Astrid announced the acquisition itself on its blog, saying that “we are thrilled to announce” that the company has been bought by Yahoo.

Users of Astrid might possibly be less than thrilled, however, as the service will only be maintained as it currently exists for 90 days, after which changes might be made. Users, however, will be able to download any data they have input into the service, if they wish.

CEO Jon Paris thanked Google Ventures and Startup Lab as well as investors Nexus Venture Partners and TMT Investments, but said that Astrid will no longer be accepting premium subscriptions. Users who have paid for annual subscriptions that overlap that period will be getting refunds.

With the purchase, Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer continues to deliver on her promise of more mobile and more acquisitions. Yahoo has also recently acquired mobile video platform OnTheAir, social curation site Snip.it, location discovery app Alike, and mobile recommendations site Jybe.

Paris’ entire statement:

Friends of Astrid,

We are thrilled to announce that we have been acquired by Yahoo!. When we set out to build Astrid, we sought to help as many people as possible become happier, healthier and more productive. We’re really excited to join the mobile team and continue this work with Yahoo!’s goal of “making the world’s daily habits more inspiring and entertaining.”

Over the next 90 days, Astrid will continue to work as is, and we will no longer be accepting new premium subscriptions. To make future changes as easy as possible, we’ll be in touch with users shortly to share how to download data.

We are grateful to the more than 4 million of you who have downloaded our apps, to those who have shared Astrid with friends, family and co-workers, and to all who encouraged us with your kind words along the way. You honored us in so many ways, and we won’t forget you.

We are also grateful to our many mentors and investors:

• Thomas Korte and AngelPad for your sage advice and assembling a tremendous community of entrepreneurs.
• Google Ventures and the team at the Startup Lab for teaching us so much.
• Nexus Venture Partners, TMT Investments, and the amazing angel investors who provided the resource and support we needed to build our products and company.
• Jump Associates and LUXr for helping us understand our users and build products people love.

To all of you, in both big and small ways you have helped us achieve the success we enjoy today. It is our sincere hope that our work will help you come closer to your own dreams.

Warmly,

Jon Paris & the Astrid Team

*Note: Yahoo! will be administering refunds to eligible users who have paid for annual subscriptions, Power-Pack and Locale Plugins.

Hat tip: The Next Web

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

So much in mobile app development is so serious these days. Interfaces are often beautiful but seldom fun as the relentless drive to small-screen efficiency and usability crowds out creativity.

That’s not the problem with Tumblr’s new Android app, released today to mostly rave reviews.

Source: Tumblr

Tumblr’s new Android app is playful and simple.

Tumblr has completely redesigned the new app, and the best part is the post-anything screen that reinforces Tumblr’s reputation as the simplest place to post just about anything. It’s playful, popping out of the bottom-right corner with a cheeky animated reveal that offers options for posting video, images, text, links, quotes, or chatting.

And yet, it’s still simple. And smart.

As UI expert Parham Aarabi says, the easiest place to reach on a mobile phone is the bottom right – where the icon starts. And notice the curve of icons, nicely approximating the sweep of your right thumb upscreen.

(Frankly, Tumblr should offer a left-handed option.)

The app, as previously, enables you to manage your Tumblr blogs, find and follow other blogs to read, read and respond to messages, and tweet out your latest updates.

Here’s a quick overview, in pictures, of the new Tumblr Android app, which is available on Google Play.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

KFC launched a new mobile app today in the UK, allowing Londoners to order their girth-enhancing chicken on the go, pop into the restaurant, and pick up their finished order in seconds.

The new technology, which depending on results will be making its way over the pond stateside, was developed with Airtag, a mobile shopping and payments provider that builds white label SaaS technology so that brands can fill out their apps with a branded mobile ordering and payment solution.

“It works on an iPhone app, or a web app,” KFC UK’s IT director Paul Borrett told me yesterday from London. “You select a restaurant, build your order, and pay with a credit card. Then you simply go to a store, swipe a QR code, and pick up your food, cutting out the step of having to stand in line, and saving about 60-70% of the wait time.”

This is not ground-breaking technology, and it has been done before.

Source: KFC, Airtag

KFC’s new mobile ordering app

What’s interesting to me is Airtag’s business model of providing white-label solutions for retailers and restaurants — and how that scales. I asked Airtag CEO Jeremy Leroyer what happens when we deal with 35 different merchants: Do we need 35 different apps?

“This is relevant for bigger merchants,” Leroyer said. “The smaller ones are definitely going to be aggregated, but this is for tier one and tier two merchants. We’re currently working with big grocers to expedite the ordering process, which will enable a similar experience for you to buy groceries.”

Leroyer argues that the important piece of any mobile wallet solution is not the payments or transaction technologies. Rather, it’s the customer experience while ordering, and the services that brands can attach to the ordering process that will make the difference.

That’s an interesting perspective and one that’s certainly worthy of consideration, especially considering the fact that we spend 80 percent of our time on mobile devices in apps. But you have to think there’s a platform play for mobile wallet technology from a Google or Apple that will be accessible to all apps, and require users to enter payment credentials only once.

Which doesn’t mean that a custom experience a la Kentucky Fried Chicken won’t still be viable.

“What we’ve been doing the last few years in Europe is push that experience and those services, to make those wallets relevant,” Leroyer told me. “The wallets that are going to be successful are going to be the merchant wallets.”

It’s certainly working for KFC right now, especially given the fragmented nature of the current mobile wallet landscape.

“I was testing this a week ago,” Borrett said. “I literally was walking to the store, ordered 30 seconds from the store, walked in, scanned, bypassed 6-7 people in line, and got my order.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google already has five of the six most popular apps in America, with Google Maps, Search, Gmail, YouTube, and Google Play. But that is apparently not enough for the search-and-mobile-and-everything giant.

So the company is now extending Field Trip, the Android-based “guide to the cool, hidden, and unique things in the world around you,” over to iOS for both iPhone and iPad. And the app that was already awesome five months ago now has double the content partners.

To build Field Trip, Google partnered with Zagat, Cool Hunting, and multiple other partners to surface the most fascinating and relevant information about the world you’re living in as you move through it. Tell it what you’re most interested in, and it will highlight architecture, or entertainment, daily deals, or more.

New content partners include the Public Art Archive and Dezeen, the art and architecture magazine, and you can adjust the app to tell you more or less, depending on your time availability and interest.

The five-month gap between the Android and iOS apps launching did allow a non-Google competitor to jump into the mix. Wanderous does much the same thing, but is more focused on a particular route that you might be following. And it saves breadcrumbs of past trips. Realistically, Wanderous is now in a tough position: Google has the resources not only to build great mapping and location apps but, far more importantly, to stock them with the almost unimaginable gobs of data required for a great user experience.

The launch is U.S. and UK only, so you’ll have to wait if you happen to live elsewhere.

photo credit: Aesum via photopin cc

Path announced this morning that Path 3 is now available, and the focus is the the type of intimate, free-form communication that happens in person. As the private social network says, “There is so much more than words that pass between us. A smile or nod or encouraging gesture – these allow for true connection and understanding.”

To enable that in a more organic — and non-Facebook way — Path has introduced private messaging. Despite the name, it can be used for both one-on-one and one-to-many communication, but the defining characteristic is that it is very free-form. Ye good olde fashioned text or photo-based status update looks almost a little limited in comparison.

A brand new language?

In the new Path, messages can be text or photos (of course) but also voice, location, a cartoon-style sticker or badge that communications your emotions of the moment, a song, a book, a video, your location, or even a movie clip you’ve found online.

In other words, just about anything but the pat on the back.

And a brand-new monetization

One of the new communication channels Path is adding is stickers, kind of a next-gen emoticon.

“These are pieces of art to be used in messaging. They are expressive and fun, and they communicate what words can’t,” Path says.

You get two free “packs” just for being a Path member, but other packs are available as well, at extra cost. Some of my favorites are designed by Hugh McLeod of GapingVoid fame, but stickers from other artists such as David Lanham and Richard Perez are also available. Path didn’t release any pricing information yet.

The new version of Path is available immediately for iPhone, and “coming soon” for Android.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

If you’re like me, your iPhone movies look like crap.

Shaky, wobbly, bouncy … it’s annoying to users and frustrating for all us buddying Scorceses, Coppolas, and Spielbergs. Even if our only audience is friends and family on Facebook.

Enter Luma.

With its recent 2.8 upgrade, the movie app replacement for Apple’s camera app uses “cinematic video stabilization” to create movies that are so smooth and clean, it’s a thing of beauty. In fact, the image above is a still from a movie shot on an iPhone with Luma … on a bike.

If I seem to be gushing, that’s because I am. I take some video occasionally when doing interviews for VentureBeat, and have received some criticism for the sadly palsied nature of the results.

I’ve tried the app myself, and the results are simply stunning. I had no idea handheld video from a phone could look so good. Here’s footage from the company showing the difference between the native iPhone camera app and Luma:

“By using advanced motion retargeting algorithms Luma not only removes handshake, but also ensures that you get the smoothest possible shot,” the company posted on its blog. “The motion retargeting algorithm automatically figures out the ideal camera motion (whether it’s a stationary, panning, dolly, or steadicam shot that you’re after) and retargets the video to match that motion.”

Luma also allows you to apply filters for various effects to your videos in a very Instagramish way, if you’re into that sort of thing. Pastel, vignette, analog, noir, toon, and the ever-favorite sepia are among the options, and the effect is applied immediately, not in post-processing. As per usual, you can inflict the results of your creativity on Facebook and Twitter, or to connections on Luma’s own budding video network.

One caveat: I did not see a share to YouTube option, which is a must-have for me. Fortunately, there is an option to save captured videos to your standard iOS camera app, from which you can simply upload to YouTube.

Overall, however, this is one of the few apps I’ll be keeping on my phone after testing. The company calls it magic. I simply have to agree.

Image credit: Luma

“We are all out in the world like advance scouts with trusty smartphones in hand — observing, discovering, and capturing interesting details on the go,” chief executive Bruce Linn told VentureBeat via email. “Share it all in Collective.li.”

Linn’s startup was formerly called NotesCloud, but the rebrand better conveys that its community is building collections of digital artifacts that are significant to them, not just taking notes, Linn said. The goal: a single space where people can collect, organize, and share everything digital.

The new Collective.li iPhone app

The new mobile app for iPhone is a good start. It captures photos, videos, and audio, and you can use it to edit clips and images before uploading them to a “beautiful digital magazine” all about you and your interests. Where, of course, they can be shared with your friends and family.

Collective.li’s interface is a little evocative for those of us who use Pinterest … or another competing mobile platform:

“We’re bringing the best of Metro (rich content tiles, elegant panoramic panels, fluid UI hierarchies) to the iPhone,” Linn says.

Since the goal is for users to be able to clip anything, anywhere, and add it to their personal portfolio, Collective.li is also launching a web clipper for Safari. The new clipper will grab articles, screenshots, tweets, videos, and more, and joins the company’s existing Chrome plugin.

Firefox and Internet Explorer 10 versions are coming soon, Linn said.

Once you’ve uploaded images, videos, and perhaps screenshots, you can organize and arrange your content. Another update Collective.li has made is that rather than using the old NotesCloud paradigm of notebooks, pages, and sections, the new service features what Linn calls a “simpler and flexible” arrangement of nested collections, which he says are “as natural to users as file folders or bookmark folders – and so much more powerful.”

Here’s a peak at one of those collections:

Source: Collective.li

A Collective.li collection

Collective.li is based in Mountain View, Calif., and has taken $100,000 in seed funding. It is still in public beta.

At home

The afternoon of Dec. 31 varies greatly depending on your game plan. If it involves snuggling on the couch with takeout and television, I won’t stick my nose in and complicate the matter. But if after two hours of Kathy Griffin and chicken chow main you’re feeling restless, I suggest a round of dance video games. This way, you can stay entertained, get in your token dance moves, and remain as much of a hermit as your heart desires. Dance Dance Revolution, Just Dance, and Dance Central are all good options.

For those looking to use their evening productively, DIY community Instructables offers fun projects to occupy the hours and make them more festive. My favorite is BaR2D2. This mobile robotic bar includes a motorized beer elevator, ice mixer drawer, six-bottle shot dispenser, and computerized drink mixer. For those feeling less ambitious, check out this how-to guide for LED throwies. It is a fun, at-home, and inexpensive way to jazz up your space without the frustration of confetti. All you need are diffused LEDs, lithium batteries, and tape. The Huffington Post also published a great guide to NYE crafts to add a little sparkle and flair to any gathering, large or small.

Party preparations

For those of you planning to be around other people, chances are you will need some sort of a party ensemble. My preferences lean toward excessive amount of shimmer, sparkle, sequins. If you are looking for style inspiration, online lifestyle publication DailyCandy offers a dazzling array of fashion and beauty tips to keep you looking glamorous all night long. I also like the outfits on the Asos Fashion Finder (for both men and women) and, of course, Pinterest. Before the festivities begin, get feedback on your outfit on Fashism. Users post a photo of what they are wearing, ask a question, and people in their social network can “love it,” “leave it,” or offer a comment.

If you are throwing the one throwing a party, a bevy of apps can help with the planning process. Simple Soiree makes it easy to plan a party from your iPhone, with tools to manage guest and shopping lists, menus, decor, and entertainment and any other To-Dos. Pocket Cocktails apps include a thorough mixology guide complete with images, recipes, and tips. Home bartenders can search by category and collect favorite drinks for easy reference. Looking for guidance on holiday party fare? Check out the Epicurious guide to New Year’s Eve. It has articles for everything from a family-friendly feast to dishes to pair with sparkling wine.

Heading out on the town

If you are an energetic soul braving the New Year’s crowds, you will probably want to have an intended destination. I am all for going with the flow, but on New Year’s, that attitude can often result in standing outside a club trying to convince the bouncer to let you in at midnight and giving him a hug at midnight. This is not fun. Trust me. If you haven’t made your plans in advance and are looking for an event at the last minute, Eventful offers a comprehensive events guide to local nightlife, entertainment, concerts, and venues. If you are simply looking for a cool bar or restaurant nearby, Facebook’s new “Nearby” feature is a quick and easy way to discover businesses with your friends’ seal of approval, as is Foursquare.

Nothing can ruin New Year’s Eve like making bad choices, so it is important that while out cheering and toasting, you make sure the good times stay good. It is easy at house parties and open bars to lose track of how many drinks you have had. DrinkTracker is an iPhone app that lets you keep a record of what you have been drinking, and it uses personal information from your profile to estimate your blood alcohol content. DrinkTracker automatically compares your alcohol intake and metabolic removal rate to keep your BAC current and will let you know when you have reached your “target.”

Oftentimes, the things one does whilse inebriated can have longer lasting effects than a headache. Thus apps like Drunk Blocker and Textalyzer are useful, because they prevent communication under-the-influence. Revelers create their black list of contacts and the app won’t let you drink and text.

Midnight

New Year’s just wouldn’t be New Year’s without the festivities in Times Square. The Times Square Official New Year’s Eve Ball app for iPhone and Android lets people join in the fun at a comfortable distance. The app features live video streaming of the activities, including the official show’s opening ceremonies, musical performances, celebrity appearances, the countdown, and the midnight Ball Drop. Users can also access content about the history of the celebration, send e-cards, and share photos. Once the ball has dropped and it is time to party like its 2013, revelers can celebrate with this Champagne Popper app from Maxim. Before the chaos ensues, you can preload a message and choose contacts, who will receive a greeting from you at midnight. It lets you spend more time drinking actual champagne and kissing, and less time texting everyone you know at 12:01 a.m.

Getting home

At the end of the night, once you have downed a few flutes of champagne, sung “Auld Lang Syne,” and hopefully received some sort of New Year’s Eve love whether it be real or digital, it is important to get home safe. Check out VentureBeat writer Christina Farr’s guide to technology that gets you home safely.

Happy 2013 everyone!

That’s one of the reasons Facebook is reportedly working on a new app that will let users send photos — and maybe videos — to friends that will self-destruct. According to AllThingsD, Facebook is testing an app to compete with SnapChat, the social network that deletes photos and videos seconds after they’ve been viewed.

SnapChat’s app, which has been accused of being a sexting tool, allows users to take pictures or short videos, add short, superimposed text messages, and send them privately to a friend. The sender can also chose how long the message should be viewable. As soon as the receiver gets and views the message, the timer starts. Once the message is deleted, it disappears from the receiver’s phone, the sender’s phone, and Snapchat’s servers.

Too bad there’s such a thing as screen captures.

After perhaps a slow start in mobile that Mark Zuckerberg blames on an over-reliance on an HTML5-based strategy to build cross-platform apps, Facebook has moving into the app space aggressively with standalone apps. Of course, it bought photo-sharing service Instagram for $750 million. It also has Facebook Messenger, a sort of SMS-replacement app on which messages do not disappear, and the apparently Instagram-competing Camera.

In addition, as part of a strategy to improve quality and get better faster, Facebook is now pushing out refreshes to its core mobile Facebook mobile apps every one or two months. Just in the past week, Facebook updated its Android and iOS apps, which are both now native apps, with better performance than ever.

The new SnapChat competitor is rumored to be going live sometime in the next few weeks. Little hint to Facebook: before Christmas would be a nice gift to your users.

photo credit: Shandi-lee via photopin cc

The big update? MOAR SPEED!

Facebook’s app release notes say that the timeline is completely rebuilt, and that the new feed opens faster on your iPhone. I downloaded and tested the update, and while this app is theoretically an incremental improvement, not a completely redo like the Android release earlier, it is much, much faster.

Facebook’s slowness to load and refresh on iPhone has been my wife’s major complaint about the app. She almost exclusively interacts with Facebook on mobile.

But even on her iPhone 4S, the app loads, displays content, scrolls, and refreshes at least 25 percent quicker than previously. And on my iPhone 5,  the news feed positively flies, where before it always seemed to struggle to keep up with my scrolling.

One thing that’s clear after also playing with the new Android version that was just updated yesterday: Facebook has finally achieved feature and user experience parity on the iOS and Android. Both apps feel snappy and very, very responsive.

In addition, Facebook also added the ability to upload photos to a specific album to this updated version.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

On the app selection front, Windows 8 is quickly coming into its own.

The Windows 8 Store now features over 20,000 apps, according to independent analysis from WinAppUpdate. The latest number is a big increase over the 12,895 apps the store featured earlier this month. Microsoft is adding roughly 400 apps to the store each day.

While those numbers are pretty good taken alone, they’re microscopic compared to those of competing platforms. Apple passed the 1 million mark on the App Store earlier this week and Google, right on its heels, now offers roughly 700,000 apps on Google Play. Surprisingly  the Windows 8 Store has already surpassed the Apple Mac App Store, which features roughly 12,636 apps, according to AppShopper.

So it’s a mixed bag, performance-wise.

But that’s just in terms of quantity. The more significant short-term mission for Microsoft is adding key apps like Google Chrome and Facebook to the Windows 8 catalog. These are the apps users will be looking for when they run Windows 8 for the first time, and the ones Microsoft should ensure make it to the platform sooner rather than later.

Via TheNextWeb

Photo: Ricardo Bilton/VentureBeat

Because, of course, I am a hardboiled technology reporter, and I don’t do frivolous crap like fashion.

Tyra Banks has released a new iPhone app to help other women — and men — learn the secret that she teaches America’s Next Top Models: how to take sizzling hot self-portraits by “smizing.” Smizing, as I learned today, is the art of smiling with your eyes.

You may think that’s a little feminine, and not for the hairier, rougher half of our species. As Tyra tells me, however, you’d be wrong:

The app is Smize Yourself, and it goes live later today. In it, Tyra teaches fans and users how to smize. Listen to Tyra’s instructions, pose, take the picture … and then get specific instructions on how to position your mouth, how wide to open your eyes, and more to become a smizing expert. Or you can simply use the Smize Yourself image enhancement features to automatically adjust your photo and create the ultimate smize.

If you’re like me and never heard the term “smize” before, join the club. But it has been around for a while.

“Ever since I introduced the term ‘smize’ in the early days of America’s Next Top Model, we’ve had an amazing response from audiences and fans all over the world,” Tyra said in a statement. “Now, everyone will not only get their fiercest photos with this lesson in smizing, but they can also have fun by showing off their most exaggerated smizing photos.”

The app is available tonight for iOS, and $1.99 will have you smizing your way to dating heaven.

You know you’ve been waiting for this and have to have it.

Of course, that may just be the stupid in me coming out. I did, after all, just video-chat with a supermodel.

Image credit: Tyra Banks

That chief executive is Damien Patton, the founder of Banjo. A couple of years ago, Patton almost met a friend in Logan International Airport in Boston. The friend had posted on Facebook, Patton had tweeted on Twitter.

Predictably, they missed each other. But the occasion did give Patton an idea for an app that brings all your social networks together and one that treats location as an organizing principle for social updates … which seems, in retrospect, to be such an obvious and intuitive idea.

The third version of Banjo, available today, showcases both location and friends differently than any other app I’ve used. I got an advance preview of the app, which already has three million users in 194 countries, to test yesterday.

Location: the here and the there

Social apps with location awareness are often all about “here” — what’s happening around you right now. ”We want a way to see important things near us, across networks … we shouldn’t miss out on things that are important to us,” Patton told me.

Source: John Koetsier

Banjo organizes all your friends across all your networks into locations

But the “here” is only part of the story, he argues. Often, because you are where you are, you know what’s happening … in your office, your home, or the restaurant. What you don’t know is what’s happening where your 10 friends in New York are, or where your 15 friends in London are.

“Actually, the ‘here’ gets pretty stale,” says Patton. “For most people, 80 percent of their life is office and home. But people don’t want to miss out … they want to know what is going on for their friends everywhere.”

So Banjo organizes all your friends across all your social networks — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and more — by location. And it will alert you to common connections who you might know via another friend.

For example, I have friends in Monaco. Sometimes it would be nice to just notice what they’re up to, and perhaps find out that they’re watching the Monaco Grand Prix, or just whiling away the day on a boat in the Mediterranean. For Patton, who is still into racing, knowing that a friend is at a Formula One race in Seoul, Korea, is priceless … as is experiencing the event through his Facebook updates.

It’s not difficult to do the local, Patton said, but doing the “there” is hard — very hard.

Indexing everything

Local events happening now are bounded in time and space. Global events — since you have friends in many cities, potentially around the world — may be bounded in time, but not in space.

The challenge is indexing everything for you real-time, in cities that the cloud-based service behind the Banjo app doesn’t even know you’re interested in, until you start up the app. Patton calls it a “real-time geospatial engine.”

And the connections aren’t just to people you specifically know, either. Banjo goes a little wider than that.

“Banjo created the ability to cross the social graphs,” Patton told me. “For example, it can tell me that a person taking a photo on Instagram is friends with a friend of mine on Facebook … even if I’ve never heard of Instagram.”

Source: John Koetsier

Banjo map view shows you what’s happening across your social graph at a very granular level of location

Patton calls those “common connections.” Banjo starts with friends, moves to connections, and can even show you a public feed of publicly-available social updates: photos, statuses, tweets, and more.

“We’ve indexed 52 billion unique connections,” says Patton. “So when you go to Atlanta, it’s customized to you. We can personalize everything to you as an individual user as it happens.”

That enables all kinds of possibilities, like the ability to find a specific location, filter by a keyword, and find all the people in Chicago at the Bears game, for instance. Or everyone in Silicon Valley who is talking about Ballmer’s recent interview with Reid Hoffman.

That’s both cool and useful, and Banjo’s home screen, which shows you your friends organized by where they are are, is as well. I asked Patton if he envisions people using Banjo as their primary social app, since you can also use it to post to multiple social networks.

“For some, yes,” he  replied. “But it’s really about the power to not miss out on things that are happening all across your social landscape. It’s so noisy right now … but when you look at it through the lens of connections and locations, it’s less noisy.”

Less noise? Sign me up.

Banjo is available for both iPhone and Android.

photo credit: plums_deify via photopin cc

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cloud analytics and optimization company Newvem released the first-ever native iPhone app to help companies manage their Amazon web services today.

Cloud Smart Meter shows IT managers, CIOs, and developers what they’re using, how much they’re spending, and what’s currently not working — or might be about to go down.

“Everyone is constantly on their iPad or iPhone,” Newvem chief executive Zev Laderman told me. “Forget the dashboard … they don’t have time to be on the screen.”

Instead, Newvem included only the most relevant features, including “unhealthy servers,” machines behind a load balancer that might be about to crash.

“Instead of showing 35 things that are OK,” he said, “we just show the CIO what the red is.”

Newvem says the app can help Amazon Web Services customers improve security by notifying them of open ports on machines. It claims it can save them money as well, giving them data on underutilized services that they can then turn off or reduce.

“We let companies see the forest for the trees,” Laderman says, saying that Newvem “analyzes and highlights what is critical for you to be on top of in your cloud.”

Once users see that there is an issue, they can deal with it personally or send an alert to a member of their technical team.

The new app can help AWS clients respond quicker  to changing circumstances, Laderman says. ”The whole cloud is about changing your technology to meet a varying load … growing and shrinking in a very usage-based model.”

Newvem currently manages over 700 clouds for companies small and large.

photo credit: jaci XIII via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Will Apple say yes?

According to a report by the Guardian, Google is working on a version of Google Maps for iPhone. Apple’s Maps application replaced Google’s — to widespread displeasure — in iOS 6. That Google would attempt to reclaim its position in iOS was fairly predictable.

What is not predictable is how Apple will respond.

Apple has played hardball with Google in the past. It held up the Google Voice app for perhaps a year as both companies wrangled with how much functionality could be included. The issue from Apple’s perspective is that it doesn’t want apps that duplicate functionality already on the iPhone, such as an app with features similar to Airplay.

Another issue, of course, is competitive advantage, as access to all of iOS’s users is a huge boon to a company that feeds on data, as Google does.

Google’s new Maps app is supposed to be ready for app store submission before the end of this year. Only then — assuming we hear about it — will we know for sure how Apple intends to respond. Another app that Apple deleted from the default set of apps that ship with iOS 6 is YouTube.

The result? YouTube has consistently been at the list of the top free apps available in the Apple store throughout October and remains at the top today. That’s an indicator that Apple users aren’t necessarily as sold on Apple’s strategic direction as Apple itself.

You’d think Apple would want to avoid something similar happening with Maps.

VentureBeat has contacted both Apple and Google for comment. A Google spokesman responded with the following:

We believe Google Maps are the most comprehensive, accurate and easy-to-use maps in the world. Our goal is to make Google Maps available to everyone who wants to use it, regardless of device, browser, or operating system.

We will update with any comments from Apple.

photo credit: Genista via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Android has Field Trip, an app that connects you to interesting sights and information, wherever you are. Now iPhone has Wanderous.

The brand-new app, which launched yesterday on the app store, shows you highlights of what’s near, what’s interesting, and what you should explore. But where Field Trip pops up information as you go, Wanderous is more like a treasure map for a route you’ve already selected.

Here’s how Adam Wolf, the app’s creator, described it to me:

“Wanderous is a navigation app that creates routes optimized for adventure. Routes in Wanderous start and end where the user specifies, but here’s the twist: During the journey, the routes intentionally wander to one or more interesting, unique, or notable spots chosen by the user. Spots can include parks, landmarks, historical sites, busy city corridors, scenic vistas, and public attractions.”

Wanderous isn’t a clone of Field Trip. But it is in the same family.

While the data that drives Google’s exploration app comes from a variety of sources, such as the Food Network, the Atlas Obscura, and Cool Hunting, Wanderous has its own database of interesting places in addition to the main attractions that you’ll likely find in any travel app.

Another difference?

Wanderous tracks where you’ve been, dropping “virtual breadcrumbs” as you go. This allows you to save maps showing what places you’ve visited — and what remains unexplored.

The app is free for a limited time, Wolf told me. So if you’re interesting, you may want to download it now.

Wanderous works on iPhone 3GS through 5 and iPod Touch third generation and up. It requires iOS 6.

photo credit: Murky1 via photopin cc

Smartphones and apps sometimes separate us from the physical world even as we walk through it. But Google has created a virtual tool that will help us appreciate the wonder of reality.

Google’s new Android app Field Trip is a docent for your smartphone, telling you all the fascinating, relevant, and historical information about the world you’re living in as you move through it — without having to ask.

Tell Field Trip what you’re interested in — architecture, history, entertainment, deals — and as you move through your day, the app will bring up fascinating tips or shopping opportunities as you move from place to place. It requires no searching, no Googling, no quick check of Wikipedia: just information that you’ve asked for, appearing when you might want to see it.

It’s not local search; it’s local find — no questions required.

Field Trip has one of the most impressive introductory videos that I’ve ever seen. It tells a fascinating story about the vision behind the project, and it’s well worth a couple of minutes of your time. Keep watching to the very end, or you won’t understand what’s going on:

Google has partnered with the Food Network, it’s own Zagat, and Eater to find the best places to eat, and Cool Hunting, Inhabitat, and Remodelista, among others, for funky stores and products. Atlas Obscura – the self-described “compendium of the world’s wonders, curiosities, and esoterica” — and the Daily Secret add in flavor and seasoning, and Vayable adds unique hand-picked experiences such as custom tours, and local, insider events.

The danger, of course is annoyance: If the app tells too much, or if too little is relevant, users will turn it off. But it can be turned off, and the categories can be personalized to your interests. I’m optimistic this will turn out to be a very, very neat tool for both vacationers and those who are rediscovering the places in which they live.

The app is only available in the U.S. at launch, and while it is currently Android-only, an iPhone version is coming “soon.”

photo credit: Aesum via photopin cc

Klash is a gamification platform for life, except much more fun than that sounds.

The team behind the app — a polyglot group including an Italian, a Turk, and an Austrian — met in Barcelona and moved to Berlin with zero programming experience and just the nub of an idea: to turn dares and challenges into memorable social media moments.

In Berlin they won the StartUpWeekend Berlin 2011 competition, found a CTO, and built both a web app and an iPhone app. Which co-founder Allessandro Petrucciani (no points for guessing his nationality) promptly pitched to Jason Calacanis in a mankini, probably on a dare from his Klash colleagues.

And that’s how the app works: connect to your friends, dare them to do silly things like moonwalk through all the crosswalks they pass, and follow, track, and share the results

I spoke to one co-founder Alex Napetschnig — the not-crazy one, as I found out – via Skype about the app.

And here’s Klash’s current, humorous launch video

photo credit: MSVG via photo pin cc

BeFunky, a free app that can best be described as Instagram-meets-Photoshop, lets you do some seriously funky stuff with your photos. Today, it launches its Instagram competitor to the U.S. market: a free photo-editing tool for Android and iOs.

Tekin Tatar, the company’s founder and CEO, said that BeFunky competes with established apps like Hipstamatic and Instagram, but it’s unique due to its “advanced smart enhancement and photo correction algorithms.”

Instagram have may its filters, but the Turkish startup is best known for its special effects. On BeFunky, users can choose from a variety of artsy frames, borders, and top it off with a retro finish. After playing around with the iPhone version, my favorites are “Old Photo” and “Gritty HDR.” Unlike Instagram, users can make subtle or extreme variations to brightness, hues, and tones (which explains how I was able to manufacture green-tinted hair).

Once you’ve added a touch of grunge or Hollywood glamour and you’re ready to share, the app integrates with the usual suspects: Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr and Twitter. You can also upload to BeFunky’s website. Also launching today is the BeFunky Gallery, which pits the site against Flickr. It’s a database of thousands of edited photos (most are head shots, but some are bordering on artistic) that you can comment on, rate, or share.

BeFunky isn’t a new kid on the block that saw an opportunity when Instagram raked in the big bucks. It has been around since 2007, and it has succeeded in raising a total of $1.6 million in funding from Golden Horn Ventures, among others.

The startup first appeared on the scene when it launched a flagship tool to give your photos a cartoon effect, which soared on the website. It achieved millions of downloads yet again with “Uvatar,” which lets you create a virtual avatar from any photo.

With its latest update, the founders hope the photo-editing tool will make headway in the U.S. market. For this reason, the small team relocated the company’s headquarters from Turkey to San Francisco.

Tatar told me that the startup has soared to 5 million active monthly users and 500,000 daily users that create 50 million photos each month. The lesson here is that if you’re an app developer with a goal to reach millions of downloads, why not give photo-editing a shot?

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

CrowdCall, the conference calling solution that calls you, has reached 1 million calls per month just five months after launch. Next week, the company is announcing new features as well as new, supercheap pricing.

CrowdCall launched in March of this year, offering a novel approach to teleconferences: no numbers, no PIN codes, no scheduling required, and participants don’t even have to phone in to join the conference. Call organizers simply download the app (iPhone or Android), indicate who they want on the call, and CrowdCall initiates the teleconference.

Participants get a call and are automatically connected.

Randy Adams

Today the service user base is doubling every month and has hit the 1 million-calls-per-month level. People are making up to 50,000 calls each day and using more than 10 million minutes of audio conferencing in 40 countries around the world.

I spoke with CrowdCall’s chief executive, serial entrepreneur Randy Adams, about the service and about the coming new features.

“I had a concept about a year ago that you shouldn’t need to know numbers to talk to people,” Adams says. “We released SocialDial, which had a group-calling feature, but it was hidden about two levels down.”

SocialDial, which is still the name of the parent company, had some traction with its app, but the most popular feature by far was group calling. So Adams decided to highlight only that aspect that by taking a chainsaw to the feature set and releasing an app dedicated solely to simplified conference calls.

(This is not the first time we’ve seen this move. Bump did something similar: Take the one great feature out of an app with many features, and make that feature the entire app.)

CrowdCall

The result was crazy, hockey stick growth. Or, as I like to call it, rocket-stick growth.

“We’re literally getting 10,000 new users a day,” Adams told me. “We’re running to scale our servers and keep service from degrading … it’s a scary thing, actually.”

That’s without any advertising and not much press.

The one thing the company has done to promote CrowdCall is to text conference call joiners — not initiators who already have the app — one time, telling them that they have been “crowd-called” and suggesting they get the app as well.

“We haven’t spent a dime to get new users,” says Adams.

It’s not the first time that Adams has experience viral growth and adoption. When he cofounded FunnyOrDie with comedian Will Ferrell, they launched with one video, sent out 10 emails, and watched as traffic skyrocketed to 3 million views a day. Adams attributes it to the web and to the product.

“The web is incredibly efficient about spreading the word about things that are remarkable,” he says.

Next week, CrowdCall is moving to another level.

New features include calendar integration, audio controls, participant management, and recording and archiving — all the add-ons that can help the app go from that’s-very-cool-kid to an actual enterprise solution. And new pricing is coming as well, starting with free, as befits a viral app. Five-hundred minutes of calling to 40 countries is free, but heavier users can choose a $10 plan for 1,000 minutes, at $50 plan for 10,000 minutes, or unlimited calling to all those countries for just $100.

With hockey stick growth and monetization of a new service typically comes funding as well. CrowdCall, which started with $1 million in angel money, will be seeking venture capital in the next few months to scale and grow. The goal, Adams said is a million users by the end of the year.

After that, he hinted, even more disruption will be taking place.

photo credit: M J M via photo pin cc

It’s all very exciting, I’m sure … checking which potential candidates have the most Wikipedia edits, assuming that their public profile is being cleaned up and groomed by armies of handlers, and making a prediction.

Only available on Android. Get your Google Play on now!

But I’m a little Romney’d out. I mean, just pick someone already. Chris, Condy, Petraeus, Marco. Flip a coin. Toss a dart.

Romney already has his own “Mitt’s VP” app out on iTunes, which performs the singularly un-useful and uninteresting function of informing you who he’s picking for veep about three seconds before the rest of the world.

I mean, this is why we have computers that fit in the palm of your hand and networks that connect us at nearly the speed of light?

It’s more fun than watching Olympics. More electrifying than Usain Bolt. Or at least better than the magnetic stage presence of that masterful public orator, IOC president Jaques Rogge.

Tugs at my heart-strings too. The app informs me that I could be the second one to know … just after the presidential candidate’s wife, Ann. (I think they may have forgotten about the VP candidate him or herself.)

Apple, isn’t there an app review process in Cupertino anymore? Can’t we just swap this out for yet another fart app?

It all reminds me of LeBron James leaving Cleveland.

Staged, managed, built up for maximum effect, milked for every ounce of publicity that can possibly be squeezed out of the utterly mundane process of picking a stooge for possibly the least powerful position in U.S. government.

Guess it worked again.

Source: Apple

Mitt’s who-will-it-be VP app

Image credit: Paul Fleet/ShutterStock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

For all of the apps, sensors, and powerful hardware our smartphones are equipped with, they’re still pretty dumb when it comes to making and receiving phone calls. With its latest Android app, Current Caller ID, WhitePages shows us one potential evolutionary path for the smartphone’s calling and texting screens.

Like caller ID on steroids, the app displays social media updates, as well as local news and weather information, alongside a caller’s name and number when receiving or making a call or text. Current Caller ID also offers nifty infographics that chart your communication history with contacts (so you can feel extra guilty about never calling your grandma).

As you can see in the video below (seriously, watch it), the Current Caller ID app takes over your Android phone’s standard call screen to do its magic (something that’s notably not possible on the iPhone). It’s such a simple concept that I’m surprised something like this hasn’t been attempted before. Or perhaps the app is just particularly refreshing since call screens haven’t really changed much since the feature phone era.

Current Caller ID replaces WhitePage’s previous Android app, which simply acted as a Caller ID app for your smartphone. The new app offers all of the same functionality as its predecessor, which WhitePages says has identified more than 700 million calls since it launched in 2008.

I wouldn’t be too surprised if Apple, Microsoft, and Android manufacturers take a few hints from Current Caller ID. The app has the potential to bring us even closer to our family and friends by automatically keeping us informed when it matters the most.

WhitePages has also put together an interesting infographic breaking down just how much we’re buried by communication options these days. Of course, the hope is that Current Caller ID will serve as a relief to the headaches of status updates, unread messages, and cluttered inboxes.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Mobile app monetization is hot, hot, hot.

Last month at MobileBeat Flurry, TapJoy, and Apsalar were only three of the firms that were cozying up to developers. Google’s AdMob is also in the hunt for both developers and advertisers, and dozens of others provide advertising and other monetization opportunities for mobile apps.

But today, Inneractive closed a $3.5 million financing round led by Evergreen Venture Partners, which also invested in the company’s first round back in 2010. The app monetization firm plans to use the funds to accelerate global expansion and double down on its private ad exchange strategy.

The reason for the noise in the app monetization space is clear: huge need, and huge opportunity.

In 2010, 71 percent of the top 100 grossing apps in mobile marketplaces were paid apps. In 2012, app analytics company Distimo reports an almost complete reversal: 68 percent of the top 100 most lucrative apps are free applications.

Source: Distimo

Top-grossing apps are all going to free

Those free applications need monetization strategies, and while in-app purchases is one of them, so is advertising.

That’s where Inneractive comes in, with two innovations: real-time bidding, and private ad exchanges. Real-time bidding (RTB) allows advertisers to vary their purchasing and pricing in real-time, while private ad exchanges allow developer communities such as Corona Labs, StackMob, and LiveCode to offer their own almost white-label advertising solutions.

Inneractive is expanding, and chief executive Ziv Elul says that this new round of financing will help the company “open new offices in NYC, India, and Singapore in addition to the ones in London, Tel Aviv, and the Silicon Valley.”

Inneractive consolidates over 120 ad providers that offer ads in 200 countries and can be integrated into apps via one line of code. It supports  iOS, Android, Ovi, Windows Phone, or “any other platform.”

Image credit: Zurbaggen/ShutterStock

Clueful is an app that examines other applications on your phone or iPad and tells you what they’re doing: accessing your address book, using location services such as GPS, encrypting stored data, connecting to your social accounts, and more.

It only worked with free apps, and it didn’t show you data on all applications, just about 60,000 of the most popular. Still, it was a very useful way for Apple device owners to get some insight into what their apps were doing.

But not anymore.

As Bitdefender announced on its website, Apple removed the app after previously approving it:

Apple informed Bitdefender’s product development team of the removal — for reasons we are studying — after it was approved under the same rules. iPhone owners who already use Clueful privacy may continue to do so.

Bitdefender is continuing to work on Clueful and plans to resubmit the app to Apple in an attempt to get back in the Cupertino company’s good graces.

While the company cannot speak about the reasons for the removal, and Apple never almost never comments on app store rejections, perhaps we can find a clue in what Bitdefender has already learned from Clueful. Of apps the company has studied:

• 42.5 percent do not encrypt users’ personal data, even when sending it over public Wi-Fi
• 41.4 percent can track a user’s location
• almost one in five of the apps analyzed can access your entire Address Book
• some apps send your information to the cloud without encrypting it.

Tracking location and accessing the address book are all fine and well, if the user has authorized it. But storing and sending private data unencrypted is not good news at all.

And it’s not something that improves Apple’s or iOS’ reputation as safe, secure, and friendly … nor the company’s desired contrast with the wild, wild, west of Android apps. Hopefully those considerations were not part of the app store approval — or un-approval, in this case — decision process.

Bitdefender could still use a private API or unauthorized method. But by continuing development the company is showing some confidence that Clueful will be re-approved when changes are made.

Bitdefender’s chief security researcher Catalin Cosoi says as much:

“While Clueful remains off the App Store, we are working hard toward understanding why our app was removed and to develop the app to improve its chances of staying there.”

For the sake of iOS users’ security and privacy, I hope the company’s successful.

Image credit: VectorARA/ShutterStock

VEVO just provided its answer by giving 50 million music lovers in the U.S. and Canada access to the videos they love anywhere, anytime, on any device. That means iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry Playbook (!), and now…the mobile web.

Native apps are designed for a specific mobile platform, such as iOS or Android, and are distributed via app store downloads. While they can be richer, more customized experiences, mobile-friendly websites or web apps are automatically available to anyone on any device with a modern web browser…without a download.

VEVO’s new announcement means you can have this desktop experience:

On your iPad or any other mobile device with a modern browser:

…all without downloading an app.

VEVO has more than 50,000 music videos in high definition and is seeing 45 billion views a year on a global basis. The service is a sort of Pandora for music videos: Users sign up, VEVO scans both their music libraries and Facebook likes for music they love, and then VEVO creates a playlist of their favorite artists with maybe a few new recommendations thrown in.

Adding the mobile web allows VEVO to be platform-agnostic, letting its millions of users watch music videos however they want.

Another major benefit? Users who click (or tap) on Twitter or Facebook links to VEVO videos have a seamless experience, seeing the video in a browser, instead of being forced to enter (or even download) an application.

VEVO serves videos in over 200 countries via a partnership with YouTube, and over 200 million people use VEVO to watch music videos. However, it’s not clear whether this new announcement means that video will be available on vevo.com for users outside of the U.S. and Canada. VEVO has typically distributed internationally via YouTube. (VentureBeat has inquired, and we’ll update this post as we learn more.)

VEVO is a partnership between Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Abu Dhabi Media Company and has offices in New York, L.A., Chicago, Detroit, and San Francisco.

Image credit: Regien Paassen/ShutterStock

[ Note: I've done a follow-up interview with Wickr. See that here. ]

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always wanted “secure, military-grade communications.” Not that I want to do anything mind-bogglingly stupid, Anthony Wiener-style, or that I’m planning the imminent violent overthrow of Western civilization.

I want it mainly just because it sounds cool.

That’s the promise of new iPhone app Wickr, which says that “the internet is forever, but your data doesn’t have to be.” The company’s slogan is “Leave No Trace.”

Well, never fear, because I’ve deleted the app from my phone. How’s that for no trace?

I was fairly excited at first: Totally secure, completely private, and I can erase my own emails on your device. I imagined setting an autodestruct for 10 seconds, sending a friend a 10-page treatise on the mating habits of Visayan warty pigs, and then laughing uncontrollably.

Juvenile, I know.

Robert Statica, co-founder

But that’s what the words “military grade” and “tactical” do to men: They make them stupid.

Wickr, of course, is made by seriously smart people. Security guru Dan Kaminsky served as an advisor to the team, Forbes tells us breathlessly. Cofounder Robert Statica is the director of the center for information protection at New Jersey Institute of Technology. He even has good reviews on RateMyProfessor, although his profile pic might be a little “The Silence of the Lambs” for some.

But there’s one small fly in this ointment of bursting intelligence.

The app only works if you’re sending email to people who already have a Wickr account. Which means that the first day you get this app, it is completely and utterly useless. To bring back an old network-effects example, it’s like having precisely one fax machine. Uno. Eins. Un.

I guess you could email yourself.

Wickr says the app is in use by many people in many different walks of life: “reporters, sources, senators, cops, freedom fighters, doctors, patients, lawyers, bankers, military, intel, boards, billionaires, celebs and college students.”

No email for you!

And I have no doubt that if I was a billionaire, I’d probably be able to force all my business associates, friends, and family to use whatever bloody email software I want, dammit.

But how on earth as a journalist can I ask my sources to not email me, not phone me, not Skype me, but instead have an iPhone, find an app, download it, create an account, connect with me, and then (and only then) communicate with me.

Not likely.

Of course, I may be completely wrong (and I know I can count on all of you tell me just how wrong I am, in the comments).

Nico Sell, one of Wickr’s cofounders, responded to my emailed request for more information about how, precisely, the company was going to get scale, go big, and make the app useful for the first-time user.

“You must invite your friends to make it useful. This is why it is viral. Remember, though, it is a free app that just takes a minute to set up with an easy invite feature.”

And maybe I’m all wet. Wickr seems to be doing something right. Sell continued, saying:

“We are already seeing a hockey stick growth curve. Wickr is currently the 16th most popular social app right after Google+ and before FourSquare and Bump! People are going crazy for Wickr.”

That is astonishing. My curmudgeonly take? It’s temporary — due to a major publicity push — and will not last. My bet is that people use email for too many things and too many people to switch just for a few private messages to one particular app — especially with no Android version (yet) and no desktop app.

Am I wrong?

Sell’s email, by the way, is still in my inbox. I think I’ll keep it there for a while…just as long as I want to.

For those who are interested, here’s a visual tour through Wickr, right from the start:

Image credit: Vault/ShutterStock

Design is determining the winners in everything mobile. The most successful players are focusing on one thing: How to make products, services, and devices as compelling and delightful as possible – visually, and experientially. MobileBeat 2012, July 10-11 in San Francisco , is assembling the most elite minds to debate how UI/UX is transforming every aspect of the mobile economy, and where the opportunities lie. Register here.

New Relic calls it the App Speed Index, and it measures how fast your site works for end users — from their perspective. The index shows companies how they are performing relative to their peers in 12 industry categories, including commerce, mobile, social networking, and online games.

Average site speed in 12 industry categories

VentureBeat talked to Bill Hodak, director of product marketing at New Relic, to get the details.

“At New Relic, we’re sitting on a lot of customer data,” Hodak explained. “With 25,000 active customers on our platform, they’re sending us 55 billion individual metrics on a daily basis.”

Those metrics are individual touch points of customers on a website or web application: a page loaded, an image viewed, a button clicked, an error, or any other trackable action being taken. With over 1.5 billion pages loaded per day, that’s a lot of data to learn from.

“We wanted to take that data and turn it into an actionable feature for our customers,” said Hodak.

In addition, the app speed index reveals the fastest sites across all business categories. In the inaugural ranking, small business software provider Intuit took second place, while Groupon took fifth. Additional factors in the index include site reliability or uptime, and error rate.

The competitive ranking is both unusual and helpful, said Lew Cirne, New Relic’s founder and chief executive:

“Right now, most companies measure speed and performance against their own subjective benchmarks, but they’re operating in a vacuum because they don’t have insight into how other companies in their industry compare. With New Relic’s massive big data collection and our new app speed index capability, we’re giving companies a huge competitive edge by providing a real benchmark that they can measure against day after day.”

Participating companies will gain access to a dashboard with speed, responsiveness, and ranking data that includes a percentile ranking in their industry grouping and daily charts of their performance:

Hodak stressed that the data is not just server-based or theoretical data: “We’re leveraging our real user monitoring data — these are real people using our customers’ apps.”

This results in more valuable data, according to Gartner analyst Jonah Kowell, who explained that standard “benchmarking reports are typically driven by synthetic transactions, which can assume connectivity that is often uncertain in today’s mobile workforce.” By using live customer data, New Relic is giving companies better insight into how their sites perform in real-world conditions.

The ranking service is free and included with New Relic’s entry-level product offering.

Image credit: ShutterStock

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In the notification from FriendThem, chief executive Charles Sankowich is quoted as saying: “I was amazed on Sunday to read that Facebook is blatantly stealing our idea with what they are calling, ‘Find Friends Nearby.’”

FriendThem’s app works by finding friends of your friends who are nearby and then allowing users to make a connection.

Sankowich goes on to claim that the feature was part of FriendThem’s trademarked materials, and that Facebook has aped the company’s marketing language. Then he threatens a lawsuit:

“We are consulting attorneys and assuming this is true and expect to commence a lawsuit very shortly. One would think that Facebook would have learned to play fair after being through the mud previously with legal difficulties, but now they are doing it again.

We may not be billionaires, but we are damn tough New York entrepreneurs, and we believe in this idea and will keep working to connect people.”

However, Facebook may not be guilty of what Sankowich alleges. It just acquired Glancee, a service that “helps you discover and connect with new interesting people around you,” in May. It’s entirely possible that the new Facebook local friend-finding ideas and technology came from that acquisition.

In addition, I’m not sure it’s common practice for companies planning a lawsuit to pre-announce their strategy, or to attempt to use the court of public opinion, before they’ve attempted the actual courts.

Facebook did pull the Find Friends Nearby feature out of its mobile app earlier today. Whether this has anything to do with the FriendThem announcement is unknown.

VentureBeat has reached out to both FriendThem and Facebook for comments and will update this story as we get responses.

Image credit: ShutterStock

Everyone wants to make their site/product/app/widget go viral. Unfortunately, most of the time when people say that, they mean “I want the world to do all my marketing for me.” Good luck with that.

Let’s start with some wisdom from about 2500 years ago, when mobile apps were long, sharp, and nasty:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

- Ecclesiastes 9:11

In other words, marketing dweeb, going viral has a lot to do with luck. That is, unless your mobile app jumps up and pokes users in the eye. Unless it makes a dent. Unless, in other words, it rocks.

But there are some things you can do to tip the scales of fate. Here’s a quick primer.

Works for one

You desperately want people to share your app, so that user numbers will skyrocket and you can sell the company to Zynga for $500 million dollars six days after launch. But before people share, there needs to be something to share.

That something is value.

Yeah, sorry, but this is the hard part: you gotta actually create something of value to someone. It’s very challenging to get around this almost-always-essential first step. (If you do find a way around it, however, be sure to share it with me, privately.)

You need to have actual value for the first use, because (oddly) there is not just one first user. There are many first users: the genuine first, the first in her circle of friends, the first in his company, the first in her city. Your app needs to be useful for each of these firsts.

Better together

Anything that gets more valuable and useful when there are more users or instances benefits from network effects. The classic example is the fax machine: one is completely useless. The same could be said of a social network — Facebook for one is pretty much a diary. Good luck IPOing that.

Build in value that grows as the user base grows. And do it in two ways.

First, make your user better when she shares something from your app. Give her props, give her warm fuzzies, make her seem hip and cool, or let her give something of value to her friends.

Second, make the service more valuable for every user when he shares with his friends. When we all got Hotmail email addresses back in the 90s (remember HoTMaiL), we could communicate better. When all of your family is on Path, you stay in touch easier.

Built-in, not bolted on

Social is not a plug-in, nor is it an API. Social is an essential layer or a core component of a viral app.

Draw Something may be going the wrong way right now, but it’s still a great example. The app absolutely requires social interaction, leading users to, in some cases, actually force their friends to install the game.

Now that’s viral contagion!

Essentially, this requires thinking of social from the beginning, rather than after you’ve finished your app and just started dreaming about marketing, and then building it in to the user experience.

Chuck the churn

This is not advice for your friendly milkmaid. Instead, it is an exhortation to keep the users you get.

Unless you want to run a continual pyramid scheme, losing users quickly will kill even a hot viral product. The danger is that you will spend your entire business existence running the hamster wheel of simultaneously acquiring and losing users, and never develop a mature, stable, and solid user base which can actually be monetized.

That may not be a problem, of course, if your strategy is just to get acquired in the mad-scramble-for-scale phase. If so, more power to you. Like OMGpop, however, you will have some long-term issues.

To prevent excessive churn, design your app so that it has not only initial value, but also long-term value. And update regularly with little extra gifts of capabilities that existing users will appreciate. Think of them like the chocolates on the pillow at the hotel.

Grounded gamification

Games are great, and gamification brings the best part of games (targets, competition, scoring, and trophies) to processes and events that are not traditionally games. But that doesn’t mean that Microsoft Word should give you points for every TPS report that you remember to put a cover memo on.

Gamification works best when it is not forced, when it feels natural. Gamification elements should emerge from the application rather than be pasted on in a “There, I fixed it” manner. For example, if there are actual achievement levels, or if the achievement is believably real.

I was not impressed in late 2011 when Klout awarded me a new achievement for visiting Klout.com three days in a row when I hadn’t even visited once (besides the time I was awarded). Nike+, on the other hand, is a great example of gamification that rises directly from the core value of the service itself.

Time and chance

In your pursuit of virality, remember the ancient wisdom: “time and chance happeneth to them all.” Position yourself to take advantage of viral effects, but don’t short-change the marketing budget!

Image credits: Contagion, Shutterstock, one cake/Shutterstock, ants/Shutterstock, rusted bolt/Shutterstock, milk churn/Shutterstock, game Shutterstock

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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