Foursquare has only recently begun testing an advertising product, but the early signs are promising, said CEO and co-founder Dennis Crowley. That’s because Foursquare is becoming more of a personalized local search engine that can walk people into local stores and restaurants. Read more »
Braintree is enabling developers to start accepting payments in 30 minutes or less. The move helps it compete with PayPal and Stripe and pitch itself as a one-stop payment shop for growing merchants. Read more »
Almost a year after buying location data provider Simple Geo, app messaging platform Urban Airship is now putting its acquisition to work with a new Location Messaging Service that lets developers incorporate current and historical location data to better target in-app push notifications. Read more »
App analytics firm Distimo, in its latest monthly report, found that outside of English-speaking countries, China, Japan and South Korea have the highest proportions of free downloads and revenue from native language-only applications. That can be an opportunity for developers who translate their apps. Read more »
Cliptamatic, a new mobile video app, is designed to make sharing short premium video content easy. The app is starting with sports, election and comedy clips but will soon include TV and movie clips. Read more »
Aviary, a maker of photo editing tools for web and mobile developers, is now up to 1 billion photos edited on its platform, a year after it launched its first mobile tools. The service now has more than 2,000 partners. Read more »
Research in Motion posted a loss of $235 million on revenues of $2.9 billion. The company, which shipped 7.4 million smartphones and 130,000 tablets, beat lowered expectations and continues to sit on a good pot of cash. Read more »
Chartboost has released some comparative data on cost-per-installs and cost-per-clicks in 18 markets around the world. It’s helpful in seeing where developers might want to look to expand as they go global. Read more »
Skyfire is announcing a new mobile browser extension called Horizon that will be implemented by carriers in stock browsers. The browser offers some usefulness but may also be seen as an intrusion by operators into the browsing experience. Read more »
Rovio, the team behind Angry Birds, is launching Bad Piggies, a game told from the pig’s perspective. The game is still physics based but it doesn’t have the same visceral fun of throwing birds and bringing down structures. Read more »
911 hasn’t changed much in the mobile era but Location Labs has some ideas about it can evolve to be more intelligent and context aware. Future 911 calls could pull more real-time data about a user including their Facebook profile and other information about their location. Read more »
LevelUp is expanding its reach with a white label tool that lets merchants build their own custom app that uses LevelUp for payments and loyalty. That can help LevelUp appeal to merchants who want to offer a branded app but still connect to LevelUp’s network. Read more »
Google Play is now up to 25 billion app downloads, a little behind the pace of Apple’s App Store which hit that mark in March of this year. Google Play also has 675,000 apps overall compared to 700,000 for the App Store. Read more »
Mobile social video startup Streamweaver lets people record a video together on their smartphones with their different streams synced into one split-screen video. Unlike other video apps that are about social sharing, Streamweaver tries to make video recording fun and social. Read more »
Foursquare is making it easy for people to see where they’re friends are in real-time with new Always On notifications when a friend has checked into a location. It builds upon Foursquare’s other services for finding friends. Read more »
Indeed has been a quiet success story, becoming the No. 1 job search site in the world after launching in 2004. Now, it’s being acquired by Japan’s Recruit Co. in a deal that will create a dominant worldwide HR and recruiting service. Read more »
Two-thirds of mobile developers in a new survey believe that Facebook can get disrupted by a mobile-first startup. And most developers are unhappy with the state of HTML5. The results help explain why Facebook bought Instagram and why it has backed off supporting HTML5. Read more »
Netflix and Good Technology both completed the first pilots of NFC-equipped smartphones for building access in Silicon Valley. The tests with HID Global demonstrate some of the utility of NFC beyond payments but also highlight the remaining work to be done. Read more »
Groupon has bought New York City-based discount reservation service Savored, which offers diners up to 40 percent off their meals in exchange for making a reservation at a specific time. The acquisition complements Groupon Now, but distances Groupon even more from its core daily deals product. Read more »
Social media analytics firm Dataminr announced that it has raised a $13 million Series B round of financing. The company accesses the Twitter firehose and provides an early warning network for finance and government clients. Read more »
Facebook is turning on new streamlined carrier billing mobile web payments thanks to an integration with Bango. The payments, which can boost conversions up to 77 percent compared to 40 percent for traditional carrer billing payments, are going live in the US, UK and Germany. Read more »
App developers are at the mercy of the app store charts, which play a huge role in determining an app’s success. That prevents a lot of good apps from being discovery and can lead to chart manipulation, said a panel of experts at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference. Read more »
Error reporting is turning into a lucrative business for Exceptional Software, which runs two services Airbrake.io and Exceptional.io. Exceptional now boasts 100,000 customers like Square, Groupon, Skype and others and is profitable without taking outside funding. Read more »
While TripAdvisor first looked at building a mobile app that “didn’t suck,” it’s now looking at how deep it can go with mobile apps by taking advantage of all the capabilities of mobile devices. Read more »
Maluuba, a new voice-activated personal assistant app, is trying to give Siri and Google Now a run for their money by combining slick natural language processing with a wide array of services. The startup has raised $2 million from Samsung Ventures. Read more »
SingTel is buying social photo aggregator Pixable for $26.5 million. The New York City startup had more than 4 million downloads of its app, which used smart algorithms to help surface the most relevant pictures for users. Read more »
ESPN is building a Twitter-style stream of content from ESPN.com called SportsCenter Feed. Users can see all the stories, blog posts, videos, score updates and pictures as they go up in real time. The beta product was built using ESPN’s APIs, which open to developers. Read more »
Many of Square bigger rivals are hoping live customer support can help them compete against the startup. Square doesn’t offer a customer service line and handles questions primarily through email, forums, videos and a Twitter feed. Read more »
Online payment startup Stripe is expanding to Canada after debuting in the US last year as a simple tool for developers who want to take payments. The expansion is the first step in a plan to go global and enable payments anywhere on the Internet. Read more »
Groupon has joined the mobile payment race with Groupon Payments, which provides a mobile payment service similar to Square. It’s part of a larger effort to build up its merchants services tool and create a new business outside of daily deals. Read more »
Picture and video sharing app Mobli has raised $22 million to build out a visual platform in which users can find timely images on anything in the world. The money comes from Kazakhstan investor Kenges Rakishev and existing investors including Leonardo DiCaprio. Read more »
Facebook is testing out the ability for advertisers to buy mobile ads through Facebook on mobile apps and websites. It could be part of a larger play to build an offsite ad network. Read more »
Tabbedout, which allows restaurants to offer mobile payments to their customers, is now providing a mobile SDK so businesses with a mobile app can easily integrate Tabbedout payments instead of relying on Tabbedout’s app. Read more »
Amazon is giving Kindle Fire developers a new maps API, providing an alternative to Google Maps. This could help developers become less dependent on Google. And it may show how Amazon plans on implementing native mapping in its tablets. Read more »
Square is making it official: it has raised $200 million as part of its Series D round including $25 million from Starbucks. The money will help the company to grow as it fends off more challenges from competitors and tries to expand internationally. Read more »
Fitbit is following up its hot-selling Ultra fitness tracker with two new devices, the Fitbit Zip and Fitbit One. Both will support Bluetooth 4.0, allowing for more real-time syncing with compatible devices. Fitbit is also introducing new social tools to better motivate users. Read more »
Gamification is thought of as a hyped buzzword by skeptics, but it’s increasingly being used by corporations to incentivize consumers and motivate employees. As enterprise adoption of gamification grows, that could make gamification startups the next hot acquisition target in the coming years. Read more »
HP’s CEO Meg Whitman said that the company is working on getting back into the smartphone market. It’s another twist for a company that has had a confused smartphone strategy. While the news gives some clarity for HP, the company still has to execute. Read more »
Isis, the joint mobile payment venture from Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile, was supposed to launch in two markets this summer. But the company is delaying the roll out of the NFC-based payment system without a firm launch date to announce. Read more »
Locaid, a location-as-a-service provider is building out its services by adding the ability to determine a device’s location by IP address. Combined with its current ability to tap carrier network data for location, it allows developers and companies to better authenticate a user’s location. Read more »
