MobileCrunch |  |
- Amazon Stops Hiding Competitors’ E-Reading Apps On The Kindle Fire
- Japan’s Top 3 Mobile Carriers Agree To Support Global NFC Standard
- The Definitive Guide To HTML5: 14 Predictions For 2012
- Last-Minute Gift Guide 2011: Things For The Audio Lover In Your Life
- The Other Side Of Open
- Intel Shows Off Smartphone Reference Design, Claims Performance Gains Over ARM
- Swype Learns To Listen Better, Type More Accurately
- Zappos Founder’s Customer Rewards App RNKD Now On Android
- Spotify For BlackBerry Officially Released, Only Supports Old Hardware
- Open Home Pro Helps Realtors Sell Homes Via Their iPads
- Meet Dotti, Sincerely’s New Mobile Photos App For That (Holiday) Disposable Camera Nostalgia
- HTC And Google Sound Off On The ITC’s Patent Ruling
- FriendFinder Launches Tablet Games Studio (With A Cool Name)
- Fingerprint’s Educational Apps For Kids Are Hot: 2M+ Minutes Played This Month
- Verizon’s Data Network Suffering (Another) Nationwide Outage
| Amazon Stops Hiding Competitors’ E-Reading Apps On The Kindle Fire Posted: 22 Dec 2011 05:08 AM PST  Amazon has stopped pretending that a group of e-reading apps it allowed onto its Android Appstore weren’t available on the Kindle Fire. For whatever reason, the company was effectively hiding e-reading apps from companies like Wattpad, Kobo and Bluefire, even though they worked perfectly fine on the low-cost tablet computer. Confused about why its app didn’t appear for users on the Kindle Fire, which is proving to be quite a sought-after device, Wattpad engaged in conversations with some folks over at Amazon, which apparently led to a necessary change in policy for all makers of mobile e-reading apps. It’s unclear when Amazon started showing e-reading apps from rivals (including Wattpad’s) on Kindle Fire, exactly, but it seems they started appearing in listings sometime yesterday afternoon. Possibly, this was part of the Kindle Fire update that was delivered earlier this week. Either way, this is good news for Wattpad, Kobo and other e-reading app developers, who no longer have to educate people on how to sideload their applications on the Kindle Fire. Last week, The Verge reported that Amazon redirected everyone trying to visit the Android Market website of direct app market.android.com links to its own Appstore. However, GigaOm’s Kevin C. Tofel reported yesterday that the browsing block is no more. I don’t consider Amazon to be an evil corporation, but both the hiding of competing e-reader apps and the browser redirection on the Kindle Fire were business practices bordering on downright shady. It is, however, worth noting that Amazon seems to be paying close attention to all feedback and prone to fixing what needs to be fixed rapidly.
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| Japan’s Top 3 Mobile Carriers Agree To Support Global NFC Standard Posted: 22 Dec 2011 04:18 AM PST  Japan, one of the most advanced mobile nations in the world, doesn’t want to be a “cell phone Galapagos” anymore, at least when it comes to payments over NFC. Paying with cell phones is already ubiquitous in Japan, but now the country’s top three telcos (NTT Docomo, KDDI au, and SoftBank Mobile) are trying to switch from the Nippon-only Osaifu Keitai system to the Type A and Type B NFC standards used globally. The problem for the carriers is that Osaifu Keitai (“Portable Wallet”), which is based on Sony’s FeliCa RFID smart card technology, isn’t compatible to the Type A and B NFC standards. Docomo, KDDI, and SoftBank have set up the so-called Japan Mobile NFC Consortium to coordinate the domestic adoption of those standards with “service suppliers and handset manufacturers”. The background here is that with this move, the carriers are not only streamlining domestic mobile payment services but making it easier for Japanese handset manufacturers like Sharp or Panasonic to sell their devices abroad. In fact, Japanese business daily The Nikkei is reporting that handsets incorporating Type A and B NFC standards from Japanese makers will be released at the end of next year. With over 120 million cell phones in use, Japan is currently the 7th biggest mobile market in the world. Via Engadget
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| The Definitive Guide To HTML5: 14 Predictions For 2012 Posted: 21 Dec 2011 10:50 PM PST  Editor's note: Guest contributor Ben Savage is the founder of Spaceport.io, a native Javascript and HTML5 platform for mobile game developers. From tech titans like Zynga, Facebook, Microsoft, Google and Apple, to startups just launching, the battle lines of 2012 will be drawn across the landscape of HTML5. Below are 14 bold predictions for how HTML5 will evolve in 2012. Welcome to a more interconnected web: In 2012, HTML5 will be adding support for some really useful and cool APIs that allow one For example, Zynga games on Facebook run inside of iframes. Using the new postMessage API these games will be able to communicate within the containing Facebook frame directly. Before HTML5, inter-window communication had to rely on a remote server – or use unreliable hacks. Another exciting addition is CORS (Cross Origin Resource Sharing). This will make it much easier for different websites to share information with one another. For example, CORS will enable startups to create photo-editing services that download your photos from Facebook, let you modify them, and then re-upload them – again without having to resort to ugly hacks. With all of the new semantic information (see Semantics and Microdata) available with HTML5, it will become much easier to create web tools that extract information from web pages. As a result, you can expect to see a plethora of new mashup services, as well as better browser modes (like readers and translators). Web browsers will look more like iPhones Everyone loves Apple’s iOS. Now it’s coming to the HTML5 web. In 2012 your browsers will start More and more applications will just be built in HTML5 instead of downloadable apps If you’re like me, you already use web apps for email, calendars, and photo-sharing, but in 2012 more classes of applications will be HTML5 enabled. Next up, you can expect to see content creation apps like Inkscape and Illustrator emerge for HTML5 and start to catch on. Internet Explorer & Microsoft will dramatically improve in coolness. Internet explorer’s reputation will stop being “the browser where nothing works right” and start being “the fast browser”. Microsoft has made major investments into improving HTML5 performance that will give IE 10 a huge performance lead over competing browsers. Its hardware accelerated “canvas” will blow away all the other browsers in any speed test. Microsoft is also adding interesting ways for the HTML5 web and the desktop to work together that will really spice up its operating system. Having good support from IE will be the impetus that will really turn the tide in favor of authoring HTML5 applications. Browser manufacturers will get into the App Store business Taking a cue from Apple, browser manufacturers will start to realize that they are missing out by not being in the app store business. Google Chrome already has an integrated app-store as its splash page. Expect many other browsers to follow. This is actually a good thing for HTML5 application developers – it means more distribution opportunities for apps, although platform specific payment systems and platform revenue-shares will follow later on. At least one major console game released or re-released using WebGL In 2012, at least one AAA console game company is going to make the leap and decide to launch a 3D title on the web using WebGL instead of (or in addition to) creating a downloadable client. It might be a re-release of a well-known title (Like “Team Fortress 2″ or “Assassins Creed”), or another way to play a popular MMO (like “Eve Online” or “World of Warcraft”), or it may be an entirely new title launching for the first time. Many more applications will use offline cache and will work offline The offline application cache will dramatically improve the usability and speed of HTML5 apps. Querying a local database will allow applications to avoid a round-trip to the server, eliminating that laggy web-app feel that makes us all prefer native apps today. In 2012, expect to see a few issues arise from this extended usage. You’ll lose your work by clearing your cache at least once or twice. Also expect security vulnerabilities to keep showing up that allow malicious applications to access private files stored on your computer by another HTML5 ads will become prevalent and overtake Flash ads Website owners keen to monetize the increasingly large amount of traffic coming from iOS devices will demand HTML5 ads (rather than Flash ads). Startups will emerge to serve this market. These startups will solve the sand boxing, security, and authoring tools issues that this new market will face. Now that HTML5 is capable of doing everything that flash ads commonly do, it’s just a matter of time before they take over. JavaScript will get a lot faster with better memory management and typed arrays JavaScript has gotten really, really fast – it's already among the world’s fastest scripting languages – but there is room for improvement. Google Chrome has started pushing the envelope on better memory management and garbage collection algorithms. This, combined with typed arrays, will bring JavaScript performance closer to more mature languages like Java. Canvas will get hardware acceleration in more browsers (but no major mobile browsers) Other browser makers will follow Internet Explorer’s lead and add hardware acceleration to their canvas implementations. Those that don’t will suffer a severe loss in mind-share. Firefox is most at-risk in this regard. If Mozilla fails to accelerate their canvas it risks being portrayed as the new IE — slow and bloated and burdened down with legacy code. However, in 2012, no major mobile browsers will successfully roll out a hardware-accelerated canvas. We will have to wait until 2013 to start seeing that catch on. People will play popular HTML5 games on their mobile devices from Zynga and others, but they will be very simple games You can expect to see your friends playing games like Zynga Poker, Words with Friends, and Mafia Wars on their mobile phones, running purely in HTML5. These games will be played on both destination websites and within native applications (like the Facebook app). However, successful HTML5 games on mobile devices will be limited to menu-based games, card games, board games, turn-based multiplayer games, and avatar customizer games. More complex and visually intensive Zynga “Ville” style games with isometric worlds or hundreds of animating sprites will not yet strike gold in 2012. Facebook will release improved HTML5-based APIs that allow for more seamless integration with external websites In its continued quest to be the de facto social-graph of the web, Facebook Connect will grow and expand to take advantage of new HTML5 features. This will allow even deeper and richer integration of Facebook connect with external websites and services. Facebook will get a lot more seamlessly integrated with your desktop Think drag-and-drop, file system access, photo synching, and widgets on your desktop. All of these features (and more) will start to blur the line between desktop and browser, bringing your social graph more closely into contact with your traditional desktop experience. Apple will NOT fix HTML5 sound in mobile Safari HTML5 sound used to work well in mobile Safari, back in the days iOS3. However, Apple disabled most of the API in iOS 4 and 5. It just introduces competition for iTunes — both the music store, and the App Store. In its continued fight to maintain total control over the Apple ecosystem, they will refrain from fixing HTML5 sound in 2012.
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| Last-Minute Gift Guide 2011: Things For The Audio Lover In Your Life Posted: 21 Dec 2011 08:40 PM PST  You’ve got a few hours left before all of the free “Get it before Christmas!” shipping deals come to a close, and you’ve still got people left gift-less. What ever will you do? Give’m the gift that just about everyone would love: For The Pirate Who Has Everything:In the age of digital downloads, everyone seems to have everything. Even for folks with dedicated seedboxes and more storage space than any one man could feasibly utilize, there’s something nice about music subscription services. Maybe it’s that it’s more convenient; maybe it’s that it’s, you know, legal. While there are countless music subscription services out there, two tend to stand out: Rdio and Spotify. The latter has a bigger catalog and some snazzy social features, but lacks an iPad app and inexplicably makes purchasing gift subscriptions next to impossible (for anyone not in Spotify’s home-turf of Sweden, at least.) Rdio’s music catalog is still pretty dang big, they’ve got an iPad app, and gift subscriptions are a one-click affair. Accounts begin at $5 a month ($10 a month gets you smartphone access), so it scales pretty well to just about any budget. (You can also supposedly buy physical Rdio gift cards in Target stores — but after going on a wild goose chase to every damn Target in my area last week, I’m convinced they don’t actually exist.) For The Home Office Gamer With A Taste For Bass:In the Office-Chair-jockey circles, Logitech’s all-in-one Z-5500 5.1 system is legendary. It's also discontinued. That's why nabbing a set of these (once $400) speakers nowadays can set you back nearly a grand (seriously, check Amazon.) The Z-5500's spiritual successor, the Z906, lacks a bit of the absurd thump that the original packed (the sub is two inches smaller) — but makes up for it with its waaaay prettier styling and improved connectivity. While it’s not quite the champion that the Z-5500 was, it’s still one of the best all-in-one sets you can get for $400. (Oh, and, for what it’s worth, Logitech’s customer service can’t be beat.) For The One Who Throws Ragers In His Mini-Mansion:
You plug the $50 brain (the “bridge”) into your router. Then you plop one of Sonos’ speakers (either the $299 Play:3 or the bigger, badder $400 Play:5) in another room, hit two buttons, and start up the app on your smartphone/laptop. Bam, wireless music from Rdio, Spotify, Pandora, or your iTunes library. Add a few more speakers, and you’ve got music everywhere in your house — all synced (or not — each can be playing its own track), all controlled from whatever device you’ve got handy. Plus, they sound really, really good. Sonos’ entire array of applications (be it iOS, Android, or the desktop controllers) could use a ton of UI work, but on a hardware front, it’s wonderful. This is the most expensive offering on the list, as a Sonos set for a 3-4 bedroom house can run over a grand. For The One Who Can Never Hear You Because He’s Always Got Those Damned Headphones In:Sick of the constant WUBWUBWUBWUB leaking out of your best friend’s crappy, poorly-sealed (but oh so trendy!) iPhone ear buds? Here’s a range of rock-solid headphones that’ll make sure his music stays in his ears.
$100-$200: This is the range most audiophiles just start to consider as acceptable, so I’m sure someone will contest me — but Sennheiser’s metal-crafted CX 980′s (MSRP $350, but easily found for around $190) are truly spectacular. Load up a playlist with a few lossless tracks, plug these things in (make sure you test all the seals for the best fit. Like any upper-end pair of cans, a proper seal is make-or-break here), and experience music you thought you knew in a whole new way. $200+: Don’t do it. Anything above $200 (in terms of actual retail price — not MSRP) falls into the “personal purchase” zone. If someone needs headphones like that, they know it — and they know exactly which ones they want. Disclaimer: As with many things we review, a number of products here were loaned to us temporarily by the companies (with no obligation to review or mention any of them.)
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| Posted: 21 Dec 2011 07:00 PM PST  Open. Open. Open. Open. Open. Open. Open. Open. Open. Every chance they get, someone from Google brings this up as a huge advantage of Android over rivals like iOS. Never mind the fact that a good percentage of the time it’s pure marketing bullshit — why exactly isn’t Google Wallet on Google’s own Galaxy Nexus device? — even when it’s true, there are some very real downsides. The user experience angle has been debated ad nauseam. More interesting is what we’re seeing now. A downside for Google. Amazon’s Kindle Fire runs on Android, but nothing about it is Google’s Android. It doesn’t look like Android and it doesn’t feature Google’s own apps. That has to annoy Google, but something exposed the other day must truly piss them off: the Kindle Fire redirects all Android Market requests to Amazon’s Appstore. That includes all attempts to go to market.android.com even when the Fire’s accelerated browsing (routed through Amazon’s servers) is turned off. Amazon has commandeered Android and is closing it down for their own purposes. The problem for Google is that those purposes are decidedly anti-Google purposes. Amazon wants to control the Android app ecosystem — the one created and nurtured by Google. Despite what they may have you believe sometimes, Google is not a pro bono company. Their work with Android is an attempt to create another billion dollar-plus business. Apps are a part of this, but the bigger parts are things like payments and content, and of course, search and advertising. Amazon is taking over apps, content, and payments with the Fire. And you have to think that search might be in their sights as well. At the very least, they could cut a lucrative deal with someone like Microsoft to make Bing the default search engine on the Kindle Fire. This would mean that Google would be making essentially nothing off of each Kindle Fire, even though they created the platform on which it runs. And this matters because the Kindle Fire is poised to be the most successful Android tablet — it may very well be already. But that’s just tablets, you might say. Google Android still dominate phones. That’s true, Amazon isn’t in the smartphone game — at least not yet. But what happens if the rumors are true and Facebook releases a phone with an OS built on top of Android? And what if they do the exact same things that Amazon is doing? Say they create their own app store, bake in their own payment and content services, and eventually cut a deal with Microsoft to make Bing the default search engine. Remember, Microsoft has a search deal with Facebook already, and is a minority stakeholder in the social network. And those are just the big guys in the U.S. Companies all around the world are also exploring (or already executing on) using Android as the basis for their own OSes. Some of these help Google, some do not. What if HTC builds they own flavor of Android? What if Samsung does? At least Google knows that Motorola won’t now… With Android’s rise to smartphone market share domination (but not actual smartphone revenue/profit and/or developer mindshare domination), much has been made of the comparison to what Microsoft did in the 1980s and 1990s to blow past Apple towards PC domination. But one key difference that no one ever seems to bring up is the fact that Windows was anything but open. If you wanted to use it, you had to pay Microsoft. You would never have been able to build your own version of Windows without getting sued into oblivion. Imagine if Microsoft had open sourced Windows back then. Would they still have become the dominant player? Possibly, maybe even likely at first, but eventually it’s feasible that a competitor would have used their work as the basis for a better version of Windows. That’s the real risk Google is now facing. Back in May, I wondered what would happen when it’s Google/Android versus Amazon/Android? That was before Amazon’s hardware ambitions were fully revealed. But it seemed obvious this battle was coming. And now it’s here. Update: With an update, Amazon has unblocked their web browser from accessing the Android Market website, Kevin Tofel reports for GigaOm. But it’s more of a PR move. You still cannot install Android Market apps without side-loading them. [image: flickr/justin marty]
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| Intel Shows Off Smartphone Reference Design, Claims Performance Gains Over ARM Posted: 21 Dec 2011 02:35 PM PST  We’ve been waiting for Intel’s promised smartphone effort for a long, long time now. The few desultory pushes by the likes of Acer and niche OEMs has done little to dent the dominance of rival ARM, whose low-power chips have become an indispensable part of smartphone architecture. Just last week, though, Intel gave a private showing of a smartphone prototype that appears to be more or less feature complete and ready to be established as the basis for a platform. The device was running Gingerbread (Android 2.3), but funnily enough actually resembles an ice cream sandwich. The choice of OS is probably just indicative of the test environment; Intel has professed their interest in the newest version of Android, and will likely want their debut to involve it. Look at that phone, though, the similarity really is uncanny. Anandtech has a few more pictures like the one above. In addition to showing off the reference design, which is just a starting place or example for manufacturers and may not be representative of future products, Intel showed some stats that indicated the new “Medfield” systems powering the phones was no slouch: These are all Intel’s internal measurements, of course, and as you can see there are no model numbers or actual statistics shown. But we can probably trust the general indication that the Medfield platform is competitive with shipping devices running fairly new ARM and NVIDIA designs. MIT’s Technology Review also noted a few interesting features in their hands-on: a burst mode on the camera that shoots 10 full-size shots at 15 FPS (!), hardware acceleration of certain web and app tasks, and wireless casting of HD video to a TV. We know they have also invested in custom Android distributions, but none were present at the event. Medfield is a die-shrink and redesign of Moorestown, a redesign of the Atom series, which as you remember was mostly found in netbooks. But although its pedigree might not sound like the best for mobile devices, it seems like Intel has truly focused on making the platform handset- and tablet-friendly. Speaking of tablets, they also showed a reference design for a tablet: No, not the most beautiful device we’ve ever seen, which is why it’s at the end of the article here. They showed it running Windows 8 in the slide deck but presumably it would run Android just as well. Intel expects the first Medfield-based devices to be revealed in the first half of 2012, and hinted that we might see some at CES in January. We’ll be sure to drop by Intel’s booth to bring you pictures and video as soon as we can in that case.
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| Swype Learns To Listen Better, Type More Accurately Posted: 21 Dec 2011 12:43 PM PST  If you haven’t taken the time to play with Swype (the trace-to-type mobile keyboard alternative), you’re missing out — and I’m not just saying that because it launched at one of our conferences. As evidenced by the fact that it’s now built right into a ton of Android handsets, it’s pretty damn good. This morning, it’s getting even better. Swype has just launched a new Beta with two fancy new tricks: Dragon-based voice dictation, and an improved ability to analyze the words you’ve already typed to better determine what you’re trying to type next. While Swype has had voice dictation features for a while now by way of the system built into most Android handsets, this new system is powered by Nuance’s Dragon technology (as you may recall, Nuance purchased Swype for $100m back in October) Curiously, it seems the new system supplants the old one entirely — there’s no way to switch back, at least as far as I’ve seen. The timing of the switch is particularly interesting, as the latest version of Android (Ice Cream Sandwich) introduces near-realtime transcription, with words streaming onto the display as the speaker speaks simultaneously — something Dragon definitely doesn’t do. Still, the company seems sure that Dragon’s offering outshines anything Google has to offer. The Beta’s other new trick is called “advance language modeling” — which, as mentioned above, analyze’s what you’ve typed so far so that it’s got a better understanding of what’s coming next. To snag an example from the demo video below: take the term “Mosh pit”. You drag your finger through “M-O-S-H”, it knows you’re trying to type mosh. But when you drag through “P-I-T”, you’re also hitting “P-O-T”; do you mean Mosh Pit, or Mosh Pot? Probably the first one, as the second one isn’t a thing. If you’d instead typed “Mush” as the first word instead, it’d know you probably meant “Mush Pot”. If you’re already in Swype’s Beta program (or are looking to get in), you’ll be able to find all of the details right over here… eventually. While the Beta has just launched, it seems their servers are currently having trouble staying up.
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| Zappos Founder’s Customer Rewards App RNKD Now On Android Posted: 21 Dec 2011 11:41 AM PST  RNKD, the customer rewards app and brainchild of Zappos founder Nick Swinmurn, is today arriving on Android. With the new mobile application, users can snap photos of the clothes and accessories they own, upload them to the RNKD website and receive rewards directly from brands. The idea with RNKD is that customers should get rewards for the things they actually bought, not just the things they “like” on Facebook, tweet about, or add to online wishlists. It’s a “put your money where your mouth is” kind of thing. Since the service’s launch last month, RNKD says it’s seeing an average of 26 uploads per person, with about 12 different brands and 9 different stores represented. Over 2,000 brands have been uploaded to the site, including big names like Nike, Ralph Lauren, Express and H&M. Somewhat surprisingly (I say totally aware of the sexist connotations), 46% of the site’s users are men. The service is doing well engaging its users, too, as 47% of its visits are return visits. RNKD says that because it’s only a month old, it’s not comfortable releasing hard metrics, like number of users or iOS app downloads. For now, the rewards primarily consist of gift cards for Zappos and Dethrone (Swinmurn’s apparel brand), but the idea is that, in time, brands themselves will step in and begin to show their top customers some love, too. The company reports that it has already been receiving requests from brands, but won’t go into detail. Businesses adore the Facebook “like” metric right now, so convincing them that’s a broken model for customer interactions is going to be a tough sell. And it’s not likely that the biggest brands would jump on board with a new startup like this until it gains critical mass. Meanwhile, it’s not likely to gain critical mass until there are some amazing rewards from big brands being offered. A Catch-22? Perhaps. But this isn’t any ol’ startup – it’s one from the Zappos founder. And that may be its saving grace. The new Android app is available for download here.
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| Spotify For BlackBerry Officially Released, Only Supports Old Hardware Posted: 21 Dec 2011 11:09 AM PST  If you’re a BlackBerry user and you’ve been waiting for a music service that’s just a bit more compelling than BBM Music, then you may be in luck — emphasis on the “may.” Spotify for BlackBerry was officially released today, but you’ll only be able to use it under some specific circumstances. According to Spotify’s blog, the newly released app will only work for users with the following BlackBerrys: the Bold 9780, Bold 9700, Curve 9300, Bold 9000, and the Curve 8520. If none of those handsets sound terribly familiar, I can’t say I blame you — the newest of the bunch (the 9780) was released more than a year ago. Spotify doesn’t explicitly mention whether or not the app works with newer BlackBerry 7 devices, but a Spotify rep told the owner of a newer Bold 9900 that he could “be sneaky and try it anyway.” Even then, the sneaky approach won’t work for everyone. Spotify’s blog mentions that CDMA BlackBerrys aren’t compatible at all, and neither is the Torch 9800. That said, BlackBerry owners with flashier hardware may still want to give it a whirl — some users on CrackBerry have apparently gotten the app to work on both a Bold 9900 and the ostensibly verboten 9800.
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| Open Home Pro Helps Realtors Sell Homes Via Their iPads Posted: 21 Dec 2011 10:58 AM PST  Open Home Pro has been quietly building a business that uses the iPad to solve a serious problem for a real-world industry. “My girlfriend would come back upset after showing people houses,” founder Andrew Machado tells me, “because people wouldn’t fill out their information. It’s like the people standing outside of Whole Foods — you instinctively don’t want to give them your information.” The app offers a polished interface to help realtors collect prospective buyer’s information, and it’s been building on top of that with a set of other features that are designed to make the home-sales process easier. These include a photo slideshow to help a realtor show off all of their prospective listings to clients, a filter showing which client leads are the most interested in buying, custom landing pages for each listing, email lead management, and a way to share listing times to Facebook and Twitter. It’s shipping a new version today, with a new user interface, that also includes features like a way to let people sign up who aren’t at an open house. So, it’s not just a listing-collection app, but a lightweight CRM. Up to this point, the app has 15,000 realtors using it, Machado says, noting that a large portion of people in the indstury already have iPads that they use for work. They’ll use DocuSign to collect buyer signatures and close deals, and real-estate apps like Trulia and Redfin to show related listings, and Realtor.com for a variety of services (including a competing product called BrightOpen). The company is in the process of raising an angel round, and has been incubated at Dogpatch Labs Palo Alto. You can download the iPad app here.
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| Meet Dotti, Sincerely’s New Mobile Photos App For That (Holiday) Disposable Camera Nostalgia Posted: 21 Dec 2011 09:00 AM PST  Sincerely, the company behind photo-printing iOS app Postagram, is launching a new app today. It’s designed to capture all the nostalgia that you and your family feel about those disposable camera photo sets you all shot during the holidays over the last couple decades. Called Dotti (maybe your effusive aunt’s name, too?), you download it from the App Store or Android Market, get 12 photos to shoot, and then get the option to send them off to be made into high-quality 4×6 prints for $4.99. You’ll get back the photos by mail in less than a week. Among the many improvements over real disposable cameras, you get the option to edit and delete any photos in the roll that you don’t want before sending it off. Oh, and you get the high-quality phone camera instead of the cut-rate one that came with the original version. The whole interface is designed to make you feel like you’re using the real thing, though. You see a roll of film in the back when you first load it up, which you cycle through as you use up shots. You see photo counter and get the camera-clicking noise as you progress through the roll. Once you’re done shooting and you’ve sent it off, the app resets as if you’ve stuck in a new role of film. The company is timing this launch ahead of Christmas, so you can take photos with your family and get them back before New Years. Of course you could just use your phone to take photos, then use Apple’s own printing service to get them, or another third party like Sincerely’s Postagram. But the point is creating a special and highest-quality experience, founder Matt Brezina tells me. “When I started thinking about it over a year ago, I felt that the iPhone was the new camera, and that one of the business models around it was that a printed photos was one of the world’s simplest and most appreciated gifts,” he explains. “So I thought: what’s the easiest way to send? First we had Postagram, and from there we built the Sincerely Ship iOS library for other developers, then holiday cards so we made Sincerely Inc. The other thing that customers said is that they wanted to put photos into a frame to archive. So we could have created some sort of utility app for that — or a disposable camera.” The app has just gone live for iOS and Android, and you can learn more about it here.
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| HTC And Google Sound Off On The ITC’s Patent Ruling Posted: 21 Dec 2011 07:44 AM PST  Though they had until April of next year to figure out a fix for their patent-infringing UI feature, HTC CEO Peter Chou has reaffirmed to the media that the company has already has a solution ready to go at a joint press conference with Google’s Mobile SVP Andy Rubin. As Jordan mentioned yesterday, the patent in question deals with the ability to tap a phone number or an address within an email to bring up the corresponding application. Chou pledged that the offending UI flourish would be removed from all of their mobile devices “soon,” and Reuters reports that the company is testing their new devices for compliance with the ITC’s ruling. Rubin also chimed in on the matter, stating that the feature that supposedly infringed Apple’s patents isn’t a core part of how Android works, but rather a “user interface feature” that has been baked into an application. Hopefully this means that Google will be able to work around it as quickly as HTC has, unless they want their other hardware partners to undergo the same legal scrutiny. For now it looks like things are quieting down on this front, but somehow I don’t expect things to stay that way. Andy Rubin would probably agree: looking forward, Rubin says he is optimistic about the scores of mobile patent squabbles eventually giving way to a “patent peace on the overall platform,” but he expects these sorts of intellectual property battles to drag on for a few more years. Meanwhile, HTC’s Chou seems a bit more miffed by the goings-on in the mobile space, and by Apple’s legal maneuvers in particular. “This industry should not allow one company use its powerful weapon to stop other innovation and take it all… this is not fair,” he said.
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| FriendFinder Launches Tablet Games Studio (With A Cool Name) Posted: 21 Dec 2011 07:28 AM PST  Internet holding company FriendFinder Networks, which operates a number of adult, social networking, dating and e-commerce websites, has quietly established a game development subsidiary back in 2010. Today, the company said that the studio, which is called Fierce Wombat Games, will be releasing its first title for Mac, PC and iOS in early 2012. Based in San Jose, CA, the studio is led by Graeme Bayless, a former exec at companies like Groove Media, 2K Games and Namco. The studio’s mission, straight from Boss Wombat’s mouth: “to build and publish games as compelling and fun as the classics that drew all of us into games”. We’ll wait and see.
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| Fingerprint’s Educational Apps For Kids Are Hot: 2M+ Minutes Played This Month Posted: 21 Dec 2011 06:59 AM PST  San Francisco-based Fingerprint Digital, a startup building educational apps for kids, is blowing up. The company released its first apps into iTunes on December 1st, and already, it has seen over 270,000 game playing sessions for a combined total of over 2 million minutes played. And, according to CEO Nancy MacIntyre, its apps are about to reach download numbers in the six figures. In just two weeks, Fingerprint pushed two of its games into the top five in the educational apps’ category: Big Kid Life Firefighter and Big Kid Life Fairy Princess. (And yes, despite what those titles sound like, they are actually games for learning.) The key to the startup’s early success is having an innovative twist on educational gaming combined with a solid team. Fingerprint was started by Nancy MacIntyre, formerly the EVP of Products and Marketing at LeapFrog, and Brad Edelman who co-founded social gaming company PlayFirst. It also has Heather Regan, the former COO of Everloop, as VP of Product Management and Learning. Former game marketing lead at 2K Games (a division of Take Two Interactive) Phil Shpilberg is on board as well, serving as VP of Marketing. What’s great about what Fingerprint is doing is that it’s re-opening the lines of communication between parent and child – lines which are often shut down as the kid gets sucked deeper into the video gaming world. Not only are the company’s apps educational, they also feature a built in sharing platform (“Mom-Comm”) which allows kids to share their progress with their parents. The grown-ups get to stay in the loop (for a change) with a news feed detailing their child’s progress and activity. In return, the parent can then provide encouragement and support through text and voice messages that are played directly in the game. Through this proprietary system, parents have received over 500,000 “snapshot” reports in December, the company says. And the kids are addicted, too: average gameplay sessions last 7.35 minutes and kids have returned to the games four times this month. The company now has five apps: three “Big Kid Life” titles (Fire Fighter, Veterinarian, Fairy Princess), Play Maker and one third-party app Do Re Mi 1-2-3. They’re really well-made, quite cute and a lot of fun. You can check out the complete set here. The third-party app is the first to use the Fingerprint SDK, which allows any title to integrate the parent-child communication system for free in exchange for revenue share with Fingerprint. The company says it will vet the titles first to make sure they have a strong educational foundation. Fingerprint raised $1.4 million in funding earlier this fall, and says its goal is to build a large network with dozens of apps. It will release several new apps next quarter including one that they’re dubbing their “biggest product initiative” and an “all new app experience.” Fingerprint is currently giving away its apps (typically $1.99-$2.99) for free, in conjunction with its Facebook promo.
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| Verizon’s Data Network Suffering (Another) Nationwide Outage Posted: 21 Dec 2011 05:34 AM PST  Just two weeks after Verizon’s 4G data network most recently went on the fritz, it looks like customers are once again being forced to live their lives without data. Scores of Verizon users across the country will be waking up without without so much as a 3G connection in sight until a fix is in place. A quick look at Verizon’s support forums illustrates the extent of the data outage: the data outage has struck New York, California, Illinois, Washington D.C., New Jersey, Florida, North Carolina, and Ohio (among others). Now the outage doesn’t seem to be affecting everyone (much like last time), and some users are reporting that their data service has been restored. I’d take those reports with a grain of salt for the time being: my Verizon Galaxy Nexus manages to pick up a 1X or 3G connection sporadically, but it never lasts for long. That said, anyone who has an LTE smartphone may want to switch into the CDMA-only mode, as that’s where I’ve had most of my (limited) success with data. While I’m sure that it won’t be too long before Verizon sorts out this mess, it may not be the most comforting situation for customers looking to re-up their contracts with Big Red. They’ve had pretty consistent 4G service for the year that the network has been live, but now customers have had to deal with two major data snafus in one month. C’mon Verizon, I expect these sorts of data issues from RIM, not you. Verizon has yet to acknowledge the issue via a release, although their @VZWSupport Twitter account has just started fielding customer complaints about the outage. We’ll keep you posted on any further developments. UPDATE: It’s all over, folks. Back to web surfing and tweeting as usual.
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