My Top 7 Apps: Steve Karmeinsky from Placeholder Ltd
We are back with another Top 7 apps list. This time around we have Steve Karmeinsky, co-founder of Placeholder Ltd.
Placeholder is developing innovative Bluetooth devices with a geo-backend and authenticated and federated APIs to access it along with mobile and desktop SDKs so that developers can easily include our Bluetooth solutions into their apps.
Steve uses the iPhone 6, let’s get on with his list…
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Passbook: Apple’s app that links to other apps making it easy to pay for coffees, store conference/boarding passes i.e. if you have the Starbucks app, it displays a barcode that you can pay for coffees with and it passes the info to the Starbucks app,
does the same for boarding passes with various airlines and even for conferences like Websummit in Dublin.
HealthKit: It’s slowly getting support for more and more health apps, nice central dashboard. More and more iOS health apps are HealthKit enabled, they detect that HealthKit is there and then you authorise what data should be passed to (or from) HealthKit and then HealthKit displays the info on a dashboard (which you can customise i.e. see what data you want on the dashboard). For me it links to Qardio, Beddit, Misfit, UP and Withings.
Citymapper: If you’re in London why wouldn’t you have it, it’s the best route planner out there. It knows where you are (or you can tell it to put you in a location), then give it a destination and it shows you ALL the routes to get there using public transport, walking and/or driving. Now has integration with Hailo so you can even book a cab through it.
UP Coffee: I sometimes have trouble sleeping, at least I can track my caffeine habit and see if it makes a difference. You have to enter the data, but it has pre-defined drinks for various coffee chains. Then it shows your caffeine input, also links to Jawbone’s UP health app.
Swarm: I check-in everywhere and track my movements (link to a thing called private square which maps where you’ve been (though I believe Foursquare can do this now too)
BLE Explorer / Lightblue: Actually two apps, but both do similar things and you can find out about Bluetooth devices around you. As well as showing what devices are there, it shows what services they’re advertising and allows you to connect to them and retrieve the service info.
GigPlug – A great new app/web service allowing you to recommend jobs to your colleagues (currently LinkedIn but FB coming soon), if they get hired, you get a cut of the hiring fee. Not spammy as you have to directly contact the colleague to recommend them.
Honourable mentions:
GBK: You get free burgers and stuff through the app/loyalty program
Starbucks: Though 99% use it through Passbook
Mailbox: Nice little email client, does it better than others
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Great choice of apps here, Citymapper is one of my favourites too. Thanks to Steve for his list!
If you’d like to contribute your Top 7 Apps or if you are the PR representing someone you’d like to see featured, everything you need to know about participating is right here.
