Android app downloads are expected to overtake iPhone apps this year for the first time, according to research firm Ovum, and will nearly double iPhone downloads by 2016. The growth in Android app downloads could have big implications for freemium app developers. Read more »
New data from app analytics firm Flurry found that younger users spend more time in freemium apps but don’t plunk down as much money while older users are the opposite, less free with their time but more likely to open up their wallets. Read more »
Former Ning CEO Gina Bianchini has launched a new social application called Mightybell, which tries to help people create, achieve and share experiences using step-by-step actions. The idea of Mightybell is to break up a specific goal into smaller steps, allowing people to experience something incrementally. Read more »
Echoecho, a Los Angeles–based startup, lets people request location updates from friends in their phone address book, who can decide whether to respond with their coordinates. The company announced Thursday that it has raised $750,000 in seed funding from Google Ventures and UK-based PROFounders Capital. Read more »
Gamification is growing up. First it got its own conference, a new certification program and now consolidation. BigDoor, a gamified loyalty platform used in hundreds of websites, is announcing it’s buying up web check-in rewards provider OneTrueFan. Read more »
Google is apparently putting its new Motorola patents to work, transferring some of them to HTC, who has turned around and sued Apple for patent infringement. The move by HTC escalates the fighting between the Apple and HTC and marks a more aggressive stance by Google. Read more »
Flush with $30 million in new funding, mobile advertising and monetization company Tapjoy is on an executive hiring spree and the latest addition is Peter Dille, the former senior vice president of Sony Computer Entertainment America who helped launch the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Network. Read more »
Canadian carrier Rogers has filed to become a bank under Canada’s Federal Bank Act, which will allow it to pursue more mobile payments services and a “niche credit card opportunity” for consumers. Expect more carriers to go the same route as the mobile payment opportunity explodes. Read more »
This year, much of the promise of mobile payments seems like it is finally coming together. GigaOM chose 25 mobile payments companies who are exerting the most influence in the mobile payment space, showing where it is and where it’s going. Read more »
Seven years after launching anarchic image board site 4chan, Christopher Poole unveiled Canvas in January, a re-imagined message board that takes the learnings of 4chan and applies them to a more mainstream community. Now, Canvas, which has been in private beta, is open to the public. Read more »
The Pew Internet Project found that 28 percent of American adults use some form of mobile and social location-based services to get directions, recommendations or check into a location. But Pew found that only 4 percent of adults use their phones specifically for check-ins alone. Read more »
Whether to go web app or native may soon become a moot point with the release of new app platform and delivery network from Strobe, which allows developers to build an app in HTML5 and deploy it as both a web and native app. Read more »
Yipit, a New York City-based deals aggregator and recommendation service, is growing fast and leveraging its wide knowledge of the tumultuous daily deals market. The company is not just rounding up deals, it’s also selling its data insights about this fast-growing market. Read more »
PlayHaven, a San Francisco start-up is looking to bring the real-time web to mobile marketing with a new platform that brings the dynamism of the web to mobile ads. The new platform gives mobile game developers the ability to react quickly to their shifting needs. Read more »
Happy Cloud, a start-up which is trying to speed up game downloads and make them almost instantly playable like streaming gaming services using progressive download technology, has partnered with content delivery network Akamai to boost its performance and make games playable within a couple minutes. Read more »
Last year Nielsen predicted that by the end of 2011, smartphones will overtake feature phones in market share in the U.S. That may be optimistic, but the advance of smartphones continues unabated, with smartphones now representing 40 percent of all mobile phones in the U.S. Read more »
AT&T’s $39 billion bid isn’t over with the Department of Justice’s decision to file suit agains the merger. But it raises a lot of uncertainty around the deal and the possibility that it might not go through. Here are some thoughts on possible outcomes for T-Mobile. Read more »
The Department of Justice move to block the AT&T-T-Mobile merger has thrown a major wrench in the $39 billion acquisition, which is far from derailed. The deal is much more uncertain now that the DOJ is suing to stop the deal. Here’s what the web is saying. Read more »
Crowdbooster, a Y Combinator start-up, is publicly launching a new social media optimization platform that pairs analytics with tailored recommendations about how to employ social media. The company, which just raised seed funding, is looking to stand out by telling customers what to do and when. Read more »
Samsung finally welcomed its Galaxy S II to the U.S., unveiling three separate models for AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile that will do battle with Apple’s iPhone. The smartphones should continue the momentum for Samsung, which sold 5 million Galaxy S II’s in the first 85 days. Read more »
Onavo, a clever free mobile application that compresses data on iOS, is now turning its eyes toward the data-hungry Android platform. Onavo Lite does not apply Onavo’s full data-compression technology, but provides some helpful data tracking and management tools that can help limit data usage. Read more »
HP’s decision to kill off its nascent tablet effort was stunning, but at least it seemed decisive. But now the company is muddying the waters by suggesting that the fate of the TouchPad isn’t sealed. HP’s Todd Bradley said the company could still resurrect the device. Read more »
Mobile payments start-up Boku has signed a deal with Telefonica, the huge mobile carrier with almost 300 million subscribers, who will use Boku to power its payment API for BlueVia, its global developer program. It comes a week after Boku secured deals with two French carriers. Read more »
AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile are reportedly poised to invest $100 million in their joint mobile payment venture called Isis, a near field communication-based contactless payment system that will do battle in the increasingly competitive mobile payments market that includes Google Wallet, Square and others. Read more »
Samsung, the South Korean electronics giant unveiled ChatON today, a multi-media group messaging app that will debut in October on its own Bada OS and will also appear on other platforms such as iOS, Android and BlackBerry. It will compete in a very crowded market. Read more »
Quixey, an app search engine with initial seed funding from Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, has just announced $3.8 million in new funding. The company is trying to capitalize on the boom in apps, which is opening up opportunities not just for developers but app discovery services. Read more »
Facebook’s big bid to take on Groupon and other deal sites is coming to an end, at least for now. The company said in a statement to Reuters that it is killing Deals in the coming weeks after four months of testing. Read more »
USC Annenberg Innovation Lab launched a film forecaster last month that utilizes IBM’s BigSheets analytics tool. It showed that Big Data analysis is something that can be done by non-technical people and it underscores the promise of data analysis when it reaches the masses. Read more »
As location-based services grow up, we’re seeing that games are not the appealing part of location and increasingly it seems like start-ups are acknowledging that games are tough to build a business on. Gowalla seemed to acknowledge that by killing its virtual items feature today. Read more »
Diffbot is trying help developers build apps that read the web like humans. The company’s technology uses visual learning robotics and artificial intelligence to view web content visually, helping apps analyze web data like humans. The company is releasing its first APIs to developers today. Read more »
Skype is helping introduce its third-party apps to consumers with a new app directory that lets people browse and access apps that are built on Skype’s API. The directory features dozens of free and paid apps that are available on both Windows and Mac. Read more »
New Nielsen data suggests that e-readers are more popular with women while guys prefer their tablets. Smartphones are now equally popular between the sexes. According to Nielsen’s second-quarter survey, 61 percent of e-reader owners are women while men make up 57 percent of tablet owners. Read more »
Mobile video provider Qik hasn’t lost a step since getting bought by Skype and said its user base has doubled to 10 million users since the purchase was announced in January. The company is also releasing Qik Premium for Android users. Read more »
Mobile developer Gameview Studios said average revenue per user for its casual game Tap Fish is comparable between iOS and Android, and on some days Android is 30 percent higher than iOS. It shows that Android is closing the revenue gap on iOS. Read more »
Pixable is trying to tame the explosion of social photo sharing by applying search engine intelligence to organizing photos, helping people make sense of all the pictures that are flying back and forth within their various social networks. It added support for Twitter photos on Wednesday. Read more »
StackMob, a mobile backend provider for developers, is integrating with cloud platform Heroku, extending its services to Heroku’s Ruby developers. The partnership allows StackMob to expand the languages it supports beyond Java, Scala and Clojure to include Ruby and later, Node.js. Read more »
Obvious Corp, a new venture launched by Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone, has announced its first partnership with Lift, a startup founded by entrepreneurs Tony Stubblebine and Jon Crosby, who are looking to encourage human potential through positive reinforcement. Read more »
Start-up DoubleRecall is turning paywalls into branding opportunities that give consumers access to premium content on websites and mobile apps if they type out a few words from a sponsor message. The model boosts brand recognition, drives higher revenue for publishers and gives users free content. Read more »
ARM Holdings is trying to quiet speculation again that the UK chip designer might be acquired, this time by Intel or Oracle. The company has been the focus of rumors before, and with the rise of mobile devices and the slow growth of computers, it’s understandable. Read more »
McAfee said Android took the top spot in mobile malware attacks in the second quarter, growing 76 percent from last quarter, moving past Symbian OS and J2ME. Android had 44 attacks last quarter, compared to 14 for J2ME and 4 each for Symbian and Blackberry. Read more »
