Through its mobile app development Technovation Challenge, nonprofit Iridescent Learning has reached thousands of girls across the country. Now it wants to reach around the world. Read more »
Facebook has acquired Parse, the company that helps developers write mobile apps in the cloud. Read more »
A new mobile engineering effort out of Palo Alto, Calif. appears to be all about client-side development, but it’s likely that AWS will get into the Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) market too. Read more »
Appcelerator is launching a fund to back early-stage mobile startups. The first investment is in Lanica, which is building a gaming engine on top of Appcelerator’s Titanium platform. Appcelerator is looking for startups that can help its ecosystem and accelerate mobile in general. Read more »
Qualcomm, which normally works with manufacturers, is taking a page from Intel and trying to sell developers and ultimately consumers on the benefits of its chips. With a new Snapdragon SDK for Android, Qualcomm thinks it can be the go-to name for devs and consumers. Read more »
Amazon is getting more serious about gaming on the Kindle Fire with the introduction of GameCircle, a social engagement layer for developers who want to add achievements, leaderboards and cloud syncing to their games. The service is Amazon’s answer to Apple’s Game Center. Read more »
While most developers won’t see a big Instagram-like exit for their apps, they are gaining a new way to make money from their apps by selling them on Apptopia, a new marketplace for developers. The service launched online last week. Read more »
Appcelerator, which helps developers build mobile apps, has been on an acquisition tear in the last year and has added mobile backend provider Cocoafish on Thursday to fill out its offering. The pickup allows Appcelerator to offer a full suite of front-end and backend solutions. Read more »
Appsfire, an app discovery platform, is launching a free service called App Booster that allows developers to create a simple two-way inbox inside their apps to help establish a communication channel between developers and users. It’s designed to be an easy way to foster in-app engagement. Read more »
Increasingly, websites and services are getting a bigger chunk of their traffic through mobile with some pushing past the 50 percent mark. That’s setting up a world in which developers and publishers have to think mobile first as consumption shifts to smaller devices. Read more »
A study suggests that apps downloaded through incentives are largely abandoned or uninstalled, providing little long-term benefit to the app developers who use these app distribution campaigns. According to a Harris online survey, only 3 percent of apps downloaded through incentivized install campaigns are used frequently. Read more »
Xamarin, the company born earlier this year when Novell laid off the entire workforce dedicated to maintaining Mono, the open-source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET development framework, was up against big odds. But at just seven months old, Xamarin is now profitable without VC backing. Read more »
HTML5 development tool provider appMobi is putting together a Black Friday deal for developers as it open-sources many key HTML5 technologies that it hopes should help spur the building of more mobile web apps that can compete with native apps. Read more »
Apkudo, a start-up, is about to unveil a new free testing service for Android developers that allows them to see how their apps will perform on almost 300 actual Android devices. It should be a help for developers frustrated with testing apps for Android. Read more »
Good Technology, which has enabled companies to extend security and management to a fleet of employee devices, is looking to extend its technology to independent software developers, corporate customers and systems integrators, by allowing them to build apps that can ride on Good Technology’s secure platform. Read more »
Mobile app analytics firm Localytics found that 20 percent of all mobile apps have social integration through Facebook or Twitter. While Facebook is the most popular tool for social sharing, the average Twitter user drives three times more traffic. Read more »
Adobe is looking to be the go-to resource for gaming with updated versions of Flash Player and AIR. Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 will be 3D enabled for the first time and will offer 1,000 times faster graphics rendering performance. Read more »
Appcelerator has built up a community of 1.5 million developers that have used its cross-platform development tool to build more than 25,000 apps for iOS, Android and BlackBerry. Now it’s looking to turn that community into a selling opportunity by launching a marketplace for software modules. Read more »
Whether to go web app or native may soon become a moot point with the release of new app platform and delivery network from Strobe, which allows developers to build an app in HTML5 and deploy it as both a web and native app. Read more »
StackMob, a mobile backend provider for developers, is integrating with cloud platform Heroku, extending its services to Heroku’s Ruby developers. The partnership allows StackMob to expand the languages it supports beyond Java, Scala and Clojure to include Ruby and later, Node.js. Read more »
Those hoping for iPad lightning to strike twice this year might be disappointed by a new report out Friday. The A6 processor, cited as the central component for a new, more powerful iPad won’t hit the public until next year, sources say. Read more »
UPDATED: GetJar just passed 2 billion downloads and has been pushing its independent app market hard, specifically on the Android front. It has recently started giving out free apps, similar to Amazon’s App of the Day and has also pushed out an Android client. Read more »
A survey of developers finds that the primary importance of selling additional copies of a single app is dropping while driving users back repeatedly and spending money within the apps they’ve already sold is gaining. It’s a natural outgrowth of an extremely crowded apps marketplace. Read more »
Apple’s hold on developers has gotten stronger with the apparent help of the iPad 2 and Verizon iPhone, cutting into gains from Android, according to Flurry. The latest numbers suggest that even with the fast advance of Android, developers still like their prospects on iOS, Read more »
Pontiflex, a New York–based startup, is helping crack the code on mobile advertising with its ad platform, which lets users sign up for the kinds of promotions they want to see. The tool is now coming to the iPad after a successful launch on iPhone and Android. Read more »
The app boom on iOS is gaining more momentum, according to new analysis, which found that App Store downloads are up 61 percent this year over 2010, to 83 apps per device, while users are paying 14 percent more per app. Read more »
Android handset makers HTC and Motorola are extending their user interface skins in new directions that are meant to help differentiate their hardware. But in some cases, the extensions could exacerbate Android’s fragmentation problem. The moves show how competitive it is for Android hardware makers. Read more »
StackMob, a cloud platform for mobile developers, has raised $7.5 million in a Series A round as it ramps up its offering for mobile developers. The new money, led by Trinity Ventures, will help the company expand and push toward a public launch later this year. Read more »
With recent mobile app store changes forcing developers to emphasize more engagement in their apps, it’s highlighting the importance of push notifications, which can be key tools in retaining users and keeping them involved in an app. Read more »
Less than a week after OpenFeint was bought for $104 million, and six months after DeNA picked up Ngmoco for $403 million, social game platform operator PapayaMobile announced it has raised $18 million, further highlighting the momentum in the social mobile gaming space. Read more »
Developer interest in Android appears to have cooled off due to concerns about fragmentation and the first wave of tablets using the operating system, according to a new developer survey from Appcelerator and IDC. But that doesn’t necessarily mean good news for the competition. Read more »
Adobe believes it’s got some increasingly popular weapons in Air and Flash to win the hearts of mobile developers. On the eve of the Mobile World Congress, the company shared some new statistics, hoping to get developers to see the value in its tools. Read more »
The mobile app ecosystem has been one of those amazing stories in the last couple years as millions of users have latched on to smartphone applications. But the rising competition in apps has me wondering how soon before we may see feature creep overtake mobile apps. Read more »
A new report evaluating recent job postings for remote workers found that employers are looking to hire mobile developers. The report also showed an increase in postings for experts in such languages as Spanish, German and Korean, and for business planning and market strategy professionals. Read more »
