Argue all you want about the relative merits of web vs native apps, but the market is the ultimate decider. And, according to one previously stalwart web proponent, for now that means going native. Read more »
Intel Capital and others have put $9 million into Irish outfit FeedHenry, which provides a mobile app development and deployment platform, along with backend-as-a-service, for mostly enterprise customers. Read more »
Twitter has acquired Crashlytics, a company that works to improve mobile app performance and reduce bugs and crashes among other popular startups. The two companies announced Monday that the Cambridge-baseds startup will be joining up with Twitter. Read more »
PlayHaven, a monetization and customer management platform for mobile game developers, has raised $8 million led by GGV Capital. The company is working to build out its service by adding more customer insights. And it’s looking to expand to Europe and Asia. Read more »
UPDATED: Color is not shutting down, said a company spokesman, contrary to a report earlier today that Color was “winding down” its business. Color has gotten its share of criticism after a failed launch and $41 million in funding. Read more »
Mixel started life as an iPad app for making beautiful collages. But the app failed to find a following because it was too intimidating and involving for casual users. Now, the team behind Mixel is finding much more success with an iPhone app. Read more »
Gojee has been using ingredient data to recommend recipes and track pantry staples on the web for a year. Now it’s final ready to make its service portable. Today it launched mobile apps for Android, the iPhone and the iPad. Read more »
Food Network is continuing its push into mobile media, this time with a new restaurant finder app called On the Road. The app isn’t Yelp or Urbanspoon. It draws its content and recommendation solely from FN’s TV programming, and that’s the way Food Network likes it. Read more »
Dunkin Donuts’ first mobile app is debuting Thursday and it’s offering a way for people to pay via their iPhone or Android device. It works similar to one used by Starbucks, which has had a lot of success since it launched mobile payments. 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 »
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 »
Is there any way to stand out among the glut of social, local, mobile services? Everplaces and Circleme, two new European startups just coming out of private beta, certainly hope so — and both are attempting to put their own twist on the combination of people and places. Read more »
The market for app discovery has gotten increasingly crowded with all kinds of competitors and yet, the rush to solve the problem continues. The latest example is App-o-Day, a new free app of the day service from former Outfit7 CEO Andrej Nabergoj. Read more »
Lemon, a personal spending tracker service, has proven pretty popular with 1 million users signing up in less than four months. Now, the company is looking to go beyond just receipt storage into Mint territory with an update that helps categorize and total up spending. Read more »
Apps are, at the end of the day, very personal pieces of software. And your favorite mobile app isn’t mine. So we decided to poll the staff here at GigaOM to see what apps changed our lives in 2011. Read more »
Sincerely, the company aimed at making it easy to get printed copies of the photos you take on mobile devices, has launched a new app called Dotti meant to replicate the experience of using a disposable camera, cementing the trend of 1990s nostalgia in mobile apps. Read more »
Life360, a mobile family safety app, has been on a tear and is now up to 10 million users. That growth has helped the San Francisco start-up pull in a $3.5 million Series A round from a host of investors. Read more »
Foursquare is poised to relaunch its Add to Foursquare feature as Save to Foursquare in the next month. It will allow users on the web to save locations to their Foursquare app when they use an embeddable button, which has been simplified for publishers. Read more »
Pageonce was one of the first iPhone apps and has built a following of more than 5 million users as a mobile financial service letting people track their bills from their smartphone. But the service has been missing one big thing until today: mobile bill pay. Read more »
Waze, the smart crowd-source traffic information application, has picked up $30 million in a Series C round of funding as it looks to capitalize on a burgeoning international opportunity, particularly in China. The company has also hit 7 million users around the world. Read more »
CityPockets, which organizes daily deals from about 30 sites including Groupon, Living Social and others, is now improving its mobile application to include not only a digital wallet but also a secondary market for daily deals that people can search for, buy and redeem instantly. Read more »
In the increasingly crowded mobile-app space, promotional apps are easily ignored: apps you might download and forget about a few days later, remembering them only to delete them later on. QMx Interactive would like to change all of that with a new sci-fi tie-in. Read more »
Fresh off its $50 million in funding, note-taking and memory service Evernote is preparing for its first-ever developer conference next month, where it will outline its broader strategy and how it plans on becoming a 100-year company by building a productivity platform. Read more »
Zaarly, a new start-up that is launching today, is hoping to speed up the pace of local commerce with a new mobile application that helps bring buyers of services and goods together with local sellers and providers in real time. Read more »
Life360, a family safety app, has been on a six-month tear, hitting 2 million families using the service. The growth highlights the work done to drive daily engagement, but more importantly, underscores the rise of smartphones and their increasing use as family utility tools. Read more »
In acquiring Israeli mobile app developer Snaptu, Facebook gained three things: a strong feature phone development platform, a presence in the white-hot Israeli startup scene and a team who’s development philosophy mirrors Facebook’s own. Read more »
There’s both good and bad news for Netflix subscribers on Android phones. The good news? A Netflix Android app has been leaked onto the Internet. The bad news? While you can browse, search and look at titles in your instant queue, you can’t actually stream anything. Read more »
