TV3’s On Demand video service for mobile has been suspended while the broadcaster investigates a breach which allowed an undisclosed number of users to download content to their mobile devices.
In six weeks Tourism Radio’s apps for campervan operators like Maui, Britz and Motorhome Republic have been downloaded 4500 times. It’s a modest starting point, but the company has high hopes for taking a slice out of New Zealand’s $15 billion tourism economy using smartphones.
Real estate company rubs salt into wound by showing this reporter all the houses he’ll never afford with visual and interactive iPad app.
Finding the right voice is a crucial component of many ad campaigns. And Word of Mouth is trying to make that job a little bit easier with the launch of its new iPhone app.
Digital Arts Network’s Ross Howard talks about the year-long development of TVNZ’s OnDemand app, building an in-app advertising platform, and the possibilities of integrating major social elements into the product in the near future.
Getting any salty old sea dog to share their secret fishing spots is nigh-on impossible. And this reluctance can sometimes be dangerous, because if they get into trouble no-one knows where they are. So, in an effort to deal with this problem and stop its customers from dying, Hutchwilco, DDB and Rapp Tribal developed a clever and helpful iPhone app that allows fishermen to log their co-ordinates to a secure database and if they don’t come home, a loved one can log on, see where they like to go, and send the details straight to the Coastguard.
If Rule 34 of the internet is “If it exists, there’s porn of it”, then surely Rule 35 is “If it can host porn, it will host porn”, a lesson Twitter’s new video service, Vine, has learned today.
Hawke’s Bay man creates iOS game from home which has taken the app world by storm, now sitting pretty in the Apple App charts.
Panasonic and Trade Me have teamed up to take advantage of televisions becoming more and more computer-like, with the launch of the Trade Me app for Panasonic Smart Viera TVs.
There’s gold in them thar mobile hills. And a rare few developers have been able to mine it, with The Angry Birds brand estimated to be worth over $1 billion, and OMGPOP, the makers of the hugely popular Draw Something app, bought by Zynga earlier this year for US$185 million (it’s a fickle world, however, and, as is often the case, both Zynga and OMGPOP have failed to rediscover the magic recently). And now, inspired by the gameplay of Draw Something, Kiwi entrepreneurs Tristan Holman, who runs a consultancy called Flashgun in the UK, and Brett Hancock, who heads up Born Digital, are hoping they might follow in their footsteps with their own game called Act a Word.
Recycling really should be second nature by now, but it doesn’t take much more than a look around to see there’s still plenty of work to be done in terms of education. So in an effort to fill up those 1000-odd recycling bins all around the country, Love NZ has just pushed play on a six-week campaign by McCann Melbourne and its direct and digital arm MRM called It’s A Karma Thing, which exhorts Kiwis to ‘do the right thing’ and earn points they can then redeem for prizes.
There were 300 entries from 33 countries for the Google-sponsored IxDA Interaction Design Awards. And Xero has beaten corporate giants Nike and Windows Phone 7 to take out the “best in class for global interaction design” award.
As far as first world problems go, searching for a scoop of hokey pokey on the summer roadtrip and discovering the store you stop at doesn’t do cones is right up there. It just doesn’t feel right if it’s not dripping down your arm and smothered all over your face. Thankfully, Tip Top and Colenso are attempting to remedy this with the new Scoop app, which gives ice-cream fiends the coordinates of their closest roller.
An app to book a hotel room at super short notice. You’d think someone would have thought of that already. But you’d be wrong. As it turns out, 21-year-old AUT marketing graduate Veronica Nobbs is trying to cash in on this gap in the market with Get a Room, a mobile app that offers punters hotel rooms at the cheapest rates when they’re booking at the last minute from their mobile.
There are currently thousands of tourists gallivanting around New Zealand, and many of them are freedom camping. Mostly, that’s a positive thing. But in some cases it leads to the inevitable negative stories about disrespectful visitors leaving a trail of filth behind them. Over the past 18 months, a team of mobile gurus has been trying to remedy this by plugging the information gap that currently exists with a free location-based app called Campermate that offers information about nearby rubbish bins, campgrounds, toilets and other amenities. And two of them are trying to get visitors to download it by heading on the ‘2-egg roadtrip’ and bribing them with free food.
With the rise of daily deal sites, smart phone technology and e-commerce, the way we’re shopping is changing rapidly and a discount culture has well and truly taken hold. And while New Zealand may be lagging behind slightly in comparison to other tech-savvy nations, lasoo.co.nz is hoping to remedy that slightly with the launch of its “smarter shopping assistant” on Android and Windows Phone apps, which allow shoppers to find and select the best deals while wandering in ‘meatspace’.
Fairfax Media is expanding its portable news repertoire, last week announcing the launch of its first Android app for Stuff.co.nz. That means “more people than ever can get up to date with Stuff’s award winning news on the go”, according to Fairfax digital general manager Nigel Tutt.
While iPhones and the like have burst onto the mobile scene, there hasn’t been an associated explosion of app designers to create the apps that make the smartphone world turn. This shortage is particularly noticeable in New Zealand and finding designers has proved a real struggle for Brett Hancock, founder of digital design company Born Digital. In fact, pickings are so slim that when the company recently put an ad on Seek for a full-time iPhone app developer, only one lonesome response was received over an entire month.