MobileCrunch |  |
- GlobalSCAPE Acquires File Sharing Service TappIn For Up To $17 Million
- uTest Helps Developers Build Better Software, Raises $17 Million
- ARROWS ES: Fujitsu’s Android Phone Is Just 6.7MM Thick And Waterproof, Boasts 4-Inch NEW AMOLED Display
- Japanese Mobile Social Gaming Startup Gumi Raises $26 Million
- Friend Count Up, Sharing Down: Path Only Works If You Reject Those Friend Requests
- LG Nitro HD Review: You Win Some, You Lose Some
| GlobalSCAPE Acquires File Sharing Service TappIn For Up To $17 Million Posted: 05 Dec 2011 04:38 AM PST  GlobalSCAPE, which specializes in information exchange solutions for enterprise customers, this morning announced that it has acquired TappIn, maker of an eponymous cloud-based file access and sharing solution. TappIn, formerly known as HomePipe Networks, was picked up for $9 million in cash, though shareholders stand to receive another $8 million if certain performance-based milestones are met over the next three years. TappIn basically lets you access any files (documents, images, videos and whatnot) stored on your computers, external hard drives or other storage devices from any Web browser or modern smartphone – the service supports iOS, Android and Windows Phone 7. Unlike services such as Box and Dropbox, TappIn lets you access digital content without to need to upload or sync said files. There are obvious security risks involved with that approach, but TappIn claims all content gets compressed and encrypted before it is accessed from another device than the one it is stored on. Founded in 2009, TappIn will a wholly-owned subsidiary of GlobalSCAPE, and all the company’s employees – including executives Chris Hopen, Parvez Anandam, Doug Wheeler, and Andrew Tull – will remain in its hometown of Seattle.
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| uTest Helps Developers Build Better Software, Raises $17 Million Posted: 05 Dec 2011 03:59 AM PST  uTest, which provides software developers with a variety of testing services for their Web, desktop and mobile applications, has raised $17 million in Series D funding in a round led by QuestMark Partners. The new capital will be used to launch new tools to aid developers, and to open more offices in the United States – namely Seattle, Chicago, Los Angeles and Dallas (for starters). QuestMark co-invested with earlier uTest backers Scale Venture Partners, Longworth Venture Partners, Egan-Managed Capital and Mesco, at double the valuation of the company’s $13 million Series C round. The startup has secured more than $37 million since its inception in 2007. uTest says part of the fresh funding will be used for mergers and acquisitions. The company basically provides “in-the-wild” testing services that span the entire development lifecycle for any software application through a series of crowd-sourced testings, including functional, security, localization and usability testing. uTest says it currently has a community of 45,000+ testers readily available from 180 countries to put Web, mobile and desktop apps to the test on “real devices under real-world conditions”. Customer includes well-known global brands like Google, Microsoft, Groupon, AOL and the BBC. Looks like uTest’s got its work cut out for it, too:
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| Posted: 05 Dec 2011 03:54 AM PST  No doubt, Japan is on its way to becoming Android country. The newest alternative for the 100+ million mobile subscribers in the country is Fujitsu-Toshiba’s ARROWS ES IS12F, which was announced [JP] by major telco KDDI au today. Their biggest selling point is that the handset is just 6.7mm thick. Fujitsu-Toshiba is still a bit slow on bringing their (mostly) awesome Android phones to North America and other places, but my guess is next year, we’ll be seeing more handsets from Japan in the global market. Looking at the feature set of the ARROWS ES IS12F, it may actually make sense:
The ARROWS ES IS12F is expected to hit Japanese stores next month with an open price model.
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| Japanese Mobile Social Gaming Startup Gumi Raises $26 Million Posted: 04 Dec 2011 10:57 PM PST Mobile social gaming is big in Japan. Very big. Mobile gaming publisher Gumi, which has been growing very rapidly lately, raised $26 million last week in a series F round from Jafco, Shinsei Bank, and DBJ Capital. It previously raised a total of $7 million. I visited Gumi’s offices and spoke with founder Hironao Kunimitsu, who says he expects to use the new capital to roll up other Japanese mobile gaming developers and expand to the Korea, Singapore, and the U.S. (see video). Gumi has 140 employees. Its growth started taking off this year. The company expects to sell more than $50 million worth of virtual in-game coins this year (see slide below), which can be used by players to outfit their characters and level up. Those gross sales fo coins are split with parters such as the phone carriers and the mobile social gaming network GREE, which is also an investor in Gumi from an earlier round and owns a 20 percent stake. The company currently has eight games, including Yakuza Wars, Pirate Wars, and FIFA World Class Soccer. It has 10 million registered users in Japan, and 1 million active users per month. The average revenue per user in Japan is between $2.50 and $4.00, with some players paying $50 to $100 a month in virtual goods. Kunimitsu explained to me the difference between social games in the U.S. and Japan. In the U.S.on Zynga-type games, people play with their real friends. But Kunimitsu thinks “that makes game not exciting.” In Japan, people play with a looser set of gaming friends—basically anyone who wants to play a game. Gumi matches gamers base don their skill levels. Overall, the market for social games in Japan is expected to surpass the domestic consumer console market in the next couple years as it surges past the $4 billion mark. Gumi wants very much to catch that wave.
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| Friend Count Up, Sharing Down: Path Only Works If You Reject Those Friend Requests Posted: 04 Dec 2011 03:42 PM PST  You’re going to be tempted, but don’t do it. Don’t add all your friends on Path. Don’t come anywhere near the 150-friend limit. And make the tough decision to reject the friend requests of people you care about. Because the whole point of Path 2 is sharing everything, and you won’t do that if you’re sharing to people that aren’t your best friends. Path’s power comes from the intimacy of your connections, not the quantity. This is difficult to adjust to because we’ve been conditioned by most social applications to connect with everyone we know. Path is different because it’s a micronetwork, not an interest network or general social network. It can but isn’t designed for sharing content that’s relevant to a wide audience, like the articles you publicly tweet, or the major life events you share with hundreds of Facebook friends. Path lets you share things that only people who really care about you want to know, like when you wake up and go to sleep, or when you travel more than a few miles. If you are friends on Path with anyone you might feel embarrassed by sharing that content with, or that you think wouldn’t find that stuff interesting, you’re much less likely to share. The maximum sharing volume likely comes with a friend count of between 3 and 5. As you hit 15, 40, or 100, you’ll censor yourself more, and find less reason to use Path in addition to other services. That means you have to undertake the socially awkward experience of rejecting requests from your co-workers, acquaintances, and fellow early adopters, and make sure not to put them in the same position. You may have already let some loose acquaintances into your inner circle or have outstanding requests from Path 1, and will need to go in and remove them. I’ve received a dozen Path friend requests from people I’m hardly comfortable sharing my Facebook posts with, let alone my sleeping habits. This indicates a widespread lack of understanding of Path that the company will need to address. The fact that you’re not trying to maximize your audience creates a fundamental distribution problem for Path and any other micronetwork that pops up. How will the mainstream ever find out about Path or think it’s work their time if they’re not bombarded with invites? This may unfortunately be why micronetworks won’t succeed as standalone products, and may need to live within your general social network service of choice. Really, Path is about granularity — the ability to share with a subset of your friends. For now, this binary “Share just to Path friends, or share to all your friends” may be adequate. Eventually as devices like the Jawbone Up give us more personal data, I think we’ll want even more sharing granularity. Depending on the content, we’ll want to the option to share to just our very best friends, our close friends, our nearby friends, all of our acquaintances, or the public. We might not be ready for it now though, judging by Facebook’s failed attempts to get everyone creating lots of Friend Lists. Path has a chance to own the micronetwork space until we’re ready for more granularity. However, to retain its value, Path must somehow keep users from reducing its distinction from existing social networks. Its on-boarding process may need to help by suggesting you only add your closest friends based on those you wall post or @reply with. It will hurt its growth, and finding the proper language will be tricky, but it is crucial that Path make it clear to users that they shouldn’t add just anyone.
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| LG Nitro HD Review: You Win Some, You Lose Some Posted: 04 Dec 2011 02:06 PM PST  Short VersionI find myself looking at the Nitro HD with mixed feelings. In some ways, it’s exactly what I’ve been asking for from LG, and in others it simply brings about disappointment. The software, in particular, failed to impress me. Hopefully a much more clogged 4G LTE network from AT&T (compared to the like, seven people that are using it now) will still find a way to outweigh the lag on what should be a high-end Android handset. Features:
Pros:
Cons:
Long Version:To start, I want to say that this isn’t an awful phone and I want to applaud the fact that I think LG is moving in the right direction in terms of design. However, the LG Nitro HD simply isn’t the fastest, nor is it the most visually appealing phone on the market. LG made about as many good design choices as it did poor ones, in my opinion, and the software just doesn’t do anything to help it out. The real shining star here is AT&T’s 4G LTE network, and unfortunately I’ve only been able to access that for a few minutes. That said, it seems to be rock solid showing download speeds between 17 and 20 megabits per second. Then again, there are only so many people playing on that network right now so it’s hard to make judgements. Hardware: The Nitro HD hardware shines in a few select spaces: the screen, the shape, and the textured back panel. Obviously the 4.5-inch 720p display can be considered the left cheek of this phone’s moneymaker (LTE being the right), and it does a good job at living up to the hype. We’re seeing great real-life color reproduction, and little to no differentiation between pixels. The shape of the phone feels great in the hand, and this coming from someone who prefers boxier builds like the Droid RAZR. It has rounded corners and a flat face and back, which makes such a large phone a tad easier to grip. The top edge the phone has squared edges, and then curves off around the sides and on the bottom. It’s 10.4mm thick, which is the exact midway point between the HTC Rezound and the Droid RAZR. Not thick, but not anorexic by any means. Then there’s the back panel. LG seems insistent on building plastic phones, which tend to feel a bit cheaper and less sturdy than phones made of metal. That said, the textured finish along the backside of the Nitro HD definitely makes the phone feel more solid and high-end than it actually is. Unfortunately, the majority of the phone, including that back panel, doesn’t take prints well at all. But for all the good, there’s plenty of bad. The micro-USB port along the top has a plastic covering which will no doubt break off at some point. Plus, I’m not all that fond of placing a micro-USB port square in the middle of the top or bottom of a phone, as it makes it hard to do anything in landscape when the phone’s plugged in. I’m also not all that thrilled with this strip of grey plastic connecting the black bezel to the rest of the phone. It simply works against all the work that textured back panel did to make this phone feel more high-end. In terms of sturdiness, I’m not all that convinced that the Nitro HD has the most solid build quality either. It creaks quite a bit when stressed, and if you put any pressure on the back panel you can feel it move around a bit, like it’s not securely latched on. Software: When speaking on software I must first do some back-peddling when it comes to earlier statements. I do, in fact, have some complaints when it comes to software performance on the Nitro HD. I didn’t notice when doing preliminary tasks just how much Android lags and stutters when switching between home screens and scrolling. Web surfing wasn’t any better, with the entire screen freezing up and then jumping into position during any form of pinch-to-zoom. LG’s Optimus overlay isn’t all that bad, to my surprise. The weather and social networking integration baked right into the UI are actually quite pleasant and seem to function quite well. The UI itself isn’t terribly obtrusive, but I fear that it may be contributing to the annoying lag I’m steadily growing impatient with. You’ll find a handful of AT&T bloatware-style apps, along with Amazon Kindle, Qik Lite, MOG Music and Zynga Poker HD pre-loaded. Camera: I’m actually pretty enthusiastic about the Nitro’s 8-megapixel camera. While it is a test in patience getting from home screen to snapped picture, the end product is exactly what you hoped it’d be. We saw really clear color reproduction, though the pictures do stray into greenish/greyish territory when using flash in low-light situations. The video capture capabilities performed well, too. It normally takes a second for a mobile camcorder to adjust from a sunny scene to indoors, but the Nitro HD’s camera did it quite quickly. Performance/Battery Life: To start I have to say that the speaker (lower-right portion of the back panel) on this phone is pretty underwhelming. Watching YouTube videos and talking on speakerphone was a struggle. Even with the volume all the way up, it makes you wonder what the point of a 4.5-inch HD screen is when you’re constantly holding the phone up to your ear. When you can hear it, watching video on the screen is a joy, as is playing games. The same lag that plagues the OS in general — from multi-tasking to opening/closing apps — doesn’t seem to be present during gaming or video playback. A nice change of pace. I’m also impressed with the battery life on the Nitro HD. I got a solid eight hours out of it (around five hours of setup, browsing, talking on the phone, gaming, taking pictures and watching video; the rest was standby). This may not sound like enough, but the truth is that most 4G LTE-capable phones suck wind in the battery department and eight hours is saying a lot. It’s also worth noting that I had the screen brightness turned all the way up. Conclusion:The Nitro HD is like a box of chocolates, you don’t know what you’re going to get. While watching video and playing games was a great experience, doing simple things like browsing the web or scrolling through the phone book was tedious. Some design choices (like that micro-USB mess) we could’ve done without, while others (like that back panel) are a great step in the right direction for LG. At $249 on a two-year contract, I’d say a lot is riding on whether or not you live in one of AT&T’s LTE markets and just how well AT&T’s LTE network performs. So far, things are looking pretty good on that front so I’d suggest doing a little research on whether you’re covered and perhaps picking up a Nitro HD (or a Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket or HTC Vivid) and seeing how you feel about AT&T’s new network.
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