When you use LocalBeacon, you’re able to design your home screen layout anyway you like. A common question is how much space do I have. We’ll cover each screen type in this short post.

iPhone

The iPhone’s screen resolution is 320px wide and 480px tall when held in portrait mode. The tab bar takes up 48px on the bottom, and the status bar takes up 20px on the top, leaving you with a 320px wide and 412px tall area for your home screen content.

iPhone4

The iPhone4 has the same resolution BUT twice the DPI. What does that mean to you? Generally, you’ll have to make images twice the size in order for them to look crisp on the iphone4. If you create a 50×50 icon for the iPhone, you’ll need to create a 100×100 icon for the iPhone4.

iPad

The iPad’s resolution is 768px wide by 1024 px tall. It has the same DPI as the original iPhone. The content well is 768px wide and 956px tall.

Here’s a handy image of the iPhone’s screen. For the iPhone4, just make it twice the size.

The tablet form factor, and specifically the iPad, have made a huge impact in people’s day to day lives. The iPad is a great tool for delivering content, and is especially suited for many different types of e-learning. Recently, LocalBeacon was used by a large medical device company to deliver e-learning content to physicians that were being trained on the companies products. The company packaged the content onto iPads and delivered the iPads to physicians for preparation before they came to the on-site training, and as a study guide throughout the course. The application had the following functionality:

• Ability to be used completely offline. This allowed physicians to prepare for the course while they were flying to the site.
• Ability to deliver video content, audio content and PDF white papers. The customer had to be able to quickly add and update coursework, while not having to update the actual app. The iPads were out in the fields with sales reps, and since the app was not available on the app store, it had to be updated “in the wild”.
• Ability to have rich surveys and quizzes. While a user watched a video, the application displays an interactive quiz with more intuitive feedback. This allowed the customer to create engaging content that kept the user interested.
• Full statistics – The application tracks what a user sees and what content they visit. It also tracks if they watch a video, and how much of the video they watched. This lets the customer continue to enhance their content to ensure that users are finding it interesting and engaging.
• Multiple course support – The application had to support multiple courses via one application that could easily be administered in the field. The customer can now create new courses on-demand for no additional costs, and have them delivered with no need to bring the iPads back or getting IT involved.

Let us show you what you can do with our platform! You won’t be disappointed. Give us a call at (512) 588-3210 or send us a note at sales@bigforge.com.

Interesting links:

More information about LocalBeacon

Retail solutions on LocalBeacon

Sales and Marketing solutions on LocalBeacon

We get quite a few inquiries about building apps for both small and large retailers and e-businesses. Often, they are stuck in the mindset of “Let’s put our catalog in an app!”. Well, that’s fine, and you can certainly do that, but if that’s all you want to do, you’re not taking advantage of what a whole new sales channel can bring to the table.

Putting just your catalog on a mobile device just makes it tiny. It’s not until you begin enriching that content with what the mobile platform offers you that you’ll really be able to call mobile a new sales channel and not just another user interface. LocalBeacon for Retailers can provide solutions that drive NEW sales to your business with solutions that include:

• Region based push – Detect when one of your customers has come into range of one of your stores, or maybe even one of your competitors! Automatically send out a push notification making them an offer to come to your store or online business
• Checkins with offers – Let your users “check in” at your location and give them a special offer when they do. With integration to Facebook, their check ins will not only drive repeat business, it will let your users advertise your business to their friends.
• Multi-Channel purchase – Easily link items in the app with possible purchase options, including your own shopping cart or sales from sites such as Amazon.com
• Tablet Interfaces – Find new ways to present your content in a compelling manner. Use LocalBeacon to create kiosk apps in the store that users can come in and “bump” to get a special offer.
• In store concierge – Let your users use your apps in store to find upsell opportunities and rapid product information by scanning the UPC code.

These are just a few of the ideas that you can implement today using LocalBeacon for Retailers. Of course, you’ll also get everything else that comes with the LocalBeacon platform, including integration with social networks, full support for all rich media, and an easy to use interface to change your content and interact with your users. Contact us at sales@bigforge.com today to find out more!

Interesting links:

More information about LocalBeacon

E-Learning solutions on LocalBeacon

Sales and Marketing solutions on LocalBeacon

Are your reps just using Powerpoint to sell your product? Consider what kind of marketing material you could put together if you could build a custom iPad or iPhone application for your salesforce.

With LocalBeacon, you can quickly create rich applications cost effectively and with no programming. Using our platform, you can easily build the following applications:

• Rich marketing video embedding video, documentation, images, and audio. When your reps meet clients, they’ll be able to hand them the iPad, and let them play with the application. Your potential prospects can interact with the tool instead of listening to another presentation. Package all of your content in an easy to navigate app that will keep your prospects engaged.
• Kiosk/convention apps. Create interesting applications that enhance your marketing presence at events where you need to stand out. Building an app that will showcase your product and let people interact with the app in the way that they want to.
• Apps on the App Store.  Keep in contact with your customers, combine social networking, and provide a unique marketing opportunity that your customers can use to keep up to date with your product, stay current with training materials, and provide a handy reference for your product line.
• Experiment! Once you have the LocalBeacon platform, you can create more apps without paying developers everything you want a new app. You can try out ideas at low cost, and invest in the ones that work.

This is just a small sample of what LocalBeacon can do for your business. Feel free to browse around our site or give us a call today to arrange a demo at (512) 588-3210.

Interesting links:

More information about LocalBeacon

E-Learning solutions on LocalBeacon

Retail solutions on LocalBeacon

Our CDN provider, SimpleCDN, looks to be going through some hard times (http://admin.simplecdn.com/), so we’ve had to move our content somewhere else. Immediately, I brought up a new EC2 instance and fired up Varnish to keep things running for now, but that’s hardly a CDN.

Since the content that gets served is very dynamic, we need a CDN that support origin-pull and is, more importantly, competitively priced. We don’t have the traffic to justify a $1k/month CDN bill. Recently, Cloudfront, Amazon’s CDN offering began supporting EC2 origins. Since we run all of our infrastructure on Amazon, this seemed like a great idea. Unfortunately, there is no way to set this up from the AWS Console, so I hacked up a quick script in boto, and thought it was worth sharing.

This uses the latest version of boto (available here). I pull the latest trunk, but you may be able to use one of the distribution versions. The script I used was:

from boto.cloudfront import CloudFrontConnection
from boto.cloudfront.origin import CustomOrigin

c = CloudFrontConnection()

origin = CustomOrigin("www.bigforge.com", origin_protocol_policy='http-only')

distro = c.create_distribution(origin=origin, enabled=True, cnames=['cdn.bigforge.com'], comment='BigForge CDN')

print distro.domain_nam

It should be obvious what you have to change, and what gets printed out should be put in as a CNAME in your DNS. Go to your AWS Console, and you’ll see the Cloudfront distro being deployed. It took a few minutes to change to the “deployed” state.

It’s too bad to see SimpleCDN go, but if you need a mirror bucket solution, this works.