MobileCrunch |  |
- Songza Raises Seven Figure Round; Launches Mobile, Sharable Music Collections In The Cloud
- Amen Aims To Find The Best Of Everything With A Smart Interface
- “Google’s Auto Correct Killed The Launch Of Our Android App”
- Everpix: All Your Photos, Automatically Organized And Accessible From Anywhere
- Verious Launches First Marketplace For Mobile App Components
- NTT DoCoMo, Samsung Talking Chipset Alliance Against Qualcomm
- Spool Is Instapaper On Steroids
- Report: Android Market Nearing 6 Billion Downloads; Weather Apps Are Makin’ It Rain
- Ford Partners With Bug Labs To Develop Open Source Platform For In-Car Innovatin’
- Angry Birds, The Brand: Rovio Sells 1M T-Shirts And 1M Plush Toys Per Month
- Gowalla Is Reborn As A Beautiful App For Travel And Storytelling
- AT&T Reveals New Windows Phones, Outlines Mango Update Plans
- If You Weren’t Using TestFlight Before, You Will Be Now With Their New SDK
- HTC’s Eyes Wander, Considers Buying Their Own OS
- StatSheet Changes Name To Automated Insights, Scores $4 Million
| Songza Raises Seven Figure Round; Launches Mobile, Sharable Music Collections In The Cloud Posted: 13 Sep 2011 12:40 AM PDT  Mike first covered Amie Street back in 2006. At the time, he was a big fan. Back then, the startup was targeting a new music model, which allowed musicians to upload their songs to Amie Street’s platform, offering those tracks to listeners for free. The more downloads the songs attracted, the price would slowly increase — the price then indicating the song’s popularity. In what now looks like a savvy decision, Amie Street sold to Amazon last September for an undisclosed amount, deciding to focus its efforts on Songza: The social Internet radio service it acquired in 2008. Today, after much iterating and tinkering, Songza is launching free mobile apps for iOS and Android that allow users to create and share personalized music collections — in the comfort of the cloud. Songza Co-founder and CEO Elias Roman likens the service to a “music concierge”, in that it serves users with playlists created by experts (and friends) for whatever mood or musical experience you could possible want. “The future of music will be driven by the convergence of expert and social curation”, the co-founder said. While iTunes, Google Music, and beyond offer some neat customizable playlist options, Roman has a point. We are more likely to go in for playlists created by musicians, critics, and DJs we trust — as well as those created by friends — elaborate algorithms can only take one so far. Pandora and its Genome Project being a terrific example. Today, listeners want big, free music collections that are easy to build, easy to keep fresh, accessible anywhere and sharable with their friends. Roman said that he thinks Songza offers just that kind of solution, as it features over 75,000 playlists created by actual people (including music experts, celebrities, artists and record labels), as well as allowing any user to create their own playlist from Songza’s library of over 14.5 million songs. And speaking of Pandora (and Spotify to boot), Songza’s value proposition is significantly aided by the fact that it is free of audio advertisements and has no monthly listening limits. The startup also announced today that it has closed a seven-figure round of financing led by investors that had previously backed AmieStreet.com, including Deep Fork Capital as well as an “undisclosed strategic investor”. Also participating in the round was Geoff Judge, co-founder of 24/7 Real Media, who will be joining Songza’s board of directors. The startup’s new mobile apps for iOS and Android not only allow users to create personalized and sharable music collections in the cloud but also offers social discovery functionality via Facebook by allowing users to tap into the playlists their friends are listening to and creating. Along with social discovery, Songza’s mobile app users can take advantage of expert-curated discovery through the startup’s bullpen of playlists that run the gamut in activities, genres, moods, and cultures. Users can find playlists for dinner parties, coding, or BBQ-ing, for example. Songza is trying to offer a music experience that is comparable in the breadth of its feature set yet distinguishable enough in concept from popular music services like Spotify, Pandora, and Turntable.fm to make a mark on the music space. A monopoly on streaming playlists seems to be the end game. But chime in and let us know what you think. Founded in 2008, Songza Media Inc. has served over 225,000,000 song streams to tens of millions of music fans. The company’s flagship product, Songza.com, is the simplest way for individuals and groups to create customized internet radio stations, for free. Users can create as many stations as they want for any reason or occasion, add songs to any station at any time, and vote songs up or down to influence how often they are played, creating a social listening...
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| Amen Aims To Find The Best Of Everything With A Smart Interface Posted: 12 Sep 2011 06:00 PM PDT  It’s been a long time since we were delighted and even slightly bemused by the utterly stripped down simplicity of Twitter. And let’s face it, there have been many pretenders to that simplistic interface crown since then. But Amen appears to have come up with a mellifluous new take on a mobile service which is tantalisingly simple, but designed to create masses amounts of data about things people like. Put simply, Amen is about finding the best of everything, often via arguments over the worst. To get the app go to getamen.com/tc in your Safari on the iPhone, sign up and download it OverTheAir. There are about 2,000 sign ups for Techcrunch Disrupt. Here’s how it works. You fire up the app on the iPhone or web browser and say a person, place or thing is “the best” or “the worst” ever, like like, the Best Dubstep track ever. Or perhaps, as actress Demi Moore (a beta user) puts it, “After Sex is the Best State For Amening Ever.” Hubbie Ashton Kutcher – an investor – "Led Zeppelin is the best rock band ever." You can agree with this statement with an “Amen”. But with a “Hell no” you have to suggest an alternative answer. It’s a rigid structure, but you can post whatever you want. Leaving aside reading between the lines of Demi’s post (as tempting as it is) the creation of the simple “Amen” or “Hell No” mechanic means Amen can create lots of definitive data about something. For instance, right now Amen says “The Best Place for Mexican Food in San Mateo is Taqueria La Cumbre. Of course, you might disagree… The location of any Amen statement is also built into the app, meaning Amen will start to tell you the best things around you. But more interesting than that, it generates a feed from users who see lots of potentially divisive statements from their friends. This is when the gaming element kicks in because you can weigh in and vehemently disagree with a person. This not just a Dilike button – you can only disagree, typing “hell no” – by suggesting a replacement to the post. That means Amen gets continually more finessed data each time. Crucially, each statement is a data point. So where as Twitter and its thousands of third party developers have had to apply tortuous natural language algorithms to the firehose in order to work out what the hell is going on, Amen has all this data and structure pre-built in to its system. It’s like one big brawl to find the best stuff, but this time with rules so simple you don’ even notice them. So the whole system is built from the ground up to bubble-up the best of everything in the world. Founderr Felix says users of the closed beta have been posting about TV shows, of coffee houses, The worst airline, the best position for sex. Literally everything. In addition people use it to create a kind of status update which their friends can agree or disagree with, e.g. “This bar is the best place for meeting Mike.” Then again it might be something more nuanced, such as… Or more inside baseball: Or more gamed: The startup has been in closed private beta for the last month and now has 3,500 users, generating quite a lot of engagement. In one month those users created 30,000 statements, created 15,500 score cards and clicked the Amen button 80,000 times. An unintended use is using is as a Q&A platform, and then finding the thing you were after, like asking “Who is the best Dentist in Berlin” and people disputing that and entering their suggestion. People have also been talking about everything from brand to what the best jokes are, to the best playlists. Of course, it’s the brands element to this that has a lot of potential. Brands can get feedback on what people are saying about them, definitely, in realtime and to a high level of accuracy because it’s all structured data. This is much harder in Twitter because there is no structured data to mine, just people random words. Plus, Amen is de-duping all the words and lists, so there is no duplication, no fat in the system. And because its starts suggesting things to you, it can start to predict what you are planning to type. The same goes for location where the Amen iPhone might already know you are in a particular bar. Lists don’t just generate one answer – there is a long tail of answers after the top result. So they get the head and the long tail of results. Even an answer with only two votes will still appear in the system. Yes, the best movie ever made bay end up being agreed on (it’s 2001: A Space Odyssey). Amen’s game plan is engagement first, and get big. Then to enable discovery and utility. Monetisation comes afterwards and could consist of ad buys within the lists, like AdWords. The startup has raised a Seed funding from Index Ventures and Kutcher. The team itself is sterling. CEO and Founder Felix Petersen formerly founded Plazes, which was acquired by Nokia in 2008. There is also Caitlin Winner (MIT, Nokia) and Ricki Vester Gregersen (Input Squared), and Florian Weber, Twitter’s first engineer interviewed here). But finally, here is a problem. In theory Amen could be copyable, assuming someone can think out how to structure this data. It’s barrier to entry might therefore be lower. But then, how many startups already have Demi Moore as a private – poised to be public – beta user?
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| “Google’s Auto Correct Killed The Launch Of Our Android App” Posted: 12 Sep 2011 05:48 PM PDT  We’ve all dealt with the frustrations of auto-correct, from unintentionally declaring that you’re getting a divorce to having your bitter, angry diatribe suddenly mutate into something involving a lot of “ducking”. Fortunately, these unwanted auto-corrections are generally little more than inconveniences. You laugh a little, backpedal as fast as possible (“I meant porkkkk”), and move on. For one Dallas start-up, though, a rather sneaky autocorrect issue is the cause of all of the ultimate discoverability issue: no one can find their new app. A few weeks back, Locai launched an iPhone app. Intended as something along the lines of Foursquare with a heavier focus on conversations, it found a reasonable amount of success — at least, enough that they were encouraged to launch an Android port. And that’s where things got sticky. Locai launched their Android app… but even days later, it was no where to be found in the Android Market. After some investigation, Locai found the issue: somewhere on the backend, Google’s Android Market is autocorrecting all searches for “Locai” to “Local” without alerting the user. As a result, would-be Android users just can’t seem to find the app. "Since everyone downloads apps by searching for them first this is a huge blow to us," said Taylor Cavanah Locai's founder. "We have brands and businesses lined up for a whole series of partnerships, events and promotions over the next several months. Now we're facing losing a ton of users and investment as people are converted to download the app, but can’t find it." If you’ve got an Android device, you can run the search for yourself; even 500 items deep, Locai is no where to be found in a search for their own name. No Android device handy? You can test the search on the web-based Android market here. Of course, there are tricks to force the Android Market to search for verbatim terms (searching for “Locai” [in quotes] or +Locai, for example) — but is this something that most users would ever even think to try? Now, a week after launch and with downloads flatlined, Locai is stuck in a bit of a corner: do they change their name (thereby abandoning whatever progress with the brand they’ve made so far), or do they just sit back and hope Google is willing to implement a fix (like prioritizing exact matches before showing autocorrect results)? Meanwhile, anyone who actually is looking for Locai for Android can find it right here. Search for Locai: Search for “Locai” (with quotes): Locai is a mobile platform helping brick and mortar businesses create and deploy their own targeted location-based services without the need for native development or an API. These are built on a native core allowing users to ask questions, voice opinions, and share with people there and their friends who aren’t. Download for iPhone - http://iphone.locai.com OR Android - http://android.locai.com
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| Everpix: All Your Photos, Automatically Organized And Accessible From Anywhere Posted: 12 Sep 2011 04:57 PM PDT  TechCrunch Disrupt finalist Everpix is a new service that automatically organizes and combines all your photo libraries into an elegant interface, whether they’re stored on the desktop or in the cloud. It supports traditional desktop software programs, like Adobe Lightroom, Aperture and iPhoto, for example, as well as online services like Facebook, Flickr, Picasa and Instagram. It will soon be able to automatically upload photos from all your mobile devices, too. And it even supports integration with Gmail. Everpix runs as a little utility on your computer (Mac-only for now), fetching the photos from online services and local galleries. You can configure which folders it should monitor, so it won’t import all the photos on your hard drive, and the online services you use. With the Gmail integration, Everpix discovers the photos sent you via email and organizes them along with the others. In a later release, IMAP support will be added to support other email programs. After the photos are imported, Everpix uses a feature called “assistive curating” to create attractively laid-out album groupings called “Moments.” These are similar to iPhoto’s “Events,” but are built for you automatically, which saves you from the hassle of album creation and organization. Not surprisingly, you can see an Apple-like design aesthetic here, given that two of Everpix’s Co-founders, Pierre-Olivier Latour and Kevin Quennesson, each spent several years with the company. Meanwhile, the third Co-founder, Wayne Fan, was previously at frog design. The service can also detect bad photos, like those that are blurry, out of focus, or under or overexposed. These photos are automatically hidden from view, but you can choose to unhide them, if desired. By default, all photos on Everpix’s Web interface are private, but you can make a collection public with just one click, or you can simply click which photos in a collection you want to share. Everpix includes a social component, too, allowing you to connect with other users, like family members for example, so you can immediately see their new photos without any need for them to first organize them, email them, or upload them to a service like Facebook. The best part about Everpix, however, may be it’s “set it and forget it” nature. After the one-time installation and configuration, there’s nothing else you have to do. You can continue to work with your photos as you would normally, saving them to your same folders, uploading the ones you want to share to the services you prefer, etc. But when you want to refer back to your entire photo collection, Everpix is there, with every photo you ever took in one central interface, available on the Web or, soon, on mobile. Everpix will launch first for Mac and iOS, with support for online services limited to Facebook and Gmail initially. Windows and Android versions are in the works. The company’s business model will be freemium, but the pricing structure has not yet been determined. The company, which was founded under the name “33Cube,” is currently in the process of raising seed funding from 500 Startups and other unnamed angel investors. You can sign up to participate in the private alpha on the Everpix homepage here. 100 people, chosen at random, will be invited to join the early tests. Judges Q&A Expert Judges: Aileen Lee (Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers), Dustin Moskovitz (Asana), Michael Parekh (MPi Capital), Joshua Schachter (Jig) DM: Looks beautiful, but rubbed the wrong way by name “Everpix.” Also, I’m Path investor. Not entirely original. What’s the longer term vision? A: We want to build something where you get a bunch of photos and we extract the best ones. JS: It’s 2011, but there’s yet to be a photo-sharing service with returns investors would look for. How to be something we need? Do people care about long-term photo storage? A: So many people use email for photo-sharing. But we grab photos from all your devices too. You don’t have to change your behavior – if you email photos, that’s fine. They’re all in Everpix’s cloud. AL: Who is initial target market? A: Everyone who doesn’t want to hassle with photos. MP: Business model? Infinite storage? A: Freemium, we don’t know limit yet. Company: Everpix Website: everpix.net Everpix automagically uploads and organizes all your photos in the cloud so you can view, rediscover and share them! Taking photos is fun, viewing them is fun, but everything else in between still sucks. People have lots of photos in various libraries and devices, accessing and organizing them is a pain, and putting them online or sharing them is cumbersome. Compare with the breath of fresh air that Everpix is: • All your photos are accessible from anywhere in a beautifully simple...
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| Verious Launches First Marketplace For Mobile App Components Posted: 12 Sep 2011 04:19 PM PDT  Today, TechCrunch Disrupt finalist Verious is launching the world’s first marketplace for mobile application components – that is, the libraries, the SDKs (software development kits), the add-ons, the open source code and other third-party services which specifically cater to mobile app developers. Until now, there hasn’t been a centralized repository of these resources. But Verious isn’t just organizing mobile app components on its site, it’s also offering a way for developers to sell their components to others through a copy-protected licensing system. According to analysts, the market for mobile application development services is expected to reach $100 billion by 2015, as many independent developers are now working on a combination of consumer-facing apps alongside mobile app component development. That no one has thought to launch a service like this until now is actually somewhat surprising. With Verious, the goal is to help developers speed their time to market by offering the components they need, but don’t have either the time or resources to build themselves. For example, there’s a 3D globe which consists of 20,000 lines of code, built over the course of 5 months with $50,000 worth of labor. It’s listed on the site for less than $1,000 to license. Pre-launch, Verious’ founders talked to thousands of developers and have compiled a list of 1,000 components along with $100,000 worth of component requests. The size of this initial catalog demonstrates the need for such a service’s existence in the first place – there are a lot of mobile app components for developers to keep up with! In addition to organizing the components on the site for easy discovery, mobile app developers are allowed to test out the components in a 30-day free trial. They can also post and “follow” component feature requests, so sellers know which ones to prioritize in their development to meet market demands. In the future, the ability to rate, review and comment on components will be added, too. The site’s patent-pending License Manager lets sellers enforce different types of licensing models, including annual fees, perpetual fees, volume-based tiered pricing, source code buyout and more. Verious will charge a 20-40% commission on components (20% for charter developers), a referral fee for premier partners listings SDKs, and revenue share for server-side partners. At launch, Verious supports iOS and Android, but will expand to other platforms as the market demands. Verious’ management team is composed of industry veterans with CEO Anil Pereira, VP Marketing Don Pitt and Web Strategy/Ops head Michael Coleman. Their combined work experience includes time spent at VeriSign, American Express, DataSphere, VMWare, Samsung, Openwave and TRUSTe. The company, founded in 2011, is backed by seed and angel investors including Charles River Ventures, X-G Ventures, Mark Britto, Iggy Fanlo, Gil Penchina, Krishna Vedati and others. Judges Q&A Expert Judges: Aileen Lee (Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers), Dustin Moskovitz (Asana), Michael Parekh (MPi Capital), Joshua Schachter (Jig) AL: Estimation of addressable market? A: 1) App services market – $100 B by 2015, plus app tools market – $30 B by 2015, according to analysts. DM: Dev tools companies have failed to make business of it. Who is doing it well? A: Plenty of companies doing marketplace models out there. MP: Quality control? Rating system? A: Developers have to produce a sample app with the code, or have an app on the App Store. Yes, ratings, reviews, community are coming. JS: How to be first stop for developers? A: Every day, companies are launching SDKs. Companies are working with Verious now to get their libraries listed. They want to be on site to grow their install base. Verious is the world's first marketplace for mobile app components, enabling developers to license pre-built, pre-tested libraries to accelerate time-to-market, access 3rd party content and increase in-app monetization. Verious serves as a lens on the Mobile App Development category so mobile app developers can find all the resources they need to accelerate their development efforts, in one place. Verious lists mobile application components for iOS and Android; mobile SDKs; mobile app development tools and services; and major open...
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| NTT DoCoMo, Samsung Talking Chipset Alliance Against Qualcomm Posted: 12 Sep 2011 04:17 PM PDT  Qualcomm is one of biggest players (if not the biggest) in the mobile chipset space, and their dominance of the market is forcing other manufacturers to seek alternative strategies. While Qualcomm’s huge presence has helped shape the market, a group of Asian companies are looking to form an alliance that will reduce their reliance on Qualcomm’s products and instead develop and rely on their own. NTT DoCoMo, Samsung, Fujitsu, NEC, and Panasonic Mobile Communications are currently negotiating the possibility of a joint venture that could start operations as early as next year, Reuters reports. At the heart of their alliance is their need for baseband chipsets. It’s one of the most important components in a phone, as it allows the device to connect and transmit signals to network towers. Qualcomm owns nearly 80% of the baseband market, and this hegemonic hold is exactly what the alliance hopes to break free from. If their alliance is formalized, NTT DoCoMo will own the majority stake, and the companies will jointly develop their own basebands to be used in each company’s forthcoming smartphones. The development costs will be split up between each company making the burden easier to bear, and should they decide to sell the chipsets to other companies, they all share in the rewards. While most of the companies are based in Japan and are unlikely to release phones using that baseband in the U.S., it’s very possible that the fruits of their labor may soon appear in a Samsung smartphone near you. At first glance, it looks like a David(s) versus Goliath scenario, but the move seems more about self-sufficiency than to strike at Qualcomm. Who knows though? With enough gumption and their pooled engineering know-how, NTT SamFuNePan may someday give Qualcomm a run for their money.
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| Spool Is Instapaper On Steroids Posted: 12 Sep 2011 04:06 PM PDT  Spool is a new service aimed at addressing the problem created by the multi-device, multi-screen environment we now live in, where the content consumption experience can vary widely from platform to platform. On iOS devices, for example, you can’t watch Flash videos without serious workarounds. On an iPod Touch or other standalone media player, you need a Wi-Fi signal in order to browse the Web. But with Spool, you don’t have to think about these sorts of things. Any Internet content, including audio, video and text, can be made available for immediate, offline viewing on mobile, simply by using the Spool app, browser add-on or bookmarklet. And because Spool is intelligent, it knows what part of a webpage to save, and what part to discard. Simply put, Spool works like an evolved version of Instapaper, the popular service that saves long-form Web articles for later reading either on your computer, iPhone, iPad or Kindle. Like Instapaper, there’s also this idea that what works on the Web isn’t necessarily what works well on mobile. But where Instapaper cleans up and reformats text for easier reading, Spool works with any media type, whether it be text, audio or video. It can even parse multi-page content for you, saving the entire article or forum thread, for example, not just the first page. The service uses artificial intelligence and a computer vision engine to read the webpage the way a human would and extract the relevant parts, while discarding the rest (like the ads, the header, the footer, etc.). Most importantly, perhaps, it converts video into mobile-friendly, HTML5-based formats that play within any modern smartphone or tablet browser. The videos and other content are also cached to the device, for offline access. In the short-term, Spool solves the problem of content incompatibly that arises, for the most part, from Apple’s decision to ban Flash from its mobile devices and publishers’ delays in moving to the iOS-friendly Web standard HTML5. It also provides a viable workaround for the still-present “offline” problem that results from poor cellular coverage and dead spots. Spool’s founders, Avichal Garg and Curtis Spencer, admit that the Flash problem is slowly going away, but they believe that the connectivity issues will remain for some time. For now, Spool lets you take snapshots of a page using its mobile app, Firefox or Chrome extension, or browser bookmarklet. These saved pages and related media can be viewed within the app or online, and favorited for easy access or archived when you’re finished viewing. The storage space Spool uses can also be adjusted in Settings, and for Android users, storing content to the SD card is supported. In the future, Spool will focus on adding deep linking (automatically pulling down the content for the links within an article you saved), plus intelligent “spooling” of your favorite sites without an explicit request on your part. The app is free for now (in private beta), while the founders consider monetization options involving freemium services, search offerings and mobile CDN models. Spool is currently addressing some real-world problems, but arguably not those that will be around forever. Spool’s technology, on the other hand, may have a longer shelf life than Spool’s apps. The company expects five patents to come of its artificial intelligence, computer vision, video extraction, video transcoding and browser emulation infrastructure. The amount of funding Spool received is currently undisclosed. Q&A Judges:Expert Judges: Aileen Lee (Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers), Dustin Moskovitz (Asana), Michael Parekh (MPi Capital), Joshua Schachter (Jig) AL: How to grow business? A: People are already doing this behavior. Big fans of Dropbox, Evernote – sites that have solve pain points for big parts of online population. DM: What about when network connections are better? A: Network infrastructure can’t keep up with number of users. Even if it does, that means Spool gets faster pipes, loads pages faster on phones. MP: Love it, can’t wait to try it. How does it compare to competition? A: A lot competitors focused on article content (Instapaper). This is about different types of content, too. (Videos, audio, etc.) JS: Do people really return to read stuff they archive to read later? A: We can also intelligently fetch things for you in advance, at some point in the future. But yes, it’s not an immediately mainstream product. Company: Spool Spool saves your favorite articles and videos to your computer, tablet, and phone. Read and watch your content when you have time, even offline.
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| Report: Android Market Nearing 6 Billion Downloads; Weather Apps Are Makin’ It Rain Posted: 12 Sep 2011 03:32 PM PDT  The Android Market continues to explode. Recent statistics published by research firm Ovum predict that app downloads in Android’s marketplace could reach 8.1 billion this year, compared to 6 billion for iOS, with total growth in app downloads expected to be as much as 144 percent this year. Today, mobile research firm Research2Guidance is releasing a report that gives a detailed look into the Android marketplace’s current escalating growth, what’s trending, and what categories of apps are making the most money. Traditionally, free, ad-supported apps have gobbled up most of the share in the Android Market. But what about those paid apps, how much are they making, and are they worth it? The research firm found that, in August, cumulative revenue from each category varied from $300 to $21,000, with the average Android app having generated $2,500 since publishing. While this isn’t a mind-boggling average, it’s not so bad either. What’s more the research firm said that, just by “choosing the less competitive and more price intensive category, developers can increase their potential revenue by 900 percent”. In terms of categories, unsurprisingly, nearly a quarter of all apps downloaded on the Android Market are games, as this has long been the largest and fastest growing category on the app store, preferred by developers across the board. However, it seems the intense competition in the gaming space has led to diminishing revenue as monetization potential slipped over the last few months. On the other hand, what may be a bit more surprising is the most lucrative category of apps in the market: On average, weather apps have generated the highest total revenue from paid downloads. Part of the reason for this is that the selection is limited, and it’s really a must-have app for every smartphone user — we want to know whether we’re about to walk into a tornado or not. Of course, the use case is very specific, and most are loathe to use (or develop) yet another weather app. There are only so many possibilities. The research firm, instead, advised developers to consider innovating on business tools — users are not as opposed to paying a price for a good business app that helps improve efficiency, for example, and the space, the firm said, is far less crowded than the rest. But how about the app store’s growth? According to the report, the Android Market remains ahead of Apple’s App Store in terms of additions of content. During August, the store grew by more than 20,000 apps, during which time Apple added another 15K apps to its iPhone App Store. As of the beginning of this month, the total number of apps in Android Market was 277,252, and the share of paid apps remains at 35 percent, with the average selling price of those paid apps being $3.13. Android Market is nearing 6 billion total downloads, which should be reached by the middle of September, the report said, and every week nearly 1,500 new publishers join the store. For more, check out Research2Guidance’s free August report here. Android is a software platform for mobile devices based on the Linux operating system and developed by Google and the Open Handset Alliance. It allows developers to write managed code in Java that utilizes Google-developed software libraries, but does not support programs developed in native code. The unveiling of the Android platform on 5 November 2007 was announced with the founding of the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of 34 hardware, software and telecom companies devoted to advancing open standards... Company: research2guidance Website: research2guidance.com research2guidance is an independent mobile industry market research and consultancy provider. We provide market reports, bespoke research and strategic consultancy helping our clients to be successful in the mobile industry. Our services include: regional market analysis, developer surveys, expert interviews, app store evaluation and comparison, mobile application strategy development, market entry strategy, etc. For all our engagements we leverage our broad contact base into the industry to the benefit of our client.
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| Ford Partners With Bug Labs To Develop Open Source Platform For In-Car Innovatin’ Posted: 12 Sep 2011 11:11 AM PDT  At the TechCrunch Hackathon on Saturday, the 108-year-old, All-American automaker, Ford, teamed up with the newly-American music service, Spotify, to showcase the growing opportunities for developers looking to take advantage of in-car gadgetry to integrate their apps and mobile services. Today at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, Ford looks to continue pushing forward with in-car connectivity and gadgetry, announcing a partnership with Bug Labs — an open-source hardware and software provider that tinkerers and engineers can use to create their own digital devices. The two companies will be collaborating on a new in-car research platform, named OpenXC, which looks to transform the car into a plug-and-play platform that will support open-source hardware and software to allow developers to make the car a playground for all kinds of cool new technologies. OpenXC, which is based on Bug Labs’ Bug System, will allow users to create a personalized driving experience through add-ons like visual and audio feedback interfaces and environmental sensors and safety devices — simply by snapping Bug Labs’ hardware modules into the consoles of vehicles. According to K. Venkatesh Prasad, the senior technical leader for Ford Research and Innovation, OpenXC is designed to create a platform that is completely open to the developer community, allowing engineers and hackers to offer cool in-car solutions to the consumer at reasonable prices. While Bug Labs has teamed with developers and enterprises like Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, Pitney Bows to design and test innovative devices, Ford is the first automotive OEM to collaborate with Bug Labs. Across the board, cars are getting smarter, and the opportunity for innovation in automotive connectivity continues to grow. Ford said that it hopes to use the OpenXC research project as a way to test new entertainment and connectivity solutions, and get a head start on the changing (and increasingly more technological) landscape, like fast-changing content preferences and “buy as you can” rental app solutions. As Asia is poised to become a big source of vehicle sales over the next decade, Prasad gave the example of a Ford owner who loves the game of cricket. Through OpenXC, drivers will be able to purchase a $15 cricket module from a local ford dealer, one that’s designed by a local developer and approved by Ford, to plug into the master control board in the car that would play a community radio station dedicated exclusively to cricket. After the season is over, the driver could replace the module with another, sport-focused or otherwise. OpenXC is designed to give both Ford researchers and third-party developers a low cost sandbox in which they can share, test, and verify any and all concepts related to in-car connectivity. The idea is to allow its open platform to give communities of drivers the ability to customize their driving experience, while at the same time allowing manufacturers like Ford to avoid building customizable vehicles for specific markets. Instead, through OpenXC’s sandbox, Ford is opening up that customization to third parties, enabling personalization of the driving experience to continue with participation from multiple sources without having to break the bank. At Disrupt, Ford and Bug Labs demonstrated the OpenXC platform using a Ford Fiesta to showcase a prototype “Fuel Economy Challenge” app that uses Bug Labs' hardware and software modules to provide a LED fuel efficiency display module in the vehicle's cockpit. When up and running, the app illuminates the windshield with a display presenting the driver’s current fuel efficiency. Drivers then have access to realtime data on how others in the challenge are performing, and who is driving most efficiently. It’s nice to see a once-troubled automaker finding new ways to remain relevant and provide its drivers with all the benefits of the mind-melting technology being developed by young American startups and tech companies. Developers and engineers, definitely look out for this one.
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| Angry Birds, The Brand: Rovio Sells 1M T-Shirts And 1M Plush Toys Per Month Posted: 12 Sep 2011 10:42 AM PDT  Given that I don’t even really need to write an introduction for it, it goes without saying that Angry Birds is a massive, massive brand. It’s available for everything from iOS to the PS3, and just recently smashed through 350 million cumulative downloads. The Angry Birds brand isn’t all about the software, though, by any means. In a Fireside Chat with MG this morning, Rovio’s North American General Manager Andrew Stalbow revealed a few key details surrounding the sales of their real world goods. Back in December of 2010, Rovio launched a series of Angry Birds plush toys. By March of this year, they had sold just over 2 million of ‘em. Today, they’re selling another million each and every month. The same goes for their line of T-shirts: every month, they’re selling another million. This is absolutely huge for them, and should serve as an important stat for app developers to keep in mind moving forward. Rovio is one of the few companies that has found success on iOS then managed to evolve their intellectual property into a proper full-blown license. So, what’s next for Rovio? After MG touched on the matter of Facebook and whether or not Rovio really saw themselves thriving moving forward without a Facebook game, Stalbow responded that “Facebook has actually been a massive platform for us, even though we’ve haven’t created a game on there yet. In terms of launching a game on there in the future, yes, absolutely, that’s something we’ll be talking about in the near future” Rovio is one of Europe’s leading independent developers of wireless games with an ever-growing portfolio of award-winning titles spanning many genres from casual to core next-gen console IP. Their studio has developed games for some of the biggest names in the mobile space, including Electronic Arts, Nokia, Vivendi, Namco Bandai and Mr. Goodliving/Real Networks. The seeds of Rovio were sown in 2003 when Helsinki University of Technology students Niklas Hed, Jarno Väkeväinen, and Kim Dikert participated in a mobile game...
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| Gowalla Is Reborn As A Beautiful App For Travel And Storytelling Posted: 12 Sep 2011 10:37 AM PDT  The location wars had a number of casualties. Some companies shut down, some sold off their remaining tech and talent. Others are still out there plugging away, but at this point, it seems clear that Foursquare won the all-important battle over the check-in. Even Facebook is slowly backing away from that particular space. Now the fun can really begin. For a number of months, Gowalla was seen as the main competitor to Foursquare. Both launched at SXSW in 2009 and both got quick traction as check-in services. But Gowalla was always trying to do more. Their experience came from the virtual goods side of things, and they tried to weave that into the location space. But it never really worked. Perhaps they were trying to do too much in the nascent space. Several months ago, the team sat down to dream it all up again. They thought about what kind of location-based app they would build today if they were starting from scratch. Then they went out and did just that. The result is the new Gowalla, which co-founder Josh Williams is showing off today at TechCrunch Disrupt. Technically version 4.0, the new version bears little resemblance to the previous versions of the app. Gowalla is no longer predominantly a check-in service. That’s still one aspect of it, but the idea is now to focus on two key areas: travel and storytelling. When you load up Gowalla, the first thing you see is still a main activity feed. Here you’ll find the activity from your friends. Because Gowalla isn’t completely pivoting away from their core location functionality, much of the data and social connections remain intact. But instead of a stream of check-ins, you’ll notice people hanging out together. They’re checking-in, but they’re also taking pictures and talking to one another in clusters that are known as “Stories”. The main middle tab is now “Guides”. Here you’ll find curated travel guides for various places around the world. For example, if you load up the app in San Francisco, you’ll see the San Francisco guide, as well as the East Bay guide and the Stanford guide. You can quickly scroll through other guides not near you as well. And Gowalla has the ability to make special guides on the fly. For example, they made a TC Disrupt guide for event-goers. Clicking on these guides loads up a bit of information about the city as well as all of the must-see spots. Again, because Gowalla has years worth of location data, they’re able to easily populate robust guides. Some of the locations are curated, some are based on check-in data and people favoriting places. The Gowalla “Highlights” feature also plays a role here. The final tab is your personal profile area. Here you’ll find all of your pictures and all of your Stories. So will this small pivot work for Gowalla? Well, they’re certainly focusing on the right areas. Check-ins are now a commodity, the real value of location lies in both augmenting personal experiences and providing useful information. Gowalla is trying to find the sweet spot between both. They’re a mobile travel guide and a well-conceived location-based sharing tool. Color, for all its faults, was trying to do something interesting around location-based sharing. This new version of Gowalla is doing something similar, but in a much more straightforward manner. You and all of your friends can take pictures at an event, cluster them together around location, and the UI to do so is obvious. You can also share all of this data to Facebook and Twitter — and yes, you can still check-in through Gowalla and send it to Foursquare. The travel aspect is potentially even bigger. While there are a lot of people going after this problem, no one has nailed the mobile travel guide so far. When someone does, it’s going to be massive. Gowalla has a pretty decent shot of doing something unique here because of all the data they’ve been collecting over time. Gowalla also has some key partnerships with Disney for these travel guides. Other launch partners include National Geographic and several major U.S. universities. Gowalla will feature guides for around 60 major metropolitan areas around the world at launch. The company has built apps for Android and iOS, and they have a web experience as well. All of them should be out shortly. We’ll see if Gowalla can do more this time beyond building a beautiful-looking app. But all of this new stuff sounds about right to me. Click to view slideshow.Gowalla is a location-based service that helps people keep up with their friends, share their favorite places, and discover the world around them. Users can connect with friends on their iPhone, Android, Blackberry or Palm smartphones—as well as on the web. Based in Austin, Texas, Gowalla was launched in 2009 by Josh Williams and Scott Raymond. The company is backed by investors including Greylock Partners, Also p-Louie Partners, Founders Fund, and other prominent angel investors.
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| AT&T Reveals New Windows Phones, Outlines Mango Update Plans Posted: 12 Sep 2011 07:27 AM PDT  If their latest press release is any indication, AT&T really loves their Windows Phones. Their current lineup consists of four WP devices, with three of them having launched alongside the OS last November and the other being a network-swapped variant of an existing device. Today’s announcement is a real shot in the arm for AT&T’s WP offerings, as three new Mango-powered handsets are waiting in the wings for a Q4 launch. First up is the HTC Titan (pictured above), the 4.7″ inch behemoth that has been enjoying the paparazzi treatment at IFA. A quick recap: in addition to its massive screen (which AT&T perhaps erroneously calls their largest on a smartphone), the Titan packs a single-core 1.5 GHz processor, 512 MB of RAM, an 8-megapixel camera, and about 16GB of internal storage. Samsung’s contributions come in the form of the Focus S and Focus Flash, a pair meant to capitalize on the success of the best-selling original. The Focus S is the more impressive of the two, with a 4.3-inch display Super AMOLED Plus display, 8-megapixel rear camera, 1.4 GHz processor, and a svelte 8.55 mm thick body. The Flash, on the other hand, is Samsung’s value offering: while it also has a 1.4 GHz processor (which may or may not be the same as in its more illustrious brother), it opts for a more wallet-friendly 3.7-inch screen and a 5-megapixel camera around the back. While none of the new trio has an official launch window yet, it’s possible that AT&T could take a page out of last year’s playbook and launch all three in a Windows blitz in time for the holidays. In addition to their new handsets, AT&T has also confirmed that all of their existing Windows Phones will receive the long-awaited Mango update some time this fall. While a more specific release window is always preferable, current users can at least rest assured that they haven’t been forgotten.
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| If You Weren’t Using TestFlight Before, You Will Be Now With Their New SDK Posted: 12 Sep 2011 07:00 AM PDT  It was nine months ago when we first wrote about TestFlight, the super-simple over-the-air (OTA) iOS app distribution service. As we noted at the time, the service seemed perfect for developers looking for a better way to test their apps before releasing them into Apple’s App Store. Since then, many developers have found it to be the perfect solution — it seems like pretty much every developer I encounter now uses it. Today, TestFlight version 2 is rolling out, and with it comes a full SDK that is likely to push any developer not yet using the service, over the edge. Here are the new features:
In other words, the best just got a lot better. And the key part is the that even with all the upgrades, the service remains free for developers to use. TestFlight says that while they reserve the right to charge for more premium add-ons down the road, these features are all now a part of the core functionality and will remain free. Currently, everyone from Adobe to MTV to Tumblr to Spotify to Instagram are using TestFlight. It’s great for distribution (which used to ridiculously involve the sending and manual installing of IPA’s and provisioning files), and now it’s going to be even better for diagnostics and analytics. If there’s any service that stands out as something Apple should buy, this is it. TestFlight notes that the SDK has been in testing with some developers for a few months. At least one of those developers notes that it’s “fucking fantastic”. Say no more. Click to view slideshow.
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| HTC’s Eyes Wander, Considers Buying Their Own OS Posted: 12 Sep 2011 06:52 AM PDT  HTC has produced devices running a handful of operating systems over the years, from big names like Android to lightweight options like Qualcomm’s BREW. What we’ve never seen though is a device that is HTC through and through — HTC hardware meets HTC OS. The Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer seems to have been thinking the same thing, as company chairwoman Cher Wang has revealed that HTC is considering purchasing their own mobile operating system for use in forthcoming devices. Though the company’s intentions have now been outed, Wang makes clear that their next steps are not set in stone. Taiwan’s Central News Agency has learned that HTC is taking the cautious approach here: while HTC brass have internally discussed their options, Wang makes it clear that their OS purchase (if it ever happens) is not going to be an impulse buy. In spite of their commitment to taking their time, HTC seems a bit nonchalant about introducing a new operating system to their already-ambitious line up. It’s likely because they realized that whatever operating system they purchase is only going to be a template upon which the HTC experience will be built. “We can use any OS we want,” Wang said. “We are able to make things different from our rivals on the second or third layer of a platform.” At least one of those layers refers to HTC’s near-ubiquitous Sense UI, which in one form or another has sat on top of numerous operating systems in recent years. That, coupled with the company’s new focus on delivering services like HTC Watch mean that no matter what OS they end up purchasing, the end result should be full-featured and recognizable. Whether or not it will be enough to claim any significant market share is still up in the air, but it’ll be a real treat to see them try. HTC Corp, (TAIEX: 2498) produces smartphones running the Android and Windows Phone 7 operating systems for themselves and as an OEM to other manufacturers. Since launching its own brand in late 2006, the company has introduced dozens of HTC-branded products around the world. The company recently introduced the HTC diamond to compete with Apple’s iPhone. Founded in 1997 by Cher Wang, Chairwoman, and Peter Chou, President and CEO, HTC made its name as the company behind many of the...
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| StatSheet Changes Name To Automated Insights, Scores $4 Million Posted: 12 Sep 2011 06:30 AM PDT  Exclusive - StatSheet, which specializes in realtime content automation, is expanding beyond sports to apply its technology to other data-intensive verticals where the cost of creating high-quality content remains high. The company has decided that a new name will better reflect its broadened focus, and will henceforth be known as Automated Insights. Furthermore, the startup has secured $4 million in new funding to spur growth. The financing round was led by Court Square Ventures and OCA Ventures, with participation from IDEA Fund Partners and other existing investors. They raised $1.3m earlier. For the record, Automated Insights will be entering new markets (think finance, weather, real estate etc.) but will maintain the StatSheet brand for its sports offerings whilst doing so. Automated Insights' technology automatically turns raw data into narrative content and visualizations. The content that is output is written entirely by software but can subsequently be formatted as headlines, summaries, and long-form articles, and then distributed via the Web, mobile applications and through social media. They recently applied its technology to power Major League Baseball (MLB) coverage. The company is now looking to debut team-centric sites and mobile apps for all 32 NFL and 244 NCAA Division I College Football teams (see an example). Since November, the company says, its software has generated over 100,000 articles (covering both NCAA Basketball and MLB). Worth noting: Automated Insights has gotten this far with only 12 employees, in less than a year, because most of what they do is completely automated. The StatSheet Network is a collection of fan-centric, sports sites designed to give sports fans the information and analysis they want when and how they want it. The network launched in November 2010, and currently consists of 345 sites that provide in-depth coverage for every Division I college basketball program in the nation. We will be adding even more sports and teams soon.
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