An ambitious startup, AirStrip has a plan to circumvent the tangle of incompatible systems currently clogging up the free flow of information in health care.

Believe or not, it’s an iOS app.

That’s simplifying quite a bit, but the app — and the mobile devices on which it runs — are a powerful tool for making health care data easy to share for doctors, nurses, and similar professionals.

“Look at what the iPhone did for the music business, and retail, and banking,” said Bruce Brandes, executive vice president at AirStrip, onstage today at VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference. AirStrip aims to make the iPhone do the same thing, only in health care. “Health care is arguably the industry most in need of a ‘big bang’ disruption.”

The crux of the problem, according to Brandes: It’s “humanly impossible” for doctors to get all the information they need from the many sources of data available to them. Electronic medical record systems (EMRs) and electronic health records (EHRs) are often built on proprietary systems and lack transparent interfaces for making them interoperable.

AirStrip started by focusing on a seemingly simple problem: Making it possible for doctors and nurses to share waveform data (heart rates and blood oxygenation levels, for instance) with one another without having to be in the same room — previously a difficult problem. The company initially focused on perinatal care.

“The sad truth is babies are injured many times because of that communications breakdown,” Brandes said.

Once AirStrip figured out how to coordinate that data exchange, it was able to expand the areas of medical data that it consolidates into its apps. It now incorporates vital signs, lab results, imaging, critical medical events, and more.

Dignity Health, one of the country’s largest healthcare providers, is using AirStrip.

“We need something that is going to allow us to communicate across system, that can layer on top of the other EMRs, otherwise we’ll never be able to exchange information like we need to,” said Richard Roth, a vice president at Dignity.

Dignity tested AirStrip with a pilot deployment at a rural healthcare location first, then followed up with an urban pilot, then jumped right in to a large-scale deployment.

An entrepreneur in the audience asked about AirStrip’s experiences working with EMR providers, particularly Epic, the market leader.

“Some vendors are more open than others, and as we know with Epic, they’re a hard nut to crack,” Brandes said.

However, Brandes noted that even Epic will integrate its data with other systems in response to customer demand, as Epic CEO Judy Faulkner noted in a recent Forbes interview.

With Dignity Health and other large health care providers who number among AirStrip’s clients putting pressure on EMR vendors, Brandes said, the walls are coming down.

“Even the closed ones are being forced to work with us,” Brandes said.

Top photo: Bruce Brandes, Airstrip. Photo by Michael O’Donnell/VentureBeat

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Looking at the Dreamcast lineup for 2013, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Sega’s 15-year-old home video game system had never gone away. Of all the supposedly dead consoles, the Dreamcast is surely the one that looks most alive.

Despite the Dreamcast production lines shutting in 2001, the console’s community is still fervently supporting new titles that continue to release. Two highly successful Kickstarter campaigns last year, for role-playing game Pier Solar HD, and shoot-em-up Redux: Dark Matters, clearly showed that love for the Dreamcast is still strong.

When the Dreamcast first came out in North America in September 1999, it looked like it could change the gaming world.

It was the first 128-bit console, from one of the big three console manufacturers, featuring the first built-in online capabilities, and boasting a launch lineup of big-name titles such as Sonic Adventure, Power Stone, Soul Calibur, and Marvel vs. Capcom. Sales of 500,000 units in its first two weeks led to hardware shortages, and Businessweek magazine heralded the Dreamcast as one of the best products of the year.

Then, just six months later, along came Sony’s PlayStation 2.

The Dreamcast couldn’t compete with the power of the PlayStation brand, as Sony’s new machine — with its built-in DVD player – began a journey that would eventually see sales of 150 million consoles. In contrast, the Dreamcast managed to sell just over 8 million sales during its short lifetime.

Many Dreamcast fans feel cheated by the machine’s premature death in 2001 — a death that saw the once mighty Sega bowing out of the hardware business for good. Those same fans can take some solace, perhaps, in the glut of quality titles still being released for the console in 2013.

2013: The year of the Dreamcast

More than 15 unofficial titles have been released for the Dreamcast since its demise, and 2013 looks set to be the best release year yet, with seven brand-new games either scheduled or already out there.

Sturmwind is the most recent new release for the Dreamcast. The side-scrolling shooter from German developer Duranik came out at the end of April, and it has already been well received by critics and fans.

It’s the first foray into Dreamcast development for brothers Roland and Johannes Graf, who between them make up the Duranik team. Prior to this, the Graf brothers have released games for the Atari Lynx, Jaguar, and Falcon.

So why pick the Dreamcast? “It’s always fun to develop for a console, at least for us,” said Roland Graf. “The other thing is of course the less-crowded market. Everyone is going to iOS or Android these days. These platforms are really drowned with apps of all type. Even if you have a nice game, it’s hard to stand out.”

Being new to the platform, Graf was unsure how many copies they would need to cope with demand. “We estimate around a few thousand units,” he said. “Of course, this is a quite a small number, but the machine has not been in the spotlight for a lot of years. There is certainly still a small but solid fan base that supports the machine, even after all those years.”

That support is more than evident now that Sturmwind has been released. Both the Limited Edition and regular version have already sold out at the website of publisher, RedSpotGames. The same is true at reseller PlayAsia.com.

Sturmwind’s Limited Edition run looks particular impressive, featuring a soundtrack CD, 3D-printed spacecraft, full color manual, and guidebook. It even has a plush toy of one of the bosses available to purchase.

While CD-ROMs for the Dreamcast are much easier to produce than, say, a cartridge-based game, the quality of the Sturmwind physical release is still admirably high. “We had a lot of production issues with our special edition packaging,” Graf said. “This is the reason the game was delayed for several months.”

For Graf, Duranik is only a spare-time project. He leaves the manufacturing, marketing, and distribution of Sturmwind entirely in the hands of RedSpotGames. Sega also did its bit to help with Sturmwind’s marketing, though, when PR executive Fabian Doehla appeared on Destructoid Live to unveil and play a demo of the game.

“I think that was just for fun,” says Graf. “They certainly won’t come back and start producing Dreamcast games now. From what we heard, they enjoyed the game.”

Thoughts from a Dreamcast gamer

Jake Smith, “end of level boss” at digital agency JP74 , was a Dreamcast gamer from the very beginning. Importing a Japanese machine before Sega had hit the Western market, Smith talked up the console in the very first issue of Official Dreamcast Magazine (U.K.).

For him, the Dreamcast’s arcade root are all important. “Anyone who played Sega games in the arcades will have a soft spot for the Dreamcast,” says Smith. “Sega Rally, Zombie Revenge, Crazy Taxi, and House of the Dead are highly playable titles, even today. I think it’s the console that closely retained that arcade look and feel in its action games, but it still managed to play host to more absorbing and in-depth games like Shenmue, Skies of Arcadia, and Phantasy Star Online.”

He’s managed to keep on top of most new releases for the console and is impressed with what he’s seen. “Generally, of the ones I’ve played, they hold their ground very well,” he says. “Highly polished, lovely graphics, excellent music, and tight gameplay. Some of them don’t feel they have quite as much depth as officially released titles — an obvious consequence of small dev teams who possibly hold down full-time jobs too.”

“This isn’t a harsh criticism,” says Smith, “as with [2009 RedSpotGames release] Rush Rush Rally Racing, the game concept was decided on because it could be accomplished quickly for a [Hong-Hong-based distributor and retailer] Lik Sang competition in 2006, but the quality of the actual game is high. Then again, some original games, like Toy Commander, weren’t exactly deep!”

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

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

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

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

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

How?

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

Source: IDC

Global smartphone market share, Q1 2013

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

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

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

Image credit: Microsoft

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

BlackBerry managed to squeeze in one surprise announcement during its huge conference keynote this morning: BlackBerry Messenger, the company’s popular messaging app, will finally jump to the iPhone and Android this summer.

This is the first time BlackBerry has brought BBM to other platforms, and it’s something the company’s fans have been begging for over the past few years. It’ll be available on iPhones running iOS 6 or greater and Android Phones running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

“We will make BBM available as the premiere multi-platform IM solution all around the globe,” said Thorsten Heins, Blackberry’s CEO, on stage today during the keynote. “Even better, it’s free.”

Heins boasted that BlackBerry Messenger already has more than 60 million users (not a huge surprise, since it’s a popular feature among the company’s 80 million users) and more than 10 billion messages are sent every day through the service.

“Why are we doing this now? It’s a statement of confidence,” Heins said. “The BlackBerry 10 platform is so strong and support has been so good that the time is right for BBM to become an independent messaging solution.”

He calmed the BlackBerry faithful by confirming that the company will still offer the “premiere and most integrated” BBM experience. Initially, iPhone and Android BBM users will be able to send chats and join BBM groups. But eventually the other platforms will see all of the BBM features out now, including screen sharing and voice and video chat.

Heins also announced BlackBerry Messenger Channels today, which is a way for brands to send messages directly to their fans. Think of it like a Facebook brand page located entirely within BBM. Brands will be able to send news updates to followers as well, so it will function almost like a news reader.

With the launch of channels and the promise of multi-platform compatibility, Blackberry Messenger is increasingly becoming the most interesting Blackberry property.

Photo: BlackBerry livestream

Chances are you already own a smartphone, and maybe you have a tablet as well. It’s possible that one is an Android and the other is an iOS device or Windows Phone. Having access to multiple mobile operating systems has its benefits, but it can get frustrating when you have to start repurchasing apps and games.

That’s exactly the issue that Spair Mobile plans to address. The developer is hoping to offer an app on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone that enables individuals to purchase an app once that can then stream to any device running Spair. This means you pay once for a game that works on an iPhone and Windows Phone. Not only that, but the games run exactly the same, and developers only have to build the it once. With Spair’s cloud-gaming functionality, players can also save their progress in the cloud and pick up a game where they left it off on another handset.

Now, Spair is entering an early alpha-testing phase. The company is looking for developers, and signups are open now on its website.

“We see a great desire to change things from developers,” Spair founder Tim Abdullaev told GamesBeat. “It proves that we are doing everything right.”

Abdullaev, who is 16 years old, says his company is working with more than 10 developers and around 30 games for these tests. He also says that the company wants to target anyone who has played Angry Birds with its final product.

“As far as I know, that’s more than a billion people,” said Abdullaev.

The young entrepreneur says his software can eliminate situations where people download games that don’t work on their less-powerful smartphones. It also could enable developers to code a game once and quickly distribute the same title on iOS, Windows Phone, and Android.

One question that is still in the air, however, is pricing for the individual apps.

“We are actively discussing the pricing issue,” said Abdullaev. “But pricing will be in full accordance with the average price in the competing markets.”

Finally, Spair is essentially a competing game market. That’s something that Google, Apple, and Microsoft all forbid in their app stores. That means Spair will face an uphill battle in acquiring users even if it does get it’s technology fully working.

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

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Lockwood Publishing, a successful free-to-play publisher on Sony’s PlayStation Home virtual world, is expanding to mobile games today. The Nottingham, England-based studio is launching a new 3D avatar that exists across mobile games on a variety of platforms.

The company is rolling out the avatar for the first time in its own title, Avakin Poker, which debuts this spring on iOS, Android, and Web browsers. The 3D avatars allow players to create realistic human characters based on the Unity 3D game engine. The poker offering features 3D renders, and it will feel much more like you’re sitting at a poker table in Las Vegas, the company said.

“This reflects a big change in the game industry,” said Joel Kemp, Lockwood Publishing’s co-founder, in an interview with GamesBeat. “We have learned a lot through PlayStation Home and established a strong community there.”

Lockwood is famous for publishing games such as Sodium and Sodium 2 on PlayStation Home. The company pioneered free-to-play high-end releases on the Sony virtual world, and it continues to maintain those games on Home.

“We had great success with Sony, but this is what we have been doing over the last couple of years,” Kemp said.

Now, the organization is expanding into mobile using the cross-platform Unity technology. Similar to systems like Xbox Live Avatars and PlayStation Home, players can create a custom 3D avatar and use it across games. They can have a single XP inventory and a single account across multiple platforms. The poker game is the first of multiple releases that will use Avakin avatars. Players can log into the same account across different channels and play against the same people.

But in contrast to Xbox Live and PlayStation Home, Lockwood has focused its avatars on mobile devices, which haven’t been powerful enough in the past to run 3D avatars. Now, those options are catching up with the consoles, and the time is ripe for this change, Kemp said. Lockwood is considering licensing the Avakin technology to other mobile-game companies.

The avatars will enable player-versus-player competition across platforms in real-time. That’s not easy to do, and Lockwood believes it is the first to do that with 3D avatars (Jawfish Games is doing it with 2D games). Lockwood has created its own cloud-based backend service, which connects different systems. It uses off-the-shelf backend components like Smart Fox server, Edgecast, and Amazon EC2, along with its own software and its home-grown metrics system called Playmetrix. Lockwood will make Playmetrix available to third parties.

The company will release the Avakin technology in the United Kingdom first and tweak it based on consumer feedback. Then, Lockwood will launch it in the Latin American market through BoaCompra, a South American game publisher, this summer. The publisher is pursuing partnerships in other territories where free-to-play business models are big.

Lockwood started in 2005 on social platforms but got a game deal with Sony to work on Home titles. The self-funded firm primarily makes rich 3D games that serve as social multiplayer experiences. The company has more than 40 people working on multiple projects. Rivals include 3D avatar games such as PKR and platforms such as IMVU. Others include Stardoll and Habbo, but those offerings focus on younger audiences.

Kemp said the company will continue to work on console games for next-generation systems in the future. If mobile games one day run on consoles, Kemp says his company will be ready since the games will run on Unity, which should run across all platforms.

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

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Once again, Android accounted for 75.6 percent of all smartphone shipments, and once again, Samsung is killing it.

The Korean smartphone king grew smartphone shipments by 64.3 percent year-over-year while shipping 82.2 million tablets, smartphones, and notebooks combined. Meanwhile, mobile rival Apple grew its iPhone shipments by a shockingly low 6.7 percent, hitting single digit growth in a market which has overall growth of 37.4 percent.

Let me say that again: Apple is at single digit growth in a market growing at almost 40 percent.

Source: John Koetsier

Android meets Wall-E.

If there’s any doubt why Apple’s stock in moldering in the mid-400′s after hitting highs last year of over $700, that’s why. And with Tim Cook basically telling Wall Street that Apple won’t ship any significant new products until this fall, or even 2014, the situation is not likely to change.

‘Despite its slowing growth, Apple still shipped over 37 million iPhones,’ Canalys analyst Pete Cunningham said in a statement. ‘But HTC and Samsung have raised the bar with their latest handsets and Apple needs to respond with its next iPhone. The iPhone user interface is now six years old and badly in need of a refresh.”

Tablets are one area of slight comfort for Cupertino.

Apple retains 46.4 percent of the tablet market, Canalys says, shipping 19.4 million tablets. That’s down from 58 percent market share in the first quarter of 2012, and once again, in a market growing at over 106 percent year-over year, Apple grew less than others — about 60 percent growth year-over-year.

‘Spearheaded by Google and Amazon, the commoditization of the tablet market has happened far quicker than that of the wider PC market,’ Canalys analyst Tim Coulling said.

The upshot?

Without significant new Apple products, major new product categories, and a much more intense Apple effort to produce a wider range of phones and tablets that the market is looking for right now, Apple share will continue to drop.

And one other interesting tidbit in the Canalys data:

Calculating operating system share over all “smart devices,” lumping in smartphones, tablets, and laptops does provide interesting insights. With that view of the industry, Microsoft ends up with an 18.1 percent OS market share — a very different proposition than high-90-percent share in the laptop/desktop world.

Image credit: Louish Pixel/Flickr

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

The Dumasoft application, released by the State Duma’s executive office to streamline the work of the deputies, can only be downloaded to iPhones or iPads, with no Android version available for mobile device users. A few deputies wrote a request addressed to Speaker Sergei Naryshkin, asking him to deal with this inconvenience.

“Dumasoft does not support the Android operating system, while not all deputies are willing to buy iPhones and iPads,” a co-author of the request told Izvestia.

The new software was deployed in the fall of 2012, after Naryshkin had personally insisted that deputies needed to have the ability to work anywhere an Internet connection was available. The Dumasoft application allows deputies to view documents and correspondence, alter bills and comment on their colleagues’ proposals.

Yury Shuvalov, deputy head of the State Duma executive office, confirmed that the administration of the lower chamber was fully aware of the problem and looking for ways to solve it.

“We will certainly issue apps for other operating systems. I think this could be expected before the end of the year,” said Shuvalov.

According to Nikita Kislitsin, editor-in-chief of Hacker magazine, Apple devices are traditionally the choice of the well-to-do. Thus, it is no surprise that the State Duma executive office did not expect any opposition to the gadgets from the Duma deputies, whose average annual income hovers around 2 million rubles ($63,100) per person.

In addition, the State Duma thought that it could go easy on software developers in this case, an expert in Internet technologies, Ilya Knopov, added.

“Apple has just one platform for which new apps can be developed,” said Knopov. “It’s more complicated in the case of Android, so the development would cost more.”

photo credit: jurvetson via photopin cc

This article from Russian daily Izvestia was first published in English in Russia Beyond The Headlines and East-West Digital News.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Android may have wrestled massive smartphone market share away from Apple the past couple of years, but until now Apple’s managed to hold onto its dominance in tablet sales. That’s now changing, says IDC analyst Sameer Singh. Not only will Apple’s market share shrink, it will also start to see its iPad unit shipments drop, he says.

That would be a disaster for Apple, which pioneered the modern tablet revolution.

According to the IDC, Apple’s global tablet market share has dropped from over 60 percent in Q2 2012 to around 40 percent in each of the third and fourth quarters of 2012 and the first quarter of 2013. And while in Q1 2012 Apple outsold Android in the tablet market by 11.8 million to 8 million, in Q1 2013 Android outsold Apple by 27.8 million to 19.5 million.

That 19.5 million iPad shipment number should drop this quarter, says Singh.

“iPad shipments normally see strong growth in calendar Q2,” Singh wrote. “However, this is always driven by a new product launch.”

The problem is that during April’s earnings call, CEO Tim Cook said Apple was hard at work on amazing new hardware and software, but that it was not coming until the fall and “throughout 2014.” Which means, Singh says, trouble:

“This means that iPad shipments should see another sequential decline in Q2 (to ~17-18 million).”

And that will push iPad market share below the 40 percent mark, making Android not only the majority tablet operating system but also the market leader by a wide margin. That’s bad news for Apple, but Apple can survive without sales leadership.

What would be tougher for Apple to survive is declining shipment volumes.

WemoLab snared admirers with the launch of its graphically beautiful 3D animated undersea world, The Blu. Now it is going after iPad fans with the launch of SuperFugu, an interactive tablet app built around a cartoonish pufferfish. SuperFugu offers kids a “digital field trip” of the world’s oceans and allows them to interact with and learn about aquatic species.

The app indicates that some developers are investing heavily in 3D graphics to stand out from a sea of competitors on mobile platforms, and that will drive mobile platforms to adopt better technology. If it takes off, it will show there is growing appetite for family content on mobile platforms.

SuperFugu is an educational app, and those haven’t always been the most enthralling for kids. But Venice, Calif.-based WemoLab is shooting to wow iPad users with beautiful graphics. The company has built the game on its high-end technology platform that it used to create The Blu, which the company quietly released on PC a year ago.

“We set this up to create the next-generation app,” said co-founder and chief executive officer Neville Spiteri. “It is an immersive and meaningful experience. We call it a digital field trip.”

The new app lets you play as a superhero pufferfish who has to free fish that have been captured by an evil octopus. Along the way, you collect golden coins (an homage to Super Mario Bros.) and watch out for predators. Fortunately, most other sea creatures don’t want to eat the poisonous SuperFugu. The app is aimed at luring kids into WemoLabs’ high-end product, The Blu, which is unique as a creative platform.

With The Blu, WemoLab created an underwater world imbued with artificial intelligence and a scientifically accurate environment. Without advertising, that world has grown to 100,000 users in 100 countries.

WemoLab created fish that behaved with the appropriate A.I., and it also created a platform so that third-party artists could create their own 3D-animated fish. The company curated the art submitted by the community of artists, and it wound up with submissions from more than 300 artists, known as Makers. They design their fish and get credit for their submissions, which can roam free in the ocean. Users can start their own sub-worlds, or habitats, and purchase the fish with virtual currency. Tapping the A.I. technology, the fish function as expected once the artist lets them loose in the world.

The platform is both educational and aimed at saving the world’s oceans, so it has garnered support from a variety of ocean experts, including Time Magazine’s Hero for the Planet, Sylvia Earle, a National Geographic explorer-in-residence. She narrates some of the experience, explaining the plants and creatures that you interact with in the ocean. You can visit different habitats in the world to check out fish in different environments. You can build your own habitat and populate it with fish — many created by Makers — that you can buy. About 25 percent of the proceeds go to Makers in The Blu, and 25 percent goes to nonprofits.

Spiteri said the world is monetizing in a healthy way. You can also adopt a fish and see where it swims in the ocean. When you click on them, you can see where they are from and who their owners are. In that respect, the game has a social component.

“Wemo stands for ‘world emotion,’ and our goal is to create next-generation, immersive connected experiences that bring people together from all over the world,” said Spiteri. “The feedback we received on The Blu overwhelmingly demonstrated that there is an exploding appetite for family-centric content with an element of learning and fun.”

With The Blu, WemoLab taped Academy Award-winning animation director Andy Jones, who created art for James Cameron’s Avatar film. Among the creatures Jones designed was a giant blue whale that swims throughout the ocean. The whale was auctioned off at a Wildaid event last year, and it garnered $10,000 for the charity. Wemo habitat creators and sponsors include The Smithsonian, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, The Ocean Elders, and others. Players can make donations from within the game that benefit ocean charities. Twelve habitats have been built, and four more are under construction in The Blu.

Jones also helped with the creation of SuperFugu, which is controlled through simple swipe maneuvers. Creators can build their own Fugu skins, and children can become “mini Makers” by submitting their own color drawings to be included in the game as a Fugu skin. Wemo added parental control features that enable parents to restrict purchases through tools such as a coin allowance. Parents can also set a timer for playtime and review a report card that promotes conversation. SuperFugu monetizes in a similar way to The Blu, where you can buy fish.

The free version of the game has 16 levels of play. WemoLab will add more levels over time and create new habitats from around the world, such as the Arctic or the Kelp Forests. The artwork is good on the iPad, but it isn’t nearly as breathtaking as the look of The Blu, which features 3D animated creatures and ocean waters in different shades of blue.

WemoLab was founded in 2010 by Spiteri, Scott Yara, and Anthony Batt. The firm now has 13 employees. They received $2 million in funding from angel investors including Digital Garage, headed by MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito. And in October, they raised another $2.5 million from strategic angels. Over time, Spiteri hopes there will be thousands of artists and children contributing to The Blu and SuperFugu.

Spiteri said that his team is at work on a second virtual-world platform dubbed The Green. That one is a world of plants, butterflies, birds, and other wildlife.

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

---

Sidekick Cycle is a smartphone game that hopes to do good — not by scoring big on Metacritic but by putting bikes in the hands of African children.

Half of all proceeds from Global Gaming Initiative’s (GGI) debut title, due out on iOS and Android platforms this summer, will go directly to international charity World Bicycle Relief. In real terms this means for every 387 downloads of the 99 cent game, a bike will be “unlocked” and put into the hands of someone who needs it.

“World Bicycle Relief is a best in class charity with a proven track record,” GGI’s chief executive Elizabeth Sarquis told GamesBeat via email. “They deliver bicycles to kids in Africa. With transportation, that child can get an education. With an education, we can change lives. It costs World Bicycle Relief $134 for that bike, and to date they have delivered more than 125,000.”

Global Gaming Initiative CEO Elizabeth Sarquis

For Sarquis, a relative newcomer to the world of gaming, the goal is to connect people to worthwhile causes through their smartphones. Providing a clear and tangible goal is key to this, and Sidekick Cycle will support engagement by keeping its players updated on the number of bikes funded.

Sarquis is both realistic and hopeful in her expectations for Sidekick Cycle. “At 387 downloads, our model delivers a single bike,” she says. “To us, that will be a victory. But realistically, for us to sell a few hundred thousand games doesn’t seem unreachable. If we reach 1 million, that would enable us to deliver more than 3,000 bicycles.”

Sidekick Cycle is the first of what GGI hopes will be a range of games supporting worthwhile causes. As with all noble gaming efforts, though, this project’s success depends on the game itself. “I’m very pleased with the quality of the game our developer, Berlin-based It Matters, has delivered,” says Sarquis. “Week over week, the game improves, and I’m confident that mobile gamers will embrace it.”

Sidekick Cycle is releasing on iOS in early June with an Android version following a few weeks later.

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

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On a worldwide basis, King’s Candy Crush Saga leads the way on the Apple iOS app store in downloads, and Imangi’s Temple Run 2 is tops in the Google Play store. But when it comes to revenue, GungHo Online Entertainment’s Puzzle & Dragons has conquered all, according to March data from market research firm App Annie.

The results show the competitive market for mobile games is becoming a battle among the same players each month for the top rankings, with no clearly dominant company.

King’s match-3 puzzle game has steadily grown in downloads on iOS since its release in September 2012. Now it is No. 1 in the most-downloaded game on iOS, and it is No. 3 on Google Play. Candy Crush Saga was No. 4 in revenue on Google Play and No. 3 in revenue on iOS. The top five grossing iOS publishers in March were unchanged from February, with Supercell (maker of Clash of Clans) and GungHo Online at the top of the charts.

GungHo’s Puzzle & Dragons, meanwhile, is No. 1 on both iOS and Google Play for the month of March in terms of most revenue. That tells you that the game, which is particularly popular in the Japanese mobile game market, has been designed for maximum monetization. (I happen to know a chief executive who admitted spending $300 in the game.) Puzzle & Dragons has generated more than 10 million downloads to date in Japan alone.

Electronic Arts had the No. 1 spot on iOS in top downloads, but it did so with a total of 984 apps on the market. On Google Play, EA was No. 3, with 107 games on the market. On iOS, EA was No. 3 in monthly game revenue and it was No. 6 in monthly game revenue on Google Play. EA’s top downloadable game on iOS was Real Racing 3 at No. 2. And EA’s top grossing apps were The Simpsons: Tapped Out at No. 5 on iOS and Real Racing 3 at No. 7 on iOS. On Google Play, EA’s The Simpsons: Tapped Out was No. 6 in monthly revenue.

Rovio, saw its place move up four spots due to the strong downloads on iOS for its Angry Birds game and The Croods. Glu Games also jumped seven spots on iOS to No. 6. Rovio was the top publisher in downloads on Google Play in March.

One of the rare new players on the charts was Fingersoft, the Finnish startup that published Hill Climb Racing. Fingersoft hit No. 4 in top downloads on Google Play thanks to its release of Benji Bananas, an “endless swinging” game.

NHN has begun to climb the charts thanks to the strong performance of games published on its Line mobile messaging network in Japan. On Google Play, Asian game publishers have posted three games on the Kakao Talk mobile messaging network in South Korea.

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

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Starting today, iPhone and iPad owners can finally get their hands on Google Now.

Think of it like an evolved form of Apple’s Siri personal assistant baked within Google’s iOS search app. In addition to receiving voice commands (a feature that’s already been present on on Google’s search app for some time), Google Now also presents useful information without your prompting.

It could, for example, tell you an estimated commute time to your office or the status of your package deliveries.

In my brief testing with Google Now on my iPhone 5 and iPad Mini, I found it to be just as easy to use as on Android. Google Now’s Cards (little boxes that it uses to deliver different types of information) are all located on the bottom of Google’s search app. Typically, the software presents the most relevant cards to you — so since I tested it in the morning, it displayed cards for my work commute and weather.

You can tap a card for more information (typically retrieved through a Google search), or swipe to remove them. At first glance, the biggest difference between the iOS and Android versions of Google Now is the available screen space. It’s a bit different juggling Google Now’s cards on the iPhone 5′s 4-inch screen, as most Android phones are approaching 5-inch screens. I also noticed that the Package Card doesn’t show any images for shipments on iOS — but that’s a fairly minor complaint.

Check out my hands-on video below:

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google Now is officially invading Siri’s home turf.

Google announced today that an updated version of its iOS search app brings Google Now to the iPhone and iPad. Just like on Android, it’s focused entirely on bubbling up information that’s directly relevant — like warning you if there’s traffic before your next appointment, or if it’s going to rain later in the day.

Unfortunately, iOS users won’t get access to all of the Google Now Cards (each of which offer different functionalities). According to a handy comparison chart provided by Google, the iOS version of Google Now won’t have the following cards: Boarding Pass, Activity summary, Events, Zillow, Fandango, and Nearby events.

On Android, Google Now has access to a lot more information, since it’s a core part of the operating system. Google will likely never be able to give the iOS version of Google Now all of the features its Android sibling has — but Google has managed to bring over most of the core functionality.

It also looks like Google is gearing up to bring Google Now to Chrome on your desktop, according to some recently discovered testing code.

I haven’t had a chance to try out the app yet (look for a hands-on later today), but it’s pretty obvious Google is turning its iOS search apps into a mini-ecosystem. It’s like the reverse of what Facebook Home is doing on Android. With Google Now, you’ll have even less of a reason to leave the Google search app on your iPhone. It doesn’t need specific commands like Siri to retrieve useful information, which could make it an even better digital personal assistant.

WWDC, Apple’s annual news orgy and developer conference, has sold out. A mere two minutes after the announced start time fo 10 a.m. Pacific, the WWDC website was stating that tickets were no longer available.

Last year, WWDC sold out in a few hours. This year, with a modicum of advance warning, developers snatched up every single one of the $1,599 tickets within a few seconds.

So, what can you look forward to from WWDC 2013?

At this year’s event, Apple is expected to unveil and release the latest versions of iOS, its mobile operating system, as well as its desktop operating system, OS X.

But if you’re waiting anxiously for some exciting, new — or any new — hardware to emerge from the bowels of the Cupertino behemoth (like that colorful imagery?), you can settle in for a spell. CEO Tim Cook, has already announced that Apple will have no product announcements until fall 2013.

“Our teams are hard at work on some amazing new hardware, software and services we can’t wait to introduce this fall and throughout 2014,” Cook said in the company’s quarterly earnings call Tuesday.

“We look forward to gathering at WWDC 2013 with the incredible community of iOS and OS X developers,” said Apple SVP Phil Schiller in a statement yesterday announcing the ticket sale.

“Our developers have had the most prolific and profitable year ever, and we’re excited to show them the latest advances in software technologies and developer tools to help them create innovative new apps. We can’t wait to get new versions of iOS and OS X into their hands at WWDC.”

Image credit: Heather Kelly/VentureBeat

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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.

If you needed further evidence that tablets are more than a mere computing fad, just look at the latest numbers from Strategy Analytics.

The firm found that the tablet industry more than doubled in the first quarter — reaching 40.6 million units, up from 18.7 million last year. This was a significant quarter since we have more than two major companies backing tablet platforms, and consumers have plenty of inexpensive tablets to choose from.

In particular, it’s worth paying attention to Microsoft’s figures. The company is finally on the map in the tablet industry, with 3 million Windows tablets shipped, which includes both Windows 8 and Windows RT (Surface) devices. While that only makes up 7.5 percent of global tablet market share, it’s a notable figure, since Microsoft didn’t even have a tablet strategy last year (we can exclude the handful of Windows 7 tablets nobody bought).

Apple, not surprisingly, is still leading the tablet industry. The company reported 19.5 million iPads shipped for the quarter, up from 11.8 million last year. But Apple should also pay attention to how much Android slates are gaining on the iPad. Strategy Analytics reports that 17.6 million Android tablets were shipped in Q1, up from 6.4 million.

Now Apple and Google are basically neck and neck for the top spot in the tablet world. Android made up 43.4 percent of the global tablet market for the quarter, while Apple held 48.2 percent, falling around 15 percentage points from last year.

For the most part, it was small and cheap tablets like the Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire that helped Android gain so much ground so quickly. At $329, the iPad Mini is still significantly more expensive than $200 Android tablets.

Apple’s big problem? Android tablets will continue to get cheaper and there will be more of them to tempt consumers. Apple, on the other hand, will be stuck iterating the iPad and iPad Mini over the next few years (likely at the same prices).

At this point, it looks like Android will end up dominating tablets pretty soon — something I previously thought would take years to do.

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

Denzel is 13 years old and running from the police. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the cops thought he was part of the riots that rocked London in 2011.

That’s the concept for Denzel, the new game from developer LabPix Studios. It’s due out this summer on Android and iOS for free, though it does have in-app purchases. It’s a pretty serious subject that the developer explores using … well, endless-runner mechanics.

“The gameplay is a lighthearted 2D endless running game that is set in a 3D world,” LabPix chief operating officer David McGuire told GamesBeat. “There are countless obstacles to jump over or slide under and numerous enemies that will chase Denzel, such as the local bully, police, security guards, dogs and grannies.”

LapPix worked to re-create the streets of London to give authenticity to the innocent Denzel’s desperate attempts to evade law enforcement.

“There is a deeper message at [the game's] core,” said McGuire. “The disenfranchisement of the youth in U.K. toward adults and the fact that the London riots were inevitable. Consequently, innocent youngsters who haven’t quite found themselves got caught up in the mess.”

McGuire claims the gameplay mechanics represent the ever-present pressure that someone like Denzel would feel in this situation.

“We hope the game mechanics will tell the story effectively opposed to using cutscenes,” said McGuire.

I haven’t played it yet, but it seems unlikely that an endless runner can convey a serious message. Still, I’m glad that LabPix is trying.

Apple, on the other hand, might prefer that the company didn’t try. The iPhone company has a history of blocking and removing games that deal with real war (Endgame: Syria) and child labor (Sweatshop HD) from its App Store.

LapPix isn’t interested in making waves.

“We enjoy games with real-world subjects as long as they are tasteful,” said McGuire. “Games that often use real-world subjects can come across as if they sensationalize an issue or even make the issue seem blasé. We don’t condone targeting any race, culture, real government, or corporation.”

That last bit comes directly from Apple’s app submission guidelines, so you know that LabPix is paying attention. Now, the studio just needs to prove it can follow through with a game that has a real message as well as it follows corporate-mandated guidelines.

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

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) will be held June 10 through June 14 in San Francisco, with tickets for the event on sale tomorrow, the company announced today.

WWDC is often a place Apple shows off new software and hardware. Last year, Apple debuted iOS 6, refreshed its MacBook laptops, and showed off Apple Maps for the first time.

This year’s WWDC will be a major event for Apple because the company’s needs to show it is still a force for innovation. Apple CEO Tim Cook has faced criticism for simply refreshing well-established products instead of introducing new devices and flashy new software. Apple’s stock price has dropped precipitously in response, and now sits around $400 a share versus more than $700 less than a year ago.

Apple SVP Phil Schiller said the company will deliver new versions of iOS and OS X software at WWDC. Hopefully iOS 7 will be a much bigger step forward than iOS 6, which hardly introduced any forward-thinking features.

“We look forward to gathering at WWDC 2013 with the incredible community of iOS and OS X developers,” Schiller said in a statement. “Our developers have had the most prolific and profitable year ever, and we’re excited to show them the latest advances in software technologies and developer tools to help them create innovative new apps. We can’t wait to get new versions of iOS and OS X into their hands at WWDC.”

WWDC will be held at Moscone West and include more than 100 technical sessions presented by more than 1,000 Apple employees. Tickets for the event will go on sale tomorrow at 10 a.m. PDT and can be purchased at the main WWDC site.

WWDC image via Apple

That the question needed to be asked at all is indicative of how confused Wall Street is with Apple. And Cook’s follow-up remarks probably didn’t help at all.

The analyst said that the smartphone market was growing at 30 percent annually and that based on Apple’s guidance for the coming quarter, it seemed extremely unlikely that Apple would be growing anywhere near that fast. And while Apple owns a higher percentage of the tablet market, Android is starting to take a bigger bite there as well.

“Your point is not lost, and we do want to grow faster,” Cook said in response to the analyst after cautioning him to look at sell-through to consumers, not just sell-in to channel inventory. “We don’t view it however as the only measure of our health.”

The first part of the answer is exactly what Wall Street wanted to hear. The second part, not so much.

Source: MarketWatch

AAPL gains $20, then gives it right back.

Cook then talked about what really matters to Apple, including customer satisfaction scores, which the company typically leads in, customer loyalty rates — another bright spot for Apple — and the amount of ecosystem commerce that takes place within iOS when apps are purchased or items are purchased with apps.

Most of that was good, particularly when Cook said that “three out of four dollars spent on apps are spent on our ecosystem.”

But then he summed it up with a typically Apple-ish Kumbaya moment:

“Market share is important and unit share is important,” Cook said. “But we’re all about customer experience and enriching lives.”

Enriching lives is not at the top of a Wall Street analyst’s list of priorities. Nor does it make the daily agenda of a typical wealthy investor. Increasing market share and making money, however, rank high on both.

Which is one of the reasons why Apple’s stock gained $20 after its earning release hit the wires … and gave it all back by the end of the earnings conference call.

Apple and Wall Street, it would seem, are oil and water.

Image credit: Dean Takahashi/VentureBeat

Big Fish Games is announcing today that its casino game, Big Fish Casino, has become the top-grossing app in the casino game genre on Apple’s iOS platform worldwide.

AppAnnie, a market researcher, said that Big Fish Games has taken the No. 1 spot. Big Fish itself said that its casino game’s revenue has tripled over the past year.

The Seattle-based company also launched a real-money gambling version of the app in the United Kingdom as part of a partnership with Betable. Betable does all of the regulatory compliance and security checks to verify whether players can legally play a gambling game in the place where they are located. In effect, Betable is able to reskin a social casino game, where players pay real money for virtual goods but cannot cash out, and turn it into a real-money gambling casino game.

Big Fish did not break out the financial performance of the gambling version, but it did say that the overall property has a loyal and engaged player base with more than 10 million friendships established in its social network. Many players have been active for more than three years.

Last month, Big Fish introduced Big Fish Bingo, which leverages the same casino mobile-social game platform. Next month, the company plans to add a real-money multiplayer roulette game to Big Fish Casino in the U.K. Carey DiJulio, the vice president and general manager of Big Fish Casino Products, said that the goal is to be the closest thing to the buzz and excitement of playing casino games in real world.

Big Fish Games was founded in 2002, and it has become the largest producer of casual games, with more than 600 external game developers and a catalog of 3,000 PC games and 250 mobile games. The company has distributed more than 2 billion games in its history.

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

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

New York City-based Tracks has gone through quite a few changes over the past few years — originally conceived of as a geo-blogging platform, it eventually ended up launching as a private social network for your life experiences in the summer of 2011.

Now Tracks is making yet another big leap, and it could be its most important one yet.

The company is releasing version 2.5 of its iPhone and iPad app today, which shifts the focus away from just creating private social networks around experiences (dubbed “tracks”) to finding interesting content from your friends and people with similar interests.

“The engagement ladder is now turned on its head,” said Vic Singh, Tracks’ founder and chief executive, in an interview with VentureBeat. “Now we’re driving consumption first, which leads to creation.”

Given that there are far more content consumers on social networks compared to content creators, the shift seemed a long time coming. Instead of opting for the follower model of so many social networks, Tracks is aiming for more of a collaborative model, Singh said.

With its initial private social networking model, Tracks felt reminiscent of the hyped up app Path. But instead of having a single private social network that’s exclusive to your closest friends, Tracks basically made every one of its “tracks” a tiny private social network. Only people invited to a particular Track could see and engage with the content — the problem was that limits most of Tracks adopters to people who want to create content.

Singh, who is also a partner at NYC’s Eniac Ventures, sees Tracks’ new focus as something more akin to Pinterest (which he wagers is the “last big web-first company”). To that effect, the company also added the ability to “reTrack” photos and videos to another track. That’s a simple feature (also similar to Twitter’s retweets and Tumblr’s reblogs), but it’s an important one as Tracks refashions itself into an app for finding new things.

After all, what’s the first thing you want to do when you find something cool? Share it.

Tracks currently has nine employees and has raised $2.5 million in funding. Its investors include Alex Welch, the cofounder of Photobucket, Eniac Ventures, GC Seed, and Base Ventures.

Singh still sees plenty of potential in Tracks’ initial private social networking mission — but he reiterated that it’s still trying to be very different from Path.

“In life you don’t have a single path, you have a series of tracks,” he said.

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

The booming mobile advertising market grew from $1.4 billion in 2011 to $4.1 billion in 2012, and it’s projected to hit a massive $7.3 billion in 2013.

And almost all of it is spent on Apple’s ecosystem.

There’s a reason that even though Android has almost caught up to iOS in downloads, it’s still way behind in monetization. Partially, it’s because iTunes has a long and successful history of commercial transactions, so people feel comfortable clicking and shopping and buying on iOS. Partially, it’s because Apple was the leader in mobile for so long.

But it’s also because advertisers are simply getting fed up with an Android ecosystem that doesn’t convert very well.

Source: MoPub

Mobile ad spend ballooned in March 2013

“There have been whispers and comments around Google’s Play app store, and some of those concerns were supported when they announced a redesign,” Paul Gelb, head of strategy for MoPub, the world’s largest mobile ad exchange says. “If you have people click on your ad and drive them to the app store and that becomes a breakage point … that will reduce the value of the ad that you want to buy.”

Which is a nice way of saying that ads for app installs aren’t always working, even when the mobile user taps on your ad.

Most advertisers and ad exchange partners don’t want to talk on the record, of course. But off the record, they’ll say that Google Play is just not at the quality level of the iOS app ecosystem. There’s too much crap, too much malware, there’s not the level of quality that iOS has … and there is a missing mass of people on the platform who have confirmed credit card accounts and are, frankly, in the demographic who are willing and able to buy.

That may sound sacrilegious to Android enthusiasts, many of whom are tech-savvy and higher-income, but it’s borne out by the numbers.

Not only are 75 cents out of every mobile ad dollar spent on iOS, but iPhone, iPad, and yes, even iPod touch ad rates are much higher. While Android smartphones draw $.50 CPMs (cost per thousand impressions), iPhones pull in $.65 to $.88 CPMs, iPod Touches do $.74 to $.98, and iPads do between $.82 and $1.16.

Source: MoPub

Mobile ad CPMs for the first quarter of 2013

So while tablets are the highest-revenue mobile ad platforms, Android tablets only account for a skinny single percent of all mobile ad sales.

That’s entirely due to the basic question underlying ad pricing: Do they work? Click-through rates on Android devices are about half as good as those on iOS devices, with under one percent on Android tablets and just over a percent on Android smartphones. Meanwhile, iOS devices such as iPads pull in 2-2.5 percent click-through rates, and iPhone pulls in 1.4-1.7 percent.

Source: MoPub

Click-through rates for mobile ads – first quarter of 2013

All of that adds up to an ad-share spend in which iPad almost eclipses the entire Android ecosystem single-handledly, iPod Touch by itself does about a third to a quarter as much as all of Android, and iPhone owns about double the share of all Android smartphones and tablets combined.

Which brings us to the 75 percent iOS ad share:

Source: MoPub

Mobile ad market share, Android vs iOS devices

Does this matter?

On a certain level, Android users might not really care — after all, who likes advertising? But advertising is increasingly driving mobile monetization strategies for app developers, who must therefore care. And that means the apps and experiences Android users will eventually get from their platform suffer from the Android monetization gap.

Which doesn’t mean the gap will exist forever. MoPub’s Gelb isolated two key factors that need to change for that gap to disappear:

“I think Android tablets need to hit. It’s incredibly important — the larger screen just offers more ad potential,” he told me. “Also, there needs to be a bit more certainty and success around identifying high-value users who are known to have credit cards and disposable income.”

The question, of course, is when that will happen.

photo credit: photo credit: swishphotos via photopin cc

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