PlayHaven, a San Francisco start-up is looking to bring the real-time web to mobile marketing with a new platform that brings the dynamism of the web to mobile ads. The new platform gives mobile game developers the ability to react quickly to their shifting needs. Read more »
Seesmic, the company best known for making consumer-facing social networking apps, has shifted its strategy for the second time in its four-year history, this time to focus on building mobile apps for the enterprise. Can the third iteration of Seesmic finally bring the company success? Read more »
Mobile payments start-up Boku has signed a deal with Telefonica, the huge mobile carrier with almost 300 million subscribers, who will use Boku to power its payment API for BlueVia, its global developer program. It comes a week after Boku secured deals with two French carriers. Read more »
The HP TouchPad hardware may not have a future, but at least updated software for the tablet does: QuickOffice HD is today updated to include document editing. That’s good news for the several hundred thousand new TouchPad owners looking to be more productive with their tablet. Read more »
Samsung, the South Korean electronics giant unveiled ChatON today, a multi-media group messaging app that will debut in October on its own Bada OS and will also appear on other platforms such as iOS, Android and BlackBerry. It will compete in a very crowded market. Read more »
Quixey, an app search engine with initial seed funding from Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, has just announced $3.8 million in new funding. The company is trying to capitalize on the boom in apps, which is opening up opportunities not just for developers but app discovery services. Read more »
Customers pining for the Samsung Galaxy S II received good and bad news this week: Verizon won’t be carrying the phone, but may be looking at an LTE model. Xperia phones gain Android 2.3.4 starting in October, and a new 360-degree camera app makes the scene. Read more »
Ness has launched its debut iOS app, a “personal search engine” that aims to provide highly personalized restaurant recommendations. Essentially it’s like a Pandora for restaurants: From the start it’s almost creepily accurate with its recommendations, and the more you use it, the better it gets. Read more »
Diffbot is trying help developers build apps that read the web like humans. The company’s technology uses visual learning robotics and artificial intelligence to view web content visually, helping apps analyze web data like humans. The company is releasing its first APIs to developers today. Read more »
Big conferences and events are meant to be satisfying, useful and inspiring, but they often leave people flustered and unsure of exactly what to do. A new app called Bloodhound aims to help everyone involved with events — organizers, presenters and attendees — navigate through all that. Read more »
When thinking of social photo apps, iOS comes to mind with strong offerings like Instagram. But it doesn’t do panoramic images like 360 for Android does: the beta app doesn’t require a ton of processing power to produce a seamless 360-degree image that can be shared. Read more »
For mobile developers looking to engage their users, push notifications have become a key tool in drawing users back into apps. Notification provider Urban Airship told me it has hit 5 billion push notifications since it delivered its first message a little over two years ago. Read more »
A new feature has appeared in iOS 5 in Japan: It’s a built-in notification system tied to Japan’s sophisticated early-earthquake-detection service, which can provide between a few seconds and a couple of minutes of advance notice prior to an earthquake’s actually hitting. Read more »
While my iPhone 4 still mostly satisfies my needs, I have to confess: For the past two weeks, I haven’t been exactly faithful. I’ve been testing out Samsung’s latest and greatest, the Galaxy S II Android smartphone. Here’s how I feel about my indiscretion. Read more »
Foursquare has increasingly shifted its sights from the present to the future, looking at how it can help recommend relevant places where people should go. But we’re seeing that the location-based network is also finding a lot of opportunities in leveraging the past. Read more »
Evernote, the notetaking software program aimed at helping users “remember everything,” has acquired image-sharing app Skitch. The full version of Skitch previously cost $19.99 in the Mac store, but will be free and soon available on “every desktop and mobile platform under the sun.” Read more »
Android users have about 250,000 apps to choose from but most have little use for any of them outside the top 50. New data from Nielsen found that 61 percent of the time spent on apps by Android users are in the top 50 apps. Read more »
GroupMe, a top contender in the group messaging app space, was born out of a hackathon but managed to find success by executing on its vision. The founders sat down with me and looked back at how the first year has gone since the service launched. Read more »
Zynga is expanding its mobile ambitions by apparently picking up New York City-based developer Astro Ape Studios. The gaming powerhouse, which is preparing to go public, has been increasingly looking to shore up its mobile efforts, which has not be as successful as its Facebook business. Read more »
The money in mobile apps is increasingly tilting toward freemium apps and that is helping companies like Tapjoy, which said it now has 10,000 apps that are using its monetization and distribution platform. The company is also delivering more than 1 million ad completions every day. Read more »
It’s easy to search and browse the photo library on your smartphone, but what if you could search for images on millions of people’s smartphones in real time? Theia, a Rice University project, can do just that by distributing the search between smartphones and the cloud. Read more »
Acer’s 7-inch tablet, the A100, launched this week with an attractive starting price of $330, but battery life could be a concern. Samsung added a new Galaxy smartphone using a few cheaper components. I also found a free task app that smartly leverages your handset’s GPS. Read more »
Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 platform is set to improve with Mango, a software update coming soon. I’ve spent some time with Mango on my smartphone, and it didn’t take long to impress me. Microsoft has a tough road ahead due to competition, but Mango will help. Read more »
As we increasingly become more mobile, not all of our to-dos are based on due-dates or times. Location is key to really getting things done. Location Aware, a free app, is a simple but effective tool for creating location-based task reminders on Google Android smartphones. Read more »
Android Market is paced by a number of very prolific app makers and it also sees more updates per app than the App Store, according to app ratings analytics and discovery firm Mobilewalla. The company found that Android users are also focused more on popular apps. Read more »
If recent news from Twitter, Pandora, Google and Amazon is any indication, it seems that a set of technologies collectively known as HTML5 are finally starting to gain a lot of momentum, and to me, that’s a good thing — especially for the mainstream users. Read more »
Amazon’s new browser-based version of its Kindle e-book app is designed to get around Apple’s restrictions on in-app purchasing, but it is also a great example of how media companies should be looking beyond the world of apps to the future of the browser-based web. Read more »
Google Apps might not have many takers amongst the big boys of business, but the company is finding success with small and rural telecoms and Internet service providers, which, in turn, are offering Google Apps to their customers. Read more »
Kickanotch — a Kansas startup that is building a one-stop app management and monetization platform for media companies, starting with radio stations — is now coming out with RevKick, a content- and ad-management tool that lets companies easily deploy, manage and monetize their apps from one dashboard. Read more »
Mobile data efficiency isn’t a sexy feature that moves a lot of apps and devices, but it’s increasingly going to be a selling point, as mobile consumers look for savings in an data-capped world. Onavo says it can save iPhone users about $1 billion a year. Read more »
Now that Facebook has thrown its hat in the ring, there are quite a few choices for mobile messaging on the iPhone and other iOS devices. The three big ones are Facebook Messenger, Google+ and iMessage. Here’s a chart comparing their features and abilities. Read more »
Does the launch of Facebook Messenger, led by the founding team of Beluga, mean the end of Beluga as its own standalone app? Beluga is still available on its own for the time being — but from the looks of it, that may not last for long. Read more »
Facebook has already started to supplant traditional email providers as a dominant way that people communicate online. With a new standalone mobile app called Facebook Messenger with SMS-like functionality, the social networking giant is poised to delve even deeper into users’ mobile messaging activity. Read more »
It’s become clear in recent years that smartphones are going to be increasingly ubiquitous for the foreseeable future. And a recent study indicates that many people are using those devices to access Facebook more often than for, really, anything else. Read more »
Android owners using Dropbox should take a look at Dropsync, a third-party client that offers more features than the native Dropbox software. Offering true, two-way sync, the app can be configured to sync at certain times, on Wi-Fi only or depending on the phone’s battery level. Read more »
It’s been a busy summer for the founders of Parse, a new startup making a software platform that adds a cloud component to any mobile app. Part of Y Combinator’s summer 2011 class, Parse has already launched in beta and is quickly gaining steam with developers. Read more »
Analyst Chetan Sharma, in a new white paper, said the impact of mobile, which has been on focused mostly on higher self needs, is now shifting to more basic issues like health care. It’s in these more utilitarian areas where opportunities exist. Read more »
Moving photos from your iPhone to your Mac can actually involve many steps and input from a user. But you can also set up wireless, automatic background syncing to a destination on your Mac of your choice, with a $2 app and some quick initial setup. Read more »
Apple CTO Tim Cook and CFO Peter Oppenheimer sat down with RBC Capital Markets analyst Mike Abramsky on Wednesday, and according to the analyst, the executives conveyed that Apple’s key motivator for getting into the lower-end smartphone market would be to provide a “category-killer” experience. Read more »
It used to be that we chose our mobile network first, and then the device. But a shift is gradually emerging where device choice is becoming more important than the fastest network, the best coverage and even the amount of mobile broadband we can use monthly. Read more »
