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Just behind Twitter and ahead Foursquare, Compass by Catch.com is one of the most widely installed and highly rated apps on Android. Until now it’s been under the radar.

The point of Compass is to help you find your way. Yes, it starts with a variety of actual compass designs to choose from that point North with as much accuracy as your phone’s magnetometer will allow.

The real power of Compass, however, is to make it easy to save and retrieve places that are important to you together with your geo-tagged notes.

Compass was developed by Catch.com, and it integrates seamlessly with the Catch Notes application on Android to enable you to attach notes to locations. When you take a note from Compass, the note is automatically populated with your current address and other data gathered from the phone’s sensors.

After you attach a note to a location, you can also add photos and soon a voice note.

Use Compass to annotate your world. Then when you want to find your way back to your important places and recall what you were thinking at the time, Compass points you toward them.

Compass ranks in the top 25 apps on Android, out of over 100,000 apps in the market. As of today, Compass has been downloaded over 8 million times, and is installed on nearly 5 million Android phones according to the Developer Console where Google reports Android Market data to developers. Most Android developers keep this data a secret, but we decided to let you in on how we track installs and usage of our app.

But just being installed on a phone doesn’t mean that people actually use it. That’s why we use Google Analytics Mobile to understand how many people actually use Compass and which features get used the most. Google Analytics shows aggregate usage data that cannot be linked with users. We use this summary data to help understand and prioritize our development tasks.

In December 2010, Compass had 1,762,328 Absolute Unique Visitors according to Google Analytics Mobile. This makes Compass one of the biggest location checkin apps in the world. Despite the many Compass users, the app has been under the radar because Compass helps you track your private places and notes, and there is no push to share your location or geo-tagged content as there is in most other checkin apps. No one can see your checkins and notes unless you decide to share them.

If you use Compass and you have any thoughts and ideas for the product, or if you would like to share a story about how you use it on your Android phone, please leave a comment. If you don’t have Compass, why not give it a try?

Snaptic and HopeLab Announce the Android “Move Your App” Developer Challenge
TED to invite winner to attend TED Global 2010 in Oxford
Snaptic Press Release

San Francisco, CA — Snaptic , a developer of smartphone and web applications that capture, organize, and share information has partnered with HopeLab, a non-profit focused on improving the quality of life for young people with chronic illness, to sponsor the “Move Your App” developer challenge in response to the 2010 TED Prize Wish.

It is widely recognized that the obesity epidemic and sedentary behavior are catastrophic to global health. Today’s smartphone platforms, such as Android and software APIs like those offered by Snaptic, offer new tools for developers to create apps that give individuals more power and control to improve their health.

“Onboard smartphone sensors, the growth of large online social networks, and mass adoption of mobile software offer fertile ground for a new breed of apps that encourage and measure movement,” said Steve Brown, CEO of Snaptic. “We are excited to work with HopeLab and the Android developer community to help everyone reach a higher state of health and well being.” (more…)

Last month, I had the chance to speak at South By Southwest 2010 — 15 minutes of fame in the Future 15 mobile track of the world’s hippest interactive conference. I was invited to talk about the Android ecosystem, where Snaptic is a leading developer with over 2 million active installs of our note-taking and geo-tagging applications. Here’s my presentation, entitled “Augmenting Your Brain With Android.”

SXSW started as a music and film festival, but has emerged as one of the biggest affairs for the Internet and new interactive technology. Since tech turned the music industry on its head and is in the process of disrupting the film business as well, it makes sense to combine tech with film and music. 2010 also was the first year SXSW had a track dedicated to mobile, which also makes sense as we enter another phase shift with the next billion connections to the internet coming through smart mobile devices.

With such powerful, always on, always connected technology in our hands around the clock, we posed the question of what this means for our brain. How can we use smart mobile technology to become smarter in managing the increased flow of information? With the flood of content generated by others people and important to other people, what is happening to the content that is most important to us?

Snaptic is developing technology to augment your brain, and we are looking to the brain for design inspiration. There are no database schemas, no tables with rows and columns, in your brain. Instead, your brain is a vast network of synaptically connected notes that grows and evolves as you capture and connect information that is important to you.

The information model for Snaptic note-taking applications is a network of interconnected elements of data, retaining and using context so that your notes make more sense and are easier to find with less effort. We have opened our notes platform to developers, making it easy to capture and connect information from any app.

We can’t do it alone, which is why we are open-sourcing more of our technology every day and inviting more developers to work with us to create a new information space designed like the brain and for the brain. Check out http://github.com/snaptic to follow our open source projects, and check out http://snaptic.com/events for information on our upcoming developer challenge and developer conference.

Google Sets is an interesting new tool from Google Labs that finds associations between words or phrases and related terms that we might not have thought about. Who could be better able to offer such a tool than Google: More than any other organization on the planet, Google knows what we are thinking. When something is on our minds, chances are that a significant sample of us are typing it into Google. The resulting data puts Google in a unique position not only to identify associations between words, but also to derive insights into human intentions and behavior.

Google Sets Home Health Monitoring Example

For obvious examples, type “Porsche” and “Mercedes” into Google Sets, and the site returns Ferrari, BMW, Audi and Lamborghini, among others. Type in “brain fitness” and Google Sets returns brain health, mind fitness, mental health, stress, cognitive neuroscience, brain training, and more.

For something less obvious, I challenged Google with the name of my old company, Health Hero Network. Google Sets accurately found AMGA, the acronym for the American Medical Group Association, the company’s partner on an important but not very well known Medicare chronic care improvement demonstration project. Google Sets also identified two of the company’s competitors, Viterion Telehealthcare and AMD Telemedicine, but missed the larger rivals Philips Telehealth and Honeywell HomMed as well as Intel Digital Health, the latest entrant into the home health monitoring market. Google Sets also didn’t pick up the fact that Health Hero Network is now part of Robert Bosch GmbH.

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