ArcTouch Exhibiting At Ad:Tech

Want to talk about your app idea in person? Come meet us in the Big Apple – New York City! We’re exhibiting at ad:tech, the premier conference for advertising, marketing & technology convergence, on November 4th and 5th. Join us in the MobileMix area – the showcase for leading mobile technology companies. We’ll show you some of the custom apps we’ve recently developed for companies, and help you learn how we can bring your app from raw idea to launch in the app stores.

ArcTouch CTO To Share App Development Best Practices

Also, Eric Shapiro, ArcTouch CTO, will be leading a live session about some “best practices” for app development. Eric, a former engineering and product development lead at Apple, Macrovision & Accenture, and founder of Zero G Software & Caustic Graphics, will share information on the current landscape and exciting possibilities of mobile apps. He will offer insight into planning time and costs, and guidence on how to be ultimately successful at expanding your products & services into the mobile app world with killer apps for iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry. The session will end with Q&A.

See the ad:tech New York website for more event details. Register for the Full Conference as our special guest with code: 20EXNY9 and get 20% off the online price.

See you in New York!

New “Beam It!” App Sends Contact Information Wirelessly Between iPhones

San Francisco, California (June 4, 2009) — ArcTouch, developers of custom software applications for the iPhone, today released Beam It! This is the first generally available application that uses the new spontaneous peer to peer connectivity features of the iPhone OS 3.0.

Beam It! allows you to wirelessly “beam” your contact information to another iPhone or iPod Touch, and features automatic discovery of other handheld devices near you running Beam It!

“The original Apple Newton and the Palm Pilot had the ability to beam contacts between devices. Now, with Apple’s new iPhone OS 3.0 and Beam It!, we have brought back this fun and useful feature,” said Adam Fingerman, ArcTouch’s VP of Products and Solutions. “This is simply the fastest and easiest way of sharing your contact info with friends or new business associates.”

Truly Wireless with Zero Configuration

Beam It! automatically discovers other nearby iPhone and iPod Touch devices running Beam It!, and then uses Bluetooth to spontaneously create an ad-hoc peer to peer network to share contact information. The automatic discovery and connection is handled seamlessly by Bonjour, without any need to manually set configurations or pair devices.

Free to iPhone Developers

Beam It! is immediately available to iPhone developers at http://arctouch.com/beamit. With over 5000 developers expected at Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) next week, these developers will be able to easily exchange their business card contact info wirelessly – without the need to retype names into their iPhones.

“If you’re a developer and planning to attend WWDC, you should download and install Beam It! before you go. At the conference, with everyone running Beam It!, you won’t want to be the only person left out carrying a bunch of business cards,” said ArcTouch’s CEO, Eric N. Shapiro. “We’re excited about the peer to peer connectivity and other new features in iPhone OS 3.0. We’re glad to offer Beam It! free to developers in advance of WWDC so they can use it to easily share their contact information.”

ArcTouch is also providing the full source code with free usage rights to members of the iPhone Developer Program so they can see how to use the new peer to peer APIs in the Game Kit framework. Visit http://arctouch.com/beamit for more information and download instructions.

Availability

The Beam It! source code and Xcode project are available now to iPhone developers at http://arctouch.com/beamit. Consumers will be able to get Beam It! for the iPhone and iPod Touch directly from the App Store soon after iPhone OS 3.0 is released by Apple.

About ArcTouch

ArcTouch, Inc. develops custom applications for the Apple iPhone, RIM BlackBerry, Google Android and Palm Pre. The company was founded by ex-Apple employees and is located in San Francisco.

Android Application Development

There’s alot of momentum around the Android platform and we’re thrilled to be an Android application developer. Most of the Android sessions we attended were standing room only, and the Android development team fireside chat proved to be one of the best sessions.

Over 20 New Android Handsets

Google announced that there’s over 20 new touch-based Android handsets expected to ship in the next year across all major carriers at many different price points. That’s a huge number and means that if you’re considering writing a custom application for your business you should make sure that Android falls into your top 2 or 3 platforms to deploy for after the iPhone.

We got our first taste of one of these new handsets from the HTC that Google gave to each attendee. It’s a great phone and the Android apps that ArcTouch has developed look and work great on it. We’ll have a full review of the phone in an upcoming blog post, but if the other new Android phones coming this year look and work the HTC then Google has a winner.

Google Wave

One of the most interesting sessions was the unveiling and live demonstration of Google Wave, a three year old research project that blends various forms of online communication and information into a unified form. Think of it as a stream of email, instant messenger, Twitter style posts and more for real-time communication and group collaboration. It’s first available as a series of developer tools and APIs and consumer oriented applications should follow later.

We imagine various ways we can leverage Google Wave in custom mobile software applications for our customers. The best part is that Google Wave isn’t limited to our Android development, but we can also leverage it in the software apps we develop for the iPhone, BlackBerry, Palm and other phones.

Overall a great conference with an abundance of smart people and great food and drink (and robots!). Next up on the mobile developer events calendar is Apple’s WWDC!

Google IO Developer Conference
May 27 – 28 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco

At Google IO, developers come together to learn how to develop applications with Google technologies, such as the Android phone platform, App Engine, Chrome, Google Web Toolkit, AJAX APIs and more. We’re particularly looking forward to the Android Fireside Chat, where members of the Core Technical Team will be available for a candid discussion about Android app development, including the brand new Android OS 1.5 (based on the Cupcake development track) and perhaps a sneak peak at the Android OS 2.0 release.

Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC)
June 8 – 12 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco

WWDC is THE event to learn every aspect of iPhone development, and this year’s WWDC will have extensive coverage of the new iPhone OS 3.0 and how to create innovative mobile apps that take advantage of new features such as in-app purchases, peer to peer connection via Bluetooth, communication with hardware accessories, and alerts using Apple Push Notification service.

Palm Pre Availability
June 6

Just two days before WWDC starts, Palm is set to introduce the Pre – one of the most anticipated new touch-based smart phones. The Pre’s webOS allows multiple apps to run at the same time, which provides a distinct advantage over the iPhone, and we’re excited to develop for it.

ArcTouch’s developers will be attending Google IO and WWDC and we’ll have reports on our blog. We’ve also started an events calendar for mobile phone software developers, such trade shows, development conferences, industry announcements. It’s where we’ll track events like the ones mentioned in this blog post.

So, like we said, it’s a great time to be a mobile phone software developer! There’s so many exciting things going on. It’s also a great time for our customers, who now have even more choice and opportunities to reach out to their customers through apps that complement their existing business’ products and services.