OLIO is a food sharing app that prevents waste

share

Every year, UK households throw away £700 of unwanted food. It is a sin of the highest order in a world where food is scarce and some countries are starving.

Not only do UK households throw away £12.5 billion of edible food and drink each year, but a third of all food produced globally goes uneaten. Our children will despise us for this.

Apparently, there is now an app for that… and it’s well overdue. OLIO is a free app that connects neighbours with each other, and with local shops and cafes so surplus food can be shared, not thrown away. Available to download on iOS and Android, OLIO has seen 100,000 user visits in its first six months since its formation in July, 2015.

Currently the app is only available in London within the M25, but the company says it will expand throughout 2016. All people need to do is take a photo of the food offered, add a description of what it is and post details about how people can pick it up. For those who want to pick it up need to log in, browse, evaluate and collect.

If you’re after some food, just log-in and browse through what’s available as most stuff is either free or heavily discounted. You can then message whoever is offering it and find out how to go and collect it.

This sounds like a winner. The gluttonous can assuage their consciences, and the skint can eat for free. Presumably its success or not in London will be the barometer of any expansion across the UK.

Howl for a spontaneous night out in London… and beyond

howl_logoThe last time I put the word ‘Howl’ and ‘London’ together was in 1982 when I went to see the vastly overrated movie An American Werewolf in London with some mates of mine.

Fortunately things have moved on in the past three decades and juxtaposing the words ‘Howl and London’ means a very different experience when getting your mates together to go out in London or other global cities. Continue reading

Introducing Nina Mobile, your virtual assistant for iOS and Android

Nuance Nina picNina Mobile, Nuance’s virtual assistant for mobile customer service, has been upgraded. She/he/it is now supported in 38 languages with an enhanced mobile experience for tablets, as it continues to make an impression in the enterprise space.

As Robert De Niro in his role as Travis Bickle it the movie Taxi Driver once said; “Are you talkin’ to me?” Yes, it would appear so, Robert, not only is somebody ‘talkin” to you, but through Nina, you are talkin’ to everybody else as well.

Nina Mobile allows companies to add speech-based virtual assistant capabilities to existing Apple iOS and Google Android mobile apps. It combines Nuance speech recognition, Text-to-Speech (TTS), voice biometrics, and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) technology hosted in the cloud. Continue reading

London games start-up hits paydirt with Smash Cops iOS racing game

Five ex-PlayStation developers who set up a start-up studio in London’s Shoreditch last year have struck gold with their new iOS racing game Smash Cops.

The game launched in the iTunes App Store a week ago after receiving critical acclaim from influential review sites such as Pocket Gamer and EuroGamer and is now at No 2. in the top iPad game chart for paid apps.

The game retails for $2.99 in the US and ‘uses innovative new push controls to control and steer your car in a way that is natural and fun for gamers’. This may be so, but perhaps the FANTASTIC name of the game is also responsible; Police chase felons and drive them off the road.

The company who developed and published the game, Hutch Games is another one of those nifty little UK companies that live around London’s Old Street. Let’s just hope the owners don’t drive to work too often or Old Street roundabout might be a little dangerous.