Imagine going off to a foreign location; let’s say China. You’re walking around Shanghai, minding your own business, when someone comes and mugs you. Sure, you could just shrug it off (or if you’re crazy you could chase them), but what needs to be done is for you to place an emergency call. Unlike the US, where all of the services are lumped into one 911 call, many countries have different numbers for different emergencies. For example, if you’re in China (but not in Hong Kong), there is a different number for police, medical, fire, and even traffic emergencies. It’s awfully confusing, but don’t fret: there’s an app for that.

With HelpCall, you can eliminate the confusion (and the need to remember a bunch of numbers) by just hitting the corresponding service that you need. The app features auto location detection and support for 126 countries. In case of extreme emergencies, the app also supports “shake to call,” which alerts a desired service in case you can’t use your voice.

The app is set up to feature four large buttons, one for police, fire, ambulance, and an emergency contact number. In case you are a stickler for design, everything is retina display optimized to give you the nicest looking buttons HelpCall could muster up.

Next time you go to a foreign land, be sure to pick up HelpCall, just in case.

$0.99

HelpCall

iPhone App – Designed for the iPhone, compatible with the iPad
Released: 2010-10-04 :: Category: Travel

[ Use HelpCall For Emergencies Overseas is a post from 148Apps ]

Popular URL shortening and analytics service Bit.ly has raised $8.9 million in Series B financing. This round of funding was led by AOL Ventures and RRE Ventures. Existing investors include Betaworks, O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures, Founders Fund, and SV Angel. Every day about 200 million Bit.ly short links are clicked on through Twitter and other services. Even though Bit.ly is no longer the default URL shortening service for Twitter, the traffic continues to grow for the service.

Bit.ly currently has 17 employees and their first source of revenues came from Bit.ly Pro accounts. They signed up about 3,000 companies and 1,000 power Twitter users. Bit.ly is working with The New York Times on a project called News.me, which is expected to launch soon. [TechCrunch]

Michelle Devon has retained a law firm for a potential class-action lawsuit against Mahalo.com. She is calling for all of those who have ever written for, completed tasks for, managed pages, or answered/asked questions for Mahalo.com. If you have done any of the aforementioned tasks for Mahalo, then you might qualify as a member of the class action lawsuit spearheaded by Devon. [Accentuate Services Blog]

We’ve recently heard that the RIM Playbook is getting an Amazon Kindle App, and I have just heard that Amazon is planning to launch its own App store for Android.

Of course, this is just a rumor. Here’s what else my Source says:

Revenue split is rumored to be “the greater of 70 percent of the purchase price or 20 percent of the List Price as of the purchase date,” which is pretty strange wording — this “List Price” concept is apparently designed to prevent you from undercutting pricing with other services — and there’ll be a $99 fee to gain entry, which is pretty standard.

I’m sure that we will hear more on this one.

Source

I get many offers from websites to do paid reviews of their services but I rarely (if ever) do it because I usually don’t think the site is good enough to share with you. I was recently contacted by the guys over at eSeth.net to do a review of their site. To be honest, they’re paying me money for this but that doesn’t mean I’m going to be gentle with them.

The site is a mobile community where quality content like themes, wallpapers and ringtones are shared by members around the globe. The site currently has over 500 iPhone 4 wallpapers, and over 1,000 wallpapers for iPhone 3GS. There are also over 2,600 mp3 ringtones. Obviously these numbers are changing everyday as more and more content is added by members… Read More