An App to Connect You with Your Neighbors

Home Elephant is an app that connects you to your neighbors.

Okay, this app seems a little whitebread but the underlying idea is interesting.

When is an app going to come out that connects you with the people that are immediately around you?

Imagine a sort of virtual billboard that populated based on your location – being able to poll the people nearby to find out where the best lunch deals are, asking to carpool, alerting to gas leaks, and to ask, “what happened on Kearny street this morning with all the firetrucks?”

Lynx Stream – A Mobile App That Captures Your Night Out

This is a clever idea.
Introducing The Lynx Stream — A Mobile App to capture and record unforgettable nights out. The Lynx Stream collects every video, picture, text, tweet, check-in and status update a group of friends makes to produce an automatic Stream of the night and highlight video, which can be watched and shared online.

Find out more and download Lynx Stream for free

http://multivu.prnewswire.com/mnr/prne/unilever/48911/

Contributed by Joshua Spanier

Self-Driving Robot Cars

Google has acknowledged that they have been working on self-driving cars for at least a year now, racking up over 140,000 miles in California tests alone.

http://gawker.com/5800949/

More Mobile, Please

Here’s some more data on mobile trends from Google.  A little “salesy” but some good stats.

Contributed by Collin Whitehead

Toothtag – Teach Your Android to Do Things

Toothtag is a new Android app that allows you to tag people (by sensing their phones) and locations (by sensing wifi hotspots and more).

You can then customize actions that will happen when you are near those places or people.

You could get an alert when your friend is nearby, or automatically check in on Foursquare when you enter your gym.

Toothtag is actually only a showcase application created by a software company called Neuaer to demonstrate their proximity platform, on which they want others to build more applications that will use the device and location-detecting capabilities.

The platform (and Toothtag) uses Bluetooth, Wifi, and NFC (Near Field Communication) technologies.

Discovered via Laughing Squid

From SXSW: Seth Priebatsch from SCVNGR on Gamification

SCVNGR founder Seth Priebatsch gave an inspirational talk at SXSW on adding the game layer to the world, and even how it could potentially help global warming.

http://sxsw.com/node/6999

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/pda/2011/mar/14/sxsw-2011-scvngr-seth-priebatsch

low-quality video of the speech: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZvcUgi8Hso

Seth’s company: http://www.scvngr.com/

Contributed by Jeremy Adirim

Chase a Virtual Mini

Capture, steal, and be stolen from – a mobile geolocation multiuser reality game based in Stockholm gives you a chance to win a Mini Cooper.

http://www.minigetawaystockholm.com/

Contributed by Johan Jäger

Randomized Street View

With Map Crunch, one click transports you to a random 360° Google street view snapshot of somewhere in the world.

BBC Dimensions

Picture what things would look like if they happened somewhere else on the map with the BBC’s Dimensions.

via flavorwire

Polymaps

SimpleGeo and Stamen have released Polymaps: a free javascript library for creating dynamic, interactive maps. They provide a beautiful gallery of examples and user-friendly documentation.

The maps make use of APIs from Cloudmade, which has an impressive gallery or mobile and desktop mapping apps.