Tonight, March 13, 2012, at Capdeville from 5:30pm to 7pm, Michael Karnjanaprakorn (CEO/Co-Founder) and Abigail Besdin (BD/Partnerships) will be in town for New Orleans Entrepreneurship Week (If you haven't gotten the full scoop on NOEW, visit their schedule site and stare in amazement.) You can enroll in the "class" online here and enjoy some drinks with them after this afternoon's keynote speech.

Now, you might be asking yourself, what exactly is Skillshare and why should I care? Besides being highlighted by The New York Times, Forbes, TechCrunch, Mashable, and Wired, this New York startup gone national is fulfilling a niche that many have sought for a while: where can one market their skills and share with others like a teacher, but without the restrictions of universities and paperwork? Skillshare is like MeetUp, but tailored more towards the actual methods of teaching and learning rather than gathering for a variety of topics to discuss.

If you're looking to find out more information about Skillshare and what it can offer you, tonight is a perfect opportunity!

Tools and Gadgets

Talking with my mother the other day, I learned that the technology we take for granted today, such as ultrasounds, was new or used very infrequently not that long ago and still is, in some cases today. So far, I've spied on my kid every 4 weeks, in contrast to my mom, who only saw me a couple times before my grand entrance. As a technophile, I'm sure many of you agree with me when I say I am glad for technology to be so accessible today. Below are some items that I particularly enjoy or look forward to owning that  are musts to consider for any type of technology nerd who is expecting. You could always surprise your favorite geek parent with one of these at the next baby shower.

RITMO Pregnancy Sound System : This innovative item is both a sound system and all-to helpful back/belly brace. The sound system can plug into the headphone jack of any MP3 player of choice, playing tunes for the baby to enjoy (and maybe enrich their mind), while mom can enjoy some much savored relief from the back brace supporting the growing weight of her womb. It weighs in at a hefty price, but I think this is a great investment for anyone with back issues or looking to have more kids in the future.

Itzbeen Baby Care Timer: This beautiful gadget does something few parents figure out they'll need to do before its too late: put the baby on a schedule. This helps! It keeps a record of every time you feed, change, bath, or put your little one down for a nap. Most parents come up with a way to keep track that involves some personal solution like a weird bracelet for feedings or a dry erase board. Ditch those fallible methods for something that you and your partner can both use with ease.

4moms Goodnight Sleep Trainer : Now, contrary to the product's manufacturer, this product is for everyone in the company of a 4 month on up. Use this device's built in training system to try and train your baby to sleep more peacefully through naps and at night. The system offers comforting steps that inform users when it is appropriate to soothe a crying child or how long they have left to wait it out before it is time to intervene. I recommend reading the manual well, and advise readers to understand that every parent's methods are different. This is simply a tool, not a guaranteed solution. Nevertheless, I'm not taking any chances on having to read Go the F**k to Sleep to my kid, so I'll be trying this one out by the next Saints season.

In addition, other normal items have gotten tech upgrades. Strollers now offer built-in sound systems that play music for both baby and parent. Baby monitors now come with unlimited range, as well as text, voice, or email alerts when the baby sets the monitor off. They have wipe warmers, special waste baskets for the biohazard kind of waste, bottle warmers, tracking devices, personal little people MP3 players (for the more frugal parents not so keen on the iPod Touch), digital bath thermometers, and even digital-readout ear thermometers for the little sick one so you don't have to visit the vestiges of ancient technology upon their rectum. (For our younger generation readers, a baby's temperature used to be taken from their rear end with a glass thermometer. Not a pleasant experience for anyone involved.)

Applications

One could on forever about apps and their seamless integration into our lives. Search for "children" on the App Store and the list is long. In the meantime, while your touch screen devices are devoid of peanut butter smears and sticky, sugar spots, here are some apps I've found for you to enjoy while your phone is still your own. (My niece could use an iPhone by two years old; enjoy it while you can.)

BabyCenter's My Pregnancy Today : This was the first app I downloaded that related to my pregnancy. If anyone has done any reading up on what's happening in the mysterious womb, BabyCenter is a definitive resource of knowledge. Well, now all of that is packaged in their neat little app. This app is available on iOS and Android devices.

Sprout Pregnancy Essentials: I love this app. Not only does it provide information on what's going on, it gives you a great image of what your baby looks like right now. It is very interactive, using points you touch on the image of the fetus to display information about development, growth, and the baby's capabilities such as sight or hearing. Different milestone weeks give a 3D view of the fetus, as well as playing an example of a fetal heartbeat. Other useful features include a weight tracker, a kick counter, contraction timer, timeline, and a delivery checklist for your hospital visit. The app also smartly uses Facebook integration so you can share your pregnancy developments with your social circle. No Twitter or other share features so far, but a small negative in a giant list of positives. This app is available on iOS and Android devices.

WebMD Baby App: Hot off the Apple Approval Committee presses yesterday comes WebMd Baby. Hypochrondriacs rejoice! We can now match our babies' symptoms to a myriad of diseases at the swipe of a finger! All joking aside, when your child is up at 2am with a raging fever of 102°F and your pediatrician has turned their phone off, anything that will give you an answer on whether you need to rush to the nearest emergency room or not is helpful. Moreover, the app also comes packing some great features, aside from the wealth of diagnosis information and how-to's. The Journal tab gives you the ability to chart your kids' growth, monitor feedings and keep your baby on schedule, as well as journal about them in the BabyBook feature. You can also add multiple kids, but unfortunately, you can't add a child before they are born. I postulate that this minor inconvenience might change once the app gets some user feedback. This is certainly an app I am looking forward to using. This app is not available on the Android market yet.

Services

Registering for items for you and your new baby is like a rite of passage for new, or old, parents. Many stores now offer an online registry service, and typically, there is a better selection online. Babies 'R Us, Target, Pottery Barn, Walmart, and Burlington Coat Factory are examples of stores that offer an online registry for users to access and purchase items to send to their favorite new parents.

However, my favorite options are services provided by sites that collect items into your registry from all over the web, such as Amazon. On the upside, Amazon offers a program called Amazon Mom, which allows registrants to discounts, shipping waivers, and notifies them of deals from partners. If you'd like to see an example of the Amazon Universal Registry in use with their Baby Registry option, you are welcome to view my registry.

No matter how much we do, nothing can prepare us for the arrival of our life-changing moment. When push comes to shove (pun intended), most important thing in your world, and mine, will arrive and technology won't be there to put a bandaid on their knee or hold them when they cry. In the end, technology is just a tool, and thankfully we can use it to make us better, more sane, parents. Are there any technologies you have found yourself using or looking forward to?

(Featured photo courtesy of Natalie Wells Photography - copyright Samantha Barnes and Natalie Wells-Crone. Please do not alter, distribute, edit, or use for any purpose, private or commercial.)

From a more local perspective, the city’s Innovation & Information Technology department understands how important public data sets can be and quietly released a new website called Data.NOLA.gov. Data.NOLA.gov is a catalog of data sets once stored on computers and servers in city hall now made public for citizens.

Why Is This Data Important?

Let’s pretend for a second that you are a baker. Your baking has always come from things you’ve learned, but nothing ever documented. One day, you find a box of old family baking recipes. Not only will they be helpful to you, but the recipes also afford you the opportunity to venture into creating a website and putting those recipes online. Others can use this public information to create software programs, mobile apps, or rich web apps all using this data. In a sense, this is what public data sets from the city can do for New Orleans.

Frequently asked questions by many citizens are, “How can I search the crime stats in my neighborhood?” “Is there map with houses that are up for foreclosure?” or “Where can I get New Orleans census data?” Based off of these questions, the city is continuously working to get this type of information cataloged and put on their website in hopes that it’ll be useful for others and allow developers to create apps using this data.

Data NOLA Gov

Features Of The Website

The website is powered by Socrata—developer and provider of Open Data Services—which is cloud-based solution that governments can use for their public information assets. Data.NOLA.gov gives you the option to search or browse through a variety of datasets. The different types include charts, maps, calendars, form, files/docs, datasets, and external datasets. If you cannot find the data you’re looking for, or have an idea of what should be on the site, you can even suggest a dataset. Some of the most popular data are a listing of the city’s commercial and residential addresses, the Office of Performance & Accountability meeting calendar, post-Katrina damage assessment, code lien foreclosure maps, and 2010 census data. The datasets even have a social networking aspect to them, allowing people to discuss, embed, or visualize the data.

Hopefully, citizens will be able to find more useful information as new datasets are added onto the website. Developers should also be able to use the Socrata platform to build mobile apps or web apps based on the city’s data.

Home Screen of InvoiceASAP

The app has many great features that you would expect when needing to create an invoice on the go; such as creating template invoices, quotes/estimates, adding customer information, and managing inventory. It also gives you the ability to attach media to an invoice (photos or audio) and store these invoices in the cloud for later retrieval.

Features That Were A Plus

InvoiceASAP has several features that I quickly enjoyed when using it. They live up to their name if you need to send an invoice quickly. It took me less than a minute to create an invoice, select my client, input what they owned, and any terms. After that, I was sending off an e-mail to my client with a clickable link to their invoice and an option to pay online. I also appreciated the attach media feature; which allowed me to send a short audio clip to my client, thanking them for their business and letting them know to contact me for any questions. I also attached pictures of the finish worked for the final proof.

Creating A New Invoice

The payment terms are editable so you can set them with your own conditions and add them to different types of invoices. Another feature that I liked was creating estimates. I had a real word example a couple of days after downloading the app, when a potential client called and wanted an estimate on some web design work. Instead of waiting until I got back to my computer, I was able to draft up an estimate with all the pertain information that was needed and send it off to the client for a faster response.

Where They Missed The Mark

While these weren’t deal breakers, InvoiceASAP should continue to fine tune the app. Here are a couple of things I disliked about the app:

• Manually Typing Everything In: Having to manually type in my client’s information and inventory information on my cell phone was difficult and very tedious. If there was a way I could import this information or type it on the web and have it pulled down to my phone; it would save me a lot of time.
• Adding My Own Fields: Adding inventory items was simple, but I would like to be able to add my own fields, take away fields that I may not need, and be able to determine which fields I want required.

Wrap Up

I wasn’t too crazy about the design of the app, it could have been a lot more polished. But when I got down to creating, editing, and sending invoices, it worked how it was supposed to. InvoiceASAP has the potential to be a strong mobile invoicing app for small and big businesses if they continue to update their product. The monthly prices are reasonable even for a freelancer and they stick to their mission: allowing people to create invoices as quickly as possible.

What I like the most about this application is the focus on pictures and simple star rating. You can instantly upload a picture and give a five-star rating. One of the things people pay the most attention to in reviews is the pictures and just how hungry it makes them. It doesn’t hurt New Orleans has some of the most amazing and beautiful food ever; this is a great place to share Nosh!

Features
Website: It’s a great social networking tool. Allows users to add friends from your contacts and social media networks as well as make new friends from the site. You can check out the great food nearby or all over the country as its being uploaded. It’s not only a great tool for our local community, but when visiting out of town, you can also search for restaurants and their menus via Nosh.

Foursquare Integration: Nosh allows users to check-in and share photos and recommendations of their dishes with friends on Foursquare.

Home Nosh: Nosh allows you to add new places classified as “private” to showcase your skills in the kitchen, without showing your address.

Nosh Website Widget: Website owners can share their nosh'd dishes through embedding the widget on your website.

Overall, I find this application useful to check out the menus and see a picture and quick rating. Great for quick reviews of restaurants before visiting. It’s also great for those who just love food photography; you can find many great user generated photos. I experienced minimal issues on my Android phone, outside of GPS/Network issues uploading; which isn’t from the actual application. I definitely recommend you check out this app and showcase some of the great New Orleans food at your favorite restaurants and your own kitchen.

Systems Analyst- Loyola University

Computer Services Lab Support Specialist- Loyola University

PC Specialist- Children's Hospital

Sr. Database Administrator- Tulane Univerity

Senior Cognos Applications Developer- Tulane University

Desktop and Server Support Manager- Dillard University

Director of Technology Services- Our Lady of Holy Cross

PHP Developer- Susco Solutions & Touch Studios

Part Time Data Support Assistant- Via Link

Web Development- CRED, LLC

IT Manager- Zehnder Communications

Programmer/Systems Analyst- The Historic New Orleans Collection

Ruby on Rails Developer- Susco Solutions & Touch Studios

Computer Repair Technician- Remote/Business Support- C4 Tech & Design

Front-end Web Developer- Kickboard, By Drop The Chalk

.Net Software Developer- Archon Information Systems, LLC

IT Help Desk Analyst- Southern Eagle Sales

Interactive Web Designer- Radolo

TeachUp! Internship

Drink Deck

Will Glass, founder of Drink Deck says that the purpose of the app is really to be a travel guide for the urban explorer, helping you find the best bars in your city and saving you money while doing it. “The app is great for things like bar crawls, planning a night out on the town, and really getting great discounts at some of the places you already know” says Mr. Glass.

How It Works?

The app has 52 cards, similar to a deck of playing cards with each card having different deals. To redeem these deals/discount you must:

• Spend a $30 minimum on food and/or drink & get $10 off , at places where $10 goes far, or a 20-30% discount off at high end bar/restaurant and craft cocktail spots where drinks are taken more seriously.
• There is NO EXPIRATION on each cards’ discount, so it makes a great host or hostess gift!
• Discounts are voided when the bar tears the perforated tab or taps the bottom left corner of their bar’s card image on your iPhone.

To redeem the discount the bartender can simply touch or virtually tear off the bottom of the card and volia! While the app is priced high at $29.99, the cost saving is truly benefit. “The app is estimated to save people over $520 as they use it” says Mr. Glass.

Discount for Balcony Bar & Cafe

What’s Next

Drink Deck is also thinking about the non-techies as it a printed coupon book that it has turned into an actual deck of playing cards with the same discounts on them that you can purchase off their website to give away as gifts or use them yourselves. Android users, don’t worry because Drink Deck also has a version for you that will launch very soon!

With some much steam behind it, the mobile gaming industry has the potential to become big in southern Louisiana.  Touch Studios, a spin off of Susco Solutions, has released one of the first iPad gaming apps out of New Orleans called Reactor HD.  It’s a puzzle game where you have to disarm a series rings on a nuclear bomb to keep it from exploding.

Reactor HD Gameplay

The Excitement Builds

Right off the bat, the game sucks you in with its detailed graphics.  I felt the grittiness of a old nuclear reactor that I feverishly tried to disarm.  The Macgyver-style background sounds, the high definition graphics utilizing the entire screen, and the fact you get the feeling that the iPad just might explode if you didn’t defuse the bomb made the game even more exciting.

Select Stage Screen

Players can also log into OpenFeint, a platform for mobile devices that will allows you to earn rewards, play with friends, and challenge others to add a social component to the game.  You also get an option to select a different stage and use a bypass key to skip a level if you get stumped.

OpenFeint Login for Reactor HD

Where It All Falls Apart

I had high hopes for the game and while I still believe it has the potential to be a good game there are a lot of key things that made it fall apart.  The object of the game is to move three rings in a circular rubix cube-style fashion to match up the colors which will make certain sections disappear in order to diffuse the bomb.  But the confusing part was the user interface of the touch.  When I went to move the outer rings, the middle rings would move.  When I went to move the middle rings, the outer rings would move.  Then when I tried to move the inner rings they would move sometimes and other times they wouldn’t.  Because of this, the game play didn’t flow and I became frustrated when trying to figure out exactly where to touch to make it work.  The game is also timed but had no timer.  The only way I know the level was almost over was win the yellow light in the middle changed to red.

Now We're Talking

We wanted to do an update to this article because after our review, Touch Studios informed us that there was actually a bug in the app that caused it not to function properly.  Since the bug has fixed, we've updated our version of Reactor HD and it was everything we thought it would be.  The gameplay was smooth and this time the circular rings worked they way they were suppose to.  As expected, the higher the level, the more complex the puzzles became.

Conclusion

Since the game finally worked, I'd recommend it to anyone who has got an iPad and into puzzle games.  But I still stand by my suggestions for a timer, in-game purchasing, and may some multiplayer options.  With a couple of tweaks, Reactor HD could be one of the first serious gaming apps to out of New Orleans.

ReactorHD $0.99

The design of the app is very straightforward, getting right to the point with the information you needed on each screen. Some people might find it more feasible to move around the icons on the main screen versus putting them in the background of the More button. The app includes:

Screenshot of Storms Tab

Updates: Textual updates about the most current tropical depression, tropical storm or hurricane. Developer tells us that the updates come directly from the National Hurricane Center.

Storms: Storm tracker meets Google Maps. The look and feel are very smooth and hurricane styled icon show TS (for tropical storm) or the category number (1, 2, 3, or 4) for a hurricane. Clicking on one of the icons shows the storms name, wind speed, location and movement.

Checklist: The checklist area is self explanatory. A handful of different “don’t forgot to do this or that” type of items. But I was perplexed as to why I could not add in items on my checklist, only check off pre inputted things.

Prep Kit: The prep kit was very useful with a disaster supply kit checklist for individuals and also pets.

Pick-Ups: Shows seventeen neighborhood pick-ups points around the city for anyone needing assistance to evacuate.

Screenshot of Maps

Maps (Gas, Food, Lodging): In my opinion, Maps is one of the best features in the app. You can select either Gas, Food, or Lodging. Once selected, the phone will pick up your current location and show you any gas station, food places, or hotels within the surrounding areas on Google Maps. Very useful when you’re on the road and need information quickly.

Contraflow: This area shows you the contraflows maps for I-10 W, I-55 North, and I-59 North during an evacuation. Another useful feature of the app whereas in the past, I would have had to have a print out the maps beforehand.

Take Pics: Don’t understand why this feature was placed in but the idea is to take photos of your property for insurance purposes. You can always just pop open the camera app on the phone and do the same thing.

Designed and developed by Calliope Digital and partnering on content from One NOLA and Evacuteer.org, the app puts a lot of useful information in your phone to give you up to date information about a hurricane before, during, and after the storm. A couple of tweaks and I would place a gold star on it. Also the question of the AT&T network and the phone battery life come into question during a real evacuation. Will the mass number of users on the network prevent someone from getting up to date information on tracking the storm? If I’m in my car and need to access contraflow maps or gas/lodging information, will my battery hold up on the long hours on the road? Hopefully we won’t have to test the app in a real world scenario but a must have for anyone in a hurricane prone area.

Price: $3.99
iVacuate -- New Orleans Region

Design & Usability

The first thing that struck me when I opened up both apps was the attention to detail on the design and graphics side.  From the home screen you can look up locations by Map View or List View.  Map View gives you a Google map with fleur de lis markers for the places you want to view while List View lists all the key areas in....well a list fashion.  If you walking around the French Quarter, you can easily pick a destination and jump straight into the content, all in one fluid motion.  It was also nice to see that I could jump into Google Maps to get walking directions.

French Quarter App Map View

Garden District App List View

Content

Screenshot of The Old U.S. Mint Content

The content within the app was presented in a very user friendly way.  An audio clip to the left coupled with vivid photos to the right and a transcript of the audio below.  Each place reveled content in the same type of way, giving me a good bit of knowledge about the history of areas like the The Old U.S. Mint on Esplanade or Preservation Hall on Saint Peter St.  I enjoyed the Garden District app more because I was able to see where John Goodman & Sandra Bullock houses were.  (By the way, Sanda Bullock if you happen to be reading this, I loved you in the Net and both Speed movies).  I especially liked scrolling through the pictures to see places I recognized and listening attentively to the audio transcript.  Speaking of the audio, I found it to be very loud and clear (good job with the voiceover) and it should be easy to hear if you're in a busy area.  All totaled up the Garden District app listed twenty-three places while the French Quarter app listed twenty-eight places.

Final Thoughts

All and all I think the app was beautifully built with solid content, but there was a lot of key areas that were missed. One of my pet peeves was not having the ability to pick up where I last left off.  Probably needing an update for the new iOS 4, when I jumped to Google Maps from within the app I had to reload the it to start all over again.  While the content was great, it left me wanting more.  I wanted the ability to pull in 3rd party information say from Wikipedia, blogs or other local media sources.  There also seemed to be no social integration built into the app.  I’d love to see things like Twitter/Foursquare tied in with the ability for locals to leave their own comments.  Who better knows the history of these places then its people right?  These apps are still in version 1.0, so with a few updates here and there who knows whats possible.

Historic French Quarter Tour Travel $4.99

Historic Garden District Tour Travel $4.99