Flipboard users on the web and on Android devices no longer have to endure the tyranny of reading a digital magazine that was assembled by someone other than them.

Today the company is pushing out a digital magazine creation tool to its Android app and website. The tool, which first debuted on the iPad earlier this year, allows you to assemble news stories, photos, status updates, videos, and other media into a customized digital magazine based on a particular topic, current event, or theme. Basically, you can gut all the boring articles and pictures you don’t like from an existing digital magazine, rearrange content, or provide additional context from other sources. And unlike the iOS version of the app, Android users can do things like “flip” content into their custom mags from other Android applications like YouTube.

One magazine you can now customize into your own publication is the Financial Times, which is entirely available within Flipboard starting today. However, you’ll still need to be a paid subscriber to view FT content.

I never really thought of Flipboard becoming a service that lets people express their creativity, but that’s exactly what this new tool does. The magazine creation tool has also proved quite popular, with over 500,000 custom magazines created by its 56 million total readers.

The new custom magazine tool is available on Samsung Galaxy phones, Nexus tablets, and several other Android-based mobile devices. You can download the new Flipboard app for free on the Google Play store and Amazon Android App store today.

Loyal Marvel fans (aka True Believers) that prefer using Android tablets like the Nexus 7 or a Samsung Galaxy Tab have reason to be excited today, as the comic book publisher’s Marvel Unlimited digital comic book subscription service.

Marvel released a Marvel Unlimited iPad app back in March, years after the service’s 2007 debut. It’s a big deal because digital comics were meant to be read on tablets, not a website or desktop app, which Android device owners will soon come to realize.

Marvel Unlimited  has over 13,000 comics available via a HTML5 web app (as well as the iOS app and new Android app), which you can gain access to for $10 per month, or $60 per year. Marvel doesn’t want to undercut sales of its newer books, which are available for $3 to $4 (on average) per issue through its own Marvel Comics store app that’s powered by ComiXology. Still, there’s plenty of good stuff to read within the collection, such as the first Wolverine mini series written by Frank Miller, or the original run of Incredible Hulk by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. It also has a few newer mini series mixed in, too.

The iOS version of Marvel Unlimited had some notable issues that held it back, like not being able to download more than six issues to your device for times when you don’t have a solid Internet connection. Yes, that means you’re downloading each page of a comic as you flip through the book, which can be a bit buggy. There’s also no guided view feature like many Marvel digital comic book fans are probably used to when reading books through ComiXology. At the same time, it’s hard to compare the service when you’re getting thousands of comics you’ve never read for a manageable monthly fee.

While I’ve not had a chance to download and test the Android version of Marvel Unlimited on my Nexus 7, I’m guessing that some of the storage limitations may be more relaxed since Android is a bit more open than iOS. (But I could be wrong. Anyone who’s used the Android app is welcome to correct me in the comment section below.)

You can download the app now for free on the Google Play store, and there’s a handful of free comic books available for you to check out if you’re not a subscriber.

Image via Marvel

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

After attracting 5 million downloads on Android, Drippler — an app that helps you get the most out of your smartphone with tips and app recommendations — has launched on the iPhone.

Drippler’s premise is that it wants to help you learn how to use your smartphone and how to do cool things with it. It gives you one update a day (it calls updates “Drips”), and these updates are usually things like news stories, how-to articles, and apps or accessory recommendations.

The Drippler Android app was launched back in May 2012. Drippler’s Android app has a 4.7 out of 5 rating from nearly 30,000 reviews, so clearly it has struck a chord with Android phone owners. Now it hopes to do the same with iPhone users.

Matan Talmi, Drippler’s co-founder and CEO, told VentureBeat that the app has been so successful as a “guide for new phones” that some smartphone sales representatives at Best Buy and Verizon stores have started telling people to download Drippler as their first app.

Talmi admitted that the app is currently is not making any money, but he sees the potential for monetization down the road with paid app recommendations.

“We’d like to have a sponsored model eventually,” he said. “We’ve had a lot of interest from brands, OEMs, and carriers for placement.”

Photos via Drippler

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Just a few hours after Facebook launched its immersive Home skin for select Android phones, a hacker released a version of Home that can be installed on nearly any Android phone or tablet.

Facebook Home was introduced to the public less than two weeks ago and launched on Friday. It is designed to give you deeper access to your Facebook friends and their status updates. But the software is only available on a small number of phones: Samsung Galaxy S III, Samsung Galaxy Note II, HTC One X, and HTC One X+. It will also be available on the Samsung Galaxy S IV and HTC One in the future.

Thankfully, XDA Developers hacker theos0o has engineered a modified version of Facebook Home that can be installed as long as you allow your phone to install unofficial apps that aren’t in the Google Play store.

The hack is relatively simple versus other Android hacks. Here’s the order of operations:

• Uninstall the original Facebook, Facebook Messenger, and Facebook Home applications if you already have them. If any Facebook apps are pre-installed on your device, you will likely need to root your phone to remove them.
• Download the hacked version of Facebook Home (link here) and hacked version of Facebook Messenger (link here). Extract the .rar files.
• Install the official Facebook app (com.facebook.katana), then the Facebook Home launcher (com.facebook.home), and then the Facebook Messenger app (com.facebook.orca).
• Enable Facebook Home under the Facebook app settings. Reboot your device.
• If you have any serious issues, reboot into recovery mode and wipe the Dalvik cache.

Facebook Home hasn’t received the kindest of reviews by users and as of this writing, the app has a 2.4 rating on Google Play. Out of about 3,470 ratings awarded, more than 1,600 of those ratings are for 1 star.

Still, that’s a relatively small number of people, and there’s no telling what other Android devices will be getting Facebook Home in the future, so we thought we’d share these directions. Let us know in the comments below what you think of Facebook Home.

Top screenshot via Facebook/YouTube

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Facebook Home, a skin of Android that can further transform your phone into a social hub, is now available to download on select smartphones including the Samsung Galaxy S III, HTC One X, and more.

Last week, Facebook showed off its Home software for the first time. It allows you to see full-screen updates from friends on the your home screen, send messages, and more things that are key to the Facebook experience.

In a short review of the HTC First, the first phone with Home pre-installed, we gave Home high marks for making Android playful and helpful immerse us in Facebook news feed items that we’d normally miss. However, we still have some reservations about privacy on the device and how much personal and location data will be shared with Facebook.

Here’s the full list of phones that Facebook Home can be downloaded for (for now) from the Google Play store:

• HTC One X
• HTC One X+
• Samsung Galaxy S III
• Samsung Galaxy Note II

Facebook has said that Home will eventually be available for the blockbuster HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S IV phones. Additionally, the HTC First became available from AT&T today for $100 with a two-year contract.

Screenshot via Facebook

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Rumors have been swirling for ages that Microsoft would finally release its flagship Office apps for iOS and Android in the near future. But a new report indicates these apps won’t actually arrive until fall 2014.

Microsoft has been pushing hard on the mobile front for the past year with the launch of Windows 8, the Surface tablet, and new versions of Office that are better for touch. It also just launched a new version of its SkyDrive app for iOS, showing that it doesn’t mind bringing some of its services to the millions of iPhone and iPad users out there.

A version of Office for smartphones already exists with its Windows Phone OS. So where is Office for iOS and Android? ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley reports that a leaked roadmap shows their release date in fall 2014, quite a long ways from now. Here’s what the leaked timeline indicates:

Gemini Wave 1.0 (October 2013): Windows Blue app updates

Gemini Wave 1.5 (April 2014): Office for Mac; Office RT refresh; Perceptive Pixel support; Windows Phone support refresh

Gemini Wave 2.0 (October 2014): Outlook RT; Office for iOS/Android

Microsoft didn’t deny the new rumored timeline but simply gave us this bland statement: “We don’t have any information to share about the next set of updates to Office,” a Microsoft spokesperson said.

Avi Greengart, research director for consumer devices at Current Analysis, told me back in February that he thought the iOS and Android versions for Office were on the way.

“If Microsoft doesn’t put Office on those platforms, it risks losing that franchise,” Greengart said.

Microsoft also reportedly has new versions of Office in development that will take full advantage of Windows 8 and touch screens. The timeline shows these apps coming out in October 2013. This makes sense because Microsoft already offers full Windows 8 apps for Lync and OneNote, and high-profile apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint should be coming down the pipeline eventually.

Tortoise photo via Shutterstock

That’s not the goal of Jimu, a new rapid development tool for Android apps that’s currently fundraising via Kickstarter.

“We want to make it possible for a lot more people to create apps,” Jimu founder Linkton Ye told me yesterday via Skype. “Everyone should be able to play with the software that surrounds us.”

But Ye doesn’t want to just build a framework for the n00bs: those of us who can’t program in Java and build our own apps. That’s part of the goal, but not all of it. The rest of it is all about those software developers who are already building Android apps today and dealing with the surprisingly repetitive and challenging tasks for each and every app they build.

The challenge lies in the fact that while there are many great tools and frameworks to help non-developers build apps — Andromo, AppyPie, AppsGeyser, and TheAppBuilder come to mind   —  they tend to be a little cookie cutter. Pick a style, select some features, choose a content feed, subscribe to Twitter updates, import a photo stream.

“We want to give everyone a jumpstart to create apps, but still leave room for developers to customize however they want,” Ye says. “There’s a lot of frameworks to let non-developers create apps, but it’s just a form to fill in. All their apps look pretty much the same, and you can’t customize very much.”

Source: Jimu

One app already built in Jimu that integrates Flickr, Google Maps, other web services, and local caching.

So Jimu not only enables drag-and-drop creation of app functionality, it also creates clean, commented source code for all your apps … which those with a technical bent can then take and customize or extend even more. At a minimum, then, it’s a rapid prototyping tool that actually works, rather than being a clickable model, a wireframe, or a set of screenshots.

Jimu does this by via what Ye calls “blocks:” chunks of code that insert objects like pictures, text, buttons, and actions. The framework is extensible, and the team is building new blocks continuously. Besides the basic necessities of an app, some of the higher-level ones include the ability to take a picture with the phone’s camera and use the image, the ability to connect to other devices via NFC, and the ability to take over a phone’s Bluetooth connection.

But it’s still early days in the project — hence the Kickstarter campaign.

“We wanted to see how many people are actually excited about this idea,” Ye told me. “Right now it’s a prototype, and we want to build a minimum viable product, so this is this is basically marketing research, and it will provide some capital to fund the project.”

The team is trying to raise $50,000 on Kickstarter. With 23 days to go, 54 backers have contributed $1,707, so there’s a significant way to go.

Assuming the Kickstarter works, Ye thinks they’ll have enough capital to finish the product. And having a successful fundraiser in his back pocket will help Jimu find additional funding. The ultimate goal is a subscription-based service by which developers who want to use Jimu pay for one or more tiers of service … and a programming blocks marketplace where developers who create a useful block can re-sell it to other mobile programmers.

Will the project get funded? Ye is optimistic.

“There are a lot of hardware and game companies doing well on Kickstarter,” he said. “For software it’s harder … but we still think it’s possible.”

Image credits: Jimu

Disclosure: one of the members of the Jimu team, Aras Balali, is a member in my coworking space.

---

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.

---

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Restaurant waitlisting app NoshList has brought its service to iPhone, iPod Touch, and Android devices so more eateries will be able to seat diners in smarter fashion no matter what devices they own.

NoshList helps restaurants get rid of paper-and-pen customer waitlisting and instead go digital. Diners instead can be notified via text messaging that their table is ready. The service launched a premium version with more features like unlimited two-way texting and table number assignment in November. The premium service costs $49 per month per restaurant.

Previously, NoshList required restaurants to use an iPad to run the service. But Firespotter Labs CEO Craig Walker told VentureBeat it wasn’t enough. With so many different types of smart devices out there, restaurant owners might prefer to use an iPhone or Android device they already own to take customer names and numbers.

“We want to do everything we can to help restaurants with multiple devices, not just iPads,” Walker said.

NoshList has helped more than 8 million diners find tables since its launch a year ago. It is now in use at 2,250 restaurants in the United States. In November, 4.5 million diners and 1,600 restaurants had used the app. Some of its high-profile customers include the Red Robin and Buffalo Wild Wings chains, and Walker says he’s testing the app “with all the big guys.”

NoshList’s parent, Firespotter Labs, has raised $18 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures. The company has also developed other notable apps, including UberConference, Nosh, and Jotly. Firespotter Labs is based in San Francisco.

Photo via Firespotter Labs

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

At long last, Adobe has launched Photoshop Touch for the iPhone and Android phones in a bid to make its flagship photo-editing software available across the most popular smart devices in the world.

“This will bring the power of Photoshop to millions of people worldwide,” Photoshop product manager Stephen Nielson told VentureBeat. “My phone is the device I always have with me so I can be creative no matter where I am.”

Adobe has offered Photoshop Touch for iPad and Android tablets since October 2011, showing its willingness to make its powerful software available outside traditional PCs. That application has been quite popular — it made Apple’s Top Apps of 2012 list, and the latest version of it on the iPad has an average rating for four stars.

But smartphones are much more ubiquitous than tablets, and if Adobe truly wants to be part of the mobile conversation, it needs to have a presence on the iPhone and popular Android phones. Adobe previously only offered an extremely minimal app called Photoshop Express for iPhone and Android phones, but it did not encompass all the features a regular Photoshop user might want.

Photoshop Touch for iPhone and Android does at least offer some satisfaction for those that thought Express wasn’t up to snuff. It lets you do a lot of what you do in Photoshop Touch on the iPad and Photoshop on the desktop. It’s simple to start new projects, and popular tools like layers, levels, cropping, clone stamp, adjustments, and filters are all right there in the app and relatively easy to access and control with your fingers.

One especially cool feature is the ability to shoot a picture from your camera and have that automatically placed as a layer in your project. So if I was in the middle of a project on my phone and happened to be sitting in a park, I could see a live camera feed behind my layers, take the right shot, and then I can have a snazzy tree-and-grass background.

The app is also designed to be part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud, so you can start a project on the iPhone or Android and then work on it from a different device like the iPad or your desktop computer. Creative Cloud offers users 2GB of free storage so you can have one folder available everywhere for photo projects.

Maybe most importantly, it’s easy to share your photo projects from the iPhone version of Photoshop Touch on Facebook and Twitter through the built-in iOS integration. To share a project on Instagram — one of the most popular photo-sharing apps out there — you’d need to save your photo to the iPhone’s camera roll and then select it from there inside Instagram. Thankfully that’s not too hard.

“I myself use Instagram all the time, but sometimes I’ll use Photoshop Touch to touch up a photo,” Nelson said. “It doesn’t have to be one or the other.”

Nelson said that Adobe not only wants to make this a fulfilling experience for the Photoshop faithful but also use this as a point to introduce some new users to Photoshop.

“On the tablet version, we’ve seen a lot of creative professionals and photographers using it, but there are also a lot of aspirational Photoshop users too,” Nelson said.

Adobe has made this a powerful application that needs a lot of processing power. So the app only runs on the iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, and Android phones running version 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) or later. This clearly limits the number of people who will be able to use it (think of all the iPhone 4 users out there), but Nelson said the experience has to be good to live up to the standards of Photoshop.

Photoshop Touch will cost $5 on both iPhone and Android. Here’s a full list of features from the iOS app (the list is almost the same on Android):

• Use popular Photoshop features, such as layers, selection tools, adjustments, and filters.
• Improve your photos using classic Photoshop features to bring out the best in your photography. Apply precise tone and color adjustments to your entire composition, a particular layer, or a select area.
• Create something other-worldly using painting effects, filter brushes, and more.
• Make your images pop with graphical text. Apply strokes, add drop shadows and fades, and more.
• Take advantage of your device’s camera to fill an area on a layer with the Camera Fill feature.
• Quickly combine images together. Select part of an image to extract just by scribbling with the Scribble Selection tool. With the Refine Edge feature, use your fingertip to easily capture hard-to-select image elements, like hair.
• Start a project on your iPhone or iPod Touch and finish it on your iPad or back in Photoshop at your desk using a free membership to Adobe Creative Cloud. Your projects are automatically synced between your devices.
• Free membership to Creative Cloud provides 2GB of cloud storage.
• Work on high-resolution images while maintaining the highest image quality. Images up to 12 megapixels are supported.

Photo via Adobe

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Self-destructing messages app Snapchat has ditched its beta tag on Android and is now available in the Google Play store.

Snapchat has caused quite a stir in the past few months, coming seemingly out of nowhere to raising $13.5 million in funding earlier this month. Many folks have accused the app of being primarily used for “sexting,” but the app is also used for joking around or sending fun photos and videos to friends and family.

The app was only available for iOS to start, but now it has finally brought the app to Android. It works with phones running Android 2.2 and up. Front-facing camera support only works for Android 2.3 and above.

Like the iOS app, it allows you to send photos and videos that can only be viewed for a few seconds. You can take a screenshot of what was sent to you but Snapchat says it will let the other party know if a screenshot was taken.

Los Angeles-based Snapchat is now valued at $60 to $70 million. It reportedly sends more than 60 million messages a day and has millions of users.

Surprised man looking at phone via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The Weather Channel has updated its Android app for smartphones and tablets with the biggest redesign since 2009, with a cleaner interface, better maps, and unfortunately, more advertising.

While The Weather Channel might be one of the less exciting apps out there, it is one of the most popular mobile apps across all platforms due to, you know, people needing to know the forecast. As of mid-January, The Weather Channel’s tablet and smartphone apps have been downloaded more than 100 million times. The company also did a heavy redesign of its website in May 2012 and that site alone attracts more than 1 billion pageviews each month from 60 million unique visitors.

The company spotlights the following new features:

• Easier access to current conditions, severe weather information, hourly forecasts, 36-hour forecasts, and 10-day forecasts
• An immediate narrative of what to expect, ie. “dry conditions will continue,” “expect rain until 4 p.m.,” gives users a better idea of how weather will affect their day.
• New localized maps and map layers include past and future radar, severe weather bulletins, and tropical cyclone tracking.
• Weather-triggered backgrounds
• Simpler user interface for navigation and quicker access to information
• Improved management for saved locations enables a more intuitive user interface. Set up your favorites to take full advantage of new weather widgets and notifications.
• Option to expand detailed weather data that is collapsed for a better visual experience
• Share weather forecasts, maps, alerts and more with family and friends to Facebook, Twitter and other major social networks.
• Automatic updates of localized weather, using your current TruPointSM location, and a new refresh button for immediate updates

While that is a lot of new features, some early user reviews of the new app aren’t flattering, with many of those who have updated now seeing many more ads and app crashes:

To be fair, some reviews are positive as well, with a few users praising the redesign and the new interface.

Check out a few more screenshots of the app below:

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

After showing off the app in January, Inq Mobile’s beautiful new Material app for Android has finally launched in beta to take on fellow content discovery apps like Flipboard and Grokr.

Inq Mobile was once known as the manufacturer of the “Facebook phone” back in 2011. But in early 2012, Inq’s endeavors to build Android phones went bust. So it pivoted to apps.

As I wrote previously when Material debuted at CES 2013, the app recommends news based on what’s happening in your Facebook and Twitter feeds on a daily basis. And while your interests change every day depending on your activity, it can make those interests permanent. Material also “learns with you”: If you are reading a certain topic every day, it prioritizes that topic higher in your feed.

Outside of content discovery, the apps’s biggest asset is its colorful and intelligent design. Inq CEO and cofounder Ken Johnstone told me in January that he was previously the product and design director of Inq before he was elevated to CEO, so he highly values design. He said: “We want the design to be well done and the barrier to entry low. It makes the app very easy to get into.”

While Inq showed off the app at CES, it is now available to anyone who is fine using it in beta. Tom Mansbridge, the head of marketing at Inq Mobile, told VentureBeat via email that the app is launching in beta so it can test user behavior and make the experience smoother.

“The best possible feedback comes from real users, so we’ve launched on beta to get our customers involved as we evolve and finesse the product,” Mansbridge said. “We’re likely to be in beta for another few months and we’ll obviously be evolving with our audience during that period.”

It’s notable that Material is launching on Android first, as most apps launch on iOS first. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t going to push Material to new platforms in the near future.

“We have a huge amount of experience from developing Android phones, so it made sense to go with Android first,” Mansbridge said. “And with three out of every four global smartphone shipments on Android, we’re focusing where there is an indisputable consumer demand. Although the Android version is first we are developing an iOS, tablet, and web version which will all follow soon.”

You can take a closer look at Material in the screenshots below:

MoviePass has launched its subscription service for going to movie theaters for the Android platform, an important step to make sure more consumers can actually use it.

We first wrote about MoviePass when it launched in October, and the service is promising. You pay between $25 and $40 a month so you can see one movie a day at theaters that take MoviePass. So if you regularly see more than three movies a month at the theater, MoviePass wants to be your new friend.

VentureBeat National Editor Devindra Hardawar says that the MoviePass app for the iPhone has worked fairly well for him in New York City, but it is a bit sluggish. His final thoughts: MoviePass still needs to prove that it’s worth the high monthly fee.

Unfortunately, MoviePass is still in beta testing and requires people to sign up for an invite to (hopefully) get access. MoviePass claims to work in “thousands of theaters nationwide,” but we’d check out theaters in your area before buying in.

MoviePass is based in New York City and has raised $4.7 million to date from True Ventures, AOL Ventures, WME, and others.

Check out a few screenshots from MoviePass for Android below:

Girl watching movie alone via Karramba Production/Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The much-hyped Pebble smartwatch started shipping yesterday, but the smartphone apps that help the watch really tick hadn’t been approved yet.

Thankfully, the apps for iPhone and Android are now available — just in time to help those who get the watch first. While the first of 89,000 Pebble orders are out the gate, it will likely take several more weeks to fulfill all of the orders.

Pebble got a lot of notice as one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns ever, with more than $10 million raised. Pebble integrates with your smartphone, and uses an E-Ink display to show information like call data, calendar entries, and social media updates. The apps for Android and iPhone help you install custom watch faces and more.

The Pebble app for the iPhone and Android provides a dashboard for your Pebble smartwatch and does the following things:

• Notifies you when software updates for Pebble ready to install
  
• Installs and remove custom watchfaces onto your Pebble
• Sends ping test messages to your Pebble
• Helps you troubleshoot issues

Check out a demo we did with Pebble in the video below.

Photos via Apple App Store

Digitial magazine service Flipboard has finally landed on a variety of Android-based tablets today.

Flipboard allows you to aggregate news into specific categories and sorts articles based on their popularity among your Facebook friends and people you follow on Twitter. The user interface is designed to mimic the pages in a printed magazine, but until now users were only able to access a scaled-up version of the smartphone Flipboard app

The new version of the app, which is available today in the Google Play store, is optimized for larger screen, such as those available on the Galaxy Note 10.1, Galaxy Tabs, and Google’s flagship tablet the Nexus 10.

Even tablets with a 7-inch screen (Nexus 7, Kindle Fire, Nook, etc.) will get the new UI when users upgrade the current app. (Of course, if you prefer the smaller screen orientation, there is a setting that lets you switch back.)

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

6wunderkinder, the company behind the popular Wunderlist to-do app, has just launched a sequel to that fantastic app that works across iPhone, Android, Web, Windows, and Mac platforms and features a refreshed design.

Although there are some other great to-do list apps out there, namely Clear, Any.Do, Astrid, and Remember the Milk, Wunderlist has been own of my personal favorites because it works well across every device I own. But it’s always had a few missing features. Notably, the app didn’t have recurring tasks, which are useful when you have a task you need to do daily or weekly, and doesn’t have calendar syncing with services like Google.

Christian Reber, founder and CEO of 6wunderkinder, told me via email that his team worked on the new Wunderlist apps on all platforms for six months and completely rebuilt them from scratch. The app performance will probably be the most substantial change users will notice.

“The most substantial changes are all technical,” Reber said. “Anyone who builds native apps, knows how much work it is to build just one app. We’ve done that with five — and we are launching all at the same time. This has been a huge and tough challenge, and I’m so happy we’ve made just in time for Christmas.”

Reber believes experienced Wunderlist users will appreciate the changes and thinks it could attract new people to the fold.

“The biggest changes for the users are at first: new beautiful and rock-solid apps,” Reber said. “Everyone who used Wunderlist 1 on a regular basis, will notice a massive change in quality. We’ve also put in new features, starting with ‘our users’ most wanted,’ like Reminders, Subtasks, and Recurring Tasks. But the most important difference for all users will be the Activity Center. It helps users to stay connected while working collaboratively on lists and tasks. It tells you what everyone is working on. It may seem small, but if you use it with others, you quickly notice that you haven’t felt like this before about a similar product.”

While Wunderlist 2 does not feature calendar syncing (the only thing I want now!), Reber says it is “on our product roadmap for early 2013.” The company will also work to push out apps for various tablets and other platforms in 2013.

On the pricing front, Wunderlist will remain a free service. But Reber said the company will introduce paid premium accounts in 2013 with a yearly or monthly subscription fee. Exact pricing and feature will come in early 2013.

Check out the video below for more on Wunderlist 2:

Photo via 6wunderkinder

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cloud storage startup Bitcasa has released new mobile apps for Android and Windows 8 platforms, with iOS and Mac apps coming in January, the company announced Tuesday morning.

Bitcasa offers a back-up solution that’s a bit different from peers such Dropbox, SugarSync, and Google Drive. Essentially, Bitcasa can back up all of your data and files on Bitcasa’s servers and you can even move things to the cloud that you can delete on your personal hard drive. The service’s interface makes accessing your files as easy as tapping an external hard drive. It costs $10 a month, a pretty reasonable price for what it claims is “infinite storage.”

Bitcasa and its new apps promise the following benefits:

Instant Streaming, Access Anywhere: With Bitcasa, users can play whole music albums, watch videos in various formats, view and share photo albums, and read documents from anywhere. Instant streaming from the Bitcasa Infinite Drive allows users to stream their personal jukebox of music, videos, and photos to mobile and desktop devices without having to sync or store files locally on each of your devices.

Infinite Storage: The Infinite Drive acts as a virtual external drive that expands with the user’s growing storage needs without ever worrying about running out of space again.

Safe Backup: Continuous and automatic backup gives peace of mind. Users can mirror their content from all their computers to Bitcasa, and access it anywhere. All files and backups are protected with client-side encryption, which means that only users can see and access their data. Users can easily retrieve files with time-capsule versioning by date.

Share Content: With one click, users can share any file or folder with their friends and family – Bitcasa or non-Bitcasa users – regardless of file size. For sharing on mobile devices, users can also set up alerts to protect against large downloads that might affect their mobile bandwidth charges.

Get Organized: Bitcasa automatically categorizes users’ data into Music, Photos, Videos, and Documents. Users no longer have to worry about managing and organizing their files — the same way they do not have to worry about storage capacity limits.

Bitcasa CEO Tony Gauda strongly believes in the power of mobile and one of the things he wanted to accomplish was making it easier to tap your files no matter where you are.

“With our mobile app releases, we are now making all of your data easily available from mobile and PC/Mac clients while taking the security of that data very seriously,” Gauda said in a statement. “By announcing our cross-platform support today, we are offering our global users secure access on all computers, mobile devices, or Web browsers by streaming from the cloud while allowing them to keep the data they access more often localized on their hard drive.”

You can download the new apps from Bitcasa’s download page.

Mountain View, Calif.-based Bitcasa launched in Sept. 2011. The company has raised $9 million in funding from Pelion Venture Partners, Horizons Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, CrunchFund, and Samsung Ventures.

Facebook has updated the “Nearby” feature on its iOS and Android mobile apps, a move that could hurt Yelp and Foursquare in the location data wars.

While Facebook basically dropped out of owning check-ins, it still wants users to depend on its apps for everything they need, including finding places to eat, drink, shop, and more. Facebook has had a Nearby feature on iOS and Android, but before it was focused on showing people nearby. (A quick scan on my phone shows that hardly any of my friends check-in, so very few show up in the feature.)

But the new Nearby gets way more powerful by using friend check-ins to power recommendations around you and show great places to visit near you, both similar to what you get out of Foursquare. It also shows off business hours of places you look at, something you’d normally use Yelp for.

The company wrote in a blog post today:

Today we’re announcing updates to Nearby in the Facebook for iOS and Android apps that make it easy to discover new places your friends like.

From the app menu, open the tab to find local spots your friends have recommended, checked into, or liked. If you’re looking for a place to eat, choose a category like Restaurants to see what’s nearby. When you find a place that looks interesting, tap to see info like friends who’ve been there and business hours.

In addition to discovering new places to visit, you can share what you think by rating or recommending places to your friends. Your own suggestions become more personalized the more you and your friends rate, recommend, and check into places.

Facebook says that the Nearby feature is still fresh, so the results will get better as more people use it. The company also said it plans to include places info from third-party services “in the near future.”

The update to Facebook’s iOS and Android apps will be available later today.

Yelp investors don’t seem particularly enthusiastic about Facebook encrouching on Yelp’s territory, as Yelp’s stock is currently down 3.5 percent in late-day trading.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Inventive conference call service UberConference, from the inventor of Google Voice, has launched new apps for iOS and Android, a move that will make conference call experiences better even if you’re a highly mobile worker.

UberConference won the top prize at TechCrunch Disrupt New York last May because its premise of “reinventing the conference call” is attractive for workers who hate traditional conference calling. Recently, UberConference introduced a new enterprise-class version of its software that increases conference size to 40 people, outboard dialing to join a call, call recording, and more.

Just like their web app counterpart, the new UberConference apps on iOS and Android allow you to add additional people to a call, mute the line, put “earmuffs” on other people on the line, and turn call recording on and off.

“With the modern worker being mobile much of the time and dependent on their devices to conduct traditional business functions, we knew that it was important to give them all the tools and functionality of UberConference in a slick app for their smart phones,” Firespotter Labs CEO Craig Walker told VentureBeat via email. “Now a user can be anywhere and quickly start an UberConference by clicking a few names from their address book. UberConference will dial out to each of the parties and bring them into an instant conference call.”

UberConference-parent Firespotter Labs, based in Pleasanton, Calif., has raised $18 million to date from heavy hitting investors Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures. The company is also the brains behind NoshList, Nosh, and Jotly.

Check out a few more photos of UberConference on iOS in the photos below:

Photos via Firespotter Labs

Google has added 24 new features to its Google+ service and updated its beautiful Android and iOS apps inyet another show of commitment to the social network.

Despite issues with getting people to spend a lot of time on Google+, Google claims 500 million users have upgraded to Google+ accounts, while 235 million are actively using Google+ features (like +1-ing apps or following friends in Google searches.) The company says 135 million users are actively using the Google+ stream proper. So it makes sense to keep refining the network.

For coordinating holiday gatherings, Google+ has added new event-planning features. Through Google+ Events, you can send messages to specific guests and see who’s viewed your invitation. There’s also a way to invite people by simply putting a link to your Google+ event into an email. Guests can also RSVP for how many people they will be bringing.

If someone can’t make your event, you can have them attend a Google+ “Hangout,” the social network’s version of group video chat. Handily, Google+ Hangouts now can run on lower bandwidth so even more people can try it. You only need 150 KB of bandwidth to take part in a session.

And here’s a list of what’s new in Google+’s updated Android app:

• New feature: Google+ Communities
• Support for full resolution photo uploads via Instant Upload
• Subscribe to any circle for notifications
• Support for time zones in Events
• Basic profile editing
• Integration with Google Now to send birthday wishes to friends
• Support for animated GIFs
• Express your mood via animated images in posts
• View and explore Photo Sphere images (Android 4.2+)
• Add the Google+ widget to your device’s lock screen (Android 4.2+)

The iOS app’s update isn’t quite so extensive, but it’s still seeing some decent changes. You can now:

• Swipe through photo albums inline
• Tap once to view photos in all their glory
• Now applies a subtle pan-zoom-scale effect to pictures in the stream

Photos via Google

Facebook has finally released a rebuilt Android application that ditches HTML5 and embraces native code, leading to a much snappier performance for reading updates, looking at photos, and checking your Timeline.

The biggest problem with Facebook’s mobile apps for quite some time had been speed. Because it built the apps with reliance on HTML5, the apps took forever to load updates and photos. Facebook corrected that mistake on its rebuilt iOS app in August, and now it has finally rectified the mistake on Android.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg previously admitted that betting on HTML5 was disastrous. “The biggest mistake we’ve made as a company is betting on HTML5 over native,” Zuckerberg said in September.

The Android app update will be available later today in the Google Play Store.

Take a look at the photos below for more looks at Facebook for Android.

Photos via Facebook

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Video-sharing application Viddy landed on Android devices today after long being available only on the iPhone.

Los Angeles-based Viddy makes a mobile application for shooting 15-second clips that can be enhanced with video effects called “production packs.” The company touts 40 million registered users and is often referred to as the “Instagram of video.”

The startup, which historically only supported uploads via iPhone, is traversing the mobile chasm with its first native application for Android that is said to support more than 757 different Google-powered smartphones and tablets. The release, several months in the making, comes more than 19 months after Viddy first landed on Apple devices in April 2011.

Viddy for Android follows the same 15-second shoot-spruce-and-share model as its iPhone predecessor, but it comes with 10 fresh video effects. The application also includes 16 soundtracks for adding audio to your clips, supports background processing (unique to Android), and is optimized for HD cameras on Android devices.

In a perfect world, Viddy for Android would help the young startup double up on users, content, and activity, but reality may be more bleak.

Competitors Klip and SocialCam, now an Autodesk property, already have a presence on Android, as do a number of other mini-video apps and services. Viddy co-founder and CEO Brett O’Brien believes, of course, that his app is better than the rest on the extremely popular platform because the company took the time to understand Android’s differences.

“Android has great technology, but developing a superior social mobile video product which exceeds user expectations on this platform is complex. There are different form factors, different versions of the operating system, challenges in accessing hardware acceleration for editing, etc,” he told VentureBeat. “We are the only company to even attempt this, and we think we have created a great experience for people.”

Viddy was all anyone could talk about in the first half of the year, but it’s hard to get an accurate reading on its level of hotness these days. Press attention peaked shortly after the company raised a $30 million round in May, partly because Viddy’s meteoric rise was driven by Facebook’s Open Graph and seemed unsustainable (it was).

Third-party tracking service AppData pegs Viddy’s monthly active Facebook-connected users at just 600,000. The startup does continue to see a healthy influx of videos from its celebrity members; the ever-influential Justin Bieber still uses Viddy to reach his 328,000 followers on the service. Meanwhile he has 4.2 million followers on Instagram.

Viddy also has an influential cavalcade of A-listers who want to see the app succeed. Biz Stone, Shakira, Will Smith, and Jay-Z are among the service’s celebrity backers.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Yahoo, still one of the most popular email services in the world, has revamped its email applications for web, iOS, Android, and Windows 8 with a much cleaner look that emphasizes speed.

Yahoo has been in the midst of changes under the direction of former Google VP Marissa Mayer, who took over as CEO earlier this year. Mayer has clearly brought some of Google’s ideas over to her new company, including free employee meals, smart acquisitions, and category advertising sales. She’s also brought over some good ideas on the product side, as you can see from the new apps announced today that will help stop Yahoo Mail users from moving over to Gmail, Microsoft’s Outlook.com, or other services.

“We’ve redesigned the new version of Yahoo! Mail with speed in mind — getting through your emails is faster than ever before,” Mayer wrote in a blog post. “We’ve also made your inbox more intuitive and easier to navigate, allowing you to focus on what matters most: your messages. And, because mobile is everything these days, Yahoo Mail now has a consistent look and feel across devices.”

The new apps for iPhone and iPod touch, Android, and Windows 8 are available now, while the version for the web will be rolling out to most users over the next few days.

Photos via Yahoo

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google today released an Android version of the sophisticated photo-editing application Snapseed, a product it picked up in its acquisition of photography software developer Nik Software. The company also updated the Snapsneed app for iOS to make it free.

Snapseed’s mobile application features auto correct and filters, just like Facebook-owned Instagram, but is more robust in the photo-editing department and not a social network for following friends’ or celebrities’ captures. The application won last year’s Apple’s iPad app of the year award.

Snapseed for Android, released Thursday, comes with all the same goodies previously found on iOS, including the ability to selectively adjust photo elements such as focus, brightness, saturation, contrast, and white balance. Both the newly free iOS app and the brand-new Android app come with one-click sharing to Google+, of course.

The releases are all about enhancing Google’s position in the hierarchy of places to consume and share digital photography. Facebook may be top destination for photo-sharing, and that’s not likely to change anytime soon, but the company seems to think it can, with Snapseed’s help, make its Google+ social network the preferred destination for rich and beautiful images.

Google+ touts 135 million people active in the stream. The service also now has a groups feature called Google+ Communities.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Time spent using mobile apps rose about 35 percent this year while TV viewing stayed stagnant and web browsing dropped slightly, according to a new report on U.S. trends by mobile analytics firm Flurry.

The study shows in greater detail what we’ve been seeing during the past few years: the rise of mobile devices as a competitor against TV, web browsing on PCs, video game consoles, and more.

Between Dec. 2011 and Dec. 2012, the average time spent inside mobile apps rose 35 percent from 94 minutes to 127 minutes a day. Comparably, TV viewing stayed the same at 168 minutes per day. Web browsing dropped 2.4 percent, from 72 minutes to 70 minutes per day.

Take a look at the stats in this chart to see how the numbers stack up against each other:

This appears to be a good sign for those who have invested in mobile. With consumers spending much more time on phones and tablets (and while also watching TV), there’s a large opportunity to develop compelling mobile apps and games.

“Mobile and apps are gobbling up the web and consumer Internet, and that’s where the opportunity is. And the opportunity has never been bigger,” Flurry CEO Simon Khalaf said in the report. “All around me, I see entrepreneurs living it, loving it and collecting it ’99 cents’ at a time.”

Of course, as bullish as Khalaf is, app stores revenues appear to be increasingly concentrated among a small number of companies. A report today said half of revenue generated by iOS and Android apps goes to just 25 developers.

Mother and daughter using tablet via Shutterstock

Even though Apple and Google’s app stores offer more than 1.4 million apps combined, just 25 U.S. developers generate half of the revenue from app sales, according to a new study by research firm Canalys.

The study looked at sales in the first 20 days of November 2012. It found $120 million was generated by app downlaods and in-app purchases, but $60 million of that total went to 25 companies, and mostly gaming ones at that. Companies in the top 25 included Electronic Arts, Disney, Kabam, Rovio, Glu, Gameloft, and Zynga. The only non-gaming app in the top 25 was Pandora, the Internet radio service.

Canalys VP and principal analyst Chris Jones said one reason wealth consolidates with the top 25 is because these game developers have multiple games and they can cross-promote between titles. He writes:

Part of the story here is that successful game developers almost invariably have multiple titles generating revenue. Zynga, for example, had 15 titles in the list of top 300 grossing iPhone apps on average in Apple’s App Store every day, and nine titles in the equivalent list in the Google Play store. Even with its singular focus on its Angry Birds franchise, Rovio has multiple game variants in the list. With the holiday season now underway, we expect to see many of these top game developers employing discounts and special offers, taking advantage of their ability to cross-promote within their app portfolios. This is expected to ensure that over the Christmas period in the US, the dominance of key game developers will only increase.

When you start analyzing the list of apps themselves, games don’t appear to have as strong of a hold. Games accounted for 145 of the top 300 paid apps in the Apple App Store and 116 of the top 300 paid apps in Google Play. That means there is room for non-game developers to make meaningful cash from their titles, but they need multiple apps in the top 300 to make an appearance in the top 25.

If non-game developers want to start getting more notice for their titles, they need to employ different promotional strategies. They also need Apple and Google to improve discoverability in their respective app stores. Apple claims it took a step in the right direction by making apps easier to browse through in iOS 6, but many of the design changes benefited incumbents rather than challengers.

“Discoverability is a particular issue in the Apple App Store and in Google Play given the huge inventories they boast,” Canalys senior analyst Tim Shepherd said in the report. “With top game developers’ content so prevalent in the stores, it can be hard for other good-quality apps to get the attention they deserve. Developers of other kinds of apps need to consider how to promote them. Depending on the type of app, they should consider how best they can exploit social media and social recommendations, tactical sales promotions and discounts, branding tie-ups, and targeted in-app advertising.”

Cake cut in half via withGod/Shutterstock

---

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.

---

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Hugely popular handmade marketplace Etsy has launched a slick new Android app to help connect mobile buyers, the company announced today.

The app lets users of the service browse through more than 17 million items from 800,000 sellers around the world. Thankfully, the app supports English, German, French, and Dutch, so many folks worldwide can immediately take a dive into the mobile experience. While the app is great for browsing items, some reviewers noted it could use some serious work to help sellers.

Etsy’s launch on Android follows launches on the iPhone and iPad, showing how important mobile is for future growth.

New York-based Etsy has raised about $91 million from investors including Index Ventures, Union Square Ventures, and Accel Partners.

Check out more photos of the new app below:

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The Google Play Store now has 700,000 Android apps, finally catching up to roughly the same number of programs in Apple’s App Store.

A Google spokesperson confirmed the new numbers to VentureBeat, but the company has not yet made a formal announcement.

Back in September, Apple announced it had hit 700,000 apps in the App Store, while Google said it had 600,000 apps back in June. Apple likely still has the lead, but now we can say that both companies have around the same number of apps.

Hopefully we can all agree that 700,000 is more than enough apps for a mobile platform and switch our focus to quality control and figuring out how to discover the best apps. Apple has tried to do this with the latest version of its app store in iOS 6, but it can still be tough to find the best apps regardless of platform.

As for other platforms, Windows Phone has more than 100,000 apps, and research in Motion is currently trying to convince developers to build for its BlackBerry 10 platform.

h/t Bloomberg Businessweek

Android image via Rob Bulmahn/Flickr

Today, Google launched a new developer dashboard for Android devs and all their Google Play-bound apps.

Google Play, you will recall, is the beefed-up, classier-looking version of the old Android Market. It contains media, games, e-books, and all kinds of Android applications.

The new dev dashboard is a sleek, Google Drive-reminiscent interface for navigating through your lineup of applications. You get the ability to publish app listings in 49 languages and a simpler, redesigned publishing workflow.

The new dash also lets you track user ratings over time so you can optimize your apps for higher quality (or perceptions thereof) — something that Google has been publicly persistent about lately.

The company recently published a huge manual and manifesto on how to build higher-quality tablet apps, and it’s been egging developers on to create all-around better Android apps in general over the past several months.

In a recent interview with Play’s team, we learned that part of the reason the Android Market was scrapped was for branding’s sake. Google wanted to create a higher-end experience for premium content, like a schmancy shopping mall where end users would feel comfortable dropping money for paid apps.

But Google just provided the storefront. “I’m not gonna take any credit for how much better the apps and games have gotten over the past year,” said Play engineering director Chris Yerga to VentureBeat earlier this year. “That’s all developers. The games and apps have gotten so much better.”

So in a way, the new dash is just part of Google’s bid to make the Android developer’s experience better and in the end, to make Android apps better, prettier, faster, and cleaner.

As with most redesigned Google UIs, you can switch to the new dashboard now from the comfort of your current developer console just by clicking on “Try the new version” in the header.

Top image courtesy of leedsn, Shutterstock

---

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.

---

The makers of the popular Dolphin Browser have released a new version of its Android app with an add-on called Jetpack that speeds it up to twice the speed of Chrome and ten times the speed of the stock Android browser.

Dolphin parent company MoboTap said today that its browser has reached 50 million installs, a sign it has largely succeeded in becoming the top third-party browser for mobile. In June, the company opened up APIs for its Android and iOS versions of Dolphin so third parties could create add-ons for the browser. Besides offering add-ons, Dolphin differentiates itself by offering gesture controls, voice commands, and more all in the same package.

Version 9 of Dolphin includes the following updates:

Network Diagnosis: Solve your network connection issues
Night Mode: Easily dim your screen to lower brightness level when browsing at night
Dolphin Connect: Option to sync your data when connected to WiFi
Dolphin Sonar (voice commands): Even more user friendly
Various performance improvements

And, of course, now the browser is adding speed with the Jetpack add-on. The add-on only works with Dolphin’s latest version, so you must download version 9 from Google Play before launching Jetpack.

Here’s how Dolphin 9 with Jetpack performed on various benchmark tests:

• HTML5test.com: Dolphin scores 480 vs Chrome 389 (HTML5test.com is an industry respected tool for testing a browser’s su­pport of HTML5)
• Ringmark: Dolphin is the very first and only browser to reach final ring (Facebook’s benchmark test)
• Octane: Dolphin: 1394 vs Chrome: 1333 (Chrome’s benchmark test)
• Sunspider: Dolphin took 1413.2ms vs Chrome took longer with score of 1847.9ms

Dolphin photo via Ste Elmore/Flickr