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Super Bowl XLIV Apps to Load Before Kickoff

This Super Bowl weekend, whether you are rooting for the New Orleans Saints or that other team, there is a dog pile of apps to can enhance the game, although I will admit not as many as I would like for some handsets.

The Super Bowl app yardage leader is the iPhone. The iTunes app store offers the official NFL Superbowl Program, formatted for your phone, for $4.99. There is a $1.99 Saints-focused WhoDatApp, which has a roster and player data, twitter updates from Saints players (I wouldn’t count on a lot of tweets during a game), and an archive of Bobby and Deke sports talk radio shows, although you need a Wi-Fi connection for audio.

There is an Indianapolis-specific app for $1.99, with a schedule, roster and statistics. The free ESPN ScoreCenter app also offers game statistics as well as scoring alerts, just in case you are momentarily distracted by the barbecue. If you need to get out of the house, the free Fan Finder app will help pinpoint sports bars near you.

Close behind is single app, but it’s a doozy. Sprint has preloaded the NFL Mobile Live app on 100 models of its phones, and not just smart phones, but semi-smart phones like the LG Rumour and Samsung Reclaim. If the app isn’t on your phone, text 7777 for a download. It’s free, but it will use data minutes. The NFL Mobile Live shows a twitter feed from NFL players and personalities, and you will be able to see live programming from the NFL Network during the game.

The Android market is a little skimpy. There are some all-news apps, some fantasy football apps, but I found just one specific Super Bowl app. it is the $1.39 Cajun Super Bowl language quiz, which lets you look up words you might hear from fans cheering the Saints in a N’awlins patois.

The Blackberry market is equally thin, with no specific Super Bowl apps that I could see. The best I could do was to find team themes for your phone at $5.99 each. Oddly, the description of Saints theme pack cites the helmet’s “lucky blue horseshoe.”

Suspicious, but I’m from Baltimore. I am predisposed to think Indianapolis is up to something sneaky.

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December 29, 2009, 2:39 PM

App of the Week: Cult Bands, Live and Free

Lots of apps provide free music, but only one I know of plays original music, recorded live in its own studios, from a variety of artists. It is called Daytrotter, and it just happens to have a free iPhone app.

Daytrotter operates out of Rock Island, Ill., where it says it entices artists to stop by its studio on their ways elsewhere. The musicians then lay down a few live tracks, often using borrowed instruments.

Almost 800 sessions have been recorded by more than 700 artists, and all can be heard free on the iPhone.

Daytrotter specializes in lesser-known bands, although many have developed strong followings since their early appearances there. Artists like Death Cab for Cutie, Raphael Sadiq, Fleet Foxes, Vampire Weekend and the Ting Tings have made appearances. Daytrotter said it adds artists each day.

Fidelity is quite good on most recordings, if sometimes charmingly crude. Just take a listen to Bell X-1’s sweetly mellow rendition of “I Fought the Law and the Law Won.”

What the app doesn’t offer is free downloads of songs, reviews and videos. For that, you still have to go to the site.

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Pay your money and take your choice: a solar-powered battery charger for an Apple MacBook for $1,200; or a new Apple MacBook for $200 less.

A Kansas company called QuickerTek has just announced the Apple “Juicz,” for those who just can’t find an AC outlet nearby, but can find the sun (the company claims someone took a Mac and a Juicz on a visit to Mount Everest and it worked well—closer to the sun, I guess).

The $1,200 lightweight, flexible panel puts out 55 watts and supposedly fully recharges just about any current Apple laptop in six hours, plugging into the Magsafe port. A bargain model for $700 has 27 watts and takes about twice as long to recharge the MacBook.

It’s a serious device, but at this price, one would have to be either committed to going green full time, or just committed. After all, AC outlets are…well, ubiquitous. As one reviewer noted, $1,200 could buy one heck of an extension cord.

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It’s hard to believe that hiring managers and employers are surfing the Web to screen job candidates – or that anything your boss might dig up online might matter as much as your undergraduate major or references, but increasingly, it seems like it does.

A recent study conducted by Harris Interactive for CareerBuilder.com determined that 45 percent of employers questioned were using social networks to screen job candidates — more than double from a year earlier, when a similar survey found that just 22 percent of supervisors were researching potential hires on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn.

One easy thing you can do to gauge of how much digital dirt there is muddying up your online reputation is by Googling yourself, said Peter Spicer, a personal risk specialist . If, for example, you have your annual beer pong tournaments memorialized on Facebook and MySpace, you might want to consider deleting those pictures or at least untagging yourself in them or ensuring that your privacy settings are set so that people outside of your network can’t view them. Choosing a slightly more respectable profile photograph of yourself couldn’t hurt, either.

“First impressions are crucial to landing a job, particularly in the current job market,” said Mr. Spicer. “A job candidate with no embarrassing photos online has an immediate edge over you if there are pictures of you on Facebook wearing a lampshade and holding a martini.”

If you cringe at what surfaces after a cursory Google search — like photos from that hotdog-eating contest you won in 1995 — you could always try creating your own content online, like a LinkedIn account or Google profile, to help buffer it out, but “a better idea is to think twice before posting any public content you wouldn’t want found by potential employers,” said David Binkowski, senior vice president of marketing at MS&L, a communications firm.

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Cape Mac is supporting it's favorite radio station during their current fundraiser by supplying

the popular iPod Nano to the station as rewards for certain donations. Cape Mac is proud to be 

a part of the  National Public Radio family. We wish them continued success in their efforts to 

provide high quality programming to Cape Cod.

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