Foursquare-Not just a game for 5th grade recess anymore

Findings from a Forrester Research report released yesterday showed less than five percent of online users in the U.S. have ever used a location-based application on a mobile device. That statistic aside, almost 85 percent said they were not familiar with the applications at all.

For those of you who may be in that 85 percent group, a location-based application is accessible through a mobile device and utilizes the ability to use geographical positioning to track the location of the user. Using a smart phone, a mobile website or via text message, users can state their current location and find the venue they are located at on the platform and choose to “check in” to that specific place.

The app check-in can also serve as a game, where users are rewarded badges or stickers based on their check-in actions. These actions include being the first to check in to a location, checking into a location more than anyone else or just by completing the action the badge or stickers denote (i.e. earning the “gym rat” badge on Foursquare by checking into 10 gyms in 30 days). Individuals can even become the “rockstar” or “mayor” of a location, depending on the app, which means they have checked in to a certain location the most.

Some of the most popular include Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt.

What’s also interesting to note about location-based media is that women are the minority users. According to Forrester, close to 80 percent of location-based apps are men and almost 70 percent are between the ages of 19 and 35.

For those few who do use these services, they don’t use them often. The report said only one percent of users post an update more than once a week.

The new iPhone: as powerful as a spacecraft?

Ever stop to think about how powerful the new iPhone 4 really is? Yea, I hadn’t either until I was given an assignment for my internship this summer. I was instructed to find statistics on the power and speed of the new iPhone in relation to other impressive machines for a company presentation on the evolution and capabilities of mobile marketing and technology.

This didn’t mean just comparing the iPhone to another phone or even a simple laptop computer. This meant comparing its processing speed to that of the space station or the Hydra computer, which beat a human being in the game of chess in 1995. Essentially, the argument was to prove the new iPhone is just as powerful as something that sustains a human being millions of miles outside of the earth’s atmosphere or is even smarter than a human.

So I began with the basics-trying to figure out the computing power of each type of machine, which for someone not tech-savvy like me, proved to be a bit challenging. For example, I found the iPhone 4 is rumored to have 1 GHz of processing power. I also found the space station has 16 MHz of computing power inside its floating walls. The math idiot I am had to then convert the MHz to GHz in order to compare it to the iPhone. Not to get too technical but since 1 GHz = 1,000 MHz, I found the space station has .015 GHz of power, making it actually slower than the iPhone (I’m still not convinced this is correct so don’t quote me on it.)

Then I turned to something called MIPS (otherwise known as instructions per second). Turns out, the space shuttle has 1.2 million MIPS within its computers and the Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition i980EE processor has 17,600. That’s about as far as I got considering Apple still hasn’t released the iPhone4’s specs.

That’s when I decided to post on Apple’s forum about my roadblock. I figured some computer nerd, no offense, with a good deal of time on his hands would know the answer.

I posted a thread asking the following questions:

1) How many iPhone 4s have been sold up to this date (7/13/10)?

2) How many mips are in an iPhone 4?

3) How does the iPhone compare to a larger computer (such as a MacBook) or anything else impressive (like the Wii, the space station computers etc.)in terms of processing speed?

The first two responses I got were:

“LOL” and “I almost posted a reply, but then thought ‘why?’….”

With the exception of these two jerks not taking any time to actually consider this could be a legitimate question, I got some very intellectual responses. Not any that helped, but at least a few kind-hearted souls tried to give me a real answer.

Overall, I got the answer that because the two computers are so different, there really is no way to compare the iPhone to something as complicated and intricate as the space station.

On person wrote:

“That's going to be an impossible contention to prove since there is no single statistic by which a system can be measured. Clock speed, MIPS, memory access rate, I/O rates, etc. are all situational and will be given different weight in different uses.”

He compared my question to “a Ferrari is better than a dump truck” sort of argument, he said.

Another person said the major difference is that computers on the space station are able to perform in order to maintain function while the processing power on the iPhone performs to handle human interface experience, something completely different.

So the moral of the story is that the iPhone 4 is powerful but unless someone can come up with a way to compare it directly to the computing power of the space station, it’s not going to take us to the moon anytime soon.

Magazine journalism, dead?

While flipping through the latest issue of Glamour last night, I came across an add that caught my attention. It wasn't an ad, but I simple statement from Glamour ensuring readers magazine journalism isn't dying and readers should keep buying their favorite publications. For the first time, my attention was diverted from the articles and colorful photographs to something that made me sit up and think about what I just read. Not just the content, but about how I was reading it. I've always read magazines but I'll admit, I have gone straight to a website to read about the latest gossip or fashion trends more often than I have pay $4.95 for the print version. As a recent college graduate with a degree in journalism, I have been aware of the fact that print journalism is becoming less and less of a novelty. But that simple ad made me really think about how much the industry is changing. I wish I had an answer for what is going to happen to it but I have been trying to answer that question myself now for four years. I will say though, that whatever happens, I have lived at a time and worked in one of the biggest industries that has seen such a great deal of change in such a short amount of time. And it's definitely not just magazines-try newspapers...and now books too. But that's a whole other conversation for another time.