Enflick, the Canadian creator of popular apps like TextNow and PingChat, is taking a big step forward today with the launch of Touch, a new mobile messaging platform to help you keep in touch with your closest friends and family.

Yes, that sounds a bit similar to Path, the year-old mobile social network that recently received a major update. But Touch, available for iOS, Android, and BlackBerry, is more focused on real-time chat rather than posting updates. It’s about active communication with your close friends.

And Touch has one other major advantage over its better-funded competitor: a massive pre-existing user base. The company says it has 21.5 million worldwide users on PingChat and TextNow, and Touch will roll out as an update for 13 million existing PingChat users.

Enflick co-founder and CEO Derek Ting tells us that Touch will completely replace the existing PingChat network — which makes sense, since Touch is an evolved form of that app. Like PingChat, you can have quick text conversations with your friends and share photos, but Touch will also let you easily keep track of all of your friends’ updates in typical social network fashion.

The Touch app looks attractive (though perhaps a bit too similar to Path), and it lets you easily move friends in and out of conversations to make group chats easier. Like all mobile messaging apps, it lets you know if your messages have been delivered and read, as well as when your friends are typing.

Still, Enflick has a long road ahead, as there are plenty of other messaging solutions on the market. And when it comes to keeping in touch with close friends, many are already praising Path’s slick new interface and life-tracking features.

Based in Waterloo, Ontario, Enflick recently raised $1 million in seed funding from Freestyle Capital, the Menlo Ventures Talent fund, and both Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga’s managers (not surprising, given the massive teen demographic for free texting services).

Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat

Plantronics updated its InstantMeeting app to allow iPhone (a aapl) users and enterprise users to connect to conference calls on their calendar with one click, much like Android and BlackBerry users have been able to for almost a year. The InstantMeeting app, which is pretty darn useful for those who handle a lot of conference calls, combs your calendar and shoots you a reminder when one is about to start. On a mobile phone, clicking through on the reminder allows the user to click to call or click to say you’re running late with the push of a button.

The update brings that same functionality to those on PCs by letting them click to call through Skype or Microsoft Lync. Gunjan Bhow, VP and general manager of New Ventures at Plantronics, says the goal is to ensure employees with VoIP clients and softphones can still take advantage of cheaper rates instead of going directly to their mobile phones and racking up big charges while traveling. It’s a pretty specific use case, but Plantronics is on the cutting edge of a shift in how people work, and how smarter and more personal computers, such as mobile phones, are allowing this shift to happen.

A personal assistant for everyone (no, it’s not Siri)
InstantMeeting on the iPhone

Apps such as InstantMeeting, Expensify and yes, Siri are taking mundane tasks top managers might have hired an assistant to handle and making delegating them affordable for all. In the case of InstantMeeting, it means I can work right up until a minute before my conference call or hop in the car knowing I’ll get a reminder when I need to get on the call, and will effectively touch a button to connect. I do have to manually enter some conference numbers because the app can’t read the bridge information, but it’s pretty solid. It’s similar to having someone outside my office connecting my calls so I can move seamlessly through my work until the exact moment I’m needed.

Expensify lets me snap a picture of my receipts and then automatically scans them for the relevant line items to create an expense report in a few minutes. The mobile app allows me to take those pictures on my mobile the moment I get my receipt and shoot them to the cloud, where Expensify does all the heavy lifting. My days of scrounging receipts from the bottom of my bag and taping them to copy paper are over, as are my efforts to then transfer that information to Excel.

Siri, of course, takes all kinds of dictation like a pro and helps find nearby restaurants, services and other items much like a real personal assistant would. Vlingo also does some of this for Android users. There are scores of other apps such as TripIt Pro making it easier and less time-consuming to book and keep track of travel, something those lucky souls who have worked at a company with a travel bureau will be glad to learn.

This isn’t just nice; it’s necessary
Just as computers helped drive productivity thanks to replacing typewriters with word processing software and calculators with spreadsheets, these new apps will help boost productivity for the masses who don’t have an assistant at their beck and call. And given that workers are being asked to do more in a day, gaining those two or three hours back each month that it takes to pull together an expense report, or the thirty minutes required to book a trip (or even avoiding the hours lost to flight delays) is a necessity.

And as we handle more and more information coming at us, it’s harder to sink into the uninterrupted flow of work, so being able to maximize that time knowing your phone can ping you when you have to join a call and then connect you can help you relax into work. Yes, these apps all take some time to set up and learn how to use (some may require you to invest in setting up rules so the app can better learn what you need from it), but much like training an assistant, the effort pays off. And thanks to advances in natural language processing, artificial intelligence, better data processing and algorithms, employees don’t have to pay quite as much to offload non-core tasks.

For more on how apps, computing and broadband will change the way people work, come to our GigaOM Net:Work event in San Francisco next week.

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Our very own Greg Kumparak and Jason Kincaid have both reviewed one — both giving it positive reviews. It’s the first time Greg has been excited about Android from a software standpoint in a while, and Jason thinks it is going to be really big. With special thanks to Appitalism, we have one Samsung Galaxy Nexus to give away.

First off, not only is the winner of this giveaway receiving a brand new Samsung Galaxy Nexus as soon as it’s released, but the winner will also receive a $500 app download card from Appitalism and Beats headphones by Dr. Dre Headphones. Obviously, in light of the holiday spirit, we wanted this giveaway to be big.

If you want a chance at winning this Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the $500 app download card from Appitalism, plus the Beats headphones by Dr. Dre Headphones, all you have to do is follow the steps below!

1) “Like” our TechCrunch Facebook Page:

2) Then do one of the following:

- Retweet this post (including the #TechCrunch hashtag)
- Or leave us a comment below telling us what excites you the most about this new phone

The contest starts now and ends Saturday, December 3rd, at 7:30pm PT.

Make sure you only tweet the message once, or you will be disqualified. We’ll choose the winner at random and contact them over the weekend. This giveaway is for U.S. only.

Good luck everyone.

Music fans, listen up! 8tracks (the self-proclaimed “social, curated alternative to Pandora”) is now available on Android.

For the unassociated, 8tracks is a massive collection of handcrafted playlists built, for the most part, by the music-obsessed. It’s one of those things that takes a bit of tinkering to wrap your head around… until suddenly, you find yourself 40 playlists deep with a monstrous collection of new tunes behind you. It’s the music lover’s music discovery engine.

This new Android app isn’t their first endeavor in mobile — in fact, the 8tracks iPhone app launched way back in April. With that said, this app isn’t just a quick port — it’s seemingly been rebuilt from the ground up with all of the mechanisms and design paradigms Android users would expect. In other words, it feels right at home on Android.

For those just diving into 8tracks (do it!), know that the service comes with some limitations: the same artist can only appear in any given mix twice, playback order is randomized after the first playthrough, and you can only skip a handful of tracks per day. When you’re willing to tune in and tune out, though, playlists from the likes of VICE, Pitch, Ghostly, Spin Magazine, and Resident Advisor should make you the hippest kid in Hippsville.

You can nab the free app from the Android Market right over here.

If you’ll excuse me, I have like 70,000 Adele/Jay-Z dubstep mashups to catch up on.

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Timeline: android



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The mobile web version of Nokia Maps now looks and behaves more like a standard native application on Google Android and Apple iOS devices, thanks to HTML5: The navigation service now provides offline downloading of maps. This ability can reduce mobile broadband data charges or allow map usage in areas that have limited or no wireless data service.

Enthusiast site Android Community noted the updates on Monday by way of the HandHeld Blog. In addition to the downloadable maps, the service — found at http://m.maps.nokia.com — also adds public transit directions to supplement the existing walking and driving navigation as well as points of interest (POI) and guides to the local area.

Nokia’s mapping service is arguably one of the best software products to come from the Finland-based handset maker, and this update makes it even better. Why else would Microsoft decide to integrate Nokia Maps in the Windows Phone platform going forward? I used the web version of Nokia Maps earlier on Monday, finding it to be so full-featured that it was almost difficult to believe it to be a web application.

 LoadingNextPreviousPicture 1 of 6 nokia-maps-1-save-local

The offline mapping mode is welcome, especially when many smartphone owners pay for set amounts of wireless data. Google, too, recently introduced downloadable maps, partially for this reason. Nokia’s implementation is somewhat limiting, though, at least in my short tests. The initial geographic area I wanted to map was too large, so Nokia Maps wouldn’t save it. I had to keep zooming and cropping before saving.

The end result was a reasonable size — about 15 square blocks of Philadelphia — and I had to boost the storage limits allocated to the service to get the 19 MB area map downloaded. Nokia calls these “neighborhood maps,” so if you’re planning to visit several areas, each neighborhood will have to be downloaded separately. That differs from Google’s solution, where I was able to grab a map of 10 square miles. Once you have a local map from Nokia stored on the device, you don’t have access to the guides and POIs, but you can zoom in for greater detail, just like Google’s version.

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Hipmunk's mascot with an Android spin

Hipmunk has finally brought its travel search application to the Android operating system, with a brand new mobile app that will hit the Android marketplace Thursday.

Hipmunk for Android, which for now only facilitates flight searches, is impressive because it retains all the slickness of the company’s existing web and mobile offerings. That’s no small feat for an app made for Android, an operating system that generally takes a backseat to Apple’s iOS when it comes to user interface design.

I played around with the new app at Hipmunk’s San Francisco headquarters this week, and it’s a pleasure to use. For lack of a better comparison,  the experience is just as smooth as using an iPhone or iPad. That’s not an accident, said Hipmunk’s Android developer Ryan Oldenburg, who worked full-time on the app since joining the company in mid-June.

“The biggest thing about our Android app is it doesn’t not do anything the iOS app does,” Oldenburg told me in an interview. “We really went the extra mile on everything.” In fact, a couple of features — such as the ability to easily clear your flight search history — are currently only found on the Android app, and are likely to be added to the next version of Hipmunk for iOS.

Hipmunk’s Android debut could mark a significant inflection point for the year-old company, which has attracted a loyal following among the early adopter set. iPhones and iPad owners are certainly the choice of many influential folks in tech and media, but Android devices currently account for about half of all smartphones sold in the US. Now that Hipmunk can better serve that huge chunk of the mobile world, the travel app beloved by the cool kids could finally start to get the mainstream following it deserves.

Here are some screenshots of Hipmunk for Android (click to enlarge):

           

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At the Tuesday afternoon Mobilize panel on how to keep people coming back to your mobile app, panelists from a variety of services like Hipmunk, Formspring, ngmoco and Yahoo agreed that there were three things you should avoid doing if you want to create high-engagement apps.

Don’t think that push notifications are the answer. Push notifications are a great way to remind people to use your app, noted Steve Douty, VP of Applications and Mobile at Yahoo. You shouldn’t “leave it up to users to remember to go back to your app,” he said. But at the same time, you don’t want to barrage them with constant popups on their screen that become an annoyance.

As Danilo Campos, head of mobile for flight search app Hipmunk put it, “It all depends on the frequency of push notifications and how those decisions to push those were made. If it’s for the wrong things or things the user doesn’t care about, they’re going to turn it off and you’ve lost an opportunity to build that relationship.” So personalization of apps and frequency and type of notifications is key.

Don’t pack every possible feature inside your app. Apps can die from an overload of features. Just adding more functionality because you can is never the answer, the group agreed. “The more you keep feature creep from happening…that ends up becoming more successful engagement,” said Douty.

“Web applications have a lot of features, [people using them] have time to work, so you can give them additional functionality, but in mobile you’ve got a tiny screen and a tiny slice of users’ time,” said Campos. ”You can best serve them by giving them” a simpler experience.

Don’t assume your app should look and act like your web site. An important part of keeping people returning to an app is that it’s easy and fun to use. If you try to recreate a whole website and all its functionality on a tiny four-inch screen, it might overwhelm or turn off users.

Formspring found that out recently when it was building its app after beginning on the web. “You really need to rethink what you’re presenting and how you’re presenting it,” said Tom Wang, head of product for Formspring. In the end your app might look “radically different” than your site, and that’s totally OK. Don’t be afraid to throw out both your own and users’ expectations in that case.

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It’s one thing to hear praise for an app from geeks, it’s another when you hear it from ‘normal folks’. Onavo falls in this category.

The free data-shrinking app which we’ve praised in the past runs quietly in the background and dramatically reduces data consumption. I myself keep it running all the time, and on a recent trip abroad to San Francisco it helped me save in the neighborhood of 75% of my potential data consumption. Seeing as I was running on a roaming plan, this meant I could email, tweet, and use mapping apps with far greater freedom.

Today, Onavo is announcing it’s first venture into the Android waters. Now before you get all excited, Onavo for Android is actually a ‘Lite’ version. It’s not data-shrinking ready quite yet, but it does however give users impressive visibility and control over app data consumption on Android devices.

I sat down with Guy Rosen, CEO, who explained that unlike with iOS, it’s pretty much a wild-west in terms of app data consumption on Android. It seems that apps can launch in the background and run tasks, such as updating, on their own accord, without having being launched by the user.

With Onavo Lite, Android users are alerted when an app suddenly consumes data at a disproportionate rate, or at improper timing, for example when traveling. Onavo makes it easy to block particular apps from running on 3G, or disable 3G completely at certain data consumption caps.

A really neat feature, taken from Soluto’s play book, is advanced warning on data-hogs. This is a crowd-sourced feature that provides users information about the data consumption characteristics of an app, as soon as it’s installed.

Just like for iOS predecessor, Onavo Lite is free and can be downloaded here.






Crunchbase

ONAVO








Company:
ONAVO


Website:
http://www.onavo.com


Funding:
$3M



Onavo empowers smartphone and tablet users to regain control of their mobile data usage, by providing a service that makes mobile data consumption efficient, transparent and manageable.

Onavo’s app saves...







Learn more

Cloud storage provider Box.net announced today that it is launching a web-based HTML5 version of its mobile application that will bring the company’s tools to any mobile device running an HTML5-powered mobile web browser.

HTML is largely seen as a powerful successor to Flash, a platform that powers most interactive web-enabled applications today. Box.net’s HTML5 app has the same functions that the rest of the native applications on smartphones and tablets have. But it has the advantage of working on any other mobile device that has an HTML5-powered browser without needing a native application. Most mobile devices today have a browser that can run HTML5 apps.

Box.net currently has 6 million users. Some 60,000 businesses employ its cloud-storage software, including 73 percent of Fortune 500 companies. That figure is up from around 66 percent in February.

“We’re not zealous about what the ultimate platform is, we just care about making sure our customers can access their content wherever,” Box.net chief executive Aaron Levie told VentureBeat. “At the same time, the long-term expectation and view we have is that a lot of these devices will become more standards based and let us focus way more on HTML5.”

This is one of the first times Box.net has devoted additional development resources to a new mobile platform. It led the company to add features to the mobile web application that weren’t even available on popular native applications like those on the iPhone and iPad. The company plans on devoting the most resources to the mobile platform that will get the widest deployment in enterprises, Levie said. In this case, he said he thinks it will be HTML5.

“You’ll typically see us leapfrogging our own apps as we can develop in one platform or another, so this time there is some enhanced functionality with the HTML5 mobile web app,” Levie said. ”It’s slightly a knock against ourselves. For example, we don’t have search in our native iPhone app, but we have search integrated into the HTML5 app,” Levie said.

Outside of working developing apps that fit customer demand, the company will also develop applications for mobile devices if it can strike a good go-to-market deal with the parent company. It worked closely with Research in Motion to build an application for the Playbook, Levie said.

“We basically have a strategy where, if we can go to market with partners in an integrated way, we’re trying to build rich experiences for those platforms,” Levie said. “With the BlackBerry, we were able to work pretty closely with Research in Motion to get it to market, we’re gonna be doing a bunch of stuff with the Playbook with their sales and marketing staff.”

Box.net also released new applications for Android and for Research in Motion’s BlackBerry Playbook. The new Android application is optimized for tablets running the latest version of Google’s Android mobile operating system called Honeycomb. The application scales down to Android smartphones as well.

Filed under: enterprise, mobile

When developers have the ability to craft applications for multiple platforms with little to no barrier, amazing things can happen. 6Wunderkinder is a prime example of this, as it managed to deliver its popular Wunderlist productivity app to additional platforms in short order thanks to a partnership with Appcelerator. But not every developer has the time (or resources) to forge such a relationship, and thanks to Friday’s release of Nitobi’s PhoneGap 1.0, they don’t have to.

PhoneGap is an HTML5 platform that allows developers to use HTML, CSS and JavaScript to create native mobile applications. Now developers can write their app once and deploy it to six major mobile platforms and app stores, including iOS, Android, BlackBerry, WebOS, Bada and Symbian. With the open source code receiving contributions from a dedicated community of developers, PhoneGap has increased in both stability and durability – which has played a large part in the project averaging approximately 40,000 downloads per month at the time of writing.

While PhoneGap 1.0 was officially released by Nitobi at PhoneGap Day in Portland, Oregon on Friday, the company is based in Vancouver, BC. In fact, The Next Web Canada covered PhoneGap’s initial launch late last year. But the building of PhoneGap has been an effort that goes well beyond the team at Nitobi, a fact that is not lost on company CEO Andre Charland.

“The community built up around PhoneGap is its greatest asset,” says Charland. “The PhoneGap community identifies common pain points and works together to overcome them.”

A team of senior software engineers at IBM have also been involved in the development of PhoneGap, and the assistance has been a major benefit to the community.

According to Nitobi, today’s major release puts the focus on accessing native device APIs, which is new ground for the web. Other improvements include overall API stability and “pluggable” architecture, W3C DAP API compatibility, contacts API and remote debugging tools. Moreover, a new unifying bridge interface was added that makes adding platforms and platform extensions simpler, along with simplification of the plugin development process.

“Most of these new enhancements come from our community,” said Brian LeRoux, Senior Software Engineer at Nitobi and PhoneGap evangelist. “For instance, PhoneGap developers were calling for a consistent way to make plugins that would run on all major smartphone platforms and this release does that.”

To learn more about what PhoneGap has to offer, check out the introductory video below.

With over 600,000 downloads of the PhoneGap code to date and thousands of apps built using PhoneGap available in mobile app stores and directories, the arrival of version 1.0 may just keep those numbers growing – and spur further growth for the company behind the project as well.Image Source

Crittercism, a platform that allows developers to track support issues in their mobile apps, announced today at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat 2011 conference that it is launching to the public with funding from Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, and others.

Crittercism’s technology is easily integrated into any mobile app and connects to a cloud-based service for monitoring apps. The company has focused on iOS for some time, and today it also announced that its SDK will also be available for Android apps.

During beta testing, Crittercism saw over 700 developers implement its technology, and it has been installed over 1 million times since it launched on iOS in January, CEO Andrew Levy told VentureBeat in a chat last week.

“Mobile app users had no recourse when an app crashed or misbehaved and were left with no other option than to leave a bad review in the App Store,” Levy said in a press release. “Crittercism gives a voice to an app’s user, keeps them engaged, and provides tools for a developer to diagnose, fix, and communicate the issue back to its users.”

The company is an alum of startup incubator AngelPad, just like task manager startup Astrid, which also announced funding from Google Ventures today. Crittercism says the funding helped it to make the transition to Android.

The company has also received funding from Opus Capital, Shasta Ventures, AOL Ventures, and early Facebook engineer Lucas Nealson.

Filed under: deals, mobile, VentureBeat

Social note-taking startup Evernote is adding yet another app to its mobile arsenal. The startup has released Evernote for Android Tablets, a free application available on the Android Market.
Evernote for Android Tablets offers the same note-taking functionality — such as audio recording and social note-sharing — of its other applications, but does so with a new-to-Evernote interface that emphasizes visual note browsing.
With the new interface, notes appear on the home screen in a Snippet View. Android tablet app users can then use the left-hand side bar to tab through the notebooks, tags and shared notebooks view options.
The startup is also enabling application users to create and edit rich text notes. The much-requested feature is now available to all Android users — not just tablet owners — who will see a a new bar with text editing and formatting options above the keyboard.
There’s even a second, larger Evernote Android widget now accessible from the home screen. “In addition to letting you jump to core Evernote features, you now see snippets of your recently-accessed notes. This means you no longer need to launch Evernote in order to find a recent note, just tap on the note in the widget,” Evernote’s VP of marketing Andrew Sinkov says.
Evernote for Android Tablets looks to be a slick re-skin of the Evernote experience. The fresh interface design represents the direction the startup will take with all future tablet app releases.
Home Screen
Search
Single Note View
New Note
Rich Text Note
Map View
New Android Widget
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In May, a pair of reports painted a troublesome portrait of the app economy on Google's Android Market. First, mobile analytics firm Distimo found that the vast majority of paid applications were downloaded less than 100 times, and a few days later, mobile search firm Chomp reported that 97% of all Android downloads on its service were free apps. For developers, the takeaway was that if you want to generate revenue for your mobile application, you have to think outside the "paid app" box.

However, that's not always the case. Although it may be a rare example, SPB Software has managed to have a revenue-generating hit on the Android Market with its SPB Shell 3D application, which earned the company $750,000 within its first three weeks of availability.

Sponsor

How could SPB do so well, when so many others are struggling. The answer is deceptively simple. Make an amazing app that people want, price it high and lock it down.

What's SPB Shell 3D?
For those who don't know, SPB Shell 3D is what's known as a homescreen replacement application. This type of customization is hugely popular among Android users who relish the ability to truly personalize their phones in ways their iPhone-toting counterparts cannot. A number of homescreen replacement apps are available on the Market today, including popular programs like LauncherPro, ADWLauncher EX, ADW.Launcher, GO Launcher EX, Regina 3D Launcher, Zeam Launcher and others. Most are offered as free products with premium upgrades available on the side.

SPB Shell 3D went a different route: price the whole program high, and include everything.

So what makes SPB Shell 3D stand out? Well, did I mention it's awesome? This program offers a 3D homescreen and built-in 3D widgets, smart folders, animated panels and more. It's fast and frankly, it's just great eye candy.

Gadget reviewers, who had been waiting for the app's arrival for a year, tended to agree. SPB Shell 3D received rave reviews  - Engadget said it was buttery smooth, AndroidPolice dubbed it "impressive," and ZDNet said it was "as useful as it is gorgeous."

It should be noted though, that the app doesn't run as well on some devices as it does on others. It struggled a little on my Nexus S, but ran well on my HTC Sensation. That may be due to the software's more recent optimizations for Qualcomm chipsets, but it could also simply be a case where the app just works better on more modern and powerful devices.

Case Study: 50,000 Copies at $750K in 3 Weeks
Of course, the app's high price turns many potential users away, and you can read the complaints in the user reviews from those who expected more for their money. But for mobile developers, SPB Shell 3D is a case study worth noticing.

Three weeks into its launch, the company sold 50,000 copies of the program, to the tune of $750,000. The app is priced higher than what users typically expect on Android: $14.95. Today, SPB Shell 3D has reached 70,000 downloads.

A key component to the app's success is the security model it uses. With proprietary technology, the app is locked down to prevent piracy. That's why the app is listed in Google's Android Market, but not Amazon's. The Amazon Appstore for Android doesn't offer strong enough security, a company spokesperson says.

In addition, the company has a business model that doesn't force it to rely on paid downloads alone. SPB Software also licenses its technology as a white label product. For example, in Japan, it worked with Fujitsu to create the interface for NTT Docomo's Regza Phone T-01C. What that means is even if the downloads hit a plateau, the app's makers don't necessarily have to lower the price to continue to grow the business - they can just focus on their partnerships.

While the app's makers may eventually have to cut the price down if they want to grow their B2C install base, there aren't plans to do so at this time. As an Android user, you may or may not care for the app or its price, but as an Android developer, you can't help but be a little inspired. Some apps do sell on Android, even when priced outrageously high.

Discuss

When people talk about near-field communications (NFC) chips in phones, they usually bring up mobile payments. But NFC chips, which are already in some Android phones, can be used by other apps besides payments (which won’t take off as quickly as people expect anyway).

At Google I/O this week, NFC apps will be highlighted. Foursquare will allow Android users to check in by swiping their phones near posters with NFC chips. Also just in time for I/O, Hashable’s Android app now supports NFC features as well. Android users can swap contact info via NFC, and also check into the same activity with someone, like #dinner or #drinks.

Hashable is a lightweight way to track the people you meet and exchange contact info. It’s completely replaced business cards for me. But on my iPhone, I still have to enter the person’s email or Twitter handle. With the Android app, if you meet someone else with an NFC-powered phone, you can just hold the phones next to each other and contact info will be exchanged via the app. It’s like Bump, without the fist-bump.

If the other person is a new contact, Hashable will add that person as one. If it is an existing contact, it will trigger the check-in feature, which on Hashable allows you to check into people instead of to places. It’s a way of noting that you are doing an activity with someone to remember later or broadcast it out to your network. The Android app also now includes a QR-code reader incase someone hands you a card with one of those. Scan it, and throw it away.

CrunchBase InformationHashableAndroidInformation provided by CrunchBase

Android has always had some apps that iOS didn’t, such as keyboard replacement software like Swype and SwiftKey. While Apple still holds a strong lead in apps, there is an increasing number of cutting-edge, innovative apps initially launching on Android before they go to iOS. It’s part of a larger build-up for Android Market, which is on pace to have more apps than Apple’s App Store later this year. But it highlights the unique appeal of the Android platform, which doesn’t make as much money for developers but is finding more interest from creative programmers, especially as hardware sales heat up.

In the last six months or so, I’ve seen — and been pitched on — a number of apps that consciously launched on Android first. Enterproid, Aro Mobile, ThruTu, Zazu, Contapps, Skifta, and RadioMe are just a few of the apps that bypassed iOS, and I’m sure there are many I’m missing. The growing interest from developers is due in part to the increasing success of Android phones, which are outselling iPhones (and every other platform, for that matter) and possibly the desire to simply target a space outside of Apple’s saturated App Store.

But a lot has to do with the advantages of the open platform of Android, which encourages more cutting-edge applications with a broader array of features in some cases. Apple’s limits on access to its hardware as well as its tougher review process also seems to be playing a role. It’s still easier to make money on iOS, and fragmentation is a headache for many Android developers, but for a growing number of developers, it makes more sense to start on Android first.

“You have more developers who love the openness of Google and don’t want to go through the iPhone funnel, they just want to create their own thing and get it out there,” said Lior Romano, the co-founder and CEO of Contapps, a contacts app. “Now with the growth of Android, the size of (Android Market) is now getting equal to Apple. If you develop free applications and want to get to scale and responses from users, Android is very inviting.”

Google has had a more open approach from the beginning, and that resulted in some innovative apps like home screen replacements and third-party browsers. But Lior said not all developers took advantage of the opportunity because the audience wasn’t there yet. But now, many are timing their apps to take advantage of their fast growth of the platform and are coming out with titles that make more use of some of Android’s architecture. Contapps, for example, offers a contact list replacement app that’s more visual, with gesture-based search, social integration and search and mapping built into the app.

Lior said building in Android offered more access to the core functions of the phone, the ability to integrate with more third-party APIs and good tools to build with. He said he was also worried about Apple stifling the app because it might be too close to the iOS native functions. ”We want to be a one-stop shop for contacts and interaction; that’s a big goal and we need the openness of Android to undertake those possibilities,” Lior said. “With Android, you get a lot of access from Google and the opportunity to build something big, not something skin deep.”

That’s some of the allure of the Android platform. Developers can get deep into the guts of a device and build out a lot of apps that work with the existing the platform or simply replace its functionality. ThruTu, for example, allows users to send pictures, contacts, their location or a vibrating “prod” while in the middle of a voice conversation. Aro Mobile, which debuted first on Android, replaces the native contacts, email, search, phone and browser apps on a device with its own cloud-connected versions with semantic technology. Aro Mobile later launched on iOS, but because of the platform’s more restrictive nature, the app wasn’t able to fully replace existing functions. It has to work alongside them, undercutting some of its appeal. Other apps like ON, an address book app, also have had to be watered down to work on Apple’s platform.

Apple’s approach has been great forconsumers who are looking for very polished apps. And Apple’s control and sense of order has been part of why downloads have soared in the App Store. But it can be stifling for some developers looking to innovate in areas that Apple is less interested in, said Punit Shah, co-founder of Zazu, a personal assistant app that reads aloud news, social feeds, and emails, and is looking to help users plan for upcoming calendar events.

Shah said the Apple hardware is great, but he’s not able to do as much with it compared to Android. On Android, he gets easier access to dialer information and can incorporate contact lists from different sources without asking for additional authentications for each source. That has led to a more robust app, Shah said. Zazu recently completed an iPhone app, but there’s no guarantee that it will get approved. With Android, there’s no review process, so developers are assured they can launch on Android Market.

“As an entrepreneur, I want to make something new that’s ridiculous and provides value. But from a company perspective, it’s much harder to do that when you have too many variables where you can be shot down,” he said.

Andrew Toy, co-founder of Enterproid, an app that creates a partition between enterprise and personal data, said his company is open to all mobile platforms. But with Android’s growth in the past year, it now offers developers the ability to get traction with a sizable audience, which wasn’t the case early on. But he said his choice to launch on Android was also prompted by Apple’s review process, which can be a concern for some start-ups, as they must invest before they’re sure Apple will approve their apps. The review process for updates can also be harder for developers who like to iterate quickly and constantly test their apps, said Toy. And he said Android is more flexible with monetization options, he said — another bonus.

“Android gives us the ability to use agile development. We’re able to fix bugs, test new features, and release new versions very quickly. Android also allows us to explore different business models as we bring our products to market. This is especially important for a company like ours, where existing revenue-generation models like advertising or paid apps don’t fit well with our target market,” Toy said.

Now, fragmentation is still a major issue for Android developers. Lior said different screen sizes, custom ROMs and operator additions can wreak havoc on testing. And Apple is still a better place to make money, he agrees. But with device sales running high on Android, we’re likely to see more developers not just port iOS apps over to Android, but instead begin their work on Android. Experimental stuff, in particular, may start showing up more on Android. And we eventually may see a class of apps that are more robust on Android than on iOS. This may not do much to alter the momentum of each platform, but there’s an increasing chance we’ll see more really ground-breaking mobile apps on Android as time goes on.

Google still has to do a lot to ensure that the platform evolves well with more tools, enhancements and access to more APIs, something we’ll like hear more of at Google I/O next week. And the buying experience in Android Market needs to continue improving to make sure it reaches its money-making potential. But it seems like the early bet on Android’s more open design is increasingly resonating with developers and that can only mean more momentum for the platform as a whole.

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If you want to run into Pradeep Sindhu, co-founder of Juniper Networks, your best bet is one of Palo Alto’s many cafes. Chances are, if you spot Sindhu, chairman of a $23 billion (in market capitalization) company, he is likely pondering about the future of the infrastructure of the Internet and the next-generation of networks.

A few days back, I caught up with him, hoping to understand how the Internet is going to evolve especially as we have entered the age of anywhere computing. “The iPhone is doing to the mobile world, what the browser did to the wireline world,” Sindhu told me. The iPhone and Android-based smartphones are changing everything, including how his company thinks about network infrastructure and how it will refine the network architecture in the future.

Why Should You Care?
Many who are developing apps and services for mobile devices don’t pay much attention to the innards of the networks themselves, barring moments when our network behaves like me running up a hill. We should be paying attention to all the underlying networking technologies, mostly because it helps us think about what these front-end services can do.

Sindhu explains that today the “networks” are the enabling technology, instead of super fast, energy hogging microprocessors. As the performance of the network increases, so does the performance of everything connected to that network, and by extension, the apps built on those device platform.

The Apps Make The Platform
“When the platform becomes general enough, it doesn’t matter as much as the apps built on top of that platform.” Sindhu pointed to IBM 360, the PC and the web-browser as platforms that became gigantic because of apps built on those platforms. The PC spawned app companies like Microsoft, Intuit and Adobe. The rise of the browser as a platform helped spawn apps such as Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo and Facebook, all worth many billions of dollars.

The iOS and Android-based Internet connected mobile devices are the new platform, Sindhu argues, except, they are with us all the time, allowing us to use apps built on top of these platforms, anytime, anywhere and as much as we want. This is a brand new type of usage behavior that is going to have a profound impact on the demands put on network infrastructure, and how the traffic flows across the network.

Sindhu points out that the establishment of platforms is becoming faster and faster. Apps, he argues, form the positive feedback loop for a platform – the more applications, the more demand for the platform. What has changed is the network (aka the Internet) which acts as amplification for the feedback loop.

Cloud + Mobility = New Information Infrastructure
Sindhu believes (and many agree) that the rise of mobility, which I like to describe as “anywhere computing,” is going to change the whole notion of information infrastructure. Most of us want “to consume information and information services anytime, anywhere, with no limitations, and preferably in the same way across all devices,” he points out.

In order for this to happen, you need “cloud” based computing. “You need an architecture where storage, especially long-term, persistent storage, needs to be absolutely centralized, logically centralized, in large-scale data centers,” Sindhu argues. And it goes for heavy computing, which needs to be in the cloud as well. Perhaps that is why in this new world of eyeball-oriented computing, mobility and cloud, should be viewed as two sides of the same coin.

For this new environment, you need devices that have just enough local storage but can tap into the cloud for everything else and are graphics intensive. The cloud clients of tomorrow are not thin clients or fat clients, Sindhu says. Instead they are all “fit clients.” And you need fit clients because for the near foreseeable future, the network performance is going to remain quite variable. “You want the device to operate well, even if the network has variable performance,” Sindhu argued.

The Network Under Pressure
It also means that the fundamental shift to anywhere computing will increase the economic pressures on the network. He argues that it is time to stop thinking in terms of silo networks–a network for voice, a network for radio, a network for broadcast television, an enterprise network–and instead think it terms of a single network.

“The silo networks actually destroy value because the value for a network is maximized when it’s a fully connected, any-to-any network. In other words, anyone can reach anyone else,” says Sindhu. It’s like Metcalfe’s Law for the cloud computing and mobile age. Sindhu argues that it is time to stop thinking in terms of boxes, wires and pipes. Instead, we need to start treating the network as a living, breathing platform and build infrastructure for it.

When I asked Sindhu to predict the traffic patterns of the Internet, he declined to be specific because he thinks that we tend to underestimate how creative people find ways to leverage the network. Instead he offered three observations:

The bandwidth requirements globally are only going to accelerate.
The traffic is going to get a lot more stochastic in nature.
The traffic is going to become more dynamic.

Sindhu argues that we shouldn’t distinguish between a wired or a wireless network, for in the future the network traffic is going to be more unpredictable, with demand coming from any client device, from any app at anytime.






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Tests of an early Android 2.2 build show vast performance gains, indicating that even older Android handsets could gain new life by running applications several times faster than today — and that Google has software it can use to combat a hardware bump in Apple’s hotly anticipated next-generation iPhone. Google is also poised to reduce fragmentation with this release — codenamed “Froyo” and expected at next week’s Google I/O developer conference — which would help both consumers and developers have a more common Android experience across the many handsets built using the platform.

AndroidPolice has been running Android 2.2 on a Nexus One for nearly a week, but yesterday benchmarked performance of the build using Linpack for Android. The results show a nearly 450 percent performance boost, as Froyo appears to use a fast compiler for the Dalvik VM used by Android. Unlike many other smartphones, applications for Android are written in Java and run in a virtual machine atop the Linux kernel — with a quick JIT, or Just In Time compiler, application code can be executed faster. The lengthy video below provides an overview of the Dalvik VM from 2008.

Given that Google is hosting a specific session for JIT compiling within the Dalvik VM at next week’s Google I/O event, it’s a pretty safe bet that Froyo will bring the speed boost that AndroidPolice has clocked. Which means Google phones running on Android 2.2 will execute application code far faster by using software, not hardware. That’s a unique situation because while other mobile platforms might see marginal performance gains through an operating system upgrade, it’s not likely those efforts would yield a gain as large as 450 percent.



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While Google doesn’t control which Android handsets will see Android 2.2 — that’s left to the carriers, with the lone exception being Google’s own Nexus One — the speed bump isn’t all I’m expecting next week. I suspect that Google will continue pulling its applications out of the core Android platform and make many of them available to device versions through the Android Market. While that won’t completely remove the fragmentation issue caused by Android 1.5, 1.6 and 2.1, it will reduce the effects — handsets with Android 1.5 or 1.6 would still have the older user interface, but would see more feature parity with Android 2.1 devices. The ideal situation would be for all capable handsets to run Android 2.2, but given the carrier control, that’s highly unlikely — a shame really, because many older handset, such as the original G1, run just fine with the Android 2.1 ROMs found on enthusiast sites and forums.

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