MobileCrunch |  |
- Pulse Jumped From 1 Million To 11 Million Downloads In 2011; Now Seeing Download Every 2 Seconds
- Google Commerce Starts The Year Off With A Reorganization
- iSuppli Agrees With IDC, Gartner: Windows Phone To Surpass iOS By 2015
- It’s Still Funny, But It Might Not Be A Joke: Jotly Arrives On Android
- 250 Million Android Devices Activated, 11 Billion Apps Downloaded
- Kno CEO Osman Rashid To Apple: “Now We Will Fight On Who Has The Better Product”
- JackThreads Announces Unique Mobile App For Android And iOS
- No More Swiping: Card.io Launches New Consumer App, Developer Tools Which “See” Your Credit Card
- The Soul Still Burns: Classic Brawler Soul Calibur Lands On iOS
- Samsung: One In Ten South Koreans Now Owns A Samsung Galaxy S II
| Pulse Jumped From 1 Million To 11 Million Downloads In 2011; Now Seeing Download Every 2 Seconds Posted: 19 Jan 2012 05:24 PM PST  In November, Amazon began shipping its new Kindle. At the time, even though reactions were varied, though Amazon hoped for the best, as some projected it would sell as many as 5 million by the end of 2011. Though the indications are that it didn’t get there. However, the media hype and early Kindle sales have still been a boon for a young startup that you’re probably by now familiar with: Pulse. At launch in November, the suped up RSS-style news reader tailored for mobile devices found itself the unofficial news reader for the Kindle Fire. While Amazon never officially endorsed them as such, Pulse was one of a handful of native apps to appear on the device’s homescreen right out of the box. Of course, Amazon keeps their cards close to their chest, like Apple, and Pulse Co-founder Akshay Kothari tells me that the team didn’t know Amazon had chosen them as such until a few weeks before the device was shipped. In fact, the Kindle Fire’s sales saw Pulse rack up 1.1 million downloads on Christmas Day alone. Of course, this is aided by the fact that the newsreader app has been both lucky and fleet with pushing designs early on emerging platforms. Steve Jobs mentioned Pulse at the iPad launch event, and although Pulse was subsequently pulled, it started a trend. The app went on to see a lot of adoption on the iPad, and caught fire on Honeycomb (as much as an app can), and has leveraged that early success to secure such optimal placement on the Kindle. Kothari today shared with TechCrunch that over the course of 2011, Pulse went from 1 million downloads to over 11 million, and are currently averaging approximately one download every two seconds, and 1.5 million every month. Of course, downloads are one thing, active users another. Pulse isn’t ready to share active users numbers, presumably because they aren’t particularly close to the downloads statistics, but people are using it. For example, in total, users have read a total of 1.39 billion stories through Pulse, and shared 9.8 million stories. As a note of tribute to Steve Jobs, 812K stories were read about the Apple co-founder on October 6th. The app has seen high adoption for several reasons, and part of that is hanks to its touch-based interface (easy swiping/scrolling), clean design, and visual appeal. But, it’s also the fact that it’s been able to strike a number of strategic partnerships with big media outlets, like ESPN, and with deal sites like Groupon. (Pulse now has over 250 publishing partners.) And, as a word to wise entrepreneurs, Kothari tells me that the success has also been attributable to the fact that the team is on all of the major platforms, iPhone, iPad, Android, Android tablets, Nook, Amazon, Windows Phone 7, etc. Focusing on building apps for each OS and mobile experience is important, and giving readers the ability to sync their Pulse apps across platforms was a big move for Pulse. Kothari says that the key, while difficult to always implement effectively, is to maintain a consistency of brand across mobile platforms, while optimizing apps for each of their particular experiences. Like others before, he said that the experience building for each is different, but that iOS makes it easy to prototype different looks, there’s a lack of fragmentation, only one screensize for the iPad and iPhone, and they have great tools. The benefit to Android is scale and the quick turnaround cycle. “Mobile hasn’t seen a great A/B testing formula,” Kothari says, but Android gets the closest. Amazon, on the other hand, has done a pretty good job of making it easy for Android developers to build apps for their modified mobile OS. Windows Phone? Well, that remains to be seen. Pulse has seen some great competition from Flud, which hasn’t seen nearly the same scale and adoption Pulse has managed thanks to its great distribution plays, but it’s trying to push forward the socialization (so to speak) of the newsreading experience. Because it was a fast-paced, hockey-stick-growth type year for Pulse, the focus was mainly on scaling. But the co-founder said that they’re getting to a point where they feel comfortable with their progress there and are ready to focus more on the social aspects of news, as well as productizing their experience. And, hey, with Streamglider, Taptu, and others, there’s plenty of competition to go around. They’ve been able to get pretty far with their Palo Alto-based team of 20, but they’re ramping up in their hiring thanks to that $9 million round in June in hopes of doing more with the reams of data they’ve been collecting around what people are reading. There’s a lot of potential around this, just as we’ve seen publishing companies launching news apps on Facebook to get in the news feed, Pulse is looking for the best ways to encourage social news sharing. And as something that’s already, in my opinion, social, there’s plenty of opportunity. For more, check out Pulse’s stats in their infographic below:
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| Google Commerce Starts The Year Off With A Reorganization Posted: 19 Jan 2012 03:11 PM PST  Some of Google’s core product areas, like search and YouTube, have the enviable duty of retaining market dominance. Others, like its Android mobile operating system, get to be the free-wheeling disruptor. Google Commerce, meanwhile, has the perennial chore of trying to gain ground versus a vareity of well-established payments competitors ranging from PayPal on the web to Apple’s iTunes and Amazon on mobile. So, it’s not that surprising to hear about a reorganization within the commerce area as Google tries to figure this space out, as we and others did yesterday. Stephanie Tilenius, one of the two executives that Google poached from PayPal a couple years ago, has been moved to the side, according to two industry sources I’ve spoken with. Google PR gave us and All Things D the same statement regarding the matter, and didn’t say much more: "Stephanie is moving to a new role where she will oversee global strategy and work with key partners to expand our commerce efforts internationally." Her title hasn’t changed, and no one has been promoted to take her spot. But here’s what I’ve pieced together. She was previously overseeing Google Checkout, which has been folded together with Google Wallet. The other PayPal executive who came over with Tilenius, Osama Bedier, is also in charge of Wallet. They previously had relatively shared duties, with Bedier being the “functional lead” and Tilenius above him on the org chart. Due to the change, Tilenius, Bedier, and the other functional leads in commerce, like Sameer Samat for Offers and Shopping, are all reporting directly to Jeff Huber, Google’s senior vice president for Commerce and Local. So, she’s not in charge of things that she used to be. Tilenius has over a decade of payments industry experience, but her two years at Google haven’t been as mind-blowing as the company no doubt hoped when it hired her — a third industry source also tells us that she’s gotten mixed reviews inside and outside the company. As of today, only two phones from one mobile carrier currently support Wallet, and Verizon has blocked it, as Business Insider notes. And it probably hasn’t helped that PayPal owner eBay sued Google over the allegation that Tilenius and Bedier brought its trade secrets with them. Maybe this reorganization will help Google finally make the payment market share it’s been trying for through all these years?
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| iSuppli Agrees With IDC, Gartner: Windows Phone To Surpass iOS By 2015 Posted: 19 Jan 2012 02:22 PM PST  Nobody wants to give Windows Phone a chance except for Robin and a whole bunch of analysts. Back in September, IDC and Gartner predicted that Windows would overtake iOS for the number two spot in the market by 2015, and Windows Phone head of marketing Achim Berg called that prediction conservative. Now iSuppli has joined in, predicting that Windows Phone will grab a 16.7 percent market share by 2015, while Apple’s market share is expected to decline from 18 percent to 16.6 percent in 2015. Perhaps “overtake” isn’t the best word, since the predictions we’re looking at offer up a .1 percentage point difference. Still, Windows Phone shouldn’t be taken lightly. The partnership between Nokia and Microsoft is a powerful one, even if Nokia’s had a rough go of it lately. The Lumia 900 is expected to be the most solid Windows Phone offering to date, and every Windows Phone I’ve played with thus far has far exceeded my expectations. What’s interesting, however, is that iSuppli doesn’t see Android losing much share at all. In fact, Android is predicted to grow from a 47.4 percent share to 58.1 percent in 2015. You’d think that with fragmentation abounding and infuriatingly slow updates in the Android camp, Windows Phone would be digging into Google’s share as much as Apple’s. At the same time, we must never forget that Apple launches one model at a time, while hundreds of Android-powered handsets hit the market each year. Past that, the iPhone is a premium product and plenty of Android handsets can be found for less than a Benjamin. In any case, there’s no harm in a third mobile ecosystem gaining a presence in the market. More competition means we all win. [via WMPowerUser]
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| It’s Still Funny, But It Might Not Be A Joke: Jotly Arrives On Android Posted: 19 Jan 2012 01:55 PM PST  I’m beginning to think the team at Firespotter Labs are marketing geniuses. Prior to launching their new iPhone app Jotly (you know, as a joke), they released a hilarious video featuring a “fake” app by the same name. In the video, a guy goes around rating things like parking meters, hiding spots, ice cubes, and a beer in the alley that was left in the sun (F-, if you’re curious). The video was meant to be a parody of our mobile/social app obsession, and perhaps our culture’s tendency towards over-sharing. It also was strikingly similar to Kevin Rose's Oink, which launched soon after. But here’s the thing: Jotly is no longer a joke. The company (also the maker of Nosh), has just released the Android version of Jotly. And an API, too. Hey, wait. That’s not a joke – two apps and an API? That’s actually a bit of work. Of course, when I asked about metrics, Firespotter Co-Founder Alex Cornell got all cagey. ”Our engineering team became so tired of us asking these questions that they stored our metrics behind a wall of riddles and booleans. And then Wikipedia decided to wuss out today and our backend server went down.” And when I pushed, he added, “unfortunately we are prohibited from confirming almost anything serious at Jotly headquarters. It would be *off-brand* I’m told.” Ha ha. Ha? But Cornell did point me to the fact that as of yesterday, this guy was the suckiest (I mean, lowest ranked) user, who was rated #73,845. Today, however, that guy has climbed to #25,511. I guess the soft launch on Android has been going well, then. There’s also the new Jotly API, so developers can build something awesome like Cat vs. Dog, for example. With a straight face, Cornell says:
Joke, my a**. Guys, we’ve all been played – Jotly was never a joke, only marketed as one. As a refresher, the Jotly intro video, below:
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| 250 Million Android Devices Activated, 11 Billion Apps Downloaded Posted: 19 Jan 2012 01:45 PM PST  We’re tuned in live to Google’s Q4 2011 earnings call, where they’ve just disclosed a few details they left out of this morning’s big ol’ data dump. Amongst them: a progress update on Android’s growth. According to Larry Page, Android has now been activated on over 250 million devices. That’s up 50 million since just November of last year. Meanwhile, the Android Marketplace has managed to cruise past its 11 billionth download. (For the curious: Apple’s App Store, which is around 3 months older, passed its 18 billionth download in December of last year.) Alas, no word on how many of those were free/paid.
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| Kno CEO Osman Rashid To Apple: “Now We Will Fight On Who Has The Better Product” Posted: 19 Jan 2012 12:53 PM PST  Apple’s latest foray into digital textbooks today raises a lot of questions about the future of the textbook publishing industry and digital textbook startups who now find themselves going up against Apple. One of the highest profile digital textbook startups is Kno, which started out with its own oversized tablet but now focusses on delivering textbooks through its iPad app. On the surface, things don’t look so great for Kno, but CEO Osman Rashid is nonplussed: “We love the fact that so much light has been put on digital textbooks. Now we will fight on who has the better product, more interactive features, and a bigger catalog.” Let’s start with the catalog. Apple launched with all of eight textbooks today, Kno has more than 100,000. But that is not even a fair comparison because Apple is initially going after a different subset of the textbook market, high school textbooks. Kno only deals with college textbooks. So they don’t compete for the same students—yet. But what about the price? At $15 each, the price Apple convinced textbook publishers to go with is well under the discounted prices Kno offers most of its digital textbooks. Again, you have to undersand the dynamics of the different textbook markets. “They did not introduce college textbooks for a reason. They are not going to bring out a college textbook for $15,” predicts Osman. By and large, high school textbooks are bought by school districts, whereas college textbooks are bought by students. A typical high school textbook stays in circulation for 5 years or more, getting passed from one class to the next. Publishers end up making on average $15 to $20 per student over the life of a high school textbook. Apple’s pricing model doesn’t change that. Publishers just won’t get all of that money up front, but must earn it every year. Until school districts begin to equip students with iPads, Apple’s iBooks textbooks aren’t going to take off. The early adopters most likely will be private schools. Apple’s ambition is presumably to expand its iBooks to college textbooks. It would be wonderful if Apple could convince publishers to maintain that $15 price point for digital textbooks, but don’t count on it. College textbooks are often more than $100, even digital ones. Expect different pricing to take hold there. College textbook pricing is also highly regulated. “If they decide to give Apple a special price, they have to give it to us as well,” maintains Osman. So that remains a big question mark. On features, there is already a race between Apple and Kno to see who can add the best interactive features to textbooks. Kno is slightly ahead with 3D chemistry models, social sharing, and advanced journaling features. Other iPad book publishing platforms like Inkling are also pushing the feature set forward. All of this competition will mean a richer digital reading experience for everyone. Finally, startups like Kno will try to compete by being more publisher-friendly. Apple released its own authoring tool today for digital publishers, but the fact is that the publishing industry is standardized on Adobe InDesign. Apple’s iBooks Author is not compatible with Adobe’s software. “They are only compatible with Microsoft Word,” notes Osman, “and nobody produces books in Microsoft Word.”
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| JackThreads Announces Unique Mobile App For Android And iOS Posted: 19 Jan 2012 10:17 AM PST  Thrillist-owned JackThreads has just announced the availability of their first mobile for Android and iPhone. Built by Fueled Mobile Design and Development using designs and user experience built in-house, the app allows shoppers to browse new deals and sales as they are announced on the site and, if so inclined, make purchases. I spoke to lead developer Chris Steib who said that JackThreads saw that much of the traffic was coming through mobile sites, something they had not initially expected. “One-fifth of the traffic is coming through iPhone and Android and a tenth of the revenue is coming through mobile,” he said. “We’ve seen traffic rise more than ten times in a year-and-a-half and we’re seeing different behavioral patterns than we initially expected.” The app will include push notifications as well as news of “nightlife sales” for those drunk shoppers looking for an angry fix. Users who download the app will receive an automatic invitation to the service, a process that usually takes a few days for the average user. “The app is fashion forward, for people interested in style,” said Steib. “It’s a very smooth, polished, enjoyable experience with OpenGL animations for that ‘Wow’ factor.” JackThreads has been on the forefront of ecommerce, offering wacky, cool clothes to online kids using a Gilt Groupe “exclusive sale model,” although with a certain techno/urban twist. Knowing this, I asked Steib why it took them so long to make an app. “Would it have benefitted us if we had it sooner? Yes, but it’s not a great opportunity loss,” he said. JackThreads worked three months on the project with an outside vendor. The app is available today for download (only the cool need apply). look at the numbers. if you’re not seeing people using those devices, then you need to see
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| No More Swiping: Card.io Launches New Consumer App, Developer Tools Which “See” Your Credit Card Posted: 19 Jan 2012 08:58 AM PST  Card.io, the toolkit for mobile app developers which lets users pay for items by holding their credit card up to the phone’s camera, is today launching a consumer-facing app. It’s something like Square, but without the dongle. It’s also not aimed at merchants, as Square is. Instead, the new Card.io applications, available for both iPhone and Android, are meant for person-to-person payments. Splitting lunch, borrowing money, paying for gas – that sort of thing. This doesn’t represent a change in direction for the mobile commerce company, though, explains former AdMob employee Mike Mettler, now Card.io Co-founder and CEO. He says the company will continue to invest in both its consumer and developer businesses. To that end, Card.io is launching a new, fully functional mobile SDK (software development kit) for developers this morning, also available for iOS and Android. For those unfamiliar, Card.io’s mobile payment solution is meant to speed up the process of inputting credit card numbers on the small screens of mobile devices, like smartphones. Instead of having to manually type in the digits using your phone’s keyboard when making a purchase, Card.io-enabled apps let you simply hold up the credit card to the phone’s camera. Card.io will then “see” the numbers using advanced machine viewing techniques. There are now over 160 apps which have integrated with the Card.io solution, including Venmo, Qthru, Newegg,Spotze, EventDay, Clinkle, TaskRabbit, Ambur, BeagleApp, Floktu, WillCal, and others. With its new consumer-facing app, Card.io is actually now competing with some of its developer partners, as it, too, will enable easy, person-to-person mobile payments. After “scanning” the card using the app, Card.io users will enter in their friend’s email address to send them a receipt and the money is transferred to either their bank or PayPal account within seven days. The app is free and there are no monthly charges, but pricing is 3.5% plus $0.30 per transaction. Also new today is the mobile SDK. Previously, Card.io’s mobile SDK was for scanning credit cards only – meaning developers would have to have their own merchant account and payment gateways set up in order to use the service. Now, with the updated mobile SDKs, developers have access to an end-to-end solution provided by the company itself. This puts Card.io in closer competition with payments company Jumio, which launched a similar service for both desktop and mobile this past summer. Like Jumio, Card.io now offers its own payments network. It should be noted, however, that Jumio just raised $25.5 million in funding on top of the $6.5 million raised last year. Card.io, meanwhile, has $1 million in seed funding from angel investors Michael Dearing of Harrison Metal, Jeff Clavier and Charles Hudson of SoftTech VC, Manu Kumar of K9 Ventures, Alok Bhanot (former VP, Risk Technology at PayPal), and Omar Hamoui (CEO and founder of AdMob). In addition, the company won’t talk much about how it fights fraud, only saying that it takes precautions, like Square does, which are its “secret sauce.” These involve things like tracking a user’s location and using a one-way hash of the phone’s unique identifier (UDID on iOS). The new mobile applications are available for download here: iOS and Android. And the SDK is here.
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| The Soul Still Burns: Classic Brawler Soul Calibur Lands On iOS Posted: 19 Jan 2012 07:14 AM PST  Ready for a blast of late 90′s fighting game nostalgia? Well, get those thumbs ready, because Namco’s arcade/Dreamcast classic Soul Calibur has just been released for iOS. I enjoyed a long-standing fling with Soul Calibur in my younger days, mostly because it was the only fighting game I was ever good at. My skills seem to have dulled considerably over the intervening years, though the touch controls probably don’t help much. Make no mistake, experienced Soul Calibur players shouldn’t have too much trouble getting back into the swing of things, but it can be difficult to pull off certain moves with consistency. Still, after playing for a few minutes, even new players should be able to get a solid feel for things. Thankfully, Bandai Namco hasn’t skimped on the content. The full 19 character roster remains intact, as well as a spate of classic game modes like time attack, survival, and extra survival. The only omissions of note are the lack of the mission and multiplayer modes, which is a real disappointment for game like this. Bandai Namco notes that they will deliver new game modes to Soul Calibur down the line though, so it’s very possible that players will be able to nab that those missing before too long. This trip down fighting game memory lane doesn’t come cheap though. Soul Calibur is live in the App Store now with an $11.99 price tag, and that’s including a 20% launch day discount. It’s bound to be something of a tough sell in a market where the excellent (and equally classic) Grand Theft Auto 3 goes for $4.99, but who knows — fighting game fans can be a particularly devoted bunch.
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| Samsung: One In Ten South Koreans Now Owns A Samsung Galaxy S II Posted: 19 Jan 2012 05:56 AM PST  It’s not really news to say that the Galaxy S II is a hit, but it has actually become a mega hit in South Korea. According to maker Samsung, the Android handset has been sold a whopping 5 million times in its domestic market since release at the end of April 2011. In other words, a little more than 10% of the country’s entire population (48 million people) are now proud owners of the phone. It’s the first cell phone that has reached this milestone in mobile-crazy South Korea, according to Japanese business daily The Nikkei. The paper also says that one out of four South Korean smartphones users owns a Galaxy S II (sounds like feature phones don’t play a big role in that country anymore). In 2011, Samsung commanded a 53% market share in South Korea’s smartphone industry. The company recently decided not to take legal action against its fiercest competitor, Apple, in its home market – despite being in a patent war with the iPhone maker the whole world over. It looks like Samsung can afford it. Via Sammy Hub
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