Find Friends in Real World With Smartphone Application

Mobile application development is conquering new heights – the range of Android, iPhone and Windows Mobile applications is so wide that now practically any app for your needs can be developed by a software company.

The eShadow application based on the interaction with wireless technologies allows searching for buddies or foreigners with similar interests that are nearby. Of course, finding virtual friends is possible without leaving the computer thanks to thousands of various social networks. But Dong Xuan and his colleagues from the Ohio State University (USA) decided to move such technology into reality.

In practice it looks as follows: eShadow installed in your smartphone analyses the data of the nearest wireless networks or communication technologies used by other smartphones and shows the direction where you can find already existing friends or potential candidates to friends. The user can select filters according to this or that feature cutting off unwanted candidates.

The researchers tested their development in practice at the distance of 20-45 m with the participation of 2-7 people. In all cases the process of searching took about half a minute. But so far the application works only with Windows Mobile OS but in future it will become cross platform.

Finding a friend or a like-minded person in the crowd is not simple enough, but at the specialized social events your chances doubled. For example, at the conference on distributed computer systems (ICDCS 2011) where eShadow was first presented.

What do you think about this and similar applications? Are they necessary? I’d like to hear your opinion.

Magic from Apple

Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive and other famous people from Apple often call their products ‘magic’ and in some respects they are right. In many cases Apple is ahead of the market for years, it manages to create really incredible devices that change the world — isn’t it magic?

Do you need examples? Here you are. Let’s remember iPad — What’s this? What for? Who needs this ‘iPod on steroids’? And it turned out we need it! Step by step this strange toy is being transformed into an extremely convenient and user friendly tool for professionals and can be a gaming console, an internet tablet, an e-book and many other things as well.  The fantasy of iPad app developers is not limited and it means that iPads opportunities also. Isn’t it magic?

Or let’s take, for example, iPhone. Look at the market of smartphones today: Android, webOS, Windows Phone, many various sensor devices, Nokia smartphones based on Microsoft OS — they are the result of releasing the first Apple phone in 2007. Without it today the market of would be completely different. Isn’t it magic?

Last year Apple presented MacBook Air of the second generation and this year Intel has introduced the concept of ultrabooks which are Windows analogues of that very ‘air’ macbook. Plagiarism? Piracy? No, that’s the natural development of the market when consumers win and the Apple magic was the impulse for this development.

Thus, every software development company tries to conquer this magic and design and develop something new, exciting and magical.

June 8: World IPv6 Day

In the nearest future the Internet architecture is likely to undergo some dramatic changes: the current version of the protocol IPv4 has already become outdated, the resource of free IPs has been practically exhausted and the development of web can’t be stopped.  Thus, the companies who are responsible for the Internet performance (mainly providers and owners of web resources) agreed to have the World IPv6 Day on June 8, 2011.

Surprisingly, the initiative was not very successful. The Internet Society (or ISOC) had been accepting applications for participating in the project by June 3rd . If we believe in the statistics, provided by the trading association CompTIA, the first global testing was not as good as it had been expected. Only 23% companies took part in the initiative. Of course, the biggest recourses such as Google, Facebook and Yahoo!, as well as providers, in particular, the American Verizon. All these services offered their services simultaneously via two protocols: the old IPv4 and the new IPv6.

Of course, there were some problematic situations; however, most of them were caused by not by some peculiarities of the new protocol but the fact that the resources had to work simultaneously in two modes. informationweek.com offered to consider that it was the day of working in a two-standard mode and not IPv6 Day. And the more separate participants of the Internet market think about switching to the new protocol, the longer the conflict two-mode performance will continue.

In the nearest future, software development companies will develop their applications taking into account this new protocol and web application development will enter the higher level of performance.

Samsung Developers: New Application Development Center

Samsung has announced the launch of the new site intended for simplifying the process of mobile application development. The development of applications for Samsung phones, smartphones and communicators has become a popular project for individual users as well as for large software development companies.  

Finding applications for various platforms and devices at one big and rapidly growing resource is very convenient. It has changed the conventional views on the online application support all over the world. Millions of users taking part in software development have made the company think over more exciting and advanced opportunities in future.

Samsung Developers has announced about the new site for mobile developers working with Samsung devices where everyone can get the latest news and updates, rich content and the forum for obtaining the technical support and it doesn’t matter at all whether you develop for Windows Mobile, Java platform or just simple widgets. Samsung Developers combines all the platforms into one unified resource with the latest SDK versions, training videos, hardware and software updates.