Posts Tagged ‘Programming’
Google’s do-it-yourself Android App Inventor opens up to all
Google is opening up , its web software for easily creating Android apps, to everyone, the company in a blog post.
, and users previously had to request an invitation to gain access to it. Now the software will drop the need for invites and move to beta status, like many Google services. By doing so, Google has enabled anyone — from novice users, to more experienced programmers — to create Android mobile apps of their own.
Google says a wide variety of users have taken advantage of App Inventor so far, building things like a , an and . With the software, users can drag and drop blocks of code to build their app, so they don’t need programming knowledge to use the software.
DIY, or do-it-yourself, technology is a growing trend these days. As VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi previously wrote, “Microsoft has made similar efforts, offering tools to help any user create video games that can run on the Xbox 360. And of the whole movement.” App Inventor’s accessibility also sits in stark contrast to Apple’s app development environment, which requires annual fees and adherence to Apple’s rules.
You can see the software demonstrated in a video below.
Companies:
Data-Mine Other People’s Flickr Photos to Generate Your Travel Itinerary
Say you have three days to spend in New York City, the . The Yahoo software starts by separating tourist photos taken in New York from photos posted by city-dwellers, using geolocation data to ensure a user's string of NYC photos covered a short span of time before moving on elsewhere. It then uses the frequency of different landmarks to determine what attractions the crowd finds most popular.
It then begins looking at the timestamps across that universe of NYC tourist photos. How long did most people spend at each attraction? How long did it take people, on average, to get from the Statue of Liberty downtown to the Metropolitan Museum uptown? From Rockefeller Center over to the nearby MoMA?
By crunching all this visual and geolocation data, the program can turn out a detailed itinerary to help travelers make the most of their limited time at a destination. Moreover, the crowdsourced itineraries scored rather well against professionally prepared itineraries among human travelers that were asked to compare the two, with 70% of human testers finding the computer generated itineraries superior to the travel agents'.
The problem with these crowd-based itineraries is that they favor the absolute middle. They average people's interest, and therefore come up with itineraries that are geared toward very general preferences. The next step is greater personalization -- allowing different travelers to input their personal interests and figure a way to have the program bias that itinerary toward Flickr users with similar interests.
In tests the program was limited to London, Paris, Barcelona, New York, and San Francisco, but with some further work and refinement could be extended to smaller and less popular destinations as well.
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