HealthTap has raised $11.5 million in a first round of funding to expand its expert online physician community, which answers questions that patients pose online or via smartphones.

The backers include Google chairman Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors fund and Mohr Davidow Ventures, while Mayfield Fund led the round.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based HealthTap’s interactive health network started just two months ago and it already has more than 6,000 doctors and 500 healthcare institutions. Patients ask questions and physicians answer them. That by itself is pretty mundane. But HealthTap motivates the doctors to stay engaged because it rewards them with a better reputation and peer recognition.

Ron Gutman, chief executive of HealthTap, said in an interview that the idea for company came about because searching for authoritative health information on the internet is a frustrating experience since users don’t trust the answers they find. Doctors can be much better at answering direct questions, but they are notoriously busy and technology-phobic.

“The goal is to transform healthcare in this country,” Gutman said. “People who use the internet for health information find it useless because they don’t trust it. There are 1.2 billion health searches every month, but the real trusted information comes from doctors.”

HealthTap “gamifies” the process of answering questions, giving the physicians reputation points for their answers. On top of that, physicians can simply tap a button on a mobile phone if they agree with an answer that another doctor gave. Doctors who earn a lot of “agree” buttons can grow their standing among peers.

In the network, anyone can ask health questions online or on a mobile app. They can get answers from U.S. doctors across 100 specialties for free.

HealthTap will use the money to accelerate growth, recruit talent, and engage more physicians and patients in its online HealthTap community.

Tim Chang, managing director at Mayfield, said in an interview that Gutman has a track record of working for seven years in the field, dating back to work he did at Stanford University. Chang said that no other service has gotten doctors so engaged in answering questions and the reason is the “gamification of health.” The physicians stay engaged because they enjoy giving answers, getting rewards, and getting peer recognition. And the network taps mobile apps, which make it easy to respond.

“The ‘aha’ that caused me to invest is not just Ron’s vision for health 2.0 and gamification,” Chang said. “It was also that he was able to get doctors to care in a way that no other startup has been able to.”

In the past, drug companies often tried to bribe doctors with money. But HealthTap also taps into the same kinds of motivations that keep people playing games. The apps feed the doctors’ pride, altruism, and vanity.

“We call this the virtualization of healthcare,” Gutman said. “Instead of using strangers to do crowdsourcing, we call this ‘trust sourcing.’”

Gutman said that all physicians undergo background checks to participate on HealthTap, verifying their medical licenses and good standing in terms of lawsuits or complaints. Approved doctors get a free “virtual practice” from which they can lead an online health conversation. They can also make connections to get new patients for in-person care.

HealthTap was founded in 2010. It launched its beta apps a few months ago with expert discussions focused on pregnant mothers and pediatricians. Then it expanded to 100 different specialties where patients can ask questions 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The information is free.

HealthTap has 12 employees. The competition is doctors and hospitals who work in traditional ways. Participants include the big providers such as Cleveland Clinic and The Mount Sinai Hospital, as well as small practices across the nation like Women’s Care of Beverly Hills Medical Group, to individual physician offices such as the one run by Robert Kwok in Saratoga, Calif.

Filed under: games, mobile, VentureBeat

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

The latest healthtech research shows that the forecast is looking good for mobile health solutions, especially for those companies buying into mobile apps. ABI Research recently released a report which predicts that the sports and health mobile app market is on pace to hit $400 million in revenues by 2016. That’s up from $120 million in 2010, meaning the market could quadruple over the next four years.

ABI’s report projects that the majority of that $400 million will come from sports, fitness, and wellness apps, which have begun to see heavy adoption over the least year. The increase of available health data and the growing adoption of health-related apps is owed largely to the development of increasingly wearable, portable, and non-invasive devices and their sensors that can effectively measure and transmit biometric data.

As smartphones add new ways to access and support healthcare apps and connect with these complementary diagnostic and health-measure devices, the mobile health market — and its customers — only stand to benefit. There are many great examples of this new generation of smart health tracking devices, like Basis’ heart and health tracker that you can wear on your wrist, Lark’s sleep monitoring band — to name a few.

These wearable devices are hooked into apps and web dashboards that let users track and improve their health. These bundled solutions are becoming increasingly user-friendly and intelligent, with many beginning to take advantage of gamification to keep users interested and coming back.

Naturally, everyone wants to build a graph, interest, social, etc., and the health graph seems to be poised to be next in line. RunKeeper, an app that helps users track their exercise, is just one among many going after the health graph — that is to say, they’re looking to aggregate all of your fitness and health data, culled from an ecosystem of apps and smart-sensored devices that collect and transmit this data (and speak to each other through APIs), then serving it to users across platforms and mobile devices, all through a simple dashboard.

And RunKeeper isn’t alone. This is where the healthtech industry is going — well, there and of course digitizing health records as well as making everything about health insurance less of a pain in the ass.

In conjunction with ABI’s report on the mobile health market’s growth, Juniper Research today released its own study, forecasting that “mHealth” apps will reach 142 million downloads globally by 2016. Which is slightly puzzling, especially when contrasted with the projection made by Jonathan Collins, the principal analyst at ABI Research. Collins said that he expects downloads to grow at almost twice the rate of revenues, with more than a billion downloads occurring annually by 2016.

Collins appears to be more optimistic than Juniper, which is likely using slightly different criteria to define mobile health apps.

But the point is clear, mobile health is on the rise.

Excerpt image from BasicHealthCare

GigaOM’s recent RoadMap conference in San Francisco featured a number of thought-provoking speakers on the topic of the future of technology, including Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, venture investor Mike Moritz and former Sun Microsystems founder Andy Bechtolsheim. While many views were expressed, one thread that ran through many of the different presentations, from mobile and design to health and communication, was the idea that successful technology involves making the computer invisible to the user, even as it becomes more powerful.

I took a look at this idea in a recent article for GigaOM Pro (subscription required). Dorsey, for example, said that the power of an information network like Twitter doesn’t have anything to do with the technology behind it. It doesn’t matter, for example, that the service is now processing more than 250 million tweets a day. Dorsey said that for him, the most powerful aspect of the service is how it can help connect us to others in far-flung parts of the world, as it did earlier this year during the demonstrations in Iran.

The Twitter co-founder said that he has also tried to make the technology in his other company — mobile payments–processing startup Square — as invisible as possible, so that retailers and other entrepreneurs can use it easily to expand their businesses and make them more efficient. Said Dorsey:

Both [Twitter and Square] are great at encouraging more face-to-face human interactions . . . I believe strongly that this information and these tools help us be better, but we need to be sure, as builders of tools, that it’s not overwhelming, that it’s meaningful, and that it’s not distracting. That it’s not something that puts technology first; it puts humans first.

Meanwhile, Mark Rolston of frog design (which famously helped design the original Macintosh) talked about how computers and other advanced technology are already beginning to disappear into our surroundings and devices, and that he expects this to accelerate in the future. Rolston said that it doesn’t take much to think about combining voice technology, like the kind Apple has in Siri, with the kind of processing power we have now to create a computer that uses any available surface (a wall, a mirror, etc.) as a screen.

Rolston imagines an extension of the kind of physical interface that Microsoft’s Kinect uses, where gestures and even facial recognition could be used to control all kinds of processes or devices and where computing power behind the scenes would allow us to interact with our homes in different ways. Computers would become “externalized resources in a room.” In that kind of environment, Rolston said, “I can talk at it and wave at it, and maybe I have a keyboard or maybe there are screens or cameras around, but [the computers] compose in the moment as we need them.”

This concept of hiding the computer can be seen emerging in other areas, too, including health-related devices like the UP from Jawbone. Many of them appear to be just fancy jewelry — in the UP’s case, a somewhat geeky-looking bracelet — but they contain as much computing power as a desktop computer probably did a decade ago. The UP tracks your activity and records your steps, just like some other devices do, but it can also be programmed to alert you when you have been inactive for a while, and it watches your sleep patterns so it can wake you at the right point in your sleep cycle. So it has a tremendous amount of sophisticated software inside it, but it looks extremely simple — all the complex parts are hidden.

As this phenomenon accelerates, companies of all kinds are going to have to adapt to this ubiquitous computing environment, both by making their products as noncomputer-like as possible (something Apple has always excelled at) and by taking advantage of the intelligence and connectivity being built into even the smallest objects around us. For more details on what is required in order to do that, please read the full article at GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users See-ming Lee and Angry Julie Monday

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
Connectivity means making the machine disappearThemes for a connected world: GigaOM RoadMap reviewConnected world: the consumer technology revolution

Clingle is a new location-based social network that wants to enhance conversations as you check in to places throughout the day.

The service, which officially launched across the U.S. yesterday with a new iPhone app, allows people to leave multimedia messages (text, video or audio) for a specific user or group of users when they check in to a certain location. Those messages can grow into full-length conversations. Users can also leave messages for others to discover, regardless of their location — sort of like Foursquare’s Tips feature.

But unlike Foursquare, Clingle isn’t focused on a public stream of activity. Instead, its more like Google+’s Huddle feature. Clingle co-founder Puneet Mehta told VentureBeat that the service is best compared with the experience of text messaging that’s been enhanced with GPS and the ability to send video and audio messages.

Mehta said Clingle has plans to partner with retail and restaurant chains to allow users to purchase items for friends so that those items are waiting for the friend when they check in at the location. And rather than dealing with point-of-sale integration with thousands of merchants, he said a solution can be as simple as providing a proof of receipt. For instance, if I wanted to buy a cup of coffee for a friend who will be at the cafe down the street hours from now (when I’m not around), I could take a picture of my receipt and send it to him. My friend would show the picture to the merchant to receive the pre-purchased cup.

Clingle’s revenue model is based on commission fees and advertising from its merchant partners. However, the company’s main focus for the time being is providing a good experience for its users, Mehta said.

While the service does have potential, it’s going to have plenty of competition from both Twitter and Foursquare, which are adding new features that give its users a more well-rounded experience.

Clingle was developed by MyCityWay, a New York-based startup co-founded by Mehta, Archana Patchirajan and Sonpreet Bhatia. Founded in 2009, MyCityWay has received $6 million total funding to date from BMW iVentures, FirstMark Capital, EDC and IA Ventures.

Filed under: mobile, social, VentureBeat

Is there a business in making mobile to-do lists more collaborative and less headache-inducing? Startup Any.do formally launches Thursday with a free Android application proffering shareable, voice-operated to-do lists, and $1 million in seed funding to find out.

The startup, founded in 2010, first released a simple to-do list application for Android called Taskos to test the mobile task management waters and determine what mobile users wanted in a lightweight to-do list app.

Taskos became an accidental hit and attracted 1.3 million users, who now create hundreds of thousands of tasks each day. The startup claims that it’s the most popular app of its kind on Android — and that’s what got investors salivating.

“We have a killer team … we’re tackling a huge market … and we came with proof,” Any.do CEO Omer Perchik told VentureBeat. “The combination of the three got us [the] funding.”

Any.do managed to get Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Genesis Partners, Blumberg Capital, Joe Lonsdale at Palantir and Aydin Senkut at Felicis Ventures to participate in its first round of funding.

Now, Any.do for Android, a free mobile app hitting the Android Market Thursday, will be the company’s key product moving forward. It comes with three particularly drool-worthy features — shareable tasks, contextual autocomplete and a simple but elegant interface — that set it apart from similarly-purposed applications, including Apple’s new Reminders application for iOS 5.

You can also interface with Any.do using your voice, drag-and-drop tasks, sync with a Google account and choose themes to personalize the experience.

A similar application for iPhone is said to be several months away from release.

“We invested in Any.do because of the strong team and their vision to take the productivity space beyond the task list,” Dror Berman, managing partner of Innovation Endeavors, said of the firm’s interest in the to-do list app maker. “Any.do’s core technology understands people’s intent, and leverages the mobile phone to not just make a list, but to actually get things done — anytime, anywhere.”

How Any.do will profit with its nifty little application is anyone’s guess. Perchik says the startup has a few business tricks up its sleeve, but he isn’t ready to reveal those plans just yet.

As for Taskos, the startup will eventually let users port over their tasks and lists to Any.do, but its ultimate fate remains uncertain.

Ten-person Any.do is based in Israel and has an office in Palo Alto.

Filed under: mobile, social, VentureBeat

Nokia is totally ready for the future. They’ve already debuted a totally insane flexible kinetic interface concept, and now they’ve even drawn up an implementation for it: HumanForm. No, the phone doesn’t look like a you-themed action figure, but rather has a tear drop shape (probably my biggest gripe about the concept).

I’m not going to go into too much detail about what’s included in the video, as you can easily see for yourself. I will, however, say that this takes the cake compared to Nokia’s earlier flexi-screen concept. One thing that really jumped out at me is the idea of electro-tactile feedback. Seems pretty out there, but it would be pretty freaking sweet to take a picture of velvet or wood and feel that texture.

I’m not so sure how I feel about the shape, though. In the hand, I’m sure this concept is actually much more comfortable than our usual candy-bar phones. But (and this is a big but), how do you account for corners of anything? At this point we’re watching video and viewing pictures on our phone pretty regularly. Web pages happen to be rectangular, as is just about anything you pull up on a mobile phone.

I’m sure there are ways to circumvent this issue, but it seems like too far of a leap to make from rectangle to teardrop. It reminds me of when Dwight wanted everyone in The Office to sell the Sabre Pyramid, a triangular tablet. It seemed crazy, but in the fictional version of Scranton, PA people still seemed to be interested in “unleashing the power of the pyramid.” Maybe the same will be true for Nokia.

Then again, if this concept even comes to fruition, it won’t be for quite a while. Enjoy the video while you wait.

[via Engadget]

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“Forget being in love with the open web and all that touchy-feely stuff.”

Jay Sullivan is Mozilla’s vice president of products, and for a spokesperson of one of the open web’s dearest darlings, he’s on a tear.

“If you want to have a variety of mobile apps, it gets expensive… that’s a lot of apps to build,” he told VentureBeat in a recent interview.

Sullivan is making a strong case against building native apps and for the mobile web as the new platform to (literally) end all platforms.

Now, a number of developments make his words especially timely. Yahoo has just announced Yahoo Cocktails, a set of tools for developers to use that make web apps look and behave more like native apps. Mozilla is working on tools to help developers sell web-based apps to mobile device users, enabling them to make profits just as developers in the iTunes App Store or Android Market can now do.

Even Adobe is scrapping Flash for mobile phones and pinning its hopes on HTML 5 for the mobile web. “HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively,” wrote Danny Winokur, Adobe VP and General Manager of Interactive Development.

“This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.”

It looks like mobile apps may be headed the same direction as multimedia CD-ROMs did a decade ago. Sadly for mobile apps, they don’t even have a useful second life as drink coasters.

But parties on the other side of the fence say it’s too soon to play Taps for apps. App advocates say mobile web enthusiasts are indulging in pipe dreams while the rest of the world is still working on proprietary technology stacks that do, now, what HTML5 has so far failed to deliver. Even if they admit that building for the mobile web will eventually be cheaper, faster and easier, it’s at least few years away from reality.

In the Mozilla Foundation’s new offices overlooking the San Francisco Bay Bridge, Sullivan — an unapologetic HTML5 advocate — sits in a conference room and rapidly deconstructs the assumption that to get your software onto a mobile phone you have to build a native application.

But he doesn’t resort to the familiar (and tired) ideologies about freedom from corporate technological tyranny that figure large in Mozilla’s current ad campaign. Rather, he gets downright practical.

First, he explains the obvious: Each mobile ecosystem has its own technology stack, its own operating system and programming language. That means developing apps requires a different skill set and a separate development process for each ecosystem.

At the end of the day, building a mobile web app instead of two or three or four native apps just makes more economic sense. “HTML5 is less expensive,” he says. “There’s always some stuff around the edges that won’t work perfectly, but compared to writing in seven different languages, it works.”

For developers, it’s technologically more manageable to build one mobile web app than a half-dozen or even just two native apps. And given the state of mobile web standards, we’re quickly approaching a point where end users can’t tell the difference between the two. All that’s really left is a business model for mobile web apps, Sullivan contends.

“When the web offers a more easy to access business ecosystem to developers, it will become more attractive.”

A better package

In conversations with organizations like Mozilla and Yahoo, in talks with mobile developers — basically, anyone who doesn’t have an explicit interest in promoting a single mobile operating system like Android or iOS — one trend is becoming quite apparent:

The app as you know it is dying.

It’s like the CD, an expensive package for digital information, a package that is increasingly becoming unnecessary and obsolete.

And just as with the CD, all we’re waiting for is a better delivery method to come along and kill it off.

The challenges to that shift are partly technical and partly cultural. Mobile web apps first must meet consumer demands for high quality and performance. And as previously noted, developers need to be able to market mobile web apps.

Yahoo is one company working on the first challenge. Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz is Yahoo’s platform vice president, and he is working on what he calls “a bunch of tricks to make web applications feel native.”

“We don’t want to emulate native, it has its own paradigm. What we want to do is create a new class of experiences. Something that’s the same across phones, TVs, tablets — the web is a paradigm that is cross-platform.”

But however much Mozilla or Yahoo might want to see the mobile web overtake native apps as a paradigm for ideological reasons, those who have to approach the problem practically in the here-and-now still have to deal with native issues and stacks.

“I absolutely believe that the mobile web is going to continue to grow rapidly,” says Jeff Haynie, who co-founded Appcelerator, a company specializing in getting web developers up and running on mobile OS platforms.

But, Haynie says, it’s too soon to discount the opportunity afforded by apps.

“That’s a huge opportunity for developers worldwide,” he continues, talking about mobile web apps. “But those compelling native experiences across lots of devices are where opportunity is going to be in the near-term. Consumers have come to expect a very high bar from experience, like the Flipboards and Instagrams that you just can’t acheive now with a web app.”

Referring to Mozilla et al., Haynie says, “These companies have many, many web developers — their foundation is the web. That’s what they’re yearning for, how to leverage that. That’s the promise of the web…

“The real question is, how do you let web developers build applications that span the native experience and the web?”

Web advocates, not surprisingly, have answers: New technologies and new marketplaces for making  money from web apps.

New technology for the new mobile web: JavaScript and Node

JavaScript and Node.js are two key technologies that will make the transition from native apps to web apps possible.

“JavaScript is LISP in disguise. It’s as powerful as any functional programming language can be,” says Yahoo’s Fernandez-Ruiz.

And with JavaScript-based Node.js in the equation, he says, “It’s hard to tell if this will be the next Ruby on Rails, but this could be.” (Ruby on Rails is a platform for developing web applications that has become wildly popular in the past few years, thanks to the speed with which developers can create sites and apps using it.)

JavaScript and Node are core components of Yahoo’s Cocktails, a new suite of tools to help developers make their mobile web apps look and feel indistinguishable from high-quality native apps. Fernandez-Ruiz says that in early previews, responses from mobile developers have been positive and enthusiastic; everyone wants to get their hands on it.

Getting content to run consistently across all mobile and device platforms is a daunting task, and to date, many companies are trying to tackle it by translating code from one OS’s language to another, e.g. Objective C for iPhone development to Java for Android development.

But the code that comes out on the other side of such translations is too often spaghetti, and trying to solve the compatibility problem programmatically isn’t a long-term option.

Instead, said Fernandez-Ruiz, “We decided to solve the problems of the next three years rather than the problems of today.”

Ideally, Yahoo wants to eliminate the multi-language scenarios that introduce complications for developers. That’s the goal of Cocktails. One Cocktail product, called Mojito, uses JavaScript and Node to run a single codebase both on client and server side.

“We’re not making any difference between the front end and the back end,” says Fernandez-Ruiz. “For us, it’s the exact same code.”

Manhattan, another Cocktail, is a Node.js hosted environment for Mojito. Apps can be wrapped in a native shell and shipped to the iTunes App Store or the Android Market or simply run in a browser, and Manhattan helps to speed up the user experience access across high- and low-speed networks and to run apps on platforms that don’t have full HTML5/CSS3 support.

While Node has been shown to have insane performance benefits, Fernandez-Ruiz says, “We’re not using it for event-driven, low-latency reasons, although those are there. We’re using it because it runs JavaScript on the server side.”

JavaScript is evolving, he says. “The next generation of JavaScript will make the it a compelling, high-performance programming language for the web. This is a new class of web apps that are cross-environment, continuous, fluid experiences.”

And for the end user, Fernandez-Ruiz says that jumping from one interface on a TV to another interface for the same service on a tablet or smartphone or PC is disturbing. “But with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript, you can have apps that look and feel the same.”

This is something we saw in action when we reviewed LinkedIn’s latest suite of mobile apps, which are Node-powered and web-heavy. Even the native apps for iOS and Android relied heavily on the mobile web for a lot of pages and features, and the mobile web version of the app looks and functions exactly the same as the native versions.

For Yahoo’s purposes, Fernandez-Ruiz continues, “Node.js is part of the puzzle, to execute code on the server side. But the premise is the same: It’s not native; it’s the web.”

Yahoo will also be introducing other Cocktails, including Windjammer and Screwdriver, in the near future.

But Haynie says the web-app-in-a-native-wrapper model should be regarded with some caution.

“That kind of hybrid application — we’re seeing almost no one using that rig[…]

The space for mobile payments has heated up really fast over the past couple of years. One thing that we’ve started to see more of lately are applications that focus more on peer-to-peer payments versus something that you’d use to see a business. With PayPal implementing NFC, Dwolla providing software solutions to hardware problems and Venmo firmly in between all of it, the space is getting crowded quite fast.

But not so crowded, according to newcomer Clover, that there isn’t room for something new.

First off, you need to know that Clover is in a private beta, which just came into the world’s view today. The way that it’s set up, you’ll need to know someone who has access already and have them send you an invitation. Once you get invited, via and SMS to your phone number or in person via a QR code, Clover has apps available for Android and iOS.

Firing up the app, you will see a main screen that shows your current balance. Funds can be added to Clover via any credit card, but not directly from your bank or PayPal. You can choose to Pay, Request, browse your Contacts or Invite new users to Clover from this screen.

If you want to Pay, there are 2 ways to go about it. You can either pay a contact directly, or you can create a QR code that is then scanned by another Clover user to accept funds from you. This makes it easy to split a bill at a restaurant, for instance, but it also leaves the door open to long-distance transactions. In time, according to some grayed-out options in the UI, you’ll also be able to pay via SMS or email.

Requests for money work the same way. You can choose to ask in person, which creates a QR code, or you can send a request to one of your contacts. Again, SMS and email-based requests appear to be coming at a later time.

To withdraw, you can do immediate transfers to your PayPal, or a bank transfer in 2-3 days. Obviously, if you’re using PayPal, you’re going to get a fee tacked onto transactions. Bank transfers might have them as well, depending on your particular bank’s methods.

So that’s the basic rundown of Clover. But what’s interesting is how the company is going about its fees. There’s a breakdown on the site, but I’ve copy/pasted it here for you.

For personal or non-profit use, it works like this -

Accepting Clover funds via Clover is free
Accepting credit card payments via Clover is free, but limited to $100 a month
Accepting PayPal payments via Clover is free, but limited to $100 a month
Accepting bank funded payments is free, but limited to $3000 per month

If you’re using Clover for your business, the fees come into play -

Accepting credit card payments via Clover costs 3%
Accepting PayPal payments via Clover costs 3%
Accepting bank funded payments costs 1.5%
Accepting Clover funds via Clover costs 1.5%

The fee structure alone should help Clover to get a healthy footing in the market, but I also have a sneaking suspicion that the team has more up their sleeves. We do know that there’s an API in the works, which will bring payment options to more apps and websites. Beyond that, the plans are still a bit in the dark.

So why not just use PayPal? According to Clover CEO Brian Lamkin, you’re probably not using it for quick payments anyway -

“…it’s not about what you can’t do with PayPal but rather what you don’t do with PayPal.  Over the past decade, PayPal has done a great job transforming how people think about payments, but most PayPal users don’t routinely use the service to pay each other for lunch, drinks, etc. from their mobile phone.”

That fast and easy idea is what you’ll probably notice about Clover from first boot. It really is incredibly simple to use. But in that fashion, so is Dwolla, so it’s going to take more than just easy to make things work.

If Lamkin’s name sounds familiar to you, there’s good reason — He’s a valley native who was previously the Senior Vice President for Yahoo’s Consumer Products division. He’s joined by other Valley-credentialed names such as John Beatty, Kelvin Zheng and Leonard Speiser who all worked at Bix before its Yahoo acquisition. Annie Lausier and Nagesh Susaria also join Clover from Yahoo. Mark Shulze comes from Quantcast, Marcus Westin from Meebo and that’s just to name a few.

Presently Clover is sitting on a $5.5 million investment from Andreesen Horowitz, Sutter Hill Ventures and Morado Venture Partners. With cash in the bank, a hot app on the market and a team that would make any startup drool, the future should hold fields of green for this new mobile payments player.

Want in? Find someone who is, or browse this article carefully. I’ve left a way for you to join me on Clover. Since, apparently, Clover gives me $5 for every referral, I’ll be donating that to Charity Water.

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.

Click to view slideshow.


Timeline: android



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Schmidt: Motorola Mobility Won't Get Preferential Treatment (Not That It Needs It)




8tracks Brings Its Handcrafted Mixtapes To Android




PayPal Updates Its Android App With Support For NFC Payments




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It’s Halloween, so it’s the perfect day to unveil the newest group of 500 Startups’ “little monsters”. Yes, this is the name that founder Dave McClure and his partner in crime Christine Tsai give to all the rock star entrepreneurs that grace the halls of their Mountain View offices.

500 Startups, as you may have heard by now, is the early-stage seed fund and incubator program founded in 2010 by the globe-trotting angel investor, which seeds between $25K to $250K in each of its startups that meet its “Three Ds” criteria: Design, data, and distribution.

The fall batch kicked off on October 10 and includes 34 awesome startups, which makes this its largest roster to date (the initial batch consisted of 12 startups and the second came in at 21, bringing 500 Startups’ total to 174).

The breakdown of this batch’s demographics shows this to be a diverse group of companies, as 8 of the startups have female founders: 72Lux, DressRush, Gizmo, LoveWithFood, MeMeTales, Talkdesk, Tiny Review, WeddingLovely; Fifteen of the startups have international founders (UK, Croatia, Canada, Brazil, Netherlands, Australia, Portugal, Bulgaria, Estonia, Russia, Japan). The distribution is also impressive, as the majority of the batch hails from outside of Silicon Valley, with teams from Chicago, Denver, Seattle, Los Angeles, New York City, Washington DC, Boston, and more among its ranks.

Two of the companies, TinyReview and WeddingLovely, have also received investments from Designers Fund, which, for those unfamiliar, is a community of designers that invests in design-experienced founders through mentorship, angel funding, and network access. Designers can also apply for investment, much in the same way founders apply to AngelList.

The “Demo Days” for this batch of startups has not yet been confirmed, but we do know that they will take place sometime in January 2012. It should also be noted that, in the spirit of Halloween, the third batch of 500 Startups companies is not only made up primarily of zombies, but it also appears that part of the strict regimen of business plan-building and product-honing also includes instruction in the fine art of dance. Thrilling, thrilling dance.

These 34 startups will give a more complete peek into their various products and plans to take over the world at 500 Startups’ Demo Days in January, but for those of you who are too antsy to wait until then, here’s a sneak preview below in alphabetical order:

300milligrams is a priority inbox for team conversations. The team hails from Estonia, which just so happens to be a country with a disproportionate number of startups per capita.

72Lux offers consumers a universal checkout and personalized
shopping experience while also offering a white-label version for publishers.

BrandBoards is bringing Google Adwords simplicity and reach to live event digital advertising.

BrightNest is the Mint.com for home maintenance, helping homeowners manage their most valuable asset with customized tips and reminders.

Cadee helps golfers understand and improve their game.

Central.ly wants to connect all of the social media profiles for small business owners.

Chorus is customer feedback without the hassle. It automatically extract meaning from thousands of customer messages as they arrive in real time.

ContaAzul is a web-based, SaaS accounting system for Brazilian SMBs.

Contactually is a personal assistant for your professional email contacts that connects directly with your CRM.

DressRush (“Gilt for Weddings”) wants to make “bridezillas” everywhere clamor to get couture without the cost. Up to 100% off retail.

eSpark Learning is “Pandora for education”, creating custom playlists of fun education apps on iPads for elementary school students.

Farmeron is a Croatian startup that helps farmers across the world to manage their production data online and to do automatized farm performance analysis using exciting statistics.

Fileboard is a service accessed from the iPad that helps manage files and attachments across email, Dropbox, Evernote, and other cloud repositories.

Fitocracy turns fitness into an addictive gaming experience where you level up in real life. (Check out TC’s early coverage of Fitocracy here.)

Forrst is where developers and designers improve their craft and companies come to hire them.

Gizmo is a cloud-based multichannel marketing platform for mobile, tablet, social, and the Web.

GoVoluntr is a social platform that brings together volunteers, nonprofits, and businesses to solve today’s social problems.

Hapyrus offers the easiest way of leveraging Hadoop to make your system highly scalable.

HighScore House turns a child’s chores and boring routines into a game, making the lives of families a little less hectic and a little more fun.

Intercom lets web businesses build powerful, personal relationships with their users, turning them into loyal customers.

LookAcross is a sales productivity tool helps you to have more conversations and up your connect rates by improving your company’s odds of connecting with people.

LoveWithFood, is the easiest way to find culinary deals & samples, curated by a community of foodies for foodies. Like Tom’s shoes for food, with every deal served, LoveWithFood donates a meal.

Meloncard wants to keep your personal information private and out of the hands of the companies that sell it.

MeMeTales is a mobile game and reading platform for kids. “Fun like Angry Birds without the guilt”.

MoPix wants to define what the movie experience can be on tablet devices and make distribution accessible to anyone with film or video content.

OneSchool is a free mobile app that connects students to the people, places, and things around them.

PayByGroup wants to make it so that you never have to front money for your group purchases again. The startup coordinates your friends’ payments to the merchant so you can plan activities without the hassle.

Redeemr helps businesses and celebrities get un-ignored by their social media fans.

Rotadosconcursos is a Brazilian test prep service designed to get users into those coveted government positions.

Spinnakr simplifies website targeting and increases your click-throughs and conversions by automatically displaying the right message to the right visitor.

Switchcam recreates the concert experience by combining and syncing fan-recorded videos.

Talkdesk lets your company have a contact center in the browser. It provides information about the caller by integrating with services like Salesforce and Zendesk.

Tiny Review is “Instagram for Yelp reviews”, or a fast and fun way to say what you think about a place.

WeddingLovely is building tools and directories to promote small and independent wedding vendors.

One of the best parts of becoming a 500 Startups company is its strong list of advisors and mentors, which you can check out here. Not to mention the fact that more than 50 percent of its first batch raised at least $250K, two raised a million or more, and every startup finished with some money in their pockets.

For more McClure on why 500 Startups is like the Oakland A’s of seed-stage investing, compared to Sequoia as the Yankees, check out Alexia’s interview here, or for seven of the most interesting startups from the accelerator’s last batch, check out our coverage here.






Crunchbase





500 STARTUPS






Financial-organization:
500 Startups


Website:
500startups.com


Launch Date:
January 4, 2010



500 Startups is an early-stage seed fund and incubator program located in Mountain View, CA. They invest primarily in consumer & SMB internet startups, and related web infrastructure services. Their initial investment size is typically $25K-$250K.

Selected areas of interest include financial services & e-commerce, search/social/mobile platforms, personal & business productivity, education & language, family & healthcare and web infrastructure.






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This post is sponsored by Geo-Loco.

With the success of smartphones, cloud-based platforms like SimpleGeo, and “contextual” data from sources like GeoIQ and Factual, location-aware mobile devices and solutions have reached a tipping point. Consumers are accepting and using the technology, and location intelligence is bringing the benefits of “hyper-local” to media and advertising through apps like Foursquare’s just announced Radar.

Executives from Google, Starbucks, Facebook and Foursquare will join investors and entrepreneurs to address these topics in a highly interactive setting.

VentureBeat readers can register here with discount code vb25 to receive a 25% discount.

Conference topics include:

- The Future(s) of Location Based Services
- The Brands are Coming, the Brands are Coming!
- Tap, Tap: Is the NFC Tipping Point Finally Here?
- The Future of Geo-Loco Investment
- Daily Deals Suck! Why and What to Do about It
- The Future of Mobile-Loco Commerce
- The Great Indoors: the Future of Indoor LBS & LBA
- API overload: Making $$$$ and Sense with Data
- Context, and Infrastructure

By fostering discussion, interaction and exchange among startups, businesses, and investors, GeoLoco offers a unique forum to explore, learn about and capitalize on important new developments and opportunities in geo- and location-based services.

[Source: Dr. Phil Hendrix, director immr and GigaOm Pro analyst]

Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat

Javascript Web app framework provider Sencha is today announcing the public beta launch of Sencha.io, its new HTML5 mobile cloud service. The service will allow Sencha app developers to build “shared experiences” in the browser, without having to write server code or manage hosting.

At launch, Sencha.io will provide a set of cloud services, including Sencha.io Data, Sencha.io Messages, Sencha.io Login and Sencha.io Development. Combined, the new services let developers use just a few lines of Javascript code to store data, send messages to users, listen for messages, deploy apps or login users via Facebook or Twitter.

The suite, which can be thought of somewhat like an iCloud for the Web, is now in open beta. It includes a Sencha.io SDK, plus full API documentation.

Details on the four core services are as follows:

1) Login: This cloud services allows users to log in to applications using Facebook or Twitter accounts or accounts specific to the application.

2) Data: Sencha.io Data let developers store data in the cloud with one line of code in a Sencha Touch application. Data is synchronized across all devices and can be shared between users. Even when a mobile device is offline, applications can still read and write data and Sencha.io Data will transparently sync when the device rejoins the network.

3) Messages: Sencha.io Messages enables users and applications to communicate with each other. For example: notifying a friend it’s their turn to play, or moving an in progress game from your mobile phone from your desktop.

4) Deployment: Sencha.io Deployment lets developers deploy their applications and optimize their application images for various mobile device screen sizes. Deployment includes a management portal that allows developers to manage versions of their applications and a fully sandboxed development environment for testing and collaboration.

More details on the services are provided on Sencha’s blog. Interested developers can go to htp://developer.sencha.io to create a team and download the SDK. Those with an existing Sencha ID are already registered. The company also notes that those apps using Sencha’s Sync and Src services will continue to work. Sync has now become a part of Data and Src is now a part of Deployment.






Crunchbase





SENCHA






Company:
Sencha


Website:
sencha.com


Launch Date:
January 4, 2007


Funding:
$29M



Sencha makes JavaScript frameworks for desktop and mobile devices. It has a new emphasis on HTML5-based products, like Sencha Touch, a framework for touch-enabled devices like those running iOS and Android. Sencha was formed from the combination of three open source projects: Ext JS, a desktop Ajax framework, jQTouch a jQuery library for touch applications, and Raphael, an SVG library.

Sencha received funding from Sequoia Capital and Radar Partners.






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After revolutionizing the digital music business, smartphones and tablets, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs was planning to take on an unlikely project: textbooks.

Jobs apparently wanted to hire textbook writers to create interactive digital versions of their books for the iPad, the New York Times is reporting based on information from the upcoming Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson.

The Times was one of many news organizations that got its hands on the biography last night, which goes on sale Monday, Oct. 24. The book sheds light on several stories about Jobs, like the fact that he refused potentially life-saving cancer treatment early on.

Jobs held meetings with publishers about working together with Apple on the new digital textbooks. He proposed the idea of giving away the books for free on the iPad, which would have allowed publishers to get around state certifications for textbooks. (Not being too familiar with the textbook business myself, I’m not sure what the advantage would be for publishers.)

Jobs believed that states would be facing a weak economy over the next decade, and that Apple could offer them a way to save money by circumventing the certification process.

Apple would have had plenty of company from others companies looking to revolutionize the textbook industry, including Kno, which launched an iPad app for textbooks earlier this year after dropping plans for its own tablet. There’s also digital textbook creator Inkling, which aims to create interactive tablet textbooks with social features.

Photo by Matt Yohe

Filed under: media, mobile, VentureBeat

I think it’s a fair assumption to say that, for app developers, the enjoyable part of their job is building the actual app, not finding the right web services and hosting provider, setting up databases, and slogging through configuration. I could be wrong to presume this to be true, but CloudMine, a Philadelphia-based startup launching in open beta today is willing to bet that most developers might agree with me.

So, CloudMine has developed a service that will allow developers to reduce the pain by providing a set of RESTful APIs that allow them to quickly create back-end solutions for their apps. Specifically, the startup is offering schema-free data structure storage, user account creation and management, and server-side business logic for computations that are too complex or data-intensive to run on a mobile device.

CloudMine is currently part of the current batch of fledgling startups in DreamIt Ventures’ Philadelphia-based accelerator program, which has invested $20K of seed funding in CloudMine’s backend solution. The service has been in closed beta for several months, where its testers have reported that CloudMine has cut the time it takes for developers to configure backend solutions in half.

Developers can use the service’s REST-based API directly or download its SDKs for the platform of their choice to give app creators the chance to increase their value proposition by focusing on the product (and getting it in front of users) and not worrying about tinkering with servers, web apps, or scaling.

I like that the PaaS service is offering a “B2D” (business-to-developer) solution that enables developers to move their focus away from infrastructure to product testing and iterating. It’s also pretty cool that developers can sign up for free and immediately get an API key for their first app — and quickly generating keys for other apps with one click once they’re ready to do so.

As to who is behind the startup: CloudMine was co-founded by Ilya Braude (formerly of Eastern Research acquired by Sycamore Networks and Drakontas), Marc Weil (who has previously worked at Apple and Oracle), and Brendan McCorkle (also the co-founder of Textaurant.

For more, check out CloudMine at home here.

Digital notebook service Springpad has doubled its total registered users in the last six months to 2 million, the company tells VentureBeat.

Springpad’s mobile apps let you save information about movies, wine, books, check-ins, recipes and more that you come across during the day. It then organizes that data within smart notebooks and arranges it into useful packages. For example, if I’m looking for movies in the area, I can pull up a list of the most popular movies among my friends. That movie page will have a map of theaters in the area, movie times, etc. It’s a pretty useful tool for keeping track of things and discovering your next few steps throughout the day.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks so. Springpad’s user base has saved over 27 million things using the service, according to the company.

“People’s habits are shifting from sharing their activities with one large network to smaller subsets of friends, like Facebook’s smart friend lists and Google’s Circles,” said Springpad CEO Jeff Janer in an interview. “What Springpad does is take the data from what you and your friends share and turn it into something much more useful.”

Right now, the company makes its money through affiliate partnerships from new business it directs to various products and services. Its mobile apps send users alerts for relevant news, price drops, product availability, coupons and other retail offers, which help facilitate that part of the business. Eventually, Springpad plans to open up relevant advertising into its smart notebooks while continuing to keep the service free for consumers.

Founded in 2008, the Boston-based company has $5 million total funding to date. Springpad faces competition from services like Evernote.

Filed under: media, mobile, social, VentureBeat

Adapteva has designed a chip with 64 computing brains for smartphones, tablets and super computers. The chip design company calls the new Epiphany IV microprocessor the “most energy efficient microprocessor” in the world.

The Lexington, Mass.-based company announced that its fourth-generation Epiphany chip will have 64 cores on a single chip. The chip can execute 70 gigaflops of computing performance while consuming a single watt of power. That’s actually a lot of power for a smartphone, but the performance can be dialed down to handle tasks more efficiently. The chip could be used in a wide range of mobile-focused markets, including running applications for machine vision, radar, speech recognition, software defined radio, security and medical diagnostics.

Adapteva was founded in 2008 and it has managed to design four chips with a tiny team of just five employees, said Andreas Olofsson, chief executive of Adapteva, in an interview. That is unheard of chip circles, where it often takes hundreds of people to complete the design of a full-fledged chip.

But Adapteva is focused on designing a chip that others can license and then take to market. Olofsson is also a veteran chip designer. He was previously part of a 100-person team at Analog Devices, but he broke off to do Adapteva. He designed the first prototype chip himself and brought on more people to do follow-ups. The company’s third chip was completed in May and it is the first commercial device.

Olofsson said that Adapteva got the power of its chip much lower by tossing a lot of things out. The chip won’t run a full operating system such as Linux; rather, it functions as a companion chip, or co-processor, sitting alongside an Intel or ARM-based microprocessor. Olofsson said the chip didn’t need a memory management unit because it wasn’t running the full Linux OS. And the chip didn’t need a large cache to run big applications either.

“We just kept throwing more features out, and with every feature we threw out, we saved more power,” Olofsson said. “At the end of the day, we have a lot of energy efficiency.”

Olofsson said the company was able to get by with a small team because it reused a lot of its design components across the chip. The chip operates at up to 800 megahertz and is built with a 28-nanometer manufacturing process.

Nathan Brookwood, a chip analyst at market analysis firm Insight64, said that he was impressed that Adapteva could design a chip so small, given the performance. He said there is nothing wrong with the companion chip approach, considering that graphics chips often have to be paired with microprocessors in personal computers. Brookwood said there are some gaps in the available information as to whether the companion approach will succeed. As for the supercomputing side, Brookwood said the approach looked promising.

Olofsson said the processor shows how it will be easy to beat the 2018 goal of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which wants to hit 50 gigaflops per watt. The company says it can do server-level computing on mobile devices.

The previous-generation Epiphany III chip was able to match the performance of some of Intel’s Xeon processors while consuming less than 2 watts of peak power. The Epiphany IV chip will be able to outdo those benchmarks by four times using the same amount of power. Chip samples will be ready in the first quarter in 2012.

The venture was self-funded at first and then Olofsson raised $1.5 million from Bittware, a digital signal processing board maker that also became a customer. Bittware makes boards for military applications. Olofsson said the company is looking to raise more money. Rivals include Intel and Tilera.

Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat

Instead of just drooling over gorgeous iPad magazines, you can now create your own.

Adobe today announced Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, Single Edition, which will grant tablet publishing capabilities to just about anyone for $395 per magazine app.

The software is aimed at freelancers, small businesses, and others who want to get their work on tablets easily. Single Edition relies on existing Adobe software: You need InDesign CS5.5 to create page layouts and Folio Producer to add sexy interactive elements, like 360 rotation, panoramas, and other media.

Once you have a completed publication, you need to purchase Single Edition at Adobe.com to publish the app to the iTunes App Store. True to its name, you’ll need to purchase a new Single Edition for every app you want to publish.

Adobe says that Single Edition will soon be available, and you’ll be able to publish iPad tablet apps by the end of the year. The company is working on support for Android tablets and the BlackBerry PlayBook (seriously) for 2012. For those who need to create multiple tablet apps, Adobe also announced the pro version of its Digital Publishing Suite, which will cost $495 a month.

Filed under: media, mobile, VentureBeat

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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Just a day after news that the MeeGo operating system had met its demise and a new Samsung and Intel backed Linux OS called Tizen would rise to take its place, both Asustek and Acer have reportedly joined the project, with HTC “currently evaluating its decision”, reports Digitimes.

Tizen will be hosted by the Linux Foundation and will be jointly-created by Intel and Samsung, supporting multiple device categories including smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, netbooks and in-car devices.

MeeGo, the predecessor to Tizen, was put on deathwatch the minute Nokia announced that it was to invest heavily in Microsoft’s Windows Phone ecosystem. The company did release one MeeGo-powered device, the Nokia N9 – which launched to favourable reviews – but the company distanced itself from development of the platform as it looked to solidify its smartphone presence with the backing of Microsoft.

The platform will focus on HTML5 and other web standards, opening APIs that will “cover various platform capabilities” including messaging, multimedia, camera, network, and social media.

Digitimes adds:

Application stores will also merge the current resources of Intel’s MeeGo and Samsung’s Bada. Tizen has already won support from Panasonic Mobile Communications, NTT DoCoMO and SK Telecom, and a software development kit (SDK) is scheduled for release in the first quarter of 2012.

Following Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility, many of the top smartphone vendors have begun evaluating their reliance on the Android platform to ensure they remain competitive should Google shift its approach with the operating system. Samsung has said it will continue development of its Bada platform, with HTC also declaring it has been looking into either buying or developing its own OS.

 

At Mobilize 2011 this week, we had a wealth of founders and executives of mobile companies onstage who not only talked up their products but also the things they’ve learned as they’ve built their apps and mobile services. We’ve picked out some of the best advice they had to offer for young mobile companies just starting out. Here are six great tips from Pandora, Flipboard, Instagram, Hipmunk, Formspring and Grey Area:

1. Don’t feel that you have to pick sides in HTML5 vs. native
Pandora  is taking a hybrid approach to its rapidly growing music streaming service’s web site and its apps, and its not alone. Pandora launched an HTML5-powered website last week, and CTO Tom Conrad said that he could see the company developing a hybrid HTML5-native app. It’s the best way to get the best of both worlds with the technology that’s available right now, said Conrad. “That gives you integration with the OS and really, really high performance and really fluid user experiences. But integrated with some HTML5 content, whose strong suit is uniform platform dynamics, and rapid turns on user interface development.”

2. Do smaller releases quickly
It took Instagram (which went from essentially zero to 10 million users in the space of a year) a while between the release of their photo app and the first major update last week. But CEO Kevin Systrom wouldn’t recommend that. “Do fewer things more quickly,” he said, rather than waiting a long time between big releases as Instagram did. “It’s not a mistake, it just took us a long time to do v 2.0. But I’d like to move us into smaller iterations more quickly because I think that if you get into a rhythm of releases you end up making more progress in the long run.”

3. Prototype early and often
Danilo Campos, head of mobile at travel-search startup Hipmunk, offered his best advice on how not to waste your developers’ time: “Prototyping is going to save you from shipping crap. It allows you to touch the application in front of you without having to invest a deep amount of resources in it. It’s something you build in an afternoon’s time rather than over the course of weeks and [then] realizing it’s not good at all.”

4. Human intervention is good
Pandora learned you can’t automate everything. “One of the key observations that [founder] Tim [Westergren] made when he started the company was that part of what we love about music is how it sounds,” said Conrad. “So to make a service that really introduces you to new artists, the best way to do that is to have a catalog of the musical fingerprints or underlying musicological attributes. The state of the art in computer listening is insufficient to tease out those hundreds of details, so we have human beings that come in and put on headphones and categorize those 400 attributes.”

5. Throw out your own expectations
This dawned on the Formspring team when they were figuring out how to translate their Q&A site into a mobile app, which they released earlier this month. At first they felt pressured to recreate their site, but they realized that wasn’t realistic for the phone’s small screen. “Some expectations are yours that you need to throw out,” said Tom Wang head of product at Formspring. Your website may look “radically different” than your app, and that’s OK if it gives the best user experience. “You really need to rethink what you’re presenting and how you’re presenting it.”

Grey Area, the company behind the hit mobile location-based massively multiplayer online game Shadow Cities also had their expectations of user behavior turned upside down early on. Co-founder and CEO Ville Vesterinen said they assumed those who played mobile games were casual gamers, meaning they engaged in brief play sessions while in transit. In reality, Vesterinen said, users play their mobile games in places they are most often, meaning they play for longer sessions. That realization made Grey Area rethink engagement and in-game experiences.

6. Compete with yourself
“A great company thinks about competing with itself,” Flipboard Editorial Director Josh Quittner said. “That’s really in the end who they compete with. They don’t think about what everybody else is doing because if you start thinking about what everybody else is doing, you end up following them.”

Keith Rabois of mobile payments startup Square echoed that. “We look at ourselves in the mirror everyday….it doesn’t really matter what other people do. We really strictly believe that. Insofar as a lot of companies start with the premise of, I have to worry about this feature, and they send around emails (asking), ‘Do we have that?’ We try to take ourselves out of that. It’s our job to build amazing products and we either succeed or fail depending on how amazing they are.”

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Wikets, a soon-to-be-released iPhone application that recommends places and products to friends, announced a $1.5 million seed round from Andreessen-Horowitz and Battery Ventures today. But will yet another recommendations product survive when reviews and opinions already litter the Internet?

I imagine these recommendation apps to be like little bodies treading water in the Internet ocean. Apps like Where exist in rafts, websites such as Yelp are the ships that float on their own, and companies that provide exit strategies or funding are the lifeboats searching the scene for people to pick up.

Not every treading body drowns. Wickets is hoping a classic approach to recommendations will help it edge out competitors, openly acknowledging that the space is crowded.

“We are doing it the old fashioned way. Our goal was to come up with a way users can put their best recommendations at their friends’ fingertips,” said Wickets chief executive and co-founder Andy Park in an interview with VentureBeat.

Wickets works by allowing you to follow other Wikets members and see their recommendations in a stream. Recommendations are made by searching a particular place or company, finding the product and adding your two cents right on its page. You can save recommendations in wishlists and define a wishlist by topic. Commenting is also enabled on the various reviews.

Based on how many people “re-recommend” what you’ve already recommended or add your review to their wishlist, you get points, which can result in gift cards. The company is not releasing the names of all of its retail partners, but does say the first gift cards awarded could be from Amazon, iTunes or other large scale retailers.

Park says that the app solves two problems: having to find a product and send an email or text regarding the product, as well as time spent waiting for a recommendation when requested from friends. The app solves these issues by attaching a review directly to the product or place page and, in theory, your friends’ recommendations will already be available on the app, so you won’t have to query the person directly.

This requires that people actually use the app, however. The app can’t reach its full functionality until a majority of your own friends are using it. So how will Wikets get people to use the app? The company believes Facebook and Twitter connect, a prompt to find friends, and a natural desire to meet people will bring in the required amount of users.

By “natural desire to meet people,” Park means that because you can see friends-of-friends’ reviews, you will want to get to know those people as well. For example, if you’re with someone who mentions a restaurant your friend reviewed, you can offer to invite that friend along since you know they like the place. It’s a little intangible, however, and hard to measure if downloads will directly correlate to people meeting each other.

User acquisition is a big problem for app companies today, which have turned to gamification, or a rewards system such as Wiket’s as a way to lure people. A number of crowdsourced products such as CrowdTwist, BunchBall and Needle are all doing this. But as any gamer knows, getting rewarded is great, but its entertainment value will die if the means by which you get rewarded is boring.

Parks did, however, say that he is saving specific strategies for the app’s launch.

The growth of a company like this is very much up in the air, especially as funding becomes less and less of an indicator that a company is worthwhile.

Matt McCall of Chicago venture firm New World Ventures told VentureBeat, “There are just way too many companies getting funded.”

For now, however, Wikets has been pulled out of the ocean to develop its app with capital from investors Battery Ventures and Andreessen-Horowitz. It is using the funding to launch the application, which went into full development after the company closed on the round in May.

Prior to the round, Park knew Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz when his former company BladeLogic was a competitor of their Opsware, both optimization focused data centers. BladeLogic went public in 2007 and was sold to BMC Software in 2008. The teams grew mutual respect over the years and are collaborating this time around.

Wikets plans to launch the iPhone app in October, as well as announce its strategy and partners further. For now, the seed round will keep the project afloat.

[Photo courtesy of Andrew Doran/Shutterstock]

Filed under: deals, mobile, VentureBeat

Pandora, LinkedIn, Box.net and many others are moving to HTML5 to give users a cross-platform, rich media experience. The latest to participate in this tend is SlideShare, a sharing platform for business documents, videos and presentations.

SlideShare lets anyone share presentations and video and also serves as a social discovery platform for users to find relevant content and connect with other members who share similar interests. The company also has a huge enterprise following, and companies like IBM and others use the platform to curate content from all of their employees and partners on a branded page.

Considering the trend towards content discovery on mobile platforms, it would make sense for SlideShare to have mobile offerings. But the startup has not offered any native apps and until today had a flash-based site that could be reached via the browser. Co-founder Jonathan Boutelle tells us that using the Flash-based site was a barrier for users accessing SlideShare from iOS sites. And when determining whether to build a native app for go HTML5, Boutelle said that building a mobile optimized site made the most sense because of the cross-platform capabilities to work on iPads, iPhones and Android devices.

The new HTML5 SlideShare site now renders 30 percent faster and users can view, share, and interact with presentations. Boutelle says the latest version of the SlideShare site uses a patent-pending document conversion technology that renders all the details of a PowerPoint or Word document using nothing but HTML5.

The site also allows visitors to take advantage several features that were previously available only on the desktop version of the site including the ability to copy and paste text; keyboard navigation; full-screen view; and the ability to view embedded documents. Registered users can also view private content, to view content from friends, and favorite content. Any user viewing a slide view page now has visibility into metadata such as the number of views, embeds, and favorites for each presentation, as well as related content and content by the same author. And the homepage now displays a list of featured presentations.

Boutelle says SlideShare continues to see growing engagement, and expects the HTML5 platform to increase usage as well. He explains that HTML5 made sense because the company wanted a lightweight experience for users and wanted documents, fonts, and more to look the same on various browser types. As we mentioned above, this is SlideShare’s first mobile presence and currently the startup doesn’t have any plans to expand to native apps. “We’re doubling down on HTML5 and making this better and bette so it works for everybody,” says Boutelle.

Currently, the site’s 60 million users upload tens of thousands professional presentations every day. SlideShare has raised $3 million in funding from Jonathan Abrams, Mark Cuban, Dave McClure, and Venrock.






Crunchbase





SLIDESHARE






Company:
SlideShare


Website:
slideshare.net


Funding:
$3M



SlideShare is a community for sharing presentations. Individuals or organizations can upload and share PowerPoint, PDF, or OpenOffice presentations. Anyone can find presentations on their topic of interest. Users can tag presentation, and download or embed them into their own websites or blogs. Users can also share their documents privately. SlideShare lets its users to join groups to connect with SlideShare members who share similar interests. Business presentations make the most of...






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I’ve always hated the notion of ratings based on five stars. It makes no sense. Sure, something that sucks is “1 star” and something awesome is “5 stars”, but what determines a “2 star” rating? What about a “4 stars”? It’s totally arbitrary. Why not just say something is “bad”, “okay”, “good”, or “great”? Or better yet, why not say nothing unless something is great? That’s the basic idea behind Stamped, a new startup currently in stealth mode.

The startup has deep Google ties — 2 of the 3 co-founders are ex-Google, while 4 of the 7 total team members are — but it’s iPhone-only for now. They’re taking the Instagram-approach to launching in that regard. And they’re taking cues from Instagram in another key regard: simplicity.

“It can be hard to figure out what a 3-star rating from 70 strangers means. We want to introduce simplicity back into the system by reducing it all down to one question: does it deserve your friend’s stamp of approval?,” co-founders and CEO Robby Stein says. ”Every decision we’ve made has been designed to make the act of stamping as fast and simple as possible,” he continues.

I love everything about those statements. And Stein goes further:

“We’re obsessively focused on building a social platform designed for quality over quantity.  There is so much value in discovering great things through your friends and too much noise on current platforms to do it easily. We want to change that.”

When it launches, Stamped will be entering an already-crowded space around mobile-based ratings. This reminds me of Instagram launching a year ago just as a plethora of mobile photo startups were launching. Simplicity and speed won the day. Stamped is hoping it plays out the same way for them.

Stein notes that he’s been obsessing over this idea for a few years, but started on it in earnest in April when he left Google (where he worked on Gmail and more recently, Ad Exchange). ”I saw that people loved to talk about the things they liked best over coffee, emails, texts, or even massive Google spreadsheets (I swear my friend has one). I noticed this is information people are naturally drawn to sharing, so I started with building a prototype that made this easier and more efficient,” he says.

There are a few other unique layers to the app, to avoid what the team calls “data diarrhea”. More on that when the app is ready to launch.

The startup, which is entirely New York City-based right now, raised a Series A round of funding from Bain Capital Ventures and Google Ventures earlier this year. The amount is undisclosed.

Look for Stamped to launch in the next few weeks. For now, you can sign up to learn more on their site.






Crunchbase





STAMPED






Company:
Stamped


Website:
stamped.com



Stamped is a mobile startup focusing on simple, fast reviews. You give products your “stamp of approval”.






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There’s a new concept for social networking services taking root, and it’s not about re-creating your offline social graph on the Web, like Facebook does today. It’s about discovering the people who are nearby you now – the ones you probably would like to meet.

This type of discovery mechanism is already being made possible by a number of services, including the checkin apps like Foursquare and Gowalla, the automated discovery of nearby folks via Sonar and Banjo, the group chatting in Yobongo, and the micro-networks that emerge through LoKast. All of these companies are playing with the idea of location-based social networks, attempting to connect you to others around you through varying means.

At this week’s TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, even more services emerged to compete in this space, too.

The powerful capabilities of today’s mobile smartphones are allowing for a new kind of networking: social discovery services, not social networking services. Discovery services are focused primarily on highlighting the users within close proximity to you and connecting you to those who you might want to meet.

Facebook, meanwhile, aims to connect you to people you already know. “Discovery” on Facebook is limited to searching for names or networks (e.g., schools, workplaces) where the introductions themselves previously took place.

But there are ephemeral, ever-changing social networks that we participate in daily. These have been left largely untapped by Facebook: the people working out at the gym, shopping for groceries, playing basketball, taking their dog to the park, watching their children on the playground, and so on. They’re the networks you stumble into and out of every day, and they aren’t composed of your close friends, Facebook friends or otherwise. They’re just people who share your interests at that same moment in time. The guy ready for a pick-up game of b-ball. The coupon-clipper finding deals at the grocery store. A new puppy’s owners hoping for a doggie play date.

A couple of standout apps from Disrupt hope to better highlight these types of networks by introducing you to the people you want to know.

One, an app called Holler (iTunes), is based around interests and activities. You join a group (surfers, for example) and the app pushes notifications to you when others nearby are interested in the same thing. For now, the groups are pre-built by Holler itself, but it’s in the process of rolling out a system where users can build their own groups. However, there will be some level of filtering and control, so duplicate groups are not created.

Holler is well-designed, with a clean and minimalist layout, which makes it easy to use from first launch. Unfortunately, it suffers from the same problem many other “social” apps do at first – not enough people are using it. To address the issue, Holler’s creators are thinking of exposing all the groups to the app’s users, not just those nearby, which would still allow for socializing around interests. While that may increase engagement, it takes away from the app’s core promise of proximity-based socializing – its mobile meetups on the fly.

In a similar vein, another TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Alley company, Mingle, has built a mobile app that also aims to connect users based on interests. But in Mingle’s case, it’s about introducing yourself to others nearby, in the hopes that you two share an interest, instead of connecting around a commonly held interest like “shopping” or “exercise,” for example.

Mingle users fill out an introduction card and post it to their current location. Others “mingling” at that location can see one another, and take the conversation offline, if desired. It’s what Foursquare could do, if it wasn’t so stuck on listing the “others here” with only an avatar and a first name, last initial (arguably useless information, unless those people are already real-life friends).

A third app from the Startup Alley is a little more out there, but interesting. Called igobubble, this mobile app lets you leave virtual “bubbles” containing text, photos, videos, music and more at a given location. Others can come along later and find your bubble and interact with it, or even change it. You’ll see who has “touched” your bubble and can then chat with them in real-time. There’s more too it than that, but those are the basics.

igobubble feels more art project than the next big hit in mobile socializing, but at least they’re thinking out of the box. Instead of just re-creating the structure of a traditional social networking site (with profiles, listed interests, avatars), it’s thinking that tying content to a location is the first step in enabling mobile social discovery. That’s certainly a different take. It’s not about who you are, it’s about what you did at that location.

Other intriguing ideas in the location-based social space included Disrupt Startup Alley participant Evertale, makers of a mobile app that will map photos to locations for the purpose of instant scrapbooking and remembering old friends, and Audience Choice winner CardFlick, a contact-sharing app for nearby users.

But have any of the new apps (or old ones, for that matter), really hit the nail on the head when it comes to social discovery? Banjo and Sonar are great, but feel more like tools than networks of their own. Yobongo’s chat seems a bit lacking without context. Holler’s mobile meetups can’t work if it can’t gather enough participants. Mingle feels more business-networking driven than social. igobubble is an interesting idea, but doesn’t have the execution down.

It seems like each service could be a part of a bigger whole – a new proximity-based social network that puts location first, people and content second. A new network no one has yet been ambitious enough to attempt to design, so focused on a single niche or feature instead.

Foursquare, at least, has the critical mass to get there, but is stagnating with its continued emphasis on the manual check-in. The company should be increasing automation for regular check-ins, building out user profiles and letting users connect via common interests surfaced by their regular activities. It should suggest new friends based on behaviors combined with “friend-of-a-friend connections.” At the very least, when a big group of friends check-in together, it should alert the users in the group who aren’t connected to each other of the missed opportunity. It should even consider letting users pick and choose add-on services to run within the app. Yobongo’s chat, CardFlick or Mingle’s introductions, and igobubble’s content sharing could all be Foursquare features one day, and not standalone applications, if Foursquare had a wider vision for its future.

In the meantime, it’s fun to experiment with the latest and greatest in proximity-based social networking, thanks to the new TechCrunch Disrupt Alley startups mentioned here and others. Whether any of them will become breakout hits, however, will have to be left for the market to decide.

Credit: Top image via Mingle






Crunchbase





MINGLE
HOLLER
CARDFLICK
EVERTALE
BANJO

FOURSQUARE
YOBONGO
IGOBUBBLE
SONAR.ME






Company:
Mingle


Website:
minglesocialapp.com



Mingle is a mobile product that surfaces human relevance within a proximity. Leveraging location, Mingle allows users to make introductions anywhere they go with hopes that it allows users to interact. Mingle goes beyond sharing interests, usernames or even checking in and provides a relevance graph to provide context in which users use to help them find interesting people.






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Company:
Holler


Website:
holler.com










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Company:
CardFlick


Website:
cardflick.co



CardFlick helps you create and share online business cards using your iPhone in one flick.

1 Click login with services like Facebook and then your card is prefilled with your contact using one of our beautiful themes

Share your card with multiple people at a time just by flicking your phone or even email.

New themes can be purchased in app.

Customers are anyone who has a business to promote and wants to network without the hassle.






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Company:
Evertale


Website:
evertale.com


Launch Date:
January 3, 2011



Evertale is the self-writing scrapbook of your life.

Relive your favorite memories in their completeness. Evertale automatically generates a scrapbo[…]

ClrTouch, a Brooklyn-based startup with a love for touchscreen interfaces, makes it dead simple to create a webpage for tablets right on the iPad.

There are plenty of companies, like OnSwipe, focused on making it easy to create tablet sites, but ClrTouch appears to be the first to let you do so right on an actual tablet.

“Our product is made to evolve the web from a click- to a touch-based environment with consumer as our focus,” founder and CEO Mark Spates told VentureBeat. “We are not just making blogging easier or [prettier] on tablets but addressing a real shift that will occur in human computer interaction over the next 10-20 years.”

Using ClrTouch is simple: You log onto the website from your iPad, enter a page title, choose feeds that you’d like to feature on your tablet, pick a layout, and hit publish. The service will help to promote the page to others, and you can also explore new content through its “Discovery Dashboard.”

Think of it like a Tumblr for tablet web pages. The company plans to build a network around the pages users create, which should make it easy for anyone to find interesting tablet sites.

ClrTouch currently has three employees and was founded in 2010. It has also recently been accepted to the startup accelerator DreamIt Ventures’ Fall 2011 Philadelphia class.

ClrTouch is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2011 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Filed under: mobile, social, VentureBeat

It’s been a long time since we were delighted and even slightly bemused by the utterly stripped down simplicity of Twitter. And let’s face it, there have been many pretenders to that simplistic interface crown since then. But Amen appears to have come up with a mellifluous new take on a mobile service which is tantalisingly simple, but designed to create masses amounts of data about things people like.

Put simply, Amen is about finding the best of everything, often via arguments over the worst. To get the app go to getamen.com/tc in your Safari on the iPhone, sign up and download it OverTheAir. There are about 2,000 sign ups for Techcrunch Disrupt.

Here’s how it works. You fire up the app on the iPhone or web browser and say a person, place or thing is “the best” or “the worst” ever, like like, the Best Dubstep track ever. Or perhaps, as actress Demi Moore (a beta user) puts it, “After Sex is the Best State For Amening Ever.” Hubbie Ashton Kutcher – an investor – “Led Zeppelin is the best rock band ever.” You can agree with this statement with an “Amen”. But with a “Hell no” you have to suggest an alternative answer. It’s a rigid structure, but you can post whatever you want.

Leaving aside reading between the lines of Demi’s post (as tempting as it is) the creation of the simple “Amen” or “Hell No” mechanic means Amen can create lots of definitive data about something. For instance, right now Amen says “The Best Place for Mexican Food in San Mateo is Taqueria La Cumbre. Of course, you might disagree…

The location of any Amen statement is also built into the app, meaning Amen will start to tell you the best things around you.

But more interesting than that, it generates a feed from users who see lots of potentially divisive statements from their friends.

This is when the gaming element kicks in because you can weigh in and vehemently disagree with a person. This not just a Dilike button – you can only disagree, typing “hell no” – by suggesting a replacement to the post.

That means Amen gets continually more finessed data each time. Crucially, each statement is a data point.

So where as Twitter and its thousands of third party developers have had to apply tortuous natural language algorithms to the firehose in order to work out what the hell is going on, Amen has all this data and structure pre-built in to its system. It’s like one big brawl to find the best stuff, but this time with rules so simple you don’ even notice them.

So the whole system is built from the ground up to bubble-up the best of everything in the world.

Founderr Felix says users of the closed beta have been posting about TV shows, of coffee houses, The worst airline, the best position for sex. Literally everything. In addition people use it to create a kind of status update which their friends can agree or disagree with, e.g. “This bar is the best place for meeting Mike.”

Then again it might be something more nuanced, such as…

Or more inside baseball:

Or more gamed:

The startup has been in closed private beta for the last month and now has 3,500 users, generating quite a lot of engagement. In one month those users created 30,000 statements, created 15,500 score cards and clicked the Amen button 80,000 times.

An unintended use is using is as a Q&A platform, and then finding the thing you were after, like asking “Who is the best Dentist in Berlin” and people disputing that and entering their suggestion.

People have also been talking about everything from brand to what the best jokes are, to the best playlists.

Of course, it’s the brands element to this that has a lot of potential. Brands can get feedback on what people are saying about them, definitely, in realtime and to a high level of accuracy because it’s all structured data. This is much harder in Twitter because there is no structured data to mine, just people random words.

Plus, Amen is de-duping all the words and lists, so there is no duplication, no fat in the system.

And because its starts suggesting things to you, it can start to predict what you are planning to type. The same goes for location where the Amen iPhone might already know you are in a particular bar.

Lists don’t just generate one answer – there is a long tail of answers after the top result. So they get the head and the long tail of results. Even an answer with only two votes will still appear in the system.

Yes, the best movie ever made bay end up being agreed on (it’s 2001: A Space Odyssey).

Amen’s game plan is engagement first, and get big. Then to enable discovery and utility. Monetisation comes afterwards and could consist of ad buys within the lists, like AdWords.

The startup has raised a Seed funding from Index Ventures and Kutcher.

The team itself is sterling. CEO and Founder Felix Petersen formerly founded Plazes, which was acquired by Nokia in 2008. There is also Caitlin Winner (MIT, Nokia) and Ricki Vester Gregersen (Input Squared), and Florian Weber, Twitter’s first engineer interviewed here).

But finally, here is a problem. In theory Amen could be copyable, assuming someone can think out how to structure this data. It’s barrier to entry might therefore be lower. But then, how many startups already have Demi Moore as a private – poised to be public – beta user?






Crunchbase





AMEN.






Company:
Amen.


Website:










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Spool is a new service aimed at addressing the problem created by the multi-device, multi-screen environment we now live in, where the content consumption experience can vary widely from platform to platform. On iOS devices, for example, you can’t watch Flash videos without serious workarounds. On an iPod Touch or other standalone media player, you need a Wi-Fi signal in order to browse the Web.

But with Spool, you don’t have to think about these sorts of things. Any Internet content, including audio, video and text, can be made available for immediate, offline viewing on mobile, simply by using the Spool app, browser add-on or bookmarklet. And because Spool is intelligent, it knows what part of a webpage to save, and what part to discard.

Simply put, Spool works like an evolved version of Instapaper, the popular service that saves long-form Web articles for later reading either on your computer, iPhone, iPad or Kindle. Like Instapaper, there’s also this idea that what works on the Web isn’t necessarily what works well on mobile. But where Instapaper cleans up and reformats text for easier reading, Spool works with any media type, whether it be text, audio or video. It can even parse multi-page content for you, saving the entire article or forum thread, for example, not just the first page.

The service uses artificial intelligence and a computer vision engine to read the webpage the way a human would and extract the relevant parts, while discarding the rest (like the ads, the header, the footer, etc.). Most importantly, perhaps, it converts video into mobile-friendly, HTML5-based formats that play within any modern smartphone or tablet browser. The videos and other content are also cached to the device, for offline access.

In the short-term, Spool solves the problem of content incompatibly that arises, for the most part, from Apple’s decision to ban Flash from its mobile devices and publishers’ delays in moving to the iOS-friendly Web standard HTML5. It also provides a viable workaround for the still-present “offline” problem that results from poor cellular coverage and dead spots.

Spool’s founders, Avichal Garg and Curtis Spencer, admit that the Flash problem is slowly going away, but they believe that the connectivity issues will remain for some time.

For now, Spool lets you take snapshots of a page using its mobile app, Firefox or Chrome extension, or browser bookmarklet. These saved pages and related media can be viewed within the app or online, and favorited for easy access or archived when you’re finished viewing. The storage space Spool uses can also be adjusted in Settings, and for Android users, storing content to the SD card is supported.

In the future, Spool will focus on adding deep linking (automatically pulling down the content for the links within an article you saved), plus intelligent “spooling” of your favorite sites without an explicit request on your part.

The app is free for now (in private beta), while the founders consider monetization options involving freemium services, search offerings and mobile CDN models.

Spool is currently addressing some real-world problems, but arguably not those that will be around forever. Spool’s technology, on the other hand, may have a longer shelf life than Spool’s apps. The company expects five patents to come of its artificial intelligence, computer vision, video extraction, video transcoding and browser emulation infrastructure. The amount of funding Spool received is currently undisclosed.

Q&A

Judges:Expert Judges: Aileen Lee (Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers), Dustin Moskovitz (Asana), Michael Parekh (MPi Capital), Joshua Schachter (Jig)

AL: How to grow business?

A: People are already doing this behavior. Big fans of Dropbox, Evernote – sites that have solve pain points for big parts of online population.

DM: What about when network connections are better?

A: Network infrastructure can’t keep up with number of users. Even if it does, that means Spool gets faster pipes, loads pages faster on phones.

MP: Love it, can’t wait to try it. How does it compare to competition?

A: A lot competitors focused on article content (Instapaper). This is about different types of content, too. (Videos, audio, etc.)

JS: Do people really return to read stuff they archive to read later?

A:  We can also intelligently fetch things for you in advance, at some point in the future. But yes, it’s not an immediately mainstream product.






Crunchbase





SPOOL






Company:
Spool


Website:




Spool saves your favorite articles and videos to your computer, tablet, and phone. Read and watch your content when you have time, even offline.






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In the days of yore, travel guides were written by intrepid travelers who spent months scribbling in diaries and field journals, or by teams of adventurous souls exhaustively scrap booking their travel experiences into the Lonely Planets of the world. Over the last decade, however, the Web has produced an untold number of personal travel blogs, digital photo albums, community-built travel guides like Tripadvisor and Wikitravel, and cool travel resources like Gogobot.

Today, Jon Tirsen and Douwe Osinga, two ex-Googlers, are officially unveiling their new mobile travel guide Triposo, which doesn’t want to just throw out the old model, it wants to do what Google did for the world’s information: Aggregate that sucka and make it easily searchable. Simply put, Triposo is based on the simple idea that travel guides can be designed in the same way that Google based its aggregation and search on some kick ass algorithms. And a little bit of indexing and semantic icing to boot.

To that end, travel guides like Triposo are possible today, because the content is there. Sites like Wikipedia, Wikitravel, and Openstreetmap have swaths of travel-related content, and Triposo wants to be the site that ranks that content so well you’ll never have to use another preachy, paper-based travel book. The environment will thank you.

Thus, the Triposo algorithm takes travel information from seven of the biggest open source aggregators (and several closed resources as well) and serves its users with content that’s relevant for them. Without any human interference, Triposo COO Richard Osinga tells me, the startup produces travel guides, with information on sightseeing, nightlife and restaurants, all ordered by Triposo’s algorithm — and complete with an easy-to-use (and offline-enabled) map. That very offline functionality in and of itself makes Triposo’s free mobile apps worth downloading.

Along with its web app, Triposo also offers 30 free destination guides for iOS using the same approach. The startup plans to release an iOS world guide, in which users can download a complete travel guide for any destination in the world, next month. Android users, on the other hand, can already find a world travel guide and guides for select cities here.

Triposo has been polishing its travel content algorithms for over a year now, and launched a swath of city guides for iOS and Android to test the algorithmic waters and user response. So far, people are using the guides on average of 20 minutes per session — so far, so good. But the end goal for Triposo is really to hone its all-in-one world travel guides, so that users can pick a destination anywhere across the globe and easily find the best cities and destinations to visit.

But how does Triposo choose these recommended destinations? “One of the things we also use intensively for our ranking algorithms are photographs”, said Co-founder Douwe Osinga. “We have a collection of a few million travel photos geotagged — with time stamps. How many pictures are taken at a place, at what time, on what day: That all helps us decide how important a location is”.

Of course, an algorithm-based company is only as good as its, well, algorithm. At the end of the day, travelers may prefer to receive personalized recommendations on destinations from their friends, or people they trust. (Or self-curated as one commenter pointed out.) And from this perspective, Triposo’s human-less recommendation platform may not suit everyone; but at the same time, it’s nice to have a free mobile app that works the same for everyone regardless. It may miss the mark for some, but the iPad app looks great, and so far, the algorithm hasn’t let me down. Amsterdam, here I come.

Along with platform unveiling, Triposo also told TechCrunch that it has raised $525,000 in seed financing from angel investors, including Chris Sacca, Taher Haveliwala, Google Wave Co-founder and Google Maps Lead Engineer Lars Rasmussen, and InterWest Partners.

The founders said that they will use this new infusion of capital to continue optimizing its algorithm, working towards the goal of becoming the best possible web and mobile destination to answer: Where should I go next? The question, however, for Triposo, is what their revenue model will be when the money runs out. Premium features? Paid apps? More to come.

For more on the interactive travel guides startup, check them out here. Let us know what you think. Travel content algorithms: Yay or nay?






Crunchbase





TRIPOSO






Company:
Triposo


Website:
triposo.com/


Funding:
$525k



Triposo makes free, interactive travel guides for mobile devices.

Using an algorithm based approach Triposo focusses on presenting the most relevant options for a traveler at any given moment in...






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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...







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Nitobi, creators of the HTML5-based mobile app framework PhoneGap, have today launched the PhoneGap Facebook Connect plugin. The addition of the plugin means that developers building apps using Web technologies like HTML and JavaScript can now simplify the log in process for their apps by allowing users to login with their Facebook credentials.

To enable third parties the ability to integrate the Facebook Connect technology, Facebook provides a JavaScript software development kit (SDK) to developers.

However, Nitobi says that using the Facebook SDK was a challenge because it requires the use of the OAuth 2.0 standard, an open standard for authorization. This sign on process doesn’t always translate gracefully for the PhoneGap developers’ apps, the company found. Typically, a login box pops up on the user’s screen because their Facebook username and password credentials aren’t likely stored on the device.

“We got working on a Facebook plugin because we’re user experience advocates,” Dave Johnson, CTO at Nitobi Inc. says. “The OAuth authentication workflow for a mobile app isn’t ideal so we created the PhoneGap Facebook Connect plugin as a way to streamline that process and improve the experience for the end user.”

The new plugin uses the same API (application programming interface) as Facebook’s own SDK, but instead of replicating the same workflow you would see on the Web using a desktop browser, it works with the native Facebook application installed on users’ own devices. The end result is a less cumbersome log in process for an app’s end users.

The plugin is now available for download from Gitub here.

Nitobi, which is now seeing over 40,000 PhoneGap downloads per month, says it expects this new plugin to be popular.






Crunchbase

PHONEGAP








Product:
PHONEGAP


Website:
http://www.phonegap.com

Company
Nitobi Software


PhoneGap is a developer package by Nitobi Software that enables developers to create mobile web applications.







Learn more










Crunchbase

NITOBI SOFTWARE








Company:
NITOBI SOFTWARE


Website:
http://www.nitobi.com



Nitobi Software creates rich web applications and developer toolkits in Ajax and Javascript.







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Internet search startup Diffbot launched its API today for visually scanning, parsing and extracting information from web pages. Diffbot detects what type of layout a page has, then searches it for common visual cues to monitor when any content changes on a page, or to extract specific information for developers to use.

The Palo Alto-based company was founded in 2008 by two former Stanford students, CEO Mike Tung and CTO Leith Abdulla, with seed funding from Stanford incubator StartX. Tung originally created Diffbot to monitor the websites for his various Stanford classes and tip him off to any new announcements, posted lectures or assignments via text message.

According to Diffbot’s creators, all web pages fall into one of 30 different page-type categories. By pegging what category a page falls in to, it can extrapolate the various types of information on that page. For example, front pages of news sites typically have the same elements: headlines, images, tags, advertisements and article summaries.

“Diffbot understands visually what all of these different elements of the page are and can be used by developers to connect that content to direct action,” Tung told VentureBeat.

Currently Diffbot has hundreds of developers using the beta API, and some intriguing products have already been created using the tools. AOL’s free Editions iPad magazine app uses Diffbot to analyze the front pages of news sites and pull out important new or breaking information. Hacker News Radio tapped Diffbot to pull content from hacker news sites and turn them into spoken reports. The city of São Paulo in Brazil uses Diffbot to track changes on the local government website and turns them into an automated Twitter feed.

Diffbot’s Follow API creates an RSS-style feed of fresh content. The On-Demand API currently looks at just two major page types, Frontpage and Article, but Diffbot plans on releasing more in the future, and that’s when things could get interesting.

“Once we have released the API for all 30 page types, we hope to enable a new type of mobile application — one where the user can take actions directly on web data, instead of reading a bunch of blue links,” said Tung to VentureBeat. “Something like SIRI, but for the entire web, and not just a set of handpicked APIs.”

Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat

As we approach the fall, all the rumors of the Apple empire descend upon us. And this year may be the craziest yet because for the first time since the iPhone’s inception, Apple did not release new hardware in the summer. And there are still whispers of an iPad revamp as well. iOS 5 is coming. iCloud is coming. And then there are the iPods which are traditionally updated in the fall timeframe each year. Things are already getting crazy enough that potential Apple announcement dates are topping Techmeme one minute, and then stories debunking those dates are the top story in tech the next minute.

This will only get worse.

But there’s a reason people write up these rumors. Because people read these rumors. And the reason they do that is because sometimes those rumors are correct. And more often than that, they’re at least somewhat correct. That hope keeps peoples’ imaginations running wild. Now it’s time for me to indulge that.

One rumor that caught my eye this week was the talk of Apple looking into releasing an “iCloud Phone” alongside a new iPhone 5 this fall. This actually isn’t a new rumor so much as it’s a repurposed one. If you’ve heard talk about the “iPhone 4S”, this is the same potential device. It’s the “cheap iPhone” that TechCrunch and others have written about in the past. Given the smoke out there, it would seem that there’s something to this rumor. Even Apple’s executives have hinted at the possibility.

But the iCloud angle is a particularly interesting one. That doesn’t mean it’s entirely accurate necessarily, just interesting. First reported by Apple ‘N’ Apps, Trevor Sheridan writes:

It has come to our attention that Apple is planning to combine iOS 5 and iCloud with a piece of hardware internally referred to as the iCloud iPhone. The iCloud iPhone will rely heavily on Apple’s new cloud based offering, and less on internal storage.

He continues:

Apple is aiming for a $400 final price for the iCloud iPhone as compared to the typical $600 iPhone price, which the iPhone 5 will cost. The carrier subsidization will bring the cost to consumers down to free with a 2 year contract for the iCloud iPhone with the same $199 iPhone cost for the iPhone 5.

He cites three independent sources on the information, and notes that a modified iPhone 4 design is likely to be used for such a device.

Reducing the internal storage in the iPhone is certainly one way Apple could reduce the overall cost of the device. Plus, Apple has spent the past year and a half perfecting the manufacturing of the iPhone 4, so you can be sure costs in that regard have come down. On the face of it, this makes some sense.

But the larger question remains if the world is ready for a cloud-based smartphone? And there’s a side question: what if this cloud phone is a data-only device?

To the first question, with Apple rolling out iCloud this fall, the timing could be right. Apple hasn’t turned on things like music streaming from the cloud yet, but they easily could. They recently did this with an Apple TV update for television shows. If you have an always-connected device, this concept could work. Storage would be needed for apps and perhaps a little for offline usage, but overall, maybe Apple could get away with a device with just a few gigabytes or so of onboard storage.

The second question is different. After we reported on Apple’s work on a cheaper iPhone, a few people reached out wondering if the iPod touch could simply morph into this product? In other words, Apple could upgrade the iPod touch with an iPhone 4 body, including the 3G radio.

If that’s Apple’s thinking for this product, it may be the perfect opportunity to create a phone that doesn’t offer traditional phone service. As in, it would be data-only.

Now, the carriers probably would have a hard time with this concept. But if Apple sold it as more of an iPod touch with 3G capabilities, they may bite. The carriers are currently making no money off of the iPod touch, which is a hugely popular product. It remains WiFi-only. If they offered a $29-a-month data plan, or pay-as-you-go, it could be a really compelling new source of revenue.

And to consumers, Apple could tout it as more of a “lite” phone. It can do everything the iPhone can, except make phone calls. And really, thanks to apps like Skype, FaceTime, etc, it can do that too — maybe they just don’t play that up as much at first.

Without full $60 or $70-a-month plans for cellular minutes and data, the carriers probably wouldn’t subsidize the cost of such a device down to $0. But they might be able to get close if Apple was able to make the device cheaply enough. The low-end iPod touch is currently $229. But then again, contracts are one more headache for consumers, so maybe Apple would be more in favor of selling the device cheaply without a contract, and allowing consumers to pay for 3G service on the go, like they do with the 3G iPads.

The concept of a data-only phone has been around for a while. In November of 2009, we reported that Google was looking into possibly offering their own Android devices which would be data-only. This didn’t happen, obviously. Instead, Google not only fully hopped into bed with the carriers for their Nexus devices, they got really close for maximum snuggling and abandoned their broader Android dreams.

Whether or not Apple takes this path this year, it’s pretty clear that this is the future. Eventually, carriers will exist as data dealers. All information, including voice calls will happen over this pipe. Cellular phone service will just be an optional add-on if you’re in an area with a bad data connection. Apple could kick-start this movement in the coming months. Or they might not. But someone will.

[image: flickr/jesse kruger]







Crunchbase

APPLE








Company:
APPLE


Website:
http://www.apple.com


Launch Date:
1/4/1976


IPO:

1980, NASDAQ:AAPL



Started by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple has expanded from computers to consumer electronics over the last 30 years, officially changing their name from Apple Computer,...







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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

Using your phone as a remote for your DSLR isn’t exactly the newest idea out there — a ton exist for iOS — but Android historically hasn’t seen that same kind of love.

There have been attempts to make it work, some better than others, but a common theme among them is that you weren’t able to run the device directly into your camera. Rather, your DSLR gets plugged into your computer or a physical adapter, and thanks to a bit of software your phone takes control from there. A bit cumbersome, no?

A plucky developer on XDA named Chainfire changed that today. A beta version of his DSLR Controller app has just hit the Marketplace, and on top of supporting a direct connection to your camera, it also looks gorgeous. The only extras involved are a USB host cable (a.k.a an On-The-Go cable) and the willingness to fork over $8.51.

The app provides a live-view display that runs at around 15 fps, which is a little on the low side, but respectable considering what we’re working with. It also give the use full control over white balance, aperture, exposure compensation, ISO speed, metering, and a bevy of other things you’ll only really appreciate if you’re a photo buff.

Now, before you whip out your cameras and your credit cards, compatibility is a bit limited at this early stage. It only works with Android devices that have USB host capability (the dev recommends the Galaxy S II or a Honeycomb tablet) and Canon DSLRs. Again, it’s still in beta, so those of you who have the right arsenal in the first place may experience a few hiccups, but after a bit of polish (and more camera compatibility down the line), we could be looking at the app to beat.

Airy Labs, a startup building mobile, tablet and browser games with an educational twist for young children, has landed $1.5 million in seed funding from Google Ventures, Foundation Capital and Playdom founder Rick Thompson.

Airy Labs says it wants its social games to come with genuine learning value that parents will approve of.

The company is part of StartX (formerly known as SSE Labs), a Stanford student startup accelerator.

The startup was founded in 2011 by a genius by the name of Andrew Hsu.

Check out this guy’s resume:

Hsu who started molecular biology research at a University of Washington (UW) lab at age 10, won the grand prize at the Washington State Science and Engineering Fair at 11, matriculated at the UW at 12, and graduated with three bachelors of science degrees at the age of 16. At age 19, he was a 4th-year Ph.D. candidate in the Neuroscience Program at Stanford University when he left in early 2011 to pursue his startup dreams. He was recently named a Thiel 20-under-20 Fellow.

He is also the author of several books, and once a competitive swimmer.

South African mobile social networking platform Motribe launched about a year ago but already it has more than 1.5 million users. Founded by Nic Haralambous and Vincent Maher, the platform is like Ning for mobile and aims to empower brands to set up mobile web communities. In regions such as Africa, South East Asia and South America where the mobile web is a big part of how people interact with the Internet, sites like Motribe are bound to thrive. We caught up with the platform’s co-founders to learn more about the service’s relatively fast growth.

Interview with Nic Haralambous and Vincent Maher , Co-founders, Motribe

Nmachi: When did you start Motribe?

Nic: Motribe was started in August 2010 and we launched our platform six weeks later after many late nights of hard work.  Our fund-raising took six months before that and a large part of the process was relocating from Johannesburg to Cape Town, which is a city much better suited to the growing start-up culture in South Africa.  We are now exactly one year old and it has been an awesome 365 days.

Nmachi: Why did you start Motribe?

Vincent: The co-founders have worked together for the past five years at various different companies.  Before starting Motribe we were working on social networking and mobile advertising at Vodacom, the Vodafone-owned mobile operator in South Africa and learning all sorts of interesting lessons about how location-based services, social networking and advertising intersect.  During the end of our tenure there we launched a massively multi-player online location-based role-playing game called Legends of Echo.

During that period we started paying attention to how mobile social groups were starting to form around subcultures, niche topics and brands.  This is the idea that is at the core of our business and we saw an immediate social and commercial need for the ability to be able to form community around topics and make that accessible to mobile Internet users in such a way that it works as well for a user in rural Africa or India as it does for someone in Europe or North America.

Nmachi: You launched only about a year ago and have amassed more than 1.5 million users. How were you able to attract so many users in such a short period of time?

Vincent: There have been several factors at work here.  On the one hand our platform can be used by almost anyone who has a web browser on their mobile phone and so the market is much bigger for us globally than it would be for a company pushing an app for one or two device platforms.  We are firm believers that the mobile web is a bridge between developed and emerging markets. On the other hand we have seen some amazing communities launch and start driving growth.  As an example Guinness, working with the digital agency Praekelt, uses our platform to organise their Nigerian fans around the topic of English Premier League football.  The US Embassy in South Africa uses our platform to talk to people in Southern Africa about their projects.  Unilever uses our platform to launch and promote Rexona in Kenya.  Motribe also manages several of its own niche communities.

Nmachi: What do you think makes Motribe unique?

Nic: The quality of our execution has been really good so far.  The most common feedback we receive is about how good the user experience of our community platform is on a mobile phone.  This is partly because we are a mobile-first company and we come from a mobile-first continent so those issues are always top of mind.  Another aspect of our uniqueness is that because we manage our own communities all the time we are constantly enhancing the tools that we and our customers use.  Instead of looking at our roadmap from an abstract perspective it is driven by requirements from the trenches, from people actually managing groups of hundreds of thousands of users at a time across multiple timezones, languages, social status and gender.

Motribe also caters for the incredibly large feature phone market. Our features, functionality and user experience on the browser is great on a smart-phone or a feature phone.

Vincent: Something that we are constantly being reminded of is how central the idea of community is to the social fabric.  Many things rise up from community: happiness, self-worth, loyalty and efficiency.  People we not designed to solve all their problems in isolation.  So over time the digital strategies that work really well seem to be those that can create and maintain community in a way that gives back as much as it takes.  On the one hand a brand may gain customer loyalty and brand awareness and, at the same time, the end-user gets access to information and small items of social capital that was not previously available.

Nmachi: Are your users close to 100% South African? If not, what other countries in Africa or globally do your users come from?

Nic: Our biggest user-bases are in India, the USA, Nigeria and the UK.  We are also growing fast in the Philippines, Ghana and Kenya.  South Africa happens to be where the majority of our community owners are located because we spend a lot of time working with digital agencies and we are quite deeply embedded inside the South African digital industry.

Nmachi: What marketing strategies did you employ to attract users?

Vincent: The four primary ways our communities grow are search, social sharing, word of mouth and mobile advertising.  When we start new communities we inject a little life into them using search advertising (because our communities are very niche) and then they must support themselves thereafter.  Most of the time the community takes on the responsibility of both managing and growing itself.

Nmachi: What sort of revenue models have you explored and/or implemented to monetize the platform?

Nic: On the platform side of the business we have a licensing model for brands and we also manage their acquisition strategy including digital campaign management.  We monetise the communities we manage ourselves via advertising and we’re about to add a new layer that will be a big step forward for Motribe and open up a few more revenue streams.

Mobile allows us the ability to monetize in various ways and we’re taking advantage of as many them as make sense right now. We’re not in the business of raising money, we’re in the business of earning money.

Nmachi: Who are your funders/investors? How have they helped set Motribe on the path to growth?

Vincent: Our seed partners are 4DI Capital, a Cape Town-based fund that is one of the more progressive tech start-up funds in South Africa.  They have left us alone to run the business and this is exactly how we like it.  For us the best kind of investment partner is one who can help us with advice about business stuff and doesn’t try to get involved in strategy and operations.  They also took the initial leap of faith and invested in us with very little proof of concept.

Nmachi: What are some of the major challenges you have faced running the startup in the past year?

Vincent: Initially we thought that growth would be one of our biggest challenges, this hasn’t been the case. Reaching 1.5m users happened quickly so, looking back, it feels like that took care of itself, to some extent.

Keeping our core focus at the center of the business has definitely been a big challenge. We both have big ideas, constantly and if you’re not careful these can get in the way of what you are trying to achieve. So we’ve done particularly well to stay focused.

Now that our team is a little bigger the company culture has become a challenge. Trying to build the company that you’ve always wanted (and left a big corporate for) is not easy but absolutely necessary. No one wants to wake up five years into their startup and dislike the environment.

Nmachi: Where do you see the African mobile social networking space in the next few years? How do you think it will evolve and what do you think will be the key drivers of this evolution?

Nic: There is so much potential in Africa with the mobile Internet that the sheer growth is the future of social networking in Africa. There are masses of untapped, unreachable users who will soon get online, learn how to surf the web and become very hungry for solutions to their problems and new ways to communicate and express themselves.

We believe that the future lies in the mobile web and developments around the functionality of the mobile web, as opposed to apps. Africa is filled with dumb and feature phones that probably won’t go away any time soon but are able to browse the web and do the basics. We are already starting to see an increase in extremely cheap Android smart phones that can browse the web with a full and rich experience. If Microsoft was smart they’d build a competitive, low-cost smart-phone to take on Android’s growth in the emerging markets.

Nmachi: What are your growth plans for Motribe in the next few years?

Vincent: There are many phases of growth that a young start-up like Motribe will go through in the next few years. Our team will grow, our platform will become bigger, better and more feature-rich. The Motribe product offering will diversify and begin to solve more problems more simply for more users.  For us the key is to stay ahead of the innovation curve and keep using ourselves as the test-case.  By the time there is a mainstream need for certain tools we will already have sharpened them.

Nmachi: Any advice for aspiring entrepreneurs looking to launch successful web startups in Africa?

Nic: The best advice that we could give is to earn your stripes, learn how to fail and always back yourself. We knew in the beginning that an idea was worth nothing, the execution is where the value lies. One thing that we’ve managed to extremely well is remember the lessons we’ve learned from our past experiences, successes and failures and make sure that we don’t repeat the same mistakes.

[…]

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

Online document sharing site Scribd announced today that it is releasing Float, a mobile application that pulls content from news and content websites and lays it out in a homogenous reading format.

“The things online that you read aren’t just your PDFs or slide shows, [they include] news content and everything else — we want to bring those in with the content you publish and make it a consistent reading experience,” Matt Riley, Scribd’s director of products, told VentureBeat.

The app pulls important photos, the byline and text from stories produced by sites partnered with Scribd. It then displays it in a vertical reading format that embeds photos throughout the text. iPhone owners can then scroll down to continue reading a story, or swipe left or right to advance to the next part of the story as they would with an e-reader like the Nook or Kindle.

“You’ll find your favorite websites and put them on your main page, and we pull all the content in from the sites,” Riley said. “We try to provide a nice, clean reading experience for content on your phone — we strip out external links and strip out the ads.”

Readers can pinch to magnify the text or shrink it. Rather than zooming in on the text, which makes it a little less unsightly on the eyes, the app re-renders the text in a larger or smaller format. So it still looks crisp and propagates through to the rest of the article very quickly. The app aggressively caches content on the phone, and renders the rest of the story while the reader is on one part of the story, Riley said.

Another cool feature is the “night-time” reading feature, which changes the text to white on a black background and is easier to read in low-light environments without straining your eyes. Users can also bookmark content to a “reading list” similar to Instapaper — those articles are downloaded to the phone and users can read them offline.

Users can log in with an existing Scribd account or log in directly with Facebook. Users can also connect a Twitter account and see a “reading view” of their Twitter timelines. The app downloads the content from a connected link on a Twitter feed and displays it like other stories.

The whole experience feels very polished, save for split-second slowdowns when trying to zoom or shrink text. The app stuttered slightly when re-rendering text in a demonstration at Scribd’s headquarters on an iPhone 4 — which is currently the top-of-the-line smartphone that carries the app.

The app already syncs up to news content producers like Fortune, Time, Wired, The Associated Press and CNET. The company doesn’t plan on releasing a software developer kit to let individual sites add their content to the Float app. It will roll Float out to other sites over time, Riley said. Any content published on Scribd will also be available on the Float app.

“We’re starting off at launch with over 150 publishing partners who we’ve worked with proactively that are happy with putting their content in our [app],” Riley said. “We’re looking to the fall to add more premium partners.”

The application is available for free on the Apple App Store today. The company will release an iPad version fo the Float reader app next, and it will be available for Android devices later this year. Scribd is based in San Francisco, Calif. It has around 75 million users.

Filed under: mobile

Cloud storage provider Box.net is unveiling a new set of code libraries that will let app developers quickly embed company’s storage and collaboration tools in their apps, the company announced today.

“We have 40 developers building that back-end stack, and people want to be able to deploy that instantly into their applications,” said Aaron Levie, chief executive of Box.net. “Developers don’t want to have to manage the user management, the access controls and the storage — they want to be able to write on top of a layer.”

The company hired Chris Yeh (pictured right), who was the product head for Yahoo Groups, Delicious, Contacts and several other social programs at Yahoo! Before taking over the social programs, he was the head of developer relations for Yahoo. The company is doubling down on developer relations because it wants to be a provider of back-end storage software that any developer can add to an app, Levie said.

Box.net is also launching a developer contest that challenges mobile app developers to write an enterprise application that uses Box.net’s storage and collaboration tools. The winners will be announced at the company’s first conference, which will be held in September. Again, the company was trying to promote the idea of using Box.net as a back-end provider of storage tools that developers can use for their enterprise apps.

That seems like it’s the direction the company is headed. One of the company’s larger real estate clients built a customer relationship management (CRM) application from scratch using Box.net as the back-end storage and collaboration component, Levie said. Most companies opt to license CRM software from companies like Salesforce.com.

“The core focus of Box is really to be an open platform,” he said.

(Normally I’m against companies using the term “platform” when describing the company because it’s overused and misunderstood. But in this case it’s the right context.)

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. It raised $48 million in its most recent round of funding. Box.net is also expanding to a new office in the next several weeks.

As of January, the Box.net application was downloaded more than 250,000 times on the iPad. The company launched the Android application in the fourth quarter of 2010 and already has 70,000 downloads. Box.net is working with Samsung specifically to further develop its application on Android tablets like the Samsung Galaxy Tab.

Filed under: mobile

In a new report titled Mobilize Your Collaboration Strategy Forrester outlines its vision for the mobile enterprise, and it all revolves around native apps and cloud providers.

With the numbers of smartphones being brought to work (Forrester thinks as much 18% of the workforce is using their own smartphones for work, but Unisys and IDC indicate that number may be much higher) collaboration apps are more important than ever. Which collaboration apps matter most on a smartphone or tablet?

Sponsor

According to Forrester:

E-mail and calendars
Document-based collaboration
Web conferencing
Activity streams
Presence and chat
Social collaboration
Expertise location
Videoconferencing

It's good to see activity streams considered distinct from social collaboration. Companies like TIBCO and Qontext are taking activity streams beyond social.

But the really important thing is that each of these apps perform quickly and with low latency on a wireless network. The new model for working with collaboration apps will won't be the traditional client/server model, Forrester says. Instead it will be replaced a "mobile app Internet," illustrated below. Forrester defines the app Internet as "an application architecture of native apps on smart mobile devices linked to cloud-based services that provide a context-rich experience anytime, anywhere."

This might recall Wired's "The Web is Dead" meme from a few months ago, but it does seem that this is the model that's becoming prevalent for enterprise mobilitiy.

Forrester has recommended mobile browser-based applications for internally devloped apps in the past, but it's clearly bullish on native apps from outside vendors. Just last week we quoted RedMonk co-founder and analyst James Governor's observation that "From an architecture standpoint it makes little sense for enterprises to develop their own iPad apps - but when it comes to consuming them they're demanding native from vendors."

Forrester is saying essentially the same thing: the apps you depend on should be native apps, and the vendors you buy from should support multiple devices. The firm also claims that only cloud providers can deliver on low latency and multidevice support. "On-premises solutions typically can't handle the low latency, high availability, and any-device requirements of a mobile workforce," the report says.

So is this what the future of the enterprise looks like? It does seem to be what employees want: good, native apps that just work and work quickly. But is it what IT and other business decision makers want?

Discuss

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

Since its inception, StumbleUpon has always been one of the most perfect lean-back apps. Long before anyone even used that term, the StumbleUpon toolbar took various pages on the web and allowed you to quickly jump between them to find new things of interest. This concept seems perfect for a device like the iPad. Unfortunately the app just wasn’t very good. Until today.

StumbleUpon has just launched an entirely redesigned and rebuilt iPad app to finally bring the experience iPad users deserve. “I feel like stumbling is perfect for the iPad — for sitting on the couch. It never took off like we wanted,” founder Garrett Camp says, talking about the first iteration of their app for the iPad (which was built by a contractor). “We decided we were going to re-do it from the ground up. We re-did the interface. It’s much better than before. It’s almost like a black version of Flipboard,” he says.

And that’s a good comparison. Flipboard is often looked at as the pinnacle of media consumption design for the iPad sor far. But it’s mainly concerned with text. StumbleUpon’s app takes on both web pages and things like pictures, and videos, which have become vital parts of the stumbling experience — particularly on mobile devices.

Camp notes that mobile usage of StumbleUpon is soaring. On the iPhone and Android devices, the service is growing 35 percent month to month, he says (compared with 20 percent overall). Since the mobile apps launched last August, a full 10 percent of stumblers now visit that way, he notes. With this new iPad experience, Camp believes they can take tablet usage which is now hovering around 1 percent and at least triple it. Again, it’s a form factor that just seems natural for the service.

The iPad experience now has things like swipe-to-stumble, the ability to flick through content. And the app pre-loads content, meaning they look to see what you’re next stumble will be and they pre-load it so you can flick and see the new content instantly.

But the coolest addition in Camp’s view is the Social Bar. It’s a new gray bar that resides at the top of the app that shows the user who submitted the page you’re on and links to their profile. “Right now, you can’t easily access who liked the page. You might not know who it came from,” Camp says of the mobile apps. They’ve updated the iPad, iPhone, and Android apps to now all have this. “It’s a much more social kind of experience,” he says, noting that in the future, they’ll extend it to including friends’ comments and tweets, etc.

“I think we’ll now fit into other slots of people’s free time,” Camp says of the new iPad experience. “It’s just like the iPhone experience that people love, but it’s so much better on the big screen,” he says.

You can find the new StumbleUpon app for iPad in the App Store here.

In the quest for a unified database of places, geo-location startup Factual is making big strides. Today it is announcing a major partnership with SimpleGeo to maintain and power its places database, which up until now has offered a competing database of places in the eyes of developers.

The merged database will have 30 million places, and be maintained and updated by Factual. Developers will be able to access the database either through SimpleGeo or Factual. “It’s Factual’s dataset, our interface,” says SimpleGeo CEO Jay Adelson.

SimpleGeo instead will focus on its other geo-infrastructure services for developers, such as its geo-storage and geo-context services (which delivers relevant information about a particular place from weather to voting districts to neighborhood boundaries).

Other startups such as Fwix are also gravitating towards Factual as the repository of places data. But don’t expect an unified places database anytime soon. Bigger players like Google, Facebook, and Foursquare will continue to build out their own places databases.

But Factual, which is backed by more than $25 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Index, GRP, SV Angel and others has the resources to go up against the bigger players.

Adelson tells me why SimpleGeo decided to go with Factual. One reason is Factual’s machine learning capabilities which it applies to keeping the geo-data fresh and accurate, along with “the ability to merge data as it arrives.” But the other reason is “there is a degree of neutrality.” While he didn’t name names, it’s not too hard to guess who he thinks is not neutral. “There are other data sets that are proprietary, or geared towards a single use,” he says. These other partners insist that “you have to use our maps, our check-ins that drives my business. Factual is in a neutral position, accepting different data sources. We looked at these different data partners and how many data sources they can integrate. I think it is a longterm bet when I am betting on Factual.”

CrunchBase InformationSimpleGeoFactualInformation provided by CrunchBase

Personal databases are typically small database management systems designed to be used by only one person to organize information (see our guide to data terminology for more information on what databases are and how they work).

We've previously looked at project management and SharePoint apps for the iPad. Personal databases can provide similar functionality, but give individual professionals more control over how they organize and work with information. We'll look at apps for accessing larger scale databases in the future.

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Bento

FileMaker has a long history of providing database tools for Apple computers (and is now an Apple subsidiary), so it's only natural to look to the company for database tools for the iPad. FileMaker offers a couple tools itself, and there are third party tools for working with FileMaker databases as well.

Bento is "personal database" for both the Mac, the iPhone and the iPad. Unlike FileMaker Pro, Bento is designed to be even easier than FileMaker's flagship database product, and offers several templates for getting started. Templates include projects, contacts and files.

Bento for iPad costs $4.99, but you'll need to also own the desktop version if you want to backup/sync your data.

Database for iPad

Database for iPad is a free and simple database app that can sync with Google Docs spreadsheets. You can also share both templates and database contents with other Database for iPad users.

HanDBase

HanDBase is a relational database application that boasts over 2,000 templates, including inventory, auto mileage, survey, time/billing and CRM. One downside is that HDBase requires a wired sync in order to back up or import databases. Some users complain about the lack of integration with cloud services like Dropbox. On brighter note, HanDBase is available on a slew of platforms, including OSX, Android and BlackBerry, and PalmOS - so if you are looking for something that runs everywhere, this might be your ticket.

HanDBase costs $9.99.

Tap Forms HD

Tap Forms Database does have Dropbox integration, but it only has 25 templates. But how many different ones do you really need? Tap Forms also supports audio notes and attachments. There is no desktop version. Databases can be backed up as CSVs.

Tap Forms Database costs $8.99.

Which One is Best?

Which Personal Database for the iPad is Best?online surveys

Discuss

Cross-posted on the LatLong Blog.

Every day, many thousands of commuters, locals, and tourists ride public transit in Washington, D.C. To help all of these transit riders find their way around the metro area, today we’re making comprehensive information about D.C.’s public transportation available on Google Transit.

In partnership with the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), we’re adding all of D.C.’s Metro and bus stations, stops and routes, as well as connections to other transit systems in nearby cities. You can find this information on Google Maps as well as Google Maps for mobile—no matter where you are, you can get to where you’re going. With Google Transit, D.C. metro-area commuters—including those in Baltimore, Montgomery and Jefferson counties—may discover a quicker route to work, while visitors can easily make their way from Reagan National Airport straight to the Smithsonian.

Public transportation is a vital part of city infrastructure and can help alleviate congestion and reduce emissions. But planning your trip on public transit can be challenging, especially when there are multiple transit agencies and you need to use information from multiple sources to figure out the best route. With mapping tools like the transit feature, we’re working to make that easier.

Directions are also available on Google Maps for mobile—so if you’re graduating from GWU and want to meet some friends in Adams Morgan to celebrate, it’s as easy as pulling out your phone. If you’re using an Android device, for example, search for [Adams Morgan] in Google Maps, click on the Places result and select “Directions.” Switch to Transit in the upper-left corner and find out which bus gets you there fastest.

Wherever your journey takes you, whether using public transit, driving, biking or walking, we hope Google Transit directions in D.C. make finding your way a little easier.

Posted by Noam Ben Haim, Product Manager, Google Maps

Israeli innovation met American business know-how (and money) today at the Israel Mobile Showcase. Fifteen of Israel’s best and brightest new mobile startups had the chance to strut their stuff in front of an audience of American investors and tech industry leaders at the Microsoft Campus in Mountain View.

Sponsored by the California Israel Chamber of Commerce (CICC), the showcase was part of a three-day CICC blitz of the Silicon Valley. Participants were selected from a highly competitive pool of Israel’s estimated 3,000 startups (that’s a lot of tech companies for a country with fewer people that the state of Virginia).

Israel is fast emerging as of the world’s hottest tech markets. The country has more engineers and sees more scientific articles published per capita than any other country in the world (Israel has 135 engineers per 10,000 people; the US has 85). Experts speculate that the strong math and science education and mandatory military service, which puts young people in charge of highly specialized technology, are two contributing factors.

CICC Executive Director Shuly Galili says entrepreneurship is simply in the DNA of the Israeli people. She also cites another advantage: From day one, Israeli developers must think global. “They have absolutely no market at home,” she said. “The country is too small. So when they get started building a business, they are already thinking about how this product is going to work in the United States.”

Here is a sampling of the companies that stood out at the Thursday showcase.

fellowup: This is a service just about anyone who isn’t Dustin Hoffman in Rainman can use. The ultimate automated, personalized executive assistant service remembers all your names, dates and events so you don’t have to.  A web-extension memory service running through a private dashboard for PC and mobile, it automatically syncs personal connections in one place. But the secret sauce is the algorithm that filters through the noise of all your social networks to let you know who and what is important every day. The more you use it, the smarter it gets. The service notifies and suggests different ways to leverage connections, from congratulating a colleague when he publishes a new article to calling a client in China during the Chinese New Year. It also pulls relevant data from the web on any contact you’re looking for.

RingBow: This elicited one of the biggest rounds of applause from the crowd. Named one of Microsoft Israel’s most promising startups in 2010, Ringbow has created a universal “task ring” that links our fingers and our phones, adding mouse-button and other functionality but maintaining a touchscreen’s ease of use. Consumers can use the ring to play games, draw, and operate apps without ever touching the screen. While they are primarily targeting the gaming market, the company says it sees this product in use by everyone from kids to the business community. And they aren’t just going after tech geeks. The company is pitching a high-fashion line of rings as well as those branded to cartoon characters.

DudaMobile: Duda Mobile makes small- to medium-size business websites mobile. The platform allows businesses to enter their web addresses into the system and customize and publish mobile-friendly sites. Businesses choose a template and can then tweak the page, changing logo sizes, colors and photos and adding widgets such as click to call. The company says it has an existing network of 75,000 website and has deals with AT&T, webs.com and HP logworks. Still in beta, it plans to open a self-service model in July. The company didn’t release its pricing info but says hosting is somewhere along the lines of “a couple dollars a month.” The company has already secured Series A funding and is renting office space from 500 Startups.

Zooz: Everyone and their mother is trying to capitalize on the burgeoning mobile payments market, but few have figured out how to do it in a non-clunky, secure way. Zooz is an end-to-end software solution for point-of-sale mobile payments that incorporates mobile payments, customer loyalty , club memberships, coupons and loyalty points in one space. The company stores all data and payment details on a dedicated central server using a secret (patent pending) encryption technology it claims is hacker proof. The company is currently targeting POS system operators and already operates in retail and restaurant chains in Israel.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):
Mobile Q1: All Eyes on Tablets, T-Mobile and AT&TCleantech Financing Trends: 2010 and BeyondConnected Consumer Q1: The Over-the-Top vs. Pay TV Battle Heats Up

Love it or loath it, the smartphone app Color is one of the most innovative Web products to have launched this year. It has a user experience that is as unique and different as Twitter was 5 years ago. This has led to confusion about how to use Color and questions about its value. In this post we look at the early uses of Color and analyze its chances of emulating the success of Twitter.

Color launched last month in a whirl of hype, mostly due to the eye-opening $41 million prelaunch funding. But since then, the user experience has been the center of focus. Many people have complained that the app is difficult to understand - mainly because the benefits of the app are only clear once you use it amongst a crowd of people and in real-time. The user interface of the app has also been accused of being confusing and inconsistent.

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What is Color, Again?
Color enables you to share "photos, videos and conversations" with a group of people who are at the same location as you. The idea is that it's only useful when you're in the proximity of a group of people. That word, proximity, has since become a trending term among the tech set. Rather than being about your social connection to someone, Color is about how close you are to them. Is this the next wave of mobile apps? Color is hoping so.

Here's a quick intro:

Color Demo from Color Labs, Inc. on Vimeo.


The ideal use case for Color then, is for events with large groups of people - like a concert or conference. Color ostensibly allows you to share your experience with that group; as well as augment your experience by giving you alternate views and allow you to see things that you'd otherwise have missed. ReadWriteWeb's resident hacker, Tyler Gillies, recently used Color at a tech conference and noted that it allowed him to see slides from many different sessions.

Color Goes to the Movies
In mid-April, Color set out to showcase its new app at the premiere of a new Hollywood film called "Water for Elephants." At the event, 49 people took 788 photos using Color - according to the event's web page. In scanning those photos, they range from official and fan photos of the movie's stars as they walk down the the red carpet, to photos of fans as they wait for the action to start.

If the goal was "to bring the red carpet to fans who could not be in Manhattan," as HollywoodNews.com claimed, then that didn't work. While I personally believe that the world can never have enough photos of Reese Witherspoon, it's doubtful that 788 blurry photos of the red carpet was a compelling experience for people who didn't attend.

The real question is: what value did the people taking those photos get from Color, while the event was happening? I couldn't find any of that user feedback online and so I've asked Color for comment. In the meantime, I asked the ReadWriteWeb community via Twitter if they've used Color, and if so was it of value? Here's a sample of responses, collected via Storify:

[View the story "Color user experiences" on Storify]

Color's Future
I started out this post by comparing Color's user experience to Twitter 5 years ago, which baffled early adopters too. Indeed, Color co-founder Peter Pham recently told The Hollywood Reporter that Color is like a "visual Twitter."

See also:
Color CEO: The Tech Justifies the $41 Million
In the end, Color is a unique app and it isn't precisely like any other - even Twitter. While there were some initial problems with the functionality, I am optimistic about Color's future. As smartphones and other Internet-connected devices proliferate, it will be apps that augment our real world experiences that will prosper.

Once the early adopters get used to Color - and it will take time to figure out how and where Color works best, just as it did with Twitter - then I expect to see usage filter through to mainstream users at concerts, events, conferences and other large gatherings of people. Whoever is the next Lady Gaga in 5 years time, my bet is that her concerts will generate thousands of photos and videos from Color users.

In short, I believe that Color has a very good chance of becoming a large scale success like Twitter. Certainly it's funded to do so!

Do you agree? Let us know your thoughts on Color's future, or your usage of it now, in the comments.

Discuss

Many venture capitalists like to say they invest in people, not ideas. That seems particularly true in the case of Milk, Kevin Rose’s new mobile development firm, which just raised $1.5 million in angel funding.

Rose, of course, is famous for founding social news aggregator Digg, but he resigned earlier this year, after the company launched a controversial redesign and seemed to stagnate. He reemerged in April with Milk, which he said consists of a small team that will experiment with different app ideas, hopefully launching four-to-six ambitious apps in a year.

The funding was first reported in TechCrunch and confirmed on the San Francisco company’s Twitter account. Investors include Digg backers Mike Maples, Jr. (of Floodgate) and David Sze (of Greylock Partners), as well as Ron Conway, Dave Morin, Philip Rosedale, Ev Williams, Joshua Schachter, Ashton Kutcher, Philip Kaplan, Chris Sacca, Gary Vaynerchuk, Tony Hsieh, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, and others. (Yes, it’s a crazy list.)

The “development lab” model seems to be a nice career path for entrepreneurs who have launched one or two successful companies and now want to create cool new products without the headache of running a mature company. AdMob Omar Hamoui recently announced his own project, Churn Labs, which has backing from Sequoia Capital.

Tags: mobile apps, mobile development

Companies: Milk

People: Kevin Rose

Pixable, a New York City startup offering a new way to explore your friends’ photos, just announced that it has raised $3.6 million in a second round of funding.

The company has released several apps, but its focus seems to be on Photofeed, an app that launched earlier this year (Pixable launched the iPad version at the DEMO conference). Photofeed is supposed to help users explore photos that their friends have already posted on Facebook, using Pixable’s “WonderRank” technology to prioritize images that would be most personally interesting based on factors like Facebook Likes and what kind of photos users have liked in the past.

Pixable says Photofeed has now sorted 10 billion photos for its 500,000 users. It has plans to expand beyond the Web and iPad to iPhone and Android devices, and to add video browsing too.

The new round was led by Menlo Ventures with participation from Highland Capital. Pixable previously raised $2.5 million from Highland.

Tags: photo sharing, Photofeed

Companies: Highland Capital, Menlo Ventures, Pixable

Many geeks still mourn Microsoft's stillborn Courier project. For those that don't remember, the Courier was a small, dual screen, hinged tablet that Microsoft officially killed off in April 2010 before releasing. The hardware is dead, but ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley thinks some of the software might live on in Office 15. Some supposed leaked screenshots of Office 15 include a new app codenamed "Moorea," which Foley thinks looks similar to an application seen in leaked Courier videos.

Foley asks "If Moorea brings this interface to life, maybe Microsoft will position Moorea as a 'killer app' for the coming Windows 8 tablets/slates?"

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Here's a screenshot of Moorea, which is described as an application that lets you store multiple types of media in one place. It looks kind of like a multimedia OneNote with the Metro interface.

And here's a Courier video:

Others think it looks more like Microsoft Office Labs' Canvas for OneNote, seen here:

Personally, I think Moorea does look more like the Courier app than Canvas, but all three could be related. What do you think? It will be interesting to see how the product, assuming the screenshots aren't a hoax, is branded. Will it keep the OneNote name, or be a new product altogether?

Microsoft has stated that Windows 8 will be available for tablets. The Windows Phone and Windows 8 desktop operating systems are expected to converge into Windows 8. Matt Rosaf at Business Insider has some interesting thoughts on why Microsoft is pursuing this strategy instead of making a Windows Phone 7 tablet: a WP7 based tablet would likely cannibalize sales of Windows 7 licenses, and Office licenses by extension. "Ballmer would be crazy -- and possibly legally liable to shareholders -- if he approved any strategy that knowingly cannibalized those two businesses," Rosaf writes.

For more on expected features of Windows 8, see our coverage.

Discuss

Editor’s note: This discussion about the superphone app platform is one of the five themes we will be focusing on at the VentureBeat Mobile Summit, on April 25-26. We’ve carefully invited the top executives in mobile to discuss the biggest challenges of the day, which, if solved, can lead to much faster growth in the industry. And at our discussion about HTML5 versus native, we’ll have top executives around the table, including Facebook, Google, Verizon, Sencha, AT&T and more.

With Android and other devices eroding the once monolithic iOS mobile app market, many developers face the costly prospect of developing for multiple mobile platforms. This, in turn, has led to a resurgence of the web vs. native debate that VentureBeat editor-in-chief Matt Marshall clearly outlined in a post several days ago.

The debate is personal for me, since I created the open source mobile web application development framework SproutCore while on the MobileMe team at Apple, a framework that lets you build mobile web apps that have many of the benefits and none of the problems of platform-specific apps.

So I’m here today to say that the debate is over: The web will win, but it won’t be the web of 2005. The iPhone and other mobile devices have forever changed the way users perceive software. iPhone apps have a user interface you can touch. They use hardware acceleration. They work offline.

Traditional web apps do none of this – which is why you see so many developers gravitating towards native technologies today despite the fact that mobile web browsers are also some of the most powerful the world has ever seen.

The problem isn’t the browser; it’s the apps. Most web apps in existence today were designed for a PC era. They were built for a world of mice, high speed internet, and legacy web browsers (like IE6). Mobile devices are just the opposite; touch-based with powerful web browsers, but often used on slow and unreliable 3G.

This change in context is dramatic. Some things that were fast now seem slow. Other things that were impossible are now easy. Even newer web apps, built using techniques that were cutting edge three years ago today, feel old and obsolete when compared to what today’s technology makes possible.

We need to build a new web experience that embraces all the benefits of native without trying to copy it: touch and gesture-driven interface, lightning fast speed, integration with next-generation web browsers. And we need to improve upon the native experience and build in functionality that makes true multi-device deployment possible: persistent data store, automatic data synchronization across platforms, easy deployment to multiple devices, built-in discoverability and the ability to work off-line.

Today’s mobile app developers are faced with two bad choices: 1) They can either build native apps, which are increasingly expensive and hard to manage due to the proliferation of mobile platforms in the market. 2) They can use today’s web development approaches, which basically force them to try to mimic the native experience in a way that doesn’t deliver a positive consumer experience.

But, as I’ve said, there’s also SproutCore, the first web application development framework available today that lets you build web apps that deliver the user experience typically associated with native apps. At my new company – Strobe Inc. – we have a team of developers with a long history of building easy-to-use web platforms, like Ruby on Rails, who are now actively enhancing SproutCore to make it easier to use, more powerful, and available on more platforms.

We have a long way to go until the web sees its final victory. The next few years will be a wild ride for developers and users alike. SproutCore is a solid start on this vision and the best way available today to place your bet on the web to win.

Charles Jolley is a co-founder and CEO of Strobe, a software and cloud services company focused on the mobile web. He is also the creator of the SproutCore open source framework. Before founding Strobe, Charles was responsible for MobileMe application development at Apple.

Tags: mobile web, native apps, SproutCore

People: Charles Jolley

Startup incubator AngelPad presented its Winter 2011 class of companies to investors and the media today in its AngelPad Demo Day. Thirteen companies total, ranging from cloud computing startups to car insurance search engines, presented.

The most recent class was chosen from a pool of around 800 applicants. The last batch, AngelPad’s first class, was selected from the extended network of AngelPad’s founders.

Here’s a list of the companies that presented:

Astrid is a mobile to-do list and reminder application for phones running Google’s mobile operating system, Android. Users can rank the importance of each task, and the application automatically prioritizes them. The application has been downloaded 1.7 million times and has picked up 20,000 five-star ratings on the Android Marketplace.

Shopobot is an online site that tracks how prices of certain products change and alerts users when the price falls beneath a certain level. The site focuses on big-ticket items that consumers usually consider before making a purchase. Shopobot searches social networks for experts in the area a consumer is shopping in, picking up recommendations from friends rather than unknown experts. Its founders come from Microsoft and online retail site Amazon.com.

Hopscotch is a mobile app that uses QR codes — two-dimensional bar-codes that anyone can scan with a phone — and links to more related media. Hopscotch users can, for example, scan a QR code on a concert advertisement poster and find out which friends are going and listen to music videos. Businesses like Live Nation, which runs concerts, can attach QR codes to their ads and pick up information about the smartphone users who scan the codes.

Cloudbot is a neutral mobile application that grabs information from multiple cloud-based services like Dropbox, Facebook, Google Contacts and Salesforce. Users type in some keywords like “eat with” and a name and the application calls that information from linked cloud services and social networks. The application can also use location-based services like Foursquare. There are 24 apps connected to Cloudbot right now and 40,000 “nouns” — basically words that correspond to parts of cloud services like Dropbox files or tweets.

Kismet is a mobile dating application that uses real identities, photos and locations to match potential couples. The site focuses on using photos more than large amounts of text such as other dating sites like OKCupid. The app is built on Facebook Connect to validate an identity, but users can remain anonymous through the application until they are ready to reveal their identities. It uses Foursquare and other location-based services to keep track of a user’s activity.

Splash is a single line of code that adds a tab to mobile games that checks which friends are playing that same game. Mobile app users can also share achievements and ask for help within each game within that same tab. The application also gives information about Splash users back to developers that add the application to their mobile games. Michael Powers, a founder of Splash, was the first employee at Slide.

Crittercism is a library in mobile applications that detects errors and lets users submit a crash report for an application directly to developers. The application gives developers a more-detailed dashboard about which errors are most prevalent. The application also lets developers communicate directly with app users. There are 25 applications live in the app store with Crittercism, and the company is testing the application with a number of top-10 applications.

Stickery creates mobile educational games for children. The application combines a number of games with educational concepts and submits feedback to parents. The application became the top education app on the App Store after launching earlier this month.

LocBox is an iPad application that customers check into with a name and e-mail as soon as they enter a store. Customers that check in get a “deal” similar to those Groupon and Foursquare users typically get. Store owners are then able to acquire data about potential customers. LocBox is then able to push out additional deals through Facebook and other social networks to bring those same customers back again.

CompanyLine is an enterprise-style social network that lets employees communicate amongst themselves. Whenever they publish a status update, the application picks up on key words that launch external applications like WebEx or download files from a Dropbox account.

Feedgen is a simple web-based application that prioritizes marketing leads in an e-mail-like interface. Any lead that is missing any information automatically tries to grab missing information from other social networking sites. The more leads and activity a Feedgen user participates in, the smarter the application gets about prioritizing certain leads over others.

Coverhound is a web-based application that has consumers put in a little bit of simple information like name and email address. The application then uses third-party applications to gather a lot of information about the consumer’s credit history and income. Coverhound then ships that information off to insurance companies and pulls in insurance rate quotes.

Secondleap personalizes the process of changing careers. The site asks a few questions to determine whether the new career is a good fit for that individual. The application then recommends schools and gives examples of ways to finance the path to a new career. The recommendations are proximity-based and are organized by how expensive they are.

Tags: Demo Day, startups

Companies: AngelPad, Astrid, Cloudbot, CompanyLine, Coverhound, Crittercism, Feedgen, Hopscotch, Kismet, LocBox, Secondleap, Shopobot, Splash, Stickery

Increasingly, there are apps that let you leave messages, photos, and videos for friends in real places. Now you can leave money as well. Many startups are already adding rewards to check-ins, but social payments startup Venmo is tying check-ins to real money with a new iPhone app called Gifi that is launching today at TC Disrupt.

Venmo is a way to text real money to your friends and broadcast those payments on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Gifi is a mashup of Foursquare and Venmo. It lets you leave money for people in specific locations, which they can unlock with a Foursquare check-in.

Imagine that you check into your favorite coffee shop on Foursquare and moments later you get a text message informing you that a friend has left you $3 at that location, along with a personal message that he wants you to have a latte on him. Or you can leave the gift for more than one friend and whoever checks in first gets to keep the money.

The app, which should go live in the iPhone store today, is free to use, but requires existing Foursquare and Venmo accounts. When you leave a gift for someone, you can send them a clue to help them find it. They will get an email with the clue. When they check into the right place, a text message alerts them that they just got a gift. You can also skip the clue and just leave a gift somewhere you know someone always check into.

For friends, Gifi is just a fun way to brighten someone’s day. But businesses could use Gifi as a way to reward loyal customers with cash for checking in, or bigger brands could leave clues and money in strategic places. After all, cash is the ultimate reward.

As part of the launch, Gifi has hidden $2,500 around San Francisco. Look for it!

Here are the questions from judges Josh Felser, Joe Kraus, Todor Tashev, Robert Scoble, and Don Dodge (paraphrased):

Q: Can you do any non-montetary things?

A: Right now no, but sure why not?

Q: Are you a part of Venmo?

A: Yes, we wanted to showcase the data.

Q: Can I add anyone?

A: They have to be your friend on Foursquare.

Q: How do this scale?

A: Friends will help with virility, I think.

CrunchBase InformationGifiInformation provided by CrunchBase

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.

Related research on GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

Google’s Mobile Strategy: Understanding the Nexus One