The new inMotion iOS app, designed and developed by Qubop, combines the power of MICROS retail data services with a highly customized mobile interface. The app provides restaurant operators with real-time stats and feedback about their business from their iPhone or iPad. Our design goal for inMotion was to bring consumer-level polish to enterprise IT, and we chose a highly stylized, visual metaphor because this is not an accounting tool — it’s a high-level view of trends and events as the day progresses, updated every few minutes. Significant anomalies, such as excessive meal discounts, lengthy kitchen prep times, or unusual labor costs, are surfaced as visible spikes or alerts via push notification.

For us, the main challenge of this project was to distill the firehose of real-time restaurant information into simple data visualizations, highlighting only the most important factors for immediate use. The design of inMotion is a deliberate break from standard enterprise UI, employing a contemporary restaurant color palette and a highly animated, gesture-based interface. Our goal was to position MICROS as a forward-leaning company, staking out new territory in mobile and hopefully changing the way that restaurants are managed.

We designed and built the app over a 4-month period, beginning with a two-week design process at MICROS headquarters, where we worked with the company’s technology, product, and sales departments to narrow the core feature set and produce detailed wireframes and mockups. Our iOS team then built out the app, including the custom graphing modules, driven by JSON APIs that we specified.

The app can be used by managers of single or multiple restaurant locations, whether they are on the property or managing remotely. Launching today in the App Store, the app is now available in the app store. MICROS has customers like TGI Friday’s, KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Great America and Aramark. We’re happy with how this project turned out, and it has already been deemed a success by test customers and MICROS management, who describe it as “second to none in design and usability”.

The object is to match ice cream scoops of the same color by firing them from a moving truck, and watching them vanish in a shower of particle effects. Each level is completed by collecting all the cherries, and performance is graded from 1-3 stars depending on how many rows remain onscreen. There are 90 levels in total, and later levels include powerups, hazards and obstacles like bombs, color-transforming scoops, and freezer-burned ice cream. (see YouTube trailer here).

Bubble Scoop is polished and kid-friendly, and from experience I can say that the soundtrack will be stuck in your head for days. It includes achievements in Game Center (iOS) and OpenFeint (Android), so players can compete worldwide.

The game is currently available for $0.99 in iTunes as a universal app for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, and in Amazon’s Appstore for the Kindle Fire tablet and other Android devices.

Mobipark

Mobipark is free until end of day 4/9/11. Download it now and get the app for free instead of $1.99 US.

Where did you leave your car? When do you need to move it to avoid a costly ticket? How do you get back to a location if  you’re in an unfamiliar city?

Mobipark combines GPS and manual map-enabled bookmarking for up to four locations. It also features an easy to use parking meter timer to automatically alert you when it’s time to put money in your meter, and notification for when you need to move your car for street sweeping. You will get an alert even if the app is not running!

GPS enabled map marker

Save map positions with automatic GPS tracking (requires GPS-equipped device) or tap a location for manual markers. Tap the walking man to get walking directions from your current location to the desired location. In the notes section, there’s easy to use picker wheel interface for saving parking place numbers, levels, colors, or the date and time to move your car for street cleaning or snow plowing.

Automatic popup notifications when it’s time to move your car, or when your parking meter is about to expire

We have international support, you can display distances in either kilometers or miles.

Mobipark Meter Picker Wheel

Mobipark Notes, for multilevel garage and streetsweeping

Tapcloud Game

A new and fresh game that Qubop made that makes use of the camera, the gyros, and other hardware in the phone. The clouds are randomly generated around you in 3D space, find them, tap them, and get points. See the world through the camera and play the game layered on top of reality.

The game is free until the next release.

You have 2 minutes. Go!

Screenshots of the game play:

Tapcloud, Played by Golden Gate Bridge

Tapcloud, played indoors

Video below…

Video of how to play:

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=ft37W1wRE1k

User uploaded video:

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZ-6QJPmI60

I picked up my co-founder, Evan Kirchhoff, in San Francisco mid-morning and we drove up to the Marin Best Buy. He had good experiences with short lines there in the past during Apple product launches and it was also a chance for us to test the newest build of Mobimileage. He was a little worried since all the Best Buys opened at 7 am that morning in anticipation of a rush on the Verizon iPhone.

We got there around 11, there were about 9 people in the mobile portion of the store- 5 of them were employees, and 2 couples. An employee walked up to us immediately and asked what we were looking for and we asked, somewhat apprehensively, “Do you have Verizon iPhones left?”, thinking the lack of lines was because they had sold out hours ago.

He said, “Sure, no problem.” and started the process of getting us set up.

An hour later, after transferring all of my information off the HTC EVO on to the new iPhone, we were on our way back to San Francisco.

Two days later I also visited the Verizon Store and the Apple Store on University (here’s the backstory) and asked if launch day on February 10 was crazy- both said there was a little crowd of a few dozen people in the morning when they first opened followed by a steady trickle of 1-2  every few minutes. No one had sold out of the phones.

On the whole, it seems the Verizon iPhone launch has been successful but not the frenzy that some people were expecting. It could be that most people who wanted the phone on the first day ordered the Verizon iPhone online. My AT&T friends whose contracts are not up don’t seem to be in a rush to pay $500+ to switch.  There is still a healthy demand for the Verizon iphone on ebay and craigslist, but not the insane prices we saw when the 3G and 4 first came out.  However, most informal reports from the field seem to indicate that Verizon and Apple guessed almost spot on what the demand would be.  Although I have not heard of a store selling out, I have heard often that they are low on stocks.

So far, I’m enjoying the call quality and in a side-by-side comparison with my co-founder’s AT&T iPhone, the signal strength does not show significant difference.

Follow me on Twitter @chiah.

Fumbling with my pen and little notebook in the dark, struggling to see my odometer reading, I realized there must be a better way to track business miles. My cofounder, Evan Kirchhoff, looked over and asked why I was cursing under my breath. He then asked why I wasn’t using a mobile app to handle this.

So we looked in the app marketplaces for a mileage app, but the ones we found wanted you to manually type in odometer readings with the phone keyboard, which wasn’t much of a step forward.

That’s when Evan said, “We have the technology. There’s already GPS in the mobile devices we carry around, so we should remove the friction from this process.”

With Mobimileage, in 3 simple steps you can record miles driven for up to 4 different vehicles or 4 different businesses:

That’s it. Your log is now stored, and you can email the mileage records to yourself.

Simple. And free!

Download it here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mobimileage-free/id417567338?mt=8

Mobimileage is the first project by Roving Screens.

Rockmelt crashed the first time I launched the browser, which is always a bad way to start with a new program. I opened up the two webmail systems that I use and another tab in the same window for browsing. I sign in to Twitter three times and get the ever spinning circle. The Facebook integration is better, it is fairly robust, meaning I saw status messages.

My major complaint is performance since when I was running those 3 tabs, the browser froze and took my MacBook with it. I had to quit Rockmelt and restart the computer before I could type in to other services, like Seesmic Desktop or Safari. The second complaint I have is I was looking for people to invite and clicked on a few names on the side. I couldn’t tell who was already in the system and didn’t want to send duplicates to people who likely already had an invite from other friends. Wouldn’t you know, even without hitting the button that sends a message, just because I clicked on a Facebook friend’s name from the invite box meant that I ACTUALLY INVITED THEM. It also meant that I couldn’t remember who I invited because I THOUGHT I was just testing out the invite functionality so the system would prompt me for confirmation. I had to search through the list and look for the “Follow up” button to see who the lucky three were and then actually send messages. One person that I inadvertently invited would never even bother downloading this and I knew that. I had clicked on their name to see what the invite behavior of Rockmelt was for someone who I knew would not have been in the first wave of invites vs people I suspected were already in the system.

Bottom line,my assessment is it’s too early to see what the best practices are for making browsing social and it’s unclear if Rockmelt has it right. From the way they are handling invites, I think there’s a long way to go before the experience becomes one that I’d want to use every day. They do have a great icon though, I have to admit.

More to come later, once I restart my computer again after shutting down Rockmelt, which slowed everything to a crawl again.

In an effort to understand the data ownership and rights, I called Kaiser Wahab, an IP lawyer based in New York. He corrected my misunderstandings and added some thoughts of his own. He told me that according to the law, no one can own facts – the fact that you are diagnosed with diabetes is not, under the law, something that can be owned. The written RECORDS of the diagnosis and treatments a patient undergoes can be owned and therefore sold, provided there are no privacy laws that prohibit it.

I also talked to Will Crawford, a Health IT expert with Children’s Hospital in Boston, who asked the question, do doctors realize the access and rights that they are giving to a private company? How comfortable will they be with their patient data, even if depersonalized and aggregated, being sold to the highest bidder?

Questions I have: Do we want a private company that is not being paid by our healthcare provider to have our health information? Do we want private companies that do not have to disclose any financial information helping to shape health data access policy that will affect us all? Do we want to have access to aggregate health information to those who can afford it? How much of the access to this data that should be a public good be owned by a private entity? In the new paradigm where the effective cost of digitized information is free, does it still make sense to stick to the old idea of having health information be concentrated in the hands of doctors, clinicians, insurance companies, and anyone that can afford it?

There was also an interesting comment on the original post on my blog by ashmond:

The much bigger concern about the PracticeFusion model isn’t that they are selling patient data but that they are giving pharma access to the “space” around your medical data by delivering ads right on the electronic medical record to your provider (that is their business model). They are essentially inserting a virtual pharm rep into the exam room and providers office without your permission.

On the one hand, having digitized patient data means more access for everyone but the details of how it is happening is important and bears scrutiny.

by Chia Hwu, original post www.thesubtleinfluence.com