MobileCrunch |  |
- Lattice Semiconductor Acquires Chipmaker SiliconBlue For $62 Million In Cash
- Red Robot Labs Acquires Supermono, Appirio Buys Saaspoint To Expand To The UK
- Panasonic Announces Android Phone With 4.3-Inch OLED Screen For The European Market
- Fownd Launches A Free Service To Reunite You With Lost Phones, Gadgets, Keys & More
- Mark It Down: June 6, 2012
- Ness Adds Social Sharing To Its Mobile Restaurant Recommendation App
- YouMail Pulled From The Android Market At T-Mobile’s Request
- Infographic: Google Goes Wild With Android Market Stats
- SCVNGR’s New Mobile Payment Solution LevelUp Goes Device Agnostic With A Web App
- Mobile Phone Payments Company Bango Signs Deal With Amazon
- Google Image Search Adds More Tablet-Optimized Improvements
- ZTE To Make Big Play For U.S. Market With High-End Smartphones
- Amazon Launches $6M ‘Fund’ To Boost Kindle Direct Publishing, Lending Library
- Chartboost Expands Its Direct Deals Marketplace To Android
| Lattice Semiconductor Acquires Chipmaker SiliconBlue For $62 Million In Cash Posted: 09 Dec 2011 04:25 AM PST  Lattice Semiconductor this morning announced that it is to acquire SiliconBlue Technologies, which develops mobile device solutions for the consumer handheld market. Lattice Semi will pay approximately $62 million in cash for SiliconBlue and aims to close the deal before the end of the year. Under the terms of the agreement, SiliconBlue CEO Kapil Shankar will join Lattice Semi as Corporate VP of the Mobility Business Unit and will be responsible for its mobility product lines. Using a single chip ‘Field Programmable Gate Array’ (FPGA) fabric, SiliconBlue’s devices basically enable mobile designers to quickly add features to their mobile platform in areas such as connectivity, memory, storage, sensor management, video and imaging. The company says its mobile FPGA devices have already shipped “in the millions of units” to major consumer OEMs who produce everything from digital camera to tablets, smartphones, ereader devices, portable media players, netbooks and notebooks. SiliconBlue says it holds 40+ patents for its technology. Founded in 2006, SiliconBlue raised over $60 million in funding from private equity firm Atlantic Bridge, BlueRun Ventures, Crosslink Capital, NEA and Apex Venture Partners. Just recently, the company secured $18 million in Series D financing.
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| Red Robot Labs Acquires Supermono, Appirio Buys Saaspoint To Expand To The UK Posted: 09 Dec 2011 02:42 AM PST  Two acquisitions today that were for the most part executed so Silicon Valley companies could buy their way into the UK (and Ireland) market. Freshly funded location-based mobile gaming company Red Robot Labs has acquired UK-based indie gaming company Supermono Studios. Cloud solutions company Appirio, which just raised funding from Salesforce.com and other strategic backers, has acquired Saaspoint, a provider of cloud consulting services. Read more at TechCrunch Europe.
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| Panasonic Announces Android Phone With 4.3-Inch OLED Screen For The European Market Posted: 09 Dec 2011 01:04 AM PST  It took them quite a while, but as reported, Panasonic is finally ready to re-enter the global market for cell phones. After 2005, Big P has been selling handsets almost exclusively in Japan. The company today announced [JP] it will start expanding its mobile business to Europe in March 2012, starting with a yet to be named Android device. Technical details are scarce at this point, but it seems clear that the biggest selling point will be the phone’s 4.3-inch OLED screen with QHD resolution (960×540). Panasonic also says that it will be NFC-equipped, with a “slim” and water- and dust-proof body (in black or silver). The company views the European market as the first step to re-internationalize its mobile business: it plans to sell a total of nine million handsets in fiscal 2016 outside Japan (Europe, Asia, the US, China, etc.), plus another 6 million in its home market. Panasonic hasn’t stated yet when (or if) this handset will hit America, too.
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| Fownd Launches A Free Service To Reunite You With Lost Phones, Gadgets, Keys & More Posted: 08 Dec 2011 10:28 PM PST  Do you lose things? Despite being meticulous about personal hygiene and a snappy dresser, I tend to misplace things. I blame it on bad parenting, of course. But, we all lose our personal items — and as much as it pains us — our gadgets are often the victims. Smartphones, especially iPhones, have been known to surreptitiously slip out of pockets at inappropriate times. Unfortunately, unlike our vehicles, most gadgets do not have panic buttons, or remote key access — although there are some tracking apps that get close. In fact, there are umpteen ways to find lost iPhones, or track your stolen hardware. Apple’s Find My iPhone has traditionally been the best way to safeguard against permanently losing an iPhone, running in the background (once set up) until you need to locate it. (And for Samsung/Android users, there’s always stuff like this.) But, of course, we have other personal items that are often lost, whether they be gadgets, like iPods, or car/house keys, etc. Launching this week with its MVP is a startup and its eponymous free iPhone app called Fownd, which simply put, helps return your lost items — one and all. Well, maybe not children, but most everything else. Cofounded by Drew Izzo (the former CMO of Ancestry.com and Roost.com, among others), Fownd customizes a homescreen photo of your choice to include a message that enables the finder of a lost item to connect with the owner — essentially, a terrific complementary service to Find My iPhone. What do I mean? Well, along with its free iPhone app, Fownd sells tags that you can add to your keys, cameras, flip phones, and just about every other important item that can go missing. These pages of 10 tags sell for $0.99, and can be ordered directly from the app. As you can see, the tags come in different sizes, with adhesive on one side, so that you can stick them to your personal items — even your smallest ones. One of these tags may take up a lot of space relative to the size of, say, your iPod Nano, but it’s not always about image here, people, think of the utility. Izzo did say that the product is still in its early stages, as Fownd has a team of four working on their product, some of whom have full-time jobs, and tags will likely continue to be improved upon and refined, until that are at maximum elegance. But the point is that, once you download the app and receive your tags, you are free to register them all through the Fownd app on your iPhone. If they happen to get lost, the finder simply texts the code provided on the tag to the number given — all anonymously — and voila! Because Fownd sends these “connection” messages to your email, iPhone and alternate phone numbers that you provide when you register, you are thus able to be reconnected with your beloved devices/keys. You can see an example text that you might receive in the image to the right. The homescreen tag is a good quick safeguard for your iPhone, but in the event that your phone runs out of batteries, (something the iPhone 4S especially has been known to do, although it has gotten better with the new software updates), you can just add a physical tag as a backup. Though, hopefully the finder will be so kind as to charge the phone. Fownd is also working on getting its web client up and running (which it should soon), so you’ll be able to track your iPhone and all other personal nicknacks and doodads from — you guessed it — the Web, and view your phone’s location on GPS via a handy map. It’s a simple product in conceit, but it works, and it’s a great complement to Find My iPhone, so that users can now keep track of their iPhones and even hope to reconnect with lost feature phones, iPods, keys, and more. And what’s better than saving money on replacing keys, or that 8 million dollar Apple product you just bought? For more, check out Fownd here. The team is looking for feedback, as the product is still in early stages, so fire away with your suggestions. Android apps are currently in the works.
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| Posted: 08 Dec 2011 05:44 PM PST  “Six months from now you’ll say the opposite. Because ultimately applications vendors are driven by volume. And the volume is favored by the open approach that Google is taking.” That was Google Chairman Eric Schmidt speaking at LeWeb a couple days ago. Specifically, he was addressing a question from the audience wondering why most big application developers are still choosing to develop for the iOS platform first instead of Android. First of all, if you haven’t watched Schmidt’s entire talk with Loic Le Meur yet, you really should. They cover a range of topics important to both Google and the broader tech space. Plus, it will avoid the small situation that arose yesterday when Schmidt was misquoted, making him sound much more arrogant about the Android platform than he actually was. While Schmidt was misquoted, the core of this latest debate around iOS and Android remains very much intact. Schmidt predicted that 6 months from now, most app developers will choose to make their app work on Android before iOS. This statement gives us an actual date that we can mark down to see if he’s right or not: June 6, 2012. Of course, my stance is going to be that there’s no way he’s going to be right about that. Not a chance. In fact, I’m not even sure he would say the same thing again if pressed. Because while the way he answered the question may have sounded reasonable, history has already given us plenty of guidance as to why he’ll be wrong. The audience member who asked the question clearly did so because Android already is the dominant player in the space. And it has been for quite some time now. Schmidt brushes that fact (a fact which he so often states when it’s advantageous to an argument) aside completely and instead implies that the only reason developers aren’t rushing to Android is because the software hasn’t been good enough until now. Of course, that goes against basically everything Google has been saying for the past couple of years. In that time, it was always been that Android was ahead of iOS when it came to software. Last year at Google I/O, for example, the knives were out for Apple’s platform. At one point, they showed Android 2.2 (Froyo) literally running laps around iOS. So when Schmidt says: “It’s taken us a while to get software that really is capable of delivering on the promise that you’ve just articulated.” to the audience member, you have to wonder why then such a software comparison was a focal point of previous Google I/Os? That’s not to say Android Ice Cream Sandwich isn’t good (I happen to be testing it out right now, and it is quite good — more on that in another column soon), it’s just that Google has consistently said the newest version of Android is the one that will blow the doors off the iOS house. It just hasn’t happened yet. And I see no reason why we should believe that the situation will be different this time. Further, Schmidt goes on to imply that another reason why ICS will bring all the developers over to Android is that Google has now gotten better at working with their carrier and OEM partners to ensure the latest software is available to customers. “With the ICS release our core objective as a company is to get all of the hardware vendors onto that platform,” was his actual quote. Yes, that has been a problem — a huge one. But again, I see no reason why it’s going to be solved here. At Google I/O this past summer, Google went on and on about their new “Android Update Initiative”. It sounded great. Google was going to get all the OEMs and carriers in line and make sure that Android updates came to all in a timely manner. “Over the next few weeks, we'll figure it all out,” Android chief Android chief Andy Rubin said at the time. That was seven months ago. Guess how much we’ve heard about the plan since then? *Crickets* Worse, just yesterday, Motorola — the hardware company Google is buying, mind you — took to their blog to dampen expectations about when their users may seen ICS on their wide variety of phones. They don’t come out and give a date, but putting two-and-two together, it sure sounds like it’s going to be many months at the earliest. Hell, they aren’t going to even finalize which devices they want to and can update until a month from now. Here’s my favorite bit:
I’m starting to wonder if sure any Android device besides the Samsung Galaxy Nexus is going to have ICS by June 6, 2012. That doesn’t bode well for Schmdit’s prediction. All that aside, let’s just think about what Schmidt is saying for a second. He’s saying that developers are just months — and maybe even weeks — away from changing their current line of thinking. Are there some developers out there that do Android first right now? Sure. Has that number been growing? I think that’s fair to say (though I have no data to point to either way). But it’s also fair to say that the vast majority of the key mobile software developers are still focusing on iOS first. The audience member cited Flipboard, everyone else can probably rattle off a dozen big names. Again, Android is already the biggest smartphone platform out there. And again, that has been the case for a long time now. So when Schmidt says “ultimately applications vendors are driven by volume”, Android should already be dominating in the race for getting the best apps. But they aren’t. I’ve spoken to many mobile developers over the years about this issue. There are a few refrains, but they’re all largely the same. First, many of them still seem to prefer to use iOS as their own primary device. The likelihood is greater that they’re going to develop for a platform they actually know and use. Second, most developers are still unconvinced that you can make any meaningful amount of money trying to sell an Android app (Schmidt hit on this quickly in his remarks, saying that the Market is now better, but doesn’t really address the issue). Instapaper creator Marco Arment is going to put his money where his mouth is in this regard by offering to split the revenue with any developer who can make a decent Android port of his app and sell it in the Android Market. If he thought it would be a huge money maker, obviously he would do it himself. Third, the Android Market is still no App Store when it comes to both distribution and discovery. Again, Schmidt sort of alluded to this being fixed, but it’s not yet clear if the changes made are actually working. Fourth, if volume was all that mattered, everyone would still be developing for Symbian, as Anil Dash pointed out earlier. Or they might even still be focusing on Windows, as John Gruber pointed out yesterday. Fifth, while eventually Android volume may be a boon to apps largely based around advertising, many app developers don’t want to move in this direction. Most still want to make something and get paid directly for it (imagine that) — see: argument number two. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Android development itself remains a huge pain in the ass. I hear this again, and again, and again — just as much today as I did two years ago. Android has what are widely considered to be vastly inferior development tools when it comes to making apps for Android versus what Apple gives you to make apps for iOS. Many refer to them as a joke. Or a nightmare. Or the bane of their existence. Or all of the above. And you have to use them to ensure that your app will work on the huge number of devices in the Android ecosystem. Very few developers even bother to actually test on the majority of them, and it’s still a pain. It makes IE6-specific development look like a cakewalk. I actually brought this up on stage with SoundTracking creator Steve Jang at LeWeb on Wednesday. They were at the conference to launch their Android app after finding some success going iOS first. When asked what the Android development process was like, he admitted it was long and painful. Pretty much every app developer going from iOS to Android will tell you the same thing — and if they don’t happen to be on stage, they’ll use many more expletives. So you’ll forgive me if I laugh when Eric Schmidt says that by June of 2012, all of this is going to change. Suddenly, the Flipboards, Instapapers, Soundtrackings, Instagrams, etc, are going to launch on Android first. It’s like saying that by the middle of next year, the majority of all TVs are going to be running on the Google TV platform. [image: flickr/LeWeb11]
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| Ness Adds Social Sharing To Its Mobile Restaurant Recommendation App Posted: 08 Dec 2011 03:30 PM PST  Ness Computing has just launched a new version of its restaurant search engine app that takes its existing recommendations technology and adds in new sharing services. Yes, there are plenty of restaurant recommendations apps out there, and social tie-ins are increasingly common on mobile devices. But what Ness does is already special, and getting better with the new version. The company has spent years developing machine learning technology that looks at your social data from sites like Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter, as well as your behavior, and figures out which nearby restaurants you’ll like most. It presents this data in a score from 0% to 100% match in a classy scrolling interface. Instead of going to a site like Yelp and seeing every restaurant with 3.5 to 4.5 stars, as cofounder and chief executive Corey Reese tells me, you get an exact percentage based on its analysis, along with explicit ratings from your friends to highlight what matters. (Note that it has bigger plans for applying this tech, as we’ve covered, but it’s focused on restaurants for starters). Having launched in late August, it has spent the intervening months refining its system using the 1.5 million ratings generated by the 100,000 users it has accumulated. The result is even finer-grained recommendations. The new social features should help it get out in front of more users. The core additions include a way to post thank-you notes and reviews to Facebook. Just click on the photo of your friend in their review to send the note, or write a review and share it on your wall and news feed. The homescreen also now shows mouthwatering photos of dishes from various cuisines, based on what it thinks you like most (you can swipe to pick different ones). The app has upgraded its provides friend recommendations and notifications integrations with iOS5, too. The getting-started process for new users has also been rearranged from the previous version to highlight sharing. In a series of three steps, you connect with Facebook or Foursquare (Twitter is coming later), and it starts pulling information about you and your friends from those platforms. The second step asks you to provide ten ratings of various nearby locations — as with the previous version, this helps it build on your social data. Then it asks you to invite friends. Overall, Ness’s tech effort has resulted in much better results for users, and the interface makes the experience more enjoyable. But it’s still hitting a crowded market that has established competitors like Yelp and Urbanspoon. The one-off recommendation improvements that it can provide are often subtle, so integrating social features could help it break out. The new version is now live in the iTunes App Store (here).
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| YouMail Pulled From The Android Market At T-Mobile’s Request Posted: 08 Dec 2011 11:15 AM PST  Whoa. I’m going to tip toe through this story a bit carefully, as it’d be easy to come off as if we’re rallying the pitchforks. We’ve reached out to T-Mobile for their side of the story, but haven’t heard back just yet. Here’s what we know: YouMail, a visual voicemail app with millions of downloads, has just been pulled from the Android Market. The reasoning, according to an e-mail sent from Google to YouMail: because T-Mobile said so. To quote the e-mail (pictured above) directly:
The problem? According to YouMail, T-Mobile never once reached out to YouMail to complain. Says founder Alex Quilici, “Our number is toll-free, so it would have even been a free call for them.” Alex also added that not only did T-Mobile never complain, but none of the carriers have complained. They’re doing “over 50 million calls every month”, and no carrier has ever expressed an issue. We’re trying to put together the puzzle pieces and figure out what’s going on here. It’s strange that T-Mobile would send out the blockade without a polite reach out — and it’s even stranger that Google would flip the switch on an app with millions of downloads without connecting all the dots. We’ll update you with more when we get to the bottom of this.
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| Infographic: Google Goes Wild With Android Market Stats Posted: 08 Dec 2011 11:12 AM PST  Google’s been celebrating their recent Android Market milestone with a string of discounted (and awesome) apps, but really — what’s a celebration without an infographic? Thankfully, Google has come through on that front with a slew of stats about the Android Market and the people who use it. For example, despite Android being the most widely used smartphone OS in the United States, Americans are actually only the fourth most active app downloaders in the world. South Korea takes the top spot in this category, with Hong Kong and Taiwan coming in second and third respectively. What’s more, the most popular time to download apps is 9PM on a Sunday, which certainly makes sense to me. After all, what better way to get pumped for a new week than to find apps that help kill time at work? Google also confirms that games are the most downloaded apps, although Android users don’t seem to be particularly big sports fans. There’s a lot more to dig into, so take a few seconds and peruse — you know you’re dying to find out how many keystrokes people have collectively saved using SwiftKey.
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| SCVNGR’s New Mobile Payment Solution LevelUp Goes Device Agnostic With A Web App Posted: 08 Dec 2011 09:39 AM PST  Back in March, SCVNGR launched a product to complement its mobile scavenger hunt called LevelUp that essentially took on Groupon and the daily deals industry with a mobile product that focused squarely on one of the biggest problems with that very industry: Customer retention and loyalty. LevelUp, and Founder Seth Priebatsch inked deals with American Express and a few others to enable users to redeem their deals by swiping their credit cards. Fast forward to the last month of 2011 and LevelUp looks a bit different than it did at the outset. The context is simple: Mobile payment solutions stand to be a big business over the next five years, but as they stand right now, carriers and the makers of mobile OSes are finding it hard to come to terms (see Verizon’s treatment of Google Wallet), and users suffer by being subjected to these obstacles. So, the SCVGR spin-off is today launching a mobile payments web app to complement its existing native apps to allow anyone on a web-connected device to pay with their phone — using any credit card or any web-connected device with a simple QR code. For now (or until we see a more widespread adoption), LevelUp allows users to bypass NFC or needing specific cards to link to a certain device and carrier on a particular version of Android. Priebatsch wants to do away with the limitations imposed on mobile payments solutions by niche requirements, allowing anyone with a web-connected device (and soon an offline, HTML5 version of the app) to show up at their favorite merchants and just pay. Building on its previous functionality, LevelUp is now combining mobile payments and loyalty rewards — as users can visit any merchant that accepts LevelUp to pay with their smartphones and save money while doing it. LevelUp is designed so that users have instant credit waiting for them the first time they use the app, with the ability to unlock further credits toward their purchases when they revisit their favorite merchants. Merchants are able to use the solution by through a LevelUp reader or by downloading the LevelUp Merchant app, which then provides local businesses with analytics, insight into the behavior of their customers, which are their most loyal customers, savings on interchange fees, etc. LevelUp is currently available in San Francisco, New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, with more than 200 merchants accepting the payments solution in Boston and Philadelphia, for example. As the second product from SCVNGR, LevelUp has access to the 2 million users and 5,000 enterprises using SCVNGR (and the nearly $20 million it’s raised in funding). SCVNGR is now at 104 employees, with 40 more joining in January to build out the LevelUp team, specifically the sales force, which will help speed up adoption among local businesses and push the product into further markets. Priebatsch said that LevelUp has already been seeing some encouraging adoption stats, among them that 60 percent of all LevelUp customers return to merchants which they’ve already patronized, with the average LevelUp user saving $25 to $50 a month. LevelUp is currently at about 100K users a month, which the founder expects to increase as more SCVNGR users adopt and as the solution pushes into more cities. LevelUp has partnered with T-Mobile to help it achieve national scale, and distribute the merchant-side payment solutions, which they’ve been offering at discounts — along with data plans to back the infrastructure of the LevelUp network.
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| Mobile Phone Payments Company Bango Signs Deal With Amazon Posted: 08 Dec 2011 09:20 AM PST  Very interesting, Bango. Sometimes the biggest deals are the ones where everyone is keeping mum. That seems to be the case with this little blip of news coming out of the mobile phone payments company Bango today. The company announced it has signed a deal with Amazon.com, Inc. to provide “services.” And yep, that’s just about all it’s saying. Bango provided a short statement, noting that Amazon is now a Bango customer, which makes it the third major customer to sign up for the mobile payments platform. Previously, Bango signed deals with Research in Motion (RIM) and Opera, both of which involve offering carrier billing services for those companies’ app stores. (Carrier billing is the payment mechanism that allows users to pay for purchases on their mobile phone bills.) However, in Opera’s case, customers are able to use a credit card or carrier billing to purchase apps. Bango won’t confirm any details of the new agreement, including how much the deal is worth or even what services, specifically, it will be providing to Amazon. But the conclusion being drawn from the news, of course, is that Bango will soon be providing carrier billing services to Amazon for its app store, the Amazon App Store for Android, which is available to any Android user (in the U.S.) as an installable app. The Store is also now a prominent feature on the company’s new Android-based tablet, the Kindle Fire. What’s interesting, however, is that the Fire doesn’t come in a 3G version, which could entail a carrier relationship. It’s a Wi-Fi only device. Perhaps Bango’s news, then, hints at something yet to come? Then again, given that Bango also provides analytics services, it could be something less exciting (to consumers, at least) than paying for apps via your phone bill. According to a Bango spokesperson, the company couldn’t share any information beyond what it has already provided due to “commercial sensitivities.” “This was very much just a regulatory announcement that Bango was required to release as it is a publicly quoted company. We hope to be able to release more information in 2012,” the spokesperson said. The full statement reads as follows:
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| Google Image Search Adds More Tablet-Optimized Improvements Posted: 08 Dec 2011 08:23 AM PST  Google has updated its Google Image Search experience with a redesign targeted towards users of tablet devices, including the Apple iPad. Now, when you’re browsing through image results on your tablet computer (yep, Android tablets, too), you can tap an image result in the carousel view to expand the image on the screen. You can then begin swiping through the rest of the image search results to continue browsing. Below each image is information about the photo itself, including the usual: title, description and URL of the page where the image is found. You can tap on the webpage preview option to visit the website hosting the image. This new feature is an extension of Google’s previous image search enhancements for tablets from back in July. At the time, Google introduced several tablet-optimized enhancements, including larger image previews, continuous scrolling and faster loading of thumbnails. The new image carousel is launching today in over 40 languages, says Google via blog post. Google didn’t specify which versions of Android support the update, but the video shows it running on
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| ZTE To Make Big Play For U.S. Market With High-End Smartphones Posted: 08 Dec 2011 07:15 AM PST  The U.S. mobile market is already saturated with smartphones, with players like Apple, HTC, and Samsung locked in a never-ending market share struggle. It’s a game dominated by big-name players, but according to the Wall Street Journal, Chinese hardware vendor ZTE is looking to take on all comers with a new line of high-end smartphones that will debut next year. It’s quite the about-face for the Chinese company, whose oeuvre to date consists mostly of budget handsets and broadband modems. That’s not to say the formula hasn’t been working: aggressively-priced Android devices like the ones in ZTE’s portfolio were recently cited as one of the reasons for China’s booming smartphone market. Even so, ZTE America President Lixin Cheng sees a big opportunity for the company by diving deeper into the U.S. market. “By 2015, we expect the U.S. to be the largest market for handsets for ZTE,” Cheng said. “Next year, we’re going to launch LTE and high-tier phones in the U.S.” Cheng declined to go into specifics, but the considering their past offerings, ZTE-branded Android and Windows Phone devices will likely be among the company’s 2012 salvo. Even though the company is looking to go the whiz-bang route when it comes to the hardware (and possibly software, if their partnership with Mentor Graphics proves fruitful), it seems as though they intend to remain competitive as far as price. Though he doesn’t delve into specifics, Cheng mentions that the forthcoming devices will be “more affordable” than the iPhone. I’m all for more competition in the market, but I have to wonder what sort of effect the ZTE brand will have on sales. People tend to prefer known entities when it comes to these sorts of long-term purchases — they’re comforting, and big brands can imbue owners with a sense of clout and pride that smaller brands can’t match up to. In spite of that, ZTE seems to have the wind at their backs for now: Cheng reports that sales of ZTE devices in the United States in Q3 were up 157% year-over-year. ZTE is probably looking forward to a bumpy ride, but they can take solace in another Asian success story: HTC. The Taiwanese company went from being a relative nobody churning out nondescript Windows Mobile devices to being the biggest smartphone vendor in the United States within the span of a few years. Could ZTE pull off that same sort of meteoric rise? Possibly, but they’ll have to bring a strong device portfolio to the table next year if they want to stand a chance.
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| Amazon Launches $6M ‘Fund’ To Boost Kindle Direct Publishing, Lending Library Posted: 08 Dec 2011 06:22 AM PST  Amazon this morning announced that it has set up a $6 million annual fund dedicated to independent authors and publishers. Dubbed KDP Select, the fund aims to let indie authors and publishers “make money in a whole new way”. Here’s how it works: if a KDP author or publisher chooses to make any of their books exclusive to the Kindle Store for at least 90 days, those books are eligible to be included in the Kindle Owners' Lending Library and can earn a share of the KDP Select fund. The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library is a collection of books that Amazon Prime members who own a kindle can borrow once a month, with no due dates. Amazon says it expects the fund to be at least $6 million for all of 2012, but has also already allocated $500,000 for December 2011 (the new option is available starting today). Under the terms of the program, independent authors and publishers can enroll anything from a single, self-published book or their entire catalog (if applicable). From the press release:
Enrolled titles will remain available for sale to any customer in the Kindle Store and authors will continue to earn their regular royalties on those sales, Amazon adds.
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| Chartboost Expands Its Direct Deals Marketplace To Android Posted: 08 Dec 2011 06:00 AM PST  Chartboost, the newly launched (already profitable) direct deals marketplace for mobile game developers is today announcing its expansion to Android. The company provides free ad-serving technology for direct deals and cross-promotions via its Chartboost SDK, allowing publishers to retain 100% of the revenue share on their direct deals. Meanwhile, the company’s opt-in ad network offers revenue sharing with publishers to help fill unsold inventory. The expansion to Android was based on strong demand from Chartboost’s current game publisher clients, a list that includes big names like Tinyco, Pocket Gems, Storm8, Funzio, Dinsey Mobile, Gameview, Crowdstar and Animoca. Chartboost is also now adding a few more top brands to its customer base, including Booyah, Funzio and Out Fit 7. According to CEO Maria Alegre, there are now 200 publishers using the service with around 400 or so apps. In Chartboost, the focus is not on banner advertising, but on customizable, white-labeled full-screen interstitials that are used to suggest new games to the app’s users. The ads perform better than banners because they’re not necessarily perceived as ads, but as game recommendations. The CTR’s for these interstitials are, on average, around 12%, says Alegre, and she expects that to remain the same as Chartboost heads to Android. However, she notes that iOS ads can often see CTR’s in the range of 15%-16%. Chartboost closed $2 million in Series A funding in October, with Translink Capital, SKTVC and XG Ventures. The company’s focus going into 2012 is on international expansion, especially Asia. Chartboost for Android was previously available in a closed beta only, but is now available for any developer to use. Sign up is here.
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