Hey there, developer friends. Suppose you’re using New Relic to monitor your app’s performance, and you like it a lot, but you also want to monitor other stuff — database performance, load balancers, caching, or even business data like conversion rates.

Starting today, you can build your own plugin for the New Relic dashboard. You can use any kind of actionable data you can dream up. New Relic has a fancy API and two SDKs (Ruby and Java) for your programming pleasure, as well as a UI builder to keep your dashboard clean and your process fast.

And speaking of fast, we’re told these plugins take about a day to build.

In a chat with New Relic president and COO Chris Cook and engineering VP Bjorn Freeman, we learned that the New Relic community now includes 1.5 million apps across 50,000 customers. What that means for the New Relic platform is more opportunities for more kinds of data monitoring and faster performance across all kinds of metrics.

“It’s going to take our SaaS platform and open it up to the world, so it’ll be an extensible solution,” Cook said. “All these other things that are in your environment will now be made available on the New Relic dashboard for no charge.”

The platform is launching with more than 40 plugins for technologies like Apache, NGINX, CouchDB and Redis, Varnish and memcache, as well as less popular programs like SendGrid.

“We’re pretty dang excited about it,” said Cook. “And they’re really, really easy to write … One of our customers has written 12 plugins in a matter of weeks. It doesn’t take very long to get up and running.”

Cook said the API and SDKs are well maintained and exhaustively documented. Once a plugin is complete, it can be used privately within your own organization, or you can join in the free-for-all and publish it publicly to Plugin Central, a sort of app store for New Relic plugins where others can download and use your work.

“It kinda sticks with our philosophy of providing more and more value, for people to have a better and better experience,” said Cook. “And it’s a better solution if people have broader capabilities and have more data in their environment.”

And it makes economic sense to turn to the open-source hacker community and keep plugins free. As Cook pointed out in our chat, hiring an engineer to write all this stuff would cost New Relic plenty of money and dilute the company’s focus.

“Trying to make money on the plugins isn’t worth it. We just want people to use the heck out of them,” he concluded.

And, as Freeman added, “We don’t want to get into nickel-and-diming people.

“We could go out and figure out how to do great monitoring for memcache and Redis, but instead of doing it redundantly, we decided to make it easy for the experts to send that into New Relic.”

But what about the plugin-laden New Relic dashboard — could it maintain any semblance of functionality and simplicity?

“We did think about that exact problem,” said Freeman. “It’s not just too many data points, it’s designing plugins to provide actionable data for solving performance problems. With the UI builder, we’ve guided people to producing better plugins.”

So you’ll be asked to pick the most important metrics, the three metrics you’d want alerts for, etc., to be added to the dashboard

“We’re more prevalent than any other monitoring solution, and the UI that we have is arguably one of the things people love most about it,” said Cook. “And they like that we help them get to the answer more quickly. … Where else would you put that Redis data? I don’t see anything on the market that can easily take all that data and plug into a single UI.”

Also, we chatted about use cases for non-programming data, such as business metrics and customer stats.

“It’s intended to bring data in from other components, but we can pull in any kind of data that’s meaningful,” Cook said.

“Ticketfly wanted to take their business data and also make that available on the same screen as their performance data to see how they correlate. They built a dashboard for the CFO … to look at things like conversion rates over time.”

Just a couple months ago, New Relic launched monitoring for iOS and Android native apps, as well, expanding on its core of web monitoring.

New Relic was founded in 2008 and is based in San Francisco. To date, the company has taken a total of $115 million in venture capital over five separate rounds of funding. Its most recent round, announced just last month, was a whopping $80 million in private equity. At that time, the CEO told us an IPO was in the works.

Image credit: Shutterstock/leedsn

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Y-Combinator startup Filepicker.io has rebranded as Ink and announced the close of its $1.8 million seed round.

The “file system as a service” startup went through YC’s Summer 2012 class. It builds tools to make it easier for developers to integrate access to cloud services within their apps on the web, iOS, and Android, making it easier to share content stored in different places. The company’s mission is to create an environment where all devices, applications, and services can talk to each other. Ink builds “the layer that lets the applications work together” so users can access whatever they need online, regardless of their connectivity point.

The original team of 4 — Liyan Chang, Anand Dass, Thomas Georgiou, and Brett van Zuiden — met at MIT in Fall 2011.

“We noticed that more and more people are using services like Dropbox and Facebook to store their files, but that those online file sources didn’t work well with mobile and web applications,” the founders said on the site. “As developers ourselves, we were frustrated by the time and effort we had to spend on these integrations, which took away from our ability to focus on core functionality that mattered to the user. Wanting to help other developers build better applications, faster, we built up the infrastructure needed so that these developers could hook into user’s content, wherever it lives.”

They went on to win the MIT 2012 $100K Entrepreneurship Competition and move to the Bay Area, where they were admitted into YC. As their technology and client base grew, they realized they needed a brand that could grow too. Filepicker.io turned into Ink File Picker, which grew into Ink Files, a “cross-browser filesystem SDK.”

“With the new name and logo, we wanted a brand that could grow with us as we build out more products beyond just picking files,” CEO Brett van Zuien said. “Also, as we invest more resources in the design and user experience of our products, we didn’t want the logo to not match the quality of the rest of the design.”

The startup now works with 20,000 web and mobile applications to connect them to photos, documents, and videos, and has transferred 1.1 billion files to date. Clients include SurveyMonkey, Livefyre, Udacity, Crowdtilt, Urbanspoon, Rapgenius, Fitocracy and Haiku Deck. using just two lines of code, these companies can connect their apps to 19 sources like Facebook, Dropbox, Gmail and GitHub, and File Picker will “handle the mess of uploading files” as well as all the javascript and backend APIs. The business is based on a freemium model. Up to 5000 files a month is free,  and then it costs $99 for a Pro plan with up to 50,000 files a month.

Andreessen Horowitz and Highland Capital Partners led this round. Filepicker is based in Palo Alto.

Photo Credit: Filepicker.io/Facebook

Rain Rannu is the founder and CEO of Fortumo, the mobile payments company that powers in-app payments for Rovio, Facebook, Barnes & Noble NOOK, EA, Gameloft and more than 60,000 other developers.

The mobile gaming industry has grown up. Digi-Capital reports that online and mobile games made up 49 percent or $31 billion of the entire gaming industry in 2012.

A maturing mobile gaming ecosystem creates several challenges for developers, especially newcomers who will have a hard time entering the market. So, what are the challenges and how can developers overcome them?

Large studios can utilize their existing audience to cross-promote new games, which leaves less room for startups. There are less new customers entering the market, making it even harder to stand out as user acquisition costs on both Android and iOS almost doubled during 2012.

Apple boasts to have 500 million credit cards linked to iTunes, but that means they still don’t have access to 6.5 billion users. And they won’t have it any time soon: There are only 2 billion credit cards in circulation globally, and many people own several credit cards. For example, in the U.S. credit card owners use 3.5 cards on average.

On top of everything else, there are also thousands of similar apps and games for consumers to choose among, which makes standing out complicated. Google recently booted 60,000 apps from its store to combat the issue of copycats and unnecessary saturation of the market.

In total, we have five major obstacles for creating a profitable game: large companies having the upper hand, fewer users entering the ecosystem, increasing acquisition costs, limitations on revenue opportunities, and over-saturation. If this does not worry you, you are either working in one of the larger studios or taking the situation as inevitable.

The situation is not inevitable. While mobile gaming has matured in western markets of North America and Western Europe, there is still huge potential in emerging markets. As most developers have not entered these markets, the opportunity to become the early bird that gets the worm is up for grabs.

Emerging markets are fragmented. Each region has its own key characteristics, and each should be approached on a case-by-case basis. The most promising regions of growth are Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, and Asia.

Latin America is one of the most successful regions for our company in terms of revenue. The mobile gaming industry grows roughly 25 percent per year; and according to estimates, the virtual items revenue of Latin America will reach 600 million dollars by 2014.

The biggest market in Latin America is Brazil as there are more smartphones there than in France or Germany. One in four Brazilian Internet users claim to play games online. With a population of 589 million, Latin America is huge emerging market for mobile games.

Another highly promising region is Middle East and Africa. Turkey is the go-to market in this region when developing Facebook games; it is already the sixth largest country on Facebook with a million new users joining every four to five months. Saudi Arabia is notable as well as it is a country with one of the highest ARPUs in the world, with two thirds of Internet users playing games.

Last but not least, the largest emerging market across the board can be found in Asia. By the end of the year, there will be half a billion smartphones in China. That is more than Angry Birds total downloads on Google Play worldwide.

As gaming consoles are still banned in China, web and mobile games are more popular. Traditional distribution channels don’t work well here, and mobile operators control a huge part of the app ecosystem. There are more than two hundred app stores for Android alone.

These facts only scratch the surface on the potential of mobile gaming in emerging markets; but for us, the figures representing revenue generated in these regions clearly prove that people want to play mobile games across the world and that ignoring such markets is an untapped opportunity.

A good starting point for figuring out overseas markets are the analytics companies App Annie, Flurry, and Distimo. Another excellent source for mobile monetization insights is Eric Seufert’s blog. [Editor's note: We'll also be talking about mobile monetization more deeply at our MobileBeat 2013 event next month in SF, where we're hosting major players in this area, from Google, to Facebook, Millennial, Chartboost, Flurry, Tapjoy, HasOffers and many more.]

My goal is not to get anyone over-excited about these regions — they are extremely diverse and applying the same logic to user acquisition as one would do in the U.S. will not work. From our own experience, the minimum things to learn in your expansion plan are:

1. Local users: Regions are varied in terms of which games are popular (e.g. China likes MMOs, Latin America loves soccer games, Africa trends toward educational games) and average gamer profiles in gender, age and income. Hardware also varies by region. India has 80 percent feature phones; China, 66 percent smartphones. In emerging markets, iOS devices can cost up to twice as much as they do in the U.S., and they are always high-end devices, whereas Android phones cover the whole price range, from costing as much as an iPhone for the high-end models but as little as $50 for lower-end models.
2. Local distribution: In many countries, there are local app stores that are more popular than Apple’s App Store or Google Play. Yandex’s Store is popular in Russia; TIM App Shop is popular in Brazil; Samsung Apps has potential in most emerging markets. China boasts more than 200 different Android app stores, and only 10 percent of downloads are made from Google Play. When it comes to data charges, think small. In countries with limited data connections, users might not be able to download a 30-megabyte game — you will need to find a way to make a light version of it or partner with a mobile operator for preloading your app.
3. Local monetization: In most emerging markets, premium apps usually don’t work that well. With freemium apps, it’s important to realize that charging the same amount in the U.S. and Brazil will not work either, because the purchasing power of consumers is different. Credit card-based billing may be close to useless in most of emerging markets, as most consumers don’t have credit cards. For example, in Turkey developers should accept prepaid cards sold in every gaming club. Mobile payment is another great option to reach the audience in emerging markets.

This non-exhaustive list should be useful for developers who have decided to take an alternative approach to creating a successful game and want to try something in addition to attempting to climb to the top of charts in App Store and Google Play. Best of luck!

Rain Rannu is the founder and CEO of Fortumo, the mobile payments company that powers in-app payments for Rovio, Facebook, Barnes & Noble NOOK, EA, Gameloft and more than 60,000 other developers. Fortumo’s payment coverage extends to over 80 countries through 300 mobile operators and works on all key platforms such as online and mobile web, Android, Windows 8/Windows Phone, and HTML5.

Image credit: Shutterstock

Alex Salkever is global product manager of M2M solutions at Telefónica Digital.

Intelligent cars are a hot topic in Silicon Valley. Around here, rather than ogle at celebrities, we ogle at Google’s self-driving cars.

And it’s not Google. Many car companies, including Toyota, BMW, and Honda, are actually working on self-driving cars, and the future looks to be playing out faster than anyone imagined.

Most of the connected-car news over the past couple weeks has focused on Google’s buy-up of social driving app Waze, but here are a few other innovations worth keeping an eye on:

Auto mechanic under the hood

One of my favorite near-future applications is Automatic, which is an all-in-one auto mechanic, driving instructor, and emergency response system.

The Automatic system takes readouts from your car’s computer for signs of wear and tear and recommends required repairs, while also using the accelerometer in your smartphone to monitor driving behavior and provide suggestions on how to drive more economically and safely.

Parking

Tech is also addressing one of the most irksome of driving problems: parking. Even in traffic-efficient cities such as San Francisco, drivers spend between 25 percent and 40 percent of their time behind the wheel in search of parking spaces or open garages.

This tremendous inefficiency, together with smartphone uptake, has given rise to a host of new technologies and applications that seek to reduce frustration, time and wasted gas.

One example, Streetline, makes inexpensive sensors that embed in parking places and can tell whether those spaces are vacant, creating a map of available spots which can be seen online or via a mobile app (called Parker) which provides voice guidance on where spaces are.

In a similar vein, there’s also VoicePark. Founded by San Francisco parking guru David LaBua, VoicePark provides turn-by-turn directions — albeit with the twist of focusing on finding parking places close to destinations rather than arriving at the destinations themselves.

Smartphone integration

Imagine being able to do anything on your smartphone from your car’s dashboard. That’s exactly what Volkswagen iBeetle, BMW Connected Apps, and Ford SYNC aim to do.

While you won’t be able to play Angry Birds or watch Netflix from your car’s dashboard anytime soon, with these three you can at least enjoy listening to your favorite music via Spotify or Pandora, access your calendar, or see what your friends are up to on Twitter and Facebook.

One of BMW Connected Apps’ coolest features is the fact that you can find where you parked your car via the Last Mile app. With Volkwagen’s iBeetle, just snap your phone into the Beetle’s docking station and you can listen to music via Spotify, have your text messages read to you (or even recent posts on Facebook) via “Reader,” or take pictures of your surroundings via “Postcard” and have them emailed to your friends for you.

Wi-Fi

One of the hottest topics that is currently being explored is turning your car into a Wi-Fi hotspot. With internet access in your car, you can access the weather, real-time news, fuel prices, and more.

T-Mobile and Audi have teamed up to offer drivers in-car Wi-Fi for only $15 a month with 30-month contract. GM and AT&T have also partnered to give drivers 4G LTE access in cars starting in 2014 with a cost of $299 a year.

While crowdsourced navigation is (reportedly) a $1 billion+ industry and self-driving cars continue to hog the limelight, just dig a little deeper to find a significant and growing ecosystem of smart cars and smart car apps.

Who knows — one of these could just be the next billion-dollar breakthrough.

Alex Salkever is currently global product manager of M2M solutions at Telefónica Digital. He is also an advisor InkWire and San Francisco Ambassador to Geekli.st. He was previously a technology editor for Businessweek and a senior for DailyFinance.

The Linux Foundation this morning announced a change to its annual Linux Training Scholarship Program with new categories that reflect the evolving world of computer programming.

These new scholarship categories come with special awards for “whiz kids,” women in Linux, sysadmins, developer do-gooders, and developers who work on the Linux kernel.

Given the demand for Linux-trained professionals in the job market, it’s interesting to see the foundation focusing specifically on women and socially-conscious developers in particular. This focus mirrors some of the most interesting trends in development in the real world.

Recipients will get a year of free instruction in one of the following areas:

• Embedded Linux Development
• Developing Device Drivers
• Linux Kernel Internals and Debugging
• Developing Applications for Linux
• Linux System Administration
• Linux Network Management
• Linux Performance Tuning

Here’s an overview of Linux Foundation training programs:

Also new this year: Scholarship recipients will get a 30-minute, 1-on-1 session with a Linux Foundation training instructor.

“We aim to help meet today’s unprecedented demand for Linux professionals by providing Linux training opportunities direct from the source,” said Amanda McPherson, the vice president of marketing and developer services, in a statement on the news.

“With more than 500 Linux training scholarship applications received last year and the Linux Jobs Report showing demand for Linux talent at an all-time high, we hope our Linux Training Scholarship Program can surface some of the talent that is showing incredible promise for influencing the future of Linux but until now were diamonds in the rough.”

Applications for the program will close in about one week, so apply soon if you’re interested.

Image credit: Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

I’m sure you’re happy to know that deep neural networks perform significantly better than shallow networks. But you might be thrilled to learn that Microsoft has doubled the speed at which it can translate what you say into text … while also improving accuracy.

What do the deep neural networks (DNNs) have to do with it?

Microsoft says that DNNs, which function more like a human brain than a traditional computer, can detect tiny variations in speech that stay the same even when your voice changes. In other words, even when you speak faster or yell, or when you’re winded from running up the stairs, those variations remain stable. Even better, they remain stable from individual to individual as long as you’re speaking the same language.

The result is that a message that takes 1.06 seconds to render into text with Microsoft’s old technology now takes .53 seconds. That may not seem like much, but in the video below it feels almost instantaneous. To skip the theory and see the goods, fast-forward to the 1:08 mark:

The best part is that the error rate is now down as well — from 16 percent to 13.5 percent — and that the technology is resistant to background noise interference. All of which — as we use more and more voice-recognition technology to control our mobile devices, our gaming systems, and to dictate our texts and messages — is a great help.

The update is currently rolling out to Microsoft data centers in the U.S.

Image credit: Microsoft

Social coding site GitHub has just launched Repository Next, a new design for repos that puts the focus on content, speed, and everyday use.

The new look and feel comes several months after the launch of new profile pages and more than a year after the company launched its spectacular page generator for developers’ projects on GitHub.

Back to the new design.

“We’ve been working toward this redesign for almost a year now, and we think it’s a massive step forward in using GitHub,” says lead designer Kyle Neath in a blog post.

“GitHub is a product you use every day,” he continued. “We’ve focused on this and optimized for how people interact with GitHub on a daily basis. The next time you click through on a notification email, you’ll find a dramatic reduction of persistent section navigation cluttering up the page.”

The team also simplified the interface to bring more focus to the code itself, including pull requests and issues. Other optimizations were all about decreasing load times thanks to some pjax magic.

“It’s a big change and may take a few days to feel right,” Neath said. “As always, this is just the beginning. This redesign paves the way for an even faster, more focused GitHub. And we can’t wait to see what the future holds.”

The rollout starts today and will be complete within the next couple weeks.

GitHub, famously bootstrapped for most of its half-decade lifespan, took a record-breaking $100 million Series A about a year ago. The cash, which came from Andreessen Horowitz, was specifically intended to fund products and projects like this — things that add polish to an already popular application, making it more appealing to the enterprise customers who supply the company’s income.

“This means instead of carrying laptops around, a developer could write an app, test it, and deploy it — all from the iPad,” Shankar explained to VentureBeat via email.

Binary also features tabs, themes, syntax highlighting, and all the handy code editor/IDE features you love so well.

“I use a Bluetooth keyboard with it and do most of my development on the iPad now,” said Shankar. “With Binary, you can write any app — a website, Node.js server, Python server, an iPhone app — anything!”

Of course, there’s the text-entry problem. Shankar says he gets around the necessary hassle of carrying a Bluetooth keyboard by using a keyboard-iPad case combo (left).

While iPad coding isn’t totally new, it’s generally the noteworthy exception rather than the rule. In fact, as recently as last September, Slashdot was still asking when, oh when, coding on the iPad would migrate from fantasy to reality.

And the fantasy isn’t one of simple pleasure or mere convenience or even novelty. For any developer, especially startup developers, the need to code on the go can change from nonexistent to urgent in a few seconds. You know the drill:

“Imagine this: I’m relaxing on the beach. I get a notification on my iPad saying the servers are down,” Shankar said. We’ve all been there.

“I open up Binary, fix a couple lines of code, push the changes to the server, and get back to playing with the dogs on the beach.”

It eliminates a little bit of the panic from those “oh, sh*t” moments that always seem to pop up.

“Binary is freedom,” Shankar said. “Coding is my trade, my craft. And now I can code and do my work from anywhere on the planet.”

Binary’s currently in public beta. Use the site link above to get in.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

“Life is awful; it just sucks,” CloudFlare chief executive officer Matthew Prince jokes.

His company is now processing 150 billion page views every month. Every minute, it generates 30 gigabytes of server log files — records of pages and images that have been sent to web-surfers around the globe. Last year, CloudFlare had more traffic than Amazon, Wikipedia, Twitter, Instagram, and Apple combined. Now it provides sites to more global surfers than the king of online engagement itself, Facebook: 1.5 billion every month.

“We keep growing, despite our best efforts,” Prince told me last week.

CloudFlare is a content-delivery network among many other things. Add your site to its cloud with a few lines of code, and it’ll be served out by thousands of machines prepositioned all over the globe — faster and more reliably than you can yourself and (for most sites) for free. Want better performance, more analytics, guarantees, and a “2,500 percent service level” agreement? That you’ll pay for.

Source: LinkedIn

Matthew Prince, CEO of CloudFlare

What the company is focusing on now, Prince told me, is building its own equipment direct from Quanta. In other words, like Facebook and Google, it’s no longer buying from an original equipment manufacturer like Dell or HP but designing its own servers straight from the original assembler in Asia to cut about a third of the cost, Prince says. And importantly, it’s partnering with up to 1,000 global Internet service providers to put those servers right in their data centers — as close as possible to clicking data consumers.

“It’s like a giant game of Risk,” Prince says as he talks about trying to put servers in Turkey, which is hard, and settling for Bulgaria, which is the gateway to the country. “Increasingly, ISPs are inviting us to take our servers and install them in their data centers. There’s a Chilean ISP that we sent a gigabit of data to every second of every day that is just begging us for servers.”

The key when you’re a gigantic global mover of data is to preposition the data as close as possible to where it’s needed and then replicate it and cache it locally. That not only saves on bandwidth transfer costs but also speeds up access for users. Right now, CloudFlare is in only 23 ISPs. By the end of the year, Prince plans to ramp that to 50 of the world’s largest and then to 1,000 by the end of 2014.

If he accomplishes that goal, he’ll have joined a very, very exclusive group of companies.

“Only 2 companies in history that have pulled that trick: Akamai and Google,” Prince said. “We’re joining that club.”

One country that’s particularly annoying is Australia. While Asian Internet traffic is expensive, Prince said — on the order of five times the cost of U.S. and Western Europe traffic — Australian bits cost five times more to move, making the Aussie Internet 25 times more expensive than that of the U.S. Prince blames the Aussie’s former national telephone company, Telstra, for being noncompetitive.

The other key when your bandwidth requirements are massive and doubling roughly every four months is peering.

“As you get larger, you can start peering traffic off your network,” Prince says. “ISPs are asking us to send traffic across private peering exchanges, and as we move closer to the ISPs, that’s easier.”

Peering allows other companies to use your infrastructure to transfer their data for free while they allow you to use theirs for the same price. Interestingly, when it comes to transferring traffic over other companies’ pipes, the U.S. is one of the most difficult countries in the world.

I asked Prince when he sees the company’s massive growth leveling off.

“You’d think with the law of large numbers it would slow down,” he said. “But it doubled in the last two and a half months recently … which is way scary … and it’s only accelerating.

Image credit: Viewminder/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

“We’re all about customer experience and enriching lives,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told Wall Street a couple of months ago.

That’s occasionally a little difficult to believe.

There’s no question that Apple is among the more customer-focused companies in the computing and technology industry. But there’s also no question that the company has a history of moves that can be tough pills for its fans to swallow.

One case in point is the iAd WorkBench/AppGratis scenario that has played out over the past few months.

This past week Apple unveiled iAd Workbench, a new mobile app advertising solution for companies that want to promote their iOS apps.  Just in April Apple pulled AppGratis, a very successful app discovery app, from the iOS app store — just five days after approving it – and then, after having had significant discussions with AppGratis over previous weeks as the company had adjusted its app according to Apple’s concerns, Apple refused to speak to AppGratis again.

Coincidence? I doubt it.

AppGratis was a free-app-of-the-day-style app that developers paid for access to in order to drive downloads of their iOS games and apps. Only iPhone owners who wanted the app downloaded it, so it was a self-selected audience, and the company was selective about who it featured. By late 2012, AppGratis was getting big enough to be able to drive upward of 500,000, and in some cases 1,000,000, downloads in just days — big enough to drive apps straight to the app store leaderboard.

Apple’s new iAd Workbench is an advertising solution for app developers. App developers who want to increase their downloads will buy ads that will be placed onto other apps, ones that users have already downloaded, and they can pay Apple per install of their app. iAds has come from rich interactive ads for 7-figure contracts with massive global brands to $50 minimum buy-ins to flog your apps.

What’s the key difference?

In scenario one, you paid AppGratis to drive downloads of your app. In scenario two, you pay Apple.

There’s other differences, and there are some nuances, sure. But that’s the core difference.

Apple was concerned about developers using AppGratis to “game” the app store top-10 ratings as well as alleging that AppGratis broke the app store guidelines. I fail to see how iAd Workbench couldn’t be used in a similar way, or how ads in any other online or mobile locations couldn’t do the same thing. And it is very clear that there are multiple other mobile app discovery solutions and ad companies who are doing the exact same thing.

I also fail to see how Apple couldn’t have devised a method of tracking downloads from AppGratis — or any other app discovery app — and adjusting the app store leaderboard to more heavily favor “organic” downloads. I wonder if something like that will be built for iAd Workbench, or if a massive spend on iAd Workbench will drive your app right up into the upper echelon of app store stardom.

Source: Apple

iAd Workbench app advertising solution from Apple

I talked to AppGratis CEO Simon Dawlat recently, but he doesn’t want to comment publicly. The company has been burned enough by the press, and by Apple’s reaction to it. But it’s pretty clear that success almost killed his iOS business. That — and the fact that Apple wasn’t “getting a piece.”

Which is why AppGratis is now on Android, where Google doesn’t exercise such heavy-handed control. And why, for iOS, it’s now focusing on the web, which Apple can’t control.

Which is an important point for Apple to remember.

While Apple was first to build a successful and massive mobile ecosystem with devices and apps and media, it’s not the only game in town anymore. It is the most lucrative in town, paying $10 billion to developers over the last five years, including a staggering $5 billion just in the last year. But sometimes platform owners have to do what’s good for the platform, and for third-party developers who are on the platform, not just what’s good for them.

The risk, if they don’t, is that at some point they’ll no longer have a platform.

Image credit: Nathan Makan/Flickr

If you’re a developer looking for a good model for how to build your app, Evernote is a great example to study.

Since launching in 2008, the digital notebook service has made its home on just about every mobile platform — iOS, Android, BlackBerry OS, and even Windows Mobile — giving it a lot of perspective about how to best approach mobile app development on multiple fronts.

So Evernote’s CTO Dave Engberg knows a thing or two about taking a small app and making it into something much, much bigger. Engberg will be speaking at our MobileBeat conference next month, where he’ll serve up even more lessons on how to build a killer mobile experience.

In the meantime, here is some mobile app wisdom he’s shared with us.

Lesson 1: Don’t be like Evernote

If you ever want to be as big as Evernote, you can start by trying as hard as you can to not copy it — especially in regard to its backend.

“Most companies shouldn’t do what were doing and run their own hardware. We have dynamics that make it more sensible for us, but 99 percent of startups should be in a cloud environment,” Engberg said, referring to services like Amazon Web Services, Windows Azure, and Rackspace Cloud.

Lesson 2: Understand the real benefits of the cloud

As Engberg points out — and probably lots of startups have already figured out — the cloud is, in many ways, the ideal environment for any budding Internet company. “The cloud is fantastic if you have certain types of problems. If your bandwidth is really spiky and varies from day to day, cloud services let you pay just for what you’re using. Same goes for storage and processing demands,” Engberg said.

In contrast, using a cloud service for data storage would be a nightmare for Evernote, whose storage demands are constantly increasing. “Something like AWS wouldn’t really work for us,” Engberg said. “The sun never sets on the Evernote empire.”

Lesson 3: If you really want to scale, build your API first

Most web companies nowadays start their operations by building their app interface first and then adding an API later on — but Engberg says that’s often the wrong way to go.

“At Evernote, we knew from the start that we were going to have multiple applications. We also knew we needed to design for synchronization at scale, so we built our API first and used that to build interfaces as opposed to what web companies would have done,” he said.

If you want to go cross-platform and scale rapidly, it’s not a bad idea to focus on that API first.

Lesson 4: Infrastructure is cheap, so innovate on talent

Here’s a crazy tidbit about Evernote’s infrastructure costs: They’re almost nonexistent. “I’m fairly certain we’re paying far more for domestic airfare than bandwidth for Evernote,” Engberg said.

Why? Because servers, bandwidth, and overall infrastructure are cheap — so cheap that, for Evernote, they pale in comparison to the real costs: people. For Engberg, the real goal should be ensuring that your talent is happy, well-compensated, and not spending time on projects that come with a lot of work but little payoff.

“Hardware is cheap, so you should be innovating on it as little as possible. Startups should focus on the most established stable commodity infrastructure and then focus on their core businesses and people,”  he said.

Here’s a number that drives the point home well: Evernote has a workforce of roughly 330 people, and only 14 of them are working on the company’s technical operations. Not bad for an app with 60 million or so users.

Lesson 5: When a new platform launches, be there on Day One

One of the big secrets to Evernote’s success is its uncompromising ubiquity. When iOS launched, it was there. Same goes for the launch of the iPad, which the Evernote team designed for without even having one to test on.

“Phil [Evernote's CEO] made a cardboard copy of the iPad just so we could get a sense of how the thing would feel,” Engberg said. That’s a long way to go just to be on a new platform at launch, but it’s that kind of tenacity that has helped Evernote get to where it is today.

The big challenge on the horizon, Engberg says, is iOS 7, which is going to force developers to revamp their apps to suit all of its new features. “iOS 7 is going to cause some upheavals.”

But you can bet Evernote will be ready when iOS 7 eventually hits your iPhone.

In an interesting twist in the open-source hardware movement, Sony has just announced it’s opening up its SmartWatch for your hacking pleasure.

The SmartWatch SDK has for a while enabled developers to create apps for the device, which launched in 2012, but today’s Open SmartWatch update will let them build and flash alternative firmware to the SmartWatch.

“If you create alternative firmware for SmartWatch, you can take control of SmartWatch as a hardware peripheral in new ways and create new experimental use cases and innovations,” the company wrote in the documentation.

The hardware in question includes a 128 x 128-pixel screen with touch capabilities, an ARM Cortex-M3 CPU, an accelerator, a vibrator, and Bluetooth-connectivity capability. With its current firmware, the Android-powered gadget has access to Google Play and its own slate of apps.

While these devices never really took the gadget world by storm (understatement — we called them “ugly and late to the party”), it will be fun to see SmartWatch hacks — if developers decide to take Sony up on the offer, that is.

All this comes on the heels of a slew of smartwatch rumors swirling around such companies as Samsung, Apple, and Google.

In the digital dating world, one of the hottest new entrants is the IAC-owned iPhone app Tinder, which has facilitated more than 50 million matches since its launch last October.

Tinder’s hook is that makes online dating a lot like Hot or Not. Just connect your account with Facebook to fill in your photo and a few interests and you’re ready to be matched up. When matches appear, all you have to do is swipe to the right if you think the guy or gal is hot, swipe to the right if he or she is not.

But fellow IAC-owned dating property OKCupid recently developed a crush on Tinder’s interface and swiping success. So the OKCupid team asked Tinder for a little help porting over its user interface, and the two teams ended up bonding.

“OkCupid worked with Tinder to bring Tinder’s innovative swiping UX to OkCupid Locals, while both Match and OkCupid have provided Tinder with product and technical expertise to help guide its growth,” OKCupid and Match.com CEO Sam Yagan told VentureBeat via e-mail.

Now OKCupid members on the iOS app have Tinder-like functionality under the “Locals” section of the app. And, because OKCupid has you fill out a profile and answer questions, the OKCupid matches are likely more relevant than Tinder’s.

The new Tinder-like swiping feature has only been live inside the iOS app for a week, and it already is attracting strong usage numbers.

“Adoption has been great, our ‘connection rate’ and messaging engagement is exactly the same as Tinder’s,” OKCupid general manager Christian Rudder told us. “We’re getting about 20 million votes a day, which, given that it’s just one of many options on OkC, we feel very good about.”

Tinder gets far more than 20 million votes a day, but since that’s the only way to use the app, OkCupid is doing well in comparison. The whole exercise shows IAC’s investment in many dating properties (OkCupid, Match, Tinder, OurTime, Chemistry, Meetic, and more) is paying off because the teams can help each other reach more single people.

“We have a portfolio of great consumer products built by the smartest people in the industry who regularly brainstorm and collaborate to create the best user experiences for singles,” Yagan said.

Photo illustration via Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

More than half of Americans now own smartphones, but as an industry, we’re still figuring out how to design well for the limited screen sizes and the sometimes flaky connections. Designing for mobile requires extra attention to detail. Over the next few weeks, I will be taking a close look at some design features that work well and some that fail.

First up is HotelTonight, one of my favorite mobile companies. It offers easy access to same-day hotel reservations using iPhone, iPad, and Android devices. It provides a fair value to consumers and hotels. And it has a business model that makes sense. (Sell things for more than it costs you.)

I consider it one of the best designed apps out there. It excels at the details, even something many companies ignore: error messaging. A while back, I wrote about how Square did a poor job of error messaging. Today, I want to take a look at how HotelTonight responds to error conditions. (To be clear, some tech people wouldn’t consider these “errors,” but users do.)

HotelTonight makes inventory available at noon local time. If you check the app before noon, you get a counter that shows when rates will be available and an option to get notified. The background is keyed to your city, making it obvious that you’re in the right place.

When I tested this, I got a notification at just the right time and I was able to pull up the hotel rates.

I asked HotelTonight CEO Sam Shank about the performance of the notifications, i.e. is it worth the design time to implement such a feature. Although he didn’t give me specifics, he said, “We only keep things in the app that are additive to our goals, so, yes, it leads to more transactions. With our business it’s interesting to note that revenue and user happiness are aligned — users are happy when they get a great hotel at a great rate, and hotels are ecstatic to fill an otherwise empty room — which is also the moment in time where we generate revenue to pay for and grow our service.”

That brings up a related point: even if you’ve built something, if you find that it’s not additive, don’t be afraid to take it out. Every button, every control is something that a user has to think about.

Another error case is when the user is checking for rooms after the 2 a.m. cutoff:

Again, the messaging is clear.

When I was in Istanbul recently, I launched the app and saw this message:

In other apps (for example, Uber), the app doesn’t seem to be cognizant of the fact that it doesn’t provide service in a particular market.

Just as important as it is to show users the right message is capturing data on where people are attempting to use your app. This can help prioritize new markets.

“We look at customer request data in aggregate and prioritize our sales efforts so that we have hotels where people need them,” Shank said. San Antonio and Minneapolis were two markets that were re-prioritized based on the data. “They were not high in terms of room nights booked vs. other cities we hadn’t launched, but there were more people opening the app in those cities. We created a heatmap and used this to prioritize.”

Another important use case is when hotel room rates are especially high during a special event, such as New Year’s Eve or Mardi Gras. Although this isn’t an error, it’s definitely something many users don’t expect. Most travel sites don’t explain the reason; HotelTonight does. (This screenshot is a mock up HotelTonight made; Shank will be speaking at VentureBeat’s upcoming MobileBeat conference. But it reflects the type of messaging seen on the app.)

Error messaging doesn’t have to be all serious, either. If you go to an invalid page on the HotelTonight’s mobile site, you get this:

Designing error messaging certainly isn’t the sexiest thing in the world. But it’s a critical part of the user experience because you have the opportunity to turn potential frustration into delight. And help capture sales that might otherwise not happen.

Rakesh Agrawal is an analyst focused on the intersection of local, social and mobile. He is a principal analyst at reDesign mobile. Previously, he launched local, mobile and search products for Microsoft and AOL. He blogs at http://redesignmobile.com; and tweets at @rakeshlobster.

At least according to one cybersecurity expert.

James Foster, the founder and CEO of Riskive, a cybersecurity company that works with large companies and, yes, (alert, alert) government agencies, says PRISM is impossible. In fact, Foster claims, it would require an annual budget of at least $4.56 trillion dollars:

“The National Security Agency is not spying on our U.S. citizens — and the thought is not only illegal — it’s ludicrous. A simple mathematical analysis proves this point. If we can assume that one person has the capacity to fully scour 100 people’s communication a day, a feat in and of itself, to read all of someone’s email, text messages, phone calls, and overall interaction then the NSA would have to have over three million employees and would have an annual budget that would be 20 percent greater than the entire U.S. Federal budget. The bigger threat is from rogue individuals who waste millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars by revealing insights into government programs intended to protect our citizens.

We are in the midst of an era where national security is paramount and the balance between security and privacy will continue to be tested. Complete transparency is an oxymoron in a post 9/11 world.”

Journalists get a lot of pitches. I guess the law of averages says some of them have to be stupid. This one landed in my inbox about 45 minutes ago.

Foster has never heard of “big data,” apparently. He isn’t aware of technologies like cluster analysis, machine learning, predictive modeling, sentiment analysis, or association rule learning that drive automated analysis of massive datasets. He doesn’t know that three-letter-organizations like the CIA, NSA, and FBI have been asking Silicon Valley data scientists for help by appealing to their patriotism. And he is not aware that individual humans will never see most of the 97 billion data points that the NSA has admitted snooping on.

Either that, or perhaps he thought that a quote like this would help defuse the scandal.

I suppose the possibilities here include that various men in black are mobilizing security experts to cast aspersions on the press reports about PRISM. Another might be that a security company that wants to do business with secretive government agencies wants to be seen visibly supporting their interests in public.

But you’d think he might have used a little intelligence in crafting the message.

Photo credit: striatic via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Steve Jobs was very upfront about the fact that good artists copy, and great artists steal. According to former Palm CEO — and former Apple SVP — Jon Rubinstein, the company Steve started is still a great artist.

As is Google, and as is Microsoft.

Speaking to Fierce Wireless about HP’s long-ago purchase of Palm, Rubinstein was asked about similarities between iOS 7 and Palm’s innovative-but-doomed WebOS:

It’s not just mobile platforms. If you look at the notifications on Mac OS X, it looks just like webOS, too. We did a lot of things that were very, very innovative. Obviously, multitasking, notifications, Synergy, how we handled the multiple cards. There’s a long list of stuff we did that has been adopted by Microsoft, Apple and Android.

Multitasking on iOS 7 is a massive update from iOS 6. Instead of simply seeing the icons of apps that are currently running, iOS7 shows users a screenshot of each running apps in a horizontally scrolling interface. That’s very reminiscent of Palm’s WebOS, which also had a horizontal scrolling view of open applications:

Source: http://the-gadgeteer.com/2009/12/11/palm-pre-six-months-in/ and http://www.brianroizen.com/blog/ios-7-beta-screenshots/

WebOS versus iOS: multitasking.

Synergy was Palm’s innovative way of merging contacts from multiple contexts: Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, your personal digital rolodex, and more. Apple has been doing that for some time with Facebook contacts, of course. In addition, Palm pioneered over-the-air operating system updates, which most of the major smartphone platforms have now adopted.

Rubinstein clearly indicates that Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows Phone have both benefited from WebOS as well. I wonder if the important point here is how much the entire mobile industry owes to Palm, WebOS in specific, and the entire lineage of Palm products since the original Palm Pilot in general.

The reality is, we probably don’t pay as much homage to the predecessors of our amazing modern smartphones as we should. And, that WebOS’s ignominious end as a forgotten and neglected red-headed step-child in the melting-down HP family home was a tragic, crying shame.

Photo credit: ross_tt via photopin cc

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

In the initial rush to the cloud, some companies may have lost site of the fact that security, efficiency, and continuous monitoring are just as important in the cloud as in the datacenter. It looks like they’re picking up that theme now, but perhaps not as swiftly as their customers might like.

A new study by cloud optimization company Newvem checked 61,545 Amazon Web Services instances that total a yearly spend of over $157 million. The good news is that cloud users are getting much more savvy about security, utilization, and optimization.

But there’s still room to improve — a lot of room.

“On average, 37 percent of AWS instances could benefit from increased security policy implementation,” Newvem says. That may not sound great, but, the company says, “this is an impressive improvement from the data that we analyzed in April 2012 where 50 percent of AWS instances stood to improve.”

The security tactics Newvem is referring to range from fairly basic precautions such as closing un-used IP ports to more global security tactics, such as properly configuring security groups across multiple services.

That’s critically important to both companies and users, of course, as more and more of our startups, enterprises, and everything in between are building their computing infrastructure on the cloud. Amazon doesn’t disclose how much of its $61 billion in 2012 revenue derives from Amazon Web Services and its other cloud offerings, but it’s likely in the $2-4 billion range. Microsoft’s Azure, a relative late-comer, is already a billion-dollar business. And Google’s App Engine is just starting to hit its stride for non-Google projects and services, and is fighting hard for market share.

With that much movement to the crowd, security is a big deal.

There is some good news, however, and the really big improvement lies in how enterprise and startup companies are efficiently using their cloud services.

Amazon, for instance, offers both on-demand instances — chunks of computing capability — that companies can spin up on short notice, and Reserved Instances that are held solely for one company’s use. Typically, companies will use on-demand instances when they don’t know how much capacity they need and will use Reserved Instances when demand has stabilized, to a degree, and is more predictable. Reserved Instances cost much less per operation, but require a commitment that could end up costing more.

“Of active Reserved Instances, only 4 percent are underutilized, revealing a very positive trend that AWS users are taking advantage of RIs to run consistent workloads that are both cost efficient and properly utilized in line with business needs,” Newvem says.

Still, however, there are savings to be had by companies who are sticking with on-demand infrastructure: 78 percent of them could benefit by adopting at least some level of Reserved Instances for at least part of the workload.

That’s good news for companies. Good news for customers would be that 100 percent of Amazon — and Google and Microsoft — cloud customers have full, excellent, and comprehensive implementation of cloud security procedures.

Image credits: Newvem

photo credit: Kris Krug via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

With over 300,000 mobile developers building 900,000 apps for the iOS app store, you would think that occasionally someone would want to sell or buy an app.

Last night, five years after the app store was born, Apple released a way to do that.

“This has been a major, major problem,” Apptopia founder Jonathan Kay told me today. “Anytime you launch an app to a store, your users were attached to the developer, and under no circumstances could those users move … so there was no ability for companies to buy competitors, and no ability to consolidate apps.”

Apptopia, of course, is a marketplace for buying and selling apps that has already facilitated the sale of $1.3 million of apps on Google Play, iOS, and Kindle, transferring 3.5 million users into the hands of new acquiring developers.

But iOS apps could only be moved from an individual developer to an upgraded company account, meaning that there was no exit strategy or liquidity for iOS app developers.

“We had our community reach out to Apple; we’ve been pushing on them so hard and showing them the process that Android has,” Kay says. “Last night they took our advice and built an unbelievable process for doing this.”

Transferring an app from one developer/company to another now simply requires that the owner changes the state of their app in iTunes Connect, notifies the acquiring developer, and accepts the transfer. Leaderboard rankings, users, details such as territories, and other things will remain unchanged. Now the new owner can push out updates to users, which — especially with Apple’s new auto-update functionality in iOS 7 — will help developers and brands integrate their new apps into their branded family of mobile solutions.

“We’ve already had a lot of large brands contact us and talk to us about this,” Kay says.

One example is Loreal, he said, which saw an app titled Suzy Salon with about 175,000 active users. Loreal could now buy that app, insert some of its branding, and simply allow the game to proceed as it did — while also sending a note about the newly acquired fashion game to its 1.5 million email subscribers.

“They don’t want to build it themselves,” Kay says. “They want to buy something and then build on top of it.”

Corey Gault is director of communications at Urban Airship.

Yesterday at WWDC, Apple once again reminded everyone that it has the best designers in the world, unveiling slick interfaces for OS X Mavericks and iOS 7 that promise to make user experiences simpler, more useful, and more enjoyable.

For developers, this annual Mecca event sets the agenda for the next several months, and it’s safe to say we’ll all be busy again innovating for the Apple ecosystem.

At a high level, what’s really interesting is that Apple is helping to solve core user experience challenges as people move throughout their day — from mobile devices to desktops, to automobiles and back to the ever-present, palm-sized mobile Swiss army knife for managing our lives.

Many of the new capabilities for OS X Mavericks and iOS 7 are designed to make those transitions seamless in ways that give consumers control and that give brands the tools needed to reach those consumers wherever they are.

Apple did that through an overt focus on push notifications for many new features, from push accelerating background app updates to new types of engagement displayed in Mavericks, all of which continues to make push messaging a primary channel for both app developers and big brands looking to engage their users.

If you didn’t tune into the keynote, or read a dozen articles, the following is what caught our attention:

First, the numbers: more than 50 billion apps sold in five years, with Apple paying out $10 billion to developers, half of that in the last year alone. While 93 percent of apps are downloaded monthly, the App Store received some updates to improve discoverability with app listings by age categories and the ability to find out which apps are popular near you. In addition, the App Store will now automatically update apps, which means developers can rest assured their iOS audience is using the latest and greatest version.

Apple’s new operating system for Mac, OS X Mavericks, prominently featured notification enhancements including replying to Twitter messages, deleting emails, and auto-replying to Facetime messages directly from within the desktop notifications. You can also sign up to receive iOS push notifications on your desktop, and with notifications synched across devices, both developers and users will have a more unified experience.

Tim Cook called iOS 7 “the biggest change to iOS since the iPhone,” and first appearances seem to live up to that. From sweeping design and user interface changes to Siri’s new voices, languages, and integration with Twitter, Bing, and Wikipedia, iOS 7 promises to deliver a new phone that you intuitively already know how to use.

With iOS 7, notifications are visible from the lock screen eliminating swipes to immediately see some of your most important and timely information. A double-tap on the home button will enable you to easily move between open apps for multi-tasking, and push notifications will trigger those apps to update more quickly in the background eliminating refresh wait time.

Users will also have a more unified experience moving between desktops and iOS devices — for example, setting routes with Maps on the desktop and sending that information to their iPhone lock screens. In addition, the Calendar is aware of traffic, weather, and more; and it automatically adds travel time to your schedule, sending a notification to your desktop and iPhone when it’s time to leave. While 95 percent of automotive manufacturers have already integrated music playback from iOS devices, a dozen are signed up to integrate new iOS 7 eyes-free capabilities in 2014.

The necessary disappointment in all of this is that iOS 7 won’t be available to consumers until fall, which will give developers time to integrate new functionality into their apps.

We’re excited to see that all of this is focused on deepening the relationships consumers have across their devices, making them more integrated into their lives through ever-increasing utility. We believe that mobile is the new brand battlefield for cementing customer relationships, and the evolution of push and its integration across digital touch points is making the experience both more useful and more manageable.

Corey Gault is director of communications at Urban Airship, a company that connects companies and people through their mobile devices, serving billions of targeted, contextual, and relevant push messages and digital wallet passes.

In talking over Apple’s changes to iOS 7 with developers, we’ve heard a lot of mixed opinions.

The design is magical. The design is awkward.

The changes are huge. The changes are just on the surface.

It’s awesome! It sucks!

But most of the folks we’ve talked to agree that iOS 7 means a lot more work for developers, from making their apps work with non-mobile devices to redesigning icons to implementing new APIs.

However, there’s also a lot of excitement and optimism around new features with notifications and automatic updates.

We asked some of our favorite hacker nerds what they thought about iOS 7 and what it means for developers. Here’s what they told us.

Mattt Thompson, Heroku

Without a doubt, the new aesthetic of iOS 7 will have the most impact on iOS developers.

We’ve come to expect small, incremental changes from Apple — the kinds of changes that are unambiguously better than what they replace. However, iOS 7 is so radically different and revolutionary that it’s going to take a while for developers to understand its implications.

There’s excitement, for sure, but there’s also a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Apple certainly has an uphill battle to convince everyone to trust their new vision for iOS.

In the short term, there will be a mad rush to retrofit all of the existing apps out there. Apple essentially wrote a $100 million check to agencies and contractors with iOS 7.

As far as long-term implications, I think the effect of a new look and feel on how apps are designed cannot be overstated: almost everything we’ve learned about making apps over the last five years has gone out the window.

A lot of us understood that this kind of shift was necessary. I don’t think any of us thought it would come so soon, or be quite so dramatic.

Chris Kelly, New Relic

Apple’s announcements at the WWDC yesterday were not just a report card on the sheer number of new adopters but a testament for the new mobile lifestyle. The divides between desktop, tablet, and phone are closing to a point where the user no longer thinks of an app separately in each of those contexts.

Updates to the notification system and better backgrounding support means apps will be “always on” more than ever. Shifting from desk, to meeting, to car, or to home will feel seamless. The user will think less about the logistics of using an app, and instead, it will simply become part of their lifestyle.

From a developer’s perspective, the expanding SDK, better backgrounding, and notifications systems will open up new possibilities and more creative solutions than ever before. Applications will move away from being device-specific and will start to solve problems more holistically, with considerations on the desktop, tablet and phone.

Understanding their customer and their motivations behind using the application will be more critical than ever.

Suhail Doshi, Mixpanel

For developers [the most significant announcement at WWDC] is definitely the automatic app updates. This will eliminate a big developer headache by reducing a major point of fragmentation.

Currently, app devs have to support all versions of their apps, as many people don’t update app versions on a regular basis, which is a resource drain. With automatic app updates, consumers will always have the latest and greatest version of an app, and developers will have fewer versions to support, streamlining dev cycles, and saving valuable resources.

Two new features of iOS 7 create interesting new possibilities for app devs. First, the Airdrop API means they can build in new and interesting ways to share content. By greatly reducing the friction of sharing, developers will invariably see increased rates of virality, engagement, and retention.

The expanded multitasking capability could also lead to improved retention; developers will see less risk in pushing consumers to an external source, as their current activity continues in the background without exiting the app.

Darshan Shankar, Flotype

The most significant announcement is autoupdating apps. Why? Two reasons:

Many 1-star app ratings and customer confusion is caused by using outdated apps that no longer work. People rarely update their apps, so this will reduce that problem.

Second, this will allow developers to iterate much faster and push bug fixes and new features to their users easily.

But iOS 7 requires me to redesign everything I’m launching a new app this week called [redacted]. iOS 7 introduces a completely new interface style, so everything from fonts and typography to button styling will have to be redone. iOS 7 no longer relies on gradients and drop shadows, opting instead for a more robotic feel with flat colors and translucency. This will take a lot of work!

Fortunately, we have a few months until iOS 7 is released publicly, so developers have time to do the necessary work.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Apple delivered on new products and developer tools at its Worldwide Developer Conference opening yesterday. But despite announcements like a completely redesigned iOS or the new Mac Pro, attendees were missing that “one last thing.”

After the keynote speech given by Apple’s top executives, we chatted with attendees to get their opinion on Apple’s new products. Beyond the Mac Pro and new iOS 7, Apple also introduced a new line of Macbook Air laptops, its latest Mac operating system, and a Pandora competitor called iTunes Radio; it also opened up 1,500 new application programming interfaces for developers.

Many say there were “holes” left by the keynote, others challenged that notion saying people just don’t understand developer tools.

Read on for their thoughts:

“I really I like the updates. I expected more. I was a little underwhelmed by the iOS 7 changes, but I’m going to withhold judgement until I see what’s in the 1,500 developer APIs because that’s really what I care about.” – Jay Al Hashal, mobile product development manager, Zillow

“The Mac Pro was probably the biggest shock. I mean, everybody expected there would be an update. But I think it’s still bigger than what most people expected.” – Tracy Keeling, Software Engineer, Zillow

“We’ve been attending WWDC since 2008, every year, and this year was just new skin, new styling, but features compared to Google’s Android operating system are really disappointing. … It’s just a combination of features from other operating systems, especially the multitasking. We’ve seen it before a few years ago on WebOS, and it’s also a little bit disappointing that there was no Apple TV SDK [software development kit] released, which we’ve been hoping for for a few years now.” – Nils Kassube, director of development, Newscope GmbH

“Apple TV SDK [is missing] for sure. … Then integration for developers into sharing between the apps is missing. I think it’s not a major release, it’s a minor release, only for the design for iOS, and not a big feature release. — Alexander Köhn, director of product management, Newscope GmbH

“There wasn’t anything big? This was huge! I think it was huge, really. It’s gonna make such a difference. I don’t know if you reacted when they said we’re going to have automatic updates. That’s something that the users might not think of as a big deal, but us app developers really want that because sometimes it’s difficult for us to have to maintain servers supporting three versions back because some users just don’t update their apps. So, it’s a really big thing for us as app developers and something Android had for a long time.” – Mio Nilsson, senior iOS developer, Ustwo, seen in the picture above dressed as a raccoon

“I was still kind of hoping for a little more, was hoping for a ‘one last thing,’ but nothing ever came through, so. … I mean I’m sure we’re going to see new iPhones and iPads, they’re going to have their own events, but because I’m here, I would have liked to see them here.” – Kris, an app designer

“This time it’s different with a lot of services instead of products, with new iOS, it’s amazing. I’m impressed by the new iOS because, there’s a huge work. I love what Jony Ive did. Actually, we had bad news because we have also flashlight app.” – Maurizio Cremaschi, co-founder, Flubber Media

Unfortunately for Cremaschi, Apple released its own flashlight app as a part of iOS 7.

“There are some obvious holes in nothing [released for] TV. I think that there are some big opportunities in there that they’re not moving in on. I think [not realeasing the Apple TV SDK] was a big mistake. I shouldn’t say mistake, I just hope they’re headed in that direction and when they do, I think it’s going to be amazing. You know, we have to give Apple a little credit to get us there when it’s ready, but it’s time. The refresh, keeping the user base exciting, that’s going to be the biggest thing to keep our apps moving.” – Doug Woods, independent developer, Dev Helper

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Life360 says it has figured out how to provide always-on location services without draining your smartphone’s battery.

That’s a significant step forward, because most GPS services are power-hungry. Location services aren’t a problem if you’re tracking an hour-long run, but if you want to use an app that tracks you throughout the day, you’ll probably find your phone runs out of juice far earlier than usual.

Life360 lets you keep tabs on the whereabouts of your family members. You can set up geofences around a variety of locations, such as your home or work, and it will automatically alert family members when you enter or leave one of those places. With this service, Life360 could replace those ubiquitous “Where R U?” texts, allowing parents to  know where their children are, and allowing children to get on with their lives uninterrupted, gosh.

“Does it drain my battery?” is always one of the first questions Life360 hears from potential users, and in the beginning, the answer was yes. In fact, it was so bad that in the first year of availability, Life360 got only 5,000 users, was turned down for venture capital funding, and got a bunch of bad reviews in the app store.

That may have been a discouraging way to start a business, but it lit a fire under the founders.

“We raised money back in 2009 when things were really, really tough. There were a lot of people there that were like, ‘Oh you know your acquisition is nothing … you’ll be gone in a couple days, like, look at Formspring, look at X random hot company. It’s been fun to outlast them,” said Alex Haro, Life360′s chief technology office in an interview with VentureBeat.

The biggest reason always-on location apps drain your battery is because it takes power for GPS to get an accurate read on your location.

But Haro, together with Chris Hulls, Life360′s chief executive, figured out that you don’t always need to have GPS on to know where someone is.

The company’s technology looks at a number of data points in addition to GPS to determine where you are: Wi-Fi signals, cell tower signals, and the geofences users set up. It takes data to know when you’re inside a geofences, but once you’re there, the company can use that information to make sure the GPS doesn’t get turned on.

The same process happens when you’re in any known place. If you’re sitting at work, it will shut off GPS and listen for signals that you’re changing locations. Once you’re in motion, it will flip the GPS on — the only time your phone will actually take the big battery hit that comes with using GPS.

The system is smart, too. For example, it figures that at 2 a.m. you’re likely sleeping and at home, so it ignores spurious location readings based on cell tower signals, which are notoriously inaccurate. If your phone starts rapidly connecting to a bunch of different Wi-Fi signals, it concludes you might be driving or on a train, and thus on the move.

But that leads to one stipulation: the location technology simply doesn’t work as well if you don’t have Wi-Fi turned on.

“When people turn Wi-Fi off, the performance is really bad. People do that for whatever reason,” said Hulls in an interview with VentureBeat. “Wi-Fi in San Francisco is critical.”

However, Wi-Fi isn’t always Life360′s best friend. The app gets tripped up if you’re connected to a mobile hotspot. Because the Wi-Fi is moving with you, it makes the app believe you’re sitting in one place, but you really could be connected while on a moving train.

Hulls would not otherwise elaborate on how Life360 knows when and where you are when not in a geofence, saying the technology is proprietary. But if you’re a mobile developer, take heart. The company is likely not going to keep this one under lock and key. Hulls says the company is toying around with the idea of licensing the tech to those who don’t want to spend the time figuring out how to do it on their own.

“It’s the high level idea now, people approach us all the time. We’ve been offered even a few million dollars to do stuff with it,” said Hulls. “We did not mean to be a geo-company it was just kind of built out of necessity.”

In our tests, we found the battery life actually did last while running Life360 in the background. However, there were some glitches with Android phones, in particular the HTC EVO. Life360 acknowledged these issues, saying a bug was being fixed soon.

Aside from bug fixing and location-conquering, Life 360 has gone back to those VC non-believers from when it first launched. Hulls says VCs have short memories. While Life360 could barely get through the door of VC firms in 2009, it has now taken on $12 million in funding, with its most recent $3 million round coming from BMW and others.

Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of mobile developers attempted to download the new operating system for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch and have crashed the site:

That’s not shocking. Apple has paid $10 billion to mobile developers since the App Store was launched five years ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook said today at WWDC, including $5 billion just in the last year. There are currently probably 300,000 app developers in the U.S. alone, and those developers have built 900,000 apps.

Now they want the latest operating system on which to do it.

Image credit: John Koetsier

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Apple took the wraps off iOS 7, the mobile operating system that runs iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch, today at its World Wide Developer Conference.

“It’s unbelievable, gorgeous,” said Apple’s Craig Federighi.

See also: iOS 7 is the essence of less

It was widely rumored the OS would follow a similar arc to Apple’s desktop operating system, Mac OS X: getting flatter, less colorful, less likable, and more workmanlike over time.

Here’s the real deal:

“iOS 6 is the world’s most popular operating system,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said. “This is why we get so excited about a new version of iOS.”

Major new features in iOS 7 include:

• Control Center
  Quick access to major controls like volume, Bluetooth, etc.
• Multitasking
  Now for all apps, with intelligent background updating when needed.
• Safari
  A new full-screen look, smart search that unifies Google search and your history search.
• AirDrop: The  ”easiest way to share with the people who are right around you.”
• Photos
  A photo app with new filters. Also, new auto-organized photos by date, place, and people, and new shared photo streams.
• Siri
  New look, new voice (male), and much more intelligence to control your device. Integration of Twitter, Wikipedia, and web search results from Bing (not Google!).
• iOS in the car
  Your iOS interface on your car’s navigation screen that has partnerships with over 10 manufacturers.
• App Store
  New app discovery service that is location dependent, and new automatic app updating (just like Google’s Android).
• Music
  An updated music app, with, yes, iTunes Radio. Choose a station, skip songs, share songs, buy songs, create radio stations based on songs … even create a radio station of just your favorite band(s). Free with ads, and completely free if you’re an iTunes Match subscriber. U.S. only to start.
• Activation Lock
  If a thief tries steals your phone, they will not be able to reactivate the phone, blocking them from reselling it.

“It’s the biggest change to iOS since the beginning,” Apple design chief Jony Ive said in a pre-recorded video.

Other updates included FaceTime audio, notification syncs across all your devices, per-app VPNs for enterprise, and more, including new APIs for developers. iOS 7 includes a new gesture as well — reminiscent of Android’s back button — swipe left to go back. And folders can now have pages.

One other neat feature: a theme-like approach to iOS 7′s appearance. Changing your phone’s wallpaper, Apple said, would also affect the way many other elements on the phone look and react.

“It’s a comprehensive end-to-end redesign of the user experience,” Federighi said. “Installing iOS 7 onto your phone is like getting an entirely new phone — but one you already know how to use.”

iOS 7 is available in beta for developers today, and final release will be coming this fall. It will support iPhone 4 and later, iPad 2 and later, iPad Mini, and the iPod Touch 5th generation.

Here are some of the other things Apple announced today:

• Apple says it has paid out $10 billion to iOS developers to date. Money!
• More than 50 billion app downloads have happened, and there are 900,000 apps in the store now — 375,000 of which are designed for the iPad. (Check out our post: WWDC by the numbers.)
• The new OS X will be called “OS X Mavericks.”
• In OS X Mavericks, the Finder now includes tabs and the ability to tag files. It’s very Web 2.0.
• OS X now supports multiple displays. Wait, didn’t it already?
• Mavericks includes features designed to stretch battery life, including “timer coalescing” and “compressed memory.”
• Safari, Calendar, and Mail have new looks, and Safari has been optimized to scroll smoothly, use less power, and more.
• There’s a new Mac Maps app. Driving with your MacBook in the passenger seat? You’re all set.
• Apple will be releasing new 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Air models, with longer battery life.
• There’s a new Mac Pro desktop computer. It’s a big cylinder. Inside, it will have dual GPUs and will support up to 3 separate 4K displays via its Thunderbolt 2 and HDMI ports. It will be assembled in the USA.
• There’s a new online version of Apple’s productivity software, called iWork for iCloud.
• Apple has a new, Pandora-like streaming music service called iTunes Radio.

Image credits: Apple, John Koetsier

In case you weren’t aware, now’s a pretty good time to be an iOS developer.

At Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference in San Francisco today, Apple CEO Tim Cook revealed that since 2008, Apple has paid out developers $10 billion for their apps.

“That’s more than the three other app platforms combined,” Cooked gushed while on stage.

Other numbers were similarly impressive. Apple currently counts 900,000 in the App Store, 375,000 of which are built for the iPad. Total App Store downloads have topped 50 billion since 2008.

“The momentum is incredible,” Cook added.

Tracking bracelets like Fibit, Fuelband, and Up are for fitness, measuring steps, motion, and action. Arm straps like BodyMedia also measure heart rate, skin conductivity (how much you’re sweating), and exercise intensity. All of those are important to Montreal-based smart apparel startup OMsignal too, but the company says there’s more to wellness than fitness.

“We think movement is awesome, we’ve worn all the devices,” says CEO Stephane Marceau. “But we’re also trying to measure emotional states. It’s mental and it’s emotional … and we call this ‘emotics.’”

OMsignal is doing that, as you might have guessed, by making you one with the shirt. Or bra — your choice.

OMsignal’s T-shirts and bras have the basic tool that every other fitness solution employs: a 3-axis accelerometer to give you motion and steps and estimated calories. But the clothing also measures breathing: respiratory rate and volume. And something truly incredible for a personal fitness device: your ECG.

That’s not just heart rate, that’s an actual measurement of the electrical signature of your heart.

“From the ECG we measure heart rate variability, which is pretty meaningful,” Marceau told me. “The difference between arcs is the difference between your heart rate. When it’s long … you’ve got no problems, but when saber-tooth tiger is next to you, they’re fast and regular. There’s 30 years of research correlating stress and exercise, but there’s no tool to measure it in real life.”

OMsignal started to work on a wellness wearable in 2011 after the team members initially designed a fitness bracelet in 2008. The goal was to access a greater body footprint — to get deeper data — and then to extract more meaningful signals and generate more meaningful insights.

Those insights have a lot to do with stress. CEO Marceau — who’s a high-energy, passionate, excitable person — has been practicing mindful breathing for a long time. With an active, busy lifestyle plus the stresses of a startup, he needs the chill factor, and needs the health benefits.

Especially the benefits of mindful breathing — even when you’re not exercising.

“I’ve been practicing yoga for a long time,” Marceau says. “Focusing on breathing is so helpful – influencing your breathing is one of the few ways to influence your autonomic system, which is a pretty powerful thing.”

Your body’s autonomic system is the mostly subconscious things you do to stay alive: breathing, heart rate, digestion, perspiration, and more. It has a huge impact on your health and wellness, particularly in the area of stress, and is largely impervious to conscious control — at least for those of us who are not Yoga gurus who have practiced controlling our bodies for 20 years.

But breathing can be under our control, and mindful breathing — slow, deep — can have a major health benefit in reducing stress and improving energy.

“With breathing, you control your stress,” says OMsignal’s chief medical officer, Stéphane Borreman — who is not only an emergency room physician but also a mechanical engineer. “Good breathing can make overall better balance in terms of the nervous system.”

All of which means that OMsignal’s apparel doesn’t just count your calories or tally up your steps for the day. It helps you understand how you are feeling, and why … it measures your emotional state.

But not just yours.

The company is working on apps that link you with your loved ones. If your spouse is feeling stressed, you can be notified and can send him or her a comforting text. Or, if a parent is experiencing health issues, you can call for help. Both of which are interesting ways to bring the power of our closest social relationships to bear on the most key issues of our health.

OMsignal is still an early-stage company and has not released a product for sale. The company just closed a $1 million seed round of financing from Real Ventures, Golden Venture Partners, and angel investor David Cohen.

But in preparation for a wider release, and in anticipation of opening up the OMsignal platform for third-party developers, OMsignal is taking a page from Google’s early “Explorer edition” release of Google Glass. One hundred of OMsignal’s body-sending shirts will be sent to life hackers, medical practitioners, and developers.

The shirts are available first; the bras will come second, Marceau says, citing the fact that bras need more design than T-shirts “for some reason.” Pricing, of course, is not yet finalized. And that will be a huge challenge, although the company may look at some means of transferring sensors from shirt to shirt so that you do not have to buy 20 smart shirts to get full sensor coverage, even when your clothing is in the laundry.

In fact, the entire design process has been a challenge.

“We always wondered, with all these fitness wearables, why isn’t arguably the most natural wearable category represented: apparel?” Marceau says. “After spending so much time making this work, we get it.”

“It’s not simple!”

Image credits: OMsignal

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Seventy million dollars is a drop in the bucket compared to the enormous financial heft of the telecommunications industry. But in the world of startups, that’s still a healthy (in the Southern sense) sum.

And coincidentally, it’s the amount that telephony company Twilio has just raised in its fourth — and perhaps final — round of venture capital funding.

As Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson said in an interview with VentureBeat yesterday, “We’re in an enormous industry. Telecommunications is hundreds of billions of dollars, one of the biggest industries that there is, and it’s transitioning from a world of hardware and carriers into the future, which is a world of software.

“And in that world, APIs are the new dial tone. We want to be that dial tone.”

Twilio, which makes telephone calling and texting software APIs for developers, said the round was led by new investor Redpoint Ventures with participation from existing investor Bessemer Venture Partners and new investor Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Redpoint partner Scott Raney will be joining the Twilio board.

Twilio sits neatly at the juncture of cloud technology (so hot right now) and developer tools (even hotter).

“It seems obvious that every other industry of big enterprise software — CRM, ERP, HRM — has moved to the cloud. That’s proven,” said Lawson. “So telecom is absolutely no different; it’s even more likely to move to the cloud because it’s already connected to a network. That’s a no-brainer that most of communications is going to move to the cloud over the next decade.

And with the not-so-slow disappearance of hardware comes a need for new tools and new partnerships. Lawson said Twilio works telcos, both as a buyer and as a partner.

“But that doesn’t change the fact that something still needs to connect the fabric of our homes and businesses,” he said. “The business logic, the intelligence of these applications, that’s no longer something hardware can solve.

“If you think about it, you don’t have to look any further than your pocket to see the future. Ten years ago, if you wanted to make a telephone call, you picked up a telephone, and the only thing it would do for the life of the device is make a telephone call. And now, we make those calls on a general purpose computer. In a world of pocket computers, how much room for innovation is there? It’s all in software.”

In addition to software, Twilio has its eye on hardware innovation, including new form factors just being hacked into existence. For example, Twilio developer advocate Jon Gottfried recently built a Twilio client for Google Glass.

“I think it seems clear that one of the key use cases of wearable computing is communications,” Lawson said.

“Think of Star Trek communicators — it’s the badge on your chest. … We’re obviously in the extreme early days, but it’s gonna move fast. And the advancements are going to come from the software people.

“There’s a lot of platforms where people are innovating; our goal is to enable people on all platforms.”

As mentioned at the top of this article, a huge Series D can signal a couple things for a company like Twilio. The San Francisco-based startup has been around for six years now and is one of the more established developer tools around.

So, we asked Lawson, what’s it gonna be: acquisition or IPO?

Like any CEO, Lawson told us that the company’s (and the investors’) number-one goal is to build a great company and a robust business, “and whatever happens, happens.

“If we decide we want to go public, we’ll do that. We’re certainly not focused on being acquired. The most obvious outcome is becoming a public entity. That’s a privilege that’s afforded you if you build a great company.”

So, what’s next for the company? While the CEO couldn’t give any specific hints about the next product launches to expect, he noted,, “Part of our growth and the Series D is that we’ve got a really cool pipeline of new things we’re gonna be releasing. We’re really excited. We can’t wait to see what people are gonna build. We’re always astounded by the ways people and companies use Twilio.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Joe Griffin has served as the co-founder and CEO at iAcquire, a digital marketing firm, since 2008.

Re-launching a website is a massive, multi-layered task for any business.

You have make decisions not only about design and branding — a re-launch requires a seemingly endless checklist of tasks: benchmarking, content strategy, audience research, SEO, back-end hosting … the list goes on. Plus, as a business every decision is hinged on ROI: What impact will the remodeled website have on your business’ traffic, engagement, and conversion?

Your business’s flaws and weak links are often exposed when it comes time to reinvigorate your web presence.

Whether this comes in tandem with an organizational restructure, a change in services or products, a reinvigorated brand strategy, or simply after realizing that your current website is not converting customers at the level you’d like, every business should re-convene on their web strategy at least every few years.

I co-founded iAcquire, a NYC and Phoenix-based digital marketing agency, and recently re-launched our agency site to reflect our evolution as an industry and as an agency. As a 15-year veteran of the digital marketing world and a captain of our agency’s recent remodel, I have gathered years of insight into necessities of a website relaunch.

These tips can serve as a blueprint, checklist, and guide for your enterprise’s future website remodeling plans.

1. Get everyone on the same page

Talk to each and every stakeholder about the impending re-launch. Meet with colleagues (within your department and cross-functionally), shareholders, clients, board members, industry mentors, and other key parties as you embark on your re-launch planning.

Ask each group similar questions:

• What is missing?
• What do you like about the current site?
• Do you think it’s the right time to re-launch?
• Do we have the capacity to do this as a company?
• Do you think we will come out better afterwards?
• Do we want a re-skin, which impacts the overall design aesthetic of the website, or a re-launch, a total overhaul?

Answering these questions early on – and getting buy in and feedback from all parties — will help you in the long run. When relaunching iAcquire.com, for example, multiple departments within our agency combined forces to create a vision for the website. Doing this helped us define scope, high-level direction, budget, requirements, and most importantly goals — all essential for the beginning strategy documents of a website redesign.

2. Allocate a budget and bandwidth

Your overall budget for your website redesign will frame your bandwidth. If your budget is in the tens of thousands of dollars, you have the budget to utilize a big agency to create a new website for your enterprise. If your budget is smaller ($7,500-$15,000) you may be able to utilize outside help on a consulting basis.

Either way, a large chunk of change will be needed for a website redesign. Hosting isn’t free either, so even if you do everything in-house you’ll need a budget.

Also, consider the project scope and if your in-house team has the capacity to complete such a large-scale project. Creative, content, promotion, SEO, and developers will all need to commit a large part of their workload to the project. For example, our marketing and strategy team dedicated a good solid three month to the project.

CEOs, CFOs, CMOs, and legal need to be engaged from the beginning as well. And project status should be communicated at least one time per week to high-level stakeholders.

3. Ensure benchmarks are in place

Create benchmarking documents to track the current website’s design and content, layout, as well as audience targeting and current website analytics (visitor interaction and conversion) so you can accurately measure success after the new site launches. Define your current and future KPIs and keep track of them. Keep in mind that these may change as your organization grows, so be inclusive and collect as much as you can.

For iAcquire, we use the following key performance indicators:

• Leads
• Time on site
• Share of voice
• Number of links
• Organic search rankings
• Impressions
• Traffic

4. Define or redefine your key audience personas

Consumers are getting savvier and savvier by the minute and modern technology allows users to tune out various messages. With that being said, it is crucial to craft your remodeled website around your converting, engaged personas.

Once you define audience personas, you can better direct:

• The tone of the copy
• The website’s overall design/look
• What type of content (images, copy, videos) resonates best
• Calls to action – where the are placed, what copy to use, user path

Creating audience personas helps all creative, content, and allows marketing stakeholders to maintain uniformity. Leverage audience market data, survey results, and need states to create personas and user stories. Use this template and create your own three to five personas. Utilize market research tools like Experian, Nielsen, Facebook data, and even Google Analytics to get to the core of your visitor base.

5. Plan as much as you execute

Draft a creative brief that includes all project requirements – from copy and SEO to technical hosting and color scheme requirements. This brief will serve as the blueprint for all parties working on the redesign.  The plan can be as long as 30 pages, though the length is not important; the content is the important part. If it helps you, then delegate specific sections to different leaders within your team. Come together and review the plan, and then from there start executing your strategy.

6. Consider your copy

A shiny, well-designed site is great, but like your looks it’s the first thing to go with age. If your content isn’t great, neither is your site. And it’s not just about well-written prose; it all has to be planned out, persona-driven content, created by understanding your key audiences and how they behave online. Develop a roadmap for content strategy and your copy will fall into place.

Within iAcquire, we know that governance and establishing an editorial calendar is just as important as setting up the content framework. Without structural guidance organizations can fall into content paralysis. These processes defines the players, topics, and requirements necessary to curate and publish content.

7. Keep the bot in mind

Within your re-launch two key “audiences” need to be kept in mind: your visitors and the search engine spiders. Search engines have a very detailed algorithm for ranking pages, and with your re-launch you want to make sure that you stay even or above in your rankings. Here are three key considerations you should have for SEO:

• Redirects
  If specific URLs are no longer active, or you are changing the site architecture, make sure 301s redirects are in place. Non-existent redirects can lead to a “docked” search position.
• Conversion end-points
  Your re-designed website will probably not have the same conversion funnel or path as your last site, so make sure someone is dedicated to checking the conversion points on your redesigned sites to make sure they are a) working, b) properly migrated, and c) tracked.
• On-page keyword analysis
  Target two to three keywords per page and intertwine them organically throughout the copy and metadata. If your organization previously targeted a list of keywords, look at them again as competition and volume changes from year to year and even month to month.

8. Who’s your host?

Consider where you are going to host your site.

Is it going to sit on a server that your enterprise owns and maintains, or will it live with a hosting company? Is your hosting bandwidth enough? Consider what frameworks you will use on the front end, and what Javascript libraries you will use, such as MooTools or jQuery. PHP, .Net, or Rails? WordPress or Drupal?

All of these decisions need to be made early on.

9. Utilize Google Webmaster Tools

Once your website is in development, have your organization set up a Google account (if you don’t already have one) and get acquainted with Google Webmaster Tools. This free Google tool can tell you any problems with site/page indexing and even click-through rates. If the content is being rearranged on your new site, it could be buried deeper, making it harder for search engines to crawl, which leads to a non-indexed area.

10. Strategize a post-launch plan

Your job isn’t over when your redesigned site launches. Create a plan to promote the new site on social media, PR outreach, and blog announcements. Plan on pushing marketing messages through these channels for at least two weeks past the launch. Connect with key influencers on social who can push your message further.

Then create a plan to organize, develop, curate, and publish new content so you keep luring new visitors in: inbound marketing at its finest. On an internal communications front, make sure that your organization is kept in the loop as well. Inform all departments of the re-launch. Be clear on what has changed and how they can utilize your “2.0” or “3.0″ website to optimally conduct their respective jobs.

While every organization has needs, adopting a process is a crucial element. Use this list as a guide, and customize it to meet your organization’s unique challenges, and develop a website that reflects your company in a way that is beneficial to you and your customer.

Joe Griffin has served as the co-founder and CEO at iAcquire, a digital marketing firm, since 2008. Prior to founding iAcquire, Joe co-founded SubmitAWebsite.com, which was acquired by Web.com, and before that he spent three years with iCrossing, where he led business development and later their paid search division. Joe writes at joegriffin.me and the iAcquire blog, tweets at @joegriffin, and lives on Google+.

photo credit: baldiri via photopin cc

This post was written by by Todd Anglin, EVP cross-platform tools and services at Telerik, a developer services company.

Mobile is the ultimate disruptor. It is disrupting the way people interact with computers. It is disrupting the way people interact with each other. It is disrupting the way people buy software (now called “apps”).

And it is significantly disrupting the way software is developed. It seems as if everything we thought we knew about everything is being challenged by mobile.

For software developers, this challenge is particularly daunting. Over the last fifteen to twenty years, developers have invented and refined processes and tools for building software that predominantly targets one platform and one form factor: the Windows desktop PC.

Now with mobile, and the proliferation of operating systems (now called “platforms”), even experienced developers are left feeling like beginners. All of the tools, processes, and techniques they have acquired to build, debug, test, and deploy software are suddenly powerless against mobile.

The race is on, then, to find the next generation of tools and development processes that will make multi-platform mobile development as productive and manageable as desktop and web development have been for so long. To achieve that productivity goal, there are five areas burning for better mobile development tools:

Building

Many platforms means many different “build” requirements.

Today, building an app (which encompasses writing and compiling code) for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry requires a mess of different IDEs, SDKs, and operating systems!

Even hybrid apps, which leverage existing HTML and JavaScript skills to reach multiple platforms, require lots of messy configuration for each target OS.

A multi-platform world needs tools optimized for multi-platform software development, not tools steeped in protecting (or reinforcing) walled gardens or arguably dated technology. Watch for new and improved tools to help mobile developers abstract platform differences so less time is spent managing software, and more time is spent writing it.

Debugging

Fewer development problems are more difficult on mobile today than debugging.

There are two primary reasons: 1) the available mobile operating system emulators are nowhere near sufficient for thorough app debugging, which leads to, 2) software being written on a PC, run on a device, and then debugged from the PC.

Today’s mobile debugging is as clunky as it sounds. The emulators are unlikely to significantly improve, so the tooling that makes it painless to debug software running on mobile devices is what must improve.

Testing

Once an app is built, it needs automated tests to ensure it works properly before updates are shipped to app stores and users. In the “old” Windows world, this was a relatively straightforward task.

With the widely varying capabilities of today’s mobile devices, testing now needs to happen not only on many different operating systems, but on many different physical devices.

Tools and “cloud device labs” are emerging, but much more is still needed to make it productive to record, playback, and manage tests across devices.

Deploying

Whether your app is bound for the public app stores or for a private group of users, deploying mobile apps today still requires far too many manual steps. The walled garden ecosystems are bent on not making it easy to “one-click deploy” an app to multiple platforms.

The problem is even more challenging if your destination is not a public app store. Thousands of internal business apps are being built every day, and those apps must find their own path to employee devices.

Watch for tooling to help deliver on the one-click, multi-platform deployment mobile app developers desperately need.

Optimizing

Unlike websites that live on servers or desktop apps that live on relatively stationary PCs, mobile apps get around. They literally live with users. They’re online. They’re offline. And once they’re deployed, they’re out of your control.

To understand what your app is doing and why, you’ve got to monitor it in the wild. Developers need to monitor usage and performance, watching for common user problems and those things that cause apps to dip below the all-important 60 frames per second, or fps (an essential measure for an app to “feel” responsive).

It will take a mix of new tools to help developers accurately and productively fine-tune apps to perfection and ensure their app is not among the one in four abandoned after initial use.

The mobile disruption has only just begun, but the need for better mobile development tools is urgent. Fortunately, new tools are emerging rapidly to help developers through the transition, so the pain of this disruption will hopefully be short lived.

Todd Anglin is executive vice president of cross platform tools and services at Telerik.

Image credit: Shutterstock

So, a day after the third annual IPv6 day, why aren’t we adopting IPv6 faster?

If anyone should know, CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince should have a pretty good idea. A content delivery network, CloudFlare moves more data and pushes more pageviews to more people around the globe than Facebook — 150 billion pageviews a month.

Source: LinkedIn

Matthew Prince, CEO of CloudFlare.

I talked to Prince about IPv6, CloudFlare, and the current state of adoption. Unfortunately, it pretty much sucks.

“The good news is that from Jan. 1 to today, we’re seeing 26.5 percent growth in IPv6 usage,” Prince told me yesterday. “The bad news is that it’s still just 1.5 percent of all requests. If we keep growing at this rate, then it will take until May 10 of 2148 before we can finally retire IPv4.”

(The original version of this article said 2048 — I misunderstood Prince on the phone.)

Prince is hoping that the growth will not be steady-state but exponential, accelerating through the adoption curve. Even if that happens, however, CloudFlare predicts that full IPv6 adoption would take seven years, until January 2020.

Not impressive.

“IP” is Internet Protocol, which gives an address and location to every Internet-capable device. The current iteration, version 4, has its roots in 1980, around the time when people like Ken Olsen, the founder of Digital Equipment Corp, still said stupid stuff like: “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.” Now of course, everyone has five or six, including one in their pocket, another in their TV, on for the sofa, another hooked up to their TV, a couple in their cars, and a few big ones lying around in various places throughout their homes on large flat surfaces with chairs.

IP version 6 was born in 1996, give or take, and offers 340 trillion trillion trillion unique identifiers — more than we could ever conceivably need. And it offers built-in multicasting, better tracking (which could simultaneously make the internet both more secure and less private), more efficient processing by routers, and support for larger packet sizes, which could speed deliver of large multimedia objects such as Netflix movies.

Source: Google

Google visualizes IPv6 versus IPv4

So it’s definitely better. So why the long delays in implementation?

According to the Internet Society, much of that is because technologies like NAT (network address translation) have enabled many ISPs and companies to use a single IP address for many machines. But the biggest problem is that IPv6 requires time and investment, and since there are some workarounds that have done the job until now, many organizations aren’t willing to lay out cash for no clear or immediate return.

For its part, CloudFlare says it’s there to support customers whichever way they go.

“If we’re not the largest provider of IPv6 web, then we’re close — we have over a million sites that are IPv6 enabled,” Prince told me. “But we’ve continued to roll out a dual-stack solution and let customers choose. That’s the real driver of growth … especially the U.S. government.”

Source: Wikipedia

IPv6 vs IPv4.

Interestingly, IPv4 is turning into a growth driver for CloudFlare. Asian ISPs, who can’t get new IP addresses on IPv4 anymore since Asia ran out two years ago, are turning to CloudFlare to host on IPv6, and then make sites available via CloudFlare’s IPv4 capability as well. That’s mostly for small, personal sites, but Prince takes some satisfaction in enabling budding web builders:

“We’re helping preserve $9.99 hosting, which is where a lot of good things start,” he says.

Even more interesting, however, CloudFlare — which protects sites from hacking attacks — is starting to notice IPv6-only hack attacks. While historically only a tiny fraction of hacking attacks, .3 percent, originated from IPv6 vectors, that’s taken a sharp uptick lately. This shows that even though IPv6 can be more secure than IPv4, DDOS attacks, which rely on botnets of compromised PCs which are hacked, drafted, and used as pawns by hackers to attack other sites, still work. In other words, even if you know exactly where the attack is coming from, that doesn’t always help in deflecting it.

The real driver, however, is that hackers have discovered something about legacy security products.

“We speculate that some attackers have discovered that a lot of legacy security products assume an IPv4 world,” Prince explains. “They’re doing IP address blacklisting, which doesn’t work in the IPv6 world. Since a lot of the security products were not designed for IPv6, they don’t know what to do, and just pass the traffic on … so IPv6 becomes a way of by-passing legacy security products.”

The biggest IPv6 attack that CloudFlare saw, just two weeks ago, was a 3GB/second DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, focused on CloudFlare itself, not one of its customers.

I guess the one good thing about hackers starting to use IPv6 is that it’s at least one sign of increased life in the protocol.

Which, frankly, is almost a good sign right now.

photo credit: Eva the Weaver via photopin cc