You’re building a tablet app, and you need to make decisions on what platforms to support. Here’s how to pick the tablet platform that’s right for you … and will result in the most sales of your app.

The choices are well-known:

• iOS
  The acknowledged market leader for scale and monetization
• Android
  The strong contender for second place, but with fragmentation concerns
• Kindle Fire
  Android under the skin, but walled off by Amazon, with its own app store
• Windows 8
  The dark horse: an intriguing option, but scale and penetration are open questions
• BlackBerry
  The dead horse?
• HTML5
  The one ring to rule them all … but perhaps a little lost in a deep cave in the Misty Mountains

For some people, the choice might be obvious. But sometimes there can be market advantages to targeting a less-obvious platform. Let’s look at the alternatives.

Why you would pick iOS

Apple’s iOS is the acknowledged leader in tablet sales. According to Gartner, the iPad will destroy the competition with 61 percent of sales in 2012. So it’s pretty obvious why you’d develop for iPad: that’s where the users are. Not only are the most people on iPad right now, but the types of people are attractive to app developers. Simply put: they have money and they’re not afraid to spend it. That’s an attractive user base.

Also, there’s very good infrastructure in the iOS ecosystem: coding tools, developer ecosystem, publishing and distribution paths, and monetization options.

On the downside, there is a lot of noise in the iOS world. With more than 500,000 apps for iPhone and 200,000 for iPad, your app faces some major challenges getting noticed. That said, if you are a major brand or have deep pockets, you can likely break free from the pack.

Why you would pick Android

If iPad is the leader, Android is the very strong contender … and there’s recent history to suggest that Android may not always trail iOS in the tablet market. After all, Android leads in the smartphone market, after initially trailing the iPhone. According to the same Gartner study cited above, Android will make up about 32 percent of tablet sales in 2012, growing to 37 percent in 2016.

So Android has a very significant number of users. A third of a large market is still a pretty large potential audience, and Android is expected to account for about 35 million tablets this year. (For a caveat about these numbers, see Kindle Fire below.)

There are other reasons to choose Android for your tablet app. There’s less noise in the market — fewer dedicated tablet apps — which means that yours has a better chance to be seen. In addition, if your app is well-designed and user-friendly, it will stand out in stark contrast to other Android apps, which, unfortunately, largely suck.

But also, if you want more control of what you’re developing and how to market it, the fact that there are multiple Android markets and fewer ecosystem constraints mean that you have more freedom in how to build and market your app.

Why you would pick Kindle Fire

In the Android section above, I listed a caveat, and for a good reason: the Kindle Fire accounts for easily 50 percent of all Android tablet sales. That’s one reason for breaking it out from the larger Android pack, but the more important reason is that Amazon pre-loads a Kindle-fire-specific app store on all devices it ships. The Amazon app store makes Kindle Fire a cross between Google and Apple: Android inside, but with an an Apple style, curated, send-us-your-apps-for-approval market.

That said, it’s hard to ignore two things: the sheer number of Fires being sold, and Amazon’s amazing ability to move product. With Kindle Fire users making up large percentages of overall tablet web traffic, it’s clear the devices are in use.

Pick Kindle if you’re an Android developer and you want another sales opportunity for your app, or if you think that your app will monetize better in Amazon’s garden. Content apps would seem to be a good bet with Amazon’s core user base, and some developers see opportunity in the platform.

One caveat for Kindle Fire: be aware that Amazon does implement some questionable marketing tactics which could affect your app’s sales … such as offering it for free.

Why you would pick Windows 8

Windows 8 Tablet is a true dark horse: Currently, there are almost no sales. However, HP is restarting its tablet adventure with Window 8, and Gartner says that Microsoft will move about five million units in 2012.

That number won’t make any developers jump for joy, but Microsoft has a history of being persistent, and it’s got the largest installed base of them all with the Windows PC market. As those customers upgrade to the latest version of Windows, there’s a good chance many of them will move to Windows 8 on tablets, and you might want to be there, waiting for them, when the market takes off. On top of that, the Windows 8 platform, whether on phone or tablet, is definitely an interesting and different take on interfaces of the future.

The best reason to develop for Window 8 right now, however, might be this: Microsoft may be willing to pay you. Or guarantee a certain level of revenue.

Just don’t expect huge download numbers.

Why you would pick BlackBerry

This is a tough one. Projected sales for BlackBerry tablets are even lower than Windows 8 tablets, at under three million. And while the underlying operating system, QNX, is geekishly interesting, those numbers will not make your finance department happy.

The one reason to pick BlackBerry: similar to Microsoft, RIM may finance your development as it struggles desperately to remain relevant in the tablet space. But don’t be shocked if the platform disappears under your feet before the end of 2012.

Why you would pick HTML5

I wasn’t sure I would include HTML5 in this list, as it’s not a platform in the same sense as the above ecosystems. However, it deserves a mention.

Pick HTML5 if you believe that the app explosion we’re currently seeing in mobile is a passing fad, and that the power of the internet will eventually triumph over each niche ecosystem.

Theoretically, all the tablet platforms listed above support HTML5 applications. But while in theory there is no difference between theory and reality … in reality there is. Be aware that there are differing levels of support for HTML5.

Perhaps worse, there’s no defined distribution, marketing, or monetization model. But if you can solve those problems, you can sell your services to just about anyone: tablet users, web users, even smartphone users.

Making your selection

Ultimately, the platform you choose will determine how you build your app, and how you market it. Most importantly, it will determine who you can sell it to. Almost certainly you will choose, either initially or later in your app’s life cycle, a multi-platform strategy.

Picking the first platform well is your key to success.

After all the turmoil Yahoo has gone through in the past month, the company is finally making moves on a legitimate plan to consolidate its resources on a handful of successful products and services crucial to its bottom line.

Today Yahoo announced that it’s shutting down digital magazine news app Livestand, which it only launched back in November 2011.

“When we discontinue products, it will be so that we can focus on opportunities where we lead and where we can create the most meaningful experiences for people using our products, and for our partners, developers and advertisers,” Yahoo stated in a blog post. “One of the first decisions we’ve made along these lines is to discontinue our personalized digital newsstand app, Livestand for iPad.”

Livestand was facing plenty of more popular competitors, such as Flipboard, Editions by AOL, Pulse News, Zite, and Google Currents. But even in a crowded market, Yahoo didn’t need to be focusing its efforts on side projects like this. The company said it still plans to focus on creating a more mobile web-friendly experience for its existing products. As we said at the beginning of the year, Yahoo can start by revamping Flickr.

It’s nice to see new CEO Ross Levinson actually doing something to lessen the company’s glut of useless services and products. But the work is far from over.

Fortunately, we’ve comprised a list of 10 products Yahoo needs to immediately shut down. (Well, it’s actually only a list of nine, since Livestand is now dead.)

Cisco plans to effectively kill off its misguided Cius enterprise tablet, the company has announced in a blog post.

“Cisco will no longer invest in the Cisco Cius tablet form factor, and no further enhancements will be made to the current Cius endpoint beyond what’s available today,” OJ Winge, a Cisco Senior VP, wrote on the company’s Collaboration blog. “However, as we evaluate the market further, we will continue to offer Cius in a limited fashion to customers with specific needs or use cases.”

The Cius tablet debuted in June 2010 as the first Android tablet that was meant for the enterprise market. The tablet was bundled with Cisco software like WebEx, Cisco Quad, Cisco Show, and an application for instant messaging. It was also capable of 720p HD video with Cisco TelePresence.

But like many other Android tablets, the Cius never really took off. Instead, Apple’s iPad has come to dominate the enterprise for tablet usage. With apps as inventive as data visualizer Roambi and LinkedIn’s surprisingly sexy social experience, there seems little reason to invest in a tablet that can’t access all that.

Now that Cisco has acknowledged that it lost the tablet battle (which we called in mid-2011), it will instead place a higher degree of focus on developing software.

“Moving forward, we intend to double down on software offerings, like Jabber and WebEx, that provide the anytime, anywhere, and any device experiences,” Winge wrote. “We will leverage key learnings and key collaboration experiences native to Cius in our other collaboration products.”

Cius photo: Cisco

Facebook may be looking to buy browser maker Opera Software, according to a new report.

A source told Pocket-lint that the social network wants to expand into the browser space and is looking to acquire Opera to do so. VentureBeat cannot independently confirm Facebook’s interest in Opera, and Facebook declined to comment on this story.

Opera is a Norway-based public company traded on the Oslo Stock Exchange. The company reported revenue of $46.9 million in the first quarter of 2012, and has roughly 700 employees spread across eleven offices, including a satellite office in the U.S. Opera makes an extremely popular mobile browser, including Opera Mini for iPhone. Opera Mini had nearly 200 million users across Opera branded, co-branded, and operator-branded installs of the mobile browser in Q1 2012.

While details on Facebook’s Opera interest are slim, we are certain that Facebook wants a piece of the browser pie, especially on mobile. In fact, months ago we heard a whisper that the social network was actually building its own browser.

That rumor makes sense when you consider a few things. First, the company is expected to release a Facebook-branded phone this summer running some type of custom Facebook operating system, said to be a fork of the Android OS. It follows, then, that Facebook would want to control — read: profit from — how users browse and access its social network on mobile. A Facebook phone running a Google browser doesn’t sound quite right, now does it?

There’s also this key detail: Facebook’s director of product, Blake Ross, if you recall, co-founded Mozilla Firefox and helped build the Firefox browser. The browser guru came to Facebook after his startup Parakey was acquired by the then young social network back in 2007.

But back to Opera. Here’s the kicker: Opera makes money on mobile, the very place where Facebook desperately needs to monetize now that it’s a public company. The software maker said it made $3 million in first quarter revenue from its mobile consumers — up 253 percent year-over-year — and $1.8 million from mobile OEMs. The company also netted $6.9 million in Q1 2012 revenue, up 303 percent year-over-year, from mobile publishers and advertisers.

“Opera expects to monetize this user base and the billions of daily web page traffic generated by these users to a greater extent in 2012 compared to 2011 from advertising, applications and search,” the company said in its earnings report.

But the fat lady has yet to sing in this acquisition play, so stay tuned.

Big and small, Microsoft has some pretty major plans for Windows 8.

On the larger end of the spectrum is the hulking 80-inch tablet that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer keeps in his office. The display, which is likely similar to the one seen in the background of the photo above (from Microsoft’s Windows 8 preview event several months ago), has allowed Ballmer get rid of his phone and note paper, Microsoft VP Frank Shaw told Wired UK.

The existence of the device is fueled by Microsoft’s desire to make pretty much every screen a computer, ”Every screen should be touch, every screen should be a computer and should be able to see out as well as see in. That is the way the world is heading [and] those screens are going to be big, small, wall-sized and desk-sized,” Shaw told Wired.

Microsoft says that it has no plans to directly sell such a large device, but that it’s very possible that third-party vendors will pick up the slack. If anything, it proves that Windows 8 can scale from netbooks and tablets, to giant screens.

Shopping apps are nothing new, but New York City-based Consmr has a grander vision beyond price comparisons: to inform consumers with an in-depth library of product reviews for things like health, groceries, beauty, and baby items. Think of it like a Yelp for consumer products.

Shoppers are clearly biting: the Consmr iPhone app has received over 100,000 downloads in its first two weeks, CEO Ryan Charles told VentureBeat exclusively.

Charles, the former head of mobile at Zagat, launched Consmr’s website a year ago with the goal of populating the site with user-contributed product reviews. By the time Consmr’s iPhone app launched on May 9th, the company had amassed a collection of over 100,000 reviews.

“That was the plan all along,” Charles said in an interview yesterday. He noticed that many competing applications had launched without an extensive review library, and he wanted to offer Consmr’s users something more valuable.

It also would have been more difficult to garner a huge amount of reviews if Consmr launched first on mobile, Charles said. (He points out that the popular foodie app Foodspotting also hit the web first to gather reviews, before going mobile.)

Just like the Consmr website, you can use the iPhone app to search for product reviews. But the Consmr app also allows you to scan a barcode, like so many other shopping apps, to instantly access a product’s page. For such a young app, it’s surprisingly fast and well-designed. It’s simple enough for mainstream consumers to use, but it’s slick enough to impress user interface geeks.

You can share reviews with your friends, and also follow other users to get a sense of their tastes. Consmr taps into your Facebook and Twitter accounts, allowing you to easily find your friends on the service. There are also a handful of celebrities using Consmr, including the online wine guru Gary Vaynerchuk. You can also create private shopping lists on the service (which will likely be shareable in the future).

Charles tells me that he has a passion for curated content in the mobile space. At Zagat, he was responsible for major deals, like the review guide’s partnership with Foursquare.

He was also inspired by how online retailers like Amazon were able to increase sales by letting customers review products. “It [reviews] increases consumer confidence,” Charles said, which was his biggest problem when shopping in retail stores where you have to sift through tens of thousands of product choices.

Consmr is based out of the WeWork Labs in Soho, and the company hasn’t revealed any funding yet (though Charles discussed raising funds last year).

You just can’t stop those wily jailbreak hackers. Today new software has been released that will fully jailbreak almost any iOS device running the latest iOS update, including the iPhone 4S and new iPad.

Hackers from the Chronic Dev Team have released Greenpis0n Absinthe 2.0, which offers a completely untethered jailbreak — meaning the hack will stick with your device even if you have to reboot it. There have been tethered jailbreaks around for some time, which are more cumbersome since you have to jailbreak every time your iOS device restarts.

Jailbreaking your iPhone allows you to run unauthorized apps and customize your phone in an assortment of ways. It’s a direct affront to Apple’s heavily locked-down app ecosystem, so the company has made each new hardware and software release more difficult for hackers to jailbreak.

The tool is compatible with just about every iOS device, except for iPad 2 models running Apple’s new 32-nanometer chipset.

As always, tread carefully when jailbreaking your device: backup first, and be vigilant when installing unauthorized apps. Though jailbreaking allows for more flexibility with your iOS device, it also opens you up to all sorts security vulnerabilities.

Via BGR, Jailbreak Untethered

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

If there is one application that personifies how Apple’s mega-popular iPad is transforming the enterprise, it could very well be the intuitive, luscious, and just-plain-cool Roambi, a business intelligence app that brings mundane data to life in unimaginable ways.

Roambi, which has attracted $30 million in funding from Sequoia Capital, lets you show your company’s SAP, Oracle, or Salesforce data on the iPad in bright charts and graphs. Each report is available for online or offline viewing, so you can always bust out your iPad for presentations or routine queries.

And unlike business intelligence players with iPad app support like MicroStrategy, IBM Cognos, or SAP BusinessObjects, Roambi does not tie you down to a single data source. “Roambi is unique because it is designed to aggregate across different data warehouses,” Forrester mobility analyst Ted Schadler told VentureBeat. “They pull it all into a single data dashboard for an executive.”

The Roambi app serves more than 230 large enterprise customers, charging $795 per user licence, and more than 4,000 mid-size customers with its Pro offering, charging $99 per user per year. Its large enterprise customers have purchased support for between a hundred and several thousand employees, meaning the company is bringing in strong revenue.

Roambi comes from San Diego-based development firm MeLLmo. The company’s founders originally picked the odd name to throw off the competition, but they are stuck with it now because all their contracts use the name. They try to make the best of their funny name and in some ways they are affectionate toward it — in the office, the guys are “MeLLMen” and the ladies are “MeLLmettes.”

A bold bet

Roambi stems from the day MeLLmo chief executive Santiago Becerra (left) stood in line to get his hands on the first-generation iPhone in June 2007. A lifelong fan of Apple products, Becerra had the time to stand in line because he had sold a startup eight months prior and was taking a break from work. He deeply identified with the idea of the iPhone and loved the concept of using a flat touchscreen display for interacting with applications and the web.

“I remember that first day of playing with the iPhone and the pre-loaded apps like the stock widget,” Becerra told VentureBeat. “It was truly different because it required no instruction manual. At the time, I asked myself ‘How long before business people will want to see data on this device?’”

Becerra was so excited about the idea of enterprise applications for the iPhone that he called up and pitched a few friends and business colleagues on the idea. A few people shied away from the idea, but he found a solid founding team that believed in it, including Quinton Alsbury, David Becerra, and Jaime Zuluaga.

Alsbury, now MeLLmo’s president of product innovation, loved Becerra’s idea from the start. He wasn’t as immediately bullish as Becerra was, but he was excited about the iPhone’s potential.

“It seemed obvious to anyone looking at the phone — there was no way that it would be relegated to just a consumer device,” Alsbury told me. “Apple being a computer company meant that they had everything they needed to make it a computing platform. It seemed obvious that the evolution of the iPhone would make it into a computing device. Motion and visual graphics didn’t exist in this form before.”

So Becerra, Alsbury, and the others talked about the idea until they finally formed MeLLmo as a stealth LLC in January 2008. Their goal was to create a touch-based data visualization app exclusively for the iPhone. But as they were just getting started, the team knew they’d have to overcome a host of obstacles, including convincing people their idea was sound. The biggest problem they had was that no software development kit existed for iPhone apps. The App Store didn’t even exist yet to distribute those apps.

From the outset, the team made two bets: One, that business users would eventually prefer using iPhones over BlackBerrys. And two, Apple would soon offer a distribution model for other applications.

Development and launch

The MeLLmo team started recruiting on the sly that January. Alsbury said the company chose the slogan “Bringing social networking 3.0 to web 2.0″ because, like the company name, it would not hint at what the company was building. Many developers and business folks saw the slogan and contacted the company about job opportunities. When the prospective employees came in, the team revealed they were actually working on a business app for iPhone. Some of the earliest prospects jumped at the idea and still work for the company today.

The most critical early hire for the company was Alex Schaefer, a part-time developer who created the popular app ApolloIM, which ran on jailbroken iPhones. Jailbreaking your iPhone opens the door to installing unapproved applications and using the phone on other carriers. Early in the life of the iPhone, jailbreaking was especially popular because Apple didn’t yet offer the ability to install apps, and people understood that the iPhone could do much more than it was allowed to do. Schaefer’s ability to work around Apple’s limitations was important for MeLLmo, since the team wanted to build an app without an SDK.

“[Schaefer] in himself is an interesting story,” Alsbury said. “He wasn’t even a full-fledged developer. He was a poetry major with two years of computer science. But we needed someone to take some of these early ideas and see what was even possible. We needed someone who could jailbreak and start messing around. When we hired him, we gave him the title of ‘iPro.’”

So about month before Apple released its first iOS SDK on March 6, 2008, MeLLmo was already hard at work figuring out app development and how its data visualization app would function. Becerra describes the earliest months of development as “difficult” because there were no rules and no playbook for creating these apps. There were only a few apps for the iPhone at that point, so designing an interface with touchscreen functionality was tedious.

“It was really a new paradigm,” Becerra said. “To us, the hardest part was to forget about the past and center on a new platform and new ways of thinking.”

The company remained in stealth mode until May 19, 2009. Just before coming out, the team met with bloggers, journalists, and analysts to preview the product, which MeLLmo expected to sell directly to corporations. They were met with lots of skeptical looks and some “well-known bloggers” told then it wouldn’t work.

“They told us we wouldn’t be successful unless we were on BlackBerry,” Alsbury said. “They said ‘No enterprise is going to buy software institutionally for the iPhone.’ They didn’t believe anyone would buy iPhone software.”

When the company finally launched Roambi for iPhone, many businesses complimented the intuitiveness of the design and realized that touch-based data visualization could add some pizzazz to sales calls, presentations, and meetings. Those businesses weren’t exactly lining up to get their hands on Roambi at first, but the response was generally positive. In fact, business users were slowly ditching their BlackBerrys in favor of more powerful and versatile iPhones and starting to find ways to use it for work and play alike.

“We were surprised how fast companies were buying into it at the beginning,” Becerra said.

Page two: How the iPad changed everything and where the company is headed next

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The main coders working on HP’s Enyo  — the HTML5 application framework first seen in the HP TouchPad — have jumped ship and are headed to Google, the Verge reports.

This puts a huge dent in HP’s plan to open source webOS, which admittedly was weak from the start. HP only announced that it was opening up webOS after it failed to find a suitable buyer. We reported that HP tried to sell its Palm assets for $1.2 billion — the same price it initially paid for them.

Sources tell the Verge that the departing crew wrote “99 percent of the code” for Enyo, and that also includes Matt McNulty, who headed the Enyo team. HP planned to release the first version of Open webOS later this year, but without the Enyo folks I can’t really see that happening. (In a statement to the Verge, HP said everything was on schedule.)

HP announced earlier this week that it’s laying off 27,000 employees — which likely gave the Enyo crew the impetus to move on.

The news doesn’t mean that we’ll start seeing great webOS design influences and features in Android. The Enyo team was instead focused on making it easier for developers to create apps for the platform. It’s still unclear where they’ll end up at Google, but it will likely be either the Android team (though Android apps are built in Java, not HTML5) or Google Chrome (which could use a robust HTMl5 app framework).

Facebook CFO David Ebersman

The screw-up resulted in a major disappointment in Facebook’s stock debut: The stock’s 15 percent decline since the IPO last Friday may not in itself be tragic. But worse, lawsuits are flying saying that legal guidelines weren’t followed. And there’s the sad fact that regular mom-and-pop investors were apparently left with the more losses on average than large institutions who got privileged information. This all was aggravated by a separate annoyance: glitches in the Nasdaq stock market trading process, which caused delays in trade and cancel confirmations, among other things.

However, based on a number of interviews VentureBeat has had with observers and other sources close to the process, it’s apparent that Facebook itself may be most to blame for the fallout. Facebook chose to be more furtive in public announcements about its business than it was in private talks with large investors.

The “update”

The decisive action by Facebook came on May 9, three days into the “roadshow,” which is the time when Facebook and its bankers visit major investors in hopes of getting them to buy the IPO stock. On that day, Facebook’s executives, led by chief financial officer David Ebersman, signed off on new language in the company’s updated IPO prospectus.

In that May 9 update, Ebersman decided to use vague language when describing how the company’s second quarter was looking. It was extremely understated, considering what we would later find out. According to the filing, specifically on page 57, Facebook said that it was experiencing the same trend in the second quarter that it had seen in the first quarter, that growth in “daily active users” (DAUs) was increasing more rapidly than the growth in ad impressions, driven by many users’ shift to mobile devices.

The exact wording is here:

Based upon our experience in the second quarter of 2012 to date, the trend we saw in the first quarter of DAUs increasing more rapidly than the increase in number of ads delivered has continued. We believe this trend is driven in part by increased usage of Facebook on mobile devices where we have only recently begun showing an immaterial number of sponsored stories in News Feed, and in part due to certain pages having fewer ads per page as a result of product decisions.

Now Facebook is generally growing quickly — and its ads are growing, even if they are growing more slowly on mobile — and so this update itself didn’t send any alarm bells to most investors, and it shouldn’t have. After all, Facebook had long warned about this mobile problem, ever since the first IPO prospectus filing on Feb 1, that revenues could be negatively affected by its huge mobile growth, because monetizing mobile hadn’t been proven. (Indeed, VentureBeat was the first to report this on the day of the IPO filing.)

Facebook’s lawyers may, in the wake of the legal mess it has gotten into, try to argue that the new May 9 language about “DAU’s increasing more rapidly than the increase in number of ads delivered” pointed to something more significant than Facebook had released before. But the reality is that this wording was just too vague to be construed by normal people as meaning anything more than what had already been mentioned before. The sad thing is, if this was such an important update for Facebook, its team must have argued about it a hundred times before publishing. So why was it written as though it was purposefully trying to obfuscate? More on that in a sec.

First, there’s been sloppy reporting about the May 9 update, and it’s worth setting the record straight. The WSJ, the leading publication for many bankers, for example on Thursday implied that the May 9 update was the first time Facebook disclosed that the mobile risks “may negatively effect results.” But the WSJ is wrong. That wording had been in Facebook’s S-1s from the beginning. Take a look for yourself at the original February filing. (See pages 5 , 13, and 46.) The fact is, there is nothing within the S-1 update on May 9 that would give normal investors the sense that there had been a material change about Facebook’s revenue prospects.

The private guidance bombshell

The more significant point is, on the next day, May 10, Facebook made private statements to a select group of banking analysts, telling them the revenue prospects had changed. This was arguably material information at the time — a big no-no.

Here’s what happened on May 10: Facebook got on the phone with a select group of 21 analysts, including analysts of its IPO underwriters, and briefed them on what was really going on behind the S-1 update. Facebook executives guided those analysts through much more explicit material than the S-1 update contained, according to our sources, saying that Facebook now expected the second quarter to be on the “low end of the range” of the financial guidance Facebook had previously given them. VentureBeat has confirmed this wording with someone with direct knowledge of those talks.

Of course, this new information prompted the analysts to take a look at the guidance Facebook had previously given to them, then estimate where the “low end” was, and revise their own forecasts accordingly. They did this beginning on May 10, as disclosed by leaks to Reuters. The banks now forecasted 30.4 percent year-on-year 2012 revenue growth on average, instead of the 36.7 percent growth previously expected. (Compare that to 2011, when Facebook’s revenue grew 87.9 percent year-on-year to $3.71 billion.)

Let’s back up for a second. When Facebook gave its original guidance to analysts in March and April, at the start of the IPO process, it was on firm legal ground in doing so. Indeed, this guidance is a normal part of the process, described in good detail by Henry Blodget, himself a former Wall Street analyst, in his good post about the IPO process Tuesday. He covers a lot of ground that I won’t go over again here.

However, Facebook’s subsequent guidance to analysts, made on May 10, “to the low end” of the earlier guidance, was not on firm legal ground, because this was clearly new information not already in the S-1. It was also clearly different than the general guidance made originally to analysts.

The bankers’ downgrades beginning May 10 were significant, as we previously reported, and were shared with a limited circle of investors. The bank analysts also released lower earnings-per-share estimates, as well as lower revenue forecasts for the second quarter. The estimates ranged between 5.4 percent to 7.3 percent lower revenue for the second quarter than previously — very significant adjustments.

Here are the second quarter revenue estimates, as leaked to Reuters:

• Morgan Stanley — $1.111 bln (new) from $1.175 bln (old)
• Bank of America — $1.100 bln (new) from $1.166 bln (old)
• JPMorgan — $1.096 bln (new) from $1.182 bln (old)
• Goldman Sachs — $1.125 bln (new) from $ 1.207 bln (old)

This obviously was material information for investors. Following the changes, Facebook and its bankers, led by Morgan Stanley, were forced to respond to questions from key clients. We see that these key investors, once informed by these roadshows and reports, started to slash the number of shares they intended to buy. One example was Los Angeles-based Capital Research & Management which cut the number of shares it wanted after talking with the company and underwriters, according to the WSJ.

But not every potential investor was privy to these revised reports.

The mood of investors in IPO stock

Unprecedented territory

So lets summarize why this was so problematic. SEC guidelines prohibit a company from issing information that is materially different from that already in its S-1 prospectus. So what constitutes “material” information? The definition of material information is that “which would be likely to affect a stock’s price once it becomes known to the public.”

Now we’re hearing from sources that Facebook is arguing that guidelines around what constitutes materiality is disputed when it comes to the issue of financial guidance. Facebook could arguably say it didn’t know if its new guidance on May 10 was going to end up being material or not. Indeed, the Facebook IPO is unprecedented because this sort of change in guidance has never happened before, at least it has never happened this late in the IPO process. But precisely since that is the case, because Facebook was on shaky unknown ground, because SEC guidelines haven’t been tested specific around this particular area, Facebook should have made doubly sure to err on the side of caution.

Indeed, a source at one of the underwriting banks we talked with could not give us a clear reason why Facebook should not have updated the S-1 with firmer trend data.

(For more on this topic of materiality, see Bloomberg’s reporting on this. It’s good as far as it goes, but misses clear reference to the fact that Facebook chose a weaker statement in its S-1 update than what it gave to analysts afterward.)

Why did Facebook do it?

We’re seeing all kinds of reporting about how the IPO legal process is a mess, and it’s true that IPO guidelines are frustrating. SEC guidelines do not allow analysts to print anything between when an IPO prospectus is filed until 40 days after the IPO. Yet they’re allowed to speak verbally to a select few of their clients. The bizarre rules are a result of previous regulation, created a decade ago, after abuses made by investment bankers in written reports during the dot com era. These rules may need to be reformed, but Facebook needs to play by them for the time being.

So what Facebook should have done on May 9 is either update the S-1 with clearly stated quantitative data (and go forward with the IPO, and deal with the lower stock price), or else pull the IPO filing altogether and wait for a better quarter.

So why didn’t Facebook do either of those two things? Well, that’s the $100 billion question. One can only imagine the huge amount of pressure that the company was feeling. Facebook, a web site that prides itself on being able to see real-time data about users, traffic and advertising, clearly knew how the quarter was progressing. The roadshow came halfway through the quarter, and Facebook’s update on May 9 was clearly a sign that it realized it needed to say something about its deteriorating revenue situation.

Now the following is just speculation, but it’s possible Facebook felt that if the May 9 update were made more forcefully, the wording could torpedo the healthy IPO it had put so much work into (indeed, the CFO had been preparing for the IPO for at least a year).

Facebook bear Sam Hamadeh

This is interpretation taken by Sam Hamadeh, chief executive of PrivCo, a company that issues research about private companies. He says Facebook should have been clearer about the shift to mobile users, and tried to quantify the potential revenue in some way. Instead, he says, Facebook executives — led by Sheryl Sandberg and David Ebersman — initially appeared during the roadshow to blame the first quarter drop mostly on seasonal trends, and he bases this on sources he’s talked with who were present during the roadshow. He takes the skeptical view, which is that Facebook executives buckled under the pressure, and decided to try to sweep the seriousness of the mobile ad revenue situation under the rug, at least when it came to the S-1. It’s true that Hamadeh has been consistently bearish on Facebook, almost predictably so, and so it’s important to keep in mind he presents just one view.

Whether or not this is true — that Facebook decided to say the bare minimum because it feared the consequences of doing otherwise — it’s the events that followed that made Facebook’s fumble on May 9 look so devastating.

The subsequent analyst downgrades — and the realization that mobile problems were bigger than expected — suddenly shed a new light on a series of previous Facebook actions on the mobile front. And this light doesn’t make Facebook look so good.

Huh, Facebook was really obsessed with mobile

Instagram, for example. Back on April 9, already in the second quarter, Facebook announced a deal to acquire mobile photo-sharing site Instagram for $1 billion. Reports emerged afterward documenting that Zuckerberg had moved to seal the deal in a matter of days — almost unprecedented speed. Could this have been driven by panic reaction to internal metrics? The motivation driving the Instagram purchase is relevant because the site is so important in mobile. Facebook clearly had seen its own mobile usage growing quickly, and in particular had noticed Instagram’s mobile photo-sharing usage becoming a bigger and bigger portion of all stories posted on Facebook. This tied directly into the negative mobile trend in revenues, since photos are so hard to monetize with ads.

And then there’s the Facebook acquisition of AOL mobile patents that came on April 23 for $550 million. Was this another panicked move, driven by a growing mobile problem, the seriousness of which only Facebook was aware of?

That’s just the beginning. There are more questions than answers raised by the timeline released by PrivCo’s Hamadeh Tuesday evening on this site (scroll down).

So why did Facebook become so bullish?

Now forward-wind to Wednesday, May 16, two days before the IPO. Facebook chose to increase the IPO share offering by 25 percent. These 83.8 million extra shares came from insiders, including folks like Peter Thiel and Jim Breyer, who are on Facebook’s board, and who are almost definitely privy to the company’s true financial position. The two more than doubled the number of shares they intended to sell. The private equity arm of Goldman Sachs, one of the lead underwriters, doubled the number of shares it offered for sale. Of course, no intent can be drawn from these actions alone. There may be other reasons they chose to release the extra shares. But it looks really bad given that Facebook executives now knew that most U.S. investors weren’t fully privy to Facebook’s real, downgraded revenue outlook.

“This stinks to high heaven,” says Hamadeh, of the extra share allotment.

Facebook also set the number of shares it planned to offer to normal mom-and-pop investors — known as retail investors — to about 25 percent, much higher than is normal for IPOs. The cap was also raised for individual investors, so that they could now own 5,000 shares, up from 500 shares.

Finally, Facebook CFO Ebersman decided to set the price of the IPO at $38, at the very top of the price range, which itself had already been increased from an earlier range. This, even though Morgan Stanley has since made statements that the $38 price took into account the lower revenue guidance data.

Confused? You should be. The underwriting banks and Facebook have stayed mum on further commentary.

The big fall

The rest of the story is known: Since trading started Friday, Facebook’s shares have fallen hard. They opened at $42, and then fell and have languished in the low $30’s. Facebook shares closed at $33 yesterday, and they’re down again today, at around $31.50. Facebook had misjudged demand, and it now has a lot of angry investors. Facebook faces multiple investigations and lawsuits. Investors filed suit Wednesday in Manhattan federal court and in San Mateo county superior court in California, alleging that the company and underwriters failed to properly disclose changes to analysts forecasts made at the underwriting banks. Facebook faces claims that could be at least $1 billion or more.

To add insult to injury, as less-privileged investors complained about their investments going south, it emerged Wednesday that the main underwriting banks made $100 million in trades from the IPO, over and above the $176 million fee they charged for the process.

Facebook declined to comment for this story.

Yes, the legal process around IPOs is incredibly frustrating, and urgently needs to be looked at closely for ways to be reformed. But it’s also clear Facebook should have been more forthcoming about its real financial fundamentals. If it had, it could have avoided this mess.

[Chart image credit: Yahoo; Mood image: Kevin Dooley, Flickr]

A few years ago I stopped for six hours in Amsterdam en route to a conference in Cairo. I took the train from Schipol airport into the city, picked up a ride on a canal boat, dawdled through the ancient streets by the Oude Kerk, and toured the Anne Frank house. But did I see the best of Amsterdam? Hard to say.

Yahoo, which seems to be on a bit of a roll in the past few weeks, releasing “killer” mobile browsers and reinvigorating Flickr groups, released TimeTraveler for iPhone and iPod Touch today. With TimeTraveler, I’d have had a much better chance of seeing the best of Amsterdam that fit in my 6-hour slice.

Using TimeTraveler is easy: input your destination, your starting point, and the time you have available. TimeTraveler will do the rest, finding points of interest, tourist destinations, and historic monuments. It will then map them into an itinerary tailored to your available time and desired route, which can be shared with friends via email, Facebook, or Twitter. Yahoo calls it “timed travel” … hence the app’s name.

Part of the technology behind TimeTraveler is, interestingly, Flickr. Apparently, photos uploaded to Flickr with date, time, and geographical metadata are used in the calculation of what destinations you can expect to visit within a set period of time. As Shouvick Mukherjee, a vice-president for Yahoo India told The Business Standard, Time Traveler “computes through Flickr images which people have uploaded in the past and tells him the destinations he would visit, say in an hour.”

Another clever feature is the ability to save your trips in the cloud. Once you publish your trips to Yahoo, they are accessible online as a permanent record of your adventure.

Available cities include London, New York, San Francisco, Bangkok, Rome, Paris, and 23 more. More are undoubtedly on the way. Actual time travel, alas, is not.

Image credit: Dave Highbury/Flickr

Rogue Amoeba, creator of the Airfoil Speakers Touch, an app that lets you send and receive audio from an iPhone to many devices, was removed from Apple’s app store today. The reason? Apple didn’t say.

Airfoil Speakers Touch acted similarly to Apple’s own Airplay feature in iOS 5. The feature lets you stream audio and video from your iPhone or iPad to a high-definition television or speakers using AppleTV — the set top box that accepts the stream. Unlike the Airfoil Speaker Touch, Airplay does not let you receive content from other devices to your phone. It does, however, directly compete with the product, making it safe to assume that’s why Apple didn’t want the app in its store.

Apple contacted the company two days ago with notice that the app was going to be taken down but gave no explanation as to why, according to Rogue Amoeba. The company has filed an appeal with Apple’s App Review Board, and Rogue Amoeba insists that the app was — to the best of its knowledge — compliant with Apple’s developer guidelines.

We have not recently submitted a new version for approval, so this removal was not connected to any pending review caused by an update. Indeed, the removed version (3.0.0) already went through the review process, and was approved back in April. Further, Airfoil Speakers Touch has been repeatedly approved by Apple’s review process since its introduction way back in 2009.

Apple has the right to add and remove any apps in the App Store. This means Rogue Amoeba wouldn’t be able to sue Apple or otherwise seek to force its app into the store.

This goes to show that while mobile application developing has become a very lucrative business for the likes of Instagram and FourSquare, it’s still a very young and vulnerable business. An app with too much success that winds up threatening Apple could have its business pulled right from under it.

via The Verge; Amoeba image via Shutterstock

Facebook’s Timeline is here to stay. And although not everyone loves this new layout, we can agree that the option to display a big image at the top of your profile is pretty cool — especially if it lets you show off your favorite video games.

We’re releasing seven days’ worth of artwork, each with a different theme, that you can use to decorate your Facebook profile:

• Sunday: The Modern Era
• Monday: Modern-Retro
  
• Tuesday: The Indies
  
• Wednesday: The 8/16-bit Era
  
• Thursday: Social and Mobile
  
• Friday: Arcade
• Saturday: Future Games

Today’s batch of covers features 10 addicting games from mobile devices and social networks. Click on the thumbnails to enlarge the pictures, then right-click (or ctrl-click for Macs) them and hit “save image as” to save to your computer.

Angry Birds Space

Bejeweled Blitz

Plants vs. Zombies

CityVille

The Sims Social

Fruit Ninja

Hidden Chronicles

Words With Friends

FarmVille

Doodle Jump

Check back tomorrow for more Timeline covers.

Nvidia’s business will grow thanks to growing acceptance of Tegra 3, a mobile processor that combines Nvidia’s high-end graphics with five computing brains. A leader in PC graphics, Nvidia has reinvented itself in the last five years to become a major player in mobile graphics chips. It competes with huge rivals such as Intel and Qualcomm, and it is holding its own on that front, Huang said.

“It stands to reason that because mobile and cloud computing are new paradigms, new computing paradigms would have to be invented,” Huang said. “There’s a new growth market in mobile.”

So far, Nvidia’s partners have shipped two phones with Tegra 3, including the HTC 1x and the Fujitsu Aero. This year, Nvidia expects that 30 Tegra designs will hit the market this year, compared to 15 last year, said Mike Rayfield (pictured), general manager of the Tegra business. In 2011, the Tegra 2 designs were used in 34 tablets and 67 smartphones. And that has generated a $400 million revenue business to date for Nvidia.

The Tegra 3 chip, which is five times more powerful in computing and three times more powerful in graphics than the

Nvidia has also just received AT&T’s certification for Nvidia’s LTE data modem chip. That means it could be used in phones that access AT&T’s LTE high-speed data network. That could help the company get off the ground in the U.S. market. The modem chips are built by Icera, a startup that Nvidia recently acquired.

Rayfield said that Tegra will be getting into sub-$300 tablets and smartphones. And the company is making progress in China. Rayfield said that five Tegra designs debuted in China last year, and 18 more will debut in China this year. Two carriers embraced Tegra phones in a big way last year, but dozens are expected to do so this year, Rayfield said.

Last week, Nvidia started talking about Kai, a mobile platform that could be the heart of an Android tablets that cost less than $199. And Nvidia has high hopes for Windows RT, the ARM-based software platform that Microsoft will release for tablet computers later this year. Those tablets are expected to give Apple a run for its money, finally.

“Mobility is going to be the most significant part of this new market,” Huang said. “These aren’t PCs. They don’t connect to printers. People don’t worry about that. It’s a different device from a PC.”

Nvidia had a tough time in the past quarter because it couldn’t get enough high-end 28-nanometer wafers from its contract chip manufacturers such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. The demand for chips was there, but Nvidia couldn’t get enough chips out to meet that demand, Huang said.

Nvidia is pushing mobile apps that make use of its chips. The Tegra Zone on Android devices has been downloaded more than 3 million times. Rayfield also showed a cool-looking game dubbed Dark Meadow: The Pact working on a Tegra 3 device. It had high-end 3D graphics and realistic lighting and shadows.

By next year, Nvidia expects to launch two new chips: one code-named Wayne for the high end and another code-named Grey for the low end.

Facebook has launched a stand-alone camera application for the iPhone to help people share photos faster and easier on the massive social network, the company announced today.

Although Facebook paid $1 billion to acquire photo-sharing service Instagram, the Facebook Camera app seems focused on bulk uploading your photos from your iPhone to Facebook rather than helping you re-touch and add effects to photos. The new app does let you edit, crop, rotate, and add filters if you so choose. (We think i is a little weird to include filters when that’s Instagram’s big focus.) Besides uploading photos, you can also use the app to browse your friends’ Facebook images.

The app appears to be a response to Google+, which recently released beautiful new photo-centric apps for iPhone and Android. Google+ hasn’t caught on with users for status updates, so it hopes it get people to come for photo-sharing. Facebook isn’t going to just sit back, apparently.

However, the app also has clear ties to Instagram. Facebook Camera was likely in development before Facebook decided to buy Instagram, and it even looks a fair amount like Instagram. Since the Instagram deal has not closed yet, that team did not work on this app, but Facebook was clearly influenced by it. Once the Instagram deal does close, we expect the lines to blur even more.

You can download the new app here.

And you can watch a video outlining the Facebook Camera app below:

Photo credit: Facebook

Google just made Android an even more compelling option for app developers looking to make a buck. The company today is launching in-app subscriptions on Google Play, more than a year after it first brought in-app billing to Android.

By standardizing in-app billing, Google made it easier for developers to charge for virtual goods, upgrades, and the like. Now with the addition of subscriptions, consumers can opt into monthly or annual recurring payments, allowing them to keep getting content without the hassle of purchasing over and over.

“For users, Google Play provides a familiar and convenient purchase experience, highlighting subscription details such as price and billing interval before continuing with purchases,” Google Play product manager Ibrahim Elbouchikhi wrote in a blog post this morning. “After the transaction, Google Play manages recurring billing and keeps users informed of new charges, sending them an email with each renewal. At any time, users can visit My Apps in the Play Store app to view their subscriptions and cancel any subscription as needed.”

Google says it’s also offering an HTTP-based API that will let developers extend subscriptions beyond Android devices. You’ll be able to subscribe to something on Google Play, then get access to that same content via a desktop web browser. This is one pretty big difference from Apple’s in-app billing, though it remains to be seen how much developers will jump on-board.

In an interview with VentureBeat, Matt Carona, VP of product at the concert streaming app company Qello, said that the in-app subscriptions will be simple to implement, and “from a consumer standpoint it makes everything really easy.” Developers get a way to keep people paying, and consumers won’t have to bother with making as many manual purchases.

Photo via Tsahi Levent-Levi/Flickr

Google has updated its Google+ app for Android with beautiful new flourishes and the ability to start a video chat Hangout on the go, the company announced today.

The app update makes a lot of sense in light of Google+’s new photo-centric iPhone app and the service’s focus on wanting to be the next Flickr. Google clearly knows it can’t win directly competing against Facebook on status updates so it will try to get people to use Google+ for other things, namely video chat Hangouts and photo-sharing.

My favorite feature of the bunch is Hangouts and that feature has been nicely updated today by letting you start hangouts directly from your phone. Before, you could attend Hangouts in progress but could not create new ones from your phone. To try it out, tap “Hangout” in the navigation ribbon, add a few folks, and tap “Start.”

As for the layout, there is now full-screen media in your river, conversations that fade in, and the ability to +1 content instantly.

The app also adds the following items:

• A navigation ribbon that slides in and out, providing quick access to everything
• The ability to download photos directly from Google+, and turn them into wallpaper
• The chance to edit posts inline, in case you make any mistakes while on the go

The new app can be downloaded now from the Google Play store.

Photos: Google

The Fullerton, Calif.-based company is creating a customizable loyalty program that restaurants can use to track and reward customers. Users can access a mobile app that allows them to check in and earn rewards without having to carry around paper loyalty cards.

“We’re replacing the ‘buy 10 get 1 free’ punchcards and working with restaurants to reward their customers faster to keep engaging them to come back more frequently,” said Jean Chong, chief executive and co-founder of Starbates, in an interview with VentureBeat.

Acquiring and retaining customers has been a broken process for restaurants for years, Chong said. Restaurants lose customers every day and they don’t know why. They have no way of reaching people once they walk out the door. But using a mobile-based loyalty program that gives customers meaningful rewards for showing up will enable restaurants to have a pulse on their business. They can mine the customer data to find their best customers and perform analytics on them. The restaurants can sign up for the program in a matter of minutes.

The customer simply scans a QR code (pictured below) at the cash register. The restaurant can recognize the customer and issue a reward on the spot if the customer has earned it. At one Quiznos, Chong said the customer loyalty went up because the chain sandwich shop gave $2 off to each customer for every second visit.

The company uses a QR code system to reward customers and provide data to restaurants. Chong said the company has a leg up in getting distribution because it has exclusive ties to Premier Food Safety, a business-to-business restaurant service company that she founded. That will give Starbates access to as many as 10,000 restaurants. Acquiring a new restaurant will be less than $100. Starbates will offer a free membership at first and then charge anywhere from $50 to $200 a month for subscriptions.

Starbates’ beta test is complete, and restaurants will now be able to sign up on their own. Starbates can offer double rewards — rewards that include movie tickets, cash prizes, and more. The company has iPhone, Android, and web versions of its app live.

The company was founded earlier this year and has five employees. It is looking for a seed round now but has been incubated by StartEngine, the Los Angeles tech startup accelerator. Rivals include LevelUp, Mogl, Stampt, Punchd, FiveStarsCard, and Bellycard. But with Starbates, customers don’t have to link a credit card to their profile. Anyone with a smartphone can participate.

Amid RIM’s seemingly-unending struggles, the company has seen a light: BlackBerry Messenger.

RIM says that use of its proprietary instant message service has spiked from 5.3 to 55 millions users over the past three years, even as the Blackberry’s user base and market share have been eroded by the likes of the iPhone and Android, as The Wall Street Journal reports.

The continued success of BBM gave former RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie an idea: RIM could capitalize on its popularity by licensing the software to competitors.

But the problems with this plan were immediately clear. Letting third-party companies use the service would undoubtedly increase BBM usage numbers, but it would also remove one of the BlackBerry’s most key differentiators.

That argument is a large part of why RIM’s new CEO Thorsten Heins axed the plan. RIM won’t be doing any licensing deals under his watch.

But where does that leave BBM? Solely in the hands of BlackBerry 10, it’s next-generation OS set for  release later this year. But with competition from Apple’s iMessage and a bevy of other iOS and Android messaging apps at all-time high, RIM is going to have a hard time attracting users back to BBM no matter what operating system its running on.

Finnish phone maker Nokia has shrunk the size of its usually huge Nokia World event into several small events and moved up the date of the first event by a few weeks, the company announced today in a blog post.

This is a major make-or-break year for Nokia, with its Windows Phone handsets rolling out across the world and trying to break through the iPhone-and-Android landscape. So it’s frustrating that the company would not go big or go home like Apple, Google, and Microsoft have chosen to do. A big Nokia event each year held the promise of new headsets and could keep Nokia fans intrigued. Now it will be a much more subdued affair.

“Instead of a single, large-scale event as we have had in years past, we will run a number of smaller, more intimate events with specific audiences in mind,” Nokia blogger Heidi Lemmetyinen wrote. “Think less CES, more SXSW.”

The Nokia World event was originally scheduled for September 25-26, but now the first “small” event will be held September 5-6. This will be an invitation-only event that “will cater primarily to our operator and retail partners.”

Not only is it disheartening that this is a strict invite-only event over a big affair that attracts Nokia fans the world over, but it also causes a headache for anyone who already bought plane tickets for its previously scheduled times. Nokia, we expect better.

Photo credit: Nokia

Tim Cook has yet to launch a revolutionary new product since he took command of Apple last August, but, little by little, he’s been shaping the company in his own way — moving it beyond the idol worship of Steve Jobs, and towards more transparency and efficiency.

In a new magazine piece, Fortune dove into Cook’s Apple and discovered that, even though things are now different from the Jobs era, change isn’t necessarily a bad thing for Apple.

“In general, Apple has become slightly more open and considerably more corporate,” wrote Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky. “In some cases Cook is taking action that Apple sorely needed and employees badly wanted. It’s almost as if he is working his way through a to-do list of long-overdue repairs the previous occupant (Jobs) refused to address for no reason other than obstinacy.”

For all of his creative genius, Steve Jobs wasn’t always the easiest person to work with. Cook, not being a product guru, is instead taking more time to listen to investors and Apple employees. Fortune recounts how he attended an investor meeting in February: Cook simply listened (without even checking e-mail), and then gave controlled remarks at the end of the session. That’s a stark contrast to Jobs, who rarely attended investor meetings.

Cook is also less of a terrifying presence to Apple employees, according to Fortune he’s taken to dining with random Apple workers in the company’s cafeteria. Like a good shrink, Cook seems to be listening more to Apple investors and employees, though that could mean some changes in the company’s famously engineering and design-oriented approach to building products.

“I’ve been told that any meeting of significance is now always populated by project management and global-supply management,” Max Paley, a former Apple engineering VP, told Fortune. “When I was there, engineering decided what we wanted, and it was the job of product management and supply management to go get it. It shows a shift in priority.”

We likely won’t see just how different Tim Cook’s version of Apple is until the company unveils the iPhone 5 (or whatever it’s called). We’ve heard that Jobs was actively involved with designing the next iPhone, but now it’s entirely up to Cook to make sure that vision becomes a reality.

Normally, accepting a blood-colored treat from a disheveled, fly-ridden vagrant means a flying dive into the nearest Starbucks for safety, but this time around calls for special restraint: Social gaming giant Zynga non-accidentally released a 40-(dead)man flock of zombies into both San Francisco and New York City today promoting its upcoming slice-n-dicer Zombie Swipeout for iOS mobile devices.

Kicking off during the magically empty space between your bleary morning commute and takeout lunch break, the shambling street team will spend three hours on a “blood drive” involving handing out mint-flavored blood pops (calm that queasy stomach: the pops contain just lime juice, mint, and cane sugar), a lot of moaning and grasping motions, and a creeping trek through each city’s downtown area.

Starting at 11 a.m. PST in San Francisco, the horde will loop around Market Street while detouring on Drumm Street, South Park, and Union Square Park for maximum freak-out factor for us normals. Need a map? Right here.

Manhattan’s rotting crew hunts for candyless victims at 10:30 a.m. EST within Union Square Park, Madison Square Park, Bryant Park, and Central Park’s Columbus Circle. Get a map here.

Zombie Swipeout, developed by Game Doctors, is a “spiritual successor” to the tower-defense title ZombieSmash. Players use a variety of sharp and blunt pieces of metal to bludgeon, slice, and chop flying zombies while obeying a single, simple rule: Don’t hit Joey. Zynga says Swipeout will hit markets globally “in the coming weeks.”

Familiarize yourself with Swipeout’s denizens in the gallery below, and make sure your Z-day kit remains locked up tight at home for these friendly freaks.

Bump has done it again. The simple app that lets you “bump” phones together to swap data and files is now letting you do the same thing with your phone and a computer.

Starting today, you can bump photos from your phone to your computer. Just navigate to the Bump URL, gently tap the phone to the computer’s spacebar, and the photos will magically appear on the computer.

“Photo sharing is really popular,” said Bump co-founder and CEO Dave Lieb in a phone call with VentureBeat. “We’ve had, like, 600 million photos shared by our users in the past two years alone.”

And when features are that popular, the Bup team’s goal becomes making the feature as simple as possible. “You don’t want to deal with email or putting them online; you just want to bump them over,” Lieb said.

Would-be Bumpers don’t have to install any new software on the computer. Once the initial “bump” happens, you’ll be able to save the photos to your computer’s hard drive with one click. Or you can get a shortlink to share the pics anywhere you want. Bump will host the images free for an indefinite period of time.

“It’s a really simple product, but from what we’ve heard from our users, it’s something they’re going to really love,” Lieb said.

“When I tell tech people about this feature, they say, ‘Why don’t I just use iCloud or Dropbox?’” he said. “But I’m a technologist, and I don’t even know how to figure iCloud out. People don’t take the time to set up even these automated things… This is a little bit more effort, but it’s just more cognitively simple.”

That kind of simplicity has become a core value for the startup. When Bump relaunched its mobile app back in February, it had pared the whole thing down to just the most two popular features. That bare-bones approach made it easy for the team to focus on making those two features better, prettier, and easier for people to use. The phone-to-desktop bump is an extension of that.

Lieb said that in the future, the Bump team might consider the phone-to-desktop bump for other types of files, such as videos or MP3s. “Certainly, it’s technically possible,” he said. “What we want to focus on is the really big pain points, and moving photos was the biggest one. People were sick of emailing photos to themselves or trying to find their syncing cable.”

And Bump has a lot more waiting in the wings. “A couple things we’re working on now are really cool,” said Lieb, “cooler than some of the things we’ve launched so far.” We can’t wait to find out (and tell you) more soon.

Image courtesy of DaBoost, Shutterstock

That’s about to change. We’ve seen the next step — and it’s a really awesome, significant step — in mobile browsers, and it was made by none other than Yahoo.

Today, Yahoo launches Axis, a new way of getting around the web, both on mobile and in your typical desktop browser. Axis is available as a standalone web browser on iOS devices now (other platforms such as Windows Phone and Android are coming soon) and as an extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.

Yes, the tech press loves to hound Yahoo about its executive troubles and its oldster status, but the fact remains that the company still employs some of the best, brightest engineers I’ve met, and it is very much focused on creating bigger, better mobile products.

To explain Axis, we have to start with search — something that many have assumed Yahoo had given up. “Far from being outside the search game, we’re very much invested in it,” said Ethan Batraski, Yahoo’s director of product management for search, in a meeting with VentureBeat last week.

Bing has lately powering the Yahoo portal’s web search, but this has freed up Yahoo’s intellectual and engineering workforce “to rethink search… as a human experience in three steps,” said Batraski.

Those three steps — the query, the results, and the destination page — have long been locked in a lather-rinse-repeat loop, with users navigating back to a results page when the destination page is lacking, or refining their queries when the results page seems off.

“No matter how much Google or Bing tries to innovate on that experience, it’s pretty much the same way it’s been for the past decade,” said Batraski. And on small-screened phones and tablets with non-optimal wireless connections, that experience is as painful as a first-world technophile could imagine. Axis does something different, bringing queries closer to the objects they represent and bringing more data onto the results page for quicker, simpler, lower-bandwidth decision-making

Here’s how it works: You enter your search term, and Yahoo does some heavy lifting (not Bing-powered). You have the option of selecting a specific object that your query is related to; for example, if you search for “Roots,” Axis might give you options to refine the search for “Roots” the TV miniseries or “The Roots” the band. In that way, it’s quite similar to Google’s newly launched Knowledge Base. It can also direct you to “instant answers,” kind of like what Bing does these days.

That’s when things get really nifty. Axis serves up thumbnails and page previews as results instead of just a list of links, and the results are still available as you navigate through destination pages. Any time you need to get back to the results, you just pull down on the screen, and a horizontal slider of results from your last query appear at the top.

This is one case where a picture is worth a thousand words, so check out the images below (captured on an iPad) to get a better idea of how the mobile browser navigation works:

You can also see demo videos from Yahoo over here.

The main point is, you don’t have to go back and forth over a painfully slow connection to do normal web search; the results are just a finger-flick away at all times, and they’re stored in a convenient, visual slider that won’t hog the already small screen. It’s brilliant and long overdue.

Naturally, the browser also brings the features you’d expect from a modern app: tabbed browsing, gorgeous image search, bookmarks, social sharing options for every page, etc.

In addition to the usual suspects in mobile devices, keep an eye out for Axis on gaming consoles and smart TVs, where search and web browsing are equally painful for similar reasons.

Batraski said he got the idea while on vacation. “I was sitting in Bermuda on a chair with a margarita, and it dawns on me: There’s no real need for a results page. I’ve never been a big fan of it. So by building it into the browser, it’s the most utilitarian way of getting to content.” Six months later, the apps were built.

On feature of particular note is the desktop-to-mobile sync option for open tabs. Firefox for Android and Chrome for Android also have this feature, but until now, it hasn’t been an option for iPhone and iPad users.

That brings us to our next point: It’s absolutely fascinating to see this innovation in mobile browser tech making its debut on iOS. Mozilla has been blocked from putting its Firefox mobile browser on the iPhone and other Apple devices, and we’re pretty sure Google wouldn’t even have bothered to ask, given Apple’s history with outside mobile browsers. But for some reason, this Yahoo browser is the exception to the rule.

“Yahoo has a really good relationship with Apple,” said Batraski. “We power their weather and finance apps.” Batraski also pointed out that, while Axis for iOS uses the Safari web view API, “it’s a complete different browser, and it runs separately from Safari.”

Of course, techies will be quick to pick up and play with the mobile browser and related extensions, but what about the rest of the world?

“Any time you show something this different, it takes users time to adopt,” said Batraski. “Right now, we’re seeing a lot of traction with tech-forward users, where they really understand this makes the experience a lot more efficient.”

As for the less digitally minded masses, he said, “This is not the first time Yahoo has been in the browser business,” referring to the company’s Yahoo-tools-stuffed Firefox and Internet Explorer bundles, which currently claim “well over 100M users.” Axis will be built into Yahoo’s new browser bundles, and the company expects to see mainstream adoption start there.

Of course, any good idea begets other, eerily similar good ideas from competing companies. Batraski said he won’t be surprised to see Google or Microsoft lift the Axis interface and user experience for their own purposes. “I won’t be pissed off; I almost expect it,” he said.

“When they see it, I think they’re going to be really peeved: ‘Why didn’t I think of that’ It’s likely to cannibalize their search experience, and I don’t think they’re ready for that.”

Another interesting note is the browser’s architecture. Yahoo has been churning out some interesting mobile web-focused, Node.js-based tools called Cocktails, and it’s now clear why: The Axis team needed these tools to build the browser and extensions.

“Axis is the first fully Cocktails app we’re going to launch,” said Batraski. “We run off Manhattan as the app server, and then use the Mojito layer for a number of modular applications.”

Top image courtesy of David Hammonds, Shutterstock

Kony’s main platform, KonyOne, allows businesses to write one app that can run on multiple mobile devices. The service also caters to business-to-business and consumer-focused app building needs. The company recently launched pre-built industry-specific apps for industries such as automotive, media, and retail. Kony’s also working on a new platform for release next month, focusing on business-to-employee app building.

The company just finished its fiscal year and boasts a 200 percent growth in business. It also says it has added 30 customers in the last year, including Scottrade and Toyota.

Kony faces competition from other mobile marketing and application development companies, such as Netbiscuits, which counts Siemens and eBay as customers.

Insight Venture Partners led the $15 million round, which will help manage growth and hire new employees.

“FY2012 was another year of record growth for Kony. We made major extensions to our technology platform and application portfolio and won the business of dozens of new enterprise customers.  We also made strategic investments in operational and management infrastructure,” said Raj Koneru Kony chief executive in a statement.  ”This funding will help us continue managing the incredible growth we’re seeing in our business.”

Kony has raised close to $39 million since its launch in 2007. The company is based in Orlando, Florida.

iPhone app image via Flickr user TheMacGirl

Video game rental service GameFly revealed today its expansion into mobile game publishing for the iOS and Android platforms as well as forging a GameFly GameStore for Android later this fall.

“GameFly is dedicated to giving consumers the best experience possible and to be their single destination for console, PC, and mobile gaming needs,” GameFly co-founder Sean Spector said. “We plan to be a leading player in mobile games by launching our retail GameStore for Android and helping to fund mobile developers of all sizes to publish, promote, and sell their smartphone and tablet games.”

GameFly expects its first published title this summer, but no further info is yet available on the game’s content and genre. Is it too early to presume that all GameStore items will be prefaced with “GameFly Games Galore”?

After launching one year ago, New York City-based Sonar unveiled a major update today that makes it easier than ever to find friends and like-minded people nearby — all with the goal of becoming a “Here-Now” mobile social network.

When it launched, the free Sonar app tapped Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare data to see how you were connected to people checked into specific locations. Today, Sonar is adding a slew of new features to build on its promising start, including “Sonar Presence,” which allows the app to run in the background and automatically alert you of interesting people nearby, and “Sonar Status,” which acts like a tweet just for friends nearby.

You’ll now be able to send private messages to people from within the Sonar app, and the company tells me it will also alert you of when your actual friends are nearby.

All of the new features serve to make Sonar even more compelling, especially compared to overly-hyped people discovery apps like Highlight and Circle.

Whereas Highlight is focused on connecting you to people actually using its app, Sonar does a better job of highlighting people that you’re connected to on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Foursquare, even if they’re not using the Sonar app. It may just be a personal thing, but Sonar fits far better into how I’d like to approach people discovery. The first time I opened the newly updated Sonar app, I found people I was connected with at some of my favorite haunts. Few apps have proven their usefulness to me so quickly.

Thanks to Sonar Presence, the app is no longer limited to finding people checked into locations. Sonar is also making a bigger push now to connect you to friends, or people you may know via an acquaintance, rather than finding complete strangers. That removes a big creep factor from social discovery, and it opens the door for you to be better organized with people you actually care about.

Google released an update to its Google Search iPhone app today, adding a few small features and tweaks that should make searching faster and more intuitive. Let’s take a visual tour of what’s new in the app by searching for my favorite animal, the angora rabbit.

Cleaner design

The new app greets you with a clean search bar and just three buttons: Apps (promotes Google’s other web and iOS apps), Voice (speak your search term), and Goggles (the still wonky search-by-photo feature that only seems to recognize brand logos). Today’s Google doodle, an amazing working moog synthesizer in honor of Robert Moog’s 78th birthday, makes an appearance on the app version as an image, but unfortunately you cannot use it to make beautiful music. At the bottom of search results page is a scrollable bar listing all the available types of search, such as Places, News, Blogs, and Discussions.

Image results go big, beautiful

Grids of different-sized images are all the rage. The image results in the app fill up your iPhone screen completely (just start scrolling to lose the controls), so you can enjoy them without any pesky user interface getting in the way. Tap to open an image (pictured at the top of this article) and swipe left or right to flip through the other image search results. Tap to save an image directly to your camera roll or share it, but check the image rights before going too crazy.

Speedy and slidey

The improvement that does the most to make search faster in my opinion is the new slider. Open a search result and tabs appear at the top of the page. You can slide left to right to get back to your search results. If you want to find a specific word on a page, tap the little magnifying glass in the lower right corner. Google also says auto-compelete and page-load times are faster, but I wasn’t able to test the updated app side by side with the older version to check.

But wait, there’s more

Finally, Google is putting promotion of its other apps front and center, adding an Apps button to the main screen. Tap to bring up a list of Google’s available web and iOS apps. The web apps will open directly in the Google Search app, not Safari.

Tokyo-based mobile gaming company GREE announced today the open beta launch of its social network tool suite for iOS and Android devices.

GREE’s existing Japanese platform, which reaches 230 million players worldwide, provides developers a plethora of social features for their mobile titles, such as leaderboards, Achievements, and a friend invite/request infrastructure.

In April 2011, GREE acquired social platform OpenFeint for $104 million. In early May 2012, it bought San Francisco, Calif.-based developer Funzio for $210 million. Both purchases signified GREE’s move for a stronger international presence.

“The GREE platform has been built with the goal of creating a worldwide developer and player community,” GREE senior vice president of product Ethan Fassett said in a statement. “We believe the GREE platform offers developers the tools to deliver unique and customized games to an engaged, global player base. We are looking forward to seeing the adoption of these new mobile-social features and helping innovate the mobile games space.”

GREE plans a bilingual English and Japanese launch of its platform in over 60 games by September 2012.

London-based developer Mind Candy also announced the upcoming release of two new Moshi Monster titles using GREE’s platform in the last quarter of 2012. The kid-friendly monster-collecting game touts more than 60 million registered users since its April 2008 release.

“Our fans love tablets and smartphones, so we’re really excited to take our much loved characters and stories to these platforms,” Mind Candy founder Michael Smith said. “GREE has achieved phenomenal success, and we’re looking forward to working with them on these two games.”

If you use your iPad for work, have we got a haul for you. DocStoc has just dumped a massive hoard of iPad apps for business users onto the App Store, and they’re all free.

The apps will also work on your iPhone. Each one contains premium content — how-tos and articles, mostly — for entrepreneurs and small business owners. Also, the suite features expert video courses, guides, and templates for creating common business documents. Some of the content might seem a little lightweight (“How to Network,” anyone?), but at the low, low price of free, it’s worth a gander.

Examples of apps we think most SMB folks (especially first-time entrepreneurs, early-stage startups, wannapreneurs who haven’t taken the plunge yet, and tinkerer/hackers) would appreciate include a legal and copyright toolkit, an accounting starter guide, a library of templates, a design kit, and a guide to prototyping and building a physical product.

Here are a few screenshots we grabbed from a range of apps in the suite:

“DocStoc launched the most robust selection of free apps that contain premium content to kickstart our larger strategy of creating original courses to teach business owners how to do things that are vital to grow their business,” said Jason Nazar, CEO and founder of Docstoc, in a release today.

Also, a company rep noted, DocStoc has integrated a new bookshelf feature via iBooks to let its users surf between its apps and content more easily. Much of the apps’ content was previously available through DocStoc’s paid subscription plans; the free apps are unlocking this content for the public.

Docstoc was founded in 2007 and claims more than 25 million registered users. The startup has raised $4 million in venture funding to date.

Image courtesy of olly, Shutterstock