New Media M.A. Research Blog | Media Studies, University of Amsterdam

Training Wheels

As one of the cultural capitals of Europe, thousands of international students (2,000 at the University of Amsterdam alone), new residents and tourists convene in Amsterdam every year. Unfortunately, not everyone who comes to Amsterdam has the typical Dutch...

By Auke Akkerman on 10/17/14 Comments Off

Alba: Improving or Controlling your Life?

During TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco the start-up Stack Lighting announced a new way to light your house: Alba. Alba is described as the world’s first responsive LED lightbulb, that is equipped with sensors that will know when you...

By Suzanne Tromp on 09/18/14 Comments Off

“SOMEBODY”. Because “Texting is tacky. Calling is awkward. Email is old.”

By encouraging real-life interactions between strangers, Somebody is one of the most interesting apps launched lately. While messaging becomes an ordinary activity incorporated in most people’s lives nowadays, the artist Miranda July, in a partnership with the fashion brand...

By Gabriel Reis on 09/18/14 Comments Off

One Word May Become Revolutionary in Media

Media as a form of communication has become ubiquitous within modern society. Platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Youtube are often considered a part of daily-life and allow users express their own thoughts and opinions to readers, friends, followers...

By Sage Stargrove on 09/11/14 Comments Off

Shazam: predicting future hits

Have you ever listened to a song and almost died trying to find out the name of the song? Then Shazam is going to be your best friend. Shazam is a music recognition app that was launched in 2002....

By Yvette Ducaneaux on 09/08/14 Comments Off

Flat Genie: Your trusted resource for living in amsterdam

We proudly present FlatGenie.com, a website developed for the New Media Practices project. Flat Genie is a place to find accurate, personal, and easy-to-use information about living in Amsterdam (and soon other cities around the world). There are three...

By Joram Binsbergen on 10/23/13 1

Are You Ready To Get Tinderized?*

How Are You Looking Online Today? Looking for a date but too shy to approach anyone face-to-face? Lucky for you, the market for smartphone apps that connects people from a distance is rapidly extending. One of those apps is...

By Ihab Khiri on 10/07/13 Comments Off

Bang With Friends – are the ‘hook up’ sites the future of dating?

By Annika Kuyper and Jakub Dutka Bang With Friends is a casual sex app, launched in January 2013. How does it work? It is dead simple. The app connects to your Facebook account and downloads your friends list. Subsequently,...

By Jakub Dutka on 10/07/13 Comments Off

Tinder: Readily Combustible Material

“Readily combustible material, such as dry twigs, used to kindle fires.” Tinder is the new application that tells you if the people you like/ want to sleep with like you too. All you have to do is download the...

By Jonne-Marie Bouman on 10/06/13 2

‘Bashing’s’ Datavisualization as Information Intervention

Living in the era of Big Data, data visualization is booming in science, marketing and journalism (( Segel, Edward, and Jeffrey Heer. “Narrative visualization: Telling stories with data.” Visualization and Computer Graphics, IEEE Transactions 16.6 (2010): 1139-1148. )). In...

By Ineke Scheffers on 03/20/13 Comments Off

Design your own reality with Stiktu

Recently, Dutch software-firm Layar introduced Stiktu, an application that lets users be creative with augmented reality. The app runs on iPhone and Android platforms and aims to be the next best thing in social media, blurring the boundaries between...

By Robert Silvis on 10/05/12 2

Review: Location-based app Placeling makes everyone a tour guide

By: Larissa Hildebrandt and Vincentiu Dinga Placeling is a free iPhone app and WordPress plugin. It is a location-based social network where you can share your favourite places. Users are encouraged to “be the guide” in their city by bookmarking locations...

By Larissa Hildebrandt on 10/04/12 Comments Off

GasBuddy – The App of Our Future

At September 4th 2012 the public broadcast station NOS announced that Dutch gas prices are higher than ever. For people who don’t own a car, like most of the students, this news is negligible and there is no need to...

By Jaimy Quadekker on 10/01/12 Comments Off

App Review: Pulse. Re-imagining the news

By: Juliana Marques and Sonia Kolasinska Tired of checking many news websites every morning to get the full overview of what’s going on? Pulse is the solution. With the help of this app it’s a piece of cake to gather posts...

By Sonia Kolasinska on 10/01/12 1

The Making of the MoMUvA app

We as master students New Media at the UvA rely on many different sources on the web for information regarding our course and objects of study. Our main idea for the MoMUvA app was to bring together these channels,...

By Jorrit Schaap on 10/30/11 Comments Off

What to do with a brilliant new App Idea?

Interview with Co-Founder and Director of SellAnApp: Milan van den Bovenkamp SellAnApp focuses on mobile app development through crowd-sourcing and funding and thereby gives everyone the opportunity to ‘transform their ideas into an actual mobile app’. Sharing your app...

By Anne Laurine Stadermann on 10/23/11 2

App review: Sleep as an droid. Or as a cyborg?

I love to sleep. So much that waking up early on Monday for morning classes is a hard and laborious task. I always set my alarm clock about half an hour early to compensate for the time spent snoozing...

By Renoud Netjes on 10/12/11 1

UberSocial App Review – Mobile Tweeting

Twitter’s official app for Android is notorious for its limited features and overall lack of functionality. Let’s face it – if people had a choice between the official app and using a computer, they’d choose the latter. Or maybe...

By Christopher Mead on 10/11/11 Comments Off

App Review: Google Goggles

I have to admit that I do not own the app I'm about to review. In fact, I have never used it. But I want to discuss this app here because I feel that in the long run it...

By Jorrit Schaap on 10/10/11 2

Prey – an open source anti theft solution for Mac, PCs & Phones [Review]

Prey is a program that should help you feel more relaxed when using your brand new macbook pro in public. It lets you keep track of your phone or laptop if it is lost or stolen. For the...

By Clément Adam on 10/10/11 1

App review: TomTom Places (iPhone)

What makes a good app? Does it have to be groundbreaking and revolutionary, extremely useful, addictive or just nice and decent? For the last few days I’ve been testing an app that might not be very revolutionary but is...

By Floris Spronk on 10/10/11 Comments Off

The Switch: from Matthew Fuller to mobile apps

Erupting Irruption Ask Elk Grove, launched ten days ago for the city of Elk Grove, California, numbers among the newest localized smartphone applications for reporting civic repairs. Most follow agendas similar to GRCity311, an app developed for Grand Rapids,...

By Kendall Grady on 10/10/11 2

App Review: Wikitude

With the introduction of AR (augmented reality) software and its implementation into mobile devices there has been a considerable rise in apps that use such geo-location and AR features. One of these apps is ‘Wikitude‘ developed by the Austrian...

By Philip Breek on 10/09/11 Comments Off

App review: Roamler

On June the 10th of this year the Amsterdam startup Roamler launched their free iPhone-app bearing the same name. Roamler challenges its ‘Roamlers’, the name for the users of the app, to complete certain tasks on assigned locations using...

By Leander Roet on 10/09/11 4