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Journal App Narrato Gets Quantified Self With Moves Integration And Wider Platform Play
Narrato Journal, the iOS journaling app from Wayra-backed UK startup Narrato, has received a neat update: It’s added integration with the fitness tracking app Move via its recently launched API.
That in itself may seem only incremental. And on its own, it is. However, the update points to where Narrato is heading. For one, it’s the first tie-in to add Quantified Self data to Narrato, so that your Move activity shows up in Narrato’s Life Stream tab. But, zooming out further, it’s a sign of what the startup is building: an intermediary between different data types in a bid to become the “Evernote for the rest of your life”, says co-founder Ramy Khuffash.
“It’s your ‘personal cloud’ that you can populate with virtually any type of data. For example, you can import Tweets, Foursquare checkins, any social data, or more advanced things like health-related data,” he says.
So, in the case of Move, an app that uses a smartphone’s sensors to automatically and privately record your activities, “health-related” data includes things like where you went, how you got there, how long you stayed there, how many steps you took, and other physical activity. These are exactly the kind of jumping off points that could inspire a subsequent journal entry of their own — Narrato is purposely designed that way with two main views: journal entries and Life stream — but it’s what’s going on under the hood that makes the startup a potentially noteworthy platform play.
“The platform is incredibly flexible, and will eventually be open to third-party developers who will be able to build with data types that we haven’t even thought of yet,” says Khuffash. “The way our platform manages data, it can ingest and make sense of virtually any type of data, and it’s structured in a way that means third-party developers could collaborate around different data types”.
As an example, Khuffash cites the different formats for activity between the Moves, Nike+ and Fitbit. “They all represent essentially the same stuff but in vastly different formats,” he says. “The power of our platform is that once that data it put into it, it can then represent/translate it into a common format that all developers can use and agree on.”
That’s a draw for developers, no doubt. But for end users, the potential payoff of something like Narrato is the way “journal”-type or Life Stream data can sit side-by-side. “We’re creating more data than ever, but all of that data is spread across the Web in disparate silos,” notes Khuffash. “We believe that when your data is in one place that you control, it’s much more useful for you. This is especially true in the Quantified Self space, where your sleep data could be in one place, and your activity data could be in another. Each data set is useful and serves a purpose, but so much more is possible when that data in in one place.”
Narrato is usually priced at $3.99, which includes the first year’s subscription. However, to celebrate the Movies milestone, the app is being given away for free for one day only.
Cube26 Brings Galaxy S4-Style Gesture Control To India's Six Leading Smartphone OEMs
Gesture control is a buzzword on the tips of everyone’s tongues these days, and after Samsung debuted a number of touch-free control features with the Galaxy S4, it’s natural that other OEMs are looking to integrated the same kind of tech into their devices. That tendency has played out well for Cube26, a Santa Clara-based startup we caught up with at CES back in January when they were shopping around their vision tech and gesture control.
Cube26 co-founders Saurav Kumar and Aakash Jain have found some interested buyers, starting with six of India’s leading OEMs, including number two smartphone provider Micromax, Intex, Celkon, Zen, iBerry and Lemon Mobile. All told, Cube26 says this represents 25 percent of the Indian smartphone market, which according to recent data, is one of the fastest growing on the planet.
Kumar explained in an email to TechCrunch that OEMs around the world are looking for new ways to stand out from the crowd, which is what motivated Samsung to come up with its own gesture features to begin with. Cube26 offers a way to do this via licensed software, rather than having to develop it in-house, giving any OEM access to tech perceived as at the cutting edge of mobile products. And unlike Samsung’s version, it doesn’t require specialized hardware; the Galaxy S4 contains two IR cameras to make Air Gesture features work, whereas Cube26′s tech is designed to be used with standard smartphone cameras, as well as other connected devices like smart TVs.
Cube26 offers up a number of gesture features including “Look away to Pause,” “Auto-call” (call starts when phone moved to ear), and “Touch-less Swipe to answer,” which is demoed in the embedded video. All of these need only a front-facing camera to work, and if you’re curious about how the look away feature performs, you can download the startup’s dedicated video player for iOS, a tech demo which Cube26 says has received over 150,000 downloads since its launch in April.
To reflect its increased efforts to sell to mobile companies, Cube26 has also brought on Kunal Ahooja, former CEO of Indian mobile OEM S Mobility as an advisor. Smartphones packing its tech have already rolled out from Micromax (the Canvas 4) and iBerry (the Auxus Nuclea N1), and devices from the remaining new partners will follow shortly, per Kumar.
Others including Israeli startup Umoove and Leap Motion are attempting to capitalize on the newfound interest in gesture tech via partnerships with OEMs, so expect a lot of activity from this space as the land grab continues. Whether or not anyone will actually use hand-waving to control their smartphones long-term, instead of just as a product differentiation gimmick, remains far more uncertain, however.
Nokia Takes Auto Ambitions Into High Gear With Connected Driving, A Cross-Platform Suite Of In-Car Navigation Services and Smartphone Apps
While Nokia continues to work on clawing back some of the once-market-leading smartphone business it has lost in the last few years to Apple and Android handset makers like Samsung, it has also slowly been building out a business based around its mapping and navigation division, rebranded as HERE earlier this year. That strategy — which has seen deals with the likes of Toyota, Volkswagen, BMW and Garmin for its in-car navigation systems — is going into high gear today. Nokia is launching Connected Driving, which included HERE Auto for embedded in-car navigation; HERE Auto Cloud for extra services like real-time traffic updates; and HERE Auto Companion, apps that will make it seamless to link up location data that you want to use or that you’ve created in your car, with what you are doing when you are outside the car and using your smartphone instead. On top of this, it’s upgrading its HERE Traffic system with a new data processing engine called “Halo.”
The launch today, in some regards, represents one of Nokia’s biggest challenges yet: it’s pitching itself as an operating system provider for other hardware makers (car companies; in-car system makers) to use as the platform for new products. Call it Nokia’s Android strategy.
Nokia is unveiling this suite of services today at the the International Motor Show in Frankfurt, Germany. As with the rest of the products in HERE, Nokia’s intention is for all of this to be interoperable with different smartphone platforms. What that will mean in theory is that while HERE Auto and Auto Cloud will be loaded on to in-car systems, the apps in the Auto Companion will be launched for multiple platforms, including iOS and Android. In practice, though, Floris van de Klashorst, VP of connected cars for HERE, tells me that it’s likely that we will see the first services to be built on the platform that Nokia itself uses for smartphones, Windows Phone.
A rundown of the new services:
HERE Auto. This is Nokia’s embedded in-car navigation service. Using cached content, Nokia says it’s the first on the market that provides comprehensive mapping data even when a user doesn’t have a data connection. This includes turn by turn voice guided navigation in 95 countries, as well as 2D, 3D and satellite map views, with street-level imagery. Van de Klashorst tells me that Nokia is now also working on an SDK (yet to be released publicly) that will let third parties integrate services directly into this experience. He pointedly tells me that this will not include ads, which users they have surveyed have said are too distracting in cars. But this doesn’t rule out placing markers, for example, for a particular pizza joint when you are driving by it looking for some Italian food. Other features that are likely to come in by way of the SDK are music services and social networking services (not distracting like ads at all, right?!). Early users of this before the wider release include in-car system maker Continental, which is using them as part of its “Open Infotainment Platform.” I’d expect other app makers and navigation service companies to be added to the list soon.
HERE Auto Cloud. Like HERE Auto, this is also designed to work with and without data connections — useful for when you are in remote areas, or you are in regions where you may be roaming outside of your carrier’s network. This is Nokia’s own layer of extra services around driving — for example real-time traffic updates, helping drivers avoid congested areas, road closures or blockages that occur en route, as well as other services such as recommendations on places to eat, parking spots, information on where to charge an electric vehicle or where to find the most inexpensive fuel.
From the screenshots that Nokia provided to me, it looks like this is one of the fruits of its relationship with Foursquare:
HERE Auto Companion. This is the bridge between what Nokia is doing in the car and what it is doing outside of it. The Auto Companion, as Van de Klashorst demonstrated to me, works both on the web and as a mobile app, and it’s actually very cool: what it lets you do is create mapping instructions or take notes of a place that you’d like to visit, when you are sitting at your computer or on your phone, and then, when you get into your HERE-powered car, those data points follow you. If you start a trip in your car, and then park it, you can continue finding your way using your handset. Taking a page from the many apps that let users control what their TVs at home are recording, Nokia says that drivers can also use the app to find their car (using LiveSight augmented reality technology) and check stats for fuel levels and tire pressure. Part of this will be based on the new HALO platform, which basically will gather data using different sensors on the car. This will be used not just for app services for the consumer but to help gather more accurate information about weather in a particular place and more.
For cars that are shared between more than one person (say, in a family) each user can have his or her own interface in a vehicle:
Van de Klashorst tells me that the big idea here is to personalize those in-car experiences: “One thing that is apparent is that people have a strong relationship both with their cars and with their phones, but the in-car systems are ice cold. People cannot influence or modify or personalise them. To make them personal is a very important aspect.”
And when you think about this, it’s a potentially interesting area when you link it up with wider trends in the automotive space, such as with car sharing services like Zipcar. “With car sharing services, this car that you don’t own becomes your car. Systems like this once will be a very important part of elevating and experience to make it your own,” he notes.
Apart from the challenges of competing against other smartphone players (including Google, Apple and BlackBerry) who also have stakes in the automotive game — Apple already has integrations with several car makers and there are often rumors swirling of how this will expand over time; Google has gone so far as to create self-driving vehicles; and BlackBerry has QNX — Nokia is doing this from a position that is not without its own challenges. In Nokia’s last quarterly earnings, Here posted sales of $305 million, down 18% over last year, up 8% on the previous quarter and it remains loss-making, with a $116 million operating deficit, which is at least marginally better than the $120 million a year ago.
Still, Nokia has in its hands a very key asset: it holds one of the biggest databases of mapping information in the world, meaning it doesn’t need to rely on third parties for it. And even with its many layoffs, it still employs hundreds of engineers that are thinking of clever ways of using that to Nokia’s advantage. Nokia has nothing to lose by trying to get out into pole position in this space at this still-early stage in the connected car revolution.
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