The company said, somewhat controversially, that Apple’s app search was lacking, leaving users largely dependent on Top 25 lists that tend to reflect the size of the developer’s marketing budget more than they do relevance to the users’ needs.

It’s not the first time someone has highlighted a problem here. Indeed, there are a few companies trying to target a perceived need for app discovery. Appsfire and Quixey spring to mind, as – of course – does Chomp, which Apple bought earlier this year.

But another service that has been gearing up for around two years is Berlin-based Xyologic, whose Xyo service went into closed beta on Thursday (you can request an invite here).

Xyologic’s big selling point is the way its technology classifies apps into relatively specific genres – a strategy that it says makes it possible to understand even vaguely-expressed search queries. In a recent blog post, the firm said its work so far has shown:

• only five percent of app search queries are for specific usage functions.
• a similar amount are for specific app names.
• the vast majority are category searches.

So, using its proprietary ‘natural app category’ tech, the company has defined more than 700 app genres and more than 100 game genres. It also claims to “put some of the best and often undiscovered apps on top of the search result rankings”, and says it can make it easier for users to evaluate the quality of an app.

Right now, the Xyo beta covers Android, although iOS is coming soon. Xyologic also announced a funding round (amount undisclosed), from investors including Signia Venture Partners, Gameforge founder Klaas Kersting and Soundcloud co-founder Eric Wahlforss. Xyologic CEO Matthäus Krzykowski told me:

“This is the first app search that aims at the mainstream user. Our approach is unique in this sense that, in the last two years, we have gathered information on how users search for apps, what queries they type, how they behave.”

So how bad is the app discovery problem, really? According to Krzykowski, 0.1 percent of apps get 50 percent of the downloads.

“The situation is pretty similar on all platforms, albeit slightly better on iOS,” he added.

Sure, Krzykowski has a vested interest in pointing this out. But, at the same time, this kind of information is what’s kept the company afloat during its initial, pre-launch two years of operations. Until this new investment round, Xyologic has bootstrapped and supported itself by selling data and reports.

“We also tested older versions of our app search in partnerships with third parties where we split up the advertising revenue. We used this money to fund our innovation in app search,” Krzykowski noted, adding that, in terms of future revenues, “you will see innovative approaches to app marketing”.

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The organization set up a temporary Berlin office a few weeks ago, and on Monday it announced it is to establish a permanent base next year in the Factory, a recently-opened tech office space that houses SoundCloud and several other up-and-coming Berlin startups. What’s more, Mozilla says it’s now hiring in the city.

“We are looking forward to playing a more active role in the vibrant Berlin internet community, building for the open web right where new web trends are created,” Mozilla CFO Jim Cook said in a statement.

Now, this isn’t a coup for Berlin in the same sense as London’s recent announcements of new Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft offices. The Berlin office will be one of what the organization calls ‘Mozilla Spaces’ – an office with some paid staff, but also where Mozilla’s many volunteer contributors can come to hack or just hang out. In Europe, there are two similar ‘spaces’ already being set up in London and Paris.

It’s also hard to nail down exactly what kind of product will come out of the Berlin establishment. Barbara Hueppe, who’s in charge of setting up the new team, told me it “will not have a special focus”, and that Mozilla hoped to “attract talent that will help us drive our diverse initiatives”.

But it is a very intriguing move, particularly given the strengths of the local startup community, and the current stage in Mozilla’s own development.

A good place to go mobile

The organization is in quite a transitional phase right now. Desktop Firefox is obviously still its marquee product, but Mozilla has pulled back from developing other legacy products such as Thunderbird and is instead working on a major mobile push. Firefox OS and Firefox for Android are the two main products to look out for there.

While it’s easy to see the mobile OS space as a two-horse, iOS vs Android race, there are a couple of notable up-and-coming alternatives. Jolla is one, with its deal with China’s largest mobile retail chain, the D.Phone Group, but carriers such as Telefonica have also expressed interest in the Firefox OS. Operators want an alternative to Android at the low end, and Mozilla has a lot to play for there.

Now look at the Berlin scene — it’s crawling with mobile-focused startups such as Amen, Readmill, EyeEm and Tweek.tv. To be fair, mobile is the big thing right now, so most hubs have an excess of such firms, but the long-established presence of Nokia’s geolocation squad in Berlin has led to a particular concentration of smartphone and tablet talent in the city.

Mozilla may not have concrete plans for working with Berlin’s startup scene just yet, but Hueppe assured me that “pure proximity will lead to many good ways of cross-pollination”.

If all goes well, that cross-pollination could mean new ideas for Mozilla and new opportunities for the local scene.

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Monday saw some consolidation in the industry supplying these capabilities for low-end phones, with Swiss handset software company Myriad Group hoovering up Synchronica, the UK-based mobile messaging firm, for around £24m ($38m). The result, they say, is the world’s biggest mobile social messaging firm.

Both companies do a lot of business with carriers, supplying white label software that those operators can then preinstall on handsets and brand as they wish. Although it also helps carriers build Android apps, one of Myriad’s core services is in providing simple tools to let even cheap phones hook into social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Synchronica’s forte is in mobile messaging, again allowing non-data-enabled devices to work with push email and social networks.

This deal will create a powerhouse in the rapidly growing sector of mobile-social convergence,” Myriad CEO Simon Wilkinson said in a statement. “It will establish a global service organisation serving over 100 carriers and 25 [manufacturers] around the world. At a stroke, it increases the addressable base for our award-winning product portfolios to over 1.8 billion subscribers with pre-installation of our products in over 100 million new devices each year.”

Those are big figures, and if you look at the histories of the two companies that’s no surprise.

Myriad was formed in 2009 through the merger of Esmertec and Purple Labs, a big name in the early days of mobile Linux development. Purple Labs had already absorbed the mobile team from French handset maker Sagem and bought in the handset client software division of Openwave (the one that’s suing Apple and RIM over patents). Crucially, the Openwave deal brought in the Openwave Browser (now called the Myriad Browser) which has been installed on 2.5 billion low-end devices.

Now add to that Synchronica’s widely-used push messaging, synchronization and backup software. Synchronica has made plenty of acquisitions of its own – most recently of Nokia’s messaging business and Neustar’s instant messaging portfolio – and the result is the kind of subscriber base Wilkinson’s talking about.

Operator branded software the norm… for now

The nature and price of the Myriad-Synchronica deal (bear in mind that last year’s Nokia buy alone was worth $25 million) speaks volumes about the future of operator-branded handset software. It’ll stay the norm on very cheap devices for some time yet… but anyone jumping onto the smartphone bandwagon gets to choose their own apps — they don’t need preinstalled stuff. And smartphones are gradually taking over even that low end of the market.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that operators are giving up their fight to be the intermediaries of the mobile software world. Myriad and Synchronica’s customer base includes ATT Verizon, Vodafone, Telefónica, Orange, T-Mobile (DT), América Móvil, NTT Docomo and many others, and it’ll be doing good business for a while yet.

I’ve asked for further details of how Synchronica’s product line will fit in with what Myriad already provides, but it’s certain that the combined operation will continue targeting emerging markets in places such as Africa and Asia.

(On a related note, Openwave seems to be getting out of the product game itself, selling off its remaining ‘mediation’ and messaging products to Marlin Equity Partners. The company said on Monday that it will embark on “a multi-pronged strategy to realize the value of our unique patent portfolio”, so it looks like RIM and Apple may soon be joined by other suit victims.)

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A German startup called fruux takes the cross-platform approach, and over the last 15 months it’s picked up almost 100,000 users who want to sync without being tied to a single platform. And now that it’s also acquired a chunk of seed funding, the company’s planning to make a second version that’s more collaboration-friendly.

The original service lets people store their contacts, calendar entries and to-do lists in the cloud and synchronize them with iOS and Android mobile devices, Mac OS X systems and the open-source Thunderbird and Evolution mail clients.

CEO Dominik Tobschall told me on Wednesday that quite a few teams have already been using fruux to run pooled contact lists and calendars — a pretty kludgy way of doing things considering that it’s a service built for one, but apparently it’s good enough for some small agencies and architects.

Now the company has some extra funding (Tobschall won’t say how much, beyond the fact that it’s six figures), it hopes to have that team-friendly second app on the market by the end of 2012.

“Our biggest competitor might be iCloud, but that doesn’t help you if you have more than one user,” Tobschall said. “We’re going more the Dropbox route -– our aim is avoiding vendor lock-in and making it platform-independent, and we hope to offer our first team features within this year.”

Other plans include the addition of developer APIs and integration with more third-party services – fruux uses open standards such as CardDAV and CalDAV.

The funding came from High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF), which has also put money into the likes of Ezeep and 6wunderkinder, and netSTART Venture.

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In an effort to make that prediction a reality, Google has announced a new set of Android developer classes aimed at helping developers through a series of lessons. “Android Training,” as it’s called, contains more than 30 lessons on topics such as Battery life optimization, Improving layout performance and Designing effective navigation. One important topic, Monetizing your app, only has one lesson on mobile advertising.

Initial offerings look fairly basic, but it’s just the start, said Reto Meier, Android Developer Relations Tech Lead in a blog post:

Each class explains the steps required to solve a problem, or implement a feature, with plenty of code snippets and sample code for you to use within your own apps. We’re starting small and this is just the beginning for Android Training. Over the coming months we will be increasing the number of classes available, as well as introducing over-arching courses and sample apps to further help your development experience. Helping developers build great apps is what the Android Developer Relations team is all about, so we’re excited to see how you use these classes to make your apps even better.

This is a nice step, but there’s a lot more to be done by Google. Android is now up to 10 billion app downloads overall, at a pace of 1 billion a month, but it’s not the primary focus for developers, especially among those eager to make money. A Flurry report comparing iOS and Android earlier this week highlighted the challenges for Google. It projected that 73 percent of fourth quarter app starts will be by iOS developers, compared to 27 percent for Android. That’s consistent with previous quarters and and an improvement for Apple from the first quarter of 2011, when iOS represented 63 percent of app starts.

Apple’s 3:1 advantage is due in part to the fact that Android apps are earning 24 cents compared to every dollar made for the same app on iOS. It’s this disparity that makes it a no-brainer for many developers to start their efforts on iOS. And I’ve also heard that Apple provides better development tools, which also helps iOS attract developers.

One set of classes won’t change the equation in Android’s favor, but it shows that Google understands it needs to do more to gain developer interest. The platform is going to get plenty of attention just by its sheer size; Flurry estimates that 550,000 Android devices are now activated daily compared to an estimated 450,000 for iOS. But to really fulfill Schmidt’s vision and the potential for Android, Google will need to not only improve its developer tools and resources, but also make it easier for Android devs to make money. As long as that 3:1 revenue advantage exists for iOS, it’s going to be hard for Android to win over the hearts and minds of developers.

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Stephen Herrod - CTO, VMware at Mobilize 2011

VMware has signed deals with Verizon and Telefonica to offer its mobile virtualization products on phones provided by the operators. The net result of this deal is that employees who want to combine their work phone and their personal phone will soon be able to do so with the aid of the VMware Horizon software on their phones.

As is usual when dealing with mobile operators and corporate IT, some caveats apply. So far only Android devices will work with the Horizon hypervisor with VMware unable to offer the benefits of a hypervisor-enabled virtualization on Apple’s iOS devices including the iPad and iPhone for Verizon. Steve Herrod, the CTO of VMware, said in an interview that’s he’s happy to do it when Apple decided to let others play around with its operating system. Meanwhile he reiterated that eventually he hopes to get VMware’s Horizon product written into the Android code.

While he’s thinking big, he also avoided stealing the carriers’ thunder. So he couldn’t tell me when Verizon or Telefonica would launch the dual-mode devices, or much about how they planned to price it or sell it. He did say that Telefonica planned to offer it as a service for corporate clients, which means that Telefonica will host the management software that will control the access to the corporate side of the phone and offer it as a service for enterprise clients. Telefonica will also be offering two phone numbers for one phone, although Verizon will not.

So far Verizon will offer the service on LG phones, although VMware also has a partnership to put its hypervisor on Samsung devices as well. When asked, Herrod said he expected more partners to be announced before carriers actually launch the service. The hypervisor has to be put onto the devices before they ship from the manufacturer, although a user doesn’t have to enable it. For more on the use cases associated with having a virtualized mobile phone, check out the conversation I had with Herrod during Mobilize.

Essentially it gives the user one device, while giving the corporate bosses a sense of control and security around what apps, data and information can be accessed and stored on the device. Herrod claims that the software has “minimal, if any” impact on the phone’s battery life or responsiveness.

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The software for Android 2.0 or better devices is free (limited with ad-support) but $5.70 buys a full, ad-free edition. Just like the desktop version of Dropbox, Dropsync supports true two-way data synchronization. And since battery life is key for mobile devices, the software also allows synchronization intervals to be customized.

Upon installing Dropsync, the software explains how the two-way sync works: You have to pick at least one folder on your Android handset’s SD card to link Dropsync with your Dropbox account. Dropsync suggests the DCIM folder, which is where photos and videos are often stored, but you can choose any folder.

To test the software, I chose the Camera sub-folder on my handset and created a new folder called “Nexus Pics” on Dropbox from within the app. Once I linked the folders on my phone and in Dropbox, I hit the Sync Now button to initiate a manual sync, which put all the images from my Nexus One camera up in the cloud. Of course, this setup is just an example; I could have easily linked any two folders between Dropbox and my smartphone and the app will keep them in sync.

Aside from the 2-way sync support, I like the various customization options. You can skip the syncing of hidden files or limit the file sizes to be synced, which keeps massive files off of the phone and won’t eat through a mobile broadband plan. Autosync can be disabled or set to occur on a set schedule by choosing the hourly interval.

Dropsync also has options to sync only when the phone is plugged in, by the amount of battery charge or through Wi-Fi only if desired. In short, most, if not all, of the options you’d want in a mobile Dropbox client exist, although the free version doesn’t have as many configuration choices.

Going Pro eliminates the ads but also includes finer levels of interval control for synching and supports the synchronization of multiple Dropbox folders. The free version should give you a taste of the product, which includes many options that really ought to be in the native Dropbox client. Until that happens though, for less than $6, Dropsync is well worth the investment for Android owners who use Dropbox on a consistent basis.

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At the end of March 2011, there were 12.2 million 3G connections, even though 3G was first introduced in India in late 2009. 3G has become widely available in recent months as companies like Bharti Airtel and Vodafone have introduced their 3G services. Telegeography estimates that 3G subscriptions jumped 73 percent in the first quarter of 2011 (which ended on March 31, 2011).

In a conference call with analysts earlier this week, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs noted that Indian operators “are making plans to increase 3G coverage from over 100 cities today to over 1,000 towns by the end of the year.” What that means is that 3G will become an increasingly important way to access the Internet. Jacobs pointed out that his company was selling chips to makers of affordable handsets and devices that are using HSPA+ technologies. Some of them, like Spice G-6550, cost as little as $90. The emergence of cheap 3G phones should provide a nice boost for Google’s Android OS ecosystem, a point we noted last year.

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Update: Unit of measurement corrected in The Future of Phones.

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Graphic courtesy of Column Five Media.