to publish their content.

“We have been working with thePlatform to create a solution that supports our producers or editors responsible for ensuring that shows or clips are ready for publication, 24 hours a day,” said Eric Manchester, a member of Time Warner Cable’s technical staff. “Having a solution we can carry on us at all times allows us to solve many time sensitive issues without being tied to our desks.”

For now, those using the iPhone app will see only thumbnails of the videos in question, but Blaine said adding full-video previews is tops on the company’s list of features to add. It will also see if there is a way to achieve similar capabilities on the BlackBerry, given that many companies also use those devices.

With Android, Blaine said the company may not even need to do a separate app because the desktop version of mpx runs using Flash, which Android supports.

Palm (PALM), which has been trying to turn itself around, created a stir last month when it admitted that its phones weren’t selling as well as it had expected. Palm warned that its revenues for the year would be “well below” forecasts.

But Redwood City, Calif.-based Self Aware Games say they liked Palm’s webOS software enough that they took a chance about a year ago and started developing poker and blackjack games like “Word Ace” and “Card Ace: Blackjack” for Palm devices first, closely followed by versions for the iPhone and Facebook.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Among the interesting findings:

• People use free apps an average of 20 times before getting bored and looking for something else.
• The average time they spend using/playing with the apps is 9.6 minutes.
• So-called “tailgate” ads, which are short flash videos or games users interact with before an app launches, are keeping people’s attention for about 22 seconds–a positive development in the fledgling mobile ad space.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

On the revenue-seeking side, BoomTown’s Twitter Business Plan Count-Up hasn’t yielded any real keepers yet. There is a real contender, though–since Jennifer Aniston so publicly broke up with her boyfriend, John Mayer, on account of his Twitter “addiction,” BoomTown suggests offering “Twitter rehab” for those not willing to lose their relationships just yet. Not sure how zoning would work on that one, but the profit margin could be nice. The Guardian’s Changing Media Summit in London didn’t provide a lot of hard answers to the revenue question either, but it did gather the curious together to discuss the matter further, ponder the Next Big Thing, and talk about what the media company of tomorrow looks like. And, perhaps proving that during hard times Americans love an unlikely hero (a Seabiscuit for our own economic disaster?), Steve Wozniak escaped elimination from “Dancing With The Stars” for yet another week–undoubtedly due to the will of the people and their appreciation of his determined and goodhearted willingness to look silly on national television. The Pillsbury Doughboy bit probably didn’t hurt, either.

On the cost-saving side, MediaMemo wrote about job and salary cuts at the New York Times (NYT). The job cuts were on the business side, but the company slashed all of its nonunion salaries by 2.5-5 percent. It will ask for similar cuts from its unionized newsroom employees, in a spirit of “shared sacrifice.” Google (GOOG) sacrificed 200 more jobs, this time from sales. One of the most drastic signs of recession, however, may be the fact that Condé Nast’s higher echelons are cutting back on chauffeured cars to get them around Manhattan.

According to Digital Daily, It was Black Thursday at IBM (IBM) on the 26th, with 1,674 job losses (and counting). 5,000 jobs are expected to be cut overall, with many of the lost U.S. positions being transferred offshore. Better news over at Viacom’s (VIA) MTV games–according to new statistics, the company’s Rock Band franchise recently surpassed $1 billion in North American retail sales, making it the number one title of 2008 across all genres, based on revenue. And that’s before Beatles: Rock Band even comes close to shipping. That’s the kind of magic shown so far by Palm’s (PALM) forthcoming Pre handset, which–without a price or a release date–has boosted the company’s share price more than $7 based on little more than a CES debut and some enthusiastic analysts. Digital Daily noted that not everyone feels magical, but the launch will tell.

Over in Personal Technology, Walt Mossberg offered quick reviews of the iPhone apps he uses most often and that make the shiny Apple (AAPL) gadget worth the price. In Mossberg’s Mailbox, Walt pointed out the usefulness of IE8′s compatibility button, which makes the browser act like IE7 in certain instances, on Web sites that were coded around the peccadilloes of the earlier versions of the Microsoft (MSFT) software. Other readers had questions about ordering broadband service without a land line and burning movies to Blu-ray discs using an iMac. Katie Boehret spent the week testing out a new TV from Samsung–the first to integrate with the Yahoo (YHOO) Widget Engine, which enables viewers to watch shows and access the Web on the same large screen. Her thoughts are in The Mossberg Solution.

More next week.

I really had no idea if I would make it, or end up embarrassed with just my mom donating at the “polished rock level.” By the way, the polished rock level (free early download) was $10. But you could donate all the way up to “weapons-grade plutonium” ($10,000), where you get to sing a duet with me. One businesswoman from the United Kingdom, named Jo Pottinger, flew in last month to sing and, honestly, did a bang-up job.

So, how have I spent my money so far? Well, I got production help from my pal Don Was (The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Bonnie Raitt). He got me a great rate at the old A&M studios (where Carole King did “Tapestry,” Joni Mitchell did “Blue” and where so many of my favorites recorded). Normally, I would never be able to afford to record there.

He also hooked me up with some of my favorite old-time session players, like Jim Keltner, who played on all those Beatles solo records. We recorded old-school and played live with not much overdubbing–and that includes the vocals.

I wanted to have the energy and looseness of some of my favorite childhood records, before everything got so quantized and auto-tuned. And because of that, we did it really fast.

Oh, I have also booked a day where I will sing and play guitar on 10 songs to a click track. My idea is to release it with the audio files so that people (pro or amateur) can put the tracks on their garage band or pro-tools and mix, produce and deconstruct the songs as they see fit. Thinking of having a contest for the best production.

So, now that I have spent a little more than half my budget on recording, plus another $10,000 on various stuff (donation prizes, Webmaster fees, the PayPal percentage, iPhone apps), I have around $25,000 left to play with.

I still don’t want to license the record to any of the labels. But now I have to figure out how to do all the things they traditionally do (distribution, marketing, publicity) and take advantage of the opportunities with new media (which they have not been so great at).

There have been more than a few companies that have come to me with their new paradigms for how to make money in this digital age–mostly how they can make money. I am trying to look at all of them (some do sound sort of promising and intriguing).

Oh, and I still want to have hard copies available too–I have a friend who will make a mini graphic novel that would include two pages for every story (song).

So here I am, asking you smartypants AllThingsD.com people for ideas. You do seem to know more than most in the “industry.”

By the way, I reopened the Jillsnextrecord site recently, upon request, for those who told me they wanted to donate and have their names in the liner notes (or sung in a song). If any of you are interested–and I’m just saying–it will still be up until we go to the printers in a week or two.

{
    "Date Generated" = "2008-08-07 17:30:38 Etc/GMT";
    "BlackListedApps" = {
        "com.mal.icious" = {
            "Description" = "Being really bad!";
            "App Name" = "Malicious";
            "Date Revoked" = "2004-02-01 08:00:00 Etc/GMT";
        };
    };
}

com.mal.icious? “Description” = “Being really bad”? A 2004 revoke date?