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Bluetooth, WiFi and cellular data may be nearly ubiquitous, but there are interesting edge cases where none of these channels will get the job done. One of those is the large music or sports event, where the event runner may want to broadcast some information to attendees' mobile devices, in order to turn the attendees into pixels that make a light show of the entire arena. In the old days, you'd just hope that everyone in the audience had a lighter, and then they'd all naturally start waving theirs around when the music got suitably epic. Today, the smartphone replaces the lighter. And the great thing about that, from a production standpoint, is that an event organizer can sidestep the messy job of instructing humans when to light their fire, or do the wave. They can control the device directly. At SxSW I saw two companies bringing the you-are-the-light-show model to large venues. Both are fairly new and haven't been used much lately, but you can expect to see them show up more. First up: Sonic Notify. This company has a code library that can be embedded into a band's or team's smartphone app. The app listens for audio tones (in the 19 to 20 kHz range) and, when it hears the right noises, it can turn on the smartphone screen in whatever color the app asks for. Or do a lot more… but for the time being, at least when used by groups like Swedish House Mafia, that's what it does. Assuming the smartphone holders have the SHM app. The audio channels carry over the noise of a loud concert or event, but not so far that the organizer can't control screens differently in different zones. So a wave a color is possible, even if pictures and words can't be displayed as they can if you have a regiment of trained people sitting in seats holding color placards. Sonic Notify's solution has the advantage of using existing hardware -- users' phones, and a venue's speakers -- but then it does require that users dig their phones out of their pockets at the right times and hold them up. And some of them are going to get dropped. Another solution is the Blink FX Wink system. On the user side, it's a cheap little wristband with a few multi-color LEDs and a battery in it. The wristbands get control data over infrared, which is a very cheap remote communication scheme. Roadies do have to set up IR transmitters, though. As with Sonic Notify, the system can be controlled by standard DMX lighting controls, and resolution of the mass display is limited to zone control, not

I own a Fitbit, but I rarely use it. When I go out for a run (don't laugh, it happens), I have instead been using the RunKeeper app on my iPhone -- because I never leave the house without my phone, and it does a good-enough job of collecting fitness data. But sometimes I do forget to turn it on. Fortunately, there's a new iPhone app, Moves, that constantly and persistently records my activity. It knows if I'm walking, running, cycling, or when I'm in something motorized, and it always knows where I am. It creates a record of everywhere I go, the routes I take, and by what means I travel. It tracks steps and distance. It is always with me since my phone is always with me, and more importantly it's always on. It does impact battery life, but I can still easily make it through a day on my iPhone. I think it's one of the coolest apps ever. And it makes me worry about the fitness gadget market. Now, for people who are actually serious about fitness, a dedicated gadget is going to be lighter than a phone and might also provide better data. Likewise, a dedicated fitness smartphone app does more than Moves does with data -- although you do have to remember to launch it and then to turn it off when you're done, so it doesn't devour your battery. But for someone who's not too terribly serious about health, Moves, and apps like it, are the future. Here's another example: Sleep Cycle.This app measures the quality of your sleep based on how much you move around in bed. You run the app, place the phone on your bed, and it gets your activity data from the phone's accelerometer. It competes with the Lark, and other multi-use movement trackers (like the Fitbit again), and Sleep Cycle is limited in obvious ways compared to devices that you wear, but if you're curious about your sleep patterns (and you sleep alone), it's a great start. As a bonus, it's also an alarm clock that wakes you up when you're in a shallow phase of sleep, instead of potentially jolting you out a deep slumber as a non-aware alarm clock will. These casual trackers could be great gateways to more serious products. Or, more likely, threats to an industry that's just getting started. Several people in the health space told me the serious athlete or body measurement nut will go for a more accurate, wearable device. But I fear this perspective may be wishful. It is true that a Lark, Up, Fitbit, Nike FuelBand, or Leikr watch will collect better data than an app like Moves, which actually requires a

Everyone could use a better email client. But the business is a heart-breaker. Get used to a cool, independent app like Sparrow, and some giant megacorp like Google buys it out from under you, and takes its developers off the table. Commit to an open-source app like Thunderbird, and the foundation behind the app will begin to give up on it and orphan you, too. Even Thunderbird's commercial cousin, Postbox, appears ready to move on. Yet the optimism of developers springs eternal, or maybe delusional, because they keep writing email apps. There is, still, strong innovation in this market. I'm not sure email is a business, but that's not stopping the devs. Case in point: David Baggett, the driving force behind the slightly odd Windows and Mac email client, Inky. He's working a two-fold plan with this app. First, the Inky email app is different. Its user interface is deceptively light and simple. Visually, it's reminiscent of the Windows 8 mail client. But Inky does very aggressive automated email management on behalf of the user: It filters, it files, it ranks messages by importance. To use Inky you have to learn to trust its sorting and filtering. The most recent messages, for example, no longer appear at the top of your inbox. Rather, the most important do. Mostly. The algorithms are still being worked out. Which is a big technology bet. The second part of his plan is tackling the challenge of the email business itself. The outcome for an email product is far from certain, and the business model of Inky is built with that in mind. While Inky looks like a bare-bones email client, Baggett is not a "lean startup" devotee. Building the foundation of an email company is "at odds with the minimum viable product ideal," Bagget told me, as an email platform is hard to create (news to me) and has intrinsic value that might not pay back for years. Baggett co-founded the travel data company ITA in 1997; it wasn't until 2001 that the company got the Orbitz deal that made it a going concern; and it was another nine years before Google bought the company, for $700 million. So the Inky client app may end up as just a demo front-end on top of a new smart email platform. It'll take some time for businesses to see the value in that platform, but that's probably where the money is. Or not. If Baggett can get people and individuals to buy Inky itself, he's happy to run the business that way. As he told me, "I gravitate to things where I have a good Plan B, where there

The communications/social platform Just.me launched into limited beta today. It's a well thought-out, mobile-focused service for sharing updates and media (including videos) with either tight social groups (family and friends) or wider audiences (like Twitter and Facebook "friends"). It blends some of the best characteristics of email, Twitter, Facebook, Path, and other services into one coherent app. It is ambitious and impressive. The early beta still has plenty of rough edges, but in concept and design, Just.me is going in the right direction. I like Just.me's flow for recording or uploading media, and then sending it, very much. Just.me CEO Keith Teare has been trying to bring coherence to the Internet for years. In 1997 he launched Real Names, his attempt to augment the clunky URL-based address system of the Web with a more human-readable, extension-free naming scheme. With Just.me, Teare's Border Collie herding instinct emerges again: Just.me is also its own network, one that functionally encompasses, for its users, the features and the address books of other networks. Each Just.me user will also have a Just.me address. Over time, Teare believes these addresses will become more valuable. So he's putting effort into creating the concept of the Just.me naming convention. All Just.me users will get a * name, as in *rafe for yours truly. Teare is hoping to follow Twitter in the creation of a self-evident naming system. Twitter, of course, has the @ locked up. If you see @rafe written down, you know what that's referring to. In the personal name space, only email itself has managed to achieve that kind of self-evident naming convention. While Google+ has the + all to itself, it's rarely referenced outside of Google+ itself. Facebook and LinkedIn, like Twitter and Google+, also give users unique or "vanity" Web addresses that are easy to read, but there's no accepted naming shorthand to designate these URLs. Just.me's unique naming scheme won't matter much unless Just.me becomes a big, important communication platform. But if the service does begin to get traction, the self-branding of the * names could be an important accelerator. It's a smart move. And it raises the question: What foundations are you laying with your venture that don't seem to matter much now, but could be key factors in the future? - Rafe   Related reading Khosla-Backed Just.me Gears Up For Launch With iOS Beta (TechCrunch) Just.me App Wants to Be a Switchboard Operator for All

Some jerk parked their car in front of my driveway a few weeks ago. I had the car towed. Which made me a jerk, too, completing the cycle of awfulness. Did it have to be this way? I needed to get my car out of my garage, it's true, but while I was angry that the driveway was blocked, I really didn't want to go all nuclear on the poor schmuck who had parked in my way. If there had been a way to reach the driver (and I did try knocking on nearby doors) I would have preferred to go that route. Having the car towed was a horrible punishment for what was likely just an oversight. Three guys in a San Francisco neighborhood even more crowded than mine are working on a solution: CurbTXT. A small sticker on a user's car informs others that the owner of the car is reachable through the SMS-based service, using the license plate as a unique identifier. The person sending the note, like "You're blocking my driveway," or, "Your meter is expired," or, "Sorry to tell you someone broke into your car," does not know the identify of the car owner, nor does the owner know the sender, unless the sender self-identifies in the note. In other words, it brings the possibility of neighborliness into a situation where it hadn't been possible before. Great, right? But there's a problem: Growth. Also: Business model. Since launch, in September of 2012, the service has been used to send "dozens" of warning messages, cofounder Ian Sotzing told me. That's not all too terrible for a service that was launched in one small neighborhood by guys trailing parking officers and sliding flyers under windshields next to parking tickets, but it's not exactly a rocketship of scalability. So when I was meeting with Ian, another cofounder, Alex Maxa, was meeting with people from the San Francisco board of supervisors, who, he later told me, were quite interested in the project. Alex tells me that the City doesn't make revenue from towed cars (the towing company does), and that a service that made it possible to reach car owners before they are towed would be to everyone's benefit (except the towing company). City support of CurbTXT would greatly help awareness and growth, and potentially provide a little revenue stream. Our cars are weird havens of anonymity, but they don't have to be quite so walled-off. A double-blind system that allows communication to car owners while still shielding identity looks like a good way to make cities more livable, by helping turn jerks back into human beings.

Some jerk parked their car in front of my driveway a few weeks ago. I had the car towed. Which made me a jerk, too, completing the cycle of awfulness. Did it have to be this way? I needed to get my car out of my garage, it's true, but while I was angry that the driveway was blocked, I really didn't want to go all nuclear on the poor schmuck who had parked in my way. If there had been a way to reach the driver (and I did try knocking on nearby doors) I would have preferred to go that route. Having the car towed was a horrible punishment for what was likely just an oversight. Three guys in a San Francisco neighborhood even more crowded than mine are working on a solution: CurbTXT. A small sticker on a user's car informs others that the owner of the car is reachable through the SMS-based service, using the license plate as a unique identifier. The person sending the note, like "You're blocking my driveway," or, "Your meter is expired," or, "Sorry to tell you someone broke into your car," does not know the identify of the car owner, nor does the owner know the sender, unless the sender self-identifies in the note. In other words, it brings the possibility of neighborliness into a situation where it hadn't been possible before. Great, right? But there's a problem: Growth. Also: Business model. Since launch, in September of 2012, the service has been used to send "dozens" of warning messages, cofounder Ian Sotzing told me. That's not all too terrible for a service that was launched in one small neighborhood by guys trailing parking officers and sliding flyers under windshields next to parking tickets, but it's not exactly a rocketship of scalability. So when I was meeting with Ian, another cofounder, Alex Maxa, was meeting with people from the San Francisco board of supervisors, who, he later told me, were quite interested in the project. Alex tells me that the City doesn't make revenue from towed cars (the towing company does), and that a service that made it possible to reach car owners before they are towed would be to everyone's benefit (except the towing company). City support of CurbTXT would greatly help awareness and growth, and potentially provide a little revenue stream. Our cars are weird havens of anonymity, but they don't have to be quite so walled-off. A double-blind system that allows communication to car owners while still shielding identity looks like a good way to make cities more livable, by helping turn jerks back into human beings.