We’re very proud that the brand new version of bLife for iPad is now available in the App Store. Drawing upon leading-edge research, bLife is an application that helps you set, visualize, and achieve your life goals. We’ve been working in close partnership with the bLife team to design and develop a highly innovative product with a gorgeous user interface.
bLife Inc. is a Los Angeles-based company focused on creating mobile and social experiences that develop and strengthen our mental and emotional well-being. bLife’s products are developed with the help of leaders from different disciplines within the scientific community, including psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics.
Have a look at the demo video we’ve made to see it in action. You can purchase bLife now for $1.99, a small price to pay to be happier and healthier! Owners of the new iPad: this one’s for you. We’ve updated the app to include a full set of retina display graphics and images to take full advantage of your high-resolution screen.
Many of our clients are using the applications we develop for them in unusual contexts, and Borealis is a good example of this. Recently launched, the Borealis mobile applications are designed for the company’s international clients in the mining, oil and gas industries who are working in the field. “When working in remote countries under extreme conditions, network access is frequently difficult. Our partners have experienced this problem with connectivity on a repeated basis”, explained Philippe Hammond, Borealis’ CTO in the company’s press release.
Creating applications for Borealis was an interesting challenge, since we were required to develop a global solution available on four different platforms, iPad, iPhone, Android and BlackBerry. These mobile applications are part of the Borealis IMS, the company’s social responsibility and environmental performance software, which enables field teams to work offline and completely paper-free wherever they operate around the globe.
We’re happy that the applications we developed help making the workers’ lives a little easier out there. Congratulations to the Borealis team for their launch!
Today we’re happy to introduce our freshly redesigned mirego.com website. It now offers a more streamlined browsing experience, a sharper design, and the straightforward information our clients expect. We hope you like it.
We designed and developed the site in-house with the objective of presenting our firm’s expertise more clearly and our client portfolio more prominently. We believe our talented team sets us apart, so we used pictures of our people and offices to infuse our site with the dynamism that surrounds us every day. Of course, our web development team also optimized the site for a clean display on iPads as a nice finishing touch.
We’d love to hear your thoughts about it! Leave a comment below or contact us to start a conversation.
We are proud to open our new offices in downtown Montreal, which will place our team right in the heart of things. The new offices are located in the Cité Multimédia, in the middle of a stimulating and open environment. We are now closer to our key partners and have opened our doors to new opportunities for growth.
Located at 50 Queen Street, our new offices neighbor many leaders in the multimedia industry, as well as an emerging community of startups and world-class enterprises which support web innovation, inventive mobile platforms and cutting-edge development methods.
The opening of our Montreal offices, along with our announcement earlier this month that high-profile executives have joined our team to support our strategic growth, marks the next step toward achieving our ambitious goals for the coming years.
The traditional desktop working environment is slowly drifting towards more accessible and open work tools. As greater mobility for employees means greater productivity, it also means faster decision making and enhanced collaboration within teams. The shift to a mobile work environment enables constant information access but bringing these tools to another level could lead to process optimization, collaborative intelligence and community development.
The iPad, despite its original design as a consumer device, can be highly beneficial to companies. Convenience is the key. Not only can enterprises integrate mobile tools to their business processes, it also helps companies go green; helping businesses take on environmentally friendly habits, cut costs and save resources. Paper usage reductions is one obvious way the iPad is helping companies get in touch with their eco-friendly standards. Like the architectural design firm BCRA integrated the iPad to lower its dependency on printing and paper usage, its impact on the environment and also its printing costs.
The San Francisco Art Exchange a gallery specialized in popular culture imagery has also integrated the iPad to its daily business. The new system is used by the sales team to present the artwork and share information with customer such as price differences, sizing options and even see what the work would look like on a wall.
Indeed there are various ways brand manufacturers can use mobile to improve their own sales or their marketing strategy. But we can go beyond this and think further as to how we can build something that can impact people’s life and mean great long term business opportunities and improvements built around mobile technology.
As teams are always looking for new ways to connect with their fans, the fans are demanding more and more information on teams and games updates. Whether it’s for players or supporters, easy access to information at all times is now a standard, sharing dynamic content to either enhance players’ performance or to engage fans is the next step.
Four years ago, the NFL Giants shared a picture of them in the locker after winning Super Bowl XLII, the picture got more than 40,000 likes in 2 hours. Where are we today with the integration of mobile in sports? For the past two NFL Sundays, ESPN had 10 million people use their mobile sites and 13 million using their website to follow game updates. Sports media are looking for new ways to engage consumers.
For Tampa Bay’s Buccaneers and Baltimore Ravens, mobile device means new Playbook. The Bucs and the Ravens are the two NFL teams that have purchased iPads for their players and coaches to integrate in their daily training instead of standard playbooks. All players can use the tablet to access games’ replay, practice and situational videos of any NFL team along with plays to practice. While mlb.com for iPad allows users to see any game in HD on your device with an annual subscription (now only 0.99$!), The National Hockey League also integrated mobile technology, allowing games to be broadcasted using a paid subscriptions to NHL GameCenter Live on mobile devices.
There is an interesting marriage between mobile and sports. For sports fans, that means game updates at your fingertips and connecting with your favorite teams, your preferred sports and favorite athletes through social networks and mobile interfaces, all without even being inside the stadium. For athletes, that means continuous access to team information, previous performances and instant connection between team members. And for Sports TV channels, that means more ways to connect with sports fans.
This holiday season, be the prepared customer. Don’t wait for Santa to carry your presents under the Christmas tree. The mobile industry will spin as this holiday shopping begins. While PayPal is already seeing $10 million in mobile payments everyday, and the holiday shopping period is not officially started, it is clear that mobile payment and mobile shopping will play a major role this season.
Our main tip to survive this season, while many consumers will rush to shopping centers, line up at cash registers and not find what they’re looking for, plan it all with your mobile, from home. This year, apps and mobile devices will play a big role in holiday shopping, with product search, availability locators and wish lists. The ultimate holiday shopping experience? The tablet! (unless you like the stores chaotic atmosphere). Replacing the catalogs, magazines and wish lists, tablets give more than just a browsing experience. When you find an item you would like to offer, you can tap to locate nearby stores and check for availabilities or even reach online merchants through the apps and buy the item right away. According to a National Retail Federation study, 20% of retailers have invested in tablet applications for Christmas this year. Nostalgic memories, the Sears Canada catalogue, is the one tool where as kids, we’d circle up the gifts we wanted and wish our parents (or Santa Claus) would flip through the pages. Sears released the first interactive tablet catalogue in Canada for the holiday season, and it’s pretty magical. A homepage covered with snowflakes, pages covered with glitters as you flip them, and gift list organizer. All we need to experience a true Canadian holiday shopping season!
Still not convinced? What about product and price comparisons? Stay informed with the proper price-comparison tools and make sure you get the best price possible. What about the deals? Many major retailers are more than happy to send deals to customers electronically, via text messages, or in-app promotions. And get loyalty rewards and points! When talking about online retailers, 51% said they invested in optimizing their websites for mobile usage and 35.3% has invested in QR codes for offline advertising like magazines and billboards, while others have updated their social platforms (Facebook and Twitter) for the holidays. And while 93.5% of retailers will offer free shipping service, you have plenty of reasons to be joyous of the holiday (mobile) shopping coming soon.
Next week, Black Friday will kick off the shopping season, use your smartphone or tablet to its full potential. Let this year’s shopping experience be more enjoyable! Make this holiday season a little more interactive, a little less hectic and a little more fun.
Yes we like to think that we are good at multitasking. Not only do we constantly get notifications from all our social networks and mail apps, push from news apps and Oh! a phone call while we’re at it. Multitasking, beyond the feature in the smartphone OS, became part of our life. How much do you multitask?
According to a study posted this week on the Nielsen blog, 40% of smartphone owners and 42% of tablet owners check their devices every day when watching TV, while only 13% of respondents never use their devices while watching a TV program.
Are you one of them? Approximately 60% of respondents use their devices to check their email while watching TV or over commercial breaks. And while, 46% of men and women browse unrelated information and 42% visit their social networking apps, 30% of them research information on the program their watching.
Are we the distracted customer? Regardless of which category of consumer we fall into, our reality is that we’ve got more media in front of us today than we’ve ever had. So here’s the deal, some TV shows are turning to mobile apps as a way to engage viewers and keep them tuning in weekly. The aim is to bring an enhanced, second-screen experience to TV shows, grasping viewers’ attention with mobile interactions. While American AMC developed their iPhone app to present sneak peeks and behind the scenes video of their TV shows and Umami launched its iPad app to provide an enhance customize TV experience based on the show you’re watching, 19-2, launched an augmented reality app turning users into policemen of Montreal involved with crime investigations.
In this competitive entertainment industry, the solution could be to capture attention and synchronize TV content with a mobile device, so that content on TV compliments user’s display. Does it solve our efficiency issues with multitasking? Most certainly not. But it catches our attention, for longer than we usually had to offer!
Let’s not build an application to get additional information on hospital directions given your current location, let’s rather talk about how our industry can impact people’s life. While study shows that the number of patients accessing health information on mobile devices is growing rapidly, we see in this trend a greater future.
Steve Jobs had his own views on the future of medicine along with his vision for Apple’s role in it. “We need to be the company that manages your relationship with the cloud: streams your music and videos from the cloud, stores your pictures and information, and maybe even your medical data,” Jobs told Walter Isaacson.
While some are talking about an environment where all medical information would fit in one convenient place to find complete medical history, we have been thinking about connecting health care centers to consumers through a flexible and convenient way: Mobile devices.
A small step for man, a big step for the industry
Can mobile apps improve the quality of the services patients receive in health care centers? Our answer is yes. Mirego, with 4 other Québec tech companies, the Centre hospitalier universitaire de Québec (CHUQ) and the Centre de santé et de services sociaux de la Vieille-Capitale, joined forces to reach one technological goal: Develop a platform to improve the quality of monitoring provided by health professionals to patients requiring home care. The platform will be used in the monitoring of home care to improve the health and safety of patients and to observe more effective interventions by pharmacists, doctors and nurses.
Each company in the Consortium already has technologies that can be used in the monitoring of home care. The first challenge in Télésanté’s project was to make these technologies truly compatible to create our operating platform and, second, to demonstrate its efficiency in our current health care system.
Indeed, intelligent technology integration in the health care system will be problem solving and make patients’ treatments more accessible. Leveraging the latest technology to deliver compassionate interactions between patients and health care centers will remain our main focus.
Perfecting voice search on mobile showed drastic improvements in the last few weeks. Artificial Intelligence infrastructures turned out to be far more than what we’ve seen until recently as some leading companies highlighted the importance of this new feature in their technology.
At Google
While Google introduced Google Search by voice on Android in early 2009, voice recognition technology went through major changes until they made it available in our pockets. Google is opening up new ways of communicating with voice enabled Google search on mobiles and computers and Ice Cream Sandwich introduced a more accurate voice-to-text engine. On their side, Google see smart houses to grow with their technology as the company or a third party could eventually add voice commands to home appliances.
Siri, seriously
It is easy to discount Siri as just another cool iPhone feature. Beyond the speech to text translator, as seen in Dragon, Siri takes that input system and puts a brain behind it. After testing the device in-house, we discovered that one of Siri’s strength is that it, not only allows the user to speak in casual language, but also answers a very broad range of questions. From writing and sending texts, to getting maps and directions (not available in Canada yet) and current stock values, Siri brings the iPhone to another level.
Give us the API
Once people understand the real extent of Siri, it is not hard to believe that an important amount of our most popular apps and even some businesses may turn out to be less useful. And what if third party developers could access the API and make apps interact with Siri? It would revolutionize the way we interact with technology. Imagine you are looking for a house and go “Open Comfree and look for houses within 5 km from my current location” or while you’re in the shower “Open Rdio and play Someone like you from Adele”, you get the picture! Once (if) they extend the API to developers, it is hard to conceive people would still use manual data entry.
Sure, the Siri we met a month ago will continue evolving over time, and yes voice recognition existed long before Apple and Google presented it. But advanced features will come in handy as users start discovering the real power of this artificial assistant. In no time, we will be able to judge the true impact of this technology. This new interactive way to use our devices will clearly continue to evolve and shape a smarter future.
