AllThingsD » mobile apps

ESPN, Twitter Expand Collaboration

Shira Ovide and Keach Hagey — Mon, 13 May 2013 22:24:58 +0000

ESPN and Twitter Inc. are announcing a major expansion of their collaboration to post sports-related videos on the short-messaging service—part of a growing wave of tie-ups as TV networks and Twitter hunt for new advertising revenue.

ESPN, which is majority-owned by Walt Disney Co., plans to show video-highlight clips on Twitter of major sports events in the coming year, including from soccer matches leading up to the World Cup, college football and the X Games extreme-sports tournaments. People can watch the video clips on Twitter’s website and mobile apps shortly after the action happens on TV.

The sports network plans to sell ads that will run inside the video clips, and marketing sponsors will commit to buying from Twitter a minimum value of “promoted”—or paid—Twitter posts to circulate their marketing pitches.

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Social App Pheed Brings Streaming Pay-Per-View to Mobile

Mike Isaac — Thu, 09 May 2013 17:17:07 +0000

There’s a reason that social app Pheed has catered to the creative community in the six months since it launched. It’s an amalgam of sites like Instagram and video- and audio-sharing apps, where creatives can retain rights to their content and monetize it if they want. Think of it as an all-in-one delivery system for content creators.

Pheed wants to take that a step further. On Thursday, the company launched an update to its iOS application that allows Pheed users to watch streaming pay-per-view broadcasts from other Pheed users directly from their mobile devices.

Pretty straightforward: A user wants to do a live broadcast of some material. Say they’ve got a song to perform, or a discussion to hold, what have you. They set up the event and decide what they want to charge — if anything — for other Pheed users to view the live broadcast. The in-app payment system accepts the cost of admission and sends it to the user’s bank account, and viewers are sent a reminder before the broadcast goes live.

Smart. It’s obviously something that could appeal to the masses of musicians and artists out there who are promoting themselves via social and apps — think of the Lady Gagas, the Snoop Doggs and others who are creating their own mobile apps to promote their albums and content — while giving random small-timers the ability to promote their material as well.

After all, it may be easy for Snoop to get his spliff-happy app downloaded thousands of times to push his new album, but the starving artist in L.A. may have a tougher time. Live performance could be a novel way to garner an audience. (I think of early YouTube stars who came from being nobodies to hosting their own TV shows.)

Unlike some other more high-profile social video apps, Pheed is bootstrapped, fairly small and doesn’t bankroll stars to join the service. “We’ve never paid anyone to join, we never gave out equity and we’re not that rich,” Pheed co-founder O.D. Kobo said in an interview. “We really tried to do it the old-school way by just showing off the product before we launched.”

It seems like the service is already doing fairly well. Pheed won’t give me hard numbers quite yet, but the app grew by 1.2 million users in February, and also gained traction from the missteps of some competitors. “We benefited from the whole Instagram mess,” Kobo said, referring to the time when the photo-sharing service came under fire last winter after announcing its intent to eventually monetize user photos in a vague way. “Lots of photographers came onboard back then, and we gained something like 5,000 to 10,000 users per day.”

I’m curious to see how a pay-per-view option could help bolster the service, if at all. I’d imagine it could introduce some headaches to artists if technical problems arise and users want refunds for a faulty broadcast; customer service is never an easy task, and I’d guess even less so for a small-time creative trying to deal with an angry customer via mobile app.

Still, targeting the creative class niche is clever, especially when a large part of the service already skews somewhat young, in the 18-to-mid-20s range — the crowd companies like Facebook desperately want to keep inside their services and other startups are still trying to court.

The update should be live in Apple’s App Store today.

Apps That Curb the Temptation to Text and Drive

Bonnie Cha — Thu, 09 May 2013 13:00:45 +0000

Would you ever drive the length of a football field at 55 miles per hour blindfolded? Some daredevils might consider it, but what if the field was filled with obstacles like people and cars?

I’m guessing most people’s answer would be a resounding “no,” but that’s pretty much what you’re doing every time you text and drive.

[ See post to watch video ]

According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, texting drivers are 23 times more likely to get into an accident than those who don’t. It’s no wonder that it’s now illegal to do so in 39 states, Washington D.C., Puerto Rico, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Yet we still do it. Studies have shown that younger drivers are the biggest offenders, but adults are guilty of it, too. This past week, I checked out several apps designed to curb this dangerous activity: Text-Star by Cinqpoint, DriveScribe by Drive Power and DriveSafe.ly by iSpeech.

Each app handles the task a little differently. Text-Star sends automatic responses to incoming texts, so you don’t feel compelled to answer right away. Meanwhile, DriveScribe blocks incoming messages and calls when it detects you’re in a moving car. Finally, DriveSafe.ly allows you to receive texts, but reads them out loud, so you don’t have to look at your phone. They all worked well, but still require discipline on your part.

Text-Star is free, but it’s currently only available for Android smartphones. Cinqpoint said it hopes to offer an iOS version in the future.

I used it on my Nexus 4 and found it easy to use. The app offers three operating modes: Automatic, Manual and Passenger. I left it in Automatic mode most of the time, which sends auto-replies as soon as it detects that your car is moving faster than 10 mph (it does this by using your phone’s various sensors and radios).

Before you head out, you can select from a list of preset messages, such as “On the road, ttyl (talk to you later),” “At the movies, ttyl,” or you can write a custom message. Though primarily designed for in-car use, you can also use Text-Star for other situations, like when you’re in a meeting.

To test the app, I drove around an empty portion of a shopping mall parking lot and had my brother text me. The Nexus 4 chimed just as usual to let me know I had a new text, but I resisted the urge to check it, knowing that an automatic response was sent. My brother confirmed that he received my custom message.

There’s really nothing in TextStar that prevents you from checking or sending messages while in the car. Some apps, like Textecution ($30), require an unlock code from a parent or administrator. Cinqpoint says it believes that brings potential liabilities, but to help encourage good behavior, it is working with national insurance carriers to provide discounts. As you use the app, Text-Star takes note of whether or not you’re using your phone while on the road, and gives you a star rating. A good star rating can then potentially be used to lower insurance rates.

DriveScribe also uses rewards to encourage safer driving, and includes a number of useful tools for parents with teens who drive. Available for Android and iOS, the app blocks texts and incoming calls when a car is moving faster than 12 mph. There’s an auto-response feature, and messages appear once you’ve stopped. The app also offers an option to allow texts from certain numbers, such as a parent’s, even while in motion. All the features worked well on the Nexus 4.

DriveScribe also monitors other driving habits, including speed, and all the data is available to parents via a Web-based dashboard. Based on their behavior on the road, drivers are awarded points for each ride. These points can later be redeemed for rewards like discounts at national retailers, which are provided by a DriveScribe partner.

For example, 1,000 points gets you a $10 Amazon gift card. But to take advantage of rewards like this, you have to subscribe to one of DriveScribe’s paid plans, which start at $3 per month. Still, it might be worth it for parents who want to give their kids an incentive to be safer drivers.

For those moments when you can’t bear to be disconnected from text messages — say, if your wife is pregnant — DriveSafe.ly is a good option.

The free app reads incoming messages out loud, and automatically replies to the sender with a custom message. It’s available for Android, and a BlackBerry 10 version is coming next month. But there’s no iOS app. There’s also a Pro version ($10 for Android, $14 for BlackBerry) that adds the ability to reply by voice, though I’d argue that can be just as distracting as typing.

Upon launching DriveSafe.ly on my Nexus 4, I thought something was wrong with the app. This is because it only displayed a small image in the upper left-hand corner of the screen rather than the entire screen, but it still worked fine. ISpeech said this is something it’s planning to fix.

Under the Settings menu, you can indicate what you’d like the app to read out loud, such as text, emails and sender’s name. This is also where you can write a message for your auto-response.

Using the same test method as the other two, DriveSafe.ly announced my brother’s name and read the message in a pleasant female voice. I was pretty impressed with the text-to-speech translation. The voice didn’t sound too robotic, and it didn’t horribly mangle the pronunciation of any names.

I’ll admit, by actually hearing the message, I was a little more tempted to grab my phone and respond, compared to the other two apps. But knowing that they received an automatic reply from the app saying that I was driving curbed the temptation.

These apps aren’t perfect solutions for completely stopping texting and driving, but they can certainly help, and are worth a test drive.

Apple Nears 50 Billion App Store Downloads, Plans Giveaway

Ina Fried — Fri, 03 May 2013 03:27:04 +0000

Apple said on Thursday that it is approaching 50 billion downloads from its App Store.

As has become customary for such events, Apple is prepping a giveaway for whoever downloads the milestone app — in this case, a $10,000 gift card to the App Store. The next 50 customers will get a $500 App Store gift card.

Cheapskates (and Android users) can even enter without downloading an app by going here.

Apps, meanwhile, have become big business for Apple and Google, generating billions in revenue. Software sales, meanwhile, have helped transform iTunes from a near-break-even business to a significant profit generator.

Apple has also paid out more than $9 billion to app developers, up from more than $7 billion as of January.

And app downloads continue at a torrid pace, with Apple having reported in October 2012 that it had just crossed 35 billion downloads.

Twitter Takes On Music Discovery, but Comes Up Short

Bonnie Cha — Thu, 02 May 2013 13:00:15 +0000

Back in my day, discovering new music and bands meant listening to the radio or going to Tower Records to sample albums at the listening stations. Now there are all sorts of apps and services to help you do that, right from the convenience of your smartphone, including a new app from Twitter.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Twitter, it’s a social networking service that lets you broadcast messages, called tweets, about what you’re doing or thinking, in 140 characters or less. People can follow you to receive your updates, and conversely, you can follow people you find interesting.

[ See post to watch video ]

The new app, called Twitter Music, helps you discover new music and artists based on what people are talking about on the service — both within your network and the broader Twitter audience. The free app is currently only available for iOS devices, though Twitter plans to bring the service to Android. Twitter Music also works on any Web browser.

I’ve been testing Twitter Music on my iPhone 5 for the past week, and it’s a beautifully designed app. It helped me keep abreast of what’s popular, and turned me on to a couple of new artists. The Web version also worked well, and it was nice to be able to navigate through the various sections on a bigger screen. That said, Twitter Music as a whole has limited capabilities.

For example, you can’t create a playlist or listen to multiple songs by one artist in sequence, so it’s not a replacement for other music streaming services like Pandora and Spotify — nor is it meant to be. Rather, it’s more of a complementary service than an adversary.

The app’s value is largely dependent on how active you are on Twitter. While you’re not required to have a Twitter account to use the app, you’ll get more from it if you do, since it offers personalized recommendations based on the people you follow. Still, it puts the onus on the user to follow musicians and share what they’re listening to, which might not be appealing to everybody.

Twitter Music is divided into four sections: Popular, Emerging, Suggested and #NowPlaying. Popular shows you the 140 most popular new songs on Twitter, while Emerging surfaces 140 up-and-coming artists found in tweets. Both of these lists are constantly changing, depending on what’s trending at the moment on Twitter.

The other two sections are designed to be personal to you. The Suggested section offers recommendations based on the musicians you follow on Twitter, and NowPlaying shows what your followers are listening to. There’s also a search function, but you can only look up artists, not particular songs.

Navigating among the sections is easy. You can either use the drop-down list at the top of the page, or you can swipe left or right.

Each page is presented with an attractive grid view that displays the album covers for all the artists on that list. Tapping on an individual square will bring up a slightly larger image, where you can start following the artist on Twitter with a tap of a button, visit the artist’s Twitter profile page to see which musicians they follow, and listen to a 30-second preview of their song.

The preview is powered by iTunes, and you don’t have to leave the app to hear the clip, which is nice. If you’re sold after 30 seconds, there’s a button to purchase the full track from iTunes.

You can listen to an entire song if you are a Spotify Premium or Rdio Unlimited subscriber, though both of these services cost $10 a month. I’m a Spotify Premium member, and after entering my login details in the Settings menu, I was able to listen to full tracks with no problem.

While a song is playing, you can tap the spinning record icon on the bottom left of the app, which brings up a music player interface. Here you can fast-forward and rewind a song by moving the record in clockwise or counterclockwise, adjust the volume and tweet what you’re listening to. With the latter, a preset message is written for you, such as “#NowPlaying @Alabama_Shakes – Hold On,” with a link to the track, but you can add a custom message, as well.

Overall, I found the app to be well designed and easy to use, but I had mixed feelings about its usefulness.

The Popular section wasn’t filled with many surprises. It’s populated with a lot of today’s pop hits from artists like Justin Timberlake, Rihanna and Bruno Mars. It would be nice if there was a way to filter songs by genre.

The Emerging page was a lot more interesting to me. It introduced me to a ton of new artists that I’ve never heard of, and there were a handful of bands who piqued my interest, such as Guards and Houses. The problem is once I heard a song, I wanted to hear more from that particular artist, but there’s no way to do that from Twitter Music. Instead, you just have to take note of that artist and check them out on another service like Spotify.

The Suggested section is supposed to offer you personalized recommendations, but in order for this to work, you have to already follow artists on Twitter. Prior to testing the app, I didn’t follow a ton of musicians, so my Suggested page was nearly empty. I only follow people if they have interesting things to say, so if there’s an artist who rarely tweets or only sends messages to promote concerts or new albums, I’m not going to follow them, even if I enjoy their music.

Bottom line: I don’t want to be forced to follow people just to get music recommendations. I prefer something like Pandora, where I can create an artist-themed radio station and listen to a stream of their songs and musicians who are like them.

NowPlaying wasn’t particularly useful to me. If one of your followers has tweeted what they’re listening to, then it shows up in this section. I follow more than 300 people on Twitter, but only four people actually broadcasted what they were jamming to, so this section of the app was also barren. This could change as Twitter Music grows and more people use it.

For those who are heavily engaged in Twitter, the app offers a bare-bones way to discover new music. But for everyone else, there’s no compelling reason to use it over existing music services.

Intel Capital Leads $9 Million Round in Mobile App Firm FeedHenry

Arik Hesseldahl — Thu, 02 May 2013 08:22:56 +0000

Intel Capital has led a $9 million investment round in FeedHenry, a provider of cloud-based mobile applications aimed at the enterprise, with offices in Carriganore, Ireland, and Burlington, Mass.

Other investors in the round include Kernel Capital and ACT Venture Capital (two Irish VC firms) and Enterprise Ireland, a government-backed development outfit. Cloud software company VMware is also an investor.

FeedHenry specializes in providing a cloud-based platform-as-a-service for developing and deploying mobile applications aimed at large organizations. It also runs what it describes as a “backend as a service” that helps get mobile apps working with existing enterprise applications. Its partners include Rackspace, Telefonica, Hewlett-Packard and VMware’s open source platform service, Cloud Foundry.

It’s also a would-be rival to Parse, the mobile development firm that was acquired by Facebook last month.

Humin App Adds a Human Touch to Your Phone's Address Book

Bonnie Cha — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 19:22:12 +0000

Take a look at your smartphone’s address book. Maybe it does a good job of storing basic contact information, but it doesn’t tell you much about the person beyond that, and if you have a lot of contacts, it can get pretty messy. One San Francisco-based company is looking to change all that.

Shown off today at the D: Dive Into Mobile conference in New York, Humin is an app that makes your phonebook more than just a repository for numbers and email addresses.

The app has several goals: To add a more human (hence the name) touch to your address book by highlighting your relationship to each contact, to make search easier, and to help you connect with new people through trusted sources.

“We thought it was time for people to really start making sense of relationships. How many times have you looked at your phone and said, ‘How do I even know this person?’” said Ankur Jain, the app’s creator.

Jain joined AllThingsD’s Liz Gannes on stage to demo Humin.

Using your phone’s address book, the app creates a profile for each individual, and pulls information about that contact from various social networks and sources, including Facebook, LinkedIn and Google. You can add notes, such as when and where you met that person, or his or her favorite sports team.

But even if you don’t add notes, Humin “ties deeply” into native apps on your phone to match a contact with a place. Let’s say you meet someone at a conference, which is entered into your calendar. Humin knows that you met John Doe that week, so it’s likely you met John at the conference.

“Naturally, we think in terms of ‘who works at company X and lives in San Francisco?’ Our app lets you type just that and search in a way that’s similar to how our brain works,” Jain said.

The app also searches friends of friends, and tells you which of your contacts is the strongest connection, so you can ask for an introduction.

Privacy and security is always a concern with apps that access your address book. Jain said that all the information that’s pulled from your contact lists, social networks and public records is ingested in the individual’s mobile device.

Humin is scheduled for release this summer as a free iOS app. An Android version will follow soon after.

Prior to starting Humin, Jain founded the Kairos Society, a nonprofit organization for young entrepreneurs and innovators working on solutions for education, biotechnology, healthcare and more.

[ See post to watch video ]

Lauren Goode contributed to this report.

Twitter Refreshes Its Mobile Presence

Mike Isaac — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 18:55:08 +0000

Twitter updated its mobile applications and website on Wednesday, pushing out a visual refresh to the company’s Android app that claims to reflect a “native” Android experience. (Essentially, that means bringing the Android app up to par with the iOS app’s functionality.) Also noteworthy: Twitter’s mobile apps and website will now support the company’s additional Cards technology, which were rolled out at a developer event on Tuesday evening.

Evernote 5.0 for Android Adds Shortcuts, Photo Features

Bonnie Cha — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 15:15:26 +0000

Evernote released a major update to its Android app today, bringing a revamped design and more camera-related features to the note-taking app.

Evernote 5.0 is available now from the Google Play store, and offers a new Multi-shot Camera mode that allows you to take multiple pictures at once and save them to a single note.

A feature called Page Camera also turns the camera into a scanner, and lets you save a digital version of paper notes and documents into Evernote, simply by taking a photo.

I got a sneak peek at Evernote 5.0 over the weekend, and Page Camera worked great. I was worried when my notes looked dark and blurry in the camera’s preview pane, but the final result was bright and clear. I was able to read my notes without a problem (well, aside from trying to decipher my illegible scribbles).

Of course, those who invest in an Evernote Smart Notebook from Moleskine will get even more functionality, including the ability to tag notes using the included Smart Stickers. Premium account holders will also be able to search for any files created in Microsoft Office, iWork or Open Office by keyword.

Shortcuts are also new to Evernote 5.0 for Android. The feature, which gives you the ability to quickly access notes, notebooks and tags, was first introduced to the Mac version of Evernote in January. But this will be the first time it’s available on any of the company’s mobile apps.

Other changes include a redesigned Notes list, new icons and tag support for Evernote Business.

Evernote has about 50 million users and is available on multiple platforms, including Mac, Windows, iOS and Android. Earlier this month, the service suffered a security breach and required all of its users to reset their passwords. The company has since announced that it plans to roll out two-factor authentication later this year.

Improving Smartphone Battery Life With Apps

Bonnie Cha — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 13:00:41 +0000

People will go to great lengths to charge their dying smartphones. But keeping your handset juiced on the go doesn’t have to mean running into the nearest cafe to find an outlet, or sitting cross-legged on an airport floor tethered to a wall socket.

Accessories like rechargeable battery cases and battery extenders can provide temporary relief from battery drain. There’s even a solution that doesn’t require carrying an extra gadget — the power management app.

[ See post to watch video ]

This week, I checked out two such apps for Android: JuiceDefender by Latedroid, and 2X Battery by Sam Lu. It’s important to note that the Android operating system itself already has tools that can help you better manage battery life on your device. You can adjust the brightness of the screen, and manually turn off wireless radios, such as Wi-Fi and GPS, when not in use.

JuiceDefender and 2X Battery aim to make power management easier by automating steps. Both turn off your wireless connections when the screen is off, and then automatically resume operations once you’ve turned it back on. With the apps, I was able to get anywhere between four and six hours of extra battery life on the Nexus 4.

But it wasn’t all smooth sailing. With JuiceDefender, there was a slight delay reconnecting to my cellular and Wi-Fi connections. Meanwhile, not all of the features in 2X Battery worked.

Also, if you’re constantly using your smartphone, these apps aren’t going to help, since they need to be in “idle” mode to really work. Power users would be better off getting one of the battery-extending accessories; Juice Defender and 2X Battery are better suited for the average user.

JuiceDefender is available in three different versions: Free, Plus ($1.99), and Ultimate ($4.99). I tested the Plus version, which I would recommend, since it gives you control over your apps (more on this later). Ultimate adds a slew of scheduling and customization options, which might be overkill.

The app offers five different profiles: Balanced, Aggressive, Extreme, Customize and Advanced. By default, the app is set to Balanced, which suspends wireless connections once the screen is off, but syncs data every 15 minutes, so you still get notifications about new email, Twitter interactions and so forth. You can also still receive incoming calls.

Aggressive and Extreme are all about maximizing your battery to the fullest, so the settings are more stringent. Meanwhile, Advanced lets you customize all the various settings.

It’s worth going through this app’s tutorial and reading the overview to familiarize yourself with all the different modes, since it’s a bit overwhelming.

At first I stuck with the Balanced profile, but soon changed it to Customized so I could have more control over my apps.

I use apps like Pandora to stream music over my car stereo, but since all connections stop once the screen is off, Pandora would not advance to the next track once a song was over.

In Customized mode, you can bypass this by adding apps to an approved whitelist that allows them to keep working in the background even if the screen is off. Since adding numerous apps to this list would defeat the whole purpose of the JuiceDefender, I only included a couple, such as Pandora and Google Maps, while letting the others (Gmail, Facebook) sync intermittently.

You can change the time interval under the Customized settings tab, and also enable Night mode, which suspends the background syncing feature altogether during specified hours, such as midnight to 6 am. There are plenty of other customization options, as well.

The app worked as advertised in my testing. With moderate use, I usually need to charge the Nexus 4 in the evening. With JuiceDefender, I could go about a day and a half before needing to recharge.

Every 15 minutes, I heard an audio alert whenever I had new emails. But when turning the screen back on, I noticed that it took a few seconds to reconnect to T-Mobile’s network and my home Wi-Fi.

For example, several times I launched Facebook and got an error messaging saying, “No Internet connection.” Shortly thereafter it would be fine. This was slightly annoying, but I wouldn’t say it’s a deal-breaker.

2X Battery works in much the same way as JuiceDefender. There are free and Pro versions; the latter costs $2.99. I tested the Pro version, which lets you have more than one app in the whitelist, adds “night” mode and removes ads.

The app keeps it pretty simple compared to Juice Defender. There are only two profiles to choose from: Day or Night.

In Day mode, all wireless connections are disabled once the screen turns off. But it can reconnect to the Internet to sync data at various time intervals — anywhere from five minutes to four hours. Night mode adds a couple more options, including the ability to switch to airplane mode.

Like before, I added Pandora and Google Maps to the whitelist. Whenever I used either app, 2X Battery knew not to disable the wireless connection when the screen is off.

With moderate use, 2X Battery delivered similar performance to JuiceDefender. I went a day and a half before needing to recharge. The app was faster to reconnect to my wireless connections than JuiceDefender — almost instantaneously, in fact. But the background syncing didn’t always work.

Only twice during my testing did I receive an audio alert to new email, even though I knew I had messages waiting for me the other times.

As much as I want to conserve my battery, getting notified about new email is important to me, particularly for work, so this was a huge drawback. As such, I preferred using JuiceDefender over 2X Battery.

Smartphone batteries need a lot of improvement. But until that technology comes, these apps can help you squeeze a few more hours out of your smartphones, provided you understand the apps’ limitations.

Crittercism Nabs $12 Million in Funding to Expand Beyond Tracking Mobile App Bugs

Ina Fried — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 11:30:07 +0000

Crittercism, a San Francisco-based company that helps mobile app developers track their performance, has raised a further $12 million from its existing investors.

The company’s technology lets mobile app creators such as Netflix and LinkedIn understand how and why their apps crash, although Crittercism plans to use the new funding to further expand into other areas of app performance monitoring.

While testing apps is important, Crittercism CEO Andrew Levy says that there is no way for app makers — even big ones — to foresee every possible issue.

“You just can’t test every possible hardware and software combination,” he said in an interview.

Levy recalls a recent issue one large customer had using its app in conjunction with certain Motorola phones. The company didn’t even have Motorola phones in its office, but Levy said his company’s product was able to gather enough information from real-world users to diagnose the issue.

The company, which consisted of just over a dozen people for much of last year, is now up to 23; Levy said he expects to have more than 60 by the end of the year, with most of the new hires going to beef up the company’s engineering ranks.

“We are looking to scale pretty rapidly,” he said. Even with a fairly small team, Crittercism’s technology is in use on more than 450 million iOS, Android and Windows Phone 8 devices. Among those using its technology in their apps, Levy said, are Netflix, Home Depot, LinkedIn and TripAdvisor.

The Series B round was led by Google Ventures, an existing investor in the company. Shasta Ventures and Opus Capital, also prior investors, provided additional funding.

Google has said it is looking to boost its presence in mobile funding deals.

Google Maps for iPhone Update Adds Contacts Integration

Bonnie Cha — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 18:37:03 +0000

Google Maps for iPhone is getting its first major update today. In version 1.1, users can now search for any address stored in their Google contacts list. In addition, tapping inside the search bar brings up the option for finding nearby places in 13 different categories (e.g., restaurants, hotels, gas stations). Google is also rolling out the app to seven new countries, including Egypt, Lebanon and Bahrain. Google Maps for iPhone launched in December and was quickly downloaded by iPhone users frustrated with the poor Apple Maps experience.

Apps Rocket Toward $25 Billion in Sales

Jessica E. Lessin and Spencer E. Ante — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 16:30:35 +0000

Nearly five years after Apple Inc. kicked off the mobile-apps craze, the industry is booming.

App stores run by Apple and Google Inc. now offer more than 700,000 apps each. With so many apps to choose from, consumers are estimated to spend on average about two hours a day with apps. Global revenue from app stores is expected to rise 62 percent this year to $25 billion, according to Gartner Inc.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Only in Barcelona: Dual Screens and Phones That Translate

Bonnie Cha and Ina Fried — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 20:54:12 +0000

There weren’t any big surprises or breakout products at Mobile World Congress this year. It has been a combination of more phablets, devices for emerging markets and some meh tablets.

But one of the best things about this show is that it gives us a chance to check out handsets from around the world. Some are simply variations of existing models available in the U.S., while others will make you green with envy.

Since these devices will probably never make it to the States, we decided to bring them to you. Below, you’ll find just a few that caught our eye this week.

NEC Medias W N-05E

NEC had an interesting dual-screen device that closed to work like a traditional smartphone and opened into a near-tablet-size device. Apps could flow over both 4.3-inch screens, or users could run two apps or use one screen as a keyboard and the other for running programs.

Though just a prototype, the NEC product was functional, and included customized email and photo gallery apps that really took advantage of the dual screens.

Kyocera Mamorino3

Just like the senior-dedicated handsets on display, there were plenty of cellphones designed for specifically for kids.

The Kyocera Mamorino3 is one that’s available from Japan. The most interesting feature of this handset is the emergency strap at the end. If a child is in any danger or needs help, he or she can pull the strap to trigger a loud alarm. An email will also be automatically sent to a designated contact person.

More Samsung Galaxy Phones

There is already a range of Samsung Galaxy devices available in the U.S. — most notably the Galaxy S III — but we stumbled across several we hadn’t seen before.

The phones ranged from the large-screen Galaxy Grand to the very entry-level Galaxy Fame and the ruggedized Galaxy Xcover 2. Also on display was the Galaxy Express, a model that seemed to bear a good deal of resemblance to the soon-to-be-updated Galaxy S III.

NTT DoCoMo Translation Service

NTT DoCoMo is one of Japan’s largest mobile operators, and its selection of smartphones is just as vast and varied. At past shows it has displayed handsets made out of wood, phones that look like chocolate and one that could be controlled by eyeball movements.

This year, NTT DoCoMo highlighted more of its services rather than phones. One was its recently launched Android translation app, which only works on NTT DoCoMo phones.

The app can translate voice calls from Japanese to English, Korean or Mandarin. A company spokesperson said there’s about a two- to three-second delay for translation.

You can also dictate a sentence into the phone, and the app will provide a text translation that you can show the other person. Text translation supports 10 languages, including French, German, Italian and Spanish.

Huawei Ascend P2

Huawei announced the Ascend P2 at the show, and quickly claimed it to be the “world’s fastest smartphone.” Such superlatives are meaningless in our book, but the 4G LTE-enabled handset is capable of download speeds of up to 150 megabits per second — to our knowledge, the fastest connection available on a smartphone to date. The Android 4.1 Jelly Bean device is also powered by a quad-core 1.5GHz processor.

Other features of the Ascend P2 include a 4.7-inch, 720p touchscreen and a 13-megapixel rear camera. The phone will be available in Europe starting in the second quarter, but there are no plans to bring it to the U.S. with a carrier.

Mailbox: Swipe Your Way to a Clutter-Free Inbox

Bonnie Cha — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 14:00:51 +0000

With smartphones, we have more access to our email than ever before, yet keeping up with the inbox can still feel like an impossible task. Unfortunately, current email apps are little more than mobile versions of their desktop counterparts, and don’t provide the right tools to handle email on the go.

But the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company Orchestra is hoping to change that with a new iOS email app called Mailbox. It aims to be more of a triage center for your inbox, and is designed to help you get your inbox down to zero. As such, it lets you use simple swipe gestures to organize messages in four main categories — archive, delete, snooze (for response later) and lists.

[ See post to watch video ]

For the past week, I’ve been using Mailbox as my primary mobile email app for both my work and personal accounts, which are both Gmail. It has its limitations. Namely, it only works with Gmail accounts, and it doesn’t automatically sync labels. But I found the ability to set aside messages with reminders to respond later to be extremely useful. The app’s gesture-based system also makes it easier to manage messages.

Mailbox is free, but you can’t just download it and start using it right away. Instead, the company is using a reservation system to gradually roll out the app to everybody, and to prevent system crashes. You’ll receive a reservation number once you download the app, and there’s a counter that constantly shows your place in line. My wait was about three days.

You can add multiple Gmail accounts. Orchestra says it’s working to add support for other email accounts and operating systems. After entering my login IDs and passwords for my work and personal email accounts, all my messages were displayed in a unified inbox. To view each account separately, you can tap the list icon in the upper left-hand corner to view different folders.

There are four main gestures you’ll need to know in order to effectively use Mailbox. A quick swipe to the right archives an email (archiving allows you to clean up your inbox by moving messages from your inbox to Gmail’s All Mail folder, so you don’t have to delete them). A longer swipe to the right deletes a message. A quick swipe to the left lets you “snooze” a message, while a longer swipe to the left allows you to file emails in different folders.

You’ll have to play around with the gestures a bit to figure out how fast or slow to swipe, but Mailbox also displays a different color for each move (for example, red for delete, yellow for snooze) as a visual confirmation, which I thought was smart.

I’ll admit that it took me a day or two to get used to Mailbox’s gestures system. But I came to appreciate the ease with which I could categorize emails right from the inbox. I receive a lot of emails throughout the day, and there’s an obsessive-compulsive part of me that hates it when I have unread messages in my inbox.

Mailbox allowed me to quickly bring that number down to zero using simple swipes. By comparison, the Gmail app for iOS allows you to archive a message with a swipe, but deleting an email requires a couple of clicks. (On the Android operating system, you can delete or archive an email with one swipe.) Similarly, you can delete a message with a swipe in Apple’s native email app, but other actions require extra taps.

That said, the most useful feature of Mailbox is the snooze control. Many times, when I’m on the go, I don’t have time to respond to an email right then and there. In those cases, I usually “star” a message or place it in a Follow Up folder, so I can address it when I get back to my computer. But, as we all know, life gets hectic, and sometimes I forget to do that.

With Mailbox, you get reminders to take action on an email. When you snooze a message, a pop-up screen presents you with eight different options on when you want to address the email. Your choices include Later Today, Tomorrow and Next Week, among others.

From the settings menu, you can also specify timing. For example, for Later Today, you can choose to receive a reminder anywhere from one to 24 hours after the original email arrived in your inbox.

The app will then send you a push notification (make sure to enable this feature when first setting up the app) at the specified time, to remind you to respond. Mailbox creates its own label in the desktop Gmail client, and you can find snoozed messages in the Later subfolder. I used Snooze a lot at the end of a workday, and on the weekend when I wanted to unplug for a while.

But, in its goal to be minimalistic, Mailbox hinders or omits some useful features found in the Gmail and Apple email apps, the most important being labels.

In Gmail, I rely on labels (or folders) to sort emails from specific people, by event and more, but none of these labels were automatically synced over to Mailbox. Instead, you have to manually move them to your Mailbox folder on the desktop Gmail client, which I only found out was possible after asking the company. It’s not very intuitive, and takes extra time.

Once you’ve moved them over, you’ll find all your labels under the Lists part of the app, along with Mailbox’s default lists: To Read, To Buy, and To Watch. You can create new lists, as well. For an app that looks to simplify mobile email, this process was a bit complicated.

Mailbox also doesn’t support Priority inbox, though Orchestra said they might add it in the future if there’s user demand. I also missed smaller features from the Gmail mobile app, like the ability to mark a message as spam, and selecting multiple emails to delete at once.

Despite these minor quibbles, there’s a lot to like about Mailbox. The easy management tools and response reminders are some of the highlights. It’s worth a try, especially since it’s free. You’ll just have to get in line.

SwiftKey 4 Launches in Google Play Store

Bonnie Cha — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 08:01:12 +0000

The latest version of SwiftKey, the popular predictive keyboard app for Android, is now available in the Google Play Store. New features of SwiftKey 4 (previously SwiftKey Flow) include the ability to type words by dragging your finger letter to letter in one continuous motion. It also features technology that can predict what you’ll write next, based on context, and learns your typing style for better accuracy. SwiftKey 4 is a free upgrade for existing users, while newcomers can grab the app for $1.99 for a limited time. The regular price is $3.99.

What to Wear: Apps for Managing Your Closet

Bonnie Cha — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 14:00:29 +0000

Remember when your mom used to pick out your clothes for you, so you didn’t have to worry about putting together an outfit? I sometimes miss those days, because I struggle to find something to wear every morning.

Hiring a personal stylist is not in most people’s budgets, unless they’re celebrities. So, this week I checked out two free apps that can help you manage your wardrobe: Netrobe and Cloth.

[ See post to watch video ]

I found Netrobe to be the more useful app of the two. With it, you can photograph each item in your closet, which takes commitment, but gives you the ability to digitally create outfits. Meanwhile, Cloth lets you record your daily looks, and has more of a social twist. It’s easy to use, and has a nice interface, but it will appeal more to fashionistas than to those looking to organize their closets.

Neither of these apps are designed specifically for women. In fact, Cloth says it has a strong base of male users. That said, I asked a group of guy friends if they would ever use an app to plan their outfits; none of them were into it.

Netrobe is currently only available for iOS devices; support for other platforms is in the works. What attracted me most to the app was the ability to catalog all my clothing, shoes and accessories. Since I have all these items stored in different places in my house (closet, dresser, chest), I sometimes forget what I have, and end up wearing my current favorites pieces over and over.

But Netrobe helped me get organized (and clean out my closet), and provided me with an easy way to assemble and test out new looks. It was great for planning outfits for a wide range of occasions, everything from what to wear to work to an upcoming wedding in May. There’s also a Friend’s Activity feed, where you can see what other people are wearing and draw inspiration from them.

From the My Netrobe section, you can create a new category, such as tops or jeans, and then start taking pictures of your clothes. To each photo, you can add details like brand, color, size and season. All this information is searchable from within the app, which I found particularly handy when trying to look for a certain color top to match with bottoms, for example.

There are also photo-editing tools, such as a cropping option to help you remove unwanted background images, and Instagram-like filters if you want to spruce up your photos when sharing outfit ideas with others.

While I was initially pumped about creating my virtual closet, I grew bored after photographing just a dozen pieces of clothing and inputting all the information. It’s a tedious task, but I found that tackling one to two categories a day made it more manageable. And it was worth it in the end.

You can create a look by going to the app’s Styleboard section and dragging items from your collection to a blank board. The visual made it easy to see what worked and what didn’t, and I could easily plan my outfit for the next day on my smartphone while watching TV.

You can share your looks with friends via Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. As I mentioned before, you can see what other Netrobe users are wearing from the Activity feed. You can “Like” items, add comments or reshare. As with Pinterest, you can also repost ideas (you have to save the images to your photo gallery first) from fashion blogs or websites to use as inspiration later.

My only complaint about Netrobe is that the user interface isn’t always very intuitive. For example, it’s not immediately clear that you can add more details other than a title to a photo. I only found the other fields after accidentally tapping elsewhere on the screen. The app can also be slow to load at times.

The other app I tried is called Cloth, which is free, and only available for the iPhone for now. A 99-cent paid version of the app provides outfit recommendations based on the weather in your area, and adds photo filters.

I tested the free app, which handles wardrobe management differently than Netrobe: Instead of logging every piece of clothing in your closet, the app was designed more for taking a photo of your outfit for the day or for a certain event.

Cloth’s user interface is much more straightforward than Netrobe’s. From the main screen, you can access all of the app’s different sections, such as Feed, Wardrobe, Snap and Status. With Netrobe, you have to navigate to a second screen to access the different menus.

To add a photo, you can tap on the Snap icon, which will give you a choice of either activating the camera or choosing an existing picture from your photo library. Then you can add tags and notes about where you wore the outfit, select a category (everyday, evening, vacation, and so forth), and more. The photo is then saved into your feed, and you can view any outfit by category under the Wardrobe section.

It’s certainly a nice way to keep tabs on the looks you’ve worn, and you can take photos of individual pieces. But there’s no way to categorize it by type or to assemble looks, so I didn’t find it particularly useful for planning outfits or cataloging the contents of my closet.

Social networking plays a big part in Cloth. Similar to the location-based service Foursquare, you can use this app to unlock achievements and earn badges for certain tasks, and many have to do with sharing photos on social networks like Facebook, Twitter and even Cloth’s blog.

I’m not really one for taking self-portraits in the first place, so I already felt weird about taking pictures of myself in outfits. I really didn’t want to share them on my social networks, but, for the purpose of testing, I did it. It’s certainly not required, and earning badges is more of a game than anything.

In the end, I found Netrobe to be most useful for my needs, which was organizing my closet and planning outfits. But if you love fashion and sharing ideas with friends, Cloth is an easy way to do it.

Crashlytics Makes Enterprise Features Free for All

Arik Hesseldahl — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 19:36:05 +0000

Crashlytics, the mobile crash-reporting and analysis platform that was acquired by Twitter last month, said today that it will make its enterprise-level features available for free. In a company blog post, the company’s co-founder, Wayne Chang, said, “The features and usage we used to charge for based on limits are now unlimited across the board.”

Marissa Mayer Wants Fewer Yahoo Mobile Apps

Arik Hesseldahl — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 21:11:39 +0000

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer says the Internet giant has too many mobile apps, and the total number should come down. With the company offering several dozen apps currently (and just today acquiring a new one), Mayer, in remarks made at a Goldman Sachs conference in San Francisco, said she’d like to trim that number to about 12 to 15.

“Ultimately, you don’t want to trouble users by making them download too many apps,” she said. “But many apps are single-use.”

The hope, she said, is that each Yahoo user will have on their smartphones “the two to four apps that matter most to them.”

One mobile opportunity she also sees is around Yahoo Groups. As communications within groups of people move to the phone and other mobile devices, Mayer said, there are “all kinds of possibilities” for Yahoo.

Now at Your Service, Winston the Personal Newsreader App

Bonnie Cha — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 14:48:25 +0000

We get our news from a lot of places these days — TV, newspapers, the Web, mobile apps, social networks. Having these multiple resources is certainly nice, but it can also be time-consuming trying to check them all in order to get the news that’s most important to you.

To help simplify the process, a Boulder, Colo.-based startup called Reactor Labs today released its free Winston app, which narrates the news to you in short two- to three-minute briefs. It’s currently available for iOS devices, and can stream to Apple TV and AirPlay devices. An Android version and support for more languages (it only supports English at the moment) are in the works.

I’ve been testing a prerelease version of Winston for the past few days, and it has been an interesting way to get news every day. The app allows you to choose the topics that most interest you, such as world news, politics and sports, and pulls information from various news sources around the Web. It can also incorporate information from your Facebook and Twitter accounts.

You tap on a specific channel to hear a rolling summary of articles, dictated to you in a male British voice (what else would you expect from something called Winston?), complete with any related images, and classical background music, if you so choose. If a story grabs your attention, you can tap the headline to read the full article.

I found Winston useful for getting my news fix in the mornings while getting ready for work. Winston’s voice sounded surprisingly human, though it certainly had its fair share of mispronunciations, particularly with names. There are some other kinks, as well. For example, it didn’t always do a good job of summarizing Facebook statuses, and I could never get my Twitter account to sync with Winston.

Still, I came away impressed by the app overall. The news summaries were relevant and well done. The interface is also attractive and easy to use.

Reactor Labs CEO and co-founder Aaron Ting said the company will continue to refine the intelligence technology for summarizing news, and will add new features, including an in-car mode and voice commands.

Reactor Labs has raised $750,000 from Windforce Ventures, Comcast Ventures and ENIAC Ventures, among others.

Here’s a video of Winston in news-reading action:

Anomaly Productions Brings Interactive Twist to Graphic Novels

Bonnie Cha — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 00:54:50 +0000

A well-written book can make the characters come to life in the mind of a reader. But one media company is also using technology to help characters literally jump off the page. Today at the D: Dive Into Media conference in Dana Point, Calif., Anomaly Productions showed how it’s bringing new and old media together to make storytelling better.

Late last year, the company published a 370-page graphic novel called “Anomaly” both as a hardcover book and a standalone app for iOS, Android, Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook devices. Along with it, Anomaly Productions released a companion augmented-reality app for the printed version, providing readers with extra material, much like DVDs.

“Anomaly” and its AR app are the brainchild of comic artist and Witchblade creator Brian Haberlin, and Skip Brittenham, one of the most powerful attorneys in Hollywood. On Monday afternoon, Haberlin joined AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka onstage for a demo. Using a smartphone camera and the Anomaly Ultimate Augmented Reality app, Haberlin transformed the dead-tree version of “Anomaly” into an interactive story, complete with animated panels and voice narration.

“Even back when I first started doing comics in 1992, we wanted to do interactive stuff, but we didn’t have the devices or the bandwidth,” Haberlin said. “Now, with iPads, tablets and wireless bandwidth, we can do anything we want. We’re at the infancy of this stuff. It’s developing the language of this storytelling, and we’re having a lot of fun being a part of it.”

The hardcover version of “Anomaly” costs $45, and the companion augmented-reality app is free (Haberlin says it’s the longest original full-color graphic novel ever done). The standalone app provides the first chapter of the book for free, but to unlock the rest of the chapters, you’ll have to pay $4.99. The company plans to release two additional titles later this year: “Shifter” in July, and “Between Worlds” in October.

[ See post to watch video ]

Micro-Social Apps Team Up: Pair Acquires Cupple and Becomes Couple

Liz Gannes — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 18:50:36 +0000

Some consolidation happening in the private-mobile-apps-for-romantic-couples space — an idea that sounds nice, but is proving to be hard to grow. Tenthbit, which has a major $4.2 million in seed funding, acquired its competitor Cupple — which it cited as first to launch in the space — and changed its app’s name to Couple from Pair. Another competitor is Avocado.

Sift Raises More Funding to Help Turn Your Inbox Into a Personalized Shopping App

Tricia Duryee — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 17:17:14 +0000

Sift has raised $540,000 in funding to turn the deluge of offers sent to consumers via email into a shopping app for the iPad. The Burlingame, Calif.-based company, which was incubated by the Tandem accelerator, said the seed funding comes from Shawn Wang, co-founder of Baidu and Unity Ventures; Deep Nishar, SVP of Product at LinkedIn; Bhupen Shah, co-founder of Sling Media; Sand Hill Angels and others. The money will be used to hire more employees.

"App and Mortar" Is One Way to Describe the Trend in Mobile Commerce

Tricia Duryee — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 23:33:29 +0000

The term “mobile commerce” is commonly used to describe e-commerce revenue that is generated over smartphones and tablets.

But Flurry, a mobile analytics company, is introducing the term “app & mortar” in a new report published today that explores the rise in smartphone shopping.

Clearly, the term is a play on the term “bricks and clicks,” which emerged in the late ’90s and became popular as e-commerce started to challenge physical retailers.

In some respects, this report confirms what we already knew about mobile commerce, but takes it a step further by figuring out who is benefiting the most right now from the trend. Surprisingly, it’s physical retailers.

In the report, Flurry analyzed the amount of time spent by consumers across more than 1,800 iOS and Android shopping apps in December 2012, compared to the same month a year earlier.

The biggest growth category by far was apps developed by retailers, such as Walmart, Macy’s and Gap.

Flurry said time spent in retail apps skyrocketed by 525 percent year over year. In contrast, online marketplaces, such as eBay and Amazon, increased by only 178 percent.

In terms of the share of shoppers’ time being spent inside the different apps, retailers also saw the biggest gains. In December 2012, shoppers spent 27 percent of their time inside of retail apps, up by 12 percentage points over the same month a year earlier.

The gain in share by retail apps came at the expense of online marketplace and daily deal apps, which declined year over year. The share of time being spent with online marketplaces decreased from 25 percent in December 2011 to 20 percent in December 2012. Daily deal providers, like Groupon and LivingSocial, fell to 13 percent from 20 percent.

Flurry did not offer a lot of analysis as to why this was occurring, but suggested that retailers were beginning to better respond to the move toward “online meeting offline shopping through mobile apps.” In general, 2012 was the first year that many online or physical retailers took mobile shopping seriously, so it was likely that the distribution of time spent would change with a huge surge in consumer interest and better options.

Interestingly, even though Flurry noted a decrease in time spent in online marketplace apps, eBay still easily beat its mobile revenue forecast (so it’s not clear if there’s a direct correlation between time spent and dollars spent). Last week, eBay said it recorded $13 billion in mobile revenue in 2012, exceeding its forecast of $10 billion. This year, the online retailer expects mobile revenue to hit $20 billion.

EBay is the most transparent of the larger e-commerce players when it comes to mobile’s contribution.

In contrast, an analyst’s best guess for Amazon is that about $3 billion to $5 billion of its annual sales are coming from mobile devices.

Etsy Acquires Mixel for Mobile Team

Liz Gannes — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 20:00:00 +0000

Craft marketplace Etsy has acquired mobile photo app maker Mixel as part of its efforts to beef up native mobile app development.

Mixel launched in November 2011 as a hyped collage creation app for the iPad, and later pivoted to be more of a simple photo manipulation tool for the iPhone.

The four-person Mixel team, which had talked to a number of potential buyers after its pivot, gets to stay in New York, making the easy move to Etsy’s Brooklyn office from the Union Square area.

Mixel co-founder and CEO Khoi Vinh — who was formerly design director for the New York Times’ Web site and is now Etsy product design director for mobile — said he and his co-founders are stripping out Mixel’s social networking features but leaving the core collage-making tools. They plan to maintain the product by working nights and weekends.

Meanwhile, Etsy’s Mike Brittain, who is director of engineering for mobile, said the company has projected that mobile traffic will top desktop traffic by the end of 2014.

Today, at least 25 percent of Etsy’s traffic comes from mobile. The company added iPad and Android apps to its iPhone and mobile web offerings in December. During the 2012 holiday season, mobile shoppers accounted for a third of visits.

But Brittain said the majority of mobile traffic comes via the mobile Web, and the company feels it can offer a better experience with native apps.

Asked whether the Mixel deal was actually an acquisition or simply a talent hire, Brittain said the company was fully acquired, but would not disclose further details.

Vinh and Brittain attested that Mixel and Etsy aligned on a few different axes — not just location — as both companies are built by “makers” and provide highly visual products.

Mixel had raised $1.1 million from Betaworks, Polaris, Allen & Company and CrunchFund.