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

You’ve come a long way, baby.

The Weather Company announced this morning that its tablet and smartphone apps have been downloaded over 100 million times and that it is launching a updated service. My Friends’ Weather, which is integrated into those 100 million apps, will alert people to major weather events and breaking alerts that might be affecting their friends.

A hundred million apps is a pretty significant milestone, and it highlights the digital achievements of a company that once was known as the weather “channel.” It’s a success story for old media in a new era.

How did the old media company do it?

“We focused on an unusual aspect of mobile: What’s the habit that we’re trying to capture for users,” Cameron Clayton, The Weather Company’s head of mobile, told me this morning. “That’s really what’s driven our downloads but also our engagement. Average users visit 34 times a month … more than once a day. The question was: How do we become like your wristwatch … so essential that even if you know the answer you still check it?”

The Weather Company’s digital prowess was on display late last year when Hurricane Sandy pounded the Eastern Seaboard. The company had a record day on October 29, with almost 300 million pageviews on its site, 125 million views on its apps, and 9.6 million views on its YouTube channel. A week after, CIO Bryson Koehler told me that they saw a 1,000 percent traffic spike during Sandy, including a period when the company was serving a staggering 110 gigabytes of data each and every second.

The mobile portion of that record was broken just a couple of months later at Christmas, as new device owners checked wintry weather conditions, generating 137.5 million pageviews on apps on December 26.

With 100 million downloads, it’s no surprise that the company’s app is the top weather app on iOS and Android, as well as one of the top overall downloads. The company jumped on mobile quickly, originally releasing an app for iOS in 2007 — just after the iPhone’s launch — and an Android app in 2008.

The new My Friends’ Weather, which the company originally launched this past summer, will now alert you when Facebook friends might be affected by extreme weather conditions. Working with Travelers, the insurance company, My Friends’ Weather shows friends in areas where a National Weather Service alert bulletin has been issued.

That will no doubt be a favorite feature of grannies and moms, but it’s not just about worrywarts. The goal is to connect that circle of friends and family that you really care about, Clayton told me.

“I’m from New Zealand and a buddy lives in Hawaii,” he said. “We hadn’t spoken in a year when all of a sudden I saw a heavy surf alert for Hawaii. So I sent him a note: I hope you’re out in this surf. Three hours later I received a reply … he had been out, and the surfing was epic. We hadn’t spoken in a year … and that’s the sort of thing we want to do for everyone who comes.”

A hundred million apps, now with social. And surfing.

photo credit: lrargerich via photopin cc

Flipboard has announced a new milestone: The social tablet app has hit 20 million users and is gaining new faces at a rate of one new signup per second.

The two-year-old startup celebrated with a stats-bragging infographic, which we’ve included below.

“Just the last year alone makes our bones hurt,” the team wrote today on the company blog.

“We launched iPhone and smartphone editions; debuted features like Cover Stories, audio, and shopping; added seven new social networks; forged partnerships with publishers like The New York Times, and localized into eight languages.”

Still, the past year hasn’t been all wine and roses for Flipboard. The app’s gorgeous aesthetic showed up in scores of imitative competitor applications, making new-school social browsers a suddenly crowded market.

And while some publishers were getting onboard, others, including Wired and the New Yorker, were pulling back from the app and making their Flipboard content less potent.

While we were happy to see Flipboard finally come to Android, we were disappointed that the app didn’t offer Android tablet support, with Flipboard exec Marci McCue telling journos that as far as this startup was concerned, “right now, the [tablet] market is the iPad.”

Here’s a deeper look at Flipboard’s birthday stats:

Popular music streaming service Spotify has landed on the Kindle Fire, giving it yet another platform to attract users.

Spotify recently announced that it has reached more than 4 million paying subscribers and 15 million total active users. That’s a 25 percent paid user growth in just eight months. Part of that stellar growth stems from its availability across desktops, Macs, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry. Now it hopes to attract the Kindle Fire crowd to the service.

Notably, the Kindle Fire app includes free Pandora-like radio, so even if you’re not a paying Spotify customer, you can still get some usage out of the app. The radio app allows you to generate stations from artists or songs. Free users will have advertisements and won’t have unlimited skips, but premium users will have no ads and unlimited skips.

The app also includes the following features:

· Full support for Android 4.0
· Free mobile free radio
· Slide-out navigation
· Social features – check out friends’ profile pages and playlists on the go
· Artist imagery in high resolution
· Related artist view – available for the first time on mobile
· ‘Extreme’ sound quality setting for 320 kbps listening

Photo credit: file404/Shutterstock

Google+ is better than Facebook — at mobile.

Google released a tablet version of its mobile application for the Google+ social network at its Google I/O developer conference. And even though Vic Gundotra’s Google+ presentation was the least exciting and most interruptible portion of the keynote, the tablet application, available for Android and soon for iPad, knocked my socks off.

I couldn’t help but think: This is how a current social network should look on a touch-screen device. So beautiful, so alive with color, so fluid, and so dynamic in its visual delivery of stories is Google+ in tablet form, that the app makes Facebook’s mobile applications look as if they were built in the MySpace era.

Specifically, I love the look of the stream, which now styles content based on popularity (+1s and comments), type (photos, videos, URLs), and the orientation of your device (I’m partial to the landscape view). The tablet app is even more bold and beautiful in design than the recently released iPhone app. The only thing missing? People.

I wasn’t the only one who thought so. In chatting with Altimeter Group mobile analyst Chris Silva about the application, I discovered that he too found Google to be more avant garde than Facebook in an area that Facebook should know best.

“[The app] definitely shows the prowess that Google has over Facebook in terms of mobile design and in creating a captivating mobile experience,” Silva said.

“Facebook … has a potentially, comparatively better arsenal of mobile development talent on board,” he added. “Here’s Google doing all this great development work on mobile with largely internal talent, and Facebook that’s gone out and spent a billion dollars on Instagram, made all these other acquisitions … and still hasn’t yet created that experience that makes me say, ‘wow.’”

As any Facebook user knows, the mobile experience is quite slow, clunky, and choppy when it works. Sometimes the app is barely functional at all.

“It’s funny that the leading social network … is completely lacking in mobile design, while the social network that’s leading in mobile design seems to be at a stasis in terms of growing its users,” said Silva in the most astute observation of all.

It certainly makes sense for Google to invest in building a great mobile experience. Not only is the entire world trading in the web for mobile, but Google+ is itself a social network that sees more mobile engagement than it does desktop engagement.

“We now have more users engaging with Google+ from mobile than desktop. That’s a significant situation, and we take it seriously,” Gundotra said on stage during the keynote.

But here’s the caveat: Silva thinks the app, even in all its glory, boils down to just a bright, shiny object. That means Google+ poses no immediate threat to Facebook.

“Right now, there’s still no reason [for Google+] to displace Facebook as the social network of record,” Silva said.

So while Google can claim that G+ has 150 million monthly active users and that active users are spending 12 minutes per day in the stream, Silva remains underwhelmed.

“[Google+ users] can be engaged for two, three, four, five hours a day. They’re still a small segment of the social networking population. I don’t see anything that’s compelling enough to change how big that slice of pie is for Google.”

But make no mistake, mobile is Facebook Achilles’ heel, and it certainly doesn’t look good for the newly public company to lose to Google in a mobile face-off.

Design is determining the winners in everything mobile. The most successful players are focusing on one thing: How to make products, services, and devices as compelling and delightful as possible – visually, and experientially. MobileBeat 2012, July 10-11 in San Francisco , is assembling the most elite minds to debate how UI/UX is transforming every aspect of the mobile economy, and where the opportunities lie. Register here.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

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

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

Astronomy Picture of the Day by Concentric Sky

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

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

Al Gore — Our Choice

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

iTunes ($4.99); Demo video

National Geographic & Fotopedia

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

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

Dreams of Burma: iTunes (Free)

Above France: iTunes (Free)

National Geographic; Google Play (Free)

Living Earth World Clock

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

iTunes ($0.99)

deviantART Muro

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

On the web (Free); Demo video on Chrome

The Numberlys

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

iTunes ($5.99); Video

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Amazon’s ridiculously hyped Kindle Fire tablet will launch next week with apps from Netflix, Facebook, Rovio, Electronic Arts, PopCap and more, with several thousand apps available in total, the company announced.

The Kindle Fire, like the Nook Color and some other Android-based tablets, doesn’t have access to the Android Marketplace, so it must provide a separate channel for apps. Thankfully, Amazon already has its own Amazon Appstore for Android, which has been accumulating apps since March.

Big-name apps that will be available on day one and run on the Kindle Fire include Angry Birds, Bloomberg, Cut the Rope, Doodle Jump, Fruit Ninja, IMDb Movies & TV, Jenga, LinkedIn, Pandora, Plants vs Zombies, Pulse, Quickoffice Pro, Twitter, The Weather Channel and Zillow.

Launching with support from such heavy hitters will help keep the Kindle Fire more competitive in the apps department against the Apple iPad 2 and Android tablets that can access the Android marketplace. The apps should also help keep the tablet at the top of consumers’ minds in the face of the B&N Nook Tablet launch, which will begin shipping just a few days after the Kindle Fire launches.

The Kindle Fire launches Nov. 15 and runs $199. It will feature a 7-inch screen with 1024 x 600 resolution, TI OMAP4 dual-core processor and 8GB of on-board storage.

Your move, Nook Tablet.

Ever since the launch of The Daily in February, people have wondered just how well an iPad-only publication could do when there are so many news sites available and many established news brands with their own iPad apps. The New Yorker iPad app, for example, has more than 100,000 iPad readers, with more than 20,000 exclusive subscribers on the iPad and more than 75,000 print subscribers using the app as well. An iPad-only New Yorker subscription runs $59.99 a year.

Even with the positive-looking subscriber numbers, The Daily is far from having a sustainable business model in its current state. The publication charges $0.99 a week for access, so with 80,000 paying subscribers it brings in about $80,000 a week. But it costs $500,000 a week to run, so it will take time to attract enough subscribers for it to break even.

So far The Daily has offered its content only to iPad owners, but it will soon launch an Android version that can run on other tablets. Those will include 10-inch Android tablets like the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and 7-inch tablets like the just-announced Amazon Kindle Fire. Availability on the Kindle Fire and other Android tablets should help the publication attract more subscribers.

The Daily’s readers spend between 20 and 30 minutes reading the app each day and view around 40 pages of the 120 pages published daily, according to Localytics. Those are promising engagement numbers and are an indication readers will continue to consume Daily content regularly.

What do you think of The Daily? Do you think an Android launch will help it build a larger following?