Serving up some app-etizing ideas

Apps are changing the way we live.

In the not so distant past we would have to go back to our home if we feared we left the lights on.

Today all it takes is a couple of quick finger moves and we can turn them off even if we”™re hundreds of miles away. Find a restaurant from the Hutch; check the weather; record a TV show while on the road.

But one sub-industry that is gaining steam and adding to the value of apps is that of “coupled technologies.”

These coupling technologies ”“ items that work in conjunction with already existing technologies or software like applications and mobile devices ”“ are boosting the ability to make possible the previously impossible.

The ideas are coming out of companies like Ikan Technologies in Stamford, which has developed the Ikan ($399), a seven-inch, wi-fi-based touch-screen tablet that scans grocery item barcodes and automatically adds them to a grocery shopping list on your phone.

 

 

 

Taking mundane tasks and finding ways to rethink them is the genesis for some of the most clever tech tools today.

With thousands of apps developed and in development, the ones that really catch your eye are the ones that make you rethink something your mind has already designated as simple and perhaps as boring. There is a huge market for being able to do things like turn on stereos before we get home.

We are getting baby steps closer to meeting George Jetson.

Another example of coupling is the Square, a simple idea: letting people pay for things with just an app and an iPhone. The square is essentially a credit card scanner that attaches to you mobile and allows you to transfer funds and receive electronic receipts. Photos also come attached to accounts with a question asking you, does this look like the payer?”™ It”™s a well thought out product that makes life convenient yet helps you remain secure. Not feeling like your information is sitting around in the identity theft tree of suckers, ripe for the taking, is what pushes this from a good idea to a great.?Coupling this kind of technology with something like say Apple”™s highly anticipated and criticized iPad (starting at $499, and being called simply an oversized iTouch) could make for the ultimate all-in-one order form. For all those Avon-callers and vacuum-vendors, that”™s a powerful sales tool. Though most people are focusing on the consumption aspects of the iPad, it is flat-out-of-the-box ultimately a productive machine having a calendar, address book, note pad, iWork and the Smartupz suite; a software suite designed specifically for companies with long sales cycles and lot’s of face-to-face with customers. Sales staffs have already begun to be one of the largest business groups to preorder the tablets.?In all, at the center of the evolution of the application, and the technologies growing around them, is a progression toward evolving the functions of life and business, not creating new ones. It is another case of the world getting smaller with bigger ideas. Today by having a Palm in the palm of your hand you are closer to having the world.