July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

It’s all sunshine and lollipops over in Windows Phone land today.

Google announced that it’s ending its fight over Microsoft’s YouTube Windows Phone app and that the two companies will be working together on a revamped version.

In a statement, Google says it will be “working together to update the new YouTube for Windows Phone app to enable compliance with YouTube’s API terms of service, including enabling ads, in the coming weeks.” Additionally, Google says Microsoft will replace the existing YouTube app with an earlier version for now.

Microsoft caught fire for its unauthorized YouTube app last week, which notably blocked YouTube’s ads, let users download videos, and didn’t respect platform requirements set by video authors. For its part, Microsoft said that the app was in response to Google blocking access to YouTube’s APIs, which prevented it from offering a fully featured app on Windows Phone. Google simply called Microsoft’s app a violation of YouTube’s terms of service.

Microsoft likely knew what it was getting into when it released its rogue YouTube app. During Google’s I/O keynote last week, Google chief executive Larry Page bemoaned the negativity in the technology world as well as the lack of decent interoperability between services. While it made for a great speech, Page’s comments were somewhat hypocritical given Google’s refusal to let Microsoft properly access YouTube’s APIs.

Now, at least, Microsoft has Google’s attention.

Days after finalizing a $1.1 billion Tumblr acquisition, and coming hot on the heels of a massive image-buffing retrofit of the photo-sharing community Flickr, Yahoo has bought yet another company.

Finally, after years of virtual irrelevance at the search/media company, Mayer has Yahoo doing huge and interesting things again.

PlayerScale, a cross-platform game infrastructure startup that provides tools for games played by 150 million users on platforms such as iOS and Android, announced the acquisition on its site today. And — unlike recent Yahoo acquisitions like Astrid – CEO Jesper Jensen said the company would continue to operate as it has, supporting over 2,600 developers and 4,000 games.

In fact, he added, PlayerScale is adding 400,000 users a day.

“With Yahoo’s backing, we can crank out awesome products and improvements to our platform faster than ever before,” Jensen said.

Source: Sean Ludwig

Marissa Mayer

That would be a major change from recent Yahoo acquisitions such as Stamped, OnTheAir, Snip.it, Alike, Summly, Jybe, and Astrid, all of which have been shuttered or put on notice. But it makes sense, given PlayerScale’s volume of business and growth rates.

And the move seems to make sense given Yahoo has now signaled a move into casual gaming on iOS, Android, Facebook, the web, and even Xbox.

PlayerScale’s platform helps game developers with pretty much everything they need to make their game platform work, except the game itself. It includes payments, chat, analytics, virtual currencies, distributed caching, authentication, social sign-on, leaderboards, localization, and more.

Here’s CEO Jesper Jensen’s announcement in full:

Today is a great day — both in our journey with PlayerScale and for users of our Player.IO product. We are happy to announce the next big step toward our goal of building the best possible gaming infrastructure platform: we have been acquired by Yahoo!. And don’t worry, we’re not going anywhere. Our platform will continue to support the same great games that you love playing today … and in fact, it will only get better from here!

Our goal has always been to help developers build the best possible games, without having to worry about building and scaling the infrastructure required to operate today’s biggest successes. In working with the folks at Yahoo!, it has become clear that we share this passion.

We have spent the past four years growing a three-person startup into a product that powers games played by over 150 million people worldwide and we are adding over 400,000 new users every day. In the last four months alone, we have increased our daily user growth rate by almost sixty percent. With Yahoo!’s backing, we can crank out awesome products and improvements to our platform faster than ever before. We will continue to support our existing product and deliver new services to help you grow and manage your success in cross-platform gaming — whether it’s casual, social or mobile.

Today marks a milestone for PlayerScale and I want to sincerely thank the team, our developers and millions of users for the adventure so far and can promise there will be more to come.

- Jesper Jensen

Image credit: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

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

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

Source: John Koetsier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image credits: Twitter icons

Nurses are the unsung heroes of the hospital who navigate crappy software on outdated hardware to keep you healthy — and it needs to stop.

Executives from Cedars-Sinai and Kaiser Permanente explained at VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference that technology innovators need to start focusing on new, consumer-like user experiences and better end-to-end communications software and hardware. Otherwise, nurses are going to start using their own devices, which creates obvious issues in privacy and data management.

“We’ve done a lot of ethnographic research of our nursing areas. … It’s still amazing when you walk into that environment that there’s still a tremendous amount of inefficiency, redundancy,” said Julie Vilardi, who’s a registered nurse as well as the executive director of Kaiser Permanente’s clinical informatics and strategic projects. “User experience it’s really critically important. Because of the consumer experience now is pretty slick, when you get into the walls of the hospital [consumer-grade experiences are] beginning to be the expectation, and we so don’t deliver it right now.”

She explained how nurses manage everything having to do with your hospital stay: your medical prescriptions, the food you eat, and the baths you take. They typically have four or so patients who may not even be in the same area of the hospital. These nurses often have to tote around workstations on wheels and clunky communications devices that simply aren’t effective. But because of their ability work in a chaotic environment, they’re making due.

Darren Dworkin, the chief information officer for Cedar’s Sinai Medical Center, said it had recently deployed 800 iPhones to its staff. He thought clinicians were going to shy away from using texting for communications, but he was wrong.

“A lot of our clinicians are beginning to use technology in other aspects of their life … they want to know how come they can’t have a healthcare version of that,” said Dworkin. “Giving them something akin to a cordless phone isn’t going to do it for communications.”

Vilardi says she hopes to see developers create a consumer-grade iPhone experience for patient management and electronic medical records (EMR). She wants to be able to push an icon to get a patient assessment, and she believes we’re very close to that reality. Dworkin, however, encourages innovators to look beyond the EMR, which he says the window has closed on. Instead, he hopes that people will find a new way of displaying data and improving communications.

According to Vilardi, iOS phones and tablets really are the devices of choice in hospitals today. This is because vendors in general are taking more advantage of iOS than Android. She explained that Kaiser is looking for ways to integrate Android, however.

Nurses, speak up! We want to hear from you about your experiences with workstations on wheels, apps, and more. Send us an email at tips@venturebeat.com or e-mail me directly at meghan@venturebeat.com.

Image via Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

SAN FRANCISCO — Online consumer engagement has been around since social media took off, allowing companies to form meaningful relationships with customers through ongoing interactions. Led by marketing and sales departments, consumer engagement programs can mean that people spend 20 to 40 percent more money on that brand or company’s products.

Since health care entrepreneurship became “sexy,” people are consistently using the term “patient engagement” at health technology conferences. But what exactly does this mean? Like online consumer engagement, is it simply when a company maintains a relationship with a patient through technology?

Since this is health care and situations are often complicated, there is little consensus over the definition of a term that everyone is using.

The closest analog to traditional online consumer engagement is “meaningful use,” a standard set by the U.S. federal government that enables providers to earn incentive payments based on how much patients are using their electronic medical records (EMR) systems. In this case, 5 percent of patients must log into an electronic record and upload their data for a provider to earn a bonus.

However, this “ongoing relationship” starts and ends when a patient merely interacts with the technology, regardless of frequency of use or the value added to a patient’s life.

For patient engagement, there should be a more robust definition that includes positive health outcomes, where engagement encompasses interactions with technology that lead to some ancillary or direct health benefit.

At HealthBeat, this concept was discussed during a breakout session titled “Consumer Health Apps: Human Centered Design,” featuring Marco Della Torre, biomedical engineer and business development at Basis; Chris Hogg, a vice president of data science at Practice Fusion; Eric Bailey, chief experience officer at PokitDok; and moderated by Aimee Jungman, formerly of Frog Design.

All agreed that we do not need a single definition for patient engagement. According to Chris Hogg, “all terms out of health are terrible,” adding that “patient engagement is merely creating products that people want to use.”

However, Della Torre of Basis saw value in correlating product usage with positive outcomes. Unless providers can quantify behavior change and prove value, the troves of data collected by sensors and “engaged” patients is useless.

Even though they clearly disagreed over the definition and value of the term, the panelists did agree on one basic point: Patients today aren’t truly engaged with health technology or even with their own health.

This is the crux of a problem that we need to address before we can begin to understand patient engagement, empowerment, and how to use these relationships to fix a broken system.

Can we create persuasive technology to encourage patient engagement with the mere concept of their own health?

For example, when people are sick, we have a tendency to exhibit avoidant behavior (like taking “medication holidays” from prescription drugs.)

On the other hand, when we are healthy we don’t want to think about health, and companies have found it challenging to channel consumer interest toward something as innocuous as their own biometric data.

So next time we talk about patient engagement, let’s also consider how users relate to the concept of their own health and whether technology can be used to not only engage, but also advance positive health outcomes.

Photo: Chris Hogg of Practice Fusion. Photo credit: Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hunters are excited by the possibilities, apparently.

Source: TrackingPoint

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

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

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

Ergo, it’s a sniper rifle.

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

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

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

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

ShopSavvy’s new look is paying off in a big way.

The company officially launched a redesigned version of its mobile shopping app for iOS today, which also incorporates new product discovery features for the first time (previously, you’d have to know exactly what you’re looking for in its apps). The new app not only looks better — it’s also led to a significant increase in user engagement among early testers, ShopSavvy revealed to us.

The amount of lists people created within ShopSavvy increased by 291 percent, while the products added to those lists grew by 555 percent. Additionally, the company said that daily sessions increased by 26 percent, and acccount creation has jumped by 44 percent.

“We have a lot of users who really wanted a discovery experience as well,” said ShopSavvy cofounder and CEO John Boyd. “The challenge was coming up with an experience that works for discovery as well as direct search.”

Previously, ShopSavvy looked like a typical price comparison application. Now it’s an intriguing blend of comparison and product browsing. There’s a new menu on the left that suggests products that you may like, and you can easily drag products into your lists and bookmarks. Doing just about anything in the new app feels effortless — so those new engagement figures make sense.

ShopSavvy first dabbled in product discovery when it launched an iPad app last December. Clearly, the company’s experience building that app has informed the redesigned iPhone experience.

Another big addition to the new ShopSavvy app is the ability to list products that don’t have UPC tags. This will allow the company to offer price comparison for a wider variety of products, and it could also be useful for local merchants, Boyd tells me.

ShopSavvy has offices in San Francisco and Dallas and has thus far raised a total of $11.5 million.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple’s countdown (err, up) to 50 billion apps ended today with one lucky winner, as yet unannounced, bagging $10,000 in iTunes money for apps, media, and more.

It’s a good thing Apple hit the number today, because if they waited even another week, the Cupertino company might have been second-best to Google’s Android. At Google’s developer-focused I/O conference today, Google’s Hugo Barra announced that Google Play has just passed 48 billion app installs — and had a massive 2.5 billion just last month.

Just as Apple has done before for major app store download thresholds, it’s giving away the $10,000 gift card to a lucky iOS user who downloaded the 50 billionth app. In addition, 50 lucky people who where the next to download an app have won a $50 gift card — even if they don’t know it yet.

Don’t go rushing to try to be one of those 50, of course … there are about 1,000 app installs on iOS each and ever second.

This is probably the last major app install number that Apple will trumpet to the skies, as Android will be making the big news from now on. At the same Google I/O conference, Android chief Sundar Pichai said that Android has now reached 900 million device activations — far more than Apple.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple has built a massive and fast-growing $16 billion annual revenue stream in digital content alone, Apple analyst Horace Dediu says.

The company announced that quarterly iTunes revenues topped $4 billion — including $2.4 billion in content alone — in its latest earnings report. Based on historical numbers alone, that’s a $16 billion annual run rate, thanks to Apple’s 500 million iTunes users. But since it also has grown at a fairly steady 29 percent per quarter for the past six years, it’s also an underestimate of the annual value of the iTunes ecosystem.

And it gets better as users have more Apple devices.

“Apple users spend about $1/day for each Apple device in use,” Dediu says.

Source: Horace Dediu

iTunes digital media revenue by product segment.

All of which means that Apple is still king of the mobile ecosystem, at least as far as monetization is concerned. Users have currently downloaded 49.9 billion apps, and Apple is currently running a contest which will see the downloader of the 50th billion app win $10,000 in iTunes cash. While Google Play is growing faster than Apple’s app store, Apple still leads in downloads, and it holds a 2.6-times revenue advantage.

It’s also an interesting metric for Amazon to evaluate itself by.

Amazon sells Kindle devices at or near cost in part because it hopes to make extra revenue on digital content — perhaps $3 per user per month – via its own app store and its digital media offerings, such as TV shows and movies. Its newly launched virtual currency Amazon Coins should help with that mission, and with 11 million to 12.5 million Kindles sold through Christmas 2012, and perhaps 15 million sold to date, that would translate into just over half a billion dollars in revenue.

And at Apple-like numbers of $40/user/year, it would be $600 million dollars.

All of which could help explain why Amazon is hitting digital media hard and buying technology to make all of its Kindles full-color, with responsive screens.

And why Apple, Amazon, and Google are increasingly hard-core competitors in their three-way battle to own your devices … and your wallet.

Image credit: 401(K) 2013/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Amazon launched its first digital currency today with a giveaway: 500 free Amazon Coins for every Kindle Fire customer. The coins, which are worth $5, can buy games, apps, and in-app purchases.

Kindle Fire customers who wish to buy apps or make in-app purchases can purchase Amazon Coins at a rate of 100 for every $1, but they can also get up to a 10 percent discount. Buying 10,000 coins earns you the full discount, and will cost Amazon customers $90.

One caveat: Amazon Coins are only available in the U.S. right now.

“Today is Day One for Coins,” Amazon VP of apps and games Mike George said in a statement. “We will continue to add more ways to earn and spend Coins on a wider range of content and activities.”

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/olivepress/6348546698/

Amazon Kindle Fire

Amazon announced the virtual currency back in February, when the company also said it would give away tens of millions of dollars worth of free Coins to customers. That’s a hint about the number of Kindle Fires sold — 10 million Kindle Fires would account for $50 million in free coins — as Amazon has never given device sales figures.

Virtual currencies can be useful for gift purposes, for children’s allowances, and for, perhaps, making it easer for customers to spend actual money since they may feel they are only spending virtual money. However, it is another layer of complexity, both for people and for the company issuing the currency, and mobile competitors Apple and Google have not released virtual currencies.

One of Amazon’s biggest goals is expanding the sale of digital content.

A full 12 of the 15 business highlights the company chose to include in its first-quarter 2013 annual earnings release were digital-content related. And that’s what Amazon Coins is all about: increasing the sale of virtual goods, which don’t have to be warehoused, packaged, mailed, and delivered.

As Mike George said:

“We are giving Kindle Fire owners $5 worth of Coins to spend on new apps and games, or to purchase in-app items, such as recipes in iCookbook, song collections in SongPop or mighty falcon bundles in Angry Birds: Star Wars.”

One important point for developers: They’ll receive their full 70 percent revenue share when customers buy items with Amazon Coins, even if the users earned a 10 percent discount on their initial coin purchase.

Image credit: Brian Sawyer/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Anna Alenius-Mathson is the head of communication for Rebtel.

Ever since Mother’s Day was established in 1908, Americans have asked themselves the eternal question: “What should I get for Mom?” And for more than a century the answer has usually involved giving her either greeting cards or flowers (or both). The explosion of mobile apps has found a way to change this, bringing mom squarely into the digital age, with products designed to make her feel close even though the distance between you may be great.

So if you’re looking for some new ideas on how to make mom feel special, here are a few clever app ideas that just might do the trick.

Say hello to virtual scrapbooking

Help Mom get on board with one of the nation’s top hobbies with the ScrapPad Mother’s DayPhoto Journal (Free), a virtual photo album scrapbook for the Mac and iPad. For Moms that are already Scrapbooking pros, this app will enable her to abandon her glue stick and create top-quality scrapbook layouts quickly and easily.

Albums can be organized and stored systematically and text can be easily entered in a variety of fonts and colors.

The best part is that all ScrapPad album pages can be shared with others or printed with excellent resolution, so even if Mom doesn’t own the app, you can send the album as a gift so she can show it off proudly to her friends.

Give mom the gift of professional style photos

The Camera+ ($.99) app for iPhone and iPad will let mom fine-tune your mobile camera until it takes photos as well as a pro camera can. It offers a variety of shooting modes, a stabilizer, exposure adjustments, even a grid tool that lets you use the Rule of Thirds to make compositions more intriguing.

The app uses your iPhone’s flash as a continuous fill light to improve the quality of your photos, and there’s even the ability to add aftereffects, use filters, do cropping and touch-up, add borders, as well as an easy-to-use storage system and sharing capability, so Mom can save and share all those sharp photos of her kids and grandkids.

If cards are ‘a must’, why not try a fresh approach?

The Cleverbug Cards App (Free) not only gives you the ability to customize and send your own cards, but it also reminds you about upcoming birthdays, anniversaries and special events. It conveniently stores all of your friends’ and family’s birthdates in proper order and offers hundreds of cards that are classified into useful categories (birthdays, anniversaries, etc.), which you can customize with personal photos or special messages.

The finished design can then be printed out by Cleverbug on high-quality card stock paper and mailed anywhere in the world. Or you can simply post your customized card directly to your Mom’s Facebook wall to show her that you’re thinking of her.

Help Mom chill out with the relaxation app

Give Mom the opportunity to relieve the tensions of each challenging day with a “sound bath” app called Serenity ($1.99), which claims to offer thirty different video and audio options that will help listeners unwind and relax.

Videos include a beautiful waterfall, peaceful fields, underwater vistas and even heaps of adorable sleeping kittens, while sounds include rain, distant thunderstorms and moving water.

There’s also undulating abstract forms that combine with sound to create synchronized light shows, which can be an effective tool for meditation or for use prior to sleeping. Mom can even watch it with Apple TV or stream the high-quality audio to her AirPlay speakers for maximum enjoyment.

A new twist on the Mother’s Day bouquet: Virtual flowers

If you’re completely dead-set on flowers, why not try something a bit unexpected.Flowerly (Free) is an app that will let you send a bouquet of virtual flowers to anyone you love in seconds. Bouquets range in appearance; some are free and some are part of premium bundles.

All you have to do is customize your own message, choose a contact from your iOS address book or your Facebook friends list, and combine it with the bouquet using a card template. Then, mail the whole virtual gift either by email or via Facebook.

The ease of sending makes it worthy download, not just for your Mom, but any Mom you know that deserves some love and recognition.

Send a virtual heart beat (… the next best thing to being there in-person)

Mom probably hasn’t heard your heartbeat since the pre-birth ultrasound days with her doctor looming close by, so surprise her this year with the gift of your own beating heart, which will bring back fond memories of babyhood — and motherhood.

Re:Beat (Free on iTunes and Google Play) allows you to capture and record the exact rhythm of your beating heart by placing your fingertip upon your phone’s camera or by tapping the screen to the rhythm of your heartbeat. The pattern of your heartbeat will then be transformed into a warm animation whose sound and vibration are perfectly in sync with your own heart. You can even send a greeting with your heart like, My Heart Will Always Beat For You or Wishing I Was There.

In terms of imagination and creativity, all these great options leave the traditional flowers-and-card option far behind, so if you can’t be there in-person, why not surprise here with one of unique ideas, which will give her something she can truly treasure, while keeping you close to her heart.

Anna is internationally responsible for all strategy and planning pertaining to Rebtel’s PR and communication activities. Anna has more than a decade of experience in the field of PR, marketing, digital media.

Mother’s Day card via Someecards

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

A month after Apple infamously booted app discovery engine AppGratis from the App Store, the company has approved a new type of app discovery engine, one based on friends, celebrities, and their apps.

And this one doesn’t have the pay-to-play feature Apple really hated about AppGratis.

“We brought something new to the table,” cofounder and CEO of AppCurious Riz Nwosu told me today when I asked how his app was approved. “Instead of just taking what Apple does and making it a bit nicer, we brought a new paradigm to the app store.”

That “new paradigm” is to find and follow friends and celebrities and install new apps based on what they use and share. Nwosu calls it a “Quora for app discovery”; it has a search-and-question function that you can use to ask, for instance, Robert Scoble what he thinks the best photography apps are or investor Warren Buffet what stock apps he uses.

“I think the hoopla about app discovery apps being booted is because they didn’t think of app discovery in a creative way,” Nwosu says. “They’re just promoting apps and repurposing an app store.”

AppCurious has no sign of the feature Apple really hated about AppGratis: the capability for a developer to buy placement, get featured, and drive hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions of downloads. Instead, it’s a social Q&A network for app users that invites developers into the conversation: When someone comments on their app, developers are notified and can respond.

In a way, it’s something like the social app discovery functionality Facebook built in 2011, but in app form. Or like AppUpdate for Android, which helps you find new apps based on your friends’ apps. A similar app on the iOS app store that has also survived the Apple app-discovery witchhunt is AppGrooves, which also enables you to make socially influenced app download decisions.

The biggest difference between the new breed of app discovery apps that Apple is permitting is probably their monetization model.

AppCurious, for instance, has no plans to charge developers per install, as that is user-driven. Instead, Nwosu plans to charge users for expert recommendations — similar to Quora’s model — charge app developers for featuring their app promo videos on the AppCurious explore page, and eventually, when he reaches scale, charge developers for access to their app’s brand page inside AppCurious, so they can communicate with users, update news, and respond to comments.

Nwosu is still building an audience for AppCurious, but he’s particularly well placed to do so. Given his startup’s location in Hollywood, he sees star power as the way his app can break out of the million-strong app pack and vault into the bigtime.

“We have some connections with celebrities,” he told me. “It would be great to get Justin Bieber to get on AppCurious, for example.”

There’s on problem with that plan: Stars are getting savvy about tech companies, and several that AppCurious has approached have already asked for equity in the company, which Nwosu is reluctant to provide.

Image credits: AppCurious

Nothing’s more seductive to a hip business owner than the next “big thing” in marketing (remember QR codes?) and lately, everyone’s been abuzz over app store Optimization (ASO). However, it’s pretty clear that ASO is more than just a pretty face. With over 700,000 apps in both Google Play and the Apple App Store, luck and hope are no longer enough to get your app found. While studies find that word of mouth and being “featured” are still the top ways apps get discovered, 63 percent of Android and iOS users have found apps by “organic search” within the app store.

The tricky part of ASO, like with any good marketing campaign, is that getting results requires playing both artist and scientist.

Here are the five little-known arts of app store optimization.

Know your app stores

App Store Optimization is not one size fits all. While iTunes and Google Play are dominating the apps scene, others are strong outside the US, like AppChina. Most notably, Amazon’s appstore for Android devices and Kindle is growing quickly.

If you have limited resources, focus on the giants, and take advantage of their key differences:

iTunes: The keyword field allows you to associate your app with certain terms. Make sure not to stuff or repeat too many variations of the same word which might trigger spammy signals.

(Many thanks to Jigl for this image)

Google Play: This apps tore has the benefit of the largest search engine algorithm in the world, which means efforts reap quick results. Optimizing the app name (see below) is especially important here.

Amazon: Unlike the other app stores, Amazon invites you to apply to get featured on their “storefront,” which means lots of views with little effort. The application can be found here.

Your app name is everything!

If you’re going to do only one thing, optimize your app name. Much like a page title for SEO, the app name serves as a relevancy signal to the app store “algorithms”, and it’s a strong one.

First, make sure your app name is actually in the title. Remember you want to have a strong presence as a brand, so people need to know your name, not just what your app does!

Next, describe your app properly. Moovit, a transit tracker includes ‘transit’ in its name and ranks third for the term.

Which means you need to…

Conduct some kick -ass keyword research

Though ASO tools are still pretty limited in comparison to the vast resources  available to SEOs, you can conduct your own tests. Ask yourself these questions:

• Which words describe your app?
• Brainstorm and then evaluate, do they support your brand narrative? Which of these words are most relevant?
• Get an objective feel for relevancy by searching for your keywords in the app store and seeing who is ranking for these terms.
• Which words are your competitors using?
• Be inspired but don’t be a copycat. Being unique will help you get traffic your competitors aren’t getting.
• Are there any related terms (and estimated volume) in Google Adwords?

The Google Adwords Keyword Tool won’t give you exact search volume within the appstore, but you can get an idea of term popularity by looking at stats for Google.com searches.

Choose your category, change your category

Choosing a category may not be very easy when your app has several utilities since it may fall into more than one.

Analyze your competitive landscape and make an informed decision regarding whether you want to take your competitors head on by being in the same list or if you want to maximize potential by going after a less crowded category.

Which brings me to my final point.

Don’t be afraid

Don’t be afraid to experiment. While iTunes only lets you change your page every time you release and upload an update to the app file, Google Play and Amazon allow you to continually edit your titles, descriptions, and categories. Take advantage of this and track your changes and their effects. Find your sweet spot and invite your customers to find you.

Denisse Dubrovsky has worked in the mobile space in both the nonprofit and for profit sectors for several years. Her experience ranges from research and support for a national government app development contest to helping great brands increase their audience and conversions within the app store through creative and forward thinking ASO. Denisse is currently an SEO Associate at Kahena Digital and specializes in ASO. You can follow her on Twitter @Deni_ssita.

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After spending $1 billion on Instagram last year to keep pace with the mobile photo explosion, Facebook is now reportedly ready to spend a similar amount on popular social driving app Waze.

The news is being reported by Israeli news site Calcalist, as well as other local publications. Calcalist reporter Assaf Gilad previously broke the news on major Israeli startup acquisitions like Facebook’s $100 million Face.com buy and Apple’s Anobit purchase, the Next Web points out.

Waze’s smartphone apps offer free GPS functionality for drivers, but they’re also buoyed by plenty of social data. Drivers can get a real-time view of current driving conditions using Waze and can report traffic issues to local Waze users. The company now has around 45 million users, and it was previously at the heart of acquisition rumors involving Apple and Microsoft.

It may seem a bit strange for Facebook to spend $1 billion on a social GPS app, but it actually makes plenty of sense when you consider Facebook’s mobile ambitions. After all, Facebook didn’t spend $1 billion on Instagram just to get photo filter technology — it bought Instagram to take advantage of its explosive user growth. Similar to Instagram, Waze has a solid base of users who keep its apps open for extended periods.

With Facebook Home, we saw just how far Facebook will go to dominate your mobile experience. (Waze was also prominently displayed as part of Facebook’s Home launch imagery.) Waze would give Facebook a way grab the eyeballs of millions of drivers, which would be a worthy followup to its recent local search efforts.

If true, the news would show the big difference in the way Facebook approaches acquisitions compared to a more traditional company like Microsoft. Facebook isn’t afraid to pay big for young startups with plenty of traction — meanwhile Microsoft is reportedly looking to purchase Nook’s troubled digital business for $1 billion.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Waze has raised $67 million so far from investors including Kleiner Perkins, BluerRun Ventures, and Magma Venture Partners.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Gmail released a minor update for its official Gmail app for iPhones and iPads today.

The biggest change: When you click on a link for a YouTube video, Google map address, or a URL, the app will take you directly to the corresponding Google app: YouTube, Google Maps, or Chrome.

That will keep you in Google’s world for longer, even though you’re not using Google’s phone.

Previously, links in Gmail would open up a page within the Gmail app’s built-in browser.

It’s a clever workaround for a fact that Google must find very awkward: Unlike on Android, Apple won’t let app developers make their apps into the default handlers for certain kinds of actions. URLs always open up the built-in browser, Safari, unless app developers choose to embed a browser within their own app.

But, with the new Gmail, it appears that app developers can do a sort of workaround, by creating a “suite” of linked apps that work together as a self-contained ecosystem.

The new app is free, available now, and requires iOS 5.0 or later. It’s optimized for the iPhone 5 but also works on the iPod Touch and iPad.

Hat tip: CNet

Screenshots: iTunes App Store

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Barnes & Noble has thrown in the towel and abandoned its Amazon-style Android strategy, finally agreeing to add Google’s app store, Google Play, to the Nook tablet.

“We are offering our customers even more great entertainment on our award-winning tablets,” Barnes & Noble CEO William Lynch said in a statement. “Now with access to more than 700,000 apps and the best reading experience available, NOOK HD and NOOK HD+ are must-see products for entertainment lovers.”

Similar to Amazon, Barnes & Noble has extensively customized Android, stripping out numerous Google features such as Google Play, default installs of Google apps, and more, isolating the Nook experience in a Barnes & Noble ecosystem.

The only problem?

Barnes & Noble only ever managed to get something like 10,000 apps on Nook, resulting in an unsustainable poverty of apps compared to platforms such as iOS, Google Play, or even Amazon’s proprietary app store, which currently sports about 75,000 apps, and has a thriving app ecosystem. Popular games like Temple Run — one of the top 50 apps of all time on iOS — never touched the Nook platform.

B&N chief executive Lynch is essentially admitted as much, highlighting the fact that now Nook will have Google Play’s full complement of more than 700,000 apps. But the addition does not come without some cost.

First, to install Google Play, device makers also have to agree to install several Google-created apps, such as YouTube, Chrome, Google Search, Google Maps, and Gmail. Those apps will now be automatically installed on existing and new Nooks via an automatic over-the-air download, which means that Nook users will find some new apps on their devices without their request or action.

More critically, B&N has been selling Nooks — much as Amazon — on the razor and blades philosophy: Sell the razor cheap, and make it up on digital blades, or content such as books, music, apps, and movies. With this new Google-centric tactic, that strategy is now at risk.

Just how much remains to be seen, but the fact is that the old strategy was not working anyways, simply due to the fact that B&N did not have the scale to attract enough developer interest, and therefore enough apps.

In addition, as Time notes, Microsoft is a part owner of the Nook business, having invested $300 million into B&N in 2012. Technology and business do make for some odd bedfellows.

Image credit: Ricardo Bilton/Venturebeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple announced a countdown to 50 billion app downloads today, signaling that iOS downloads are north of 49 billion already.

“Apps have revolutionized the way we play video games, consume news, do business, educate, communicate, create art, and so much more,” Apple says.

And as Apple has done before for major app store download thresholds, it’s giving away a $10,000 App Store gift card to the lucky iOS user who downloads the 50 billionth app, plus a $500 gift card to the next 50 people to download an app.

Currently, the countdown is at 49,216,610,939, and increasing by about 1,000 every two seconds, so there’s perhaps two and a half days until the download counter crosses the 50 billion mark, assuming the rate stays the same.

In addition, Apple revealed the top 25 free and top 25 paid apps of all time. Facebook owns three of the top 16 free apps, and Google has four of the top 25. The original Angry Birds is the most downloaded paid app of all time, and an astounding three more editions of Angry Birds — Seasons, Space, and Star Wars — are in the top 18 downloaded apps of all time.

Image credit: Rovio

In the blink of an eye, Facebook has quickly become a major player for  connecting with local businesses.

Taking advantage of that huge opportunity, New York City-based Yext announced today that it will now let its users synchronize their local business information with Facebook. Yext’s platform lets business owners manage their listings across sites like Yelp and Yellow Pages from a single dashboard. (Which, hopefully, leads to less inaccurate data and more sales.)

“It’s a fairly long call thing … Half of local searches occur on mobile devices, and 24 percent of the time [for most users] is spent on Facebook,” said Howard Lerman, Yext’s chief executive and cofounder, describing how he believes Facebook will inevitably become a bigger local search player over time. “So, without really trying, Facebook has kind of captured the market with their Nearby product … that has profound implications for the local discovery ecosystem.”

Facebook last year upgraded the “Nearby” feature in its mobile apps to include local businesses (previously it only showed nearby friends). Last month, that feature was renamed to the more descriptive “Local search.” Facebook also revealed that it had two billion connections (mostly Likes) between users and local businesses, along with 645 million page views.

With its new Facebook integration, Yext lets its users manage their Facebook listings for local businesses with the same dashboard that manages information for other local listing sites. You can manage comments on the pages, as well as manage your own posts.

Best of all, Yext offers business owners a simple way to manage multiple Facebook pages for specific locations — making them more visible with Facebook’s Nearby feature. Yext also compiles data from all of those separate listings — like people currently checked into different locations — as a single figure in your main brand page.

I asked Lerman if Facebook actually wants companies to have multiple pages on its site (especially since many will appear identical, aside from things like address, phone number, and business hour differences).

“Facebook is clearly committed to local discovery experience, these are the pages that appear in their local search,” he told me. “It’s not the brand page. It doesn’t make sense to see there’s a brand nearby. It makes sense to see there’s a location nearby.”

The company began work on this Facebook integration shortly after releasing its Power Listings+ product in January, a massive update that lets businesses manage information like staff biographies and store maps.

Yext has raised more than $65 million from Marker, CrunchFund, Sutter Hill Ventures, Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), WGI Group, and others. The company sold off its pay-per-call business last fall, and it’s now focusing entirely on local listings.

At this point, Lerman has gotten the “eccentric genius” startup founder vibe down pat. So I wasn’t surprised when he related his thoughts on Yext’s current standing through a surfing metaphor.

“I don’t surf, but I know some people who do, and I just had an image in my head of a guy on a board with no waves, swimming around to catch a wave,” he said, describing the typical situation of a startup founder. “Now there’s a giant crest — when that happens you have to stand up and not fall off your board.”

Photo: Daniel M. Silva/Shutterstock.com

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

“The world around you is not what it seems,” says Ingress, the virtual game that uses the real world as its gamespace. And, perhaps, when Google’s semi-independent division Niantic Labs is finished with its mission, we humans won’t be, either.

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and usable. Note carefully that Google says nothing about the Internet in that statement.

In the last few eye-blinks of human history, we’ve created virtual worlds: cyberspace, virtual reality, the World Wide Web … places that exist in our devices, on our computers, in our servers, on the internet, and in our heads. But there’s also a space in which we live and walk and eat and breathe. Realspace. Meatspace. IRL. The real world, so we say, that we can touch and taste and smell.

Google’s trying to bring those world together, partly through the work of Niantic Labs.

Augmented reality is nothing new, of course, with marketing-focused companies like Layar building connections between physical and virtual reality and Ikea’s most-downloaded branded app of 2012 doing similar things. Other startups have explored AR capabilities as well, such as Caterina Fake’s Findery, which invites people to leave geo-tied notes that others can discover and read.

But when a company with the resources of a Google tackles the problem, and has a tool in Google Glass that seems destined for significant developer (and probably user) penetration that can actually create interconnections between the real and the virtual perhaps more efficiently than any other previous product, you’ve got something interesting. And potentially huge.

So a couple of weeks ago, I chatted with the man who’s leading that effort.

John Hanke: the missionary of mapping

John Hanke is vice president of product for Niantic Labs, the year-old Google-but-not-Google division of just a few dozen engineers that brought us Field Trip, the app to explore the world around us with a virtual docent. And, of course, the virtual/real game Ingress.

Source: LinkedIn

John Hanke

Before Niantic, Hanke ran Google Maps, Google Earth, and other geo areas, and before Google, he was the cofounder and CEO of Keyhole, the innovative geo-mapping and visualization company. Google bought Keyhole in 2004, which brought Hanke in the search engine’s fold to lead the its maps, earth, street view, and local divisions.

Now, he told me, rather than let him leave to scratch his entrepreneurial itch yet again and do another startup, Google gave him a semi-autonomous group to, as his LinkedIn profile suggests, experiment at the “intersection of mobility, real world, and the Internet.”

“We set up Niantic as a group that could explore new types of mobile apps with ubiquitous always-on features,” Hanke said. “And we’re set up to act like a start-up.”

Virtual + physical = field trip

Field Trip was one of Niantic’s first creations, and while on the surface it’s an app that helps you find cool stuff, ultimately it’s a tool to merge metadata and data and then present them together. While you’re in the physical world, Field Trip pulls data about that experience from digital sources, feeding you that information, and changing — deepening, enriching — your experience of place. Layering with with history, perhaps, or science, or culture.

Because, after all, one rock is very much like another rock, but if this is the precise rock where Geronimo attacked Mexican soldiers armed with only a knife and his courage, that changes our experience of this particular place. And the merging/melding/layering of virtual and physical makes it more real, in a sense — hyperreal.

Source: John Koetsier

Google’s Field Trip app helps you explore “reality.”

Enabling that, of course, requires extensive virtual enhancement of the what-you-see-is-what-you-get world.

“One of the things that we’re trying to evangelize is the concept of geo-tagging everything,” Hanke told me. “I would have expected eight years ago that it would be ubiquitous now, but it’s still not. But I think we’ll get there.”

Geotagging everything digital is a key intersection point between virtual and real. If this blog post is written here, and not there, that adds flavor and nuance to the information. And if a particular historical fact is geotagged to a specific mapped location, that adds depth and dimension to our experience of that place.

“We’re applying some of the same techniques we currently use in standard web search, and the same kind of discipline, to pull really interesting, really good places up from everything else,” Hanke says. “The model is that you’re walking through an unfamiliar neighborhood, but with a friend who is telling you the best things around you. You enjoy it just like before, but you’re a little more informed.”

AR + MMO + IRL

Depth and dimension are definitely core components of Ingress, another Niantic Labs app/experiment/game. Ingress is a — take a deep breath — augmented reality massively multiplayer online video game.

The real world is real, but it’s fought over virtually by two shadowy groups: the Enlightened and the Resistance. Niantic has filled the Earth with virtual portals, usually coincident with actual physical landmarks or monuments, that players need to capture in order to gain territory. Capture territory with large numbers of people (aka “mind units”) and your faction gets more powerful.

Clearly, the massive integration of Google mapping technology with a sophisticated gaming engine is required. And the result is another intersection between the real and the virtual.

“Ingress is a massively multiplayer online game designed for mobile, with real location-based connections,” Hanke told me.

You play with everyone in your faction, and you might meet up with other players in real life, or you may just know them virtually as team members in another area. Along the way, Google learns an awful lot about how you use your mobile devices, about mapping physical locations, and about overlaying cyberspace on meatspace.

Source: Google

Ingress’ field of play is the world, layered with virtual data.

All of that knowledge is going to come in very handy with Google Glass.

Endgame: Google Glass?

Hanke is cautious when speaking about Google Glass, as is the PR handler who is copiloting our conversation. Even already public information is a question mark as we chat: Google is definitely being Apple-like in the control and distribution of Glass and its future.

But something tantalizing tidbits do come out.

“We definitely kinda had Google Glass in mind when we started work on apps at Niantic,” Hanke says. “We need mobile devices that are less intrusive than the phone is.”

Source: Google

A model demonstrates Google’s new Project Glass technology.

And we need devices with different input/output modalities, he says. After all, it’s not easy to play Ingress running around holding an expensive and fragile device in front of you like a window ripped from its frame. And yet you need that portal from the physical to the virtual. For instance, while Field Trip is great to open the doors on human context for the world around us, it threatens to detract from our experience of the world by redirecting our eyes from the ultimate big screen of reality to the small screen of our mobile device.

Google Glass, on the other hand, sits unobtrusively on our foreheads, leaving our hands free and providing data as an overlay on top of the physical world rather than an alternative to the physical world. That model of layering, mixing, and intersecting is top-of-mind for Hanke.

“It just can’t be the case that people are walking around heads down tapping on a screen,” he says. “That just can’t be the future of the human race.”

Cyborg me now

Which, of course, is exactly what’s at issue: the future of the human race. Or, at least how we ingest, consume, and reconstitute digital data. And analog data. And meld the two into one harmonious whole of knowing.

That’s perhaps a little metaphysical for a small division of Google that focuses on maps and games and apps.

But the web has rewired our brains in a decade or so of virtually ubiquitous Internet access, and the smartphone has rewired our behavior in five years, taking us from creatures who look up to to see others to beings that look down at any opportunity to see small bits of plastic and glass and metal in our hands.

So is it really too much to expect from a transformation that brings us from clear divisions between what is real and what is virtual to an elegant blend of the two?

“This is not psychosis or some cognitive break, but an actual takeover of the mind,” Google’s introductory video for the Ingress game says ominously.

Art imitates life, I suppose, and life, in turn, imitates art.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google is reminding developers who’s in charge in the Android relationship — and it’s not the developers.

In an effort to take control over self-updating apps, Google is now making it clear that developers can’t update Google Play apps by any other means than Google Play. The move is an indirect dig at Facebook, which was found to be doing that very thing with its own app last month.

“An app downloaded from Google Play may not modify, replace, or update its own APK binary code using any method other than Google Play’s update mechanism,” says the new text added to the “Dangerous Products” section of Google Play’s developer program policy

Right now, the only apps that may update without Google Play are apps that weren’t downloaded from Google Play in the first place. (These are called “side-loaded” apps.)

For Google, the core of the problem is security: If developers can circumvent Google Play for app updates, how difficult would it be for bad guys update their apps with new, potentially dangerous features and permissions that Google isn’t aware of?

“Google play is a trusted source for Android application downloads, and we are committed to providing a secure and consistent experience,” Google says.

That’s a very good thing — if you’re an app developer.

According to the analytics firm App Annie, which launched Amazon app store analytics in beta last month, 19,000 developers are now publishing apps to Amazon, as opposed to 180,000 using Google Play and 210,000 who are publishing apps to Apple’s iOS app store. The lower number of apps and the fewer developers focusing on Amazon make for a less crowded marketplace in which there’s a little more room to grow.

“While Amazon Appstore is the new kid on the block, we hear great things from developers about their ability to monetize from the store,” App Annie CEO Bertrand Schmitt said in a statement.

Source: App Annie

The top 10 paid apps in the Amazon app store – U.S.

App Annie unveiled its fully baked solution recently — just after Amazon announced an impending expansion of its app store to 200 countries — and today released the results of a 1,500-developer survey focused on Amazon’s app store.

The top three reasons developers release apps for Amazon start with convenience. After all, Amazon Kindle runs Android underneath that Amazon skin, and it’s easy to port apps to Amazon’s store. Second, however, is the hope of more sales, as Amazon just announced earlier this month that it is rolling out to 200 more countries, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, India, South Africa, and South Korea — which buys a lot of apps. And the third reason is that when it comes to Android tablets, Kindle Fire is, well, on fire.

Amazon does not disclose Kindle sales numbers, but in January Localytics said that the number of Amazon Kindle Fires grew 322 percent in the holiday quarter — quadrupling the growth of the next-leading Android tablet, a Galaxy Note II from Samsung. This means that as Android increasingly penetrates the tablet market, Amazon increasingly penetrates the Android ecosystem.

There is one down side to the Amazon app store, however: price point.

App Annie says that the top 400 apps on Amazon have an average price point almost half that of Google Play and iPad, and even less than iPhone, even though smartphone-focused apps are typically cheaper than tablet-focused apps. The average price of the top 400 paid apps on Google Play is $3.55. On iPad, that’s a slightly cheaper $3.39. But on Amazon’s app store, that’s a much lower price point: $1.73.

Which shouldn’t come as a shock, I suppose: Amazon is the U.S. Internet’s superstore, and sharp pricing has been built into its business model since the beginning.

But it is something to keep in mind.

The web represents one of the biggest triumphs of individual freedom and openness over corporate control.

Now corporations have found a way to roll back that openness. One of of the most successful? Apple, whose quarterly earnings report lands later today.

Amazon, Facebook, and Google are close behind, but nobody has the leverage Apple does. That’s why I think Apple’s long-term revenue possibilities are strong. It’s also why Apple, and those who are busy emulating it, represent a dire threat to the open flow of information.

Openness vs. central control

As Tim Wu argued in his 2011 book The Master Switch, new technologies — the phone system, radio, television — go through several phases. There’s an initial phase of experimentation during which the technologies prove themselves. Then there’s a flowering of alternatives in the market as dozens or hundreds of companies sprout up and grow rapidly to seize previously nonexistent market opportunities. That corresponds with a sense of optimism about the technologies’ potential to change the world and democratize communication.

Eventually, however, market forces and aggressive executives concentrate power — and regulatory control — in a few giants.

AT&T is the classic example: In the early years of the 20th century, hundreds of local and regional phone systems existed, serving small markets in idiosyncratic ways. Eventually, AT&T assimilated them all, bringing the entire phone system under the control of a single, centralized, autocratic monopoly.

That kind of central control is terrific for reliability (you could call anyone in the country — or the world — and get a crisp, clear connection) but terrible for prices and for innovation. It was only with the forced breakup of AT&T’s monopoly that phone rates started to come down.

Similar cycles of openness followed by consolidation followed the appearance of radio and television technologies. But the web, in some ways, is an amazing exception.

For three decades, HTTP (which Paul Ford called “the Web’s operating system”) and HTML have proven to be resilient, flexible tools for interconnecting people and machines, facilitating communication in the most decentralized way imaginable. Anyone can publish a web page to a server on the Internet, and within seconds it is readable by anyone in the world who has the address and a browser capable of rendering HTML.

What’s more, anyone can link to any page on the Web without having to ask permission and without having to worry about what hardware or software delivers that page. All you need is a URL — another widely accepted, well-defined standard for interconnecting information.

If you can’t beat the web, go around it

Now, however, there’s a threat to this openness. It’s called the app store.

Technically, it’s not just the store: It’s the entire ecosystem of apps, content, hardware, and software. Apple perfected the model, and it has transformed the company into one of the most profitable corporations in the world. Even though its share price has plummeted in recent months, Apple is still in a very strong position thanks to the leverage that this ecosystem gives it. Indeed, that position is so strong that Apple continues to generate profits even though its market share among mobile devices is shrinking.

Apple’s model is so successful that others are emulating it. Amazon, as I’ve written before, is perhaps best-positioned to create a similarly integrated ecosystem. Amazon sells content (TV, movies, music, books, news) and apps; it also sells a popular Android tablet that is tied tightly into its own app store as well as its shopping cart for physical goods. 

Others are still in the running, though. Google has an app store, software, and its own hardware, but its ecosystem is less tightly controlled because Google also has to work with dozens of hardware manufacturers — the companies who actually make most Android devices, led by Samsung — who have their own agendas.

Facebook is trying to enfold its customers more and more deeply into its own world, starting with its own quasi-open web standard called Open Graph (really just a markup language aimed at making it easier to share text, audio, and video within Facebook) and, lately, extending to its own Android app, Facebook Home, that takes over your phone and turns it into a virtual Facebook phone.

Microsoft, of course, has lots of leverage with the Windows ecosystem, and while it’s coming from far behind in mobile, it might have a shot with Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 — but it’s too soon to say how well this will work.

But nobody has all the pieces tied together quite as well as Apple.

What we lose when we use apps

The app approach is working: 80 percent of the time people spend with their smartphones and tablets is spent using apps, not the web browser.

Apps provide a better experience for end users, in many cases, because their performance is better. They’re better-optimized for the screen and for other specific capabilities the device has. And for many publishers, it’s easier to make money from an app, whose experience enfolds the end-user and keeps them contained within an environment of the app publisher’s designing.

With the web, by contrast, users keep escaping to other sites — there’s no wall around the garden. That’s why many mobile sites have those obnoxious popups that encourage you to download the publisher’s mobile app. For these companies, the mobile site’s best use is as marketing tool for the app.

But here’s the problem: Apps are difficult to connect to one another. There’s no universally accepted way to link to a specific page or location within an app. (Many apps don’t even have pages.) To connect with an app, you need to use its application programming interface (API), assuming it has one, or the API of the device it’s running on. Naturally, that API differs from device to device. Making app-to-app connections is far more difficult than linking to a URL because you need to be a programmer to do it.

The difficulty of integrating apps with one another was one of the topics I heard executives discuss, in passing, at VentureBeat’s recent Mobile Summit. I’ll be honest, though, it wasn’t one of the event’s top themes. It matters the most to enterprise IT architects, for whom it’s a hassle as they try to tie together various apps that their employees use.

For big companies and carriers, app-to-app connections aren’t important. They’re too busy trying to build their own ecosystems.

Most entrepreneurs don’t care about the ease of integrating apps: They just want to make their own apps popular and figure out how to make money from them. And for consumers, this issue is not even on the radar screen.

That’s why I’m not optimistic about the future of the open web, particularly on mobile: There are huge companies with a large incentive to bypass it, and very few who have enough of a problem with it to register any opposition.

We may just look back on the past 30 years as a strange and happy interregnum between eras of corporate control. Enjoy it while you can.

Image credit: Phil Aaronson/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Windows Phone 8 users who just want to see a stream of random, but curated content need to look no further. Tumblr is finally here.

It’s all mobile for Tumblr these days. The company launched its Windows Phone 8 app today, shortly after revamping its Android version.

Where previously the Tumblr app was only available on iOS and Android, today’s news opens the “post anything” blogging site to a whole new host of phones.

The app is connected to the phone’s voice assistant. You can speak your posts and Tumblr will obediently (we hope) record the thoughts. It also shows content from the Tumblrs you follow on the live tiles, or the ever-changing home screen box graphics, as well as the lock screen. Of course, you’ll be able view gifs on the app as well as take photos from it.

It’s obvious Tumblr is focusing energy on its mobile side. The company recently released an update to its Android app that includes a playful revamp to its activities menu. Options to post videos, images, links, quotes, photos, text, as well as to chat appear to be spring-loaded, popping out of the bottom right corner of the app. This was done on purpose, since that corner is the easiest place to poke the screen with your thumb.

We don’t get that same, lively feel from the Windows Phone 8 app, however. Those working on the Android app likely have more resources than those working on Windows Phone 8. Android still holds the top spot on mobile marketshare charts, making it a much wider audience for Tumblr to target.

The app is available now from the Windows Phone App Store.

Tumblr app image via Microsoft

Instead of buying digital goods, we are increasingly exchanging them for our personal information, such as our names, email addresses, browsing preferences, location and much more.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with this model but the long term viability of it depends on all parties coming together to ensure transparency across the value-exchange.

That’s why MEF has recently launched its Global Privacy Report to investigate levels of awareness as to what user data is captured and whether or not this affects consumer behavior.

The study was far reaching with over 9,500 respondents across ten countries.  What emerged is a fundamental disconnect between the assumptions we as an industry make about consumers and what they actually think.

Freemium content or ad-funded services are based on a simple value exchange: you get a useful app for free or next to nothing and in return the app provider collects your user data to monetize it in some way.  That’s why when you boot up an app you are often met with some form of request about sharing your location or other data.  

For the consumer the request it can appear totally unrelated to the function of the app – for example, why would a spirit level app need to know where you are?

Moreover, consumers are increasingly aware that if they can purchase mobile versions of console games for free or next to nothing (when its console edition costs a hundred times as much) then its likely that something else is going on.

This is the hallmark of the app economy.

Interestingly, the report found that 70 per cent of consumers say  it’s important to them to know exactly what data an app is collecting and what data is being shared.  Nearly half say that it’s very important.  This says very clearly that consumers understand the impact of apps on their privacy and importantly that they want to have some control.   

Secondly, the wake-up call to app developers should be that that only 37 per cent of consumers are comfortable sharing information.  33 per cent are not at all comfortable. That means either 33 per cent of all consumers are avoiding apps because they don’t trust them, or they are happily downloading and using apps unaware that they are sharing their personal information.

Neither of these scenarios is good, but the second is much worse.

It means that at some stage it is likely that there will be a backlash. Consumer trust is a company’s most valuable asset and not easily regained whether or not app providers clean up their act and become more transparent.

Building consumer trust is critical to growing a sustainable business in a market where thousands of apps jostle for space.  As an industry we have a limited window of opportunity to show consumers that we are capable of protecting their privacy by not taking their understanding of it for granted.  We have work to do to bring consumers with us on this journey into this information value-exchange that is equitable to all parties.

Some of the principles of trust are already established at a legislative level with privacy policies becoming mandatory in many territories. What’s missing is how developers and app stores introduce and build the asset of consumer trust into their day-to-day business, taking the practical steps to establish transparency in a consumer-friendly way.

It’s not uncommon for a privacy policy to be reached via a link that takes the consumer out of an app and on to the mobile web, interrupting the user experience.  Some apps also have privacy policies that run to 65 pages and we have to consider if this disclosure is constructed with the consumer in mind and would a consumer really read a lengthy policy in the immediacy of the mobile environment?

App providers don’t have the time to become privacy experts.

They need a simple, cost effective way of building best practice privacy disclosure into their development workflow in a way which puts the consumer at the centre of this process.  Clearly there is a need for tools which provide short form privacy policies that also execute in-app and explain privacy in plain English.

Consumers have told us that privacy is an issue for them and we can ill-afford not to listen.  MEF is working with our members to address this challenge with practical guidelines and new tools through its Global Privacy in Mobile Apps initiative.

Andrew is the global chairman of MEF, trade organisation representing the global mobile content and commerce industry. He is also the chief strategy officer at mobile payments business, mBlox. An industry veteran with more than 17 years experience at the mobile coal-face Andrew has championed countless mobile industry issues. He help found MEF in 2001 to support the mobile industry as it grows in to new geographies and new vertical markets.

Photo Credit: Szift/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Chinese “app store” 7659.com is using Apple’s own bulk enterprise licensing technology to distributed pirated apps to Chinese iPhone and iPad users, completely free.

The site, which is only available within China unless you spoof your location via a proxy server, offers a wide selection of iPhone and iPad apps. In just a few moments, I found Final Fantasy V, a $16 iPad game; Badland, a newish $4 app; Le Vamp, a $2 game for iPhone and iPad, and many others.

Apple’s enterprise app deployment technology enables app distribution to an “unlimited number of iOS devices.” Essentially, enterprise app deployment enables corporations to function as their own app distributor, after getting a developer provisioning profile from Apple. That’s turned out to be a good thing for pirates in China, as over five million Chinese iPhone owners are currently using the site to find and install apps. And it seems to be a good thing for iPhone users, who are now getting free apps.

It is not, however, such a good thing for Apple or for the developers who expect to be paid for those apps.

Thanks to this ingenious enterprise strategy, iPhone owners in China do not have to jailbreak their phones in order to install pirated apps — as Taiwanese blog MicGadget puts it, essentially the same app is being distributed, again and again, with the same license ID. That’s exactly how Apple designed in-house enterprise apps to work, although it’s not likely they envisioned the technology being used this way. Jailbreaking, of course, comes with the increased risks of bricking your iPhone, boosting vulnerability to malware, and blocking updatability to new iOS software.

Source: John Koetsier

Final Fantasy V, a $16 game, for free.

The site is provided by a front company called Kuaiyong, which appears to be owned by Beijing YouRanTianDi Technology Co Ltd. Though English-speaking users cannot connect with and use the service, Kuaiyong provides a short explanation of what it does for foreign Apple users — along with a justification for providing the pirate app store: the apparent difficulty of Apple’s iTunes:

Statistics have shown that a significant amount of Apple users are Chinese based. However, the fact is that in China, a large number of Apple users are not very familiar with the iTunes system and how to effectively manage it.

In order for Chinese Apple fans to download applications securely, Kuaiyong developed its own method of giving users access to thousands of free apps without having to jailbreak their devices. Kuaiyong offers detailed descriptions of apps, free app download trial, IOS device management and visual and audio file backup system. IOS system backup and recovery features will also be released in the very near future.

Our goal has always been about bringing Chinese Apple users with quick, convenient and pleasant IOS experience. Since the introduce of Kuaiyong, the proportion of jailbreak in China has declined dramatically from 60% to around 30%. Kuaiyong will hold on to this goal in the future and we would like to see more support for Apple as well as Kuaiyong.

In other words, the company is clearly providing a valuable public service — and one that Apple should be thankful for.

That valuable public service, of course, is essentially like Amazon pulling a Kindle on Google: replacing the approved Apple iOS app store with a native Chinese service that would enable Chinese consumers to own and enjoy Apple hardware while cutting the cord on Apple’s services, app store, iCloud backup and recovery, and more. Essentially, everything that Apple uses to tie its customers into its services and to monetize them beyond the initial purchase moment.

It’s difficult to see how Apple can remain unaware of what’s going on here. Although apps are being installed — and presumably updated — via Kuaiyong, iPhones have historically phoned home to Apple for many things, including iCloud, location services (which led to privacy complaints and legal action), and, at least in early versions, the capability to see what apps are on a device and remotely kill them.

In all those communications, one would assume that Apple has built in provisions that it can check what enterprise provisioning profile exists on a device, and perhaps more. From there, it should be a piece of cake to find a stunning massive shadow “corporation” in China with five million employees, mysteriously scattered all over the country.

That’s something that Kuaiyong is at some pains for avoid, for obvious reasons. And if you visit 7659.com from outside China, you’ll see a note what seems to be a warning to avoid having your iPhone communicate with Apple in any way:

It is recommended that [you] do not use Apple ID or AppStore to reduce the frequency of repair.

I’ve asked Apple for comment multiple times but have not yet heard back.

One thing is fairly certain however: Apple will be looking for ways, or utilizing methods already available to it, to neutralize this threat and shut down this rogue app store. There’s a challenge in that, however: It’s in China. And China has not been a very friendly place for Apple lately, as state-sponsored media have had Apple in their sights, and Apple CEO Tim Cook was forced to apologize over the company’s warranty and support policies in a country where, according to a source I talked to, few companies accept returns of any products for any reason.

So the situation may require for some extreme delicacy on Apple’s part … and the solution cannot involve bricking five million Chinese consumers’ iPhones. That, more than anything else, would be corporate suicide in China.

More examples of pirated apps here:

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Today, Yahoo has rolled out two new mobile apps — improved versions of Weather and Mail, old-timer apps that have gotten huge improvements to make them, as a rep said via email, “a little more fun and beautiful.”

We think “little” is an understatement.

The new apps are Yahoo Mail for tablets (iPad and Android tablets, specifically — sorry Surface!) and Yahoo Weather for iOS. Check out the high gloss on these bad boys:

For the Mail app for tablets, Yahoo built in some swiping gestures, some full-screen viewers, and a few other touches appropriate for the larger form factor and the lean-back user experience. The end result is pretty and functional.

But it’s the Weather app that really blows us away. The team at Yahoo took advantage of one of the company’s most-used applications — Flickr — to give the app a modern magazine aesthetic. By using images from the Flickr community to show weather conditions around the world, the Weather app can now illustrate in glorious, full-screen color, the weather that’s happening outside your doors.

The result is amazingly fresh and very much in stride with the apps mobile-first companies are releasing right now.

For months, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has been promising us a new focus on mobile for this aging, uncool company. That promise has been percolating for the past year or so while Mayer steered Yahoo toward a string of acquisitions — young designers, hot startups, buzzy mobile apps. We’re guessing the new apps released today are part of Mayer’s bigger plan to revamp not just Yahoo’s mobile app lineup but also its image.

That Weather app has all the charm and aesthetic appeal of Facebook Home, one of the coolest apps on the block. If Yahoo can keep up that design standard, it might get its groove back sooner than we expected.

Image credit: TheTechBlock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Simon Dawlat is the CEO and founder of AppGratis, whose app discovery app was pulled from the app store by Apple.

Allow me to jump right into this by saying that yes, we have created a business while solving a problem.

And that last time we checked, it was still OK to do that.

Source: AppGratis

Retraction letter

I will also use this post to clarify once and for all the delusional accusations about AppGratis allegedly running a “bot network.” These accusations came from one single person. This person went to TechCrunch. TechCrunch bought the story and published it. It started spreading. Our lawyers acted rapidly and obtained a formal and written apology letter that you can find here. As stated before, we have never done anything shady in order to grow. And we will always be able to bring proof of that.

But back to the important part: our business model. And why it is fair and rock-solid.

To understand where we come from, it’s important to remember that we started in this industry years before there actually was an app advertising market.

Back in 2008, I started coding apps with some friends in San Francisco. That was right after the App Store was released. Quickly, our apps started failing. Not because they sucked (or maybe because of that — but back in those days, any app with a cool icon was a potential hit). But because App Discovery was already a nasty problem.

After toying with different ideas, I set out to launch a daily newsletter where I would send my daily app picks to friends. AppGratis was born. On the side, I was also running an app-focused blog where I was reviewing apps on the web, so I was in contact with a lot of fellow app developers. I started reaching out to these guys, and offering to highlight their apps. In return, all they had to do was either set their app free for one day, or at a discounted price. I’d take their app, review it, write up a quirky little copy about it, and push the send button.

As for today, thorough reviews by our app-curators combined with editorial excellence remains a heavy component in the amazing App Discovery experience that AppGratis brings to the market. The only difference now is that we operate in 12 languages, and in more than 30 countries.

And this is how we helped and are still helping — for free — hundreds of indie devs with great apps to get well-deserved visibility. In the past few days, many of them have stood up for us … and many haven’t, probably in fear that Apple will stop featuring their app if they speak. I make no judgement of this. I thank the former, and fully understand what motivates (or doesn’t) the later.

We operated as a fast-growing newsletter for more than 1.5 years.

Then, in the Fall of 2010, Apple approved the very first version of AppGratis. At that point, we started growing even faster.

Over 2011, we grew AppGratis as a company from only 2 people to one with 30, all with no external funding.

In 2012, we saw our first clone appear on our radar. We accelerated global expansion while talking to potential VCs. By Q1 of 2013, we had closed our $13.5M Series A and had secured 5% marketshare in the US market. And as I said before, we’re just getting started.

So. Where’s the money coming from?

The money comes from advertisers with freemium apps.

In the Spring of 2010 — as a direct consequence of Apple introducing the In-App Purchase API a few months earlier — we started getting the first serious requests from leading industry players. Discussions went like this: “Hey guys, we have this cool app. It’s already free though. Can you feature it? We have a big budget to promote it.”

We scratched our heads.

How could we bring these cool new apps to the AppGratis community by

1. creating more value to our users
2. connecting advertisers with the right users among our core audience, and
3. making a decent living in the process?

We went back to the clients saying: “Look, your app is great, but already free – what can you add extra, that still fulfills the deal we have with our users?”

At that point, we started experimenting with offering in-app deals to our users where the client would unlock an in-app purchase for a set time, and we’d then feature it. We’d label these deals “Sponsored,” we’d enforce our internal policy to make sure that we were only working with the best advertisers, and — as people tend to forget — we’d only feature apps that Apple had approved for its App Store in the first place.

We then surveyed our community: “Folks, happy with this new type of deals?” Answer: Yes. Status: OK. Carry on, AppGratis.

Then, the whole incentivized-downloads controversy kicked in, resulting in Apple declaring that developers should not pay for guaranteed Top 25 placements. We introduced a new pricing structure based on performance. Media buyers could buy traffic with us on a “CPI” basis (which stands for “Cost-Per-Install.” This is now the industry standard). And to guide them through their complicated media buying, we’d send them — with no guarantees whatsoever — a spreadsheet that indicates the forecasts of installs we thought we’d be to able to drive for their app in each country. Since the App Store algorithm relies mostly on download velocity, it’s simple math to buy your way to the top of the charts by purchasing the numbers of installs you need combining multiple vendors. It’s the most common marketing strategy in the market today, and at the end of the day, it’s just regular advertising.

People have accused us of gaming the top. But the reality is that with or without the “rankings,” our community will still drive millions of installs for the apps we feature. Independently from the App Store. We have never based our business on ranking exposure, because we’ve always expected Apple to chime in at some point, and change that.

We have always based our business on solving the App Discovery needs that consumers have.

As entrepreneur Aziz Ali commented last week:

You have to realize that the 12 million users are willingly using AppGratis to find apps, download new apps and write their personal reviews of the apps they like. If the users HATE the promoted app, it will get more bad reviews than good ones. So in a way AppGratis is magnifying and speedifying the purification of the Apple AppStore since more and more people will discover and rate apps in the Apple AppStore faster.”

Exactly.

Some people seem to have a very moral approach to this. But at the end of the day, all we do is simplify discovery for our users. Simplify attracting new valuable users for developers. And send the App Store around 300 million visits per year.

And we also made a business in the process.

Yep.

A business.

Sue us now!

Yesterday, Business Insider accused us of gaming the system and “leaked” one of our spreadsheets under the title: “Leaked Document Shows AppGratis Used Lure Of App Store Rankings To Attract Cash From Developers”. But as Jason Calacanis responded to this after reading it and other accusations of AppGratis gaming the system — “it’s not gaming, it’s forecasting.”

Now, I’m happy to report that we made more than $9M of revenue last year by helping users discover new apps, and by helping developers forecast their marketing actions. And we are on track for doing $25M this year — even though, in a forecasted $25 billion (with a ‘b’) App market by 2015, that’s still a mere 0.1% marketshare.

Today, whether or not Apple reinstalls AppGratis in the App Store, we have a vibrant 12-million-user community behind us. And in less than two days, close to one million of them reiterated their commitment to our service by signing our petition. We have a killer team. We have cash in the bank that we raised mostly in case of a rough patch (not such a dumb move after all). And we have faith because we know that our work matters to the most important people that we know: our USERS — the people who are actually buying the devices, who are actually *choosing* to download the apps we feature. And Developers, who make the apps, and can eventually make or break a platform.

And even more exciting, we’re back to our roots. A crazy cool daily newsletter with millions of subscribers, that will very soon be complemented by the newest and nicest HTML5 WebApp you’ll ever see. Two things we fully own, and that no one can take away from us. So when I stated a week ago that the reports of our death were greatly exaggerated, I wasn’t kidding. Not kidding at all. AppGratis is just getting started.

Because from the bottom of our hearts, we know we add value to this whole ecosystem.

And we intend to keep doing just that.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google Play is quickly catching up to Apple’s App Store, both in download numbers and in revenue.

In November 2012, Apple’s iOS App Store took in four times the revenue of Google Play. In the first quarter of 2013, iOS app revenue still led, but by a lower multiple: 2.6 times as much. And Google Play, once just a fraction of the iOS App Store’s size, now accounts for almost the same number of downloads.

Those are just a few of the insights from app analytics company App Annie’s latest market index, which also reveal the best locations and categories in which app developers can maximize revenue.

Source: App Annie

Google Play downloads catching up to iOS app store downloads

Apple’s App Store is still growing, and growing fast, with quarterly revenues up 25 percent. The difference is simply that Google Play is growing incredibly fast.

“While the iOS App Store and Google Play both had solid gains in app downloads last quarter, Google Play had a higher percentage growth rate as well as a greater gain in absolute downloads,” the report says. “From Q4 2012 to Q1 2013, iOS App Store quarterly revenue grew by roughly one ­quarter. Meanwhile, Google Play app revenue grew by roughly 90 percent.”

iOS App Store

Interestingly, in the iOS App Store, China was the leading contributor to Apple’s 25 percent growth rate in downloads; it hit the number two spot in downloads by country and the number four spot in terms of revenue by country:

Taken together, the UK, Japan, U.S., and China account for about half of all iOS downloads, App Annie says. And the U.S. and Japan account for half of all iOS revenue.

Games drive about 40 percent of iOS App Store downloads, holding down the top spot, and 70 percent of revenue. Gainers in downloads include the photo and video category, which just broke into the top three this quarter, and gainers in revenue included the education category, which jumped a spot this quarter.

Google Play

The picture is considerably different for Google Play, where Russia, India, South Korea, and the U.S. drove 50 percent of all downloads. Russia has been rising steadily in the ranks, according to App Annie, as Android makes inroads there.

And Asia owns Google Play in terms of revenue, with Japan moving ahead of the U.S. last quarter, and South Korea joining it this quarter. Those countries, with the U.S., represent a staggering 70 percent of all Google Play revenue, which is why Google Play’s top publishers by revenue read like a who’s-who of Japan and Korea.

Also interesting: In Japan, the games category accounts for over 90 percent of Google Play revenues. And in Korea, games is responsible for a massive 95 percent of income.

In Google Play, games are about 40 percent of all downloads and account for 80 percent of all revenue. In other words, “Google Play” is very well named indeed.

With all that data taken into account, the perfectly optimized app for iOS revenue is a game targeted at the U.S. and UK, with Japan if possible. And the perfectly optimized app for Google Play revenue is also a game, but targeted at Japan and South Korea, with the U.S. and UK thrown in if possible.

Which gives app developers something to think about.

photo credit: Jesus Belzunce via photopin cc

The web wasn’t built for the complex web apps we’re using today — Instart Logic hopes to fix that.

The Mountain View-based company is emerging from stealth today with a cloud-based solution to make mobile web apps perform lightning fast. Instart Logic also announced that it has raised $17 million in a second round of funding led by Andreeseen Horowitz and Greylock Partners.

Specifically, the company aims to fix slowdown problems that arise from increasingly complicated mobile web apps and a non-stop flood of mobile device traffic. The hope, naturally, is that faster web apps will lead to people actually using them more.

For the most part, web apps today just aren’t as fast as native apps built specifically for mobile platforms. But while fast, native apps are costly to produce and difficult to update — so publishers turn to the HTML5-based web apps to support multiple mobile platforms with a single app.

Instart Logic held a beta program last year, and it boasts that several of that program’s participants — which includes a Fortune 500 company — are subscribing to its service for “mission critical” apps.

The company raised $9 million last year, bringing its total funding to $26 million. Other investors include Sutter Hill Ventures and Tenaya Capital.

Cheetah photo via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

There’s no more waiting for the hot iOS e-mail app Mailbox.

Mailbox issued version 1.2 of its app today, which dumps its controversial reservation system while also adding some nifty new features.  Notably, it’s Mailbox’s first major update since it was acquired by Dropbox.

“After 10 weeks of around-the-clock hard work, our engineering team has scaled the Mailbox service to deliver over 100 million messages per day (and growing),” the company wrote on its blog today. “We believe we can now confidently handle new users as they sign up, so we’ve pulled down the reservation system.”

Mailbox’s app offers an elegant interface for managing your Gmail account, but what makes it truly interesting is its capability to help you manage mail by quickly swiping or deleting messages as well as delaying messages. The update also brings faster swiping performance, some interface enhancements, and time-sensitive snooze messages.

Mailbox CEO Gentry Underwood told us the company implemented the reservation system to avoid having a complete meltdown on launch day:

We’ve designed the system to be as redundant and fault-tolerant as possible and have done as much load testing ahead of time as we could conceive of doing without real users. The reason we didn’t just ‘switch it on,’ though, is because we don’t know what we don’t know. Even the most advanced services run into problems when they initially scale, and we wanted to maximize the chance that we could keep our service up.

While the wait list made sense at an infrastructure level, Mailbox was also criticized for creating a false sense of scarcity to hype up its app. Also, those lucky enough to snag their reservation just wouldn’t shut up about it. Now that it’s open to everyone, look out for early adopters jumping ship.

After waiting several weeks for my Mailbox app, I ended up giving up on it within 10 minutes. I appreciated the design and interface tweaks, but I’ve become a bit too reliant on Gmail’s Priority Inbox, which Mailbox surprisingly doesn’t support. At this point, Gmail’s iPhone app is still the best e-mail experience on Apple’s platform (though it could use the offline capabilities of its Android sibling).