I just came across the article “Fire Eagle and tarpipe: two ways to avoid battery-drain on your mobile” written by one of our users, Guillaume Riflet. I found this article particularly interesting because the author makes a deep analysis of one of the causes of device battery draining: using too many applications. Quoting the article, where Guillaume comments about the current diversity of mobile applications:

However, the major technological bottleneck for this new eco-system to strive, is the device battery-life. Today’s smartphones and pdas drain all the power in just a few hours. This is a big problem that is bound to stick around for a while, (unless some physics Nobel prizer comes up with a brilliant solution).

Until someone finds a way to dramatically increase battery lives, there’s a simpler solution that relies on two services that act as a middle-layer for two different types of information:

• fire eagle: a Yahoo! service that receives updates about your current geographic location. Then, other services can access that geographic information, eliminating the need to update the same information to different services;
• tarpipe: a social media publishing platform that lets you send information to different services by performing a single action.

By using fire eagle and tarpipe you’re in fact spreading your geo-location and publishing your information by performing a single action, instead of using many different applications. Quoting the original article:

With this in mind, you’ll hopefully drain less power from your device, and yet have the same functionality.

All this makes me think about launching a tarpipe fire eagle connector. What do you think?