The CIBC first announced that they would be releasing real estate apps that allow potential home buyers to search available homes in given areas straight from their mobile device. Now, they have officially launched the app on the unlocked iPhone 4 and Blackberry. The app will allow users to specify locations that in which they are considering buying a home, and then the app will provide them with maps, listing and pricing information, as well as other relevant information that you might be interested in when purchasing a home.

As well as just showing you a map with all of the available properties, the app will include a calculators page that allows you to choose different options and allow you to filter out homes that do not meet your specifications or are not affordable enough for you to consider. Among these include a mortgage payment calculator, which lets you get a good idea of what you could expect to pay per month if you were to purchase the home, the plausibility of renting versus owning, as well as the affordability of the home given your current earnings.

The app for BlackBerry phone such as Torch 9800 unlocked,  Bold 9780,etc also features neighborhood reports, which will allow you to get a good idea of the area that you would potentially be moving into. This is especially important for individuals with children who are looking to move into a nice area. The built in calculators will give you the ability to tweet, text or even email the details of the listing of your choice to anyone that you think might be potentially interested in it.

This app should help out home buyers, as well as home sellers and real estate agents. So far, most of the listings have been spread out across several websites that are only easily accessed from a desktop device. A mobile app will allow users to take a look at the possibilities, all times of the day, from a simple interface that spells things out in plain English.

It All Started With Deep Love

Originating in Japan in 2003, an author under the pseudonym of Yoshi, ‘published’ the first mobile-phone novel ever, entitled Deep Love, a story about a teenage prostitute who finds love through a chance encounter. Though mobile phones only process 1,600 characters per email, Yoshi employed this limitation to his advantage. Using concise dialogue, devoid of words too lengthy or complicated, he blended a rather generic plot with straightforward storytelling, attracting a new generation of readers who did not typically read novels. Serializing chapters, readers could email him their feedback. Incorporating their ideas, the story took on new twists and turns. Deep Love was so successful, it went from mobile to print and eventually hit the big screen.

Three years prior, Yoshi had created a website providing content for mobile phones and added a template called “Let’s Make Novels”. His promotional campaign consisted of passing out business cards to 2,000 high school girls in front of Tokyo’s Shibuya Station (the center of Tokyo’s youth culture).

For years now, young girls from all over Japan and China have been tapping away at their cell phone keypads, writing stories of young love, lust, unwanted pregnancy, and terminal illness… The writing is simple, the language repetitive. Emoticons are used to economize space; big spaces are used between words when trying to accentuate quiet parts, whereas wordsgetcrammedtogether in the heated scenes. In 2007, five of the best-selling novels in Japan were republished cell phone novels; the top three written by first-time novelists.

The number-five novel, If You, was written by a 21-year-old, known only by her first name, “Rin.” It is common for cell-phone novelists to keep their anonymity, as their stories draw from personal experience and could potentially shame them. Rin completed her novel in six months while on commuter trains to and from school and her part-time job, uploading posts onto a website where readers could comment on the work as it progressed. If You received a number-one ranking based on online readers’ votes, and it was republished in paperback, selling over 400,000 copies. Most writers only dream of numbers like that.

Revolution Tool For Women?

The cell-phone novel has certainly infiltrated Japanese youth culture and is quite groundbreaking in that it is now written mainly by and for young women. In a society which has been rather unfavorable to women, the mobile-phone has opened new doors and possibilities. But while many agree that a channel for girls to express themselves is a positive step forward, many argue that the storylines reveal nothing new and that the art and sophistication of the language is undeniably paying the price.

Here are two excerpts from the New Yorker, which elaborate this point:
Satoko Kan, a professor who specializes in contemporary women’s literature, said, “From a feminist perspective, for women and girls to be able to speak about themselves is very important,” “As a method, it leads to the empowerment of girls. But, in terms of content, I find it quite questionable, because it just reinforces norms that are popular in male-dominated culture.”

Mikio Funayama, the editor of Bungakukai, a monthly literary journal said, “The author’s name is rarely revealed, the titles are very generic, the depiction of individuals, the locations—it’s very comfortable, exceedingly easy to empathize with.” “Any high-school girl can imagine that this experience is just two steps from her own. But this kind of empathy is largely different from the emotive response—the life-changing event—that reading a great novel can bring about. One tells you what you already know. Literature has the power to change the way you think.”

The Cell Phone Novel in North America

Though the market for mobile-phone novels remains nowhere near that of Japan or China, both established and aspiring authors in North America are finding real promise in using tools such as Twitter and Quillpill to get their stories out there, to large audiences, in the matter of minutes.

Cell-phone novels are changing the way people read and write. With 140-character entry limits, authors must learn to choose their words and sentences carefully or run the risk of losing readers. Readers can fish through thousands of posts, perusing through the shelves of a massive cyber library whether they’re on a bus, train or waiting in a line.

The cell phone novel is offering budding writers a new space for their ideas, an easy system for editing entries and getting feedback from readers. Though it may still be in its early stages, it holds huge potential in a not-so-distant future. It is a fast, collaborative, and most of all accessible way for sharing stories. And after all, who really wants to stand in the way of creativity, no matter how absurd the tools may seem at first.

What would we do without cell phones? Well, with more cell phones than there are people in Europe and 72% of the Canadian population active cell phone users, let’s just say, it would probably be like taking away electricity for much of the Western population. Oh how things change in only 36 yeas.

The history of the modern cell phone begins on April 3, 1973, when Director of Research and Development at Motorola, Dr. Martin Cooper, made the first cell phone call ever, to his rival, Dr. Joel S. Engel, head of research at At&T’s Bell labs, as he walked down the streets of New York City. The Motorola DynaTAC cost $3,995, weighed over 2 pounds and took over10 hours to charge. But its large size, high cost and overall impracticality didn’t quite make it very appealing to the general public.

In 1983 the Motorola_Dyna 8000X became the first truly portable mobile phone on the US market, with an impressive one hour of battery life and the power to store up to 30 phone numbers!

The Nokia-Mobira Cityman, which came out in 1987 got a huge publicity boost when Mikkhail Gorbachev was pictured using one to make a call to his communications minister in Moscow. It weighed 800 grams and cost EUR 4,560.

In 1987, Japanese manufacturer NEC launched the NEC 9 A, which became the fastest selling handheld mobile phone. It was smaller, lighter and had more features than any other handheld mobile phone.

In 1989, Motorola MicroTAC became the first-ever flip phone. It weighed 12.3 ounces and retailed between $2, 495 and $3, 495

In the nineties, cell phones and pagers became a huge fad. The nineties also marked the widespread adoption of personal computers and the Internet. In 1993, the BellSouth/IBM Simon Personal Communicator became the first mobile phone to add PDA features: phone, pager, calculator, address book, fax machine and e-mail device, for a total cost of $900.

The Motorola StarTac came out in 1996, paving the way for sleek, lightweight (3.1 ounces) cell phones.

In the late 90’s and early 2000’s, it was all about the candy bar-style phones available in all sorts of colours. You could talk for 3.3 hours, they had internal antennas, PIM features and fit 5 lines of text.

In 2000, the Kyocera QCP6035 introduced the SmartPhone which cost $400-$500 and was the first Palm-based phone to be widely available to users. It only had 8MB of memory though.

The first commercial camera phone was the J-SH04 made by Sharp Corporation, which had an integrated CCD sensor and came out in 2001.

In 2002, the BlackBerry 5810 became the first to offer voice capabilities.

By late 2007, Apple came out with its long awaited iPhone, an internet connected multimedia smartphone. The iPhone featured a touch sensitive screen, 2 megapixel camera, the ability to sync iTunes to the phone, and more than 25000 apps. In 2007, the iPhone was named “invention of the year” by Times Magazine.

Case and point, uses for cell phone cameras have evolved just as quickly as the technology in them. The original intent behind camcorder phones was to enable cell phone users to send video messages to friends and family. Now cell phone cameras both aid and thwart criminal activity, record extraordinary situations (i.e. natural disasters) and are also used by people for bootlegging purposes (i.e. recording concerts, live performances, movies, etc.)

Most recently, people have started recording both short and feature length films entirely with their cell phone cameras. Sometimes referred to as ‘Cellular Cinema’ their popularity has grown so much that entire film festivals now exclusively feature films made on cell phones.

This is an excerpt taken from the Pocket Films Festival website: “The Pocket Films Festival explores the potential for audio-visual expression that lies hidden in a “practical high-tech toy,” and through various media, aims to construct an ideal method of communication that excites our sensibilities – something not yet obvious even to artists.”

They acknowledge the medium is still young and not yet taken seriously by most artists. Those on the vanguard of cellular cinema don’t allow this to affect their artistic endeavors as new cell phone films pop up on a daily basis.

Here are some examples taken from Youtube that show some of the creativity coming out of cellular cinema (Warning! Artsy Videos Ahead):

Mankind is No Island

Kung Fu Film

I Miss You

Man with a Cell Phone Camera

Cell Phone Video Collage

Cell Phone Car Chase

Cell Phone Cinematography

Recorder

Recording information can be crucial to a mission’s success. While voice recording accommodates more than just spies, it’s still a useful basic spy staple. There are other apps, like Jott, VoiceNotes, and Ecconote, that do the same thing.

Google Latitude

Coordinate your mission with your contacts by having everybody’s location fed real-time to a Google Maps display. This app isn’t quite ready yet, but it is being developed.

iFirstAid

An injury left untreated can slow down your mission. Get information about poison, choking, stings, bleeding, burns, and more. This is stuff you should know, but the app sure helps if you don’t!

Google Earth

Far from being useful to only spies, Google Earth is still the poor man’s satellite support. See and read the upcoming terrain, and plan your approach.

Safety Button

About to do something dangerous? This app traces your steps and saves them when you start up the software, and has one big help button to push when you’re in trouble. The app will then contact a chosen friend (asset, ally, etc.) with your current position.

NATO Alphabet

Echo — bravo — zulu — niner. Don’t look like a chump if you have to start busting out NATO alphabet code. Odds are you won’t use this, but it’s good to have just in case.

Lie Detector App

Save time and try to get the truth. While lie detectors are about as pseudoscience as you can get, an app like this still might have a use.

Change Your Caller ID

Fairly self-explanatory. Don’t let your number give away your identity, or rather, change it to what you need it to be.

Edovia Linguo Language Translator

Settle quickly into a new country and translate important phrases to store for later. Includes Arabic, Bulgarian, simplified Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese (Romaji and Kanji), Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish.

Spontaneous Insight: People Search & Background Checks

If you need a quick rundown on a new face, try this app to do a background check, getting criminal records and other potentially critical information.

Mobiscope: Video From Webcams

Turn your iPhone into a command centre, and monitor your video surveillance channels. No need for a sleepy guard with a magazine. Includes saved recordings, motion detection, and email alerts.

Extra mention…

SecureAccess

Shame this tool doesn’t actually work. Some functional fingerprint-based app could have been cool.

Feel free to comment some suggestions for apps to add, in case I’ve missed any!