Or maybe you didn’t notice it. The Quartz team told me about the change in advance, and even I have a hard time seeing much difference. The biggest change is that a black bar that used to run across the top of the site and then shrink down as you scrolled down is now just preshrunk.

You can see, sort of, by comparing some “before” shots (clicking the images should enlarge them):

And an after:

The more interesting thing to note about Quartz’s overhaul is that it is one of dozens of changes Atlantic Media’s newest property has made since it launched seven months ago. Quartz editor Kevin Delaney says the site has pushed 73 code chages since Quartz first debuted, most of which have to do with the way the site’s guts function.

The reason Quartz can do that, Delaney argues, is because of its decision to rely on an HTML5 design that essentially serves up the same page to every reader, no matter what device they’re using to access the site. If you want to change the way an HTML5 site looks or behaves, you can simply change it — no need to monkey with an app that’s already downloaded to someone’s iPhone or Android.

That runs counter to a lot of current digital distribution thinking, which holds that every Web distributor — from newspapers to Facebook to Netflix — needs to be thinking app-first.

No need to beat the debate into the ground — it’s really only relevant to a few thousand people, and it can take on a religious overtone — but it is worth noting that it seems to be working for Quartz. Delaney said his site is now attracting two million users a month.

That said, it looks like iTunes’ sales growth may be slowing down.

Last quarter, iTunes sales increased 28 percent; in the previous quarter they increased 23 percent. Most retailers would be very happy to see those kind of leaps, but as far as I can tell, they are the smallest increases Apple has seen in the last two years.*

You can see what the last two quarters looked like in context, below:

So what does that mean? Dunno. Maybe nothing more than a statistical blip.

If I had to bet, though, I’d put money on a couple different culprits:

• In the old days, when Apple only sold music, iTunes sales rose alongside iPod sales: Whenever someone bought a new gadget, they spent some money on songs, too. Assume the same is happening here, but for all digital media. And booming iPad sales aren’t enough to overcome more modest iPhone sales.
• The other thing that fuels iTunes sales is the expansion of new markets — new iTunes stores and iTunes App Stores opening up in new countries. And maybe those lines shoot right up again if or when Forbes shows up in China. We’ll see.

* All the data in this chart either comes directly from Apple, via the prepared statements CFO Peter Oppenheimer reads during quarterly earnings calls, or via math I’ve done myself, based on those same numbers. The chart only goes back two years because Apple didn’t consistently provide iTunes sales numbers before then.

Well, if you’re so inclined, now you can combine your two favorite things. There are a number of mobile apps that cater to pet owners, many for monitoring purposes, but some just for sheer fun. Here are a few to consider:

Reward your dog when he’s stuck in the house alone. Ever use the iPad to appease your child? A new app called Pavlov Dog Monitor aims to do the same thing with Fido. This $4.99 iPad app uses audio-sensor technology to listen for your dog’s barks when you’re away from home. It then triggers prerecorded videos — with you saying, “Bad boy!” or alternately, “Good boy!” — to help quiet the dog. For an extra $1.99, you can have the barking updates sent to a Facebook message folder, helping you monitor your dog’s agitation throughout the day. The entrepreneur behind the app is also working on a Bluetooth-equipped treat-dispenser that will give your dog an actual treat if he hasn’t been barking for awhile.

Don’t have a dog? You can test it out yourself by barking at the app. I tried this for about 2.5 seconds and then came to my senses.

Finally, get a good picture of your “active” pet. You know how when small children are having their portrait taken, the photographer coos and shakes a rattle to get them to smile? That’s what this app, called PetSnap, does for Whiskers. It costs $1.99, and is available for iOS devices only. There are more than 25 sound effects to choose from to grab your pet’s attention. Then, just when their ears perk up and they’re all, like, “Squirrel!” you can snap a photo, which is saved to your phone’s camera roll. There are even sound effects for your pet Space Llama or your exotic Zoo Frog.

Want to know what your dog is really thinking about you? That’s where Cross Tuner for iOS comes in. Using this app, you point your iPhone camera at your dog or cat (or zombie, or teddy bear, which for some reason are also options), and then talk to your pet. The app responds with a thought bubble for your pet, complete with an audio recitation. “If you’re not going to talk, at least change my litter,” was one of the thought bubbles I got when I briefly tested it. You can also record footage of your pet doing that adorable thing, and share it to Facebook or YouTube. But this free app is better in theory than in delivery. For example, you can’t import already-shot videos of your pet and attach fun audio captions to them.

Bonus app: This app makes Grumpy Cat look content. It’s the Angry Cat Simulator, available for iOS and Android. The free version has a limited number of angry cat characters; the “plus” version, which costs 99 cents, includes more than 60 angry animals — they aren’t limited to just cats. The ads on the free version are super irritating, though, so if you feel like spending a dollar on a mindless app today, I recommend the upgrade. Bear in mind that this app won’t turn pictures of your actual pet into angry cats (which I was hoping for when I first downloaded it); it merely simulates an angry cat, one that becomes more irate as you “pet” it on the screen, or shake your device.

Yes, this app encourages you to scratch a virtual cat’s chest. I rest my case.

The events in Boston — starting Monday with a pair of explosions that killed three and injured 176 near the finish line of the Boston Marathon — came to a dramatic close Friday night with the capture of 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of two brothers suspected of carrying out the attacks. He had been hiding out in a boat parked in the backyard of a house in Watertown, Mass.

A furious citywide manhunt brought Boston and surrounding towns to a standstill, and there was little else to do all day but watch the live TV coverage. All day, reporters repeated what they knew, which was precious little beyond the bare facts. One suspect was dead, the other on the run after an intense gunfight with police. The “Breaking News” banners became meaningless, because throughout the day there was not much actual news breaking other than that the search continued.

Not 30 minutes after a news conference during which local officials told Boston residents they could probably go outside again, police engaged in a firefight with the suspect hiding in the boat.

It was at this point that a quarter of a million people, including me, tuned in to the streaming video image of Uniden Bearcat scanner radio picking up publicly available police communications traffic in Boston.

As anyone who’s ever worked at a local newspaper can tell you, the real “breaking news” is often heard on police scanners. And, with right kind of radio, it is perfectly legal to listen in on how cops on the beat and firefighters conduct their business. Listening to the scanner is often how reporters and camera crews know where to go when there’s a story breaking.

The scanner in question was set up in an anonymous home in Framingham, Mass. The owner had inexplicably placed his radio in the bathroom at the base of the toilet, trained a live Webcam on it, and streamed it to Ustream.

Police scanners are so common that enthusiasts have been streaming live audio from the airwaves to the Internet for years. And apps that tap these livesstreams are common on iOS and Android devices.

During a week in which professional media organizations like CNN and the Associated Press had so often failed to meet the standards to which they hold themselves, reporting arrests where none had occurred, the desire for a raw feed and clear information was understandable.

Those listening to the scanner audio naturally turned to Twitter and Facebook, relaying news of the capture to the world, and allowing the city of Boston and the rest of the world to breathe once again. Some thought the scanner stream was not a very good idea. The suspect might have been monitoring social media, the thinking went, and might be tipped off to the movements of police. Unlikely, as police were bearing down on him while he was bleeding in the back of a boat after two exchanges of gunfire during the day.

Space Rogue on Twitter was one of those listening and, at 8:42 pm ET, had the first tweet I saw containing the news:

“Suspect in custody but nobody inside the perimeter, still a hot scene”

April 19, 2013 5:42 pm via YoruFukurouReplyRetweetFavorite

@spacerog

Space Rogue

Here’s what the live audio of the capture sounded like. The audio below lasts three and a half minutes, and begins with some routine-sounding traffic. At about the 50-second mark, you’ll hear someone say, “no other elements on the boat, HRT only,” referring to a hostage rescue team that had been called in, presumably to talk to the suspect and negotiate his surrender, if necessary. Then there’s a long, agonizing silence, broken up by indistinct radio noise. At about the 2:45 mark, you’ll hear the first reference to “still a hot scene,” followed by the confirmation “suspect in custody,” and a call for a medic. The cheering of local residents started soon thereafter.

Update: UStream has just published a corporate blog post on this video feed, saying that at its peak, 265,000 people were watching, and that throughout the day more than 2.5 million people tuned in. Half of them were on mobile devices.

First launched in 2009, the cross-platform messaging app has charted a stratospheric rise in popularity. Today, WhatsApp is the single-most-used independent smartphone app in nearly every country in the world. It has hundreds of millions of users, and processes as many as 20 billion messages per day. And, as CEO Jan Koum said onstage at D: Dive Into Mobile on Tuesday, WhatsApp is now bigger than Twitter, which officially claims 200 million monthly active users. The company daily processes eight billion inbound messages and 12 billion outbound.

That success has drawn attention from some big Internet companies. In the past six months alone, it has been a rumored acquisition target for Facebook and Google, though it has officially denied talks with both.

What’s it like being at the very center of the messaging app market land grab? And how does the company, which forgoes advertising in favor of a 99-cents-per-year subscription fee, propose to convert popularity into significant revenue?

Simple, said Koum. Build the platform and the revenue will follow.

“We’re looking forward to a world with billions of phones,” Koum said. “And once that happens it’s going to be extremely easy to monetize. But a lot more people need to join the smartphone revolution and a lot more people need to buy more goods on their phones.”

So why not rely on advertising for revenue in the meantime? There’s no chance of that happening, said Koum, citing WhatsApp’s anti-advertising philosophy.

“We do have a manifesto opposing advertising,” Koum said. “We’re proud of that. Who likes advertising? We’re so bombarded with ads so much in our daily lives and we felt that smartphones aren’t the place for that. Our phones are so intimately connected to us, to our lives. Putting advertising on a device like that is a bad idea. You don’t want to be interrupted by ads when you’re chatting with your loved ones.”

There are plenty of successful businesses that don’t use advertising, Koum observed. Gas. Water. “We want to be one of them. … Our monetization strategy is simple. One dollar a year. If we did something besides that, it would just get in the way. … We want a great product and great user experience.”

Pretty cool, right? We’ll see — the app was supposed to be out around now, but Gaga has been sidelined by hip surgery. But Troy Carter, Gaga’s manager, stresses that people who don’t want to consume Gaga as an app won’t have to: He’s very happy to sell music the old-fashioned way, as an iTunes download, and even on a physical CD.

Why? Because that’s where the market is, he reminded Kara Swisher at the D: Dive Into Mobile conference. A good reminder: When Justin Timberlake sold close to one million copies of his new album in a week, the bulk of those were CDs, sold via Target and Walmart, Carter said.

“You can’t shock the water in our business. It’s about gradual change,” he said. “You still have to cater to the market that’s out there.”

So when does that change? Soon, but not very soon, Carter predicts. He figures his market goes mostly mobile in three to five years.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130415/why-lady-gaga-isnt-ditching-the-cd/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130411/rockmelt-ends-its-browser-dreams/ http://allthingsd.com/20130411/rockmelt-ends-its-browser-dreams/#comments Thu, 11 Apr 2013 20:25:01 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=311253 Rockmelt announced Thursday it would soon end support for its desktop browser service, instead transitioning its user base to its mobile apps and newly launched Web-based product. The company, helmed by ex-Netscape engineers and backed by Marc Andreessen, aimed to reinvent the browser with social capabilities. But as Rockmelt subtly admitted in its post, Google’s Chrome momentum was just too much to keep up with.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130411/rockmelt-ends-its-browser-dreams/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130411/app-non-gratis/ http://allthingsd.com/20130411/app-non-gratis/#comments Thu, 11 Apr 2013 16:27:13 +0000 Dan Porter http://allthingsd.com/?p=311101 When OMGPOP was an independent company with limited resources, releasing apps you never heard of, someone whispered to us that for a low six-figure amount, they could propel us to a Top 5 ranking in the App Store. Those were the days, well over a year ago, when bots ruled the App Store. Fake downloads in India, Chinese bot farms, all were tricks you could use to game the charts. We, like many companies, could never ethically use these tricks, and Apple moved quickly to shut down the scamsters. What was so scary was that, after the shutdown, I immediately saw some Top 10 apps drop hundreds of places in the App Store.

On Tuesday, they were No. 3, by Thursday they were No. 400. It was mind-blowing how fast some of these supposed “hit apps” fell quickly to obscurity. Given what happened — and Apple’s response — the question remains, why did app developers use these tricks?

The main reason is that it is hard to get discovered in the App Store. Without some advantage, users might never find your app — and the amount that you can spend to get there above board is limited. Another reason is that when you hit the Top 25, then the Top 10 and then the Top 5, the exposure in the App Store generates significant organic downloads. In other words, people see you on the charts and they decide to download your app. In some ways, it’s not unlike how record labels manipulated the SoundScan charts in the 1990s to make seemingly unpopular records become hits.

But it’s hard to keep the schemers down. When Apple smartly moved against the bots last year, there was a brief gap in the market. Into that gap stepped a new breed of companies to help market apps. Sure, the scamsters always had their tricks. Notice an app pop up at No. 1? Look for hundreds of reviews that only have one word (amazing, incredible, awesome), or look for a shockingly low number of reviews for an app that’s No. 1. These are indicators that folks are doing something shady to make it to No. 1. And Apple, to its credit, tirelessly shuts them down and closes loopholes. It’s a thankless task.

But there are known, above-board companies whose mission it is to help also market apps. AppGratis, until getting booted for violations of the App Store rules, was one of those companies (Free App of the Day is another). In some ways, Apple’s halt to AppGratis is a big deal. Many of the games and apps that are at the top of the charts recently engaged AppGratis, which uses its large audience to drive large download volume. They do this by offering their members discounts on paid apps. This is particularly important to small or independent developers who lack the cross-promotion networks and marketing clout of established companies, and who can rely on a deal with AppGratis to expose them to a large audience.

While it is a big deal — to both developers and consumers — for Apple to remove AppGratis, in many ways, in the long-term view, it does not matter. And that is the key point.

There is no doubt that Apple’s vigilance makes the app store a friendly, clean and amazing place for consumers. But the fight to keep it that way is tireless and never-ending. As long as there is money to be made, app developers and app marketers will find new angles to lay siege to the charts.

But the win for Apple, and ultimately the loss for the app developers, is that in the end, the App Store really is a democracy, and no amount of cheating ever truly wins. What I mean by that is that there is a hidden meritocracy in the App Store charts. By hook or by crook, you might find a new angle to drive your app to the top, but at the end of the day, if consumers don’t like it, your app is going to fall.

What matters more than hitting the Top 10 is the ability to stay in theTop 10. That is the secret. There is tremendous movement in and out of the chart rankings, but the apps that stay there day after day and month after month — games like Candy Crush or Words With Friends, or apps like Instagram — they are the true winners. And staying there just cannot be gamed. The other apps are like shooting stars. They hit the charts via AppGratis, but there is ultimately something not sticky or fun or compelling about them, and they quickly slide back down.

So AppGratis may be gone, but companies like it will continue to crop up to take the app developer’s money. A hit is always going to be a hit, and that can only be achieved by creating an amazing product that people truly love.

Dan Porter is the former CEO of OMGPOP.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130411/app-non-gratis/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130410/ge-puts-your-imagination-to-work-with-quirky-crowdsourced-gadgets/ http://allthingsd.com/20130410/ge-puts-your-imagination-to-work-with-quirky-crowdsourced-gadgets/#comments Wed, 10 Apr 2013 17:53:34 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=310737 General Electric brings good things to life — provided that you come up with the idea, submit it through a hip New York tech startup site, and rely on its patents.

That might well be the new/old slogan for GE, which today announced a partnership with Quirky, a young company that develops gadgets conceived by an online community and refined by users and in-house experts, as Liz Gannes explains here. (Unlike other crowdsourced projects, which sometimes amount to little more than vaporware, Quirky gets things done: It has produced more than 200 products over the past few years — things that actually get pushed through big retail stores. The startup recently got a little funding boost of $68 million to continue on this path.)

Here’s how this partnership is supposed to work: GE is opening up a bunch of patents — “thousands” — to people in the Quirky community, who can then come up with product line ideas that build upon those patents and submit them to Quirky.com/GE. GE and Quirky will review them, and will choose products that will be developed by Quirky and sold at retail. They’ll be co-branded “Wink: Instantly Connected.” The creator then gets a share of the revenue. The cut depends on how many “influencers” there are involved in the project.

Some of the patents GE is making available include those for optical tech, like holographic and lens technologies, “thin-film encapsulation” tech that coats and protects electronic devices like smartphones and TVs, and telematics used in vehicle-navigation systems. The initiative is meant to foster ideas for consumer-facing products and app-friendly connected devices, like home appliances.

For those who consider themselves true inventors — say, someone with a game-changing gadget they’ve been building in the basement while they apply for patents — playing with GE patents might not appeal. And Quirky owns the product ideas developed through its site and pays royalties to inventors.

But for people who don’t want to deal with the patent-application process and are looking for a little product-creation support, that’s where this project — or P&G’s similar Connect + Develop program — comes in. And the seasoned industrials and consumer goods companies will gladly take some fresh ideas.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130410/ge-puts-your-imagination-to-work-with-quirky-crowdsourced-gadgets/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130405/blackberrys-pitch-to-ios-and-android-game-developers-were-the-same-but-different/ http://allthingsd.com/20130405/blackberrys-pitch-to-ios-and-android-game-developers-were-the-same-but-different/#comments Fri, 05 Apr 2013 17:33:04 +0000 Eric Johnson http://allthingsd.com/?p=307879 At the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last week, most mobile devs said they would focus on iOS and/or Android (usually both), and play the “wait and see” game with everyone else. But in sync with its surprisingly good fourth-quarter earnings, BlackBerry is pitching the idea that bringing games into its new OS is a no-brainer.

“I’ve been evangelizing that BlackBerry is not a business device,” global gaming head Anders Jeppsson said. “It used to be, maybe, many years ago. But over 80 percent of our users are active consumers today, and they’re very, very social.”

In order to get to those users, though, developers must first be persuaded that porting games over to BlackBerry is simple and cheap. Naturally, Jeppsson said it is, thanks in part to the company’s open-source efforts on Github and the cross-platform social gaming tools provided by BlackBerry-owned Scoreloop.

Microsoft is also touting how easy it is for mobile developers to transition into its ecosystem, but — this is both a positive and a negative for Redmond — the discoverability gap versus BlackBerry 10 is huge. Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 are the newest members of a big family, including the proven powerhouse Xbox 360 and its accompanying Xbox Live Marketplace, not to mention Windows 8’s backward compatibility with innumerable PC games. Meanwhile, BlackBerry 10 is a nascent OS currently available on just one device, the Z10.

Efforts to bridge that device gap include some monetary incentives for BB10 developers, like the (now ended) “10K Commitment” that promised early-adopter devs up to $9,000 in free money if they couldn’t reach $10,000 in revenue in their first year on BB10. There’s also a first-mover advantage, Jeppsson added, because the OS is barely two months old. In other words, it’s easier for a game to break out on a non-Google and non-Apple platform because, at least for now, the pickings are slimmer.

Jeppsson said he’s been working on developer outreach since he came to Research In Motion in 2012, when RIM acquired Jeppsson’s user interface design company, The Astonishing Tribe. He claimed “many” developers are making more money with BB10 than they are on iOS.

But the devil’s in the details, and one of the biggest questions is, what proportion of BlackBerry 10 users are frequently playing games on their new Z10s? A company representative said she would try to find out last week, but did not respond to a follow-up request for numbers. (“Frequently” is important, because players who download games, open them once and never come back are near worthless for the free-to-play mobile developers that dominate the charts on other operating systems.)

Lack of specific numbers isn’t stopping Jeppsson from some good old-fashioned competition bashing when it comes to attracting developers from outside BlackBerry’s ecosystem.

“I think BlackBerry users are actually users that are willing to pay for quality content,” he said. “They expect a quality experience. They’re not going to sideload stuff and pirate it like Android [users], stealing software.”

However, he added that his newest goals are less about developer outreach and more about making the case that the consumer’s gaming experience is better on his side of the fence.

His hope is that, as phone hardware continually improves (“This is easily an Xbox One in terms of what it can do,” he said, holding up a Z10), users will be able to play the same games as consoles, so that a game started on the bus can be finished on the couch.

Again, Microsoft is preaching a similar message. But although it already has the console side of the equation worked out, its cross-platform games are more casual than the more complex hardware-constrained games Jeppsson aspires to pair with BlackBerry — or, indeed, run entirely on his phone.

“Why would you want to buy a big PC to play Counter-Strike, where you remove all the details anyway because you want 60 frames per second?” he said. “That’s how I play Counter-Strike.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130405/blackberrys-pitch-to-ios-and-android-game-developers-were-the-same-but-different/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130404/viddy-co-founder-chris-ovitz-to-depart-company/ http://allthingsd.com/20130404/viddy-co-founder-chris-ovitz-to-depart-company/#comments Thu, 04 Apr 2013 12:00:49 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=309120 After a rocky year of high-level departures and staff cuts, social mobile startup Viddy will soon lose a key member of its team.

Chris Ovitz, co-founder and head of business development at Viddy, has taken a reduced, part-time role at the startup, with plans to eventually leave the company altogether, according to sources familiar with the matter.

While Ovitz did not respond to a request for comment, Viddy confirmed Ovitz’s role change to AllThingsD. “Chris is a tremendous partner and asset to Viddy, and he will shift into a part-time role as our team is focused on building the best social video experience,” said JJ Aguhob, Viddy co-founder and president, in a statement. “Chris’ skills are invaluable to our marketing and strategic partnerships initiatives and we’re glad he’ll continue to play that role.”

Along with co-founders Aguhob and Brett O’Brien, Ovitz played a key role in the formation of the mobile video startup, which lets users share short video clips with others, using their smartphones. Viddy rose to prominence over the summer of 2012, when mobile social video apps like Socialcam and Klip gained traction and a wide user base on the back of the Facebook platform.

But as users began to feel spammed by mobile video app activity, Facebook quickly curtailed the apps’ growth by making changes in the News Feed. As a result, Viddy, Socialcam and others saw massive drops in user activity, and have languished ever since.

In the time since, Viddy has faced its own series of internal challenges, giving former CEO Brett O’Brien the boot and eventually cutting its staff by more than a third.

The loss of Ovitz, however, will cut especially deep. One source claimed Ovitz was the “key” member of Viddy, in particular his “relationships with content creators to investors” doing a large part to drive the ailing company.

The remainder of Ovitz’s tenure as a part-time adviser and consultant is indefinite, and it isn’t clear what his next move will be.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130404/viddy-co-founder-chris-ovitz-to-depart-company/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130403/twitter-beefs-up-cards-technology-to-attract-mobile-developers/ http://allthingsd.com/20130403/twitter-beefs-up-cards-technology-to-attract-mobile-developers/#comments Wed, 03 Apr 2013 14:00:05 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=308782 As we reported it would last week, Twitter on Tuesday evening announced an expansion to its Cards technology program, aiming to encourage more mobile developers to create customized, multimedia-based tweets for the service. Twitter hopes this will attract more third-party developers to create richer tweets for the stream, while offering more ways for small businesses and app developers to promote and sell their content.

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