If people spent as much time working out as they did on Facebook, let’s just say there would be nary a muffin top or belly bulge in sight.

But this doesn’t mean that social can’t help fitness. The Cody app launched today, taking the compelling aspects of social networking and applying it to exercise.

Cody Inc., the app’s makers, call it a “virtual fitness coach.” Its target audience is the casual exerciser, not hardcore fitness fanatic. The app serves as a digital workout partner to help you keep your motivation and have fun doing it. During an interview with VentureBeat, co-founder Pejman Pour-Moezzi said plenty of fitness apps are out there, and Cody is different because it focuses on the social element, rather than on data such as heart rate or calories burned.

“What we observed that this focus on metrics has gone so far that I think it ends up intimidating a lot of people,” he said. “The social aspect of fitness is what fascinated us — how much motivation, or how compelling fitness gets when you have a workout buddy. It’s a social-first fitness app, so it’s all about connecting and sharing with other people.”

Pour-Moezzi and his cofounder, Paul Javid, formerly worked as product managers at Microsoft and left to create a product to help people achieve their goals. The obvious application was fitness, and they wanted fitness with Cody to feel like sharing a photo on Instagram or posting a Facebook update. The app is highly visual, making it easy to discover, share, and discuss content about health and exercise. Cody will also bring up relevant information based on stated fitness goals. Over time, Pour-Moezzi and Javid hope to integrate location service; for instance, someone wanting to find a kickboxing gym could look at community reviews to find a place that suits their needs.

Cody is free Apple App Store, and the founders aren’t focusing on monetization. Right now, they want to expand adoption and engagement for the app and are considering premium features, such as in-app purchases of yoga videos down the road.

There are horrible, terrible ways to advertise a new iPhone app. And then there is this new YouTube ad by Domino’s, which has become a viral sensation because it’s so amazingly bad.

Domino’s Japan President Scott Oellkers tries his best to read a script about how exciting the company’s new iPhone app is, and it falls flat. It doesn’t make much sense that Oellkers is the one introducting the app, considering it heavily features Hatsune Miku, a popular anime character who helps sell music software.

What’s sad is that Domino’s Japanese app does do some interesting things. On top of ordering pizza from it, you’re able to take pictures with Hatsune Miku and even watch an augmented reality performance by Hatsune Miku on your phone.

One thing to keep in mind: Perhaps the ad is more palatable to the Japanese market than it is with Americans. If you can’t understand what Oellkers is saying, the ad may not be as terrible.

The ad has attracted more than 230,000 views since its debut on Wednesday.

With slick new version of its gesture-based mobile email app now available, productivity startup Taskbox announced that it’s raised a $600,000 seed round of funding today.

Taskbox is focused on bringing a better, more efficient way to sort through your email while on a mobile device. It differs from competitors like Mailbox because it always wants to help you turn email messages into a prioritized task list without harvesting your personal data. It’s currently only available on the iPhone for Gmail and Google Apps users, but the startup does have plans to expand in the near future.

The additional capital will be used to hire additional employees for engineering and design. Taskbox tells me it’s already hired two new employees to help reach its goal of becoming your “one-stop shop” for staying more productive throughout the day, more akin to an Evernote instead of just being a solid smartphone email client.

The new seed round was led by Central Texas Angel Network (CTAN) with participation from other notable angel investors, including McAfee’s CTO Michael Fey and James Foster.

Founded in 2012, the Austin, Texas-based startup has raised a total of $850,000 in funding to date. Taskbox is seeking to raise a series A round of funding in the later half of 2013.

Money image via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

You know what sucks worse than email? Waiting in line to use an app that’s supposed to make using email easier. That’s exactly what you’ll have to do if you download the hotly discussed mobile email iPhone app Mailbox.

Fortunately, rival Taskbox can do pretty much everything Mailbox does, but without the ridiculously long waiting period.

Like Mailbox, Taskbox is an iOS email client app that operates under the assumption that it’s much easier to plow through your messages using figure gestures on your smartphone. For example, flicking your fingers right lets you archive or delete worthless messages, while swiping the opposite direction gives you the option to mark a message important.

“Clearing through your messages is really only half the battle people face when dealing with email overload. The real challenge is what to do once you’re finished,” Taskbox CEO and founder Andrew Eye told VentureBeat in an interview recently. “All your assignments and tasks usually originate from the inbox, so we really felt it was necessary to do something that addressed those problems, and not just improve your mobile email experience.”

I first encountered Taskbox back in October 2012 shortly after its initial launch and was pretty much sold on the experience. However, the startup is planning to launch a new version with a cleaner, more simplified UI, which I’ve had a chance to check out.

When you mark a message as important in Taskbox, you actually move it into a separate “Taskbox” folder and have the option of rating it by importance on a scale of 1 to 5. You can also mark messages as “complete” or “delegate” (both of which also have their own sub-folders), send short canned responses, and schedule deadlines.

Right now, the app only supports Gmail and Google Apps accounts, but more email services are planned for the future, as are native apps for Android, Windows Phone 8, and BlackBerry 10. The app runs into some issues with threaded conversations that all appear as separate messages, but if you’re constantly sorting your email through Taskbox, they shouldn’t cause you much of a problem.

The iPhone app will also set you back $3, whereas Mailbox is free; still, there are some advantages to paying for the app. Eye points to Mailbox’s bout of downtime last week as one reason to opt for a paid service.

“Downtime in email is unacceptable,” he said. Unlike Mailbox, he explained, Taskbox isn’t running all your data through its own servers, which means there’s no downtime and fewer security risks.

“Taskbox is a pure email client with no server technology necessary. That means no storing or mining of your personal information on proprietary servers… [and] no additional company/technology between you and your mission critical email,” Eye said.

Founded in 2012, the Austin, Tex.-based startup has six employees and is seeking a Series A round of funding.

A new iPhone app made me realize that my life is nothing but a game. The Carrot to-do list is Siri’s evil twin. She’s a condescending, sadistic program that resides in your iPhone with the sole purpose of putting you down as you carry out real-life tasks. Forget any sense of accomplishment: She’ll shoot it all down.

Normally, iPhone apps and games exist for my amusement. In this case, I exist for her amusement. Each time you clear a to-do list, you complete a level. The first level works as a tutorial to teach you the app’s gestures: Swipe down to add an item, swipe left to open the menu, swipe right to clear an item. After you complete those tasks and clear them according to the instructions (that includes adding your own item and clearing it), you proceed to level two.

Carrot congratulated me by saying, “You made it to level 2? Pardon my surprise. Without direct supervision, I figured you’d just sit there drooling mindlessly.” Ouch. Then she rewarded me by telling me how to say “manatees” in binary code, adding, “I’m sure you’ll find that useful one day.” Thanks, Carrot. She once even told me that I’d be killed by setting my hair on fire.

I’m not making that up.

Part of the fun of doing everyday things with this app, like grocery shopping, is that you cross it off your list and have Carrot criticize you every step of the way. You have to be a bit of masochist, and failing to complete your tasks will only piss her off. It’s a lose-lose for you.

It’s no accident that Carrot’s first to-do list plays out like a game tutorial. Carrot’s creator, Brian Mueller, says on his blog that he looked to games for inspiration. “When you play a game, you start out with only one or two basic abilities. New ones are introduced over the course of the game, once you’ve gotten used to messing with the old ones,” says Mueller. “You start off with the ability to create and complete tasks, then you unlock additional features as you kick ass in real life and level her up in her game.”

You can check out Carrot on her official site.

[via TUAW]

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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

Enterprise cloud powerhouse Salesforce has added new tools to its Service Cloud that help address customer service problems while people are in mobile apps, making it possible to reach customers that are increasingly glued to phones and tablets instead of PCs.

“We’re doubling down on mobile and this is no exception,” Alex Bard told VentureBeat. “This is an Apple-like experience for collaboration and solving your issue.”

Salesforce and its CEO Marc Benioff have been betting on mobile apps and experiences for a long while. The outspoken Benioff even suggested back in October that Windows 8 would be “the end of Windows,” because mobile devices had become the go-to devices for workers and consumers. And in this case, Salesforce is betting further on mobile by making Service Cloud way more usable with smartphones and tablets.

So let’s say you spot a suspicious bank charge on your account while you are inside your bank app on the iPhone. Salesforce’s update makes it so that the bank can easily add some HTML5 code to the app and you can talk to customer service rep via chat with one click.

“We provide the best platform that can be integrated into your company’s apps,” Bard said. “These can be integrated easily into an app or a mobile web page.”

Chatting with customer service via your app isn’t the only new feature to Service Cloud. The update today also include three other big updates:

• Co-browsing for sales associates: Co-browsing tech lets you and a customer associate browse on the same screen. Service agents can collaborate with customers about how to use an app by working directly with them. Input from either person registers on the screen.
• Mobile Service Communities (forums): Salesforce’s Communities are essentially forums that allow an app’s users to communicate with each other and let the company moderate those communities. If you have an answer about how something works in an app or a game, you can simply go to the community and ask.
• Service Cloud Touch for mobile devices: The company’s Service Cloud Touch app, which helps engage with your customers and leads, has been optimized to support the iPhone, iPad, Amazon Kindle, and Android devices. Ideally, this will make service agents more mobile.

The feature on here that sticks out the most here is co-browsing. Bard told VentureBeat that this is the first real use of the co-browsing tech it wanted when it bought GoInstant for $70 million in July 2012. It’s particularly cool because you’ll be able to simultaneously move the screen with an associate to show them the problem. Then the customer rep can address the problem faster.

“This creates a much better experience for answering questions and doing things inside a mobile app,” Bard said.

Salesforce says co-browsing will be generally available in the second half of 2013, while the other three features are now available today.

Service Cloud has more than 34,000 customers including GE, Chipotle, Comcast, Activision, KLM, Yamaha, and TED. It claims that its clients see a 37 percent decrease on average in first call resolution time and a 36 percent decrease in support costs.

Photos via Salesforce

Facebook’s mobile app for iOS has been updated with several new features today, including placing free calls over data.

Facebook’s less-popular Messenger app for iOS previously got free voice calling, but now it looks like it wants all of its members to call their friends through the main FB app as well. As long as you have an active Wi-Fi or data connection, you’ll be able to place a call through Facebook with the ease of an app like Skype or Vonage. Calls only work in the U.S. and Canada so far.

On top of free calling, the application has also improved buttons to like, comment, and share posts.

Woman using call me gesture via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Yahoo has updated its Flickr app for iPhone with several new features to improve the experience, including downloading Flickr photos to your phone, faster picture uploads, and being able to mention your friends with an “@” tag.

Flickr has struggled over the years to stay relevant, and the rise of Instagram hurt whatever chance it had of being the dominant mobile photo-sharing app. But Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer clearly likes Flickr and has made sure the app has gotten some attention. On the mobile front, Mayer said she wants to eliminate up to 80 percent of Yahoo’s mobile apps, but Flickr clearly isn’t one of them.

Yahoo added Instagram-like filters to Flickr for iPhone in December and now we’ve got more updates today. This indicates Mayer clearly wants Yahoo to be recognized as a product company again.

The new update includes the following additions:

• Download photos from Flickr straight to your camera roll.
• Mention and tag friends in a photo or post by using an @ sign.
• Photo uploads have been optimized to work faster.
• Flickr photos are saved immediately to your iPhone camera roll.
• Higher-resolution photos are displayed in lightbox so you can zoom in more.
• You can take photos using the iPhone’s volume up button.

Read the Yahoo’s blog post on the update below:

Take the conversations to another level!

You can now mention your friends right from the app. Start by typing in the @ sign, and then simply select one of your Flickr contacts to mention them in a title, description or comment. We will notify your friends that you mentioned them.

Download your photos!

You can now download your own photos from Flickr to your camera roll. Just tap the share icon on any of your photos and tap “Save Photo”. A few seconds later the photo will be in your iPhone’s camera roll in the largest available resolution.

Faster than light (nearly)!

Uploads from the Flickr app are much faster. We did some magic to optimize uploads, but also start uploading in the background while you think about the photo’s title or where you want to share it to. You basically get the best of both worlds: High resolution uploads that will make sure that you can enjoy your photos in great quality in the future, plus fast uploads in the background, so that you don’t have to wait.

And there is more: Photos that you take with the Flickr camera are now immediately saved to your camera roll. We also now display an even higher resolution image in the lightbox view, so you can zoom in further and see all of the details. Lastly you can now take photos in a snap by using your iPhone’s volume up button.

Take a look at the new mentions function in the photo below:

iPhone photographer photo via Flickr

Twitter-owned video sharing application Vine has raised its age rating from 12+ to 17+ following controversy surrounding pornographic clips shared widely on the service.

Vine is one of the hottest new video-sharing applications, and its quick rise in just a few weeks led to the ouster of rival app Viddy’s CEO. But Vine has had a problem with users submitting easily searchable clips of porn, which was highlighted when someone at Vine accidentally placed a hardcore porn clip to the top of every user’s feed. Twitter responded to that incident by making Vine porn harder to find.

But it looks like that wasn’t enough to please Twitter (and perhaps Apple, who has blocked certain iOS apps for making risqué images and videos available). Now Vine has been bumped up to a 17+ age rating, likely to make sure parents will know questionable content can be found on the service. When you download or update the app, it now warns that the app contains “age-restricted material” and says you need to be 17 or over to download it.

On top of bumping up the age rating, the latest Vine update adds sharing to Twitter or Facebook after you post to Vine. The update also lets users report or block an abusive profile and fixes bugs.

Check out some recent Vine videos below to get a feel for the uses of the service besides porn:

Time for a little Puppy Bowl action. vine.co/v/b106vu7w5jV

— Sean Ludwig (@seanludwig) February 4, 2013

Get off my pier. vine.co/v/bnB7WUW3XUv

— Buster Heine (@BST3R) February 4, 2013

Top image via Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat
Thumbnail image of sexy couple via lenetstan/Shutterstock

Twitter-owned video-sharing app Vine is taking steps to curb access to porn after it attracted a lot of unwanted criticism this morning for placing a hardcore porn video at the top of every user’s feed.

After a few hours with the video up and collecting a great deal of negative feedback, Vine removed the offending clip, and a Twitter spokesperson apologized for the “human error.”

“A human error resulted in a video with adult content becoming one of the videos in Editor’s Picks, and upon realizing this mistake, we removed the video immediately,” a Twitter spokesperson told VentureBeat earlier today. “We apologize to our users for the error.”

But now the service is doing more than just being more careful about its Editors Pick’s. Vine now blocks many searches for tags that might lead to pornographic videos, such as #porn, #boobs, #sex, and #booty. Searching for those terms brings nothing up inside the popular app.

While tags such as #nsfw and #pornvine are still searchable, it at least looks like Vine is beginning to take steps to make sure Apple doesn’t remove Vine from the App Store, like it did with 500px for pornographic images. Apple did, however, remove Vine from its list of Editor’s Picks today.

Vine was launched last week by Twitter and has attracted a lot of fans among the tech-enthusiast crowd. We’ll see if that enthusiasm holds up after this controversy.

Check out how some common Vine searches look now below:

Woman with eyes covered via MarcusVDT/Shutterstock

Facebook has updated its popular iOS application with the ability to record and share videos and voice messages, a big improvement to the already well-featured app.

The Facebook mobile experience is one of the most important aspects of Facebook these days because more than half of the social network’s 1 billion users are accessing the app through phones and tablets each month. And so, it must continue to make the native app experience better. Video recording is especially important, as Facebook can now encourage users to record and share directly on its platform, rather than via apps like Vine.

On top of the voice and video recording, Facebook has also improved the Nearby tab, which gives you information about restaurants and local businesses nearby.

The updated app promises the following additions:

• Send voice messages when you have more to say
  
• Record and share videos right from the app
• Share and connect with your favorite places using the improved Nearby tab

Take a look at the new version of the app in the photos below:

Mark Zuckerberg photo via VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google Maps for the iPhone is here, and it’s glorious. In only a few hours after launching, it’s become the top free iPhone app on the App Store.

It’s not hard to see why: The Google Maps iPhone app is gorgeously designed (just like the Gmail iPhone app, which launched last week), and it finally gives iOS 6 users a full-featured alternative to Apple’s troubled Map app.

To learn more about how Google approached building the long-awaited app, we chatted with Daniel Graf, director of Google Maps for mobile. Graf joined Google last year as director of its Mobile Apps Lab after founding the cloud-based video publishing platform Kyte in 2005. In April (shortly before Apple announced iOS 6 and its own map app), he took charge of the mobile maps team.

VentureBeat: How long have you been working on this?

Daniel Graf: We haven’t announced that. Usually Google doesn’t comment on how long it works on a product … what I can say is that it’s probably longer than what you would expect.

Creating a mapping application from the ground up is actually quite challenging from a technical point. It’s not just rendering some pictures and text. Rendering a map is similar to creating a 3D game, where you have a 3D rendering engine, which we created. To have the performance you see now, where you can zoom and pan at this speed is quite a challenge. And of course, hooking it up to all of the data sources we have on Google came on top of it.

VentureBeat: The design really falls in line with the new Gmail App on iOS and Google Now on iOS and Android. Is this a new, consistent style for Google on mobile?

Graf: I think what you’ve experienced on Google properties on the desktop over the last couple years, we have now kind of a streamlined design — a very delightful design which puts the product on the foreground. If you look at our app, the map is really the U.I. There aren’t many menus, but if you actually play around with it, you’ll see all of the features are actually here. You’re not actually missing anything.

You’re right — on the mobile side, of course, all of the mobile development teams collaborate closely to get this one Google experience onto mobile devices.

VentureBeat: It seems vastly improved over what we’ve been seeing in Google’s apps before. Is this something you’ve pushing since you joined the company last year?

Graf: This is always a team effort — there’s no individual part of this. I’m very happy to be a part of the team.

VentureBeat: Do you have any sense how Google approached mobile app design before you joined the team?

Graf: Mobile apps really only took off a few years ago with the smartphones. In the beginning, before you run, you have to walk, and before you walk, you have to crawl. So there were the crawling efforts, and I think now we’re on the walking side — and hopefully soon we’ll be running. I don’t think this is attached to me, this is just what’s happening in the industry overall. We’re seeing better and better designed products.

As you pointed out, it’s quite nice that Gmail launched last week; you can see a common design theme there. If you actually look at the app store rating, we’re at four-and-a-half stars now. We don’t get that quite often, and we’re pleased about that.

VentureBeat: Are you surprised by the quick uptake on the app?

Graf: [Laughs] You can never expect anything like that. We knew that there was the demand — people loved Google Maps in general. Our statement has always been that we want to be on all major platforms. Looking at the numbers, we are impressed.

VentureBeat: Was the Apple approval process difficult?

Graf: We work with Apple on a daily basis, and on many levels, Google and Apple have a very deep relationship. On the map side, all I can say is that we have a friendly relationship. You see the app out there now,  and everything is working smooth. I think everyone around the table is happy about this today.

VentureBeat: Is it the same team building the iOS and Android versions of the app?

Graf: I’m responsible for all mobile platforms.

VentureBeat: Why are you pushing new designs on iOS first? It seems that, historically, Android has received updates like this first.

Graf: If you look at the Android Play store, users are very happy with what we have there — we have a working solution there. On iOS, we didn’t have one. Obviously, our priority was focused on iOS and iPhone in recent months. Moving forward, our goal is always to have the best experience on every platform.

We’re not saying, “We’re going to have feature parity everywhere,” but we definitely want a seamless experience on all platforms.

VentureBeat: Should we expect an updated version of Google Maps on Android to look like this eventually?

Graf: If you look back, we update on Android very frequently. We’re not planning to push that moving forward.

VentureBeat: What exactly are you trying to accomplish with the Google Maps SDK and the new URL scheme for developers?

Graf: With Google in general, it’s not just about our applications, the way we design it. We want to enable an ecosystem. And that’s what we did here as well. Maps has a long history with APIs on the web, and on iOS our goal was the moment we launched the app, we wanted to launch the ecosystem.

VentureBeat: Do you think Apple would ever let third-party apps like Google Maps replace its built-in apps?

Graf: You’d have to ask Apple about that.We made this app, it’s on the app store, it’s out there now, and that’s all we care about.

VentureBeat: How important was it for you to keep public transportation within the app? That’s one big difference from Apple’s Maps app.

Graf: It’s absolutely essential. I think there’s a few things we really wanted to hit on with this new experience. We had the opportunity here to design something from the ground up, so design was our main focus, to have the best experience out there that nails all your use cases.

In most metropolitan areas a lot of people don’t need a car. Google has been known to have quite a comprehensive solution around the globe. We actually cover over a million transit spots — that’s not 100 percent coverage around the world. But in major metropolitan areas, we think we have very good coverage.

VentureBeat: When will we see an iPad version of the Google Maps app?

Graf: We usually don’t comment on future product releases. It is functional on the iPad — it’s not an optimized iPad experience at this point. But you can imagine that smartphones are the top priority for mapping, and mobile mapping is primarily used on smartphones. I would say stay tuned.

Top photo: Daniel Graf/Google+

Months after the debut of its iPad app, Amazon has now released a new version of its Prime Instant Video iOS app that’s been optimized to play on the iPhone.

The app itself serves up hundreds of videos available within Amazon Prime’s streaming video library as well as any rented or purchased videos from Amazon. You can also download those movies or TV shows to watch when you don’t have an Internet connection. It also has plenty of options to manage your personal video watchlist.

What you can’t do with the app is purchase or rent non-Prime videos. To do that you’ll need to visit Amazon’s website, make the purchase, and then head back into the app. Part of this is probably due to Apple’s 30 percent commission fee on all purchases made through an iOS app. Amazon understandably doesn’t want to give Apple a cut of its digital video sales.

The other thing you can’t do with the Amazon Prime Instant Video app is enable the Airplay feature on Apple TV. Basically, that means you cannot watch Amazon Prime videos on your television when playing them from your iPhone. That’s a huge letdown, because it really demonstrates how closed Apple really is when it comes to direct competitors — especially since Apple doesn’t have its own unlimited streaming video subscription service.

The app is available today for free in the App Store, but to access the Prime Instant Video library, you’ll need to have an Amazon Prime membership.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

As a New Yorker, sometimes it’s hard for me to keep up with the best things going on right now and places I need to check out. There are so many things I just can’t keep track.

The new Spun app for the iPhone might be a solution I’ve been looking for. Created by the same team behind the slick Broadcastr app, Spun ties relevant news and recommendations to real-world locations and makes it easy to find the stuff you should be hitting up.

“There’s a ton of great stories being told about cities like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, but people can’t keep track of them all,” Spun CEO Andy Hunter said in a statement. “We curate the best, most popular content, and present it in a fun and interactive way. Spun is the easiest way to keep your finger on the pulse of your city.”

Spun’s interface is a strange and pretty beast. If you swipe your finger to the side, you can go to a new section in a 3D rectangular prism. Each side of the prism has a new section such as “Food & Drink,” “Arts & Entertainment,” “Lifestyle,” and “Top Stories” that you can cycle through depending on your interests.

The app currently covers New York, Boston, Philly, Washington D.C., Miami, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Portland, and Seattle.

You can read more about Spun on its main site.

Photo credit: Spun

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Popular video-sharing site Vimeo has rebuilt its iPhone app with the addition of faster uploading and improved social sharing to Twitter and Facebook, a sign it wants to attract more fun content shot on the fly.

“We re-visioned it, refocused it, and simplified it a lot,” Vimeo President Dae Mellencamp told VentureBeat. “People do want to share quick clips from their lives on Facebook and Twitter. You don’t see these brief clips on the Vimeo homepage, but they are very popular.”

Vimeo has had quite the year. Over the past few months, it’s added a new CEO, redesigned the main site with an emphasis on larger videos, launched an array of apps, and given its community ways to make money with a “tip jar” and paywall options. Now it’s gone back to mobile to keep momentum in that extremely important area.

The new iPhone app adds a few key features. First, it makes uploading faster and more convenient than before and it begins uploading the second you put in a video title. Second, users can now pause and resume uploads, which can come in handy if they move between different wireless networks. Third, users can search for and watch other videos while uploading in the background. (A careful warning to iPhone users: If you don’t have unlimited data, be careful about uploading HD video. You could burn through your data cap pretty quick.)

Notably, the iPhone app removes the in-app video editor that Vimeo for iPhone had before. Mellencamp said Vimeo removed this because the experience needed to be streamlined. Additionally, she noted that video editing was difficult on such a small screen.

Next up, the iOS-focused Vimeo team will work on revamping its iPad app, Mellencamp said. In 2013, Vimeo also plans to look at its options at revamping the Android app.

Check out the video below for more.

Lift, the startup that aims to simplify self-improvement, has raised $2.5 million in funding to help people keep their resolutions.

San Francisco-based Lift makes an iPhone application that is to habit-making what Twitter is to communication: stupid simple. The three-month-old application offers people a rudimentary way to track goals such as flossing or eating veggies and uses social encouragement to keep folks coming back.

The mobile self-improvement system, already beloved by early backers Evan Williams and Biz Stone of Twitter fame, has attracted even more tech celebrity buy-in. The $2.5 million Series A round was led by Bijan Sabet at Spark Capital; he will join the company’s four-person board, which includes co-founders Tony Stubblebine Jon Crosby and Williams.

Sabet is a big get for the startup considering his previous role on Twitter’s board and his current Tumblr and Foursquare board positions. In his blog post on the investment, Sabet said he’s already hooked on the application’s “simple, positive, social” approach to turning goals into habits.

“The anecdotes that [Williams and Sabet] have together are amazing,” Stubblebine told VentureBeat in a recent chat, recounting stories exchanged at a pleasant first board meeting that left him excited about Lift’s increased potential.

With enough money in the bank for the next 18 months, Stubblebine said the Lift team is preparing for its next opportunity: New Year’s Eve. “All of my focus is on New Year’s resolutions,” he said.

The team has a sizable update planned for the app that is set to launch on — you guessed it — January 1, 2013. The pumped-up version will feature a facelift and major speed improvements alongside reminders functionality and more social juice.

Lift’s checkin-to-better-habits system also has the potential to act as a real-world litmus test for fad diets — super-marketer Tim Ferris’ “4-Hour Body” program, for instance. The startup monitored the habits of a few hundred people on the diet and surveyed participants after four weeks. The goal was to identify which habits matter the most in making the diet a success, and, of course, to determine whether or not the diet actually works. Ferris is an angel investor in Lift.

“Of the people that completed the diet, 84 percent lost weight, and the average weight loss was 8.5 pounds,” Stubblebine said.

Lift has raised $3.1 million in funding to date. The $2.5 million Series A round included participation from SV Angel, Adam Ludwin, Tony Robbins (yes, that Tony Robbins), David Allen, and Greg Yaitanes. Obvious Corp. participated in the round, as well.

Uplifting photo via Shutterstock

Believe it or not, there are some instances where mankind has produced some truly disgusting uses of technology — disgustingly awesome, that is. The most recent example is the new Shatoetry iPhone app from the greatest performer who ever lived, William Shatner.

Shatoetry is indeed a play on words, combining both Shatner and poetry, to perfectly describe the app’s purpose. The famous actor is often known for delivering lines with unnecessary pauses intended to add a dramatic tone to a performance. And Shatoetry lets you put words into his mouth — sort of like a talking pet monkey, but more awesome and Canadian.

The app essentially gives you a huge soundboard of words spoken by Shatner. You can drag words to the screen and arrange them into a sentence, adding pauses when appropriate. Tapping a word gives it a greater emphasis or changes the tone, while tapping the pauses makes them longer. Once you’re finished arranging, you tape the “Shat That” (seriously, that’s what it’s called) button to play it back. If you like it, you can share it on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or via email.

There’s even a co-op mode that lets you build “Shatisms” with friends. It actually uses Apple’s Game Center to find other people to play with, which I wasn’t expecting at all. Each person get a set time limit per turn to drop as many words onto the app before the buzzer dings. Then it shifts to the other player.

The app is amusing, but its one setback is in actually sorting through the huge list of words to craft the perfect Shatism. It would be far less time consuming if the developers sorted words by type (verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc.). After about 20 minutes, I settled on my own Shatism, which is embedded as a YouTube video below.

And should there be any doubt, the app did come from Shatner’s brilliant mind, according to the app’s developers, Blindlight.

“All we did was to focus on what Mr. Shatner had already done (which is MASSIVE), and figure out what part of will be most interactively rewarding on a mobile platform,” Blindlight General Manager Lev Chapelsky told VentureBeat. His firm has over a dozen years of experience getting celebrities to uniquely utilize their talents through technology and was instrumental in signing Paul McCartney to score a recent Bungie game.

“For us, the product and the celebrity need to be integrally sensible,” Chapelsky said. “Shatoetry is a voice app concept that’s uniquely Shatner.”

Chapelsky said the development team is planning to release an Android version of Shatoetry in the near future. The team would also like to offer users additional “word packs” as in-app purchases at some point. For instance, a winter holiday word Shat pack would make a lot of sense in a few more weeks.

Shatoetry is available to download in Apple’s App Store today for $2.99.

Streamweaver is a new iPhone app that does something pretty basic, but extremely cool.

The app lets you and a group of iPhone owners record a live video at the same time, then each unique camera angle into one split-screened view — sort of like an easier, albeit more shaky, version of a broadcast video team that’s focusing on a single event. For instance, if you were filming a concert, you could have people with iPhone cameras recording from either side of the stage, within the crowd, behind the band. (Need another analogy? Substitute a concert and stage for nearly any sporting activity.)

“When we looked at how to do this (Streamweaver), we wanted to make sure the recording, uploading, and editing were all simplified while maintaining a social experience,” said Streamweaver CEO and co-founder Erik Carlson in an interview with VentureBeat.

The multi-angle, single split-screened videos can’t be watched in real-time, as the bandwidth and cost associated with livestreaming is far beyond what most newly launched startups can pay for. Instead, Streamweaver focuses on the recording aspect. But the finalized split-screen video can be viewed via the Streamweaver app, the web, SMS text message, Facebook, or Twitter.

It works by first letting each user record a video from their iPhone, then uploads it to the Streamweaver service to combine each portion into the single split-screened view without any additional editing. Carlson noted that this process ensures each video was actually shot at the same time — meaning if an individual misses or botches their initial video angle, they can’t go back and re-record it unless all the other people recording video also re-record their portion.

Streamweaver users (both together or separately) can only record up to 60 seconds’ worth of video.

Founded in 2012, the Nashville, Tenn.-based startup has seven full-time employees. Streamweaver has an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Tennessee Community Ventures Fund and Mountain Group Capital. The company is still working out its revenue model but did say it has enough cash to last through 2013 for what it’s trying to accomplish.

The Streamweaver iPhone app requires iOS 5 or higher and is available for free today in the App Store.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

StumbleUpon’s new application for iPhone and iPad offers iOS users a fresh, colorful, and personalized twist on the now 10-year-old practice of thumbing through the best the web has to offer.

Released Wednesday, the app sports a new head-to-toe look, a stumble-centric navigation experience for instant gratification, a modified home screen for alternative ways to stumble, and new trending, “slide,” and “StumbleDNA” features that make for a faster, more personal browsing experience.

Founded in 2002, StumbleUpon is the resurrected startup that helps people uncover interesting photos, articles, and videos. The web exploration company, which was purchased by eBay in 2007 and then sold back to its owners in 2009, now has more than 25 million users and is growing fastest on mobile.

The new StumbleUpon experience for iOS looks and feels like no other product the veteran company has released to date — and that’s quite intentional.

“This app, to me, is the first step in really reimagining our product line,” StumbleUpon’s vice president of product Cody Simms told me. “We looked at how we could improve the navigation … while bringing a new element of fun and fluidity to the experience overall.”

The playfulness Simms speaks is most evident in an eye-catching design that screams, “come touch me.”

The new home screen encourages mobile folks to flit about the web, albeit with purpose, by stumbling in four ways: thumbing through content picked specifically for them, exploring articles in an all-new trending section, stumbling the activities of friends, or diving into selections around a particular interest.

The trending section suggests hot content getting the most amount of likes, shares, or community reactions, while activity mode exposes what friends and StumbleUpon ordained experts are liking for a more diverse selection of content.

Once the stumbling process is started, the application user will immediately uncover a StumbleUpon innovation called “slide.” Slide is a new feature that provides people with an instant, visual preview of content so that they can speedily skim and flick through articles, videos, and photos.

The stumbler will also notice that a color-coded bar follows them through the app. The bar, otherwise known as StumbleDNA, is meant to be a visual representation of who you are and what you like. Colors in the bar denote specific interests, and the bar changes with your changing tastes.

Altogether, the iOS app, said Simms, should accomplish three key tasks: help people stumble in new ways, weave identity into the experience so that StumbleUpon is a reflection of a person’s likes, and alter for the better how the service recommends content to its users.

“This iOS launch … is really the first experience of these coming to life in our product set that you’ll start to see across everything else we do,” Simms said.

The company said a new web version is coming soon and that a refreshed Android app is also in development.

One year after graduating from the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator’s first class of startups in NYC, the online parking marketplace Parking Panda is launching an iPhone application and expanding its coverage to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Parking Panda was particularly interesting at launch because it offered home owners a way to rent their unused parking spaces, something that could be particularly profitable during major sporting events. But over the past year, the company has learned that striking deals with large parking garages is an easier way to expand its service.

“It’s easier to work with garages because they can now sort of apply ‘big data’ analytics to parking,” said Nick Miller, Parking Panda’s cofounder and CEO, in an interview with VentureBeat. He added that the company is doing a lot on the backend to help garages optimize their yield and pricing.

Parking Panda’s free new iPhone app lets you find and reserve parking spots on the service. It’s an upgrade from Parking Panda’s mobile website, which users on other mobile platforms can still take advantage of.

Miller and the rest of his team have learned a lot about parking spaces since founding the company. “We found that while the peer-to-peer model was incredibly effective for this space, the parking industry itself was really sort of old school … but it’s on the precipice of technology revolution,” he said. “Now we’re seeing lots of innovations in the parking space.”

Around 85 percent of Parking Panda’s volume comes from commercial parking garages, while 15 percent comes from private homeowners. Miller said the company is still seeing “solid growth” on the private end, and the company isn’t thinking of moving away from that offering anytime soon. Miller himself has taken advantage of private parking spaces recently, and he says that homeowners can easily make between $300 to $400 a month by offering up their parking spots.

Parking Panda will next target Austin, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, which should greatly expand the company’s inventory of parking spaces. Currently, Parking Panda has more than 20,000 parking spaces available for rent in Baltimore (where the company was founded), Washington, D.C., and the Bay Area.

Unfortunately for New Yorkers, it may be some time before we can take advantage of Parking Panda. Miller says that NYC’s transportation industry is so unique that the company would have to completely revamp its operations to function in the city. For now, it’s simpler for Parking Panda to focus on more traditional transportation markets.

Parking Panda sees a future in event partnerships. It’s the official parking partner for the Baltimore Grand Prix – meaning racegoers may reserve their parking spots ahead of time — and it’s also partnered with the local ticketing company MissionTix.

Parking Panda has raised around $750,000 from angel investors, including Jose Marin from IG Expansion, newBrandAnaytics CEO Neil Kataria, David Troy from Shortmail, and Sean Lane from BTS.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg didn’t mince words today about the company’s past mobile strategy.

“The biggest mistake we’ve made as a company is betting on HTML5 over native,” he said at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, referring to the original HTML5-powered Facebook mobile apps that were plagued with slowdowns and other issues.

Facebook last month released a native iOS app that’s built specifically for Apple’s platform and is subsequently much faster. We’re still waiting for word on a native Android app, but Zuckerberg promised that one was on the way.

The company’s move away from “hybrid apps,” or mobile apps that rely heavily on HTML5, was a major blow against other developers pushing for the hybrid app approach. While the original hybrid apps were slow for users, they also made it easy for the company to deploy updates and changes across multiple platforms. Now Facebook has to go through a much more arduous process to update its iOS and Android apps.

Speaking with TechCrunch and CrunchFund founder Michael Arrington, Zuckerberg elaborated on his issues with Facebook’s past mobile apps: “We’re very self critical … it was not where we wanted to be before (laughs) … but to be honest even what we have now isn’t as good as it can be.”

Zuckerberg pointed out that the company has more usage on its mobile website (also HTML5 powered) than its iOS and Android apps combined, so Facebook isn’t going to run away from HTML5 entirely. “But we just couldn’t bet completely on it,” he said. For both iOS and Android, he said you could do much better work with native apps.

Photo via TechCrunch Disrupt’s livestream

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Attention, shoppers: Walmart is exploring mobile ways to speed up the in-store shopping experience for the 1 billion customers who walk into its stores each month.

Earlier this week, the retail corporation conducted a small usability test of a “Scan & Go” feature that enables iPhone owners to scan products, bag items, and use self-checkout kiosks when done.

The company invited a group of employees to test the new iPhone app feature at a Walmart SuperCenter store in Rogers, Arkansas. Participants were screened using an online survey, first discovered by Reuters. Walmart videotaped, shadowed, interviewed those selected, compensating them $100 for their time and giving them a $25 gift card to use on purchases.

The research initiative is likely just an early step by the retail behemoth to determine whether the functionality creates a speedier, easier checkout process for its customers. Walmart’s current iPhone application includes scan functionality that customers can use to check prices and get additional info on products.

The fledgling program also looks to be the culmination of multiple acquisitions made by Walmart Labs, the retail company’s social and mobile product incubator. In January, Walmart Labs added iPhone app agency Small Society to its fold. It also picked up mobile point-of-sale startup Gabble in November 2011.

“We are continually testing new and innovative ways to serve customers and enhance the shopping experience,” a Walmart spokesperson told VentureBeat. “At this point, we don’t have anything specific to share on that testing.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Members-only Flash sales site PLNDR is going mobile.

The website is launching its first iPhone app today as it aims to take advantage of its increasingly mobile-focused user base. 30 percent of its traffic already comes from mobile, so creating an app has become a necessity, the company said.

PLNDR, which has 1.7 million users, offers users time sensitive deals on clothes, shoes and a variety of other apparel – often at highly discounted rates. PLNDR is also inherently viral: Users can earning $10 by signing up friends who end up buying something from the site.

The iOS app offers largely the same set of features as its website, with the addition of mobile-only sales and a variety of other “surprises.”

Greg Selkoe, CEO of PLNDR parent company Karmaloop, says that PLNDR wants to do more than replicate the web in an app. “Our strategy is much more involved than just PLNDR on mobile – stay tuned to see what we have cookin’!” he said in an email to VentureBeat.

The app was designed by Xtreme Labs. Inc, which has also created apps for Fandango, Reuters, Vevo, Groupon, and many others.K

The Boston-based Karmaloop is backed by a $35 million investment from Insight Venture Partners.  Launched in 2010, PLNDR earned $16 million last year.

Photo via Andrew Archy/Flickr

Anyone else irritated by the sheer abundance of people who snap panoramic views of a stunning countryside and then alter/enhance/destroy them with a hipster, ’70s-style filter?

Joe Macirowski feels my pain. In a blog post, the app developer detailed his year-long quest to rescue perfectly decent photos besmirched by filters.

Macirowski’s app, Normalize, is now available for $.99 app on the AppStore. Normalize unfilters your filtered photos and restores them to their natural ebullience. If an image is full of shadow, the app can make some subtle enhancements to normalize the brightness and colors. With Normalize, you can see the view as it appears to the naked human eye — no borders or sepia tones allowed.

Once you download the app, simply upload the photo, wait a few seconds, and then use the sliding scale to tweak the color scheme. It’s not perfect, but the original setting does a good job at reverting the image back to its former glory.

Is this an app you would actually use, or would you prefer to remain in our retro-glam, darkly lit, post-Instagram world?

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Borrowing an idea already made popular by Starbucks, quick-service coffee and donut franchise Dunkin’ Donuts today released applications for iOS and Android that allow its customers to pay with their mobile devices.

Dunkin’ Donuts, like Starbucks, employs a 2-D barcode scanning system for mobile payments. Customers load funds onto a digital Dunkin’ card and hold the card’s barcode up to a scanner to pay for their food and beverage treats.

The new mobile pay option is accepted in-store and at drive-thru windows at the chain’s more than 7,000 U.S. locations.

The Dunkin’ Donuts mobile application also includes a store locator, nutritional information on menu items, and a mobile gifting feature for sending Dunkin’ gift cards to friends via email, text, or Facebook.

“With our new mobile app, we are enabling an entirely new level of speed and convenience for our guests that will further distinguish our brand throughout the country,” Dunkin’s chief global marketing officer John Costello said in a statement.

Those comfortable with the Stabucks mobile pay experience will feel right at home inside the Dunkin’ app for iPhone or Android, as there’s an uncanny resemblance between the two apps.

Starbucks first shipped its mobile pay system in January 2011; it has since become the top mobile payment network and has processed 60 million mobile transactions to date. Perhaps following in the brand’s footsteps isn’t such a bad idea.

The pay-by-phone, digital wallet movement will pick even more steam when Merchant Customer Exchange, the company created by 14 top retailers, ships its mobile pay applications for quick checkout at places such as Shell, Best Buy, Target, Wal-Mart, and 7-Eleven.

Photo credit: o4orange/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Mango Health is a stealthy startup lifting the veil today on an iPhone app that could save your life.

The beta application allows users to easily enter their medications and supplements by snapping a picture — or by entering text, of course. The app will then determine the potential interactions between medications and nutritional supplements to provide the pill-popper with necessary warnings.

Founded in February, the San Francisco-based startup aims to build health-focused mobile apps that consumers actually want to use.

The young, six-person startup has raised $1.45 million in seed funding from First Round Capital, Mike Maples, Steve Anderson, Keith Rabois, and Mark Pincus.

Mango Health for iPhone is the company’s first mobile app release and has been engineered to meet the needs of the catch-all population of people who take prescription drugs, over-the-counter medicine, and nutritional supplements. That means you, basically.

In addition to checking for drug interactions, the app also lets uers log activities, maintain a schedule, compare themselves to others taking the same drugs or with similar conditions, and receive incentives in the form of points, discounts, and rewards for following doctors’ orders.

“Those features work together to help consumers better manage and improve their health in a way that has not been possible before,” CEO and co-founder Jason Oberfest told VentureBeat.

The application’s most fetching quality, apart from the whole save-your-life appeal, is an inviting design that could make tracking pill and supplement usage a task people actually want to do.

Seventy-five percent of U.S. adults who take medications admit to not following physician prescribed treatment plans, according to the New England Journal of Medicine. Mango Health hopes its design and game mechanics will encourage these people to be much more proactive in managing their own health.

Mango Health for iPhone has been in testing since March and is being released in private beta today. A public release of the application is slated for August.

Photo credit: Paul Matthew Photography/Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Saga can do what Siri can’t.

Saga, which launches today for iPhone, is Siri if she were proactive. The application doesn’t wait for you to ask a question but instead knows enough about you from the activity passively logged by your phone to offer up information and recommendations when it thinks you need them most.

“We call it an intelligent companion,” Andy Hickl, CEO and co-founder of parent company A.R.O., explained to me in an interview. “We’ve built an app that knows where you are, what you’re doing, and tries … to hook you up with information, or recommendations, or notifications that might help you out in your current context.”

Saga functions much like a start screen for life with the purpose of providing people with insight on their past, present, and futures.

The iPhone application collects data on where you are at all times to build a complete profile of who you are — how old you are, where you work, what you do, where you live, where you’ve been, what you like, and so forth. The data is used in aggregate, matched up against people with similar qualities, to make timely recommendations and suggestions on things you need or may want to do. Saga will suggest the best place to stop for lunch on a road trip, for instance, or remind you to pick up groceries, since the app knows you haven’t been to the store in a week.

The application opens to a “Now” area that shows you where you are — no checkins needed — and what’s nearby. Here you’ll also find notable tidbits such as a weather report and information on upcoming sporting events.

Scroll up and you’ll find Saga’s recommendations. If it’s lunch time, Saga will suggest a place for you to eat. If it’s nice out, Saga may suggest a beach trip or nudge you to go fly a kite in a nearby park. When happy hour rolls around, Saga will point you to a popular drinking hole. Scroll down and you can check out a history of everywhere you’ve been.

In addition to adaptive recommendations, Saga surfaces hyper-local weather data, provides traffic conditions and routing information, shares logistics for travel (pit stop, anyone?), and alerts you to upcoming events. The application can hook into Foursquare, as well as collect data from other activity-tracking sources such as RunKeeper, Withings, and Fitbit to log your history and get more intelligent.

“We’re using all this data to be able to make recommendations; not just places to go and spend money, or things to do, or events and movies to go see, but also activities,” Hickl said. “One of the things we pride ourselves on is the ability to understand enough about you to be able to figure out the kinds of things you might want to have recommended to you.”

One of Saga’s biggest hurdles will be convincing people to come back to the application after download. The company admits that the app will take 48 to 72 hours to get to know a person. In today’s download-today-forget-tomorrow app environment, that time frame is an eternity. If your first experience of Saga is one that leaves you underwhelmed — and you will be underwhelmed on day one — why would you ever go back?

So I put this question to Hickl: At what point does Saga become something I need or want to use on a daily basis versus something that just tells me something about myself that I already know?

Hickl said the app’s ability to anticipate a person’s needs is what should keep the person coming back for more. “Things like ‘It’s time for a midnight snack’ or ‘How about dinner and movie?’ Those kinds of recommendations that are really tailored to you and tailored to your needs … are really where we’re going.”

There’s also the issue of location and the creepy factor of knowing that an app is tracking you everywhere you go. Saga demands 24 x 7 access to location services to function, and that’s a lot to ask from a person, a fact not lost on the young company.

“One of our biggest goals is to provide enough value to let people say ‘hey, it’s worth it to me to be able to run location services 24 x 7,’” Hickl said.

The company also has a commitment to user privacy and promises never to sell or give away your personal data. Saga users can wipe out all data collected when they’re done with the application, and eventually they’ll be able to tell Saga to delete specific data points on them.

But give Saga an opportunity to get to know you and the application should make a little bit of difference in the quality of your life, Hickl said.

“We picked the name Saga not by accident,” he said. “Ultimately, what we want to be able to do is tell your personal story that takes in evidence from all these different sources and makes it meaningful to you in a way that’s not meaningful now.”

Saga is a product of Seattle-based A.R.O., a privately-funded startup with 18 people and backing from Paul Allen.

Update: Saga is available on the App Store. VentureBeat readers can use the code “VENTUREBEAT” for priority access.

Photo credit: Shutterstock

“Where” is yesterday’s news. The next big opportunity in mobile is “when,” according to serial angel investor Bill Lee, who’s backed the likes of Posterous, TweetDeck, and Yammer. Add Twist to that list, a startup backed and co-founded by Lee that today unveils its time-saving application for iPhone.

“Twist is about time,” Lee told me in an interview. “If you’ve ever wasted time waiting for someone, then you know the problem we’re trying to solve.”

The story goes that Lee got so fed up with waiting for late entrepreneurs to arrive to meetings and so frustrated by the lack of communication and last-minute time-juggling that he set out to create Twist.

“I figured there’s got be a better way to reduce that anxiety and help people save time,” Lee said.

The Twist application, released on iPhone Wednesday, is a mobile utility that addresses Lee’s frustrations, along with a number of other common “when” scenarios, with precise updates on a user’s arrival time. So a person could start a Twist, as the process is called, to automatically notify a family member when she is on her way, inform a carpool participant when she’s about to arrive, or update a business contact like Bill when she’s sitting in traffic and running late for a meeting.

With Twist, our savvy commuter enters a destination or selects an event from her calendar, which is integrated into the app, identifies the parties she’d like to notify, and then goes about the business of getting to her destination as usual.

Then Twist takes over. The app notifies her friends via SMS (or push notification if they have the app) when she’s on her way and provides contacts with an almost-always accurate estimated time of arrival (ETA). Should anything prevent our commuter from missing her ETA, say traffic, Twist will tell her friends via SMS that’s there been a delay and include a new time of arrival. When she’s about to arrive, Twist will send one final update to her pals.

Twist even helps with the pre-planning and can tell our gal when to leave, with traffic data factored into the experience, and help her decide what to wear with weather information.

“This is a place where technology is underserved,” Twist’s technology-steeped co-founder Mike Belshe told me. Belshe, an early member of the Google Chrome team and founder of the SPDY protocol, has a personal and professional interest in saving people time. Twist, he said, simply replaces the actions we all take, such as texting a significant other when we’re on our way home or calling to say “hey, I’m here,” with a better solution.

Twist arrives on the scene with $6 million in funding following a year of quiet development. Funds from the Series A round being announced today were pooled together from co-founders Lee and Belshe, Bridgescale Partners which led the round, and eBay co-founder Jeff Skoll.

The where piece of the social, location, mobile (SoLoMo) movement may already be exhausted by a bevy of applications that help people share where they are, as Lee insinuated during our chat, but Twist’s best asset is very much tied to location. Specifically, Lee and Belshe pride themselves on having built an application that calculates ETAs better than anything else on the market.

“ETAs are fairly complicated,” Belshe said, citing Google Maps’ inability to provide accurate travel times between two destinations as an example. “We think we’ve tapped into something that most of the other guys don’t have, which is we know you. As you use Twist more and more, we keep learning from your behavior. We know if you’re a faster driver than average or a slower driver than average. We can look at historical routes and apply that. … We’re really focused on making sure those ETA times are great.”

Even Uber, the on-demand car service startup, could benefit from an infusion of Twist’s technology to improve the ETAs it provide users, Lee added. In fact, that example speaks to the company’s eventual plans to monetize the service. Twist, as a platform for time, could be used by apps, services, and local businesses to provide customers with more accurate arrival times, Lee said.

First, Twist will need to win over consumers, which may prove to be a tricky task. Twist’s system, as simple as it could be to work into your routine, requires just that: a change to the day-in, day-out routine that you’ve always known. Add to that the fact that you’re involving other people in this system, people who might not yet be acclimated to the idea of using an app to solve life’s little problems, and you’ve got a few kinks that could impede adoption.

But raise the question of usefulness, and Lee and Belshe will most certainly point you to a Harris Interactive survey, conducted on behalf of Twist, that found 24 percent of Americans admitted to having sent a text or email while driving to let someone know they were on their way.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple has added a full-fledged application for podcasts to the iOS App Store to make it easier for people to find and organize content from podcasters around the world.

As we described previously, podcasts are prerecorded audio (sometimes video) programs that you can listen and watch across various devices while online or offline. The format became successful on Apple’s watch because the company created a dedicated section of the iTunes Store for podcasts. In the latest versions of iOS, users have been able to access podcasts through the “More” tab on the Music app. But now with a stand-alone app, listening to and finding new podcasts becomes much easier.

It’s entirely possible that Apple will remove podcasts from the Music app. The new app will also likely hurt already existing apps that organize podcasts such as Downcast, Instacast, and Podcaster 5.

The Podcasts app’s full set of features can be viewed here:

• Enjoy all of your audio and video podcasts in a single app.
• Explore hundreds of thousands of podcasts including shows in over 40 languages.
• Try the innovative new Top Stations feature to find new podcast series in a variety of topics, including arts, business, comedy, music, news, sports, and more.
• Browse by Audio or Video podcasts, or see what’s most popular in Top Charts.
• Tap subscribe for your favorites and automatically receive new episodes for free as they become available.
• Stream episodes or download to listen while offline.
• Skip forward and back using simple playback controls.
• Turn on Sleep Timer to automatically stop playing a podcast while listening in bed.
• Share your favorite episodes with friends using Twitter, Messages and Mail.
• Optionally sync your favorite episodes from iTunes on your Mac or PC.
• Sync your episode playback for seamless transition between devices.

Take a look at the gallery below for more looks at the app for the iPad and iPhone:

Stealthy San Francisco-based startup Lift has today ever-so-slightly pulled back the curtain to reveal a snippet of its master plan to change the way people achieve their goals.

Lift, as a refresher, is the tiny company that made a big splash last August when it came to light that Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone were backing the application through Obvious Corporation, the boys’ post-Twitter app house and New-Age venture fund for spawning projects that make the world a better pace. But, until today, little has been known about Lift, save its mission to “unlock human potential.”

As it turns out, Lift is an iPhone application, now slated for August release, that borrows concepts from the Quantified Self movement to help people track, analyze, and achieve goals, Lift CEO and co-founder Tony Stubblebine said in a blog post. The iPhone app isn’t designed for any one type of goal, but it has been used in its beta period for self-improvement in health, fitness, productivity, happiness, and relationship areas.

The company’s end game is to eliminate willpower as a factor in achieving goals, Stubblebine said. “Imagine smooth, fun, optimized, self-reinforcing paths for every aspiration … We think we can turn chores into positive draws.”

It’s starting point, however, is a simplistic habit-tracking app to help people develop mindfulness in the areas where they want to improve. Users set or share goals, track their progress, and get support from others with the same goals. The app shucks gamification elements and instead includes two feedback loops — visualized progress and support from others — to keep people motivated.

Lift sounds fairly rudimentary and will compete with an abundance of lifestyle and productivity apps on the market, but perhaps it will offer the same variety of approachable simplicity that helped Twitter take off. And, according to Stubblebine, the app works for even the most mundane, but still important, activities.

“Yesterday, 2 out of 5 Lift users tracked their flossing (including me),” he said. “That’s an example of a supposedly trivial, fundamental habit that everyone’s been told to pick up and that most people will say they wish they did. But flossing has never had proper support (just bi-annual guilt from your dentist).”

Photo credit: Shutterstock