The true impact of the launch of the iPhone probably has as much to do with the software that was eventually created on Apple smartphone as much as that smartphone itself, thanks to developers who saw an opportunity and a revolutionary approach to mobile software. Read more »
The death spiral of Research in Motion appeared to get even more steep as the device maker reported a huge miss Thursday in its quarterly earnings and reported that its savior platform, BlackBerry 10, will not be ready until next year. Read more »
Social travel service Gogobot, is putting big pictures front and center as part of a new Pinterest-like web site redesign. But the company said it’s doing more than just helping people discover new places. It gives them the tools to get there too. Read more »
Noom, a maker of Android-based fitness and health apps, has found success with its flagship app Noom Weight Loss Coach because it doesn’t require users to enter in a lot of data. The app tries to deliver timely coaching lessons that can still motivate users. Read more »
Snapette, which launched last August with a sort of Pinterest for the real world model, is now becoming more of a resource for local merchants and brands, who can use the mobile app and its new website to alert users to products they might like. Read more »
At its I/O conference Google unveiled the next update to Android, version 4.1, aka Jelly Bean. The update, which will first become available as an over-the-air download next month, brings a lot of nice improvements and some cool enhancements to search, notifications and navigation. Read more »
Mobile payment startup Square is taking on its most requested feature: unique log-ins for multiple workers. Now, the Square Card Reader app will offer unique log-ins for up to 50 employees, so a manager can have them log-in separately without getting access to the business account. Read more »
Placecast, which allows retail brands and operators to push out location-based offers, is now making its ShopAlerts technology available to mobile payment and mobile wallet providers. Retailers, operators or credit card companies with existing payment apps will be able to incorporate ShopAlerts into their apps. Read more »
VeriFone is taking its newly launched SAIL mobile payment product to Android smartphones after debuting on the iPhone last month. The move helps VeriFone better compete with Square, an early mobile payment leader and PayPal Here, which are both available on iPhones and Android. Read more »
App users are a flaky group, easily discarding apps in favor of the hot new thing. But new data suggests they are developing more loyal toward apps, abandoning them less frequently and visiting their favorite apps more often, according to app analytics firm Localytics. Read more »
CasaHop, the first start-up out of former Huffington Post CTO Paul Berry’s incubator SoHo Tech Labs, has raised $1.2 million, led by First Round Capital, with participation from Betaworks, Lerer Ventures and a number of individual investors. The site helps users exchange homes. Read more »
PayPal is undertaking a big reorganization that simplifies the company’s structure around a mobile theme. It’s part of a larger effort to build a more unified experience for customers that is easier to use across the company’s different access points. Read more »
Near field communication, the wireless technology that’s forever been poised to break out, may finally get the big push it needs. Code pulled from two iPhone prototypes suggest that upcoming iPhones will have NFC controllers connected to the power management unit, according to a new report. Read more »
The house of the future will be outfitted with hundreds of products created on 3-D printers, everything from jewelry and home decor items to eventually more complex items like furniture or digital devices. It’s coming sooner than people think, said Peter Weijmarshausen, the CEO of Shapeways. Read more »
Evernote is increasingly looking at how to educate people on the many uses of Evernote and its family of products. That’s one of the big themes of Evernote’s second annual Trunk Conference in August, which will feature a lifestyle series for users. Read more »
Flipboard, Apple’s 2010 iPad app of the year, is finally launching on Android phones worldwide and will also be available on the Kindle Fire and on Nook tablets. The personalized news magazine app will also incorporate Google+ and YouTube for the first time. Read more »
Platform as a Service has a bright future but one of the big concerns is vendor lock-in, preventing companies from making their applications portable. That’s going to be one of the big challenges for PaaS to grow. Read more »
Hookflash is launching an iPad app by the same name Thursday that integrates LinkedIn’s directory, giving business users a free over-the-top alternative for voice, HD video and messaging. It’s the first communications app to build upon LinkedIn’s social graph. Read more »
Livestar, a new iPhone app, makes it easy to find the two kinds of recommendations that matter most to many users: friend suggestions and professional reviews. The app from former Microsoft exec Fritz Lanman serves as a sort of search engine, Q&A platform and review aggregator. Read more »
PayPal, one of the first companies to offer a bug reporting program, is following the lead of Google, Facebook and Mozilla and is now upping the ante with a paid bug bounty program, which will reward researchers for finding holes in PayPal.com. Read more »
Tumblr’s iPhone app has gotten a major redesign that introduces more robust blogging features and new speed enhancements. Tumblr still doesn’t have a dedicated iPad app but the new 3.0 update should provide a lot of improved functionality for fans of the mobile app. Read more »
BancBox is formally launching its payment platform today, offering not just the ability to accept credit card and other payments, but also hold the funds in stored accounts and move it around between financial institutions, all in compliance with regulatory requirements. Read more »
Waze, the crowdsourced traffic app, is trying to save people money as well as time. The company is unveiling a discount fuel service that lets users receive 5-10 cents off each gallon they buy from more than 200,000 gas stations across the country. Read more »
Smule, whose Ocarina app turned the iPhone into a digital flute, is following up its Hall of Fame app with Ocarina 2, which is designed to teach people to play songs for a price. Users can prompted like Guitar Hero to press buttons that create music. Read more »
955 Dreams, whose Band of the Day app was Apple’s App of the Year runner up, is now letting other publishers make use of its smarts by releasing a publishing platform as well as an ad engine so content owners can create their own magazine-style apps. Read more »
Mobile payment start-up Square is working to fill out its menu of services and today it’s revealing new loyalty, inventory, analytics and discovery tools for Square Register and Pay with Square, helping Square appeal to a wider number of merchants. Read more »
Korea’s future as a startup hub is still a work in progress but I see a lot of reasons to be optimistic about companies emerging from this country of 50 million people. Here are four start-ups that caught my attention at the BeLaunch conference last week. Read more »
Danfung Dennis, a war photographer whose company Condition One is set to graduate from TechStars’ New York class today, has created a video technology that lets people create immersive video that can capture 180 degrees of view and can be manipulated with swipes or an accelerometer. Read more »
Samsung is trying to champion near field communication and is introducing new programmable NFC tags called TecTiles that work with a new mobile application on NFC-enabled Android devices. Users can program that tags to do 25 different tasks. Read more »
Lemon, a mobile expense receipt tracker, isn’t just interested in helping people organize their receipts by taking pictures of them. It is looking at becoming a full mobile wallet for users and it’s just raised $8 million to go after that goal. Read more »
Jim Fowler, who sold his crowd-sourced business contact data company Jigsaw to Salesforce for $175 million in 2010, is back and he’s applying a crowd-sourced model to competitive intelligence, using a team of freelance researchers to build business reports on private companies. Read more »
South Korea is building a start-up ecosystem, hoping to create some of the innovation that turned Silicon Valley into technology capital. The latest step is a two-day conference next week called beLaunch, which is equipping local entrepreneurs with important lessons and getting them to think big. Read more »
Fancy, the social discovery and commerce site, just picked up a big name user: Mark Zuckerberg. The move is interesting because Fancy competes with hot social start-up Pinterest and has figured out a way to make money through social discovery. Read more »
BMobilized, a New York City-based company, is working to help businesses get mobile with the launch of a DIY tool that converts any website into a robust HTML5-enabled mobile site that works on any device and browser combination. Read more »
After getting pelted with complaints from users about its redesign, Bitly has responded and has restored some of the simple URL shortening that made it popular to begin with. The link shortening function is easier to find and much faster to use. Read more »
Google may be poised to help bridge mobile monetization gap with the biggest integration of its AdMob acquisition to date. AdWords’ more than 1 million advertisers will now be able to extend their campaigns to AdMob’s network of 300,000 mobile apps. Read more »
LevelUp, the local loyalty and payment app, is getting $12 million to expand the service nationwide. The service, which is an offshoot of location start-up SCVNGR, now has 200,000 users, who are spending $2 million a month with the app. Read more »
Mobile Q&A app Thumb is generating crazy engagement with users spending almost four hours a month on the app. Now, the app is evolving to allow its users to become more expressive and social, making Thumb more of a full-fledged social netwok for opinions. Read more »
Foursquare’s ambitions to become the primary recommendation resource for users is the driving vision behind the latest update to its iOS and Android apps, which include a host of improvements to its Explore feature and an improved social structure that encourages more interaction. Read more »
Paul Berry, the former CTO of the Huffington Post, is pulling back the covers today on his stealth social publishing start-up RebelMouse, a publishing tool that lets people pull in and present their Twitter and Facebook content and mix it with stuff from the web. Read more »
