Keas announced at Healthbeat today two new content partnerships with My Healthy Dish and Noshtopia that will help employees make wiser nutritional choices and save employers money on health care costs. 

Businesses use Keas to create and manage their workplace health programs. The system promotes healthy behavior and teamwork by rewarding people for achieving simple exercise and nutrition goals through games and social motivation. Keas’ CEO Josh Stevens said that seventy to eighty percent of health care costs are preventable, like those caused by smoking and over-eating, or conditions triggered by certain habits and behaviors. Unhealthy habits can lead to lower productivity and the business bears the brunt of these costs. Keas uses gamification to make losing weight and making healthy choices a fun, social, and mobile experience. 

“It is in employers’ best interest to motivate their employees to do the right thing,” Stevens said. “Healthcare costs are rising and every time an employee takes personal time off to visit a doctor or fill a prescription can result in $250-$500 in productivity costs. The productivity savings of health employees are huge.” 

Stevens said his goal is to provide solutions for the “99 percent of a patient’s life when they are not a patient.” Often this means supporting actions like eating more fruits and vegetables and reducing stress. Obesity-related conditions cost around $150 billion a year and a nutritious diet is a central element of overall wellness. 

Keas recently conducted a survey to track employee sentiment towards nutrition and gain insight into what it can do to improve workforce habits. The survey found that 73 percent of the U.S. workforce frequently or always reads nutrition labels, 86 percent is eating breakfast at least 5 days a week, and 94 percent is increasing the daily intake of fruits and vegetables. 63 percent believe that fast food and junk food are leading causes of obesity, and an increasing number of people are turning to home-cooking in an effort to eat healthier. 

The partnerships with My Healthy Dish and Noshtopia will help employees do things like prepare green smoothies for the morning and provide inspiration for simple-to-prepare healthy dinners.  

“These are the folks that publish best content in nutrition,” Stevens said. “They provide meal planning and recipe ideas from experts that employees can use for inspiration. We want to bring everyone together, including CFOs, HR teams, wellness experts, and employees in one central portal.”

The easier it is to integrate nutritious eating into every day life, the healthier employees will be and the less employers will have to pay. It seems like a win-win, except for, maybe, the fast food franchises.

Photo Credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

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The mechanics of the innovation are simple and have already added the lexicon of gestures that most mobile users have already become familiar with: Pull the user interface down to force the app to refresh its current view.

But thanks to Twitter’s innovator’s patent agreement (IPA), the business and legal ramifications are just about as easy.

Source: John Koetsier

Facebook’s mobile app on iOS uses a version of pull-to-refresh

As The Verge notes, Twitter’s IPA was released as a 1.0 spec today as releasing it in draft form early in 2012. And the IPA is in full effect for this most recent Twitter patent.

Loren Brichter, the developer who created pull-to-refresh — which Twitter acquired in 2010 when it bought Tweetie — was concerned about how Twitter would use his patent. So concerned, in fact, that he asked Twitter to agree with him as part of the terms of the sale of his company that it would never use the patent offensively.

This means, according to the IPA, any company that has not initiated offensive patent litigation in the past decade is safe. Defensive use of the patent, however is permitted by the IPA if the following terms are true:

1. If a company “has filed, maintained, threatened, or voluntarily participated in a patent infringement lawsuit against Assignee or any of Assignee’s users, affiliates, customers, suppliers, or distributors.”
2. Or, if a company :has filed, maintained, or voluntarily participated in a patent infringement lawsuit against another in the past 10 years.”
3. And finally, “to deter a patent litigation threat against Assignee or Assignee’s users, affiliates, customers, suppliers, or distributors.”

There’s one more loophole for offensive patent action if the above do not apply: if the company that owns the patent asks the engineers responsible for creating the intellectual property for written permission.

Overall, however, this is a significant step to making patents better and reducing the impact of patent trolling and patent lawsuits — if other companies adopt it in large numbers.

“We hope the adoption of the IPA will spur constructive dialogue on making patent system work better for companies, inventors, and policymakers alike,” Twitter’s Ben Lee wrote today.

Image credits: Twitter icons

Communication is one of the biggest challenges facing health care today. Doctors cannot use e-mail, social media networks, or SMS texting to discuss patients because it violates privacy regulations, and electronic medical record (EMRs) systems are generally incompatible with each other, which makes the secure exchange of information even more difficult.

At VentureBeat’s HealthBeat today, Verizon managing principal of connected health care solutions Nancy Green explained how Verizon can benefit the health care community.

“When you think of Verizon, you think of our wireless network. But we have a $6 billion health care practice and a chief medical officer ,” Green said onstage. “We are moving and enabling the business of health care so others can innovate. We have experts on compliance and security, and startups can use the size and scope and scale of Verizon to make a difference.”

Security and authentication are major concerns when it comes to medical communication. Green said that 27 countries, the White House, and the U.S. nuclear launch codes are secured by Verizon. The company knows how to do security and authenticate people, and it is applying this expertise to the health care. Verizon has credentialed every clinician and physician in the United States and provide a secure channel for transmitting data, such a prescriptions. An example is Verizon’s work with Surescripts to support electronic prescriptions and set up digital signage on devices. From their iPads and  iPhones, doctors can sign in using a passcode, authenticate their identity, write, confirm, and accept prescriptions, and digitally sign documents. Verizon’s “exchange layer” moves the information securely from network to network (doctor to pharmacy) so doctors don’t have to visit a terminal or use pen and paper.

Verizon’s dual persona technology is also particularly useful in the medical field. Doctors often use their personal mobile devices for work and Green said that it is a struggle to securely manage patient data on phones and keep it separate from personal information. Through an exclusive partnership with VMware, Verizon has a solution that can lock down the enterprise/clinical side of phones.

To quote Voltaire (or Uncle Ben from Spider-Man), with great power comes great responsibility. Verizon has a network of 115 million people and a huge telecommunications infrastructure, and Green said the company is committed to supporting entrepreneurs and ideas that use this power for good. So is competitor AT&T, which also has health care solutions. Both companies see opportunities in an industry that makes up 17 percent of the GDP and relies heavily on mobile and telecommunication technology. These opportunities also extend beyond mobile health technology. In March, Verizon announced its new cloud service for health data exchange and a partnership with HealthSpot to power tele-medicine kiosks in the field.

Photo Credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

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A month ago CEO Tim Cook disappointed Wall Street and crushed Apple fans by saying that Apple had amazing new products coming out “this fall and throughout 2014.” Which means that none were coming out this summer, and which also means that if some new products are coming out in fall, they need to be in testing now.

Cue iWatch testing rumors.

Taiwan’s Economic Times says that Apple is currently testing 1.5-inch OLED screens from Ritek’s RiTdisplay after first building prototypes with a 1.8-inch display, which Apple rejected as being too large for a wrist-based computing accessory. The OLED screens use OGS touch sensors (“one glass solution”), which will theoretically help Apple keep the iWatch thin and light.

But Apple has presumably not ordered in volume, as Ritek recorded a first-quarter loss. Apple production partner Foxconn has also reportedly received a small-scale trial production order of 1,000 devices.

Testing the new, smaller size right now — and getting into preproduction — could help Apple get product ready for delivery to consumers in late summer or early fall.

But don’t hold your breath.

The iWatch has been rumored since late 2012, including in some almost-certainly-Apple-initiated NYT, Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg leaks. According to at least one study, a full 20 percent of U.S. consumers want an Apple iWatch, sight unseen, and an Apple patent published in March of this year reveals that Apple is thinking about flexible wrap-around displays built into a transparent housing.

Oh, and perhaps one of the reasons for the rumors?

Samsung is supposed to be working on a smart watch, too. Perhaps Galaxy Watch? Meanwhile, Google’s entrant into the wearable computing sweepstakes is already being hacked on, developed for, and ogled.

Or would that be oogled?

Image credits: iWatch mockup by VeneStudio; Hat tip: C|Net

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

While messaging app MessageMe just raised $10 million in funding, that announcement was missing key info about the app’s growth. Now the company has come forth with some impressive stats, including that the service now has 5 million registered users just 75 days after launch.

Competing with popular apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, MessageMe offers iOS and Android applications that let you share rich messages and content with family and friends. On top of standard text, you can also send images, YouTube videos, iTunes tracks, voice recordings, and more. Ten days after launch, MessageMe users were uploading two images per second. Today, they are uploading eight images per second. More than 1,500 notifications are sent to MessageMe users each second.

“At MessageMe, our ambition lies in the goal to change the way people communicate around the world, and the mediums through which they connect,” the company said in a blog post today. “From a text message, to a song clip, to those personal moments with your best friends, we’ve built a product which is now used by more than five million people to communicate one day to the next.”

MessageMe only launched its apps in early March but already has attracted $11.9 million in funding. Investors include big names like Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, True Ventures, and SVAngel.

Next up, the company says it has “groundbreaking additions in the pipeline.” We’ll see if it can deliver on that promise.

Photo via MessageMe

WildTangent is diving deeper into mobile gaming by launching its game service on Asus tablets on a worldwide basis.

The WildTangent games will be accessible inside the Asus entertainment platform for Android devices. They offer consumers the ability to play premium casual games for free and receive free in-game items thanks to advertising support from major brands.

In addition, consumers can rent games when free play expires for a fraction of the retail price. They can also apply rentals toward buying the games. WildTangent has been a major player in casual games for more than a decade, but it has only recently expanded to mobile games, which have become the fastest-growing part of the game business.

“Our focus is on providing a fantastic cross-device games experience by providing consumers with new choices to play top games for free or for rent, without the commitment to buy them,” said Sean Vanderdasson, the senior vice president at WildTangent, in a statement. “By partnering with Asus, a global leader in the tablet and PC space, we can help their customers find and play great games.”

“WildTangent makes it easy for owners of Asus tablets to install games from a wide selection of publishers,” said Vira Chang, the head of the eBusiness Service Department at Asus, which is one of the world’s major PC and mobile device makers. “Through our partnership, we are able to extend WildTangent’s streamlined service to our consumers.”

WildTangent’s games are inside Asus@vibe+ for Android. WildTangent games will also be on Asus Windows 8 PCs in the coming months. Players will be able to use the WildCoins virtual currency for in-game items.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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HasOffers, a company offering tools to help companies track the performance of their online ads, has raised a Series A led by Accel Partners, with additional funds from RealNetworks founder Rob Glaser and Founder’s Co-op’s Chris DeVore.

HasOffers is based in Seattle and has 79 employees. It has been bootstrapped, growing on revenues without investment to date, since its founding in 2009. Fun fact: Its co-founders, Lucas and Lee Brown, are twins.

“We really didn’t need to raise money based on our current cash flow and ability to keep growing, but this partnership with Accel changes the game for us,” said Peter Hamilton, the chief executive of HasOffers, in a canned statement.

According to the press release that the company will be issuing tomorrow morning, HasOffers has two products, both delivered as a SaaS (software-as-a-service):

• White-labeled software for networks and agencies to manage their performance advertising programs.
• MobileAppTracking.com (MAT) attributes installs, in-app engagement and purchases back to ad partners (such as social networks, publishers, and mobile ad networks).

Clients for the white-labled product include Bucksense, Tapjoy, SponsorPay, Applift, PocketMedia, OfferMobi, Crobo, and Tapit.

Clients for MAT include SuperCell, HotelTonight, Spotify, LivingSocial, Electronic Arts, Square, and Yahoo!

We contacted Accel’s Rich Wong, who will be joining the board of HasOffers, for an explanation of what motivated the investment.

“In our investment thesis from Accel, we are now in a third phase in mobile advertising,” Wong told us. The first phase included “walled gardens” controlled entirely by mobile carriers. The second phase includes ad networks such as AdMob, Quattro, and others. The third phase, Wong said, is marked by the rise of real-time-bidding (RTB) networks and programmatic buying, and that’s where HasOffers fits in.

“In this phase, the ‘machines are taking over’ and more and more of the ad spend in mobile is going to shift towards a programmatic buying solution, buying across multiple traffic sources, instead of two or three primary ad networks in the previous phase,” Wong said.

The key to that working, Wong said, is having a trusted, independent third-party measurement system, so ad buyers can tell where their clicks are really coming from.

“The days of the CMO not knowing ‘which 50 percent of their advertising was wasted’ is ending,” Wong concluded.

Top photo: The HasOffers executive team. Photo courtesy HasOffers.

Which is precisely why Leap Motion released this video showcasing its impressive Windows 7 and Windows 8 integration:

With Leap Motion, you can now do everything available in Windows for multitouch functionality — without actually touching anything. The company promises that operating system-level functionality and web browsing capabilities will work out of the box, no software or driver installations required, and will be simple to use.

“We want our users to have a magical experience, with easy and natural movements in the air leading to amazing interactions,” co-founder David Holz said in a statement. “Leap Motion’s mission is to break down the barriers between people and technology.”

The demo shows a user navigating Windows 8′s home screen tiles via in-air gestures, selecting and rearranging tiles, opening a web browser, and surfing sites while zooming sections for a closer look, all without touching a mouse or a touch-sensitive screen. In addition, previewing one of Leap Motion’s intended uses as a controller in the media room or kitchen, the demo shows how simple it is to scroll through Netflix, select a movie, and begin watching. Or to draw a scene in one of the Leap Motion apps, then rotate it in 3D.

The Leap Motion device is tiny, about the size of a pack of gum. It senses both of your hands and all 10 of your fingers with 200 times the sensitivity of the Xbox 360 Kinect. The company recently announced OEM bundling with select computers from ASUS, and an even more interesting deal with HP that will see the hardware melt away into the computer itself, embedding Leap Motion’s functionality into laptops to make them gesture-enabled right out of the box, without any hardware components to plug in.

And there’s more to come:

“We’re looking to embed our tech into watches, and smartphones, and glasses, and everything,” Leap Motion’s COO Andy Miller told me a couple of weeks ago.

All I want to know is: Where’s the Mac OS X demo?

Image credits: Leap Motion

AT&T customers really itching to video chat in Google’s new Hangouts app may be itching for a long time.

The carrier says it plans to open up video chatting for all customers running LTE devices by the end of 2013.

“Throughout the second half of this year, we plan to enable pre-loaded video chat apps over cellular for all our customers, regardless of data plan or device; that work is expected to be complete by year end,” AT&T said in a statement to The Verge.

Core to AT&T’s concern are pre-loaded video chat apps, which the company says come with much higher usage numbers than their non-preloaded counterparts. AT&T, it seems, isn’t confident that its network can handle the burden of lots of Android users video chatting all at once.

For customers, the situation is sure to be a bit tough to stomach, and could push them away from AT&T and into the welcoming arms of Verizon or — more likely — T-Mobile.

The situation is nearly identical to the issues AT&T  faced last year with Apple’s FaceTime app, which didn’t work on its cellular network. Backlash from consumers and regulators eventually forced the company’s hand, however, and AT&T was forced to (slowly) loosen its restrictions on Apple devices. And it looks like the same thing is happening with Android and Hangouts.

SAN FRANCISCO — Mobile devices could save the medical industry and consumers billions of dollars a year.

Mobile health technology provides patients with greater opportunities to manage their diseases and communicate with providers. On stage today at HealthBeat 2013, Ivor Horn of the National Children’s Medical Center (above, center) and Asthmapolis president Mark Gehring (above, right) spoke about the potential for “mHealth” to reach underserved populations and help them take control over their health.

“The key is recognizing how people use technology,” Horn said. “Over 80 percent of patients in underserved populations are willing to receive information via mobile or text, and over 90 percent wanted access to their health information and are open to sharing it back and forth. The two main issues are trust and self-efficacy — the ability to feel like you can accomplish what you want to accomplish is really important and that the information comes from a reliable source.”

More than one-third of U.S. adults are obese, and obesity-related conditions like heart disease, diabetes, and stroke are some of the leading causes of preventable death. The medical costs associated with obesity are in the realm of $150 billion.

Asthma is another pervasive problem. Fifty million people in the U.S. live with chronic respiratory disease, and uncontrolled asthma leads to 500,000 hospitalizations and two million emergency room visits a year. It is a $50 billion problem.

The prevalence of both diseases is higher in low-income populations, and mobile devices can be a powerful vehicle for addressing these problems.

During the discussion with Horn and moderator Robin Strongin, Gehring said that Asthmapolis is not just a mobile app– it is a disease management company that collects data and gives patients tools to improve their clinical outcomes.

“We are redefining the metrics for success,” Gehring said. “This isn’t about downloads. There is a 70 percent reduction in hospitalization for patients using Asthmapolis, and when they do end up in the hospital, they spend 70 percent less time there. This is where the health care system is headed. Our business model is to sell to payers and providers to save them costs, keeping in mind how to save payers and providers money is key.”

Asthmapolis recently raised $5 million from the Social + Capital Partnership to support development of new services to extend its reach to people living with all forms of chronic respiratory disease, not just asthma.

Horn and Gehring emphasized that when building mobile apps, it is important to develop the technology in partnership with the health care system, connecting and providing value to people on all sides, including patients, payers, and health care providers. Ultimately, fewer hospital visits is better for everyone and in addition to eating green vegetables and regular exercise, mobile devices could become part of an integral part of a healthy lifestyle for all segments of the population.

Photo Credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

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Peter Molyneux, the father of “god games” and founder of 22cans, has gone mobile and is announcing that his Godus title will be published by Japan’s DeNA.

The game is an ambitious attempt to reinvent the god-game genre for mobile. And Molyneux, who has made heavy-duty console games like the Fable series, is bullish on mobile. His entry into that market is another sign that mobile is becoming to big a market to ignore, even for triple-A game developers.

DeNA, a mobile-social game network with a multibillion-dollar valuation, is expanding to publish Western content. Based in the United Kingdom, 22cans is developing its title for Android, iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch devices. The game will use DeNA’s Mobage mobile-social game platform in the West, Japan, and Korea.

“We have huge respect for DeNA’s successes in mobile gaming. By fusing their expertise and experience with our passion and dedication, we are going to make Godus a truly groundbreaking reinvention of the god-game genre,” said Peter Molyneux said in a statement. “As a global leader in developing and publishing mobile games, DeNA is the ideal partner for us to collaborate with on the launch of Godus.”

In Godus, you play a god. You can wield divine powers over your devoted followers. It’s similar to Molyneux’s older title, Black and White. If you advance your civilization, your people will believe in you more. With that belief, you can sculpt entire lands, beautifying them with your touch.

But you face challenges from rival gods. You can also be an angry god, creating earthquakes, volcanoes, or tornadoes to unleash upon the rival gods and their worlds. You and your people will clash with other gods in multiplayer battles.

“One of my first jobs in the video game industry was working on the quality assurance team for Peter’s Populous 2. That title and its predecessor set the tone for a whole new generation of games,” said Clive Downie, the chief executive of DeNA West. “Fast forward to 2013, and it’s an honor to have the opportunity to work with Peter again on the launch of Godus. Our team is looking forward to working with 22cans on a game that we know will set a new standard for the mobile generation.”

No launch date has been set yet.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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That lasted a few months, at least.

Nokia and Intel had decided in 2010 that they needed an answer to Apple’s iPhone juggernaut which was taking high-end smartphone sales away from Helsinki and making it completely obvious that the king of chips had no chips in the mobile processor poker game. Meego was the answer, and Meego would be the operating system that would lead the then-still-powerful Nokia back to the forefront of the mobile market, and would make Intel relevant in small, low-powered, and battery-life-efficient phone CPUs.

Unfortunately, one loser plus another loser often just equals two losers. And, unfortunately for Nokia and Intel, Google and Samsung took their lunch and ate it, too, as Android began to reign uber alles. So Nokia turned to Microsoft for salvation — and a very painful process it has been — and Meego lost its way.

But not entirely.

Jolla, a new and independent smartphone vendor which almost no-one but mobile wonks has ever heard of, took the core of Meego and built Sailfish, a new mobile operating system that is built on an open-source project named Mer that is the new incarnation of Meego, and is just now teasing the coming-soon release of its very first device, the oddly named and oddly designed but also oddly attractive “The Other Half.”

Surprise, surprise, Jolla is based in Helsinki, Finland, where there just happens to be a surplus of top-notch mobile talent available lately (shocking, isn’t it). And surprise, surprise, all of the top Jolla leaders are ex-Nokia employees. Almost two years ago, Jolla announced its intentions of bringing a new smartphone to market. The biggest surprise is that they seem to be succeeding.

We are Jolla. We are Unlike

Jolla appears to be a two-part device, consisting of a 4.5-inch screen, a buttonless main phone handset, and various colorful plastic cases, or “other halves.”

Snap one on, and your phone OS changes.

Source: Jolla

The Sailfish OS almost reminds you of Windows Phone tiles.

Changes color, changes battery life, perhaps, changes content such as apps and media, and changes in other ways yet to be invented, based on the creativity of Jolla and partners.

Actual devices have yet to be released, and the details are fewer than might be desired, but the key point is that the Jolla is Android app compatible. Which, frankly, is probably essential for any new smartphone platform entering the market today. The smartphone market is an ecosystem battle, not a device battle primarily, and any new entrants with any real aspirations for success have to plug into what is already available and — largely — a global standard.

Interestingly, the main Sailfish operating system screen appears to draw from Windows Phone design elements, with titles on the home screen that aggregate information that you might be interested in.

According to Engadget, the phone will have a dual-core processor (type unknown), LTE, an 8MP rear camera and a front-facing camera, and have 16GB onboard storage plus micro-SD expansion.

At the very least, it’s an interesting take on mobile that enables users to participate in some — if not all — of the benefits of the world’s leading smartphone operating system, while still having some unique and differentiating factors. Jolla says it will offer the world’s best multitasking experience, and will be so intuitive that you can operate your favorite features “without even looking at the device.”

Main navigation on the phone is buttonless, with the four main icons appearing to be Phone, Messages, Browser, and Apps. The Sailfish operating system will also support gesture control, the company said.

I’m assuming that full Google integration and access to Google services such as music would not be included, and syncing contacts and other core data would not be as simple as on a straight Android phone.

However, Jolla seems to be competing on differentiation. And while the jury will be out on how successfully they’ve achieved it until we have actual devices in our hands, at first glance, they’ve succeeded.

Image credits: Jolla

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

China’s speedy growth in fast-mobile subscriptions — and increasing mobile competition among the giant Chinese mobile carriers — will be key factors in driving Apple’s moldering stock price to unseen heights of over $800, one analyst said today.

With over three quarters of net new mobile growth in emerging markets, if Apple is ever to get its stock back to the $700 heights of summer 2012, it needs a less expensive and more carrier-friendly product suite. That’s coming this summer, according to Brian White of Topeka Capital Markets, and just in time.

The three major Chinese carriers reported subscriber growth for April 2013 today, and wireless subscribers rose 13 percent year-over-year to 1.16 billion. Fast wireless subscribers using 3G connection speeds rose 84 percent to 293.1 million.

And that’s the critical number.

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dailysublime/6814011513/

Competitor Samsung will have something to say about Apple’s success — or lack thereof — in China.

The major competition right now between China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom will drive China Mobile, the grandaddy of mobile in the Middle Kingdom, to finally adopt the iPhone … and offer Apple’s iDevices to its 730 million mobile subscribers. That’s a deal that Apple and China Mobile have not been able to consummate since 2009, and it could be the deal that kickstarts Apple into massive growth outside its U.S. market once again. Especially given the fierce competition between carriers in China.

And the competition is all over the 293.1 million 3G subscribers, who are projected to grow to between 375 and 400 million by the end of 2013.

China Mobile’s 730 million mobile subscribers includes 120 million of the higher-end 3G subscribers, meaning China Mobile, which has historically trailed Unicom and Telecom in the more lucrative segments of the mobile market, leads the race for 3G subscribers in raw numbers. Unicom and Telecom, however — both of which sell Apple’s iPhone — have a much higher percentage of users on big contracts, giving them better per-user margins.

China Unicom has 254.6 million mobile subscribers, including 91.9 million 3G subscribers, and China Telecom has 170.2 million users and 81.1 million 3G users.

Cue the lower-priced iPhone, which White believes is coming this summer.

That will help Apple finally ink a deal with China Mobile just as the bulk of its 730 million subscribers are starting the switch to faster 3G connections. Which could mean tens of millions of new customers for Apple in Asia, and — with growth in other countries as well — set up a sales growth recovery for Cupertino that, White believes, can bring AAPL back to its $700 heights, and beyond, up to his price target of $888.

That’s a lofty target, of course, and a lot will have to change between the ears of Wall Street analysts and institutional investors for that to become a reality. Morgan Stanley, of course, has also published an analysis that Apple could triple sales in China with a lower-cost iPhone.

Since Apple sold $8.8 billion worth of product in China in the second quarter of this year, out of $43.6 billion in total sales, tripling that could be $26 billion quarterly, and perhaps as much as $100 billion annually.

Those are big numbers, and whether Apple can accomplish that or not, no one knows. But if it did, that would certainly have a major effect on Apple, its stock, and the mobile markets.

Major competitor Samsung, which sold 400 million phones last year and captures 95 percent of all profits in the Android device ecosystem, will have a few things to say about it too.

photo credit: wZa HK via photopin cc

Carrier billing doesn’t have the hype of digital wallets or NFC, but it’s still a pretty convenient way to tackle mobile payments. After all, why enter a new set of credentials when you can simply have something added to your cellphone bill?

Payvia, a company that has pushed more than $2 billion through its carrier billing platform, announced today that it has purchased Mogreet, a mobile marketing company that offers text and media messaging for brands. With the acquisition, Payvia will now be able to market products to consumers, as well as offer a way to buy them.

It’s a union that makes a lot of sense, especially since carrier billing is expected to move more towards physical goods over the next few years.

Payvia claims it’s the largest carrier billing firm in the U.S. with a reach of 120 million mobile users. Naturally, Pavyia and Mogreet will integrate their two services as part of the acquisition. Additionally, Payvia says Mogreet’s customers will see mobile video quality double, as well as faster messaging speeds. Mogreet will now have an international reach across North America, Europe, and Asia.

The new TrackingPoint sniper rifle doesn’t fire when you pull the trigger. Rather, it fires when it knows it will hit the target you’re aiming at. And then streams video to the included iPad mini to allow you to share your hunting or sharpshooting experience with Facebook, YouTube, or maybe even Al Jazeera.

Now, the company says, everyone can be an expert marksman.

“With TrackingPoint, even a novice shooter can become an elite long-range marksman in minutes, accurately and effectively engaging targets out to 1,200 yards,” the company said in a press release.

That’s good, if you’re a hunter and you want to “ethically harvest” game by making immediate kills shots. But it’s also incredibly dangerous, since now inexperienced shooters can be as accurate — or more accurate — as trained military snipers from almost a mile away. The potential for terrorism and targeted assassinations is obvious.

The shooter simple tells the rifle what he or she is aiming at by locking a laser on the target. The gun’s built-in laser range finder, compass, environmental sensors to gauge wind speeds, inertial measurement unit, ballistics computer, and networked tracking engine then engage. But the rifle only fires when you’re holding it in exactly the right direction to hit the target, ensuring that even the unsteadiest and untrained hands can deploy death from a distance. And every shot is recorded and streamed to your nearby iPad.

“Think of it like a smart rifle. You have a smart car; you got a smartphone; well, now we have a smart rifle,” company President Jason Schauble told NPR.

Hunters are excited by the possibilities, apparently.

Source: TrackingPoint

XS1 is the largest-caliber Precision Guided Firearm (PGF) available today.

“When I first saw this system, I knew immediately that I had to have one,” said the first owner of a TrackingPoint rifle. “As a sport hunter and professional marksman, I see the TrackingPoint technology as an excellent way to ensure more ethical harvesting of game and to share the thrill of the hunt with anyone. I cannot wait to make amazing shots of my own.”

The Austin-based company that makes the TrackingPoint rifle calls it a “Precision-Guided Firearm (PGF),” carefully avoiding any reference to “snipers” or “sniper rifles.” But the size and weight of this deadly weapon — 27″ long, over 20 pounds loaded — make it a very unusual hunting rifle. I’m no firearms expert, but several sites I’ve checked indicate that average hunting rifles weigh in at 6-12 pounds, and that a rifle of 20 pounds or more is “just too heavy for general purposes.”

Ergo, it’s a sniper rifle.

TrackingPoint has made some efforts around safety. The sophisticated tracking scope that makes the rifle “smart” is password-protected, according to the company’s CEO, so while the gun will still fire without an authorized user, it won’t allow access to all the intelligence that could make a weekend warrior into an instant Marine sniper.

The company made its first deliveries this week, and due to “overwhelming demand,” has set up a web-based application process to get on the waiting list. We can only hope that the application process doesn’t allow any deranged individuals to access this type of deadly weapons.

And, no matter how smart these rifles are, the question is: are they wise?

Google’s I/O developer conference is over, and we’ve learned quite a bit: Devs just can’t get enough of Google Glass, design is a bigger focus for the company than ever before, and Larry Page is kind of sad about a lot of things. It’s been a whirlwind ride, but honestly we’re just glad to be out of San Francisco’s Moscone Center.

Check out our highlights from I/O below:

• Google I/O 2013 keynote live blog
• Larry Page is sad, hopeful, and frustrated in his heartfelt Google I/O speech
• Google Glass apps are easy to develop, but brutally difficult to design well
• What hardware is Google making after Glass? Mary Lou Jepsen knows
• What’s next for Google Glass: More units, more apps, more colors
• How cognitive science and user empathy powered Google’s design breakthrough
• OK, Google, your conversational search is awesome as hell
• Maps rebuilt from the ‘ground up,’ iPad version coming this fall
• Google Play for Education could kill the iPad in schools
• Major design overhaul makes Google+ look a whole lot like Pinterest
• Google announces its Spotify competitor, Google Play Music ‘All Access’ — ‘radio without rules’
• Hangouts, the best part of Google+, gets standalone iOS, Android, and Chro

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Twenty-four hours after Google released three location tools for its app developers, startups are already integrating the APIs into their products.

The founders of Valet stayed up all night to get the new API into their app as quickly as possible. Valet launched in April in the Google Play store to help people remember where they parked. It tags your parking location with a pin and reminds you when to pay the parking meter. You can set a timer for your meter and share the location on social media. There is, of course, no guaranteeing you will avoid fines, but it does cut down on the “human error” often responsible for the tickets.

Founder Will Roman recently relocated to San Francisco from Austin, Texas, to work at another startup. After “losing” his car a few times in the unfamiliar city and getting slapped with multiple parking fines, he recruited cofounder Josh Deffibaug, and the two set out to build Valet.

The app received mention on Gizmodo and a couple of Android blogs for its “simplicity and beauty” and was attracting a good number of users through word-of-mouth. But when Roman and Deffibaugh heard the news about Google’s new location APIs, they saw an exciting opportunity.

“Everyone who drives can appreciate this,” Roman said in an interview. “Parking tickets suck, and so does forgetting where you parked on a busy day, when visiting a new city, or after a night of drinking. With integration of the new Google Play Services location API’s, all features can be automated on over 95 percent of Android devices thereby preventing you from ever loosing your vehicle or getting a parking ticket again. We’re the only parking app in the world to integrate the Google Play Services location API’s.”

The location application programming interfaces (API) are part of Google Play Services, a tool kit for Android developers. Integrating location-sensing features to your app can be challenging and Google’s fused location provider “intelligently manages the underlying location technology” to make building location-aware app easier and less energy-intensive.  The technology combines GPS with on-phone sensors like the gyroscope, accelerometer, and barometer to collect your movement data and deliver a more accurate, immediate, and power-efficient application.

Using “Activity Recognition,” your phone can figure out whether you are walking, cycling, or driving which has clear applications for fitness apps. The Valet founders realized that the same technology could be used to tell when a car goes from driving to park mode, and can automatically drop a pin in your parking spot without you having to push a button.

“The new location APIs are more accurate, simpler to integrate, and back ported,” Roman said. “They solve a lot of the fragmentation issues of Android and enabled us to cater to the broadest market possible with even better reliability than previously possible.”

Competitors include iCarPark, Car Finder AR, Find My Car Smarter, Car Locator, Where Did I Park. Valet is based in San Francisco, where parking does in fact suck.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Bang With Friends’ newborn iPhone app no longer appears in the Apple App Store, leaving “down to bang” iPhone users wondering why.

The company’s chief executive Colin Hodge told Valleywag that the app recently passed over one million users, but it’s been removed from the store.

Bang With Friends matches you up with people in your network who are, well, interested in having the sex. You sign up for Bang With Friends using your Facebook account. The “service” will only match you up with those willing to service you; otherwise, your activity remains anonymous.

The company only launched its iOS and Android apps last week, bringing the action off the computer and into the mobile world. You’re now able to find out if someone wants you when you’re on the go, but not if you’re an iPhone user, evidently.

It might not be the subject matter that’s giving Apple pause. If the company found Bang With Friends violating any privacy guidelines, or taking data in a way that Apple doesn’t approve of, it would pull the app. We’ve reached out to both Apple and Bang With Friends to figure out what is behind this removal and will update the post upon hearing back.

BangWithFriends’ website only offers that it will “be right back” and is trying to work with Apple to restore the app.

It was also recently uncovered that you can discover just which of your friends use the app on Facebook. All you need to do is type a special URL into your address bar and it will call up all of your friends who match a certain app identification number. This goes against what Bang With Friends claims, which is that your use of the app will remain anonymous.

via Valleywag; Bang With Friends image via Bang With Friends

Google has gone from a company that approached design through cold, hard data to one that’s employing gorgeous, user-centric interfaces.

Design was a big theme at this year’s Google I/O developer conference, with over a dozen sessions exploring design in some fashion. And you can see Google’s new aesthetic focus in plenty of its products — like Gmail’s slight redesign and the upcoming Google Maps refresh — but Android serves as the fastest example of Google’s design turnaround.

Perhaps it’s because design matters all the more on a small smartphone screen. With Android, Google also had to do something about Apple’s head start with iOS. To get Android to look as good at the iPhone, Google had to radically reshape how it thought of design, and fast. Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich,” released in 2011, was Google’s first attempt to emphasize design in its mobile OS. Its aesthetic has only become more refined since then.

Google being Google, it’s also obsessively focused on the function of its design. Unlike of the old days, where Google went with the design most people liked through rigorous testing, usability is front and center now, with a new focus on cognitive science and user empathy.

Designing to delight on Android

Users brought up a slew of design issues in Android’s first few versions, and Google saw the need for a new direction. Enter Android’s new design principles, co-authored by Google’s Rachel Garb, head of interaction design for Android apps, and Helena Roeber, who previously headed up Android’s user experience research team.

“We thought, what if we turned this long list of shortcomings that bum us out into something that actually inspires us to create beautiful and usable designs,” Garb said during a Google I/O panel yesterday.

Enchant. Simplify. Amaze. With Android 4.0 two years ago, those three seemingly simple principles became the cornerstone of Android’s design.

“We all respond emotionally to every moment we experience, and we experience around 20,000 of these moments every waking day,” Garb said. Negative emotions are so powerful they have the ability to shorten your lifespan, while positive emotions are essential for daily life.

Garb’s goal: to make sure Android serves as a fount of positive experiences. That was a big departure from Android’s earlier days, when it was complicated, technical, and far from user friendly.

As one example, Google developed a subtle animation in the Android home screen to tell users when they’ve reached the end of their available screens. If there was no indication, users could get frustrated. The new animation delighted users so much that they ended up playing around with it just for fun.

“Not only did it tell them they did everything right, it also kind of helped establish the virtual spaces and provided the feedback in an elegant, subtle, and non-disruptive way,” Roeber said.

Google also added a full-time writer to the design team to take charge of all of the user-viewable text in Android. With short words, active verbs, and common nouns, the writer helped transform Android into an environment more suited for typical, non-technical users.

For example, a setting that used to read “Use tactile feedback” was changed to the more human-readable “Vibrate on touch.” Similarly, a warning that used to read “You didn’t insert a SIM card” now simply prompts “Insert SIM card now.”

You can see all the new design principles at work in Google Now, Android’s predictive search virtual assistant. Enabling it simply takes one click on your Android phone (Simplify), and afterwards it simply presents relevant information when you need it (Enchant). Its interface is sparse, consisting of only the cards you need to see at any particular time. Google Now also learns from your behavior to get better over time (Amaze).

Better design through science

“All of our evolution has been optimized for the types of things we’re likely to see,” said Alex Faaborg, a Google designer with a background in cognitive science and machine learning. Speaking at an I/O panel focused on cognitive science and design, he discussed a few examples of how tiny decisions take advantage of human perception to create a better user experience.

Gestalt psychology principles play a significant role in Google’s designs. For example, Google is using white space more liberally across its products to group items (consider that bit of space between Google search results). In Android, it’s taking advantage of our ability to automatically complete shapes for things like form entries (boring rectangular boxes are out, now you just see the bottom portion of a text entry line). Similar objects, like the stars and check boxes in Gmail, are grouped together to make them easier for us to scan.

Even those small notifications you get in Google Docs along the side of the edges of your screen are backed by cognitive science. Faaborg pointed out that we see peripheral motion faster than what we’re looking at directly, so it makes sense to keep your notifications along the edges of the screen.

About half of Faaborg’s talk focused on vision, while the other half focused on attention, focus, and memory. Google learned that repetition may be a better way to teach simple concepts to users, instead of just offering a single tutorial up front. For example, a repeated alert in new Android phones tells users where they can find all of their apps. Previously, users would skip through the short introductory screen.

“Consistency is not critical — you don’t need to build products identical to what’s on the marketplace,” Faaborg noted at the end of his chat, in a takeaway that also tells us a lot about how Google views design now. He urged developers to build innovative designs and trust that their audiences will be able to understand them. “People are smart,” he said.

Is it enough?

While Google’s design breakthroughs have led to some major changes internally, its competition hasn’t been sitting still.

Apple, a company practically synonymous with excellent product design, will likely see a major style evolution now that Jony Ive is in charge of design company-wide. According to rumors, this year’s iOS 7 could be a major overhaul more in line with Ive’s aesthetic (a love of simple and flat designs).

With Windows 8, Microsoft made a radical design shift as well, bringing elements from its slick Windows Phone operating system to the desktop. Microsoft just announced that it sold 100 million Windows 8 licenses in its first six months on the market, which is in line with Windows 7 sales. With its support for tablets and traditional computers, Windows 8′s design could continue to pay off for Microsoft as personal computing trends change over the next few years.

No matter what Google does, it can’t please everyone. But now, at least, Google is trying.

Photos: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat: Top image: Google

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Say what you will about Windows Phone, but the platform’s greatest strength has always been Nokia’s Lumia phones.

And the latest phone in the series, the Lumia 928, is no different. The Lumia 928 is the first high-end Lumia for Verizon, which by default makes it a very important device for Nokia itself. But is it any good? Here are a few first impressions.

A camera to kill for, maybe

Above anything else, Nokia and Verizon are selling the Lumia 928 on the power of its camera. The phone’s 8.7-megapixel shooter “captures amazing blur-free photos and videos even in low light”, according to Nokia, which has gotten in trouble for making lavish claims about its phones’ cameras before.

The Lumia 928′s camera ain’t too bad.

So do those claims hold up with the Lumia 928? Sort of. I took a bunch of shots with the phone, and very few of them came close to the almost-flawless sample shots that the phone teases you with. That’s not to say my photos weren’t nice (the one of the Manhattan skyline is especially good), but they just didn’t consistently match the quality I was expecting. I wasn’t blown away.

Still, the camera is fast, and features like Smart Shoot (which captures a series of images and merges the best ones) and Cinegraph (which is Nokia’s answer to Vine) are neat, if slightly gimmicky, additions. The best part? The Lumia 928 comes with a hardware camera button, which, in full disclosure, I only just now remembered exists.

Nokia is also making a big deal out of the Lumia 928′s Xeon flash, which helps freeze motion in certain kinds of shots. I didn’t get a chance to try this out, but MyNokiaBlog gives a good idea of how it works.

Nokia ditches color for yet another black slab

One of the best, most immediately striking things about the Lumia phones is that they come in a wide, attractive variety of colors. They feel unique, interesting, and fun to hold. That color is gone with the Lumia 928, which, with the exception of its white back, feels like just another black slab. The phone is pretty, but there just isn’t much to care about beyond that. (And the giant Verizon logo on its front doesn’t help either.)

As far as the whole feel-in-hand goes, the Lumia 928 sits right on the line between being solid and uncomfortably bulky. Maybe it’s the squared edges or the plasticky back, but the phone just isn’t particularly enjoyable to hold. For lack of a better word, the Lumia 928 just feels, slimy.

In fact, the Lumia 928 would be a far, far better phone if it had the same aluminum casing as the Lumia 925, which Nokia annouced earlier this week.

One thing I do appreciate about the Lumia 928, though, is its power button, which is placed in the center of its right edge. It’s a tiny thing, but it shows that Nokia puts a lot of thought into how people are using their phones. So thanks, Nokia.

We’ll have a more detailed review of the Lumia 928 very soon.

Today, not that much has changed.

After debuting close to $40 and cratering to just under $18 in August, the stock has somewhat stabilized in the $25 region, down 30 percent from its opening-day high. And along the way, the story emerged of how Facebook tried to hide some of the mobile risk inherent in its business and how the company panicked and botched its IPO by using vague positive language in its public prospectus and, apparently, specific negative information about slowing revenue growth to institutional investors privately.

Not to mention the $100 million paid to banks to stabilize the stock — on top of $176 million in IPO fees — for efforts that ultimately failed. And technical glitches that cost the NASDAQ $62 million in compensatory fees.

All of which negatively affected the overall IPO market.

That all said, however, Facebook has seemingly nicely recovered from the disaster — at least from a business fundamentals perspective. Revenue growth was strong in its latest quarterly earnings release, with the company booking $1.46 billion in revenue for Q1 2013, compared to about $1 billion a year ago. More importantly, mobile was significantly up, accounting for 30 percent of ad revenues, and Facebook singlehandedly accounted for 6.5 percent of all online ad dollars spent in the U.S.

Not exactly Google numbers, but pretty good nevertheless.

And the company has massively beefed up its advertising options. It’s now posting retargeted ads right in the news feed, once sacrosanct territory. And in a move aimed directly at advertising giant Google, Facebook has launched a self-serve tool that allows advertisers to target its users based on what they actually buy and want to buy offline … which is a significant move to targeting the intent graph that Google hits so well by virtue of being a search engine, but Facebook has often missed since its visitors are on the site to meet and greet people. In addition, as soon as July, Facebook will be rolling out 15-second video ads in the news feed, a product that it will be charging major brands millions of dollars for.

All of which is having an effect.

The consensus recommendation for Facebook is currently a buy, with a price target of $34. Most analysts are in the Strong Buy category, with few or none in the dreaded Underperform or Sell slots. And in the past four weeks, analysts have revised their earnings estimates upward by a factor of 6 to 1.

So there’s a lot of positive in Facebook’s future, and there’s a ton of potential. But it’s still challenging when analysts compare Facebook stock with other internet high-fliers like LinkedIn or Yelp, which rose 148 percent and 48 percent in their first years, respectively.

But at least it’s better than Groupon and Zynga, both down around 75-80 percent.

And, I would argue, while there are a ton of challenges and many very significant competitors — primarily Google — the future for Facebook is bright.

Even if the public start was a stubbed toe.

Now, after passing Pentagon tests, the devices are actually approved for use.

Before authorizing any devices for use in security-conscious military environments, the military requires a very specific and detailed implementation and deployment plan. A large part of that is the creation of policy for approved use as per DoD Directive 8100.02, which says that cellular devices are not allowed into areas where classified information is discussed, stored, or processed without written approval.

And until that happened for the Apple devices, the hundreds of thousands of phones and tablets were in administrative limbo.

“Most of them have not been deployed and are still sitting in a warehouse,” a source I talked to a month ago said. “They haven’t yet been able to build an implementation guide on how to use them.”

Today’s decision, however, paves the way for the U.S. military to actually use the devices in secure areas, and potentially expand their purchase order. It marks a turning point away from BlackBerry devices, which have been considered more secure, and which to date have formed the vast majority of government-issued mobile phones.

The problem with clearing smartphones for use in top secret environments is that they are, essentially, full of radios: Bluetooth, WiFi, cellular.

“With standard consumer devices, there’s no way to prove that the Wi-Fi is turned off,” my source told me.

One solution the DoD had previously implemented for iPads was to hand them off to a second party after delivery from Apple to crack open the cases and “snip the Wi-Fi radio” to disable it, and then close them up again. Apparently, the DoD reached a special agreement with Apple to maintain warranty eligibility, which would normally be voided after opening the case.

Today’s approval, however, is for a version of iOS 6 that has likely been customized by Apple and certified by military technologists to ensure security compliance without actually having to snip wires.

Interestingly, according to Bloomberg, the military plans to create its own app store for military applications, which would allow DOD personnel to use commercial hardware but employ tested and approved applications.

photo credits: The U.S. Army via photopin cc, Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

Maxthon has carved out a name for itself as a reliable alternative web browser built with the cloud in mind. The company has more than 120 million monthly users for its browser, which isn’t as crash-prone as those made by its rivals.

Now the Beijing-based company hopes to transform the web experience further by releasing a WebKit core for Android browsers so they can become better foundations for web-based games. The new release of the browser, which has achieved a billion downloads, will make it work even better with web-based games, the company says.

Karl Mattson, the general manager of Maxthon International, told GamesBeat that the Maxthon cloud browser has carved out a niche among gamers because it allows them to sign into as many as five separate accounts simultaneously. That allows them to play different games at the same time. It is also more reliable since memory-management technology was built into the browser from the ground up. If you’ve ever had a browser crash on you during a game or a multi-window session, you’ll come to appreciate memory management. This is basic plumbing for the internet. And it’s something that is holding up the progress of the game industry, along with the difficulty of making games that can run across various platforms.

“We’ve grown by word of mouth in the gaming community,” Mattson said. “We’re the best browser you’ve never heard of. Now we’re offering the world’s best support for HTML5,” the lingua franca of the web. In a test running HTML5 canvas using the CanvasMark benchmark, Maxthon scored the highest of the major web browsers in running HTML5 pages.

That improved support for HTML5 will make it easier to run both 2D and 3D games in web browsers, enabling games to be written once for the web and run on a variety of platforms. Maxthon is available as an app in Apple’s iTunes App Store and the Google Play store for Android devices.

“Gamers are the canaries in the coal mine in leading support for fast browser performance,” Mattson said.

Mattson said that the browser has become the favorite of pro gamers who play web-based games in professional tournaments. It also offers a split-screen feature on the desktop. Maxthon says it can render web pages on Windows, Android, and iOS faster than any other web browser.

Maxthon is growing in a variety of regions, but its market share in browsers is still below that of rivals like Opera, Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer. The company is now expanding in the U.S. market. Another rival is OnLive, which offers a cloud-based browser that loads pages really fast. But Maxthon doesn’t put quite as much of the computing task in the web-connected data centers, or cloud, itself.

“Our goal is to make the actual software faster,” Mattson said.

Jeff Chen, a student in Singapore, started the browser in 2003 when he created a browser out of frustration. He was tired of the poor performance of the big browsers and found an abandoned browser projected dubbed MyIE. He decided to craft his own browser, dubbed MyIE2. He formed the company Maxthon in 2004 and kept adding features. In 2005, Chen renamed the company Maxthon, and the browser became the first one with tabs. Then it added sandboxed tabs in 2007 for added security. In 2008, Maxthon offered cloud-based services for syncing bookmarks and history.

With memory management, Maxthon allows you to pick up where you left off, no matter what you were working on, with any of your Internet-enabled devices.

“We started with a high-performance web-browsing experience,” Mattson said. “We made a strong commitment in the last year and a half to HTML5 support. We’ve got support in the gaming community because of this. We’re making HTML5 games work really well. As a company, we believe that the browser should change the computing experience.”

That meant that users could log into their browser and access their own favorite web pages and history of browsing from any location. In 2010, Maxthon came out on Android, and it has reached more than 500 million downloads to date on that platform. In 2011, the browser came out on Android tablets. Maxthon is also getting chip makers such as Intel and Advanced Micro Devices to support its software in their hardware. The company received one round of funding from Charles River Capital and WI Harper. Today, the browser is used in more than 150 countries.

Maxthon provides HTML5 support in Android, allowing for high-quality video support and Web GL enhancements. Other new features include the ability to run 2D games at 60 frames per second on devices that can support such graphics. It can also run WebGL 3D graphics.

Maxthon has more than 220 employees and is profitable. Now that’s a company that should be on the radar of all of the major game companies and platform owners.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Samsung’s Galaxy S4 may be tasteless and unrefined, but that’s not stopping lots of people from buying it.

After a month on the market, the Galaxy S IV will hit its 10 millionth device sold next week, according to Samsung co-CEO Shin Jong-kyun.

That may not sound like a big deal, but the importance of the announcement is clear once you consider that it took Samsung 50 days to get to that point with the Galaxy S3 and five months to get there with the S2.

All of this underscores one clear and unsurprising point: Samsung still dominates the Android world, even though its phones lack the stylistic finesse of the iPhone or even our recent Android favorite, the HTC One. Tasteless or not, Samsung is pulling in the cash: According to recent estimates from market research firm Strategy Analytics, Samsung captured 95 percent of the $5.3 billion in profit made by Android in the first quarter of this year. If Samsung doesn’t own Android in influence, it definitely owns it in profit.

Strategy Analytics agrees. ”We believe Samsung generates more revenue and profit from the Android platform than Google does,” Strategy Analytics’ executive director Neil Mawston said in a statement.

That probably horrifies Google — or at least you’d like to think so. But instead of feeling threatened by Samsung’s devices, Google is embracing them — albeit in its own special Google way. Yesterday, the company unveiled its own Nexus-ified version of the Galaxy S4, which will be sold stripped of Samsung’s TouchWiz interface. Google’s message with the device was pretty clear: “Samsung, we love your hardware, but you can keep the software.”

Turns out there are a lot of other people who really love that hardware, too.

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat 

Voiding your warranty, apparently, is as simple as running five short commands. To run those, however, you need a higher-resolution way of communicating with your Google Glass device than the touch-sensitive screen on your specs.

“Fortunately, this is an Android device, and like most Android devices, it has a Bluetooth chip,” Google engineer P.Y. Laligand said today at the chat on hacking Glass.

Source: Google

Glass is just Android, underneath.

So he simply turned on Bluetooth, paired an external keyboard, opened up a terminal window, and typed five commands in ADB, or Android Debug Bridge:

1. $ adb reboot bootloader: (Allows you to access the bootloader)
2. $ fastboot oem unlock: (Removes security precautions, erases user data, and … voids your warranty.)
3. $ fastboot flash boot boot.img: (Replaces the boot image)
4. $ fastboot reboot: (Reboots back into a normal state)
5. $ adb root: (Finally, you have root access and access to all the data partitions)

These are not steps to be taken lightly, according to Google engineer Hyunyoung Song.

“Even though there are recovery methods, there is a chance that you could get stuck in a state from which it’s not easy for your device to be recovered,” she said. “And Google will not support you.”

Google Glass owners who have taken the lives of their $1,500 Google Glass Explorer Edition devices in their hands and bravely gone where few dare, however, have done some exceptionally cool things. One has installed standard Ubuntu Linux on Glass and now programs on Glass using Emacs, a text editor. Another has created an avatar that mimics your head motion, bobbing around just as you do while talking and gesturing.

Source: Google

Danger, Will Robinson! Voiding warranty now!

And Google — while not supporting you if you brick your device — encourages developers to play around in root mode, hacking new apps and experiences which can be then brought into the Google Glass ecosystem.

“Now you’re in root mode,” Song said. “Play around and go nuts with whatever you want to do.”

For the faint of heart, there will be a safety net at some point. Google will be releasing the standard Glass system images, which can be used to recover bricked devices.

Probably.

Image credit: Jolie O’Dell/VentureBeat

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Tomer Shoval is co-founder and CEO of medical bill tracking service Simplee. Shoval will be speaking at HealthBeat event next week, which deals with how IT is driving change in health care.

Mobile billing and payments have seen extraordinary growth in almost every consumer industry, from utility bills to lattes. However, the healthcare industry has been slow to adopt mobile billing and payments. A number of factors are converging to make 2013 a year of rapid growth in mobile payment options for medical providers and patients.

Healthcare is a slow-moving, highly-regulated industry that historically has been resistant to adopting non-care related changes. As pressures on hospital and physician revenue mount, medical providers are increasingly forced to take on new billing options. Here are three reasons why mobile medical billing and payments will expand in 2013:

1) Multiple Payment Scenarios and Options

There are two general types of mobile payment options: point-of-sale purchases and bill pay. To date, much of the mobile payments buzz has centered around quick and easy point-of-sale transactions. The partnership of Starbucks and Square to make coffee purchases faster and easier and the recent expansion of the PayPal mobile wallet to thousands of retail stores are perfect examples of this application.

Mobile bill pay has also been quietly gaining momentum. According to Fiserv, mobile bill pay has grown 41% among smartphone users since 2011. Further, a Western Union survey found that 39% of respondents intend to pay more bills online this year and 12% will pay more bills with their smartphone.

The good news for healthcare is that patients frequently make both types of payments – either at the doctor’s office as a point-of-sale purchase or through a cost share with insurance. There is a unique opportunity for medical providers to shorten the payments cycle, increase revenue, and decrease collection costs across the entire billing spectrum, all while providing patients with a much greater degree of control and convenience.

2) Healthcare Bills are Complex

Anyone who has visited a doctor or filled a prescription can attest to the complicated nature of medical bills and insurers’ explanation of benefits. In the past, this has translated into lengthy and often overlapping paper billing statements from multiple sources. It can be difficult to determine how much a patient owes, to whom, and by when.

By the very nature of the platform, online and mobile bill pay has the power to clearly and concisely deliver a simplified medical bill. As more providers begin to explore new billing practices, patients are eager to adopt them. According to a 2012 Billing Household Survey, 76% of customers who use a smartphone to manage utility, phone, and other household bills would also like to pay their medical bills this way. Patients do not want to spread statements out on the kitchen table and use a calculator and checkbook to pay these bills. They expect a better way. As soon as providers begin to offer these options, that demand will only intensify.

3) Providers and Patients are Aligned

By taking a cue from other industries, mobile medical billing and payments is likely to benefit both medical providers and their patients.

The Biller Mobile Bill Pay Benchmark Study by Fiserv found that service providers use mobile billing and payments to improve customer service and reduce costs, and patients use it to save time and improve convenience.

For the healthcare industry, the benefits of mobile billing and payments are even more immediate. Provider revenues are being squeezed on all sides, and patient payments are a rare area of potential growth. Mobile billing and payments has the potential to give patients clarity and convenience when and where they need it most and to enable medical providers to eliminate overhead, shorten time to payment, and increase patient engagement.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

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In a blog post today, the Twitter founder announced closing a funding round led by Spark Capital with participation from SV Angel. An elite group of individual investors also contributed, including Jack Dorsey, Bono, Reid Hoffman, Steven Johnson, Evan Williams, Al Gore, Greg Yaitanes, and Roya Mahboob.

Not much is known about Stone’s startup beyond the fact that it is called Jelly, involves mobile technology, and has something to do with promoting social good.

“As mobile devices have taken an increasingly central role in our lives, humanity has grown more connected than ever — herein lies massive opportunity,” Stone wrote. This financing will support advancing Jelly beyond the prototyping stage through hiring and product development of “what we think of as the natural next step for our connected society.”

Jelly has hired former Twitter engineering manager Ben Finkel as CTO and the man behind Twitter music, Kevin Thau.

News leaked that Stone was working on a new startup in March 2013. He and Twitter cofounder Ev Williams left Twitter and founded the Obvious Corporation, which launched in 2011 as a startup incubator and investment vehicle. In August 2012, Obvious announced a new publishing platform called Medium that encouraged medium-length, thoughtful content and was intended as a “better place to read and write about things that matter.” Williams said this would be his main focus. Now with Jelly, Stone has his own pet project and there is speculation about whether this means Stone is leaving Medium/Obvious.

Until we know more about Jelly, we must be content with details about jellyfish themselves. Perusing Jelly’s blog yields interesting information, like the fact that jellyfish brains are decentralized and “more ‘we’ than ‘me’” and a group of jellies is called a bloom.

And Windows Phone could jump into second place quicker than you think.

While they’re not Android or iOS-style numbers, Windows Phone sold 7 million units in the first quarter of 2013 for 3.2 percent market share, according to the latest IDC report. Meanwhile, BlackBerry sold 6.3 million units, down a third from the previous year, for 2.9 percent market share — less than half of its share just a year ago. Market leader Android took its customary massive 75 percent of the market, and Apple’s iPhone slipped from 23 percent global market share in 2012 to 17.3 percent share.

“Windows Phone claiming the third spot is a first and helps validate the direction taken by Microsoft and key partner Nokia,” the IDC’s Kevin Restivo said in a statement. “Given the relatively low volume generated, the Windows Phone camp will need to show further gains to solidify its status as an alterative to Android or iOS.”

Those further gains are possible over the next year or two as Microsoft’s primary phone parter, Nokia, transitions to an all-smartphone lineup.

Part of Apple’s quarterly weakness was the company’s lack of any new hardware or significant new announcements. That made Apple slip to its lowest global smartphone market share in years, now less than a quarter of Android’s size, with only 37.4 million iPhones sold to Android’s 162.1 million. But systemically, Apple is falling out of the race for smartphone supremacy. And that puts Apple at risk of being in Microsoft’s sights for the number two position in the global smartphone market share battle.

How?

Nokia is going all in on Windows Phone — mostly by necessity — and now accounts for 79 percent of all Windows Phone sales. The Finnish company has sold over 20 million Windows Phones to date, which is not bad, considering the challenges of Android, iOS, and Microsoft’s stutter-stepping from Windows Phone 7 to Windows Phone 8.

Source: IDC

Global smartphone market share, Q1 2013

But the real opportunity for both Microsoft and Nokia will come as Nokia continues its transition from feature phone sales over to Windows Phone. The company still sold something like 55 million feature phones in the first quarter of 2013, and while those cheap phones are going largely to developing nations, they will transition at some point to Windows Phone.

Those feature phones sales are decreasing, and the transition from cheap feature phone to somewhat more expensive Windows-based smartphones will decrease them still more, but they will be higher-value sales.

And, they might just be high enough, depending on what Apple does in the region of a cheaper iPhone, to catapult Microsoft to number two.

Image credit: Microsoft

After raising more than $10 million on Kickstarter, smartwatch maker Pebble announced today that it has received $15 million in first round funding from Charles River Ventures.

That’s a pretty hefty sum for a company that was initially shot down by VCs, a blow that led to the Kickstarter campaign, one of the first big crowdfunding success stories. But after nabbing around 85,000 orders on Kickstarter and successfully kicking off Pebble shipments (despite significant delays), it’s not surprising to see investors taking a second look.

Pebble says the funding will let it expand its software engineering team, scale for demand, and grow its open development platform. (I backed Pebble via Kickstarter and am still waiting for my watch.)

Pebble could be credited with kicking off the latest smartwatch craze — now Apple, Google, and several other companies are rumored to be working on similar devices. The Pebble communicates with your smartphone to show incoming calls, email messages, and calendar entries, and it can also run apps on its own. After launching its initial SDK for developers in March, the company is today releasing an updated SDK that allows for two-way communication between your smartwatch and smartphone. That means Pebble apps can now be built to remotely control your smartphones or other web-connected devices.

The company is also launching a Sports API for fitness apps, which would give developers the ability to connect their apps with the smartwatch similar to RunKeeper’s integration a few weeks ago.

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

Google made a lot of big moves to impress Android game developers at the I/O developer conference in San Francisco yesterday. One of its most interesting new products is an Xbox Live-like network that provides cross-platform multiplayer, achievements, and cloud saves  for mobile titles called Google Play game services.

This suite of tools launched immediately after Google officially revealed it during its keynote presentation. In fact, some developers already updated their games with full support for Google Play game services.

We’ve gone ahead and collected 10 games available now on Google Play that use the new features. Check ‘em out below:

Super Stickman Golf 2: Free

Noodlecake Studios’ 2D arcade golf title gets expanded multiplayer support on Android with the implementation of Google Play game services. The developer added a new multiplayer mode along with achievements, leaderboards, and cloud saves.

Riptide GP: $1.99

Google worked closely with developer Vector Unit to get it on board early for these new Google Play features. The company added leaderboards, achievements, and cloud saves to its popular water-based racing title.

Shine Runner: 99 cents

This is another Vector Unit app. The arcadey smuggling game features the same support for leaderboards, achievements, and cloud saving.

Beach Buggy Blitz: Free

One more Vector Unit app has Play game services support. The company once again added leaderboards, achievements, and cloud saving.

Osmos HD: $2.99

Hemisphere Games’ beloved tablet title, Osmos HD, gets multiplayer powered by Google Play. The studio added local and online multiplayer with friends or with random match-making. It is also introducing 19 new achievements.

Modern Combat 4: Zero Hour: $6.99

Developer Gameloft completely reworked its multiplayer service to work with Google’s new tools. Now players can sign in with Google+ and use that for matchmaking and cloud saves in the first-person shooter.

Townsmen: Free

Studio HandyGames implemented Google Play game services into its medieval city-building title yesterday. Players can now sign in with Google+ to access online leaderboards and 61 in-game achievements.

Farm Invasion USA: Free

HandyGames also added the new features to its 2D alien-crushing title. Gamers can now check leaderboards and achievements for this app as well.

Rocket Island: Free

HandyGames also has some new features for its steampunk hex-based puzzle game. The studio added leaderboards and achievements to the game.

Campus Life: Free

Developer Pocket Gems is using Google Play game services to add leaderboards to its Campus Life sorority simulation title.

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