July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Nonprofits are waking up to the benefits of having a mobile and social media strategy.

Cure.org raises money for children in need, and it’s experimenting with a suite of mobile apps to draw attention to the cause.

Launching this week, the company’s new iPhone app features profiles of kids in developing countries who desperately require surgeries. You can donate directly through the app and receive real-time updates on the patient’s progress.

Cure was founded in Kenya in 1998 when it opened a new hospital. Since then, the nonprofit has served 1.9 million patients and provided over 138,000 life-changing surgeries in 27 countries. Along with medical treatment, Cure has a spiritual mission, but it says it will treat patients regardless of their religious affiliation.

CTO Joel Worrall, who joined the company over three years ago, was one of the first technology hires. “My goal is to show donors that when they give $1,000, it’s really changing someone’s life,” he told me.

Inspired by crowdfunding sites, the new app features a progress bar on each patient’s profile page [below] to show how much money has been raised to date. Once the target is reached — typically a few thousand dollars — the surgery is scheduled, and donors will be regularly updated on the patient’s recovery.

Once you’ve made a donation, the app invites you to send a get-well message. If there’s a language or literacy barrier, Cure.org claims its on the ground team will translate the messages and ensure they’re received.

Cure.org’s technology is cloud-based, so Worrall can quickly fix any issues. He said the company is using application performance service New Relic to monitor the app’s performance.

Cure.org hopes that by adding a personal, human touch to its app, more people will be inspired to make a donation. For instance, Allan [above] has clubfoot, a condition he was born with that left him feeling alienated from his peers. The app includes detailed information about his family life, schooling, and upbringing.

“This technology is doing a great thing for the kids that we are serving,” said Worrall. “Our goal is to make you feel close to someone on the other side of the world.”

Top image via Cure.org

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Medio has launched K-Invite, a platform it says will help game and app developers acquire more mobile users.

K-Invite lets mobile app developers and marketers create and track the virality of their apps. It is intended to spur customer growth across platforms. The net result will be higher quality users — those that stick around and spend money — at a fraction of the cost charged by traditional ad networks.

With K-Invite, developers sign up and get a dashboard they can use to add their apps and set up campaigns. The developer integrates the software development kit into their iOS or Android apps. Then the developer determines where they want to reveal K-Invite to their users. K-Invite facilitates one-to-one social sharing between friends via text message, email, Facebook, and Twitter. It lets app owners reward users for successfully referring friends.

User acquisition has been identified as one of the toughest problems of the mobile app era. It’s particularly acute in games, which account for the vast majority of app revenues. Ad networks have tried to fill the gap, but they wind up charging a high fee, according to Seattle-based Medio.

Medio was founded in 2004 and has 70 employees. Medio’s core business is creating predictive app analytics. Kontagent, Localytics, and Playnomics play in this market. But K-Invite is aimed at disrupting that business.

“The economics of acquiring users from traditional ad networks is no longer sustainable,” said Rob Lilleness, chief executive officer at Medio, in a statement. “With K-Invite, we’re taking full advantage of the lessons we’ve learned on social platforms to create a viral growth mechanism for our customers. By leveraging your network of existing users to acquire new customers, K-Invite helps solve some of the biggest issues developers face today – dwindling ad network inventory, cost prohibitive pricing, and lack of scale.”

Rivals include mobile ad networks such as Tapjoy, Jumptap, Greystripe, and Millennial Media. App and game developers typically have to juggle multiple ad networks to get enough users. Ad networks sell installs at a high volume to the highest bidder. But K-Invite was built on the notion that mobile apps don’t need lots of installs. They just need a sufficient number of high-quality users. K-Invite helps developers do the sorting, using a managed identity technology that tracks a user across multiple devices. (And it does so without invading privacy).

Medio, founded in 2004, has raised $44 million to date. Investors include Accel Partners, Trilogy Equity Partners, Frazier Technology Ventures, and Mohr Davidow Ventures. Customers include Rovio, Disney, ABC, T-Mobile, and Telus.

“Attracting high-quality, loyal users is a major driver towards success for any mobile app,” said Patrick McGrath, senior product manager at PopCap Games, which is evaluating Medio, in a statement. “K-Invite’s unique approach to user acquisition allows game developers to focus on creating compelling viral hooks in games, giving the industry more options than the traditional ad network route.”

https://vimeo.com/65850843

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

While everyone’s talking about Facebook mobile today, Twitter cleaned up both its iOS and Android apps with a couple new features.

Mobile is the money word for social networks today and while Twitter’s app updates are life-changing, they do improve the overall user experience.

Both apps now come equipped with the over 100 new locations that show trends. Trends show you the most popular topics being discussed on the social network. It can be filtered by location, as opposed to all of Twitter, to show you what’s happening and where. This is particularly helpful for breaking news. But before the new locations were added, trends were stuck in major metropolitan areas. The new locations help refine what’s happening in specific parts of the world.

On the iOS front, Twitter users can now invite their friends to join straight within the app. Not sure how helpful that will be, though, because who do you know that isn’t on Twitter? (Other than your grandparents and the tribe you met on a vacation to a far-away island.)

Also new in the app, when you reply to a retweet, it will automatically mention both the original author of the tweet, as well as the retweeter.

Android is left with only one significant update other than routine bug fixes. You can now switch Twitter account by accessing the menu.

Of course, you can’t have a full-on Twitter mobile update without a little love for its micro-video app Vine. Nothing huge here, as Twitter just updated the app yesterday to give you access to the front-facing camera (selfies!), but Vine’s video playback has been improved.

hat tip The Next Web; Twitter image via Rosaura Ochoa/Flickr

That’s both surprising and almost certainly about to change, however, as soon as marketers see the latest data from Apsalar. The mobile analytics and advertising company studied its data pool of 500 million unique users across both Android and iOS, and it found some extremely interesting differences in the way men and women buy and use apps.

Women install 40 percent more apps than men, buy 17 percent more paid apps, and pay an astonishing 87 percent more for those apps. In other words, if you want to make money selling apps, you better appeal to women.

There is some hope for the knuckle-draggers among us, however. Men do lead in a couple of categories: mobile games and in-app spending. In other words, we’re suckers for that virtual gewgaw that will help us crush our virtual enemies in our virtual worlds. Oh, and one other thing — very stereotypically, we use business-related apps 85 percent more than women.

While we’re on the traditional sex-roles theme, women use social media apps a staggering 600 percent more than men, news apps 90 percent more, and productivity apps 89 percent more.

I’m guessing they’re not using the productivity apps to schedule their Clash of Clans battles, either.

One other interesting difference: In spite of our vaunted navigation skills and reputed disinterest in asking for help or directions, men use navigation apps a full 40 percent more than women.

Here’s the data in visual form:

photo credit: lisibo via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Yahoo updated its iOS app today to include its recently purchased Summly technology. Now, you’ll be served much more enticing story summaries with beautiful images before you dive into your content.

The company purchased Summly at the end of March, with the obvious intent of using its technology in Yahoo’s mobile apps. The technology looks at a piece of content and automatically summarizes it in a digestible blurb. In the Yahoo’s case, these blurbs are displayed to mobile users with a beautiful picture relevant to the story to help people decide if they want to commit to reading an article (that’s how distracted we are today).

Yahoo also wants to know more about what you’re interested in. The app is built to learn about you as you browse and select topics of interest. For example, once you’re in a story about space, you’ll be shown different topics having to do with that industry. You can select or remove those topics based on your interest, and Yahoo will eventually learn to serve you more relevant content.

It also improved search so you can find any content that isn’t already on your radar, including video and image search.

Last week, Yahoo released a new weather app to an approving audience. Many said the app was finally a beautiful mobile product to come out of the once-falling media giant. The new app uses Flickr, the major photo websites owned by Yahoo, to spruce up the weather stats. You can, as VentureBeat’s Jolie O’Dell points out, look at weather around the world with the Flickr integration.

At the same time, Yahoo also released a new mail app for iPad, reiterating a point that Yahoo is trying to drive home: we want to make Yahoo on mobile awesome.

Mayer spoke last week at conference for human resources individuals explaining that her work from home policy is an attempt to get more products like this out of her employees. While she understands that productivity will likely suffer, innovation and collaboration are more likely to happen when folks are in the same room. She used the weather app as an example of what can happen when people come into the office.

The app is available to download from the Apple App Store now.

Yahoo app image via Yahoo

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

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

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

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

Source: AppGratis

Retraction letter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So. Where’s the money coming from?

The money comes from advertisers with freemium apps.

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

We scratched our heads.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As entrepreneur Aziz Ali commented last week:

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

Exactly.

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

And we also made a business in the process.

Yep.

A business.

Sue us now!

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

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

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

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

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

And we intend to keep doing just that.

Shortly after he raised $13.5 million in venture capital to grow his mobile app discovery business, Apple yanked his app from the iOS App Store, citing several app guideline violations. Since then, his business is in jeopardy, and his integrity has been questioned by those who accused AppGratis of using bots to inflate download numbers for the apps AppGratis featured.

Still, he says, he needs to “keep calm and carry on doing what we’re doing, because it’s right.”

Today Dawlat put up a petition at save.appgratis.com, asking users and concerned members of the public to express their support. The petition quickly gained over half a million signatures in the first few hours and now has over 600,000.

But it’s not about pressuring Apple, Dawlat says:

“I don’t believe anyone can put any kind of pressure on Apple, so really, we’re not trying. This online petition serves the simple purpose of creating an irrefutable proof that AppGratis is first and foremost a community and a product loved by millions, filling a real need. It’s a statement we needed to put out there because there has been so much written already and this is our way to let people know the truth on AppGratis.”

Truth, of course, is the first casualty of war, and it’s very much in question right now.

Conor O’Connor, CEO of discount hotel app Hot.co.uk, said today that AppGratis artificially inflated the download numbers of apps it featured by using bots — fake iOS users. AppGratis, of course, makes money by charging developers to get their app featured in AppGratis’ app, website, and emails. Getting your app featured by AppGratis can result in huge download traffic for your app — many campaigns have driven more than 500,000 installs of an app in a single day, and recent campaigns have resulted in over a million downloads.

O’Connor’s statement is confusing to me, because when I talked to Apple about AppGratis, I specifically asked whether AppGratis had been engaging in any shady behavior regarding download bots. Apple said no, that it was about app store submission guidelines 2.5 and 5.6.

And a source very close to AppGratis told me today that O’Connor is “lying and delusional” and that AppGratis is scrambling to have its lawyers both get evidence of that fact and potentially take legal action.

Meanwhile, Dawlat is reaching out to the AppGratis user community via the online petition for support.

“We’ve always had users in mind first,” Dawlat says. “Millions of them have signed up to our service. We owe them to continue. So we have started reaching out to them yesterday and received over half a million support emails in less than 24 hours. And it’s adding up at an amazing rate right now.”

It’s a strong vote of confidence, Dawlat says. And, he adds, it’s ”the ‘YES’ that says we need to keep calm and carry on what we’re doing, because it’s right.”

photo credit: the|G|™ via photopin cc

That’s an 11 percent increase in downloads from the end of 2012, according to Canalys’s latest App Interrogator Report, and a 9 percent jump in revenues. Which makes sense, given that we spend 80 percent of our time on mobile phones in apps. And while North America is seeing fairly healthy growth, with an 8 percent increase in downloads and an 6 percent increase in revenue, it’s not the most happening place for mobile.

“Some of the strongest growth was seen in emerging markets, such as South Africa, Brazil and Indonesia, helped not least by the growing base of smart device users in those countries,” the company said in a statement.

Asia, of course, is a mobile powerhouse, with China purchasing more new smartphones than the U.S., but Indonesia has a fast-growing population of 250 million and is seeing increasing smartphone penetration.

So what about non-Google and non-Apple apps markets?

‘The Apple-Google duopoly creates certain challenges for app publishers, carriers, investors, and device vendors, so there is intense interest in the possible emergence of a third ecosystem,’ said Adam Daum, Canalys’s chief analyst in a very tactfully worded statement.

BlackBerry has now hit 100,000 apps for its latest operating system, and Windows Phone has made good progress as well, Canalys says. But both are still challenged by a relative lack of market penetration that will drive the kind of developer interesting that has resulted in “there’s an app for that” being true on both Android and iOS.

“Apple’s App Store and Google Play remain the heavyweights in the app store world. In comparison, BlackBerry World and the Windows Phone Store remain distant challengers today, though they still should not be ignored,” said Tim Shepherd, Canalys Senior Analyst.

photo credit: Rick McCharles via photopin cc

We dubbed it “our Christmas,” the day when all our good engineering deeds would pay off and we’d be rewarded with a bounty of happy active users for our mobile app, Avocado.

Up until this point we’d enjoyed steady and predictable growth, but with only two weeks’ notice we realized a few big, coinciding promotions would bring us a 30x increase in traffic and a membership boom for which we weren’t yet prepared.

Scaling for a “Christmas” moment is scary; it forces you to confront all the design decisions you may have made earlier when bootstrapping your app. No matter what the hidden weaknesses are, a massive group of new users will find them.

With only two weeks, how could we scale our infrastructure to meet demand and not fall over?

Preparing for scale

This is a document of how we screwed up. And then how we fixed our screw-ups. Please learn from us.

At first, we thought we knew where our weak points were. Well, until we ran some tests and found our problems were in a completely different place.

We’ve been using Amazon’s Web Services. Here’s the initial configuration of our deployment:

1 frontend server (stored: API, web presence, socket.io, HAProxy, stunnel/SSL encryption)
1 Redis server
1 MySQL server
1 batch server (running miscellaneous daemons)

Our API server was using Node.js since it’s lightweight, fast, easy to code for, and has a large community with some solid libraries we use (and some we have written and shared).

Given the results of early tests and under limited resources and time, we understood where we needed to focus: new user signups — clearly our most complex process. We put our energies into finding the pain points and where the system would die if we had a sudden influx. This was an important business decision: You can let a few normal day-to-day activities fail, but you don’t want new user creation to fail.

Better testing

Smart scaling required us, as a wise man once said, to check ourselves before we irreparably wrecked ourselves. In other words, we tested, tested, and tested some more.

Early tests weren’t good enough so we created a replica environment: entire duplicates of our database and existing server and partitioned them off so nothing would affect our production environment. We ran through some common use cases like account creation as well as messaging and uploading images. We saw where Avocado failed and at what rates.

Pro Tip #1: We used much smaller EC2 instances in our test environment than in production. Not only does that provide limited resources all-around to more easily find problems, but it’s considerably cheaper as you pay for the amount of hardware you use on AWS.

Pro Tip #2: We built test scripts as well as used a tool called jmeter to simulate tens of thousands of user signups per minute.

Our testing process: Run the scripts, find weak points, re-run the scripts. We then experimented to see what would happen if, for instance, we added a second server or if we took advantage of all the CPUs on a given server.

We started to see things immediately. Any time we had thousands of users signing up at one time, things would grind to a halt and connections to Avocado would take ~30 seconds to complete.

What we discovered: Any time Node.js spawned off a separate process, the system would take a hit. At the time, we were spawning off a Python process to send verification emails and another for image resizes (required when a user uploads a photo to their activity stream). When that happened, we’d see a big ol’ CPU spike. We realized it was those processes that were slowing everything down.

Well, it was the processes. And the fact that we had everything on just one box.

We also noticed slow database query response times. We saw in the test environment that a handful of MySQL queries were showing up in MySQL’s slow query log (for instance, if we queried to see if a certain email address had received an invitation to join their “boo” on Avocado).

Pro Tip #3: MySQL query optimization can be something of a dark art but speeding up queries can be as easy as adding additional indexes to a couple tables.

One last thing: SSL encryption/decryption was a major load on the CPU as well, but we didn’t know to what degree it would impact the system under heavy user traffic in production.

What we changed after testing

Our first fix was to rewrite the email system, previously in Python, in Node.js so it wouldn’t need to call up another process. Moving to a node.js mailing library meant we could send 3x to 5x the number of emails in a period of time as it would take to call the external python program.

Next, we put stunnel (SSL encryption handler) and HAProxy onto their own EC2 server so we wouldn’t overload our core services.

We had a few possible solutions for the image resizing problem found in testing where spawning ImageMagick processes from node.js proved to be a huge resources hog. We explored the option of leveraging some faster libraries and third-party image resizing services.

But we ended up not rewriting any code or using any services. Either may have worked, but we didn’t want to do last minute code changes a day before our big promotion. So instead, we deployed four new EC2 instances whose sole purpose was image resizing. We took these down after the promotion.

Currently we’re back to just resizing images on our normal frontend servers (the servers that serve the API and Web page/client). For the future, we’d like to leverage a service that we can upload images to and request whatever size we want as we need them, thereby offloading the hardware intensive operation of image manipulation to someone else.

During “Christmas”

On the second day after “Christmas” began, we were woken up early in the morning by a notification that our server response times had slowed to a crawl due to traffic. The frontend server’s resources were maxed out. This, admittedly, was not our favorite way to start the weekend. #startuplife

We deployed a second frontend server and routed half the traffic to that server.

To review: At this point, we now had:

2 frontend servers
1 HAProxy/stunnel server
1 Redis server
1 MySQL server
1 batch server (running miscellaneous daemons)
4 image resizing servers

From that point onward, we kept an eye on servers and rolled out new EC2 instances as traffic increased. (We maxed out at 15 EC2 instances.)

Prior to adding all those servers, we came across another issue in testing that we waited to fix until we actually needed it: We realized that the larger EC2 instances had multiple CPUs available that would go mostly unused on our API servers due to the fact that node.js is single threaded. The HAProxy server was only pointed at one instance per box. We waited to deploy a fix because the solution was somewhat experimental — we didn’t want a “guess” to go to production. Yeah, it turns out we should’ve gambled on that guess.

All the while, whenever we would update the HAProxy configuration to handle our latest scaling solution, Avocado would go down for 1 to 2 seconds as our HAProxy restarted, thus loading the new config. Our next task was to create a redundant HAProxy server to prevent any down time.

In response, we used the Elastic Load Balancer to route traffic to the two HAProxy servers. The Elastic Load Balancer also handled the SSL encryption which took a huge load off of the proxy boxes. This allowed us to downsize the proxy boxes considerably, thus saving money in EC2 instance costs.

Everything seemed good. For, like, five minutes. Then there was socket.io.

We discovered our socket.io servers began to seriously eat up resources. Up to this point, we had a single socket.io server instance running on one of our two frontend servers. Which meant if we ever needed to update the frontend server, even if it had nothing to do with socket.io, our socket.io server would go down. It would only be a blip, but it’d still result in downtime. Downtime = sad users.

Scaling socket.io to multiple servers is tricky because if a user is connected to one socket.io server, they need to stay connected to that same one for the entire session – another socket.io server won’t have their credentials if they’re suddenly moved. So, we used something called “sticky sessions” to keep users connected to the same server for the life of their session. (When you home screen the app, we close the socket.io connection, and when you open the app again, we create another socket.io connection for the user.) Sticky sessions sets a cookie for the life of the session so it knows what socket.io server to send you to every single time. HAProxy will see that cookie and send you to the right socket.io server.

On that note, we’d like to say that while WebSockets are the new hotness (and while socket.io takes advantage of it), mobile apps should be warned, Websockets will not work on some cellular networks worldwide.

Instead, we had to use XHR-polling with socket.io, which uses HTTP requests to simulate a real-time connection. Furthermore, Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancer didn’t support WebSockets, so we had to use XHR-polling regardless.

Once that issue was resolved, we scaled out to two socket.io servers. After this initial scaling, we moved the socket.io server to its own box – inside of that we could have 8 socket.io servers (one per CPU), so we had a total of 16 instances of socket.io servers.

I’m sure at this point you’re saying, “16 socket.io servers?! You’re doing something wrong.” And in thinking that, you’d be right. So, we changed something else to improve our performance: database connection pooling.

Prior to this we had one connection to the database per server instance. Any time a process wanted to talk to our database it had to get in line. The process happened so quickly that the line wasn’t very long, but since we only had a single connection per server instance we ended up using a lot more resources than necessary.

For example, our socket.io servers were eating up 60 percent of the box’s CPUs across all 8 cores because of only having one connection to the database per socket.io server instance. When we added the connection pooling, we added anywhere from 2 to 10 connections to the database per server instance.

We didn’t do this connection pooling before mostly due to lack of time and because we didn’t want to make major changes to our database code with only three days before the promotion. The connection pooling meant that usage went from 60 percent of CPU to 3 percent. Response times were dramatically improved all around.

Going international

Our “Christmas” event took us global. And we hadn’t adequately prepared for that. Users in other parts of the world were connecting to our servers all the way in NorCal. And that meant sloooow connections. We have since launched servers throughout the world, relying on Amazon to route traffic based on latency.

And that’s all part of our…

Post-Christmas planning

We’re still in the afterglow of this growth and while things are slightly less hectic, we also have quite a few other big events planned, and each of those mean more scaling.

We expect to be using auto-deployment strategies. For example, Amazon will deploy new boxes automatically based on certain metrics, letting us deploy new servers when their average CPU usage exceeds a certain percentage.

One concern we’re talking about though: if you do auto-scaling wrong you might accidentally deploy 100 boxes… and then you’re paying for 100 boxes. So we’re cautiously proceeding here.

Biggest lesson learned: It would have been great to start the scaling process much earlier. Due to time pressure we had to make compromises –like dropping four of our media resizer boxes. While throwing more hardware at some scaling problems does work, it’s less than ideal.

Generally, it’s hard to know in advance what you’re going to need unless you know exactly what growth to expect. So plan for the worst, hope for the best, and good luck out there.

TL;DR: Plan ahead. Test your servers until they fall to pieces. Eat your veggies.

P.S. We’re hosting an Android Hack Night during Google IO this year; come by and chat us up if you want to learn more about what we did.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Jan Beckers is founder and CEO of HitFox Group.

Monetization is survival.

If free-to-play game publishers have made it to the top of the app stores’ grossing charts, it’s for one good reason: Monetizing efficiently was not a choice. Indeed, the free-to-play business model forced publishers to develop and implement the mechanics allowing for successful monetization right from the start.

The good news is, in the process they developed some great practices for the mobile industry as a whole.

As competition continues to heat up in the mobile space, with close to 800,000 apps available on the App Store and as many on Google Play, here’s how all app marketers can learn from them.

Changing the Game

Free-to-play has revolutionized the monetization model in gaming by charging players based on their willingness to pay, instead of displaying one set price for all. Indeed, through a dynamic pricing scheme for in-app purchase items, free-to-play has enabled game publishers to monetize the whole of the price/demand curve.

By removing the lower price limit and allowing a vast majority of users to play the game entirely for free, it has triggered two positive effects:  On the one hand, it enabled the generation of high volumes of players, and on the other, it made it possible to monetize part of the long tail of users, either because they are ready to pay smaller amounts, or by showing them ad offers.

By removing the upper price limit, it also made it possible for the most committed players to spend an unlimited amount of money in the game, therefore unleashing an enormous monetization potential. Aeria Games, for example, the publisher of the card-battle game Monster Paradise, recently reported that its ARPPU (Average Revenue Per Paying User) had seen peaks of $90 and above over the holiday season.

Understanding mobile

The most striking realization of Free-to-Play’s potential on mobile is the rise of mid-core games, such as Supercell’s Clash of Clans (which is reported to make $1 million a day, along with the company’s other title, Hay Day). The success of the mid-core genre stands as a strong example of how mobile audiences should be approached: by addressing as many users as possible, but also by understanding and taking advantage of the great variety of mobile usage patterns.

Whether your app is used a couple minutes here and there, 30 minutes during the daily commute, or the whole weekend long, it should be structured in a way that offers (at least) the value that every user expects from it.

Learning from the challenges of free

The free-to-play model, while offering a whole new perspective on monetization, also brought along some major challenges.

First, acquiring users was no longer synonymous with monetizing them. For players to be converted into payers, they also had to be retained and engaged. So publishers had to develop a thorough understanding of the behaviors and usage patterns at play within their game. This was achieved through the implementation of in-app analytics.

For instance, Struan Robertson of NaturalMotion, the successful publisher of free-to-play hits MyHorse and CSR Racing, explained that you should spend time each day looking at your dashboard of stats.

Then, as the cost of acquiring users kept soaring, it became vital for game publishers to know at which price they could buy additional players in order to remain profitable. Sho Masuda, the VP of user acquisition at Japanese publisher Gree, reported that the company used the large amount of data collected over time to forecast what the value of an install for a particular game is going to be.

Finally, quality of players can vary greatly across the traffic sources employed for user acquisition. This in turn strongly enforced the need to accurately track in-app user activity to determine which sources perform best so you can fine-tune the ad spend and optimize the marketing budgets.

Calling all app marketers

To make the most out of their monetization potential — even if survival is not immediately at stake — all app marketers can benefit from the lessons of free:

1. Understand, consider and engage all your users.
2. Unleash the monetization potential of your biggest fans.
3. Understand and take advantage of mobile behaviors and usage patterns through in-app analytics.
4. Continuously track your promotion channels’ performance and optimize your advertising spend.

Game on!

photo credit: E-Plus Gruppe Fotostream via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This past month, Google Maps lost its position as the most downloaded app on Apple’s iOS store — to one of Google’s other apps, YouTube. And mobile messaging app WhatsApp continued its meteoric rise to messaging supremacy.

Those are just two of the quirks and insights in App Annie‘s February index of what’s happening in mobile apps, which has just been split from its game index to provide more insights into which companies and apps are doing well on Google Play and Apple’s iOS app store.

Here’s a selection of the most interesting insights:

Google still owns top spot on Apple’s app store

Source: App Annie

Top downloaded iOS apps

Months after YouTube and Google Maps were unceremoniously booted from Apple’s core iOS offerings, they continue to be the top downloaded apps on the App Store, swapping first and second position in the past two months.

Essentially, users are speaking with their fingers and telling Apple they want these apps.

Google Play is more diverse than the iOS app store

Source: App Annie

Top apps by platform

There’s more variety in the top apps on Google Play than on Apple’s iOS app store. While the top 10 apps on iOS are all from just five publishers, most notably Apple itself, the top 10 apps on Google Play are from eight publishers.

Aside from Apple, Google, and Facebook, there’s just one small company (Keyloft) on the iOS top 10 list and one individual (Jessie Tao). On Google Play, there’s WhatsApp, Adobe, Viber Media, and Outfit 7.

Gree and WhatsApp are completely killing it

Source: App Annie

Google Play top publishers by revenue (excluding games)

Gree, the mobile social gaming company, is tops in monthly revenue on Google Play. And WhatsApp jumped an astounding 93 spots on App Annie’s index to slot in at number seven.

That’s not all WhatsApp has done — it’s also fifth in the iOS app story by monthly revenue, fifth on Google Play by downloads (for both of its apps), and it took the second spot on Google Play’s most-downloaded list for its main WhatsApp Messenger app, which is also the sixth highest-grossing individual app on Google Play. By any measure, that’s impressive.

Other highlights?

TurboTax by Intuit jumped into the top 10 list on both iOS and Google Play as tax season is upon us, and Evernote nudged into the top 10 list on iOS, jumping 45 spots.

Find more details and info at App Annie’s index page.

photo credit: Sugar Daze via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Rob Woodbridge is founder of Untether.tv.

I quit smoking 14 years ago this past March.

I can still remember that last pull of my last cigarette and the little jingle that played from my LifeSign smoking cessation computer. I quit smoking because a mobile device told me when to smoke … and when I was done smoking for good.

And it worked.

That was the first time for me that a habit change was brought on by a mobile device — but certainly not the last. Back then the commercial web was emerging, mobile was a distant ripple and the RAZR was the rage. There wasn’t a single smartphone in sight.

Today, when five out of six people on the planet carry a connected device, many habits have already been modified as a result of this pervasive technology. There is a “low-hanging fruit” kind of change that is sweeping through the home as land lines are being dropped in lieu of mobile phones. Parents are debating at what age to buy their kids cell phones.

Smartphones and tablets have hampered our ability to focus on one thing at a time while simultaneously doing serious damage to video game console makers, broadcast television and the entire retail industry.

These changes are macro changes brought on by creating a much more efficient market place — this is the Wal-Mart effect of removing friction from the supply chain. While they seem like habit change, they are really just efficient evolution brought on by technological advancement. Predictable really.

Personal habit change, however is different: It stems from a decision to change something at our core. Like the LifeSign computer I used to commit to quitting smoking, can the new devices in our hands bring about personal habit change to a mass audience?

There are many companies out there who think so.

Getting better sleep

The wearable computer industry is about to be set ablaze.

Companies like Nike, which is reinventing itself as a software/hardware company, FitBit, and Jawbone are leading the “body analytics” movement. These tools are amazing, but they aren’t built for the average person interested in changing one habit. They are built for an audience in tune with their body, but wanting more tangible insights. These devices will have their day but they are too overwhelming and too complicated to affect any serious change in the near future.

Sleep Cycle is an app I’ve been using on my iPhone for the past 150 nights. You launch the app, set the alarm and place your iPhone face down under the fitted sheet on your bed. It uses the accelerometer to determine movement indicating wakefulness (i.e. you are not in REM sleep) around the time you would like to wake up. I’ve noticed an incredible difference in the quality of my sleep and my mood when the alarm does go off and have managed to alter my sleeping patterns to become an early morning person.

The work out streak

There are thousands of apps littering the various app stores focused on physical activity. I know because I’ve paid for 100′s of them already. The one that stuck is an app called Gain Fitness, simply because of a simple motivational feature that none of the other apps that I found used effectively: the workout streak.

What made this one stand out was its simplicity. It doesn’t have prominent social features that rely on peer pressure and isn’t focused on sharing workouts and results — this is much simpler than that. The workout streak counts the number of consecutive workouts that you’ve done.

Period.

If you can’t get to the gym or do a workout that day, too bad, you missed it. You can’t make it up tomorrow, it is just plain gone. At first this seemed as though it was a bug but when I spoke with the founder he said it was being used as a chief motivator and it works.

I’d rather walk

Moves is a new breed of iOS apps that, once launched, remains active but dormant on the device, quietly collecting data.

In the case of Moves, it uses a combination of GPS, cell towers, Foursquare and the built-in accelerometer to determine the number of steps taken during a day (all the computing power is done in the cloud). This isn’t new but the founder and CEO Sampo Karjalainen had a very focused reason for building the app: To increase the health and wellbeing of users by changing walking habits through gamification. He hopes to encourage people to park a little further, walk a little longer and get a little more active all through his app.

The ties that bind

There are thousands of apps in the market place that do any or all of these that I’ve highlighted but the common thread for all of them is the uniquely personal nature of each.

Individual habit change — getting better and deeper sleep or going to the gym more often or walking greater distances — are single action outcomes: what the Persuasive Tech Lab at Stanford University calls a succession of “tiny steps.” While the apps are targeting the general population there is more emphasis on the individual. Single task, outcome based, habit changes that create tangible results while depending the user’s commitment with every deep sleep, weight lifted and step taken.

Perhaps the greatest habit changed is the one that happens when great product function creates incredible loyalty – a habit many companies are trying to change every single day.

photo credit: SeeMidTN.com (aka Brent) via photopin cc

Technology enables us to work from anywhere, but it might make it harder to manage from anywhere. GroundCntrl aims to help you keep track of your company and motivate your mobile workforce with a $1.3 million round of funding filed with the SEC.

The filing names Richard Mandeberg, the chief executive and co-founder, as well as Pat McVeigh, who it cites as a director, and David Shen, the president of David Shen Ventures. Shen is likely not the only investor, as the filing states 13 investors in total, though they aren’t identified.

GroundCntrl is a combination of a software as a service and a mobile app that organizes tasks and employee-incentive programs. It’s specifically aimed at companies with a “mobile workforce,” businesses that have workers spread out and not necessarily in an office. An example could be a canvassing business, such as the environmental folks you see on the sidewalks asking for a moment of your time.

The software can set up different tasks that need completing and assigns different achievements to your workers once those tasks are completed. You might get a Foursquare-like “badge” if you upload pictures of your retail store or knock on 100 doors bringing awareness to your cause. These badges then translate into real prizes, if you so choose.

The mobile app helps employees get these tasks done as well. In the case of taking pictures of your retail store, or the pop-up shop your company is hosting for a week, employees can upload photos directly to the app. You can customize other tasks as well.

Once your company starts using GroundCntrl, it will record data on each team and each employee so that upper management can see just how productive each element of its mobile workforce is.

The company was founded in 2010 and was originally called Commondeeds.

Employee using smartphone image via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

With its newest 1.3 version, Addappt is reach for a wider audience for its smarter contacts app for the iPhone. The open mobile contact directory is now more widely available for download and it has new features like work group contacts.

Addappt‘s big idea is to free your contact list so you can take it to any platform you want. It hasn’t lived up to that yet, since there is only an iOS version available. But at some point, you have to figure it will go cross-platform, and then it will be one of the apps that allow users to escape the walled gardens of the big platform owners. The contact app is also more social.

Addappt launched its limited distribution, invitation-only version in December, and the company has now updated it to include group management and quicker messaging. The update is all about getting more things done with fewer screen taps. With the iPhone, you are limited to sending messages to five people. With Addappt, you can create a group, delete one, or rename one. You can add contacts to the group with a tap. And you can message the group with a single tap.You can also add multiple photos to a message and share it with the group using a few taps.

The free app is the brainchild of Mrinal Desai, co-founder and chief executive of Los Gatos, Calif.-based Addappt, and chief technology officer Jorge Ferreira.
Addappt is an always up-to-date, private address book, maintained by your friends. When you sign up for Addappt, you create your own accurate contact information. Once you do that, the app will check to see who among your current contacts has adopted the Addappt app. When it finds a match, it asks both parties whether they want to share their contact information (that preserves privacy). Once they agree, they never have to ask each other for updated contact info again. That’s because whenever you make changes to your contact info, Addappt will automatically update that information in your Addappt friends’ phones. And when your friends change their contact info, Addappt makes the changes in your contact list.

The contact info is richer than a normal list. You can upload your own profile photo, add phone numbers, email, physical address, web sites and social media handles as well. You can tap on any one of the icons for texting or for phone numbers in order to initiate communication with your friend. If you want to text someone, you tap the text icon under their contact name. You can also see the local time for any one of your contacts. That way, you never call them in the middle of the night by accident. If your friend enters a birthday, then that shows up in your iPhone’s calendar.

The contact information remains private, and you choose whom you want to share it with. Addappt does not crawl multiple contact lists and bring the information to you, since that can lead to privacy violations and it often retrieves inaccurate information. To protect your privacy, Addappt does not store your address book on its servers. It doesn’t spam your friends, and it will not sell a user’s personal information to third parties, Desai said. Your data are backed up on the phones of your friends, and you can add them again if you lose your phone.

Previously, Desai founded CrossLoop, a peer-to-peer tech support market, in 2006 and he left the top post at the company in 2010. He also worked at LinkedIn as its first business development manager.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Mobile app analytics source App Annie announced today that it is adding Amazon Appstore statistics to its existing Google Play and iOS analytics solutions. The service is currently in beta release.

And what the data shows is that the top apps on Amazon are very, very different than Google Play.

All of Amazon’s top 10 paid apps are games, including three Disney titles: Where’s My Water and two versions of the super-popular Temple Run app (Oz and Brave). And while Mojang’s popular Minecraft game is near the top in both stores, the key difference is that Google Play’s top 10 selling apps include seven utilities, including Swiftkey Keyboard, the top-selling app in the U.S.

When it comes to free apps, social networking and communications apps dominate Google Play: Facebook is the top app, Instagram is at number three, Facebook Messenger is at five, and Skype and Twitter are at eight and nine. On Amazon, Facebook barely cracks the top 10, and no other social networking or communications tool comes close.

One of App Annie’s goals, of course, is to show developers where the big opportunities are. Based on the early returns, the main thing Amazon customers want from the company’s app store is games.

Analytics for the Amazon Appstore are important, since Amazon’s Kindle family is almost certainly the best-selling Android family of tablets in the world. Amazon doesn’t release Kindle sales statistics, but the Kindle Fire HD 7-inch dominates web use by Android devices, and ABI Research has calculated the total number of Kindle tablets in the market as of January as up to 12.5 million.

Distimo, which also provides app store analytics, already includes Amazon Appstore numbers in its privately available data.

Image credit: Blake Patterson/Flickr

Yo, developers, and a very happy Friday to you all. Here’s something to check out if you’ve got mobile apps on the market or in the works: AppGlu has launched today, and it says its a “mission control for mobile apps.”

Most interestingly, it allows you to turn the reins over to your business folks after the heavy lifting of actually building and launching an app has been completed.

Basically, it’s a central platform where your less technical team members can update your app’s content, push out the changes, track what your users are doing, and send out push notifications as needed.

This particular tool is all about maintaining control after you’ve already launched, and it will save you, the mobile developer with a heart of gold, ever so much time and back-and-forth frustrations with the rest of your team.

“If mobile applications are not actively managed and maintained after a launch, they can easily become stale and irrelevant,” said AppGlu CEO Adam Fingerman in a statement on today’s news. But we all know how quickly updating a bit of content or sending out a push-based marketing message can turn into an overwrought series of miscommunications between devs and biz side workers.

“AppGlu believes that for companies to have a successful app there needs to be a division of roles,” a rep wrote to us via email today. “Developers focus on developing the apps and getting them to launch, and after launch, business people take on the management and maintenance of the app.”

Now all you have to do is squash bugs, maintain servers, freak out in the middle of the night when a bot swarms you with requests — you know, the fun stuff.

AppGlu is based in San Francisco and was founded in early 2012 by the aforementioned Fingerman and Eric Shapiro, a programmer and serial entrepreneur.

Image credit: Piti Tan/Shutterstock

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Mobile monetization platform StartApp announced that it has been downloaded a staggering 500 million times today, and that it completes more searches on the Android platform than any service other than Google.

“We’re seeing a billion pageviews per month,” CEO Gil Dudkiewicz told me on the phone this afternoon.

That staggering number of downloads — minus churn due to deletions — has resulted in StartApp’s search app appearing on one out of every five Android devices globally, and StartApp itself coming from almost literally nowhere to being what it calls “the largest independent search distribution network in the Western world.”

The search service is part of a mobile monetization platform that StartApp runs for developers.

When developers agree to StartApp’s terms, they bundle a search portal with their app and get a cut of advertising revenue generated by that search portal. Fifteen thousand apps currently bundle StartApp, up sharply from just 3,500 in July 2012.

Users have the option to install the search icon or refuse it, but enough agree to keep the icon — and actually use it — that StartApp has become a global force in search in less than two years.

“The vast majority of apps don’t make money via downloads,” Dudkiewicz says. “The reason for it is that the paid model doesn’t really work for most of them … and ads don’t really resonate well with most users.”

[Indeed, mobile monetization is one of the areas of focus of our VentureBeat Mobile Summit on April 1&2, where we've invited the top 180 executives in mobile -- from brands, to ad networks, to manufacturers, and more -- to network and discuss ways to push the mobile economy forward].

So StartApp is announcing a new monetization model today in addition to its search portal: Exit Ads. This model, StartApp VP Itay Rokni says, distinguishes between the use of the app and ads, enabling users to use the app as much as they wish unencumbered by marketing and then giving them options to view and download other apps on exit.

That’s an interesting take on the app distribution ecosystem, which already has companies like AppGratis and other free app-of-the-day apps.

“We’re competing with anyone offering any kind of monetization for developers,” Dudkiewicz says.

The company was coy when I asked who its search partners are for the search portal that has been its main claim to fame so far, simply saying that they are “most of the big ones” and that the company was could not be more specific.

photo credit: Express Monorail via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

After a long day at work, you open your fridge and are greeted with a forlorn-looking piece of cheese and some rancid smelling milk. We have all experienced this pain and that weary reluctance to make a trip to the grocery store.

A startup called Instacart is fast becoming a favorite in the Bay Area for its mobile and web service that lets you order food and beverages in a snap. The app is available for free on Google Play and the App Store.

Since it launched in August 2012, Instacart has found a niche with busy, urban professionals — but it’s also used by office managers at local startups.

To make it easier for roommates or colleagues to order items for a shared kitchen, Instacart has launched a new feature called “Shop with Friends.”

Click the “Shop with Friends” button to access a communal shopping cart, which anyone can access by clicking a custom link. ”The idea is to give people the flexibility they have at the checkout counter,” said Instacart’s founder, Apoorva Mehta, in an interview. Mehta is a former supply chain management engineer for Amazon.com, who saw an opportunity to fast-track online grocery delivery.

The company plans to beat out the competition with its focus on customer service and user experience design. Simply login via Facebook or set up an account, open a shopping cart, add a few items, share the link if you’re shopping with friends, and tap to place the order.

Thousands of items are available and will be delivered by Instacart’s team of personnel at home or an office in under three hours.

Instacart recently partnered up with yuppie chains WholeFoods and Trader Joe’s, and also delivers groceries from Safeway. The startup makes its money by charging a convenience fee ($3.99 for orders over $30) and an additional $14.99 for one-hour delivery.

We first reported on Instacart at a recent demo day for Y Combinator, the highly competitive accelerator program. At the time, we described it as an “Uber for grocery deliveries.” Similarly to Uber, Instacart has butted heads with city regulators (in this case, over its ability to sell wine and spirits).

In future, Instacart plans to bring in new revenues by selling an enterprise subscription to larger companies. The company has raised $2.3 million in seed funding.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The global app economy will reach $25 billion this year, according to new data from ABI Research. Thirty-five percent of that, or $8.8 billion, will be tablet apps, and 65 percent, or 16.4 billion, will be smartphone apps.

And Apple will have a combined 65 percent share.

The overall trend in the app economy is that tablet app monetization is outpacing smartphone apps, ABI said. By 2018, the company said, tablet apps should surpass smartphone apps in revenue. At that point, total global app revenue will reach $92 billion.

“The larger screen makes apps and content look and feel better, so there are more lucrative opportunities,” analyst Aapo Markkanen said in a statement. “One might think that the bigger installed base of smartphones would compensate for the disparity, but that notion fails to take into account the arrival of low-cost tablets, which hasn’t even started yet [in] earnest. The smartphones paved the way for them, but in the end we believe that it’s the tablets that will prove the more transformative device segment of the two.”

For 2013, ABI expects Apple to take 65 percent of global app revenues, followed by Google’s Android with 27 percent. The remaining eight percent will be fought over by the other mobile ecosystems, primarily Windows Phone and BlackBerry.

ABI didn’t comment on Apple versus Android share in later years, but you have to assume that the 65 percent share will not last. According to one measure, Android’s overall global market share hit almost 70 percent in 2012, and ABI has previously predicted that by December 2013, there will be 800 million Android smartphones to 300 million iPhones in active use.

But Apple’s market share will stay very strong for many years to come, Markkanen believes.

“Apple’s share is obviously declining as Android grows,” Markkanen told me on the phone. “By 2018 in terms of tablets it will still be 57 percent, and in terms of tablets plus smartphones, it will still be above 50 percent … around 52 percent.”

That 52 percent of the 2018 app market will be worth about $48 billion, a third of which is almost pure profit.

photo credit: waferbaby via photopin cc

An app screeching to a halt may be annoying to you. But knowing when and why it happened is valuable for developers who want to make their apps perform better.

That’s where Crittercism’s monitoring service for mobile app performance comes in. The company announced today that it has received $12 million in a second round of funding led by Google Ventures. Additionally, Crittercism is also launching a new service that will let developers monitor cloud services and network conditions around apps.

Its goal? To take its monitoring service to the next level.

“We’ve essentially turned into a big data company, a lot of our job is to process and triage that reporting data for engineering teams, and it’s becoming more and more important,” said Crittercism founder and chief executive Andrew Levy in an interview with VentureBeat.

The company’s monitoring platform is currently being used by major companies like AT&T, Netflix, and NPR to manage their mobile apps. Levy boasts that Crittercism’s software is running on more than 500 million devices and in more than 50 billion app sessions. That’s a significant amount of growth for a company that only launched in mid-2011 (at our MobileBeat conference).

App performance monitoring is an increasingly important field, as the fate of the mobile industry relies upon developers having the proper tools to make sure their apps are fast and stable. Twitter just recently snapped up Crashlytics, a Crittercism competitor that focuses on crash reports, which shows that even companies already focusing on mobile need help with performance analysis.

Levy tells me the new funds will be used to expand Crittercism’s executive and engineering team, as well as other teams throughout the company. The company will also focus a bit more on marketing (though it hasn’t had trouble scaling without much of a marketing machine).

“We started as mobile developers, our focus has shifted more towards IT operations teams and DevOps [a collaborative development method between IT and software engeineers],” Levy said. “We’ve learned how it [their app] is really a black box for engineering teams — they really like that insight in how it’s performing and how those performance metrics affect their business.”

Crittercism decided to add the ability to monitor cloud services and network conditions after it realized there plenty of events that can affect app performance. Plenty of apps rely on Amazon’s cloud servers for storage and data processing, while others rely on external services for things like payment processing and location features. Levy says the new features will let developers detect the performance of external services in real-time. The company is taking requests for invites to the private beta test of the new features.

Altogether, Crittercism has now raised around $19 million in funding. Its other investors, which also participated in this round, include Shasta Ventures and Opus Capital. Google Venture’s Wesley Chan will join the company’s board as part of this round.

The San Francisco-based company now has 23 employees, and Levy hopes to scale to the low 60s by the end of the year.

Photo: Mia Judkins/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google Play turned one today, and in honor of the birthday, Google is celebrating by giving gifts. Gifts for you, that is, and your Android device.

The gifts range from a free $15 to spend in Fancy, a “crowd-curated catalog of amazing goods,” to a free book, to 10 percent off on reservations made through Hotels.com. There are also deals on movies, like Kung Fu Panda, and games, like Disney’s Gnome Village.

Google launched Play as a “digital entertainment destination where you can find, enjoy, and share your favorite music, movies, books, and apps on the web and on your Android phone or tablet.” While still earning perhaps only about a quarter of what Apple’s iOS store brings in, Google Play revenue is growing 10 times faster than the app store and will likely reach a million apps in June 2013.

Here’s what Google has to say about the celebration:

It was just a year ago today that we launched this amazing shop on the interwebs to offer the best in digital content. Since the best parties are the ones that send you home with a present, today we celebrate our birthday with a festive goodie bag full of gifts. Don’t delay in picking up these limited-time offers. Continue the celebration all week with even more special deals on movies, books and magazines along with exclusive gaming gifts. It’s been an incredible first year and we look forward to sharing the gift of digital diversions for many more to come.

Get your free stuff — if you have an Android phone or tablet — right here.

photo credit: skippytpe via photopin cc

Literally.

That’s the sad reality of app development today, and fewer than half of users who download an app actually use it more than once. Which is precisely the problem that Scringo, an innovative toolkit for developers, is launching to fix. Scringo lets you add features like in-app user messaging, “radar” to let app users know when other app users are near, an app activity feed that can be public, interactive developer feedback, and more, in just two to five minutes.

Oh, and it’s free.

“We’re here to manage three problems for app developers,” Scringo co-founder Ran Avrahamy told me from Tel Aviv. “Reach (or distribution), retention, and revenue.”

Those are pretty much the core challenges for appmakers: getting users, keeping users, and yes, making some cash from users. Avrahamy says, accurately, that there are hundreds of APIs and software development kit focusing on these issues. His goal was to bring together the key needed features in one single SDK.

Source: Scringo

Scringo’s customizable sidebar

Scringo’s SDK is cross-platform for Android and iOS, and integrates into your app in minutes, according to the company. Avrahamy isn’t a developer, and he says he’s integrated Scringo into an app in about five minutes. The fastest he’s seen a developer do it is just over two minutes.

With Scringo integrated into your app, you now have a new totally customizable sidebar that appears and disappears as needed, and contains social login capabilities, the ability for users to share their activity stream while in the app, and the communication functionality mentioned above. Radar helps app users connect with others, if they choose. And the feedback feature includes a “magic rating system,” which, when a user rates the app at five stars, prompts him or her to rate it on the app’s app store.

“The activity stream turns your app into a live dynamic community,” Avrahamy said. “One developer integrated it into a NASCAR app, so users could like cars, drivers, or tracks. Every time a user likes something, it shows up in the activity feed.

Scringo also includes an action button in the activity feed, so if the activity is, perhaps, buying a shirt, others who see it can also buy the T-shirt. Avrahamy calls it “enriching the inner virality of the app.” And a push notifications functionality that helps developers stay in contact with app users, and inform them of important new updates or capabilities.

All of the features are customizable in Scringo’s “Developer Zone,” where WYSIWIG tools control colors, icons styles, included features, and more, and update virtually instantly in the app itself.

Scringo 1.0 was in public beta for eight months, the company says, during which time about a thousand developers signed up and 260 apps actually went live on Google Play and Apple’s app store, ultimately reaching more than a million end users. That eight months of “intensive learning,” Avrahamy says, provided the data that informed what the company built into 2.0, which is its first fully released product.

That data includes how well the SDK helps app developers with their core problems.

“We compared apps before Scringo and after Scringo,” Avrahamy told me. “We saw a 97 percent increase in time spent in apps after integrating Scringo, and an 89 percent increase in recurring sessions.”

In other words, doubling the time, and doubling the uses. Or, as Avrahamy puts it, “we’re giving more reasons for the users to stay, and more reasons to come back.”

Source: Scringo

Scringo adds radar features to your app, optionally.

The big question, of course, is always monetization.

Developers have the option of using the monetization features that are currently built into the SDK, like buying T-shirts. And more monetization options will be coming soon, including a sort of app-store-for-developers inside the company’s developer zone, where developers who create interesting tools can offer them to other interested developers.

Currently, the revshare is 100% developers, 0% Scringo, which sounds like a great deal. Eventually it will likely be the now-standard 70-30 app store split.

The entire offering is very developer-centric and developer-friendly, so much so that Avrahamy calls the company a B-to-D company: business to developer.

“We have a mutual interest,” Avrahamy said, speaking of developers. “What we’re trying to bring is several options of monetization.”

photo credit: Sandeep Somasekharan via photopin cc

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

In 2013, we’ll download 10 apps for every single woman, man, and child on planet Earth.

Half of those apps will be Android apps, which will have 58 percent smartphone app share, according to ABI Research, and 41 percent of those will be iOS apps. Apple’s iPhone will account for 33 percent of smartphone app downloads, ABI says, while the company’s iPad will take 75 percent of tablet app downloads. Windows Phone and tablet devices will account for the majority of the rest, with BlackBerry taking about a 2 percent share.

Add it all up, and about 35 billion Android apps will load to devices in 2013, plus another 29 billion iOS apps.

That is a lot of apps.

While Google’s Android is clearly doing well in smartphones, the future of its tablet aspirations is not yet as clear. Only 17 percent of tablet downloads in 2013 will be on Android tabs, ABI says, which compares poorly to iPad’s 75 percent tablet app share.

“The most pressing issue for Google is how much of this handset momentum will ultimately trickle down to tablets, where Apple is holding the fort remarkably well,” ABI analyst Aapo Markkanen said in a statement.

Source: Jennifer Van Grove/VentureBeat

Jeff Bezos and the Kindle Fire

Interestingly, Markkanen says that Amazon, which is a major Google frenemy, might be helping Android the most in the tablet space, since its Kindle Fire is almost certainly the best-selling Android-based tablet on the market. The enemy part is that Amazon’s Android is a de-Google-ized version of Android which taps into Amazon’s content ecosystem, not Google’s.

The friend part is that since Kindle Fire is giving Android at least some degree of tablet momentum, app developers are more likely to build apps for Android-based tablets, which they can then sell on both Google and Amazon app stores.

But Google needs more Android tablet partners to do well if it wants Android’s share of app downloads to increase.

“The question is becoming, is there enough critical mass with Android partners, led by Samsung?” Jeff Orr, another ABI analyst told me over the phone. “And, are there going to be more vendors who can make a move and break away from the pack?”

Another big question: How will wearables affect the market?

Google is coming to market with Glass in 2013, the company has said, and it’s a perfect chisel to pry Apple fans out of the iOS ecosystem. But Apple is countering with iWatch, conceivably. Both will stimulate an explosion in apps designed either to work with them or on them.

“We’re certainly looking at wearables,” Orr said.

photo credit: schnaars via photopin cc

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

The new SDK adds better mobile analytics that will help developers get metrics on sharing events and actual usage: what people are actually doing in their apps. In addition, the new tools will enable conversion logging from ads running in Facebook-connected iOS apps, and — currently in beta — logging of in-app purchases. Both of which, of course, will help Facebook-connected apps monetize better.

In addition, the new Facebook SDK adds better — and simpler — error handling.

“The SDK will now automatically categorize errors by common application handling behavior and provide helpers to simplify some common error response cases,” Facebook engineer Jason Clark posted today. ”In addition, the SDK will automatically handle a larger number of error cases including various iOS 6 cases such as password changes and expired tokens.”

It sounds like developers who have heard about the update are happy, so far, as the update is solving annoying problems. One, Jack Tihon from Endorse, said “It’s about time. I was living in a world of pain trying to unstick users with expired tokens due to various reasons (change password, sign out of devices, etc.”

With better tracking and analytics capabilities, the new SDK is almost starting to impinge on some of the functions of dedicated app analytics solutions like App Annie and Flurry, but of course in a purely Facebook-focused manner.

The update also includes bugfixes, is backwards compatible, and is available here.

photo credit: Steel Wool via photopin cc

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Siebrand Dijkstra wants anyone to be able to make an app. He’s the CEO of AppMachine, which just launched at Mobile World Congress. The Netherlands-based company lets users build a richly featured native application for Android or iPhone from simple building blocks he compares to lego bricks. 

Several superstar Dutch DJs and the Amsterdam Dance Event mobile app, a complex application that would previously have cost upwards of €50,000 ($66,000) to build, have already created apps with AppMachine.

AppMachine’s 20 app bricks cover everything from Facebook integration to discographies for DJs. You can add products and floor plans, send emails, and like Facebook pages from within the app itself. The crawler feature scans an existing web site and extracts relevant information like photos, RSS feeds, iTunes playlists, or Twitter accounts to be added as content to your brand new app.

Plenty of other “build your own app” products exist, including another Dutch company, LayarGloss, but Dijkstra emphasizes that AppMachine apps are truly native and not a melange of HTML and native code. An app simulator is provided for testing.

AppMachine provides extensive analytics features for tracking downloads, locations of users, and time spent in an app. The final app can be multilingual, adapting automatically to the language of the phone on which it is used.

Target customers are DIY app builders and design agencies. A more flexible version will be available later for developers who will be able to drag in XML and XSL files or even a web service and have AppMachine’s content management system automatically convert it into tables. 

You can build an app for free but pay a one-time fee when you publish via AppMachine on one or more app stores. The fee varies between €399 and €1,499 ($525 and $1,975) depending on the version used (“Gorgeous” for DIY app makers, “Designer” for designers, and the more flexible developer version). It’s currently in closed beta but will be opened up to new accounts in two weeks or so.

 AppMachine is based in Heerenveen in the Netherlands, was established in 2011, has 24 employees and is privately funded. 

Even better, your apps share about 90 percent of their code, making cross-platform development simpler and quicker.

Today Xamarin is launching Xamarin 2.o, a bundle of products including Xamarin Studio, a new IDE, Xamarin.iOS for Visual Studio, a plugin for Visual Studio that enables cross-platform mobile development, and the Xamarin Component Store, an “app store for code,” where you buy and sell components of apps to speed your development and make some cash.

“Xamarin enables us to deliver high performance, native apps that, until Xamarin, were only possible with Objective-C and Java,” says Matt Crocker, director of client engineering at Rdio, which has been using the new software. “Sharing over 50,000 lines of code across platforms gives us more time to spend on great user experiences. Xamarin 2.0 will help us build even better apps, faster.”

With the massive rise in mobile devices and apps, cross platform development tools are enjoying a golden age. PhoneGap allows developers to build for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone in HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Corona created its own simple language, Lua, to enable cross-platform development in a single language. Appcelerator’s Titanium developer platform — which the company claims is the widest-used in the world — also uses Javascript as the foundation programming language.

Xamarin’s approach?

There are eight million C# developers in the world, the company says. So why not let them build mobile apps in a language they know? The Xamarin studio, which also allows developers to build Mac apps, lets C# developers leverage their existing skills, “essentially transforming existing teams into mobile developers virtually overnight.”

Launched two years ago, Xamarin says it already has 230,000 mobile developers using its software development tools, growing its developer community 300 percent in the last year alone, and adding 12,000 new customers — companies like Clear Channel, Rdio, and the Portland Trailblazers.

“In the very near future, every business process and customer transaction will happen on a mobile device,” Nat Friedman, Xamarin’s CEO and cofounder said in a statement. “Xamarin’s unique approach … has already helped thousands of businesses to successfully deliver on their mobile strategy.”

photo credit: kk+ via photopin cc

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Monetization isn’t a simple process for us mobile developers. Advertisements, paid installs, in-app purchases — these all can generate revenue for mobile app developers, but they aren’t the only methods available.

Our friends in the industry have taught us a number of other innovative strategies to monetize mobile apps. Here are seven of our favorites.

1. Expand to Gaming

LINE is the most popular mobile messaging app in Japan with over 80 million users. It’s also completely free.

To maintain its massive user base, LINE turned to gaming to cash in on its existing user base. It launched a puzzle game called LINE Pop, which garnered more than one million installs in one day and 10 million installs and $1 million in revenue in less than two weeks.

The success of LINE Pop is definitely a wake up call for many productivity apps (especially messaging apps like Whatsapp) to think about new ways to capitalize on their user base.

2. Internationalization: Go Where the Money Is

Not all users are created equal; some citizens in some countries are more willing to pay for apps than others. Smartphones help to speed up globalization, but not all developers think globally, and most Silicon Valley app developers tend to focus mainly on the US market. This makes sense as long as you have enough run rate.

But it doesn’t make sense when considering this: In October 2012, Japan claimed the number one spot as the country with the highest revenue generated in Google Play, claiming 29 percent of the app store’s total global revenue. The U.S. followed close behind with 26 percent, and Korea stood at 18 percent.

According to Distimo’s report on the fastest-growing countries for App Store revenue, countries like Japan, Russia, China, Taiwan, Thailand, Brazil, Mexico, and Korea all showed a higher year-over-year growth in revenue than the U.S., which ranked 13th with a growth rate of 44 percent. Forget about these countries, and you’re missing enormous revenue potential.

3. Drive Installs for Other Mobile Apps

Dolphin Browser generates revenue by driving installs for other mobile developers. On our browser’s “Speed Dial” page, we display a list of apps we recommend. We don’t do any traditional banner ads or push notifications advertising (we hate those as individuals), and our users really seem to like our recommendations. Plus, we make good money with it.

Another great example of this monetization model is Appsfire, a popular app discovery tool that tracks free or temporarily discounted apps.  Its developers were able to build a big following and drive revenue from other developers who want to market to Appfire’s users.

4. Employ the Freemium Model

Noom is a weight loss coaching app that gives users daily tasks and helps them with long-term weight loss.

Instead of charging for installs and selling advertising, Noom was successfully able to bridge the gap and charge for monthly subscription to its premium coaching services.

Its basic app is free, but for those users who want a bit more, they need to fork over a few bucks. It’s a win for everyone, the casual users who get smaller benefits free of charge, the company that makes money for its work, and the serious users who have the option to get high-quality content.

5. Licensing & Merch

Not something every mobile app developer has what it takes to be able to pull off licensing and merchandizing as a monetization strategy. Only those with significant traction, a substantial user base, and a marketable brand can do this.

The prime example of this is Rovio, makers of Angry Birds, which has very successfully marketed its brand with its more than 200 licensing partners selling T-shirts, plush toys, phone cases, water bottles, pens, bed sheets, snacks, drinks, and a theme park in the works.

Merchandise sales made up about 30 percent of Rovio’s sales in 2011, and the company estimates physical goods made up 50 percent of its business in 2012.

6. Go Enterprise

Box is the most successful and classic example of this method of app monetization. Instead of charging consumers and competing head-to-head against Dropbox, cloud storage provider Box jumped the consumer ship and changed its monetization course to focus on the enterprise, where it saw a lucrative and untapped market.

Evernote is also following a similar route with the recent launch of Evernote Business.

7. Turn Advertising Into Entertainment

This is not ordinary advertising. No banner, interstitial, cross-promotion, or offer walls in the game. Outfit7 (creator of Talking Tomcat, which has 600 million installs) has mastered the art of turning advertising into entertainment. Here’s how:

DreamWorks approached Outfit7’s chief revenue office, Narry Singh, last year wanting to integrate DreamWorks’ film Madagascar into the Talking Tomcat experience. Singh knew his clients would not settle for a simple banner ad, so instead, he designed interactive, nine-second applets. A user could activate the Madagascar experience by beating Talking Tomcat five times. Once activated, a Madagascar dream cloud would appear and the game background would change completely.

“We want to integrate Madagascar as part of the game.” Singh said. “Your customers don’t buy your app, they buy your story.”

This strategy of turning advertising into entertainment scored Singh and the Outfit7 team a click-through rate higher than 9 percent.

If your app is not making money right now, don’t panic. Focus on building up your install and active user base then focus on monetization.

If you have users, money will come.

Edith Yeung is chief of corporate strategy for Dolphin Browser and a founding partner at RightVentures. Her focus is on mobile and consumer Internet companies. Prior to her current role, Edith founded BizTechDay, a voice of news, events & research for small business, mobile and Chinese technology. She previously worked with AT&T Wireless, Oracle, Siebel, Autodesk, Cisco, Telstra and Hungary Telecom. Edith has appeared on CBS, NPR and in the Wall Street Journal and is frequently quoted in ReadWriteWeb, Small Business Trends and other tech and SMB publications. She also often speaks on mobile, women and international entrepreneurship.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

These days it’s not enough just to create a mobile app. To truly compete, you need an app that takes full advantage of the huge leaps we’ve seen in mobile design.

Kleverbeast, a new app creation platform for the iPad and Android tablets that is kicking off its beta test today, aims to unlock the best of modern tablet app design to just about anyone with a drag-and-drop interface.

With its focus on design, Kleverbeast is a step beyond current code-free app makers like iBuildApp (and plenty of others). And since its designs look high-end, you won’t need to worry about hiring a developer to truly make an impression with your app. For anyone in a design-related business, having a slick mobile app could be the difference between making a sale and losing a customer.

“We’ve looked at those do-it-yourself app creators, and we think our user experience is fundamentally better,” said Dinesh Moorjani, co-founder of Kleverbeast and the CEO of IAC’s startup incubator Hatch Labs. “We wanted to make it affordable and we’re not targeting developers.”

Kleverbeast subscription plans start at $29 a month, which Moorjani claims is “two orders of magnitude” lower than hiring a professional developer to create something similar. Creating an app with the platform can take anywhere from 15 minutes to a few hours, but it’s a far simpler process than other tools like PhoneGap and Appcelerator (based on my experience with those tools).

Moorjani and Kleverbeast’s other co-founder, Harman Kochar, showed me several apps built on the platform, and they were all gorgeous and surprisingly distinct. The platform is currently being used by major names like Chinese artist Zeng Fanzhi and Emmy-winning photographer Lawrence Schiller. All of the apps sported slick and dynamic interfaces, but they were also all very different. You won’t have to worry about making a cookie-cutter app with Kleverbeast.

New York City-based Kleverbeast was founded in 2011 and has raised $2 million in seed funding internally. The company is planning to kick off another round of financing in the next few months.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

In the age of smartphone apps, the calendar certainly seems dumb. Tempo AI, a startup spun out of Silicon Valley’s SRI International research center, is changing that today with the launch of its Tempo Smart Calendar on the iPhone.

The app takes advantage of artificial intelligence to keep you on time and prepared when you’ve got back-to-back meetings. It converts the old-fashioned data calendar into a smart secretary. It can do things like prompt you to leave for your next appointment, guide you there with a map, and share the relevant documents for the meeting with you so that you don’t have to go searching for them while you’re on the run.

The Tempo Smart Calendar may sound a little like Siri, and it is a kind of cousin to Apple’s so-called personal assistant. The underlying artificial intelligence technology comes from Menlo Park, Calif.-based SRI, which with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency created a five-year research project dubbed CALO (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes) to develop a smart personal assistant. Tempo AI licensed technology known as Prep Pack, which organized data for more efficient use.

Tempo AI, a startup funded by SRI, took the technology and used it to create a smart mobile productivity app that analyzes data from your mobile calendar, your email, you location, and your contacts. It applies machine learning to enhance meeting details or even suggest whom you should invite to a meeting, said Raj Singh, founder and chief executive of Tempo AI, in an interview with VentureBeat.

“I became a slave to my calendar, with conference calls on the road,” Singh said. “I had to look up destinations in Google maps and search my smartphone for documents that I should have read already.”

The app is the brainchild of Singh (pictured at top, top row, second from right), a mobile veteran who dreamed it up in 2011 because he had challenges while trying to stick to his own busy schedule. An entrepreneur-in-residence at SRI, Singh teamed up with Microsoft veteran Corey Hulen and Thierry Donneau-Golencer of SRI.

“I wanted to build something that would make my life easier and reduce stress,” Singh said.

The personal assistant streamlines routine tasks, and it finds and neatly organizes everything you need to be fully prepared. It fetches contacts, email, and related documents and places them in context.

In a single tap, anyone can complete common tasks, saving time and reducing stress. If you’re running late for a meeting, you can tap Tempo Smart Calendar, which presents you with a variety of options. You can tap a single button to send a message to other meeting attendees, saying you’ll be late by 15 minutes or by a half hour.

Tempo Smart Calendar focuses on what is coming next, anticipating what you need to do. It provides you with the relevant emails for a meeting in the event summary. It also adds documents and locations. You don’t have to type in a long search while you’re driving or walking to a meeting. That makes you both efficient and safer while you’re trying to move at a high speed. If you need to find a phone number, Tempo Smart Calendar will do that for you, so that you can place a call to tell someone that your flight has been delayed or you’re stuck at the office.

Tempo Smart Calendar is designed to fill in the gaps and suggest locations, contacts, emails, and documents, even if only minimal details are added to meetings and events. With a single tap, the app can dial into conference calls, handling the passcodes. It can review emails that pertain to specific meetings and events. It can open related documents such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or PDF files. And it can find an exact location without an address.

And the app can fetch driving directions, locate nearby parking, and estimate drive time. With a single tap, you can reach attendees via phone, email or text. It can send a already filled-out “running late” email or text to a whole meeting roster. It can check your flight status, browse attendees’ LinkedIn profiles, scout locations with Foursquare and Yelp, and post birthday messages to Facebook. If you’re counting up how many thumb taps Tempo Smart Calendar gets rid of, it’s a lot.

Tempo Smart Calendar can also handle tasks that are more complicated. If someone’s anniversary is coming up, it can remind you and send you a link to buy flowers.

“The calendar is where life happens, and Tempo gives people more control over their day by enhancing their calendars in a meaningful way,” said Singh, founder and CEO of Tempo AI. “We’ve designed the experience to reduce the noise that’s often associated with virtual assistants that push information to users out of context or intent. Tempo surfaces information and actions in your calendar in the context of the people you know, the places you are going, and the information you’ll need.”

Singh believes that mobile calendars (ahem, Microsoft and Google) have stagnated as simple digital representations of paper calendars. They cause “friction and hassle” for users because there is no context for any of the information in their calendar, Singh said.

Over time, Tempo Smart AI learns your habits and preferences, and it becomes more useful in making suggestions. Tempo AI uses the same kind of technology as Siri, but for now it is not voice-activated. SRI has spun out lots of firms over the years, generating billions of dollars in value over time. Tempo AI is still based within the vast hallways of SRI’s headquarters.

At some point, Tempo AI might try to modernize other productivity apps. But for now, it is focused on doing whatever it can to make your day easier. Tempo AI taps technology that can either pull data out of repositories for you, or push information that you need at the moment.

“The calendar is identifiable, it has closed intent, and it is structured,” Singh said. “This is about connecting the dots.”

The free app itself can sync to your local calendar and the address book in your iPhone. As an option, you can connect it to Google’s Gmail. Later on, Tempo AI will offer premium versions that people will pay for.

Singh said that his app will differ from competitors in that it will be open, while others are closed apps tied to one vendor’s ecosystem.

“We don’t want your data to be stuck in a silo,” he said.

Tempo AI has seven employees and it has raised seed funding from SRI.