In the original post I also promised to let everybody know once I found something that looked interesting and close to what I wanted out of a note application on the iPad. I think this application comes really close to something that I”d love to use in my daily work.

CourseNotes looks like the application that I”ve been waiting for. It has a lot of great features combined with an awesome UI, that seems really intuitive. Check the promotion video after the jump:

Organize your course notes into multiple subjects and note sessions

Export note sessions via email and send them to yourself or your friends

Transfer note sessions peer-to-peer with other CourseNotes users

Track assignments and ToDo lists for each subject

Define new terms and build a lexicon of definitions for each subject

Check out the application’’s website for more information: [www.coursenotesapp.com]

I just wrote an email to the developer and I”ll keep you updated if I hear something new.

Update:

I just received an email from Jon Klein from CourseNotes and here is something very interesting:

“We are actively working on “plain” drawing, and would like to include diagrams in the future, but have not yet begun any work on it.

Exporting to PDF is also on the TODO list, but not sure on the timeline for that either.  Exporting notes in general is something we want to take a careful look at.  We currently offer email and Bluetooth export, but we know that users will be wanting more in the future, like online sharing or desktop syncing.”

You sign up for a Flattr account like you would with any other social network like Digg, Twitter, StumbleUpon etc. You can then choose your monthly flatrate amount, there is a minimum of at least 2 EUR/month. For you as a content provider you have to be willing to give if you also want to receive, so if you want to add a Flattr button on your site then you will have to sign up for the monthly flatrate first. This isn”t a one-way service, it goes both ways.

Think of it as something kind of like Digg but where you donate or give micropayments to the content provider every time you click the Flattr button. As the end of the month Flattr will divide your monthly flatrate amount out to the content providers whom buttons your clicked.

So lets say you had a 20 EUR/month flatrate and you clicked the Flattr button 45 times this month then each provider that you clicked would get 1/45th of the 20 EUR = 0,44 EUR. I would imagine that users would make their own system so they would click some buttons twice if the content was really great – but I”m sure we”ll see some solutions about how you can give more to some.

Flattr are having informal talks with several large sites, such as Youtube and Flickr, it would make it possible for users of those sites to add Flattr buttons next to their content. Think of all the great possibilities if this service gets accepted as the standard payment across the web. No more trouble signing into PayPal, entering your CC details and so on. One click with one budget – can it get any easier?

“We are currently having informal talks with several large sites. We welcome anyone who wants to join, we do not exclude, we include.” – said co-founder Linus Olsson in an email.

It’’s not all good news, in the beginning Flattr will take a 10% cut of all the payments that the users make. They hope to be able to bring this cut down as the service gets more popular. They”re aware that if the service gets too expensive and only a small amount goes to the content makers, then people will simply stop using the service.

“We will at start have a 10% fee of the monthly Flattr amount, but hope to lower that as fast as the system takes of.”

I also asked them what they thought about expanding the service to mobile platforms and to that Linus Olsson answered:

“We are planning to build API’’s for every possible platform, iPhone is on that list.”

This seems quite interesting and I can”t wait to see how it will play out. There will be some bumps in the road for Flattr but if they get past them, the service could revolutionize the way content is delivered on the internet. It would give copyright owners a realistic alternative to giving their content away for free or have it pirated and distributed without their control – with Flattr they could now make money if the content is good enough.

In an interview with the British BBC Peter Sunde said the following:

“We want to encourage people to share money as well as content. It’s a test to see if this might be a working method for real micropayments.”

Content providers before have been successful in giving their content away for a price that the consumer decides themselves, just look at how Radiohead gave away their album for a price that the consumer decided. It was a huge success and it shocked the record industry, but the old men still didn”t change anything.

You can sign up for an invite code over on the Flattr site. According to Sunde the service will open up to the public around March.

You guys have certainly heard about the newest thing from Apple, the iPad right now at least. Well it would seem that Fujitsu already have a product called iPad, it’s a (smart)phone from 2002 running Windows CE.

History behind the trademark:
Fujitsu’s original application for the trademark “iPad” was stalled because the company Mag-Tech had already filled the trademark for a handheld number-encrypting device. U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s gave Fujitsu’s application a status of abandoned, be Fujitsu reapplied back in June 2009. A month later Apple applied for the international trademark through a proxy and has until February 28th to decide whether they will oppose Fujitsu’s original trademark application.

This is not the first time Apple has chosen a name that’s already used by somebody else. This also happened with the:

1. iPhone back in 2007: Linksys/Cisco already had a handheld phone called the iPhone but Apple payed up for the name. Read more at: [Engadget]
2. iTunes in 2003: Beatles’ Apple Corp. claimed that Apple Inc. was breaching a 1991 agreement that Apple wouldn’t enter the music business. Money took care of that problem too. Read more at: [Wikipedia]
3. iPod menu in 2006: Creative claimed that Apple Inc. was infringing their so called “Zen Patent”. Read more at: [iLounge]

So Apple and Fujitsu might just settle on a secret deal between the two companies which gives the Fujitsu executives a couple of Mercedes or even an Bugatti Veyron – each. Apple might actually fight this one in court. No one knows but Apple have until February 28th to decide what their next move is going to be.
Maybe Apple would actually change the name of the device to something better, like Slate or iSlate(iS late) – who knows.

I had planned on not making any posts regarding the iPad until I had actually had a hands-on with the device, but I just thought this was something interesting to share with you guys.

In other iPad news:
Adobe keeps whining about the iPad and iPhone not having Flash. Get over it and realize that your godawful plugin is finally dying. More over at: [Gizmodo]
The iPad SDK simulator is showing some hints that the iPad was supposed to have a camera. More over at: [CrunchGear]

Here is just a bunch of the rumors from the last couple of days:

• MacRumors: “Apple Tablet Likely to Include Front Facing Camera?”
• Wall Street Journal: “Apple Sees New Money in Old Media”
• TUAW: “Tablet analysis and opinion: What TUAW has put on the table”
• Fox News: “Verizon, AT&T May Carry Apple Tablet”
• MacRumors: “Apple Tablet Hints: Virtual Keyboard, Camera, eBooks, More”
• Gizmodo: “The Apple Tablet Interface Must Be Like This”
• AppleInsider: “Sources detail physical design of Apple’s upcoming tablet device”
• Kotaku: “Why Apple’s Tablet Will Include Gaming”
• MacRumors: “More Tablet Rumors: Dual Dock Connectors, Antenna Panel and Optional 3G Support?”

Then @williwu posted this picture on Twitter, it appears to be a traditional “spy-shot” – but it looks pretty real.

[tweet]

So what do you think? Anything close to what you tought it might look like? Let us know in the comments below.

Google Street View is finally here. Everyone can now go explore Denmark on their own computers.

A couple of days ago the Danish site Krak.dk launched their own version of Street View. Their pictures are better than Google’s but their complete lack of a proper user interface and there is no way you can navigate around without ending somewhere completely different. Google probably saw this as an attack to their Street View features and they quickly launched their Danish version. It’s been years since the first Google Street View car was spotted here in Denmark and the 21th of January was the day it went online. It’s reported to be working in over 100 Danish cities all over the country, great news for a lot of citizens here in Denmark but also for visitors. It should work on the iPhone Maps.app and on Android phones too.

Quickly people started exploring the pictures and places around the country. Photos started to appear around the internet especially on Twitter. Here is a couple of tweets from Danish tweeters:

• @mikkelmarius “Interesting street view: Someone being run down just in front of my office. http://bit.ly/7W8PTU #streetview #copenhagen” [tweet]
• @streetviewfunny “First Nude found in Denmark via Google Street View NSFW -http://tinyurl.com/ykntsts #streetview” [tweet]
• @streetviewfunny “First Danish Rubber Necker found via Google Street View - http://tinyurl.com/ykey6rp #streetview” [tweet]
• @streetviewfunny “Danish Couple Shopping for some Marital Aids via Google Street View - http://tinyurl.com/ylbazfz #streetview” [tweet]

Those are all pretty funny and they are now added to all the other funny Google Street View photos. It appears that the photos are taken on widely different times.
This road supports the claim, try to move just one step forward and see the seasons jump from fall to summer. See more right here: Google Street View

Google employees with a little waving.

Google Street View also came to Sweden and a bunch of other improvements – check out the source for more information. I wonder if their new patent for ad placement will ever actually be real?

Here is a man teaching a woman how to use a cellphone:

[Google Latlong Blog]

Danish source [Ekstra Bladet]

Update:
@iTelling just sent me this photo from Google Street View. This is the TV show “Hvor fanden er Herning?” shooting on location.

Check it out here

Now it’s official Apple is hosting an event on the 27th January at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. Apple has just sent invitations around to select media outlets around the world with the title “Come see our latest creation”. The invitations doesn’t mention what they are going to announce but that was expected. Rumors have been flying around the internet for past 3 years about a possible Apple tablet and this seems to be the day it’s going to be revealed to the public.

While I do expect Apple to launch some kind of tablet I don’t think anyone is really going to have an idea as to how it’s going to be. Just like the iPhone launch when people expected and iPod with a built-in phone and Apple launched the iPhone which was something entirely new that nobody had expected. I image this new product is going to do the same things, amaze and surprise – or at least that’s what I’m hoping for.

It’ll all take place at 10AM Pacific time, 18:00 GMT and 19:00 here in Denmark. I’ll be covering the new products and what I think about them as soon as something is revealed.

Read more at:

[ars technica] [WSJ Blog]

Update:
@williwu “Possibly iPad/iSlate photo? http://bit.ly/6ChPpb Seems to fit the rumors.” [tweet]

Alright lets cut to the chase:

It’s been over two years since Open Handset Alliance unveiled the Android an operating system designed by Google. Android is a mobile device platform built on the Linux Kernel. The first cellphone to be released with Android was the HTC Dream/T-Mobile G1. The Android system quickly gained popularity after the launch of the G1 and more people and manufacturers became interested in this free and open-sourced mobile device platform. In the end of 2009 there was 18 phones running Android, HTC is the manufacturer with the most Android phones out at the moment. So that was some history on Android now lets get back to the newly released Google Nexus One.

The Google Nexus One was announced by Google on January 5th just before CES. A lot of people had been looking forward to this “superphone” to rule them all like so many times before it got the name “iPhone killer”. The hype was big at the Google press conference where press and bloggers were given free phones to review and keep.* Quickly after the dust had settled, people started to discover problems and bugs with the Nexus One. As more and more people turned to the Google customer support, the forums and auto response FAQ answers failed to satisfy most users. Some users tried to contact T-Mobile and HTC for support but they kept referring the customers towards each other or Google. Google just wasn’t prepared for all this need for support, they can usually deal with by just referring to their FAQ. More than 518 comments in a thread about T-Mobile Upgrade Eligibility.**

So could Google have handled the launch differently? Well it seems like Google wasn’t really prepared for launching and selling hardware at the moment. They hadn’t done their homework as far as support goes and they were clearly caught off guard. When Apple launched the iPhone back in 2007 they received some bad press for how they handled support but it now shows that Apple benefitted from the way they handled and took care of problems. Apple insisted that AT&T would send customers to Apple(Store) and then they would deal with their problems.

The Google Nexus One got all the hardware and software to support multi-touch and yet they thought it would be a good idea to exclude this in the US version of the Nexus One. The same happened to the Motorola Droid which doesn’t have multitouch but its European counterpart, the Motorola Milestone, does indeed have multitouch. People are claiming it because of a patent made by Apple, apparently they have patented the whole multi-touch technology. In Europe you can’t patent software though so that should be the reason for Nexus One and other Android phones lacking multitouch in the US. I don’t really think this is the issue since so many companies are including multitouch in their products even in the US, and the fact that multitouch is in fact included in Android – but just disabled on US phones, seems weird. Well okay I guess you can live without multitouch gestures such as pinching and etc. right?

This video pretty much proves my point that the Nexus One is still missing a lot of testing and bugfixing. I still don’t really understand the need for the trackball and the four buttons on the bottom, excuse me but the phone have a touchscreen – that was a touchscreen, that means you don’t need all those buttons and trackballs. Just look at how Apple managed to only place one button on the front of the iPhone with volume up/down, silence/ring and standby/power off on the sides. It just seems like you wouldn’t have a need for those buttons but maybe that’s just me. Anyway as you just saw in the video the four touchscreen capable buttons at the bottoms doesn’t seem to be working properly, since the reviewer seems to have a lot of problems pressing them.

As this test shows, the Google Nexus One is falling a bit behind on the touchscreen but it is doing fairly well compared to the Droid. Read more about the test at: labs.MOTO.com

The expectations to the Google Nexus One was big when the first photos and descriptions of it showed up on the internet. Google had given the phone out to employees as an early Christmas gift and of course these employees were telling the whole world about the new fantastic phone. After all the photos and information had been released there was really nothing new other than a sad little phone that is being sold online by Google only. It really is just the next HTC Android smartphone, nothing is really revolutionary or new about the phone except the Google branding. It hasn’t being sprinkled with magic unicorn dust or anything else. If Google hadn’t given the phone to it’s employees, then they would have surprised the whole world at the press conference, the press would have been writing about it for days whereas now who is really talking about the Nexus One? The only stories I’m seeing about it is describing the poor support or lack thereof. We had all expected Google to revolutionize the way smartphones are sold and subsidize in the US, but it’s still just a HTC phone being sold on a two year contract. I’m sorry but I don’t need yet another Android phone on contract, where is the Google that usually “breaks new grounds” and does what they want and not what the big companies want them to do. I want Google to put pressure on T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon and make some changes to the way cellphones are being sold. Where is the GSM/CDMA chip so it could function across multiple networks. I was expecting a lot more from Google with this “Google Phone” and what I’ve seen so far doesn’t make me want to trash my iPhone at all.

You should remember that I’ve been using an iPhone for over 2 years now so I’m used to the way an iPhone handles different things. I’m sure you could get used to the way the Google Nexus One does things it just takes some time, just like when I first started using the iPhone. I do realize that Google Nexus One is kicking the iPhone’s butt in a lot of cases, but I personally had just hoped for more from Google. I really like the way Android handles the integration with cloud applications and documents, the Gmail app is just one of the places that Android phones beat the crap out of the iPhone.

* According to new FTC endorsement guidelines, bloggers are now required to disclose free gifts from companies whose products they review. http://bit.ly/8jfaL9
** Google Support forum, http://bit.ly/7tOdUc

Update:
Nexus One Multitouch Available Now; Floodgates Open for Hackers [Gizmodo]

CitySourced is basically an app for the normal citizen in every american city* who wants to help the local government/city council with problems around the city. This sounds really great and the way CitySourced executes this idea of citizen reporting is just brilliant. The easiest way to understand this app is to see it or understand how it works for the person wanting to report something.

So let’s say you are driving down a road in San Jose, CA and suddenly you see a pothole in the middle of the road so you park your car at the side of the road goes out and with CitySourced snaps a photo of the pothole. Then the apps reads your GPS coordinates and sends it to the city council of the city you are in. At the city council they have a program running on a computer that sees all of these reporting tick in and they can then review them and fix them. The developers are planning on implement some features requested by Kevin Rose at TechCrunch50, some of these features are:

• Be able to subscribe to your own neighborhood.
• See events close to you, that you can take action on right now.
• Implement a Digg like system where you can vote up reports to give them higher priorities.

Besides these new features they are also planning to implement the app with other data sources and for the city council to gather all this real time data at a central point.

Take a look at this video fra TechCrunch50 with the company presenting the application:

I think this is a really great application for the iPhone and they are developing an app for the Palm Pre with Android support coming soon. This really should be in every city around the world, just think about all the problems we meet every single day these would be easier to fix.

Website: CitySourced.com

Twitter: @CitySourced

*I hope this expands to the rest of the world soon.

Review recap:

One of the biggest things going on right now is the story of Apple “secretly” registering domains and trademarks back in 2007 as a way of securing the brand for a future product launch. In 2007 the domain iSlate.com was transferred to the registrar MarkMonitor.com which we know is responsible for Apple domain and trademark registrations. Of course the name of the real registrar was hidden behind MarkMonitor.com. This looks suspicious but it could just be a coincidence.

But the rumor site MacRumors.com investigated the domain further and they found out that sometime in 2007 the real owner of the domain was exposed for a short time. Guess who was the owner of the domain, yes you guessed it, Apple. So the name definitely seems to be a plausible name for the Apple Tablet or should I call it the Apple iSlate.

Besides the domain name pointing towards iSlate as the name the trademark is registered in Europe by a lawfirm Apple is known for using to register trademarks. In the United States the trademark is registered to a unknown company in Delaware, Slate Computing LLC. Back before the iPhone  was launched a little unknown company also in Delaware registered that trademark too. Now this could of course all be a coincidence but someone dug deeper and found out that a Regina Porter had signed for the trademark. Regina Porter is also an employee at Apple Inc, with the title Senior Trademark Specialist. So we just found out that Apple is making up small “fake ” companies so they can register trademarks and domains without anybody knowing, no big deal everybody is doing that.

So Apple registered the domain iSlate.com back in 2007 and registered a trademark in both Europe and The US. Apple has also told iPhone developers to start preparing their applications for a bigger screen. Rumors are saying that the iPhone SDK 4 and OS4 has tools for a bigger resolution.

Apple has also rented Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco the 27th of January so it’s expected to be launched there and shipping within 2-6 months.

A reader at CultOfMac just got a tip from a friend who is working at Apple, saying that the tablet will have a very “steep learning curve”. I’m not buying because of multiple things:

• Apple is not known for releasing things that doesn’t work out of the box and intuitive.
• When Steve Jobs showed the iPhone for the first time he spent almost 2 hours explaining how revolutionizing this new device was. After this Apple made videos where people could learn to use their new gadget.
• A “steep learning curve” could be two things, either it means there will be a lot of learning or a learning that is easy and goes fast.
• I think Apple will try to just add more gestures to their already functioning multitouch technologies.
• More VoiceOver controls like we know from the iPhone and OS X.

Then some rumors about a 3D graphic User Interface used for navigation and such. It should be a 3D quality UI but on a two dimensional screen. I’m not so sure about this rumor tho.

More cloud based operating system. It does indeed seem like we are moving more and more into the cloud but I think we still need some things before a 100% cloud-based operating system can be used on this tablet.