For those on the go, finding a clean toilet in Singapore and giving feedback on the best and worst commodes is now in hand with a new app for mobile phones and tablet computers. The Restroom Association of Singapore (RAS) already has the LOO Connect service on its toilet.org.sg website that allows people to pinpoint and comment on public facilities and to see those given three, four or five stars.

With the new app for Android smartphones and tablets, the non-profit group said it was “leveraging on the ‘crowdsourcing’ trend and technology to recognise clean toilets and encourage socially responsible behaviour”.

Singapore mobile app flushes out clean and dirty toilets [tech2]

Need to make a call but run out of juice? Just give your cellphone a shake for an extra burst of power – that’s the idea behind a new cellphone charger that turns movement into energy.

Shashank Priya and his colleagues at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg are designing an emergency onboard charger that draws energy from the piezoelectric force generated by your fingertips clicking the keypad, or just by giving the phone a good old shake.

The researchers mounted a sheet of piezoelectric polymer called PCT beneath the keys in a cellphone to see how well it converted vibrations from pressure waves into energy to power the phone.

In their experiment, the setup generated around 10 microwatts of electricity. That’s not nearly enough to continuously operate a phone, but Priya says it would be sufficient for an emergency situation.

Charge your cellphone with a tap or a shake [New Scientist]

If you often find yourself walking on lonely streets or dangerous situations alone, then the awesome new Coyote Case may just be what you need. This ingenious Smartphone cover not only protects your iPhone from scratches and dings; it can actually protect you from predators! How does it do this – by emitting an incredibly loud siren when activated! Dubbed a “powerful, personal protection system”, this Smartphone cover emits an ear-piercing 100+ decibel siren sound when the panic button is activated.

The Coyote Case for iPhone: Your personal bodyguard [Gizmodiva]

Nokia hasn’t really ever had the coolest phones on the market. They are generally just those reserved for construction workers and project managers; the type of phone that is simply used to stay in touch and get the job done. However, Nokia’s most recent concept, though it’s not exactly breaking news anymore, still has the entire smartphone industry buzzing and has smartphone enthusiasts dropping their jaws.

After Nokia’s concept for the Nokia Kinetic made its way on to the Internet excitement began to grow considerably. The most exciting feature about the phone is that it is actually bendable. No more worrying about the phone being shattered if sat on. No more rigid covers. The phone can literally sit in your jeans pockets and will move with the curvature of your body.

In addition to a bendable structure, the phone has an OLED display and has all the regular computer parts of a traditional smartphone – they just all bend. However, the bending feature isn’t just for flexibility sake; it actually serves a higher purpose and grants users greater control over their phone. By bending the phone inwards or outwards, users are able to zoom in or out on photos and are also able to use the feature to flip through their music.

The user interface is also something to be impressed by – if the fact that the phone is bendable isn’t enough. The Kinetic’s UI is highly sensitive, and allows users to quickly scroll across the screen. Phone manufacturers are in a high stakes race right now to provide customers with the most responsive phones on the market, ones utilizing the most cutting edge smart sensors and even sound transducers and mini load cells such as the kind outlined at Transducertechniques.com.

With this phone, a simple touching of corners can allow users to quickly hop through pictures or whatever they are interested in while tinkering on their smartphone. However, the incredibly responsive UI is also pretty good about self-monitoring itself so that a quick slide into the back pocket doesn’t have it calling all of your contacts.

Unfortunately it is still too early to say whether or not the Kinetic will make it to the sale floor. Currently, it is only in its prototype phase. Regardless, this is definitely a solid indication that form and specifications of smartphones are not fixed–they can and probably will adapt to consumer demands.

Consideration was given for the editing and publishing of this article

It’s worth noting that revenue for mobile device sales has outpaced PC and laptop sales in recent years. And whether you’re a small business owner, an entrepreneur, or a freelance project manager of any kind, you understand the importance of real-time applications in charting your sales. The key word here is mobility. This has a lot to do with how sales numbers will be tracked moving forward.

Mobile phone use didn’t begin with such a bang. At one point consumers viewed mobile Internet use as somewhat of luxury. These days it’s considered a necessity. Many people can’t imagine getting through the day without access to a smartphone and its panoply of apps. The most recent addition that will have sales reps dancing at their doors, is mobile CRM. While people await the next generation of augmented reality and location-based web browsing they can for the time being take advantage of. Many people use their mobile devices even when their desktop computer is on hand.

People are opting for mobile video more than ever too. Video streaming, which absorbs a lion’s share of the web’s activity, dominates mobile phone use, as does handheld gaming, e-commerce, and e-book reading. Most human activities can be undertaken, or at least broached with a mobile phone. This is a reality that business professionals and entrepreneurs of all stripes must contend with.

CRM apps will combine the powers of place-based apps, GPS, and real-time communications in order to usher in a new generation of mobile sales information technology.

This post is a guest post from our supporters.

ARTKIVE is the easiest and fastest way to chronologically store, share and print your child’s artwork or schoolwork. Never again feel guilty about throwing away artwork your kids bring home. Get rid of the clutter and start to enjoy your child’s work. Your kids will love flipping through their Artkives to see their creations.

The love pros at eHarmony invent an iPhone app that can be programmed to call with a fake “emergency,” allowing you to graciously escape a lame date. First, you’ll be able to choose precisely when the call arrives, whether that be in 3 seconds, 1 minute, or 5 minutes. Then it lets you specify the emergency: Your mom calls to tell you your sister just went into labor, for example, or your next-door neighbor rings to tell you your apartment’s flooded.

The sneaky app that will call you with an “emergency” during a bad date [AllTop]

In cheesy films when there’s an emergency and someone shouts “is there a doctor around?” one always appears from the crowd to help, but in the real world it often isn’t that easy to find someone with sound medical knowledge who’d be able to save lives in an emergency.

Well in order to address this problem, a new application called Rapid Rescue is currently being tested in Singapore, which aims to connect those in medical emergencies with trained first aiders who are nearby.

The app has been developed by the Singapore Red Cross Society and enables trained first aiders to set up dedicated push notifications, so if someone close to them needs help they’ll be alerted straight away.

Rapid Rescue: Find first aiders during medical emergencies [Shiny Shiny]

Friday is an app that wants to automatically track your activity in order to provide a history of your communications, additional analysis, and even a search engine for your own life.

With Friday, which now has around 55,000 sign-ups pre-launch, what you’re seeing is sort of like the flip side to Siri. Where you may ask your virtual assistant about things that will happen in the future (what’s my day look like? Can I get sushi nearby?), you ask Friday about things that have already happened.

The interesting thing here is not just that it has access to the history of your communications (phone calls, text messages, emails, etc.), but that it also has access to other events, like photos that were taken, changes in the phone’s status (battery drops, e.g.) as well as activity taking place on third-party services (Facebook or Foursquare checkins, tweets, e.g.).

Friday: A Personal Assistant That Remembers What You’ve Done [TechCrunch]

A great new app by Virgin HealthMiles, of Richard Branon’s Virgin Group, is taking seriously the responsibility companies have for the health of their employees. Based around the idea of providing wellness activities and mobile incentives for its users, this app has an accelerometer that tracks steps and workout calories and then syncs the info to the users’ Virgin HealthMiles account. The Dash app allows users to manually add weight, blood pressure activity, and duration while the BMI numbers and biometric information is automatically calculated. Going forth, employees can keep track of their workouts and caloric burns and even have access to summaries and graphs which correlate their weekly and monthly progress.

Apps and tools like this which incentivize positive employee behavior and performance are becoming more of priority for employers looking to create a stable and productive work force. Many leadership training seminars now focus on community health objectives just as consistently as communication skills and technology integration.

While the Virgin HealthMiles Dash app is not the first mobile exercise application that keeps track of calories and progress, it is one of the first that is uniquely tailored to employees as an incentivizing factor for their work forces. Perhaps one of the neatest tools on the app is the Challenges feature, which facilitates and encourages team challenges with real-time stat tracking. This is all part of the Virgin HealthMiles Connections social platform, which creates a community-based news feed.

Dash is also one of the first activity tracking apps that has a well-planned reward platform based around the health of the participants and not the micro-managing delight of the community manager. One of perks of this for the employees is that he or she does not need to be a part of the rewards platform in order to participate. Let the employee accelerometer challenges begin!

This post is a guest blog post from our supporters

Photo organization service Everpix just launched its first iPhone application. The app does two key things: it offers you a way to access your entire photo collection from your phone, plus it automatically uploads all your iPhone photos to the Everpix cloud.

The app is a crucial part of the overall Everpix experience, which, for those of you unfamiliar, works primarily as a Mac application at present (Windows coming) to automatically organize and combine all your photos, whether they’re stored on your computer or in the cloud. The service supports photo uploads from iPhoto, Aperture and Lightroom, plus photos from your online collections on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and Picasa.

New Everpix iPhone App Automatically Uploads Your Photos To The Cloud [TechCrunch]