TechCrunch Disrupt finalist CheckPoints is a mobile shopping rewards app that lets consumers choose their own rewards. Despite not being available for OS3 users until recently, CheckPoints is currently the fastest growing mobile shopping application (in the same space as Shopkick and Barcode Hero) on the iPhone, amassing its first 100K users in one month and its last 100K users in the past two weeks.

The app is free to download and use, and lets shoppers earn CheckPoints by checking into over a million participating locations and scanning the barcodes of a number of featured products including Belkin, Tyson, Energizer, Kmart and more. You can redeem CheckPoints for prizes like cash, gift cards, airline miles and gadgets.

The app aims for a notably different demographic than Foursquare and Checkpoints users, who check in on average about 3 times a day, are predominantly female and 64% of them are between the ages of 25 and 44.

The decision to go Android wasn’t very hard,“From the moment we debuted in the Apple App Store, we’ve had requests to expand to the Android Market – in fact, we’ve got a waiting list of over 10,000 people,” said co-founder Todd DiPaola.

Venice-based CheckPoints currently has 1 million in funding. You can find the app in the Android Marketplace here.

Shopping Rewards App CheckPoints Launches On Android

To me, one of the most interesting thing about Foursquare is the History tab. It transforms the service from a “where you are” app, into a “where you were” log. In a way, it’s sort of like a diary. I wish Twitter was better at this idea as well. Because what I tweeted a year ago says something about how I was feeling, or what I was doing back then. In fact, a lot of the web services we use on a daily basis would be perfect for this type of passive diary writing. And that’s exactly what Momento, an iPhone app, makes happen.

At its core, Momento (made by the UK-based d3i) is a straightforward diary app. It allows you to easy write “Moments” (diary entries) to express what you are doing or feeling on any given day. It takes the process a step further by allowing you to tag friends (from you iPhone contact list), places, events, and add photos to these entries. But the real killer feature of the app is that it also allows you to import bits of information from a number of services including Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, Digg, and any RSS feed. The result is a brilliant log of almost everything you’re doing online.

Other services have tried to do similar things before, but Momento works because they’ve nailed the user interface and experience. The entire app looks like a journal, which is broken down by days in descending order from the current day. In this view, you get a snapshot of any given day, including the most recent items (tweets, check-ins, etc). Clicking on any of these days takes you to a detail page which shows you all of your activity for that day. All your tweets, check-ins, blog posts, pictures, etc, are here.

There’s also a calendar view which allows you to quickly hop to any moment in the past. Clicking on a date will again take you to a specific day page with all of your info with what you did that day.

Another view allows you to see entries broken down by tags. From here, you can choose to see only entries with certain people tagged. Or you can see only entries that you gave a high rating to (when you make your own Moments, you can rate them if you want).

There’s also a way to see just certain types of elements, such as tweets. Again, these are broken down by the day they were sent. And what’s really awesome is that you can search all of this stuff if it has been imported into Momento.

The key to Momento is that all of this information is for you and you alone. You import social items, but it never sends anything out. It’s simply a way for you to log and keep what you did on any of these services in a given day. And it’s all presented in a very nice, easily accessible package.

It’s another of the anti-social social apps, like OhLife and the newer Path, which seem to focus more on what experiences mean to you (or a very small group of friends), rather than to strangers and the larger web as a whole.

With the personal approach in mind, Momento also comes with an impressive way to both backup and export all of your data (this is accessed through iTunes file sharing).

Momento also comes with some nifty importing options to better tailor you data. For example, you can tell it to leave out tweets with a certain hashtag. Or you can tell it to only import tweets with a certain hashtag. You can tell it to leave out @replies and/or retweets, etc.

Momento actually isn’t a new app; it first came out about a year ago. But version 2.0 was recently released, and with it comes a huge number of excellent improvements including all the geolocation service integration and the video service integration. Both of these features are pretty key for a full and interesting social service diary.

Simply put: I love this app. I think it’s a near-perfect execution of a very compelling idea: passive diary writing. The downside is that it currently only works with the iPhone/iPod touch/iPad. But if you have one of those devices, this app is well worth its current $1.99 price (that’s a limited-time price). Find Momento in the App Store here.

Momento Is Perhaps The Perfect Passive Diary App

photo © 2008 mike | more info (via: Wylio) In the tech industry saying that something is dead actually means “It’s on the decline.” And yes, the phone call is on an inexorable decline.

My original title for this post was “The Phone Call Will Be Dead In __ Years” but since consumer inertia is somehow still keeping our parent company Aol in the dialup business, I thought it might be prudent not to include an ETA on the death of the call.

Less obsolete but more annoying than a handwritten letter, the phone call is fading as a mode of communication even if the nostalgic will be singing its praises for awhile. We reached a breaking point in 2008 when text messaging topped mobile phone calling in usage, and we’ve been living in a world dominated by text based communication ever since (Thanks Twitter).

If old media has taught us anything, it’s that it takes most industries at least a generation to be completely disrupted, especially something as powerful as Big Telco.

But we are definitely on our way there. According to Nielsen data, voice usage has been dropping in every age group except for those past the of age of 54. Text is just easier.

“Now, 78 percent of teens recognize the functionality and convenience of SMS, considering it easier (22 percent) and faster (20 percent) than voice calls (though still fun). Voice activity has decreased 14 percent among teens, who average 646 minutes talking on the phone per month.”

Interest in voice calling is now sharply differentiated by age, and few technological advancements have ever survived while failing to capture the interest of 22 year olds.

Mike likes to rub it in MG’s face that the iPhone can’t actually make calls due to terrible AT&T reception, but the truth is that we iPhone users (and to greater extent smartphone users in general) are not primarily using our phones to make calls. We may carry around things we call “phones” but to us they’re just pocket-sized computers.

MG’s response to Mike, “It doesn’t need to. I use the phone mostly for apps and browsing, not calls.” On background: MG is in his 20s and Mike is in his 40s. As if we needed more proof, MobileCrunch editor Greg Kumparak’s AT&T phone bill is indicative of the voice habits of an entire generation.

Sorry Telcom industry, we are increasingly provided with reasons to not use your voice services. While still not exactly mainstream, we now have access to a plethora of free, internet-based calling options like Google Voice. When I’m interviewing startups and ask to “get on a call” they usually direct me to their Skype usernames.

When I do cold call someone for information (and am more often than not directed to an automated message) companies send back their responses via email. And I have countless times declared a fatwa on PR people who think it’s cool to cold call me, especially before 9 am.

It’s not just job related calls that are annoying. The other day somebody from my bank called me to talk about my 401K. Fair enough. The problem is I wasn’t exactly expecting the call as I only get 3 or 4 a week now. And I picked up right as I was trying to write a post breaking news (One thing a phone call does signify is EMERGENCY). I ended up mumbling something rude and hanging up on the person. I still don’t even know what a 401K is even though I’m sure I’ll eventually get around to Googling it.

The saddest thing is that since I became a millionaire in the TC/Aol sale (not) it really is about time I started to do stuff with my money other then pray that I’ll still have a paycheck tomorrow. That phone call might have actually provided me with useful information had its unabashed interruption not been so abhorrent.

Ideally, here’s how that interaction should have gone down: Chase Bank should have sent me an EMAIL about the fact that they noticed I had more money in my account, with a link directing me to my 401K option plan. There I could decide BY READING and not listening to some customer service rep’s scripted drivel on what plan was right for me. Now, as it stands, I’ve got a random phone number in my Stickies that I will never call back. I won’t give a second thought to my 401K until I’m up late at night surfing the Internet and find out it’s like important five years from now.

What’s maybe sadder than the 401K episode is what this phone call generational schism means for people who are older than you. Much like Mike thinks his mom is silly for using chain emails to get in touch, I dread the inevitable Sunday phone calls from relatives that I have to return lest they think I’m dead. I wish they would just @reply me on Twitter or something. Instead I’ve now got 18+ voicemails I have no desire to deal with.

Maybe I should start making people write me handwritten letters?

The Phone Call Is Dead

Sometimes the guys in our office like to get in stupid fights about phones. Yeah I know they do it on the blog, but they also do it in private as well times 1000. It is essentially the song that never ends, with Mike Arrington and Jason Kincaid erring on the side of Android and MG well, sigh.

Here’s Arrington’s take on one such fight that happened today:

“Earlier this evening in the office Jason Kincaid and I, both Android users, asked MG yet again why he won’t admit the iPhone flaws. He said ‘As soon as there’s a better phone, I’ll buy that one instead.’ I pointed out that the iPhone doesn’t actually make calls with any reliability, and he said, seriously ‘It doesn’t need to. I use the phone mostly for apps and browsing, not calls.’

My response – if it actually made calls, perhaps that wouldn’t be true. He then threw something at me and stormed out of the office. True story.”

While I’m sure it exists, I’ve never seen a girl get in a pissing match over a phone. But apparently our phone choices have become a huge part of our identity no matter what our gender, hence the above comic.

And while I would not throw down for my iPhone 4, I have to say that the comic is pretty accurate, especially the dinosaur part.

Thanks: Csectioncomics

What Your Phone Says About You [Graphic]

During the “Back to the Mac” event two weeks ago, Steve Jobs made a particularly witty remark as he unveiled the MacBook Air, one that made the audience chuckle in laughter:

“We asked ourselves, what would happen if a MacBook and an iPad hooked up? Well, this is the result, we think it’s the future of notebooks.”

There is always a strategic intent with the things that Apple says at product launches, especially when they come from Steve Jobs. This is because Apple cares deeply about the perception of its products. By intimating that the Air is the future, and that it blends the best of the MacBook Pro and iPad, Apple is signaling a lot. There is no doubt that this first phase in “hooking up” between the MacBook and iPad foretells a deeply converged future on many levels.

iOS and OS X Aren’t Hooking Up

Often when people visualize the convergence of the iPad and MacBook lines, they wonder whether a unified operating system will take over, which somehow blends the best of both the touch and “mouse” metaphors.

This is unrealistic and silly. Though iOS is OS X’s little cousin—both use different APIs and layers, but reside on top of UNIX—merging them makes little sense from an end-user perspective. iOS and OS X serve different use-cases, applications, and markets, and the touch metaphor on a MacBook simply wouldn’t serve a user well in the majority of cases. And running multiple browser tabs and multitasking between 8 open applications requires a much more immersive experience than iOS may ever provide.

But despite the fundamental difference in how we interact with a MacBook and iPad, Jobs made sure to deeply blend how we view the two products at the marketing level, by touting attributes like the Air’s ability to turn on instantly, and last 30 days without a charge.

Why the Hardware is Rapidly Intersecting

One reason why Steve Jobs wants us to think about the MacBook Air as an extension of the iPad, is because there is a hardware convergence happening under the hood. The MacBook Air benchmarks were the most telling sign that this is occurring. Apple was able to double the system performance of the MacBook Air, despite using the same 3 year-old CPU technology from Intel—Intel Core 2 Duo processors running at pokey speeds.

Though profound this isn’t surprising—the Air uses flash instead of spinning disks, and SSD technology dramatically cuts data transfer bottlenecks for applications that are I/O (Input/Output) constrained. And guess what? Most simple computing tasks are memory and IO-constrained. This fact helps the flash-based Air operate on par with Apple’s high end MacBook Pro line, except under taxing CPU-intensive scenarios such as video rendering.

So let’s get this straight: Apple is using several year old technology, and the Air’s system performance screams. This is nothing short of incredible proof that after a certain threshold, CPU advancements are only adding incremental benefit to 90% of what the user cares about today.

Instead, performance is more dependent on graphics processing than ever. This is why Apple designed the Lion OS to heavily focus on OpenCL, which leverages parallel constructs within the GPU to extend its utility to non-graphics tasks. And a big reason why Apple didn’t go with Intel’s newer CPU line is they lack support for OpenCL, and Apple is probably designing new applications like iLife 11 to take advantage of OpenCL’s power.

The fact that Apple’s sexiest new Notebook didn’t go with Intel’s latest technology is damning for Intel and is the best signal yet of how innovation in PCs is getting blown away by what’s happening in the mobile ecosystem. Right now, benchmarks show that the fastest ARM-based smartphone CPUs are only about 25% as fast as the Core 2 Duo that Apple is using in the MacBook Air. But this delta will compress fast.

In about 2-3 years we will be seeing integrated chipsets make their way up the food chain, and potentially fit in notebook-class form factors. Multicore ARM solutions, based on ARM-15, will make this a reality in about 2 cycles of Moore’s Law.

Skeptics will say “no way — never, not with the need for Flash”. I agree that Flash is probably here to stay on desktops. But all the pressure on Adobe to make Flash better is, ever so slowly, improving how rendering and compositing are done in hardware. And even in the midst of their darkest public battle last Spring, Apple and Adobe were cooperating in getting Flash acceleration to work on desktop Macs. In the future, it’s conceivable that Flash could be the only remaining bottleneck that prevents Apple from using an embedded SoC in a MacBook Air. But hardware acceleration for Flash is approaching which can solve this dilemma.

All of this rapid advancement in what’s under the hood has huge ramifications for the future of the MacBook Air and iPad. Anyone want a MacBook Air that is several pounds, Runs OS X, lasts for 30 hours, has a detachable keyboard, and then converts to an iPad running iOS once the screen is removed?

I am not saying that Apple is going to make this device, nor that it’s even in their best interest to pursue one-size-fits-all form factors. But there is no denying that the hardware is converging, and the “Back to the Mac” theme of Apple’s latest event deeply intimated this.

The Mac Store’s Incredible Network Effect

The remaining puzzle piece in the intersection of the MacBook and iPad is all about the applications—both end-user discovery & distribution and developer support. The iOS storefront was the genius behind the iPhone becoming a low friction distribution warehouse for content.

In much the same way, the Mac Store is Apple’s umbrella strategy to encourage developers of long-tail content to have an easy landing pad on the Mac, developers who are already building apps on top of iOS.

Interestingly, the Mac Store allows Apple to do the reverse of what Microsoft is doing with Windows Mobile 7: whereas Microsoft can leverage .NET familiarity to encourage the desktop dev community to write apps for WM7, Apple will use its iOS franchise to kick-start a vibrant ecosystem of Mac developers.

But there’s also something more magical that this network-effect provides for Apple: by specifying that developers use Apple’s tools, namely Xcode and LLVM, Apple gains a layer of control in how this hardware convergence plays out.

How so? Apple can have developers simply flip a recompile switch and upload universal versions of apps to the Mac App Store, which work on both ARM and x86. In this way, Apple is setting up a distribution mechanism to host and install code which will allow them to transition hardware seamlessly.

This is the ultimate in streamlined distribution, since a developer can focus on one unified environment based around Cocoa Touch and Objective-C, along with a set of UI / UX constraints. Apple then abstracts all this from the user, independent of the hardware.

Apple Hates Control and Loves Optionality

If it’s not completely clear yet, Apple is setting the stage to be processor and component agnostic. This not only allows them the above-mentioned architecture-neutrality, but also affords them incredible pricing power, and ensures they can tap into consistent component supply, which will be a critical challenge as they lock up an even bigger slice of the supply chain.

Apple can build an A4-variant themselves, or they can partner up with one of many vendors. If Intel starts innovating again, that’s an easy choice for Apple. If nVidia, with its graphics pedigree, emerges as a winner in combining GPUs with ARM-based CPUs, Apple can partner more deeply or buy the company. Or Apple might decide to stick with x86, but use GPU/CPU technology from AMD.

It’s all about optionality. And Apple is building that into its long-term strategy, by combining its rapidly expanding footprint in mobile hardware / software with its iOS developer mind-share to rev its Mac franchise into much higher gear.

Wow Hooking Up Feels Amazing – When’s Our Next Date?

I believe it’s pretty clear: Apple wants to use OS X, running on an incredibly battery efficient MacBook Air-like form factor, as a bottoms-up strategy to attract loyal iOS fans over to the Mac franchise. After all, there are around 150M users of iOS worldwide. Apple knows that iOS is a secret weapon to bring both consumers and corporate users to higher end Mac products. And the marketing around the Back to the Mac event is just a precursor for Apple’s underlying strategy in mixing these two worlds.

Behind-the-scenes, Steve Jobs is setting up all the pieces for Apple to converge these product lines. But it’s all about optionality for Apple. When and how they choose to get there is up to them. And my guess is Steve Jobs is going to do so in a way that continues to make the Apple experience a superior one for you, its loyal customer.

The Sexy Details of How the iPad and MacBook Will Hook Up