VMware was already an investor along with Kernel Capital and Enterprise Ireland, and all three have participated in the new round as well. Intel has however taken the lead this time with ACT Venture Capital also joining in.

FeedHenry serves business customers that want to develop and deploy in-house mobile apps. In February the company partnered up with Telefonica, allowing the bundling of FeedHenry’s platform with the telco’s infrastructure-as-a-service platform, Instant Servers, for the benefit of European customers.

According to Marcos Battisti, Intel Capital’s managing director for Western Europe and Israel, the investment will help FeedHenry expand internationally:

“The mobile application market segment for enterprise is at a tipping point and those companies delivering a comprehensive solution that provide both an end to end mobile development strategy and a way to implement applications easily and securely will be at the forefront of the market segment.”

FeedHenry’s rivals include firms such as Antenna Software and SAP. The Irish firm’s particular selling point is flexibility, allowing deployment of its Mobile Application Platform to public, private and hybrid clouds. Apps developed on the platform can also be built once then rolled out to iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone devices.

The company also provides “backend-as-a-service” functionality, with server-side code based on Node.js, as well as app management tools and analytics. There’s been considerable activity in that BaaS market with Salesforce.com and Rackspace adding mobile backend capabilities there and Facebook buying Parse just last week.

It should be noted that this is far from the first investment Intel Capital has made in this space. Just this January, it also put $4.6 million into enterprise mobile app deployment firm Apperian. And, in February, parent company Intel bought the mobile app development tools division of AppMobi.

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Crashlytics wrote on the company blog Monday about their plans for mobile app development in tandem with Twitter:

We built Crashlytics to deliver the world’s most powerful and lightest-weight crash reporting solution. With us, developers gain instant visibility into the precise line of code that caused a crash, enabling them to more easily fix issues. Since our iOS launch, we’ve had the privilege of working with thousands of incredible app developers, from those building independent passion-projects to many of the top iOS apps available today – Twitter, Vine, Yelp, Kayak, TaskRabbit, and Waze, to name just a few.

Going forward, we’re thrilled to work with the incredible team at Twitter. We share a passion for innovating on mobile and building world-class applications. Joining forces will accelerate our build-out, allowing us to leverage Twitter’s infrastructure to deliver new features faster than ever.

The Crashlytics team hails from Cambridge, and the Boston Globe profiled the company in April 2012, where the founders discussed their motivation for starting the company to help other startups understand what was causing crashes on mobile. Presumably Crashlytics will be working on Twitter’s mobile app to improve performance, which is crucial as Twitter tries to improve reliability and scales out the company going forward.

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The latest funding was led by new investor GGV Capital, with help from existing investors e.Ventures and Tandem Entrepreneurs, and comes on top of $3 million previously raised. I caught up with PlayHaven last year when the company upgraded its platform to handle real-time messaging through HTML5 overlay windows. The improved platform enabled developers to shift quickly between generating revenue through ads, promoting their other apps and getting users engaged through rewards and incentives.

PlayHaven wants to use some of the funds to build out its consumer insights and customer management tools. The company’s overall goal is to help developers maximize the lifetime value of their players.

This is actually the third business model for PlayHaven, which started out as a social network for gamers called MyGameMug before moving onto to create communities for mobile games. PlayHaven competes against companies such as Tapjoy, Chartboost, Flurry and others who are helping developers better monetize their games.

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But the company isn’t dead yet, said a spokesperson. “Color is not shutting down,” the spokesperson told me.

UPDATE II: The Next Web, quoting trusted sources, reported that Apple is about to buy Color for a price in the high double digits. Apple bought Nguyen’s previous startup Lala for $80 million and Apple SVP of internet services and software Eddy Cue knows Nguyen. (Original story continues below)

The report of Color’s closure was first reported by Venturebeat, which cited a company email sent to employees. In it, the company apparently announced to employees that “last week, the Board and major shareholders voted to wind down the company.” But we’ve heard from a couple of people who said that employees there have not received the email. The company is now trying to investigate where the email information may have come from.

UPDATE I: Venturebeat said the email was sent by Color’s vice president of finance Andrew Urushima and that it can’t confirm that more than one employee received it.

Make no mistake, Color is going through a lot of upheavals. Nguyen hasn’t been with the company for about three months, though he continues to retain the title CEO. The size of the staff has fallen from about 50 people earlier in the spring to a staff somewhere in the 30s now. And morale took a hit after Nguyen stepped back from day to day duties, sources have told me.

But the company has a deal with Verizon signed in May to embed its mobile video sharing app on certain Android devices. I’m told that the deal is still in place and Color is working on new product plans. It’s still possible, of course, that Color or its backers could call it quits all the same. But a lack of money probably isn’t the issue. Nguyen said earlier this year that Color had enough money for five or six years.

That’s as a result of Color’s huge $41 million funding last year from Sequoia, which was trumpeted at the same time it launched what was originally a photo sharing app. The app’s failure to catch on with consumers and the cocky promotion-style of Nguyen made Color the startup everyone loved to hate. But does it mean Color is doomed? It might be ultimately if no one can make Color’s pivot toward live video sharing work. And now with more founders stepping back, it doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence. But it sounds like people will have to wait a little more before they break out their favorite Color jokes.

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Vinh’s company Lascaux had already started working on a Mixel iPhone app and that soon became the sole focus of the company, which announced in August that it was ending support for the iPad app. Less than a week later, Mixel quietly pushed out an iPhone app that was much less complicated and allowed users to automatically create collages and share them from their phone. While the iPad app was more involved and allowed people to cut out images from pictures, manually place and size images and remix other collages, the iPhone app creates simpler collages with less work.

Even without a big press push or marketing campaign, Mixel’s iPhone app has gotten more than 10 times as many downloads as the iPad app. And it’s been featured twice by the Apple App Store, recognition that the iPad app never received. Khoi declined to share download numbers and said Mixel is still not a viral hit a la Instagram. But it’s now on much stronger footing. Here’s some of the lessons he shared with me:

Creative friction kills: The iPad app was impressive to use but it required a level of creative commitment that scared off everyone but the most dedicated users. The iPhone app fixes that by easily allowing people to import pictures and automatically designing a collage for them. Users can shuffle the pictures, pick from several styles, tweak the layout and contribute to friends collages. But they don’t have to do much work to create a finished product.

Sharing is as important as creation: While Mixel originally helped people create more intricate collages, the iPhone app is much more designed around sharing. Vinh said that Instragram’s example showed that while you first want to make something that looks good, you have to make it easy for people to share. And personal sharing is what drives an app like Mixel.

iPad is a hard place to build a social network: Vinh was hoping to build Mixel into a social network for sharing collages. But he found that while iPad users use the Mixel app for long periods at a time, they don’t come back often enough. The iPhone, with its larger base of users and its ability to go everywhere with users, gives Mixel the ability to be more of a daily app for users. Vinh said 18-20 percent of people are coming back to the app week over week, much higher than the iPad app.

Keep it simple: Vinh said he found it was hard to explain the iPad app without providing a demonstration. That was ultimately part of the problem because it was hard for people to grasp what Mixel was all about.

Next up for Mixel is more tools to make better collages. Vinh doesn’t want to include an image search engine like the iPad app had because that made people focus on outside images. But he is looking at including access to stock images to help people tell fuller stories through their collages.

He’s also trying to use location data so people at the same event can contribute to each other’s albums. Mixel also recently added the ability for people to make their post cards and tag friends in an iPhone 5, iOS 6 optimized version of the app.

Vinh said he was “smarting” a little after the iPad app didn’t take off. But he said he’s learned a lot from the experience and feels he’s positioned to do much better with Mixel’s iPhone app.

“There are now legit reasons to bring friends into the app and to generate value for yourself,” he said. “We didn’t have that before.”

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On Wednesday, though, Gojee launched native apps for the iPad, iPhone and Android devices, which allow its users to take Gojee into the grocery stores where its recommendation engine and pantry tracking tools can prove the most useful.

For those of you unfamiliar, Gojee has aggregated about 10,000 recipes from 300 contributors ranging from crowdsourced food portals like Food52 to individual food bloggers. The site, however, doesn’t allow you to search for specific types of recipes like you would on a traditional food site like Allrecipes.com. Instead you search by key ingredient, and it then begins recommending recipes one by one where that ingredient features highly.

The recommendation service, however, truly becomes useful when paired with its pantry features. Anytime an ingredient appears, you’re given the option of adding it to your list of “I have” items. This causes Gojee to recommend dishes not just based on the key ingredient, but the items stored in your fridge or cabinets. You can even “dislike” certain ingredients.

So say you’re in the mood to cook chicken and have on hand chickpeas, lemons and olives, but you also simply despise the taste of ginger. Gojee crunches all of this variables, and then spits out recommendations for Mediterranean dishes over, for example, Asian dishes. Not only does Gojee know I would probably like those recipes, it also knows they would be the easiest recipes to shop for.

Meal planning on the fly

I’m a regular user of Gojee, and while I love its concept of ingredient-based search – as well as the recipes it serves up – I am often frustrated by its lack of portability. I’m forced to plan my meals before I leave for the store. The smartphone apps, however, now allow me to be far more spontaneous in my meal planning.

For instance, if I’m at the butcher shop and discover short ribs are on sale, I could immediately do a search for short ribs on Gojee. Not only would it recommend recipes, but it would notify me of the exact ingredients I need to buy to make those recipes. Since it knows what I already have it saves me a return trip to the store and from accidentally doubling up on staples already in my pantry.

According to Gojee CEO and co-founder Mike LaValle, Gojee always intended to make mobile a key part of its strategy, but the NYC-based startup wasn’t willing to sacrifice the aesthetics of the service just to throw a quick mobile app into iTunes.

“We want to understand how our users engage with food both physically and emotionally,” LaValle said. “We’ve been developing the mobile app since we launched the site last year. We spent that time obsessing about the design and talking to a lot of customers. We knew how we could take Gojee’s utility mobile, but the bigger challenge was how to create a natural mobile interface that would occupy a new corner of the web.”

Gojee’s meticulous efforts certainly paid off. Recipe apps on smartphones tend to be clunky affairs, shoving as many recipe recommendations, ratings and info into a small screen as possible. Gojee maintains its voluptuous web user interface in the mobile apps, offering up a simple “I crave” search bar and presenting full-screen photos of each recipe, which you can flick through one at time. Each photo has a pull up tab that allows you to preview the ingredients needed and an option to go to the recipe’s web page.

At that stage, the presentation gets a bit awkward as most of Gojee’s partners haven’t optimized their sites for mobile browsers. Gojee offers in-frame tools that allow you to easily zoom in and out on the relevant ingredients, directions and cooking times. An in-app mobile recipe template would be ideal, but that would contradict Gojee’s mission of directing users its partners’ sites. It’s a minor problem, though, in what overall is an incredibly useful and beautiful cooking app.

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Called On the Road, the app shares many features with popular foodie apps Yelp, Urbanspoon, Nosh, and Forkly, but it’s fundamentally a different animal. Rather than crowdsource information, reviews and photos, all of the content in the On the Road is drawn from the Food Networks own TV and magazine programming.

That may seem like a limiting factor, but the Food Network has a lot of programming. A search for restaurants near my north side Chicago home yielded 23 businesses within a two-mile radius – ranging from upscale establishments, diners, bakeries, and hotdog and burger joints.

While the app can be used to simply find a random place to eat, most of the features are built around FN’s programming. Separate sections are included for each of FN’s TV shows, and you can search by chef as well — many of FN’s personalities bridge multiple TV show. So if you like the show “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” you can bookmark the restaurants Guy Fieri features on the show or you can recommend them to friends through built-in Twitter, Facebook and email buttons.

If you really like “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” you can use one of the app’s key features to generate a “road trip” highlighting every one of the taquerias, greasy spoons and fried chicken joints appearing on the show in a particular metro area or region. Food Network is trying to tap into peculiar emerging phenomenon: the foodie road trip. It’s included several pre-defined road trips with the app, either centered on particular cities like New York or San Francisco or on regional cuisine, such as Texas BBQ. But the app also allows you to easily generate your own tailored road trips and has a built in badge-based reward system for customers who complete those treks.

It’s a slickly designed app, but it’s definitely not for everybody. If you love the Food Network, then you’re going to love On the Road. But anyone looking for a more general-purpose restaurant recommendation app might be disappointed. There’s very little information about the individual restaurants beyond location data, a brief description, and a URL; and all establishments are treated equally – there are no stars or reviews.

But that’s the point. In an interview earlier this year, Food Network GM of digital Bob Madden told me that FN’s digital and mobile content strategies are built entirely around the concept of supporting its more traditional TV and magazine programming. Ultimately FN’s chefs are the curators of On the Road’s content and do they do their curating on TV. The app is intended to provide an interactive complement to that programming.

There are exceptions to that strategy though. In April, FN launches an interactive cupcake cookbook for the iPad that contained content unique to the app.

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When it comes time to pay, users select which virtual card they want to use and the app presents a QR code, which is scanned by an employee. The amount is deducted from their balance immediately after the purchase.

Dunkin Donuts’ mobile payment system, which is available at most of its 7,000 U.S. locations, is similar in execution to the Starbucks mobile app, which also works with virtual cards and barcodes. But unlike the Starbucks mobile app, Dunkin Donuts users can also send mobile gift cards to each other via the app. Users can send a gift card up to $100 to a friend via Facebook, email or text message. The app also provides menu and nutritional information plus a tool for finding a nearby Dunkin Donuts.

I just tried the app out and the payment system worked just as smoothly as any Starbucks mobile transaction. I just opened the app, tapped on my virtual card and was ready to be scanned. I was told by an employee that the handheld scanners first appeared in the stores about two or three months ago.

It’s not surprising that Dunkin Donuts is moving into mobile payments. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz said last week that the company had 60 million mobile transactions in the last year and a half since it launched mobile payments. Now, a quarter of Starbucks transactions happen via Starbucks cards with a growing percentage of that quickly shifting to mobile. Schultz said the adoption of mobile payments is the fastest he’s seen of any product in the last 40 years. That’s partly why Starbucks invested $25 million in Square and announced it would soon enable Square payments in its locations.

Getting people to pay via a mobile app may provide some check-out convenience for customers of Dunkin Donuts, though it’s probably negligible. I didn’t see much speed improvement over cash or credit though it was nice to pay without having my wallet with me. But moving to mobile payments also gives Dunkin more insight into the purchase habits of its users and allows the company to build a closer relationship with its customers. And by enabling gifting right from the mobile app, Dunkin Donuts is making it easy for people to buy more gift cards.

The Dunkin Donuts announcement comes one day after Target, Walmart and a dozen other retailers announced plans for their own mobile wallet system. It’s a reminder that many merchants are realizing that mobile payments is something they want to control themselves. That could have a big impact on the growing number of mobile payment systems that are emerging like Isis and Google Wallet.

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Flipboard will now be available worldwide in the Google Play store and will come pre-loaded on the Samsung Galaxy S III. A modified smartphone version of the app will also appear in the Amazon Appstore for Android, the Barnes & Noble Nook Store and in Samsung Apps. Select Android users were allowed into a beta program last month, which helped Flipboard iron out the last kinks in the Android app before worldwide distribution. Other users who had signed up for the beta will be informed Friday of the app’s availability. Some eager Android users had previously downloaded a leaked version last month. 

As announced earlier, Flipboard will now incorporate feeds from Google+, so users will be able to see stories and updates from their activity stream and be able to comment back on shared content. The news magazine app has also added YouTube as a source, allowing Flipboard users to view popular videos, follow channels and see their own saved videos. That brings a lot of great video to a service that has been primarily about stories, pictures and updates.

The magazine app has also expanded international support with the release of fully localized versions for Germany, Korea, Italy, Spain and The Netherlands. Previously, Flipboard had supported Japan, France, China and English-speaking countries.

While the move to Android phones has been long-awaited, Flipboard’s marketing executive Marci McCue said there is no rush to build a version for larger Android tablets and it isn’t on the company’s roadmap.

“We focus on taking one step at a time. As far as tablets go, the biggest player is the iPad. We’ll watch the (tablet) market but right now the market is the iPad,” said McCue. She said there may be some Android devices that have undergone less testing for the Flipboard app, but she said it should work for most higher-end devices.

Android fans should rejoice at yet another major iOS standby coming over to Android. Now, with Instagram available on Android, and other big name developers, such as music maker Smule now developing for Android, there are more signs that Android is rising in the eyes of developers. But the fact that Android tablets are still not a priority for, at least, Flipboard suggests that the platform has a ways to go on those devices. That may be what Google will address at its developer conference next week, perhaps with its own tablet hardware.

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The result of Lanman’s work is Livestar, a new iPhone app (Android coming soon) that makes it easy to find the two kinds of recommendations that matter most to many users: friend suggestions and professional reviews. The app serves as a sort of search engine, Q&A platform and review aggregator, combining elements of Yelp, Google, Quora, Metacritic and Facebook. But while many of those services started on the desktop web, Livestar is built from the ground up to be mobile only.

How it works:

At launch, users can search across three categories: movies, music and restaurants. With a slider function, they can call up reviews on various subjects from critics, aggregators like Yelp, Trip Advisor and Urban Spoon, friends and taste makers. The critics function is helpful in pulling up all kinds of professional reviews from trusted sources, such as local newspapers, magazines and online publications.

That alone is a big plus, giving people a way to receive via mobile a broad selection of professional commentary on the things they like. Metacritic doesn’t have a mobile app and Rottentomatoes’ app just covers movies. Users can set their radius on reviews, so searches for local items, such as restaurants, can be filtered by location. Lanman believes that browsing for professional content will probably be the primary use case for users at first.

But the promise of Livestar is also in getting reviews and suggestions from friends. Livestar does this by allowing users to ask specific questions of their Facebook friends, their mobile contacts list or other users on Livestar. I can ask for specific recommendations for things like “best Italian restaurant downtown.” Livestar is smart in that it pre-formats the question, so that a recipient gets a list of popular restaurants that they can touch to give a 1- to 5-star rating. If they don’t see a restaurant on the list, they can easily add one and give a rating or a longer review.

The key, Lanman said, is that Livestar makes it easy for someone to respond because they don’t have to do much typing to provide valuable input. The original user will get their responses and can store them for future reference.

Users can curate a list of trusted friends on various topics and they can follow other Livestar users. Search results can be narrowed down to specific professional and personal sources. Users can also follow taste makers, who are scored according to their reviews, likes and followers and are suggested based on similar tastes. They system will eventually add other categories such as books, wine and apparel, and eventually hotels and bars.

Removing friction

Lanman said the power of Livestar is in removing the friction it takes to obtain this type of information. He said a lot of care went into making searching extremely simple and particular attention was paid to making it easy for friends to respond to recommendation requests. Between the simplicity and the social obligation of friends asking for a favor, he believes Livestar should have a solid response rate. He said friend suggestions trump algorithmic solutions, which require a lot of input from users to sort out their tastes. And he said those machine-learning systems are held to a higher standard and often get abandoned if people see questionable recommendations.

The other key was making the service mobile-first. While Yelp has flourished as a resource for restaurant hunters, Lanman said it has struggled because it was built before mobile and social came of age.

“If Yelp was built today it would be Livestar,” Lanman said. “It was great for keyboard and mouse but with touch and location enhancements, people can do so much with a few taps. By lowering the work it takes to participate, it fundamentally increases the number of people who participate.”

Livestar, which has received $2 million from SV Angel, Ray Ozzie, Peter Chernin, Paul Bucheit and others, doesn’t have a revenue model just yet. But Lanman is quick to imagine the possibilities. He said that Livestar could become a great place for advertisers to offer coupons and discounts because like Google and its AdWords ads, Livestar will be positioned to capture a lot of consumer intent. For example, when Livestar begins offering wine recommendations, a user will be able to look up the wine list at the restaurant they’re at on Livestar and see what the different scores are for the available wine. A winery that is featured at that restaurant could bid on that opportunity and could offer a coupon for their wine. Lanman said Livestar could also integrate with services like OpenTable, Seamless and Fandango and make some money with affiliate fees.

Threat to Google?

Fritz Lanman

I like what Livestar is trying to do and I think it serves a need in the market. Increasingly, my searches for movies and restaurants and other categories are moving to mobile and being conducted when I’m out and about. I like the idea of being able to have one resource to find the best trusted recommendations I can get. Just being able to see professional content in one place is a big plus and if they can get friends reviews to work, which is no small feat, that’s even better.

Focusing on mobile also seems a no-brainer but it’s an important distinction. Many services are getting ported over from the desktop web but they’re still not well optimized for the way mobile and touch work. But mobile services that do a lot of the work ahead of time and make it easy for people to interact using some swipes or touches actually get a lot of engagement. I’m thinking of mobile Q&A service Thumb, formerly Opinionaided, which gets a lot of responses to queries because of its simple response mechanism.

I’m also reminded of Steve Jobs’ prediction that apps will be able to take the place of search engines in many cases and this is a great example of that — which should worry Google. Google has obviously been aware of aggregators being able to siphon off some search traffic, but if more mobile-first commercial search engines emerge like Livestar, which will look across a number of verticals, it puts even more pressure on Google. And it again shows that while an algorithm works for a lot of things, smart curation and social discovery is increasingly a threat that needs to be addressed.

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