Today’s stories from Kromek & Roamler …
This has got to give a whole new meaning to ‘hot spots’. A UK company, Kromek, is launching a personal portable radiation detector – RadAngel, into the Japanese. Not only will this detector work in conjunction with an Apple iPhone or iPad, the system also makes use of social networking. The company claims that the detector can distinguish between man-made hazardous radiation sources in the environment (such as Cesium from the Fukushima disaster) and typical background radiation. The best bit is what happens when a user discovers an occurrence of man-made radiation. Utilising location based services such as GPS, collected data can be exchanged and shared. This allows users to create and participate in an online RadAngel community that informs people of local radiation levels and potential issues. A sort of Dangerbook, then. It’s hard to see much demand for this product outside Japan but wait until Kromek launches FoodAngel – an accessory to RadAngel for use in the kitchen. Yup, that’s right. Users to can check whether food, soil, or water is contaminated with Cesium and FoodAngel will be available to buy in August 2012.
Roamler is a location-based crowd sourcing app for iPhone users currently available in Dutch only * here, ‘Roamlers’ perform small tasks at home or in their local area on behalf of brands in return for ‘experience’ points, and in most cases a cash reward. In the Netherlands there are already 5,000 Roamlers who have faced up to 150,000 tasks. In preparation for a UK version Roamler has signed up brands to use this innovative means of market insight include Red Bull, Walkers and TomTom. Emm McAndrew from Rugby is one of the first UK Roamlers. Emm comments, “I’m very impressed with the variety and quantity of the tasks available and also with the encouragement to the user to keep things fresh and creative. Roamler has now become part of my daily routine – when I go somewhere new, I used to check in on Facebook but now the first thing I do is check Roamler to see if there’s a task nearby!” So the product must be in beta, then.
*UPDATE: Actually the UK version has been live for some time. See comments below.
We would like add to this post that Roamler is live in the UK! Since December 2011 to be precise, and we have around 1,500 UK Roamlers now. Want to join and start using Roamler? This is the UK app store http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/roamler/id440588804?mt=8