July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

A few months ago I bought an external 3TB hard disk for our home computer, mostly for my wife’s 53,000 photos. Turns out that if I had just waited, I could have simply uploaded them all to MyShoeBox.

“We offer unified photo storage across all your devices, for free, at 1,024-pixel quality,” founder Steve Cosman told me a few weeks ago in Toronto. “Or you can pay $5/month for unlimited resolution.”

Tomorrow MyShoeBox is launching version two of its photo backup and sharing service, with a new iPad app, updated mobile apps, and a new shared galleries feature that you use to build grouped sets of photos with people you went on vacation with or family members who shared an event such as a wedding.

The freemium model has helped the company get a quick start.

Source: MyShoeBox

Search and self-quantification

After exiting from Toronto accelerator Extreme Startups in the fall, the service saw 13.4 million photos uploaded in November, its first month. And, Cosman says, MyShoeBox users upload far more photos than Facebook or Flickr users — 3,200 each, compared to Facebook’s 220 and Flickr’s 320.

But the value proposition is much more than photo backup.

Instead, MyShoeBox is a way to enjoy all of your photos, all of the time, on any device you have. Frankly, for most people, their photos are strewn around their main computer (photos from their actual, official, camera), their phone (snapshots from their built-in camera), and their social networks (uploaded from wherever you happened to be at the time). There’s no unified view, no way to see — and search — all your photos at once.

Using MyShoeBox for the first time syncs your photos up to the cloud-based service automatically, in the background, and installing the services’ mobile apps on your Android or iOS-based phone will do the same.

That’s helpful, because we often want to see more of our photos on our mobile devices.

“Our new iPad app is an incredible way of browsing your entire photo collection,” Cosman says. “And it’s one of the only ways you can get your full photo collection on your iPad … most people don’t have enough space.”

What most interested me when I chatted to Cosman is MyShoeBox’ solution to a problem that I think I share with many other digital photographers: enjoying your own work and finding photos. A former program manager for Microsoft’s augmented reality team for Windows Phone, Cosman has placed special emphasis on automated sorting, tagging, and exploring features.

“So many people that have given up the concept of a photo collection,” he says. “Faces, places, and things are important ways to automatically categorize photos. And they keep getting smarter every day.”

So MyShoeBox highlights places you’ve been, photos you took last year at this time, events, cameras you used, and more, creating what the company calls “an interactive infographic” of your life. That includes personal quantification data like the top times you take photos, and your most photographed neighborhoods.

And if you want to search your photo collection, MyShoeBox has just rewritten its search features to be much faster and more powerful as its power users often have more than 15,000 photos each.

“iOS, Android, Windows, Mac … it works pretty much anywhere,” Cosman says. “And once together, it’s automatically organized.”

MyShoeBox is based in Toronto, Canada, and is currently raising a financing round. Its new iPad, iPhone, and Android apps will be live in Google Play and the app store tomorrow.

Image credits: MyShoeBox

While some may still balk at entering credit card information to buy something on a smartphone, it seems the fashion community has taken to it like a pair of peep-toes and a good pedi.

Poshmark, the used-fashion mobile marketplace, says people are uploading $1 million in inventory each day, and launched an iPad app to take advantage of the growth.

“Since the listings will be viewed in a larger format and browsing becomes more seamless, we do expect to see Poshmarkers making faster purchases and more of them,” said Manish Chandra, founder and chief executive of Poshmark, in an email to VentureBeat.

Poshmark allows anyone to upload listing of various fashion items for sale. This includes worn items to items that are still new with tags. The app focuses on photos and curates the listings into “Posh parties,” or themed mobile “events” where people can contribute their items in hopes of striking a deal with a more targeted buyer.

Chandra explained that in the last 100 days alone, the app has grown ten times in terms of its run rate in the last three months and is looking toward having $350 million in inventory uploaded this year alone. At the end of last year, the company was only projecting a $100 million run rate.

Because of how photo-focused the app is, I am surprised that it took Poshmark this long to come out with an iPad app. The Menlo Park-based company was launched in 2011 and was originally only available on the iPhone. Now, the company has expanded to the Web, though you cannot attend posh parties on the website.

“We spent a lot of time carefully redesigning some of the most-popular sections of the Poshmark iPhone app in order to maximize the iPad’s screen, including the main news feed, our Posh Party feed, and user profiles,” said Chandra.

With the iPad app also comes the new ability to search for items by size — a desperately needed feature in an app that truly does have thousands of submissions to weed through.

Poshmark recently received a $12 million round of funding from Menlo Park Ventures, and will likely put more fund and energy into updating the app after receiving user feedback. We can also expect to see Poshmark come to Android soon, which will likely create the infrastructure that could make it an international business.

Images via Poshmark

Spreadsheets are the awkward, unpopular Mary Katherine Gallaghers of software. A new app, Permanent, turns them into superstars.

Permanent is a tablet app for spreadsheets. In a world where more of us are carrying our work in trendy cross-body bags and completing small tasks while on the train or waiting in line, touch-friendly spreadsheet software for tablets seems like a no-brainer.

Yet Google Drive and similar mobile apps give us plenty of spreadsheet-related headaches to this day. And we get that; spreadsheets aren’t sexy. No one ever got a big tech blog writeup for their awesome work on spreadsheets, right?

This is why Permanent is so remarkable. It takes something unsexy and makes it glamorous to look at and pleasurable to use.

As Tweetie and Letterpress creator Loren Brichter tweeted of the new app, “When thought through, touch can be so much more powerful than keyboard/mouse. This embodies that spirit.”

These new spreadsheets are touch-optimized. They support scripting and have tons of undo/redo options. The app can handle big, database-size sheets, and you can write and use formulas to your heart’s content. Upcoming releases will also import and export spreadsheets to and from the more common file formats, including Excel, CSV, and ODF.

Permanent is starting on iPad. Right now, it’s selling for $10, a 50 percent discount for its planned $20 price.

Here are some screenshots for ya:

Permanent is the code-child of developer/designer Kyle Hickinson of Ontario, Canada. He’s been designing iOS apps since 2009. His partner for Permanent is Kevin Lawler, a computer science-focused entrepreneur based in San Francisco.

Top image courtesy of Yuganov Konstantin, Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Fashion app Poshmark can afford diamonds and pearls now. The company just got a $12 million second round of funding led by Menlo Park Ventures.

“We turned down many, many partner meeting with other firms,” said Manish Chandra, founder and chief executive of Poshmark, in an interview with VentureBeat. “What attracted us to Menlo is that they’re working in this marketplace.”

Menlo is also an investor in Fab.com, a social shopping website with a focus on funky, cool, curated inventory. Though the company is very different from Poshmark, it shows Menlo’s interest in curated, social fashion. Existing investors Mayfield Fund, Invetus Capital, and SoftTech VC also participated in the round.

Poshmark is an iPhone application that lets users sell and buy fashion. It handles the payment transaction and provides a shipping label the seller can print out to send purchased items to their new homes. Clothing and accessories are sold through “Posh parties,” or themed feeds where people can submit their items for a certain amount of time.

The parties see upwards of 30,000 items, which drove Poshmark to release “showrooms” or feeds curated by the party host. These include “Host Picks,” “Designer,” “First Look,” and now “New With Tags.” Chandra says a 100,000-item Posh Party is just around the corner and that some of the funding will be dedicated to creating discovery tools.

“We need to be able to scale the entire platform,” said Chandra, “I think, for us, it’s really constant innovating. It’s figuring out what are the edges with this issue.”

Indeed, over the course of a year, Poshmark sees $100 million worth of inventory go through its channels.

With this funding, we can also expect to see Poshmark on new devices including the iPad, Android, and the broader web. You can expect to see the iPad version come out first, which will include some of the same experiences we currently see on the iPhone, but it will likely take advantage of the space afforded by the iPad and iPad mini screens.

Chandra said the funding will also be used to build out the company’s servers and its infrastructure and to streamline the shipping process.

Currently, Poshmark is only available in the U.S., but after a trip to Spain where Chandra said there was a lot of desire for Poshmark, that might be changing.

“Oh yeah, definitely. I think international is definitely something we want to do.”

Woman with diamond image via Shutterstock

Path, a social network focused on private updates for small friend groups, has just rolled out its brand-spankin’-new app for iPad, and it’s a doozy.

The startup emphasized in an announcement this morning that the app isn’t just Path for iPhone on a bigger canvas; rather, the design nerds at Path rebuilt the whole shebang from the ground up.

“As you’ve come to expect from Path, Path for iPad is beautifully and purposely designed,” said a Path rep via email. “The larger iPad screen allows for different viewing options in both portrait and landscape modes.”

One of the more interesting visual changes is the collage interface for landscape mode viewing. Each daily collage is different, and you can swipe back and forth to see a previous day’s collage.

Within each collage, more important moments are highlighted in larger tiles. Tapping a tile will take you to a fullscreen view to look at all the comments and emotions associated with the content.

Checkins and arrivals are also displayed in a single map, and the homescreen now displays recent activity and your friends list in addition to your home feed.

Here’s a sneak peek:

We recently got to sit down with Path CEO Dave Morin for a long chat on mobile design. The founder and former Facebooker, who is famously passionate about design, told us, “True simplicity takes a lot of time. And in mobile that’s especially true.”

Hence the long wait for Path’s big iPad debut, we can deduce.

The company previously spent an entire year taking its app from the 1.0 version to the 2.0 version, and during that year, the team found that most of its users were only using one screen. Getting down to a bare-bones, simple, elegant interface based on that data took time and lots of careful UI/UX work. What was left at the end, said Morin, was a single-screen design users loved.

Top image courtesy of Natasha Kramskaya, Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Yahoo has just launched the newest version of IntoNow, its TV companion app, and it’s bringing a boatload of new features to tablet and smartphone devices.

IntoNow is the media-centric company’s television sidekick “experience.” It brings avid TV fans a comprehensive offering of news headlines, statistics, and even social media updates from popular actors. IntoNow 3.0 is specifically tailored for iOS devices (the old IntoNow is also available in the Google Play store; we anticipate an Android-friendly version of IntoNow 3.0 will be available shortly).

The app update aims to give fans more and better ways to engage with and around television shows. The TV portion of the app will continue to deliver relevant stats, tweets, and trivia in real time. Music Sync is an IntoNow feature that can automatically identify a song playing in a show and take you to iTunes for instant gratification, should you choose to own said tune.

One hilarious new feature is mashing up TV moments with meme-making. Called CapIt, it allows viewers to screen-capture and caption anything they see on their TV. Angelina Jolie’s gonna love that.

Another new feature is group chat, which is what it sounds like. You can instantly set up private conversations with friends, start a chat around a specific show, or set up a recurring chat event to coincide with a show’s air time. It’s like a book club, but without all that annoying reading.

“iOS devices are pervasive in our living rooms, and second screen behavior is now commonplace. IntoNow wanted to up the ante and give people a whole new experience,” said Yahoo product VP Adam Cahan in a release on the update.

“We’re the first to offer some major technological innovations – like the ability to capture and share moments that happened seconds ago on TV or automatically identify songs playing in the background – all of which gives people watching TV with IntoNow 3.0 a unique, interactive experience.”

Here’s a sneak peek at some of the new features:

As a footnote, do let’s refrain from placing any praise or blame for this product on Marissa Mayer, the company’s new CEO. Girl’s only been there two weeks.

Top image courtesy of Goodluz, Shutterstock

Reading Rainbow is making a big comeback, and it’s skipping your TV in favor of the other screen in your living room: your iPad.

In an in-depth chat in VentureBeat’s San Francisco studio, Reading Rainbow host LeVar Burton talked about how the reincarnation came to be. As always, Burton was the consumate storyteller, and he conveyed his deep belief that technology should be used not just for profit but for good.

We also got a hands-on demo of the new app, which contains classic videos from the show as well as new, interactive content. The Reading Rainbow iPad app is priced as a subscription, and it’s a tad on the pricey side ($9.99 per month or $29.99 for six months).

But c’mon, you’re using the iPad as a babysitter anyway, and at least with this app, you’re getting some of the best, highest-quality content that you’re going to find on any tablet.

Stay tuned tomorrow for Burton’s non-Reading-Rainbow-related insights on space travel, science fiction trends, and the royalties Google owes him as soon as Google Glasses hit store shelves.

Guess how much of LinkedIn’s new iPad app is actually mobile web and not native.

Go ahead — guess. We’ve had a lot of fun asking people to guess this over the past couple days. They’ll start with 40 percent and edge up to 70 percent, but no one comes close to the real figure: 95 percent.

Yes, only one screen in the entire LinkedIn iPad app is actually native. The rest is good ol’ HTML5-based mobile web technology, running in the browser and leaning heavily on Node.js.

We were shocked to hear this 95-percent figure from Kiran Prasad, who heads up LinkedIn’s mobile development team. Shocked, but not appalled — after all, Prasad was the engineering heft behind the company’s recent slew of gorgeous mobile apps, which were also heavily reliant on the mobile web.

But the new iPad app had struck us as so surprisingly sexy during our initial review that we had to know more about how Prasad and his team of four (yep, just four devs built this app) packed so much punch into a web app for a tablet.

Especially as Silicon Valley tech companies pick sides in the web-versus-native war, it’s fascinating to see the presumably conservative LinkedIn lean toward the more progressive side of mobile technology. But this is a stance this team has taken for a while now, and LinkedIn is currently one of the mobile web’s biggest supporters and strongest case studies.

LinkedIn and the mobile web

“Last year, we had just launched three different phone apps. We were starting to invest more in HTML5,” Prasad told VentureBeat yesterday.

“We had a 60/40 split where about 60 percent of any app was in HTML5.”

LinkedIn’s big news at that time was how it had employed Node.js in its at-scale mobile apps — what seemed to many to be a pretty big gamble for the company. But the other part of the story was how Prasad and his team combined native and mobile web functionality in iPhone and Android apps, creating hybrids that bridged the divide in the native-versus-web mobile debate.

Now, Prasad said the company relies on mobile web technologies more than ever. “Because we made that full investment, being able to get the mobile web on a tablet was really doable,” he said.

Of course, being able to have greater developer efficiency was a draw, but Prasad said that would never have come at the expense of creating a beautiful, responsive app that would be a pleasure to use.

“We always focus on user experience and app speed as a number one priority,” he told us. “If the performance wasn’t there, we wouldn’t have gone with the web.

“But with the iPad having the faster processor and being a more powerful mobile device, we felt like the web-based version could give us the performance we needed.”

In the end, Prasad continued, it came down to the little things: Did onscreen buttons depress and pop back up quickly when tapped with a fingertip? Was scrolling snappy? Did crossfades occur smoothly and without any lag?

“We did users studies in-house, and I don’t think people noticed a big difference. Nobody said, ‘Oh that’s native,’ or ‘Oh, that’s web,’” said Prasad. “As long as we can make the experience fast enough, nobody can tell the difference. It still feels right.”

And a lot of that performance, Prasad said, came from removing unnecessary design wankery (our verbiage, not his) — the rounded corners, the omnipresent gradients. By making things simple, clean, modern, flat, and even print magazine-like, the LinkedIn app only got faster and better on the performance side, as well.

“Our focus on trying to get a simpler design is actually helping us make things faster. It’s a good feedback loop,” said Prasad.

Here are some screenshots of those super-speedy mobile web pages for your reference. The first slide shows the sole native page:

Now, with more Node.js

In addition to seriously beefing up the company’s mobile web investment, Prasad is also leaning more heavily on Node.js — and with more confidence.

“We’re still full-on Node. We are excited that it can scale,” he said. “Over the past few months, we’ve made performance tweaks so we can scale even more. On four boxes, we can now handle 20 times the load we were handling before.”

Prasad said the company used to use nginx, an open source Web server and a reverse proxy server, due to the engineering team’s concerns about the stability of Node. “It was there to make us feel comfortable,” said Prasad. “If any of the nodes went down, nginx would report the errors.”

Today, however, Prasad no longer feels the need for the security blanket. “In the tablet version of the server, we’re still using Node, but now the clients are talking directly from the load balancers to Node, there’s no nginx.”

In addition to experiencing a growing confidence in the technology itself, Prasad et al. are also contributing to Node’s growing ecosystem of tools — stay tuned for those to be open-sourced.

“Some of the changes we’ve made are Node modules we’re going to release back into the community,” he said. “Some of it is application-specific… But overall, the tools for Node are becoming better.”

“Responsive design” just doesn’t work

Finally, Prasad wrapped up with an impassioned statement on a new trend in mobile applications: responsive design.

The core concept of responsive design is that the designer/developer would create a single design that can scale up and down fluidly across scores of different devices — laptops, tablets, TVs, mobile phones, etc. Many advocates exist for this solution to widespread connected-device fragmentation, and these advocates have founded companies and launched tools specifically to make responsive design simpler and faster.

But Prasad thinks it’s all wrong. Responsive design might work for uncomplicated, one-off websites, he said, but for applications or networks (such as LinkedIn is), responsive design is actually bad.

“We’re looking at the ‘entrenched’ use case [for desktop users], the coffee-and-couch use case [for tablet users], the two-minute use case [for mobile phone users],” Prasad said, rapidly outlining a few of the ways people are interacting with digital information and highlighting how unique each of those scenarios can be — and how different are the needs they present.

“You can’t take a mobile app and just scale it up to tablet or desktop,” he said. “A lot of responsive design is building one site that works everywhere, and that works for websites. But it’s bad for apps… You have to come up with a completely different design because of the use case.”

Top image courtesy of Yuganov Konstantin, Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

LinkedIn has just popped its iPad app onto the iTunes App Store, and you’ll be shocked at how slick, pared-down, and beautifully designed it is.

This is the company’s first foray into tablets, and the wait has paid off. The deliberation and attention to detail — it all shows, from the clean-as-a-whistle homescreen to the trendy slider interface for quickly browsing industry news.

When LinkedIn revamped its mobile apps last summer, we had roughly the same reaction. Being used to the LinkedIn web interface, we certainly weren’t expecting the professional network to roll out this type of modern, pared-down yet full-featured offering.

To an extent, we lay the blame for these awesome apps squarely on Joff Redfern’s shoulders. He’s LinkedIn’s new-ish mobile product chief, and he’s been working on the company’s mobile overhaul since last May. Redfern clearly knows what he’s doing in the mobile arena, and LinkedIn, an oldster by Silicon Valley standards, is comfortable letting him take the company in new directions.

In a phone conversation this afternoon, Redfern told VentureBeat that, given the large demographic overlap between LinkedIn power users and iPad owners, the iPad app was a necessary addition to the fold. Typically, LinkedIn’s most avid users are a relatively affluent crowd, and they’re in their early 30s to 50s, which lines up nicely with tablet ownership demographics (college grads under 65 years of age who earn $75,000 or more per year).

Also, the BYOD trend (that’s “bring your own device,” shorthand for the explosion of consumer mobile devices in the enterprise) means the time is right for bringing more professional applications to iPads. Catering to that trend, the iPad app will be integrating your calendar with your LinkedIn contacts, so you can see at-a-glance and up-to-date information on people before you dash into your next meeting.

Let’s talk stats. People love stats.

• LinkedIn has 150 million members total around the world
• The network’s mobile traffic is skyrocketing, from 8 percent this time last year to 22 percent now
• Every second, LinkedIn mobile users rack up 19 people searches and view 41 profiles
• Even without a custom app, iPad traffic makes this tablet the network’s fastest-growing device, up 250 percent year over year

Here’s a sneak peek at some of the interfaces and features you’ll be seeing in the new iPad app. We just wish the LinkedIn website was as pretty, especially for the dashboard-like updates screen and the Flipboard-reminiscent news interface:

Developers, stay tuned for an exclusive deep dive into the fascinating and surprising tech behind this gorgeous app.

Top image courtesy of Yuganov Konstantin, Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

There are a lot of ways mobile apps are changing how we view our world and consume media. And while some are revolutionizing productivity or remodeling business presentations, others are pushing the boundaries of art, nature, and storytelling.

The following six jaw-dropping apps have turned our tablets on their ears by re-imagining what the form is capable of producing, striving beyond the usual boundaries to become something both impressive and exciting. Anyone making a tablet app these days needs to up their design game to be truly competitive, and these apps set the bar very high indeed.

Astronomy Picture of the Day by Concentric Sky

Developed in partnership with NASA, the Astronomy Picture of the Day (also called APOD) features decades of high-resolution photos of space hand-selected by NASA astronomers, who also write the included descriptions. There are new photos added every day, and the app allows you to find photos by date or shake the phone for a random image, save photos and share them with friends. And that’s all well and good, but the stars of the show here are the astounding images themselves, showing the vast skies above, from interstellar dust clouds and nebulas to volcanoes and telescopes.

iTunes (free), Android (free); Video demo

Al Gore — Our Choice

This app, which was designed to accompany Gore’s book of the same name, examines the causes of global warming and the solutions being enacted to combat its effects. The app itself changes the way you read and experience a book by melding seamlessly with the photography, interactive graphics, animations, maps, and documentary footage contained within the app’s many functions. A narrative from Gore turns it into a portal to experience the book through videos, photos and infographics that turn your tablet into a powerful learning aid. Charts and data are entirely reimagined; sliding your finger along the screen allows you to see the world’s population grow, and blowing into the microphone turns the blades of a wind turbine. The exquisite photos can be enlarged and pinpointed on a map, making anything you see in the book, explorable in the app.

iTunes ($4.99); Demo video

National Geographic & Fotopedia

National Geographic and Fotopedia teamed up for two incredible journeys — one is through Burma, the other is a bird’s-eye view of France. Both feature the stunning images of the planet and its people that fans have come to expect from National Geographic; the Burma tour features over a thousand photos, while the France app touts over two thousand professional aerial shot. Both also have interactive maps, slideshows, wallpapers, options to share, and a trip builder feature, which, after taking these virtual tours, you may very well be tempted to use. The magnificent photos coupled with stories, history, and geography make for an engrossing experience.

Android fans get a slightly different options in the National Geographic app which acts as more of a companion to the magazine with photos and categories such as news, pace and photo of the day.

Dreams of Burma: iTunes (Free)

Above France: iTunes (Free)

National Geographic; Google Play (Free)

Living Earth World Clock

Hands down the most strikingly beautiful world-clock app available, the Living Earth World Clock provides clock, weather, and alarm features with a live 3D simulation of the planet at the current moment in time. It also has global weather and forecasts around the world, and will display sunrise and sunset borders as they are happening in real-time. Clouds will streak across your tablet as they are moving across the sky outside your window; tropical storms appear on your screen as they are happening. The alarm clock can be synched with your music playlist, waking you to the song of your choice.

iTunes ($0.99)

deviantART Muro

Here’s the thing… technically deviantART Muro isn’t an a tablet app. What it is, is an incredibly versatile treat for the eyes crafted out of glorious HTML5. Muro is a drawing app that works right within the web browser on any tablet (or computer), as long as that tablet’s browser runs HTML5 (which at this point is pretty much all of them — including the iPad’s Safari). Muro doesn’t require Flash or a special plug-in and it works with both touchscreens and Wacom’s pressure-sensitive drawing tablets. Muro users create some astoundingly beautiful 2D digital artwork, which can be easily shared using a solid set of drawing tools and a variety of filters to blur, sharpen, and emboss. Perhaps the best part of this web app is browsing the works of all the other phenomenally talented Deviant-artists.

On the web (Free); Demo video on Chrome

The Numberlys

This gem from Moonbot Studios is a story-in-an-app celebration that’s half Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, half Pixar-style genius animation (that’s no coincidence as Moonbot Studios was co-founded by a former Pixar employee. Read the full story of the Academy Award winners at Moonbot). Part story, part adventure, part mystery, and part game, the Numberlys follows five little friends who live in a black and white world where only numbers exist until they create the alphabet by jumping, spinning, smashing, and pulling apart numbers with tools. The video is instantly charming, intriguing, and astoundingly lovely all at once. The very cool companion website is equally fun and imaginative. Visually beautiful, unique, and highly enjoyable, It’s an app worth buying a tablet for.

iTunes ($5.99); Video

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Although Apple is fond of showing iPad users playing games, watching movies, and listening to music on its ubiquitous tablet, more and more industry professionals are finding ways to incorporate the iPad into genuinely productive enterprise-level work. No longer just for Angry Birds, iPads can now be found in schools and universities, doctor’s offices, stockrooms, and boardrooms. There is an ever-expanding menu of specialized enterprise apps that are making the iPad a must-have office supply.

PlanGrid: Blueprints on the iPad

A prime example is the PlanGrid app, which allows users to store, view, and manage blueprints on the iPad. PlanGrid also allows note taking and sharing from the field, and uses the cloud to store project drawings and receive updates. All of the features of the app were designed specifically to save contractors time and money by making it easy to access blueprints and to share notes and changes. The availability of blueprints in a digital format not only saves time — no more waiting for the blueprints to be physically printed, no mistakes made by building off of old blueprints — but also takes a significant amount off the bottom line; PlanGrid claims that for every million dollars in building costs, there are typically printing costs of $3,500. The app is free to download in the App Store and for the first 50 sheets. Larger plans cost $20 or $50 a month.

Mobile MIM: X-rays in your doctor’s pocket

The new iPad touts the quality of its new retina display, and what better way to put it to the test than to use it for extremely vital visual information — like an X-ray or an MRI? MIM Software has done just that with its Mobile MIM app, which is used by medical professionals to view images from CT, MRI, X-ray, ultrasounds, PET, and SPECT scans. The app can also review images, contours, DVH, and isodose curves from radiation treatment plans. Doctors, nurses, lab techs, and other medical professionals can download data using an encrypted transfer to protect patient privacy, and set a passcode to encrypt non-image information and prevent unauthorized access.  Patients can also access their information from the cloud, making it easy to communicate across long distances. The Mobile MIM app is free to download from the App Store, but the companion cloud service does charge.

Kitchen IQ: Food safety and more for restaurants

While the iPad is used by culinary aficionados and amateur chefs to find and store recipes, take photos of food, organize and plan meals, and keep track of grocery lists, it’s also increasingly being used in the restaurant industry by managers to train staff, acquire customer feedback, plan and record events, keep track of expenses, and manage reservations. One example is the free Kitchen IQ app, designed to help restaurant professionals maintain operations according to health standards and guidelines by providing tips on avoiding foodborne illnesses. It also explains labeling options, finds common pitfalls, and even has a virtual Food Safety Audit for kitchen inspections.

EasyBib: Assistant for academics

Many see the iPad as a threat to traditionally paper products like newspapers, magazines, books, and libraries — however, many of these industries are adapting the tablet to their own purposes. Case in point is the free EasyBib app, which scans a book by bar code (or by entering in the title) to provide you with MLA, APA and Chicago style citations, or you can write your own citations. Citations can then be emailed or exported to EasyBib’s bibliography management service for easy organization.

Stock Room: Track inventory

Similarly, stockroom managers will be assisted by the simply named Stock Room app, which tracks inventory of items in a stock room or storage area. Users can snap photos of the items they need to track, perform a receipt of items into a stock room, keep a detailed log of receipts and items leaving the stock room as well as email a list of received items, of items being used, of item history and of current stock of the item. The personalization and detailed entries can help managers keep track of office supplies, spare equipment, mail supplies, tools or vehicle inventory. Stock Room costs $1.99.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

The Khan Academy released its iPad application today, bringing its new wave of education to the mobile world.

Currently, the Khan Academy has more than 3,000 videos of all different subjects in its education warehouse. With the app, parents, teachers, and students can watch students’ progress on these videos along with information about how long students took to answer practice questions, and whether they’re stuck on a certain topic. The app now allows you to watch these videos offline by downloading them to your iPad. You can also sync progress between your devices, according to Fast Company. For instance, if you’re watching a video on your laptop, it will pick up in the same place on your iPad to be viewed wherever you go.

People often repeat certain sections of Khan Academy’s videos to understand the topic better. In fact, creator recent Sal Khan attributed the success of his program to this ability to re-watch a lesson without the pressure of a human teacher. For this reason, the company added easier backtracking to its videos. A list of “subtitles” and associated timestamps appear below the video for you to click on and return to that segment.

The iPad app does not yet support practice exercises, but the company does plan to include them in the future.

Khan Academy is the brainchild of Sal Khan, who was working as a hedge fund manager when he started tutoring his younger cousin in math. The young girl could answer harder, logic-based questions, but was held back by her inability to understand units. After writing small programs to help her practice their tutoring sessions, he decided to create full-on YouTube videos for her to watch on her own. That’s where the idea took off, and soon he was tutoring up to 25 of his family members.

Apple has been getting into e-learning as well with its textbook initiative, iBooks 2. iBooks 2 takes existing textbooks and makes them into interactive e-textbooks, where students can watch demonstration videos, look up words as they read and more. Companies such as Inkling, Chegg and Kno have similar offerings as well. Apple introduced iBooks Author in that same initiative, which helps publishers automatically create e-books through drag and drop templates, as opposed to taking a print book and transforming it to meet the digital generation’s needs.

Schools have been experimenting with digital education and have been rolling out experimental iPad programs to see how students react to the technology. The Menlo School in Atherton, Calif. has had one of these programs in place for roughly a year. It gave iPads out to its eighth and tenth graders to read, do projects on and take home.

The Khan Academy iPad app is currently available in the App Store for free.

Flipboard today launched a new version of its wildly popular social app for iPad. Company reps tell us the new app is even “more personal and more beautiful” than before.

Also today, the rep continued, the startup is introducing “more international content and a custom edition of Flipboard for France.”

The iPad app will now include Cover Stories, a popular feature of the Flipboard iOS app for smaller screens including iPhone and iPhone touch. It’s also gotten a few design tweaks to be even more magazine-like, the company said.

Cover Stories allow Flipboard users to to see the most interesting stories from all their sources at a glance. Cover Stories can include images, status updates, blog posts, news articles — you name it. Cover Stories now appear as a “double tile” on the Flipboard iPad app’s first page, and the featured posts will become more relevant over time as you use the app and it “learns” what stories and sources you like best.

On the design side, users will see print-like features, including new covers, typography overlays on photos, and full-bleed images, which the startup said in a statement are intended to “make the social magazine pages resemble the beauty of print design that people love so much even more than before.”

In other features, the app’s Table of Contents now has a third page, bringing the total number of titles to 32; a new “first launch” experience to get new users onboard with a range of topics; and the ability to add entire folders, not just individual feeds, from a Google Reader account.

As for international content, the new app comes with “recommended regional reading” for users in UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland, France, Hong Kong and Taiwan and a bespoke app for users in France.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Hookflash, an iPad app maker looking to make workplace communication streamlined and more productive, has pivoted to focus on connecting you with your LinkedIn contacts. The company is releasing its inaugural app in March, and it will help you communicate with your LinkedIn connections for free.

LinkedIn is definitely a powerful tool to connect with business professionals and potential clients, but communicating with your connections isn’t always effective. Let’s face it, do you keep on top of your LinkedIn inbox as much as your other social networks? Probably not. Hookflash realized that LinkedIn contacts can be very valuable, but not exactly easy to talk to, so it created an app to fix the problem.

“The value of your communications device or technology is directly proportional to how easy it makes it to communicate with the people in your network and maintain your directory of contacts. LinkedIn is the best service in the world at doing that for you, so we integrated LinkedIn as a directory instead of building our own,” Hookflash chief executive and co-founder Trent Johnsen told VentureBeat. “Hookflash leverages the social aspects of LinkedIn and enables instant voice, video, or text communications with anyone in LinkedIn directory via the iPad — which is increasingly becoming the work tool of choice.”

The app will let you place voice and video calls and send text messages to any of your LinkedIn contacts for free. And it will display LinkedIn profile and activity feed information for each contact in the app, so you’ll know who you’re talking to and what they’ve been doing.

Unlike its competitor Skype, there is no need to build a list of contacts. When you log in to your LinkedIn account in the app, your information will be synced automatically. The app also pulls information from LinkedIn so your conversations have more context than they would with Skype.

Hookflash is slated to be available in the App Store in March. Until then, you can sign up for early access on the company’s website.

Hookflash debuted last year at DEMO Fall 2011. The company is based in Calgary, Alberta and Palo Alto, California and has raised $1.2M funding from Sora Group.

British Prime Minister David Cameron, a huge iPad fan, is having a special iPad app made for his particular country-running needs.

According to a report in The Times, the Prime Minister (and someday soon, anyone else) will be able to use the app to get broad and detailed information about Great Britain’s vital signs.

The Times’ sources say the app is currently under development and will be released to the public once it is completed. A report on GigaOm has sources saying the app has been in development for a couple months already.

When completed, the app will likely act as a sort of dashboard to show at-a-glance information and news on economic and social health barometers. Data will come from the UK’s National Health Service, crime reports and unemployment agencies, as well as Google and Twitter.

Advisers on the Prime Minister’s staff reportedly got the idea for the app during a recent trip to the United States.

Cameron is no stranger to the world of Silicon Valley technology. He famously video-chatted with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg last year about how the social network could help the UK solve its financial woes.

However, the PM’s attitude toward social media hasn’t always been so friendly. During the London riots earlier this year, when Twitter and Facebook were used by rioters, Cameron publicly contemplated banning social media use for those who would use such networks to plot against the government or to break the law.

At that point, Twitter execs were called in to meet with UK government officials about the service’s role in the riots.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Travel search site Kayak is releasing a new unified iPad and iPhone app today, replacing its standalone iPad app and adding a sleek itinerary-consolidation feature that seems poised to take on TripIt.

This is actually a major update that will turn Kayak‘s free iPhone app into a unified app optimized for all iOS devices, including the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. The two-year-old standalone iPad app will be phased out, which means Kayak faces the tricky task of making sure all of its users switch to the new app.

The updated Kayak iOS app will introduce quite a few new features to iPad users. The design has been simplified, the search interface updated, and iPad users can finally search for rental cars. For those who actually book trips through the Kayak apps, there’s a great new autofill feature that makes it much easier to complete reservations. In the app’s settings, you can fill out a form with all of your information, such as name, address, phone number, email and date of birth — almost everything but credit card information. When you go to book a flight, car or hotel, the third-party site opens within the Kayak app and the information is automatically populated, cutting down drastically on painful iOS-keyboard time.

The coolest part of the update is the Trips feature. While not new — it was on Kayak.com and there was a read-only version on the iPhone app — the feature finally gets to shine on the unified app. “It’s exactly what TripIt is, but free and better,” Bill O’Donnell, Kayak’s chief architect, said in an interview. Like TripIt, the Trips feature consolidates all of your travel details in one place that can be accessed from any of your iOS devices or through the Kayak site.

The tool isn’t just for travel booked through Kayak; it handles restaurant reservations and other miscellaneous bookings too. Anything you forward to the Trips email address from your registered email is added to the itinerary. “You can write your hotel confirmation number on a cocktail napkin, take a picture and sent it to us, and we’ll add it to your trip,” said O’Donnell.

The company is also trying out a new feature that lets you book directly through Kayak instead of being taken to a third-party site. So far, only select hotels can be reserved directly through Kayak, but the company hopes to roll out the feature to other travel options soon.

The new app is fast and well-designed, and could generate some much needed positive press for Kayak. Earlier this month, Kayak pulled its advertising from TLC’s “All-American Muslim” reality show along with Lowes. The company denied it was bowing to pressure from conservatives, glibly saying in a statement, “the show sucked.”

Here are some screens of the consolidated app running on an iPad:

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cloud storage company Box updated its iPhone and iPad apps today, realizing that the world outside the office is no longer an oyster, but a giant second office.

Box has seen people using mobile devices to access the company’s file storage grow 30 times in the last year, and they blame that increase on the mobile workforce. Our whole culture around communication has changed. Once upon a time, we called house and work landlines and happily left voice messages if the person was unavailable. Now we’re smash-guitars-against-the-wall-mad when someone doesn’t pick up their cell phone. Don’t even get me started if you’ve tried them twice with no success. It’s a game of convenience, which businesspeople of all kinds are taking advantage of, be it while traveling or simply to check that presentation before they’ve tossed back the comforter.

“More businesses are helping their employees work effectively from the road and across the globe, especially considering nearly 60% of all corporate employees access content outside the office with their mobile phones or tablets,” the company said in a statement.

Over a million people have already downloaded Box’s apps, so the company is adding new tricks to the bag. Users are going to be able to upload photos and videos to Box and create folders for them on the go. Sure, you could use this to snap some cool photos of the conference floor at Le Web, or share a pretty sunset from your remote meeting, but there are very functional purposes to this feature. Box uses the example of a construction site that needs to send pictures of its progress back to headquarters. It could also come in handy for the small business looking for its second office and wanting to share pictures of the search.

Being able to create folders on the go keeps your photos organized and not floating around your Box storage without purpose. Also included in the app updates is a search function, so you can find the folders or individual files you just organized.

Lastly, you will be able to favorite folders on the go. To favorite a folder or file is to save its contents directly to your phone, so you can access it without internet connectivity. This comes in handy for businesspeople who want to review an announcement on the go, or prepare for a talk when they know they’re going to be stuck in some long tunnels.

The iPhone and iPad apps can be found here. They’re free, though you will need a Box account to use them.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Online auction site eBay is launching a new feature for its mobile applications today to help boost purchases from customers while they’re on the couch watching TV.

The move is part of eBay’s new “Couch Commerce” strategy. Users that open up the company’s iPad app will see a new “watch with eBay” tab that lets them type in their zip code, cable provider and current channel. Based on your viewing experience, the app will then begin suggesting items from the 200 million listings available on its site.

For instance, if you see one of the characters on Supernatural referencing a monster database on his Samsung Galaxy tablet, eBay will pull up listings for all Samsung tablets as well as competitors.

For people who only casually watch television during the day, this could be a great way to do holiday shopping without having to fight the crowds at major retail chains. As for eBay, this new feature has plenty of potential to boost sales.

The company said it has plans to partner with networks, cable providers and others to help identify those product placement spots that usually go unnoticed within movies and TV shows (that is, unless you watch the CW).

While plenty of people are on a mobile device while watching television (86 percent, according to the company’s research), many of them aren’t always in the shopping mood. It’ll be interesting to see if this type of strategy working in the long-run when the “watch with eBay” feature gets added to the company’s other mobile applications.

It’s also worth noting that eBay is very serious about product recommendation technology. Earlier today VentureBeat reported that eBay acquired recommendation startup Hunch for an estimated $80 million.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Jetpac debuts Tuesday as a Facebook friend-propelled rocket belt, taking you on a visual journey around the world for your travel inspiration.

The startup has developed a travel magazine-like iPad application, slated for release before the end of the year, that culls Facebook photos to recommend locales and attractions to visit. It also points you to the right Facebook friend for travel advice.

Intrigued? You can sign up, reserve your profile and get a sneak peek at what’s to come.

“The best place to get excited about travel right now is still magazines and guidebooks … and to talk to friends to get their travel stories and recommendations,” co-founder Julian Green told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview. “What Jetpac tries to do is bring those two things online and make them better.”

The startup connects to Facebook to marry a rich magazine-inspired experience with travel recommendations from friends. Jetpac then analyzes the thousands of photos your Facebook friends have shared, determines photo locations and activities pictured, and plucks out the best shots — it knows that a photo of mom and dad, for instance, is usually not a good one, so these are automatically left out — to place them into entities called “trip books.”

Trip books represent the latest and most popular places that your Facebook friends have been to. Trip books include only the photos that will help you make informed travel decisions. You can see who’s been where, click a picture to see photos in a slideshow, “like” a photo and save it to your stream for even more content related to the pictured place, follow activities like scuba-diving, and connect directly with friends for travel questions.

“It solves that problem of, ‘How do I know in real-time where my friends have gone and had fun, and are willing to tell me about?’”

Jetpac’s visual approach to travel recommendations is currently powered by Facebook photos, but the startup will soon add additional inspiration sources, including Instagram and Flickr, Green said.

The startup, founded in 2011, is based in San Francisco and has raised $300,000 from angel investors.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Television-tagging application IntoNow has launched for the iPad, and it now matches tagged content to real-time news and updates, parent company Yahoo announced today at a press event in Sunnyvale.

IntoNow is the iPhone and Android application that uses patented technology to listen to and identify millions of television and movie titles, in a similar fashion to how Shazam identifies music. The technology originated at Auditude, but the app was spun out as its own entity. Yahoo acquired IntoNow in April 2011, just 12 weeks after the then nascent startup launched its iPhone app in the App Store.

Available for free on the App Store, IntoNow for iPad is designed to engage the multitasking television viewer. It tags live and time-shifted broadcast television content, highlights related content, and recommends television shows and movies based on your tagging behaviors and preferences.

The app’s most compelling feature, however, is its ability to discover and feature real-time content — in the form of tweets, news headlines or play-by-play sports updates — related to what the user is watching.

IntoNow for iPad, explained product manager Adam Cahan in a demonstration of the application, is taking closed captioning data and analyzing it using Yahoo Core technology, the company’s personalization and optimization engine. It then works to understand show content and context, matches that information against current news items, and surfaces results in the right-hand sidebar of the application.

Cahan referred to the process as ambient-style computing, and said that IntoNow will focus on this technology to better answer the question of “what’s next?” in the second-screen entertainment environment.

IntoNow had close to 600,000 users and was averaging 25,000 to 35,000 tags per day prior to being acquired by Yahoo. Cahan disclosed that, to date, IntoNow has been downloaded more than 1.6 million times on Android phones and iOS devices.

Today, at long last, Facebook has introduced its application for Apple’s iPad.

The app will give users “the full Facebook experience, right at your fingertips,” writes former Microsoft employee and current Facebook engineer Leon Dubinsky on the Facebook blog.

“Facebook on the iPad feels fun,” he summarized.

Facebook’s new iPad offering will let you access chat features, messages, photos and profiles. The app places particular emphasis on visuals, for obvious reasons. Dubinsky writes, “Photos really shine on the iPad. They’re bigger and easy to flip through, like a real photo album. It’s like having a slideshow with all your friends and memories, wherever you go.” Touch capabilities mean you can swipe a finger to slide through an album and pinch to zoom in on a picture. You can also go into full-screen mode, as seen in the screenshots below.

The app features a slick navigation bar on the left side for finding games and apps, as well as a drop-down box with notifications and new messages available on each page at the touch of a fingertip.

In addition to chatting, browsing and flipping through pictures, you can also play games in fullscreen mode, watch high-resolution videos in line and stream content to Airplay devices.

The long-awaited release has been one of the more anticipated — and hotly contested — application launches of the year.

Back in June, a Project Spartan rumor surfaced. Reportedly, the project was to build an HTML5-based web app for mobile Safari that would to circumvent Apple’s App Store. The rumor originated on TechCrunch. While we’re sure that a couple Facebook engineers could have been working on such a project (the company’s intrapreneurial culture means that small teams are working independently on all kinds of projects all the time, but many of them never see the light of day), Spartan turned out to be smoke and mirrors.

In fact, the company’s iPad app had already been in development for nearly a year.

In addition to today’s iPad announcement, Facebook has also given its iPhone app a facelift. The new version of the app features faster search, simpler navigation and better access to games and Facebook apps.

You can get both apps free of charge in the iTunes App Store right now.

As far as an Android or other OS tablet app is concerned, a Facebook spokesperson told VentureBeat, ““We work closely with every mobile device maker and platform provider; however, we aren’t announcing anything beyond the iPad at this time.

“Tablets are obviously an exciting segment of the mobile market now and we are as excited as everyone is in seeing the new device experiences that may be coming down the line. People today can visit m.facebook.com on their Android tablets and have access to most of the features and functionality of the iPad app, including the ability to access app and play games.”

Many people have complained about Facebook’s lack of iPad support, which has forced them to use the iPhone application on the tablet or a third-party app like Friended or Facely HD. As of today, we can add former lead engineer of Facebook’s iPad Jeff Verkoeyen to the list of frustrated people.

In a blog post today, Verkoeyen announced that he was leaving Facebook for a new position on Google’s mobile team after becoming frustrated with Facebook’s decision to hold off publishing its iPad app.

The app has been “feature-complete” (which means it is basically finished) since May, but the company kept pushing its release date back, according to Verkoeyen. It’s also worth noting, the Facebook iPad app was discovered by some people nosing around the company’s iPhone app code. Verkoeyen has since removed the information about the app from his post, according to Business Insider.

Facebook didn’t make any announcements about its mobile strategy at last week’s f8 developer conference, and we’ve heard nothing official about a time-table for when the company plans to release an iPad app.

The first thing striking about Twitter’s iPad app is its friendliness to first-time users — whether they’re just new to the app or to Twitter itself. Instead of being hit with a login box upon initial startup as with a lot of Twitter apps, it shows you categories like Art & Design, Science and Travel on the left, and trending topics on the right, along with Sign Up, Sign In, and search boxes. Tapping any of the categories, trending topics, or making a search reveal tweets in the right panel. If your use only extends to occasionally lurking through categories and trending topics to see what’s being talked about, you might not even see the need to sign up.

Unlike other apps which use panes only in landscape mode, Twitter’s makes no fuss about its pane-oriented design. Once logged in, the left pane lists the usual suspects: Timeline, Mentions, Lists, Messages, Profile, and Search, and the right shows the tweets. Tapping on a tweet brings up another pane on the right, with the tweet at the top, and any link included in the tweet opened usefully below it. If a tweet is a reply to another, the entire reply thread is shown below instead.

This is where the app begins to set itself apart from any iPad or Twitter app that we’ve seen before — at least, in terms of user-interface. Fairly intuitively, you can drag each pane into, out of, and “almost” out of view, using quick swipes. A couple of use-cases: you tap on a tweet, read it, and slide it out of view. Or, you slide it slightly to the right so that it is just out of view as it loads the embedded link — most useful for videos — while you continue scrolling through your timeline and slide back to it when it finishes.

Another neat innovation is the use of gestures. Pinching outward on a tweet brings up a popup box that gives you a quick overview of a Twitter user, including their bio, location, follow counts, and links to jump to their tweets and mentions.

And finally, as if all the panes weren’t already enough, pressing the Compose Tweet button in the bottom left brings up a yet another pane at the top, while the keyboard slides up from the bottom. Everything in between the keyboard and tweet compose box stays in the middle, making it somewhat useful for you to be able to read and browse tweets even while you think of what to type in those 140 characters.

There are a couple peeves worth mentioning. First, the app doesn’t seem to make full use of its landscape mode — every screen is just a horizontally expanded version of the portrait mode. The extra space on the side on some of the panels could be used better. Second, as intuitive as it is, there is a slight learning curve to all the sliding and swiping and pinching. Some users may initially get confused when things start to slide in and out of view.

With that said, it’s a solid effort by Twitter. The company could have easily played it safe and given users something tried and tested, but there seems to have been an attempt to raise the bar in terms of user experience and the product in general. It’s going to undoubtedly make a dent in some of the other Twitter apps, most of which are paid. Why pay $5 for unknown app X when Twitter has quite an impressive offering of its own for free?

Back in April, the company acquired Tweetie, the maker of the popular desktop and iPhone Twitter app. While this app isn’t based on previous work by the developers at Tweetie, the influence on the product is clearly visible.