1DoorDash
Your delivery order from DoorDash or Grubhub could come from a “dark kitchen.” Basically the food you ordered is coming from a big-name restaurant under another name. Examples being Pasqually’s Pizza being Chuck E. Cheese and It’s Just Wings being Chili’s.
2. In 2012, before the introduction of Uber, a Toronto Taxi license was sold for $360,000. By 2018 they were rumored to be down to $65,000 and likely still dropping.
3. A Fitbit played a role in solving a murder. Using the Wife's Fitbit and analyzing her movements, analysts were able to create a timeline that proved the husband had created a false story.
4. In 2015, a smartwatch maker Pebble declined a $740 million offer from watchmaker Citizen. A year later they sold the company to Fitbit in the region of $23 million - $40 million.
5. Real human skulls are traded on Instagram by a small but active underground collectors’ market. The skulls are decorated and sold by macabre enthusiasts. Some sell for tens of thousands of dollars.
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6Candy Crush Addiction
The popular game Candy Crush exploits mechanisms of addiction in the same way some recreational drugs and gambling do.
7. An Uber driver once sued Snapchat, alleging that the teen who crashed into him at 107 mph was using Snapchat’s speed filter while driving.
8. Mark Zuckerberg attempted to buy Snapchat for $3 billion in November of 2013 but was rejected. Almost 3 years later, Instagram cloned Snapchat’s main features and launched ‘Instagram Stories.’
9. Since Uber was introduced in New York City in 2011, drinking-related car wrecks decreased by 25–35% in all boroughs.
10. Language learning app/site Duolingo makes its money from having its users practice translating a real-world document (e.g from CNN). Duolingo has contracts with these websites to translate stories and is earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year with this business model.
11WhatsAppitis
A woman was diagnosed with "WhatsAppitis" in 2014 after using WhatsApp on her smartphone continuously for 6 hours caused wrist pain.
12. Uber drivers in China changed their profile photos to ghosts and zombie images so that when potential passengers saw these pictures they would cancel the ride they had just booked, thus earning the driver the cancellation fee.
13. Tinder was thusly named because a tinder box (your phone) holds matches (swipes to the right) that could potentially catalyze the fire of a new romance from a single spark made by swiping matches to the right.
14. OkCupid found that women using iPhones averaged twice as many sexual partners as those using Android devices.
15. The French soccer team Avant Garde Caennaise is managed by over 2000 ‘virtual managers’ who watch the game in real-time and use an app (United Managers App) to decide tactics, substitutions, and line-ups.
16Line
The successful app Line was developed as a response to Japan's 2011 earthquake, helping the Japanese facilitate communications during the disaster.
17. Police organizations want to ban the app Waze because it identifies police locations and makes them potential targets for harm.
18. In 2009, an app called Pocket Fritz running on a 528 MHz HTC Touch was entered into a grandmaster chess tournament and won.
19. The predecessor to Google Lens, the Google Goggles app (now discontinued) was able to solve Sudoku puzzles in seconds.
20. There are Bluetooth-enabled toilets in Japan that can flush and bidet using an app (My Satis) and anyone with the app can control any toilet within range and activate its flushing and bidet functions because all the toilets have the same Bluetooth PIN ("0000") hardcoded.
21Halqemeylem
The Halkomelem language in British Columbia is near extinction. In 2000, it was estimated that the number of fluent Halkomelem speakers was less than one dozen. Most are middle-aged or older, and few are monolingual. To save the language, a Halkomelem iPhone app (Halqemeylem) was released in 2011.
22. There is an iPad app named Whale Alert that shippers can use to avoid hitting whales near ports. It is part of a largely voluntary program that has reduced whale/ship encounters by 81% since 2007.
23. The widely popular app, 'Yo!', is being used as an improvised missile-warning system in Israel.
24. There is an mp3 player, made specifically for prison inmates. It even has an app (JPay's music store) that shows songs purchased most by inmates in their prison.
25. Siri was originally an app available for purchase on the App Store until Apple acquired it two months after its release.
