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Bits Blog: A Firefox Smartphone for the Developing World

September 7, 2012 by Leave a Comment

The smartphones going into the world’s next two billion pairs of hands may not belong to either Google or Apple, but to Mozilla.

The Mozilla Foundation, which oversees open source software projects like the Firefox Web browser, expects to release a mobile operating system for smartphones early next year. Its target market is Latin America, then the rest of the developing world, where smartphones from Apple and Google are still too expensive for most people.

The Firefox models will be anywhere to one-third to one-sixth the cost of the competition, according to Mozilla and its partners.

“This is the connection of the world to each other” though mobile devices connected to the Internet, said Gary Kovacs, chief executive of the Mozilla Foundation. “This is about a standard, compliant easily accessible Web” for mobile devices, he said. The phones would be “in the middle of the high end of the feature set, and the low end of the price,” he said.

Mozilla’s main partner is Spain’s Telefonica, which already has about 215 million mobile subscribers in Latin America, and operates 6,500 stores worldwide.

Telefonica also has co-investments with China Unicom, a major Chinese carrier, and is an investor in Telecom Italia. Other carriers, including the German giant Deutsche Telekom, are also participating in the technical work. Qualcomm, a major maker of mobile phone chips, is also part of the Mozilla project.

“We are looking at a $100 to $115 price point” for the phone, said Carlos Domingo, director of product development and innovation at Telefónica Digital. He said the phone would have features associated with high-end phones using Apple’s iPhone or Google’s Android operating systems, he said, like a sharp camera, a big touch screen and an accelerometer. And, of course, a Firefox browser:

The Firefox phone will largely be sold in prepaid phone markets, where lower-income people typically buy their air minutes ahead of time. An Apple iPhone without a two year contract costs about $650. High-end Android smartphones cost $350 to $450 without a contract.

The carriers may welcome a competitor to Google and Apple, and thus participate in the Mozilla initiative as a way of ensuring that they are not always at the mercy of the two giants in terms of future technology. Qualcomm gets an outlet to sell more chips.

Mozilla hopes its phone will increase the use of the Web on mobile devices, instead of mobile apps created to work only with Apple or Google products. It still plans to release a mobile “store” where people can buy mobile software, but does not plan to police it, like Apple does, or block developers not working with Google, as the search company does with its store.

The Firefox smartphones will work according to technical standards that will make it easy for content developed for the Web to move to phones, Mr. Kovacs said, perhaps eventually eliminating the need for specially built mobile applications. Like its other products, the software for the Firefox phones will be free and open to inspection by anyone, he said.

There are already cheaper phones on the market, like the $70 model by China’s Huawei that is popular in Africa, where an economy tied to Amazon’s cloud computing is emerging. Those phones have tiny screens, Mr. Domingo said, and use older versions of Android.

The first manufacturers of the phones will be ZTE and the TCL Corporation, both Chinese manufacturers.

Article source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/07/a-firefox-smartphone-for-the-poor/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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App Smart: Tracking Your Car’s Performance (or Lack of It) by Phone

October 20, 2011 by Leave a Comment

I haven’t yet managed to procure a Turbo, but high-performance autos remain a preoccupation, as do apps that cater to the part of me that can’t drive 55.

The best one on my list is Dynolicious ($13), which measures your car’s horsepower, speed and braking power, among other things, and lets you share those statistics with like-minded people.

Yes, it is about as practical as a pint of octane boost or a pair of fuzzy dice. But for anyone who doesn’t mind occasionally treading on the red line, this app is worth buying.

And if $13 is too high, you can essentially get the same app for $5 — although with a liberal dose of advertising — with Bosch Light ’Em Up Dyno Iridium. It is produced by the creator of Dynolicious, and the only significant difference between the apps is the Bosch branding in the cheaper app. A free trial version of the Bosch app, Light ’Em Up Dyno, is also available.

Android users cannot get quite the same quality with similarly designed apps, like aDyno (free for the ad-supported version, $4.80 for the ad-free version), Dynomaster ($5) or RaceDroid (free), although Dynomaster is the closest of the three and well worth trying. (It also has an unlimited refund policy.)

Both Dynolicious and Bosch Light ’Em Up Dyno use the iPhone’s accelerometer and geotracking mechanisms to reproduce the testing and output of a traditional dynamometer, a performance-tracking tool commonly found at speedways.

And while pit crews would not rely on these apps to prep for the next Nascar race, the data is reliable enough for hobbyists, at least if you are willing to devote a half-hour or so to configuring the software.

That process can be slightly frustrating if you do not know some basic information about your car, or where to find that data, so here are some shortcuts.

To start Dynolicious or Bosch Light ’Em Up, you need to know your car’s weight and drive train loss. The car’s weight is easy enough to find in a manual or online. (Search for “curb weight MT” if you have a manual transmission and “curb weight AT” for automatic transmissions.)

Add the weight of the car’s occupants when testing, and if the car’s tank is less than full, subtract roughly six pounds for each gallon of missing gas.

Drive train loss, or the amount of power lost in the journey from the engine to the wheels, varies from car to car, but according to the Dynolicious manual, 20 percent is a “fairly accurate” figure. (Online auto forums, like Ultimatecarpage.com, suggest that the range is 10 percent to 30 percent.)

I spent 10 minutes surfing around the Web and, on a barely educated guess, settled on 17 percent for my manual transmission BMW.

Dynolicious and Bosch require you to calibrate the device’s accelerometer — that takes about 30 seconds, with step-by-step guidance in the app’s setup section.

Yahoo Autos suggested that my car’s horsepower was 184 at 6,000 revolutions per minute, so I took Dynolicious for a test spin on the highway to see whether my car had lost a step since it rolled off the assembly line several years ago. I was also curious to see how quickly I could reach 40 m.p.h. and 60 m.p.h.

I found a highway entrance with a stop sign, opened the Timed Run section of the app and pressed the Go button. The software detects your car’s motion and starts the test accordingly, so you can concentrate on driving safely.

I accelerated quickly through the gears, and when I reached highway speed and stopped accelerating, the app automatically stopped the test.

I then pulled off the highway and checked the results. They were disappointing.

The app did not return a horsepower reading, and its 0-to-40 result (nearly eight seconds) was unrealistically slow.

Justin Morgenthau, BunsenTech’s president, said my experience was the result of a known issue with the app and said rebooting the device would solve the problem.

He also suggested I mount the device in a bracket or place it in a cup holder with enough surrounding material to keep it stationary and position it so it was leaning slightly forward.

I followed both bits of advice, and it worked much better. Dynolicious said my car had reached 181 horsepower, and I reached 60 m.p.h. in 9.1 seconds. Not exactly worth posting on Facebook or Twitter — which you can do from within the app — but it was good enough.

Dynolicious and Bosch also track your time at 70 m.p.h. and 80 m.p.h., as well as your quarter-mile time. Mr. Morgenthau said such measures were for people who were driving on test tracks, private raceways and other places for safe and legal high-speed driving.

The apps measure your car’s braking and steering performance, too, but Mr. Morgenthau said such features were for more serious driving devotees who want to refine their technique.

If the $5 price for Bosch Iridium gives you pause, the free version is the obvious alternative. It measures only your horsepower, 0-to-60 time and quarter-mile time, and you cannot add multiple cars or save your tests as you can with the paid version.

But free, it is a great way to give the category a try and maybe reconnect with the part of you that once considered cars something more than just a way to get to work.

Quick Calls

Sentinel 3: Homeworld is a new release on Android ($3). The alien battle game, which is already attracting high ratings from Android users, was among the more popular Apple games of 2010. OpenDesks and LiquidSpace (both free on Apple) let mobile workers, freelancers and others find and reserve work space in multiple cities.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=d190c49eb780307aafd62d4768193ab0

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Projects Use Phone Data to Track Public Services

June 6, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The city’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority has been trying to provide a better sense of predictability in recent years by adding displays in stations that state when the next train is expected. Now, a Web development firm called Densebrain says that it can do the same thing at practically no cost, by analyzing how people lose phone service when they head underground.

Urban planners, technology companies and officials from local governments see potential in projects like these that mine data collected from phones to provide better public services.

Boston is developing a system called Street Bump that uses a smartphone’s accelerometer and GPS system to detect when a driver hits a pothole and then sends that information to city officials.

Techniques like this may help cities collect data that until recently would have required expensive network sensors.

“It is unlikely that we are going to be able to invest in that sensor system. But what we’ve recognized is that many, many constituents have already invested in a sensor platform,” said Chris Osgood, co-chairman of the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics in Boston, which is responsible for establishing Street Bump.

Densebrain’s project works by taking note of which cellphone tower a phone is communicating with. It then looks for disruptions in service followed by significant changes in location. If a phone located near Times Square suddenly loses service and reconnects at Prince Street and Broadway 15 minutes later, then it has almost certainly traveled there using the N or R trains.

This type of data, when taken from large numbers of phones and analyzed algorithmically, could give an accurate look at the performance of the entire subway system in real time.

Or so Alex Morgan Bell hopes. Mr. Bell began designing the system last year, when he was studying electric engineering at Columbia. After trying to get the idea going by himself and luring only several hundred people as users, Mr. Bell joined Densebrain, a Web development company that makes NYCMate, a transit map app (and is perhaps best known for SitorSquat, an app that maps public restrooms).

Users of the free transit app, who number about 600,000, according to the company, will be asked to activate the feature starting on Monday. Mr. Bell believes that the system needs 10,000 users to give a reliable view of the trains in Manhattan.

There are still questions to work out. In its pilot stage, the NextTrain app will work only for trains underground. The system will also include an experiment that uses phones’ microphones to sense when riders are on buses, but Mr. Bell believes that some sort of hardware would probably have to be installed for the system to work above ground.

There are other ways to track mass transit. NextBus, a technology company based in California, works with about 90 transit systems nationwide to analyze data drawn from GPS devices to provide real-time updates on the movements of buses and trains. Los Angeles began using NextBus for its entire bus system in May, the largest transit agency to do so.

Mr. Bell said the information appearing on the authority’s subway arrival clocks did not help riders who were still above ground. The authority said that though it would like to provide that information to developers eventually, it had no specific plans to do so.

“You can stay in the Starbucks instead of leaving, because you’ll know when to say, O.K., now I’m going down into the hot sweaty disgustingness,” Mr. Bell said.

The authority says that NextTrain could be a useful service for riders as a supplement to its own projects, and an engineer at the authority said that Densebrain’s data might prove useful for its own planning.

Data automatically collected from large groups of cellphones is a new frontier for planners and local governments, said Frank Hebbert, director of civic works for Open Plans, a nonprofit technology and planning association.

“It’s a completely different source of data,” said Mr. Hebbert. “The idea that you suddenly have data sets coming to you in which you haven’t had to go and physically put in infrastructure is pretty amazing.”

Another smartphone app, Waze, combines data on how fast users’ cars are moving with other data sources to determine traffic patterns. It then suggests alternate routes.

Waze, which says it has about four million active users, said it was in talks with several city governments to provide insight into traffic patterns near large construction projects. The company says that its benchmark for critical mass is to have 0.25 percent of drivers in a metropolitan area as users. It has not reached that goal in any American city.

Apple and Google have been collecting traffic data from iPhone and Android phones for similar purposes. Mr. Hebbert said he would eventually like to see phone companies provide a database of anonymous location information that planners and developers could use to build applications relevant to civic projects.

This could be a challenge, as it is clear that many people are uncomfortable with technology companies or government agencies tracking their every move.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=68ee318d77a75a38909f4dbb7f8788c2

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