Last week we launched a new application called “Baby Loves Music”. That same week we received our first Cease and Desist letter from Baby Loves Everything to stop all infringing acts of the name Baby Loves Music, as they claim common law ownership over the name.

After some digging at the US Patent and Trademark Office, we found that a patent for the name Baby Loves Music was listed, but dead. We feel we are outside the definitions of goods and services, but none-the-less (even though the patent is dead) we are not here to bust anyone’s chops.

We have designed a solution to this issue, and it is as follows: We have changed the name of the application “Baby Loves Music” to “Baby’s First Music”. We have changed all instances of the name across websites and iTunes. A update to the application has been approved for sale, and all owners of the application will receive a push notification of the update’s availability.

We wish the owners of the “Baby Loves..” line of products would accept our sincere apologies if they feel we have infringed on any trademarks (living or dead), and want you to know that in no way did we wish to profit from or harm your brand. We also wish to state that Dirk+Weiss has no affiliation with the name Baby Loves Music, or company Baby Loves Everything, LLC.

Thank you to everyone for your cooperation!

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If you have every walked, driven, biked or ran through Harvard Square in Cambridge, MA, you have probably spotted those large groups of tourists being lead around by tour guides wearing straw hats and carrying signs. This is the Hahvahd  Tour, and now they can say, “There’s an app for that”.

Today, a new application that we created went live into the iTunes App Store. Trademark Tours Presents: Harvard University, is a campus tour application for the prestigious institution, and is filled to the brim with great, rich content.

Creature Features

• Integrated Google Maps and GPS
• “Live Tour” footage
• Bonus Content Galore!
• Streaming Audio
• Harvard Square Business Directory
• Free Souvenier Map
• Integrated video in the app, no buffering
• Ability to jump to a stop anytime you wish

Development Insight

This application was built using PhoneGap, an open source framework that allows for developing mobile applications natively using HTML/CSS and JavaScript. The benefit of using PhoneGap over Apple’s own XCode Environment and Objective C programming, is the portability to other devices such as Android OS and Blackberry Apps.  

When developing this way, you can easily develop lighter-weight “Web Apps” that actually just use the browser framework that is native to the platform, rather than writing a code base from scratch. This elevates errors, but is not without some higher performance drawbacks. While things can run incredibly smooth in the web framework of these mobile devices, any more advanced animations, gaming or hardware intense acceleration is better off inside the native language.

This app also uses JQuery along with PhoneGap to create animations and navigation. Video and audio are using HTML5 standards.