This past spring, the team at Path realized it was time for a change. The San Francisco-based startup had debuted its flagship photo sharing app (accompanied with a serious amount of media buzz and some mixed reviews) in November 2010, and had spent the first several months post-launch working to perfect the original product.

“Six months ago we stopped. We just said, ‘Okay, what are people really using Path to do?’” Path co-founder and CEO Dave Morin said in an interview this week. The company surveyed Path users and found that many were using the app to remember moments in their daily lives — it wasn’t just about sharing photos, it was about cataloging personal memories for themselves. “Ultimately we realized that we had to completely re-imagine Path.”

Path 2, the new version of Path that is launching Tuesday for both iPhone and Android, is what’s emerged from that redesign effort. But to think of this as the 2.0 version of Path would be a big mistake: Path 2 is a dramatically different product than the app the company launched one year ago.

A diary for a mobile and social world
Path 2 aims to be a “smart journal” that catalogs all the big and small moments of your daily life. Along with your photos and videos, the new app has features that let you keep track of your thoughts, the music you’re listening to, where you are, who you’re with, and even when you wake and when you sleep. You can choose to keep each update entirely to yourself, share it with your Path contacts (limited to 150 based on Dunbar’s number), or share it publicly via Facebook, Twitter, or Foursquare (Tumblr support is on the way.)

Path 2 screenshot (click to enlarge)

Morin took me through an in-depth demo of Path 2, and for me it had the perfect combination that I look for in the increasingly crowded world of mobile apps: It was both beautiful and actually useful. Lots of people — myself included — maintain personal blogs or use social media sites partly for the same reason that they would maintain a diary: To personally remember what they’ve done. Every New Years’, I vow that I will be better about tracking the little things that make up my days by keeping a journal, but I typically start slacking off on it a couple months in. With Path 2, it could be a lot easier to keep my resolution: It’s on my mobile phone which makes it easy, and the social options make it more fun.

More complexity, more competition
With this redesign, Path is going more squarely into competition with services such as Evernote and even Facebook, the platform on which it was conceived as a much simpler photo-sharing app one year ago. When asked about this, Morin stressed that Path is different from Facebook on several counts: “We’re private by default and always will be, while Facebook is often public by defualt. We’re a tech company, Facebook is a media company. We’re a freemium business, and Facebook is advertising driven.” He was more accepting of an Evernote comparison, but pointed out that many people use Evernote primarily to keep track of their business lives. “What Evernote does for work, we do for life.”

Path 2 music post (click to enlarge)

This move also brings up questions for Path that weren’t there when it was a simple photo sharing app. When you position your service to be something as personal as a diary, users have the right to be a bit more demanding than they would with a more standard social app. For example: Path 2 still does not have a one-button export feature for all your content, although Morin says this is on the way. Right now, the only way to get all your data from the system is by sending an email request to customer service.

Also, the ability to view and analyze your Path data from other perspectives — say by zooming out to see an annual timeline, or a month view — is not yet available. These types of features could be made possible if Path releases an API, which Morin says is a definite possibility for the future.

But will it have staying power?
The question of money is an important one here. Many web startups don’t start thinking seriously about revenue in the first couple years of business, but if you’re going to use an app as your personal journal, you want to have confidence that it will stay around for a while. Evernote, for example, is a profitable business: The company charges $45 per year for its premium app and the company’s CEO Phil Libin has been forthright about his mission to make Evernote a going concern for the next 100 years.

Path, which has 20 employees, is not at a point where it can cover its own costs. Path 2 is a totally free app and Morin says he has no plans to start running ads. The business model is a “freemium” one, but for now the only premium products Path sells are small: Additional photo filter options and the like. Path has other premium offerings in the pipeline, Morin tells me, and the good news is the company won’t have to worry about keeping the lights on for a while: It has taken on some $11 million in funding since its inception.

All in all, Path 2 is a great looking app and it stands a chance to become a big hit in the months ahead. But if it wants people to really be serious about committing to the new app, Path could do well to outline its financial plans a bit more firmly for prospective users.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Hipmunk's mascot with an Android spin

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

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

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

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

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

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

           

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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

Salesforce.com GM of Platforms (and former Heroku CEO) Byron Sebastian

Last week, Facebook and Heroku announced a partnership through which Facebook developers could easily launch applications on Heroku’s cloud Platform-as a Service via the Facebook development portal. That appears to have been a smart partnership for Heroku, which reports it saw more than 33,800 Facebook applications launched on its service since the social network giant unveiled new features at yesterday’s f8 conference.

On the official Heroku blog, Adam Seligman notes “that’s more than 20 [applications] a minute. Facebook has again innovated and captured the excitement of the developer community.”

However, in the comments to both Heroku’s post and on Hacker News, there’s some debate over whether these are “fake apps” launched to get access to the new Timeline feature. It’s difficult to tell, especially because developers don’t need to launch on Heroku to access those features, some commenters claim.

Assuming at least a good portion are actual applications, though, such a large number is also a ringing endorsement for PaaS, in general, which increasingly appears to ideal for developers wanting to build and launch lightweight applications. For individual developers, PaaS is a way to host an application without getting caught up in systems management or other low-level concerns. Enterprise developers get the same benefits, even if they only utilize right now for non-mission-critical Facebook or mobile applications.

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Astrid Inc. is best known for making a popular web and mobile app that allows users to create to-do lists with social features. But the San Francisco-based startup, which this week announced an undisclosed amount of new funding from Google Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners, has much bigger plans in mind.

“We didn’t raise the money we did simply to be a to-do list company,” Astrid co-founder Jon Paris told me in an interview this week. He was short on specifics, but it seems that Astrid may be keen to expand its services beyond task scheduling — and into helping with task completion.

To date, Astrid has focused purely on helping people make to-do lists — albeit in a very unique way. Astrid’s mobile app allows users to make to-do lists and share them with certain individuals or groups of people. Astrid lists can also be made entirely public, or completely private. Astrid is currently available in the Android app marketplace; an iOS version is in beta testing now and will launch to the public later this month.

Astrid for Android has been downloaded more than 1.5 million times in the past year alone, and it currently has more than 250,000 active users monthly. The reason for Astrid’s popularity is two-fold, Paris tells me: The simple user interface attracts the multitasking-mom contingent, but the app has power features under the hood that satisfy power using “life hacker” types.

Meanwhile, Astrid’s social features add fun to the often staid practice of task management, Paris says. “When my buddies see that I haven’t biked to work in a week, they like to give me a hard time about that,” he said, adding that sharing goals also makes people more motivated to get them done. The CEO said he likes to joke that Astrid is a “cure for the lazy husband and nagging spouse” cliche, since it allows couples to check in and remind each other of things that need to be done in a quicker, less direct way.

But now Astrid has a bigger picture in mind. Paris told me the company plans to put its new funding toward building offerings beyond its signature to-do list app. “We’re trying to discover how to give more help to people to help them be more productive,” Paris said. “I think there are a lot of really interesting ways we can help people get important things done.” Given that one of Astrid’s new investors is Jack Herrick, who co-founded the crowdsourced how-to website WikiHow, does this mean the company could start providing the capability to outsource the completion of certain tasks on their to-do lists to other people — or even robotic services? The question elicited a smile from Paris, but he made a point of holding specific plans close to the chest: “We’re happy to have the domain expertise that every one of our investors bring,” he said.

The task completion space is certainly heating up at the moment: TaskRabbit, an online marketplace where people can pay others to run their errands, recently raised $5 million in funding and is actively working on a nationwide expansion; and new startup Fancy Hands promises to provide virtual personal assistants at affordable prices. Astrid already has the list-making process down pat; it may be smart for the company to get further into helping people cross things off their to-do lists, as well.

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Social note-taking startup Evernote is adding yet another app to its mobile arsenal. The startup has released Evernote for Android Tablets, a free application available on the Android Market.
Evernote for Android Tablets offers the same note-taking functionality — such as audio recording and social note-sharing — of its other applications, but does so with a new-to-Evernote interface that emphasizes visual note browsing.
With the new interface, notes appear on the home screen in a Snippet View. Android tablet app users can then use the left-hand side bar to tab through the notebooks, tags and shared notebooks view options.
The startup is also enabling application users to create and edit rich text notes. The much-requested feature is now available to all Android users — not just tablet owners — who will see a a new bar with text editing and formatting options above the keyboard.
There’s even a second, larger Evernote Android widget now accessible from the home screen. “In addition to letting you jump to core Evernote features, you now see snippets of your recently-accessed notes. This means you no longer need to launch Evernote in order to find a recent note, just tap on the note in the widget,” Evernote’s VP of marketing Andrew Sinkov says.
Evernote for Android Tablets looks to be a slick re-skin of the Evernote experience. The fresh interface design represents the direction the startup will take with all future tablet app releases.
Home Screen
Search
Single Note View
New Note
Rich Text Note
Map View
New Android Widget
More About: android, android tablets, evernote, startup
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Android has always had some apps that iOS didn’t, such as keyboard replacement software like Swype and SwiftKey. While Apple still holds a strong lead in apps, there is an increasing number of cutting-edge, innovative apps initially launching on Android before they go to iOS. It’s part of a larger build-up for Android Market, which is on pace to have more apps than Apple’s App Store later this year. But it highlights the unique appeal of the Android platform, which doesn’t make as much money for developers but is finding more interest from creative programmers, especially as hardware sales heat up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):
Bringing an Android App Store to Market: Who Should Compete — and HowMobile Q1: All Eyes on Tablets, T-Mobile and AT&TA Media Tablet Forecast, 2011 – 2015

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

On my last visit to New York, I stopped at apparel maker Bruno Cucinelli’s store in the West Village. In a city of opulent, luxury-brand outlets, this tiny outpost was perhaps one of the most ideal and idyllic shopping experiences. I go there again and again. There is little or no clutter, a limited set of apparel options and more importantly, everything is laid out for maximum impact.

You enter the store, walk down an aisle looking at the clothes hanging on your right (men’s wear), reach the end of the store, turn around, check out the middle aisle, and take in what’s on display. The whole process takes a few minutes. Once you’re done with the walk-through, you zero in on one or more items on display, and engage with the sales person. If nothing catches your fancy, you move on.

It doesn’t take much time, and more importantly, it involves fewer decisions on my part, making shopping less of a chore.

That Cucinelli store is a great metaphor for what I think is a good mobile app experience. Why? Because the store had little or no friction when it comes to the shopping process. Similarly, in order to be successful and stand out among the growing number of mobile apps demanding our attention, the mobile apps have to have little friction.

There are few ways an app can work toward a better experience. It all starts with overcoming three major constraints with today’s mobile and smartphone experience:

Network speeds, despite all the talk from carriers are limited and thus not conducive to heavy download activity.
Limited screen real estate, which puts premium on every pixel.
Finite number of mobile gestures (that don’t involve using the keyboard.)

Faster Is Better
The same demand that makes smartphones an exciting opportunity also turns into a liability. It doesn’t matter what device you use; even the best of 3G networks has bandwidth challenges. And while at some point in the future, the faster wireless broadband technologies are going to solve the problems, today as an app developer, you have to keep the challenges of network speeds in mind.

What you have to do is build apps that are fast. By that, I mean not only does the app load fast, but also has a lightweight experience. It’s optimized less around cool features and more around the speed with which you can use an app’s core value proposition.

Kevin Systrom, co-founder of Instagram, recently told me one of the crucial product decisions his start-up made was optimizing around speed. Knowing upload speeds on wireless networks were bad, they decided to limit photo size to small enough for a quick upload, yet looked gorgeous on the smartphone screen. The speed, he contended, would make for happier customers, who in turn would use the app more. And they were right.

Other app companies are finding out that faster execution is key to higher engagement. Foursquare Co-founder Dennis Crowley, speaking at a recent event, said the company was building a lighter version of the app for faster check-ins and to reduce the check-in time from 20 seconds to five seconds.

The easier and faster it is to check-in, the more likely one is to use Foursquare. This isn’t a radically new notion; Google has used the speed with which it can serve up search results as a lure for getting people to use its search more often. Since the search results show up blazingly fast, one is likely to search again, even if the first try doesn’t yield results.

Size Matters
A couple of months back, I wrote about what makes a hit (consumer) Internet service. Of the three reasons I listed, “clear purpose” and “simple to use” were ones that make perfect sense for mobile apps, given the limitations of screen size and touch-screen gestures. A good example of an app with clear purpose and simplicity? Instapaper: the save-and-read-later app.

That simplicity and clear purpose begins from the very second someone opens the app after downloading. Signing up for your app/service should be done within seconds, not minutes. One of the reasons why I loved Beluga was that it probably had one of the simplest sign-up processes. Not many questions asked — enter an email, get a username and password, and you’re ready to go.

Better yet, use Facebook Connect, which removes any friction that there is in terms of sign-ups. There is a big risk of you being logged out of all these apps if your account gets hacked, like mine was a couple of months ago. But app developers are embracing the Facebook Connect, and are well aware of such risks.

Daniel Raffel, co-founder of a yet-to-be-named stealth mode company, described Facebook Connect as the “K-Y Jelly of the mobile web.” By now, most, if not all, people have Facebook accounts, so by entering their username and password, the hassle of signing up a service and remembering another password is also eliminated.

This is crucial. Too much typing on a smartphone can be arduous and time-consuming, no matter how deft you are. The less time spent between download and using the service, the faster customers can start to experience your offering. Remember, there are no second chances in today’s app-infested world.

A few days back, I wrote about why apps (and other products) have to start building the idea of “happiness” into their offerings. Speed, simple and easy sign-ups, and single focus on core values only add to that “happiness.” Those three qualities are the reason why I keep going back to that Cucinelli store. On my last trip, I almost bought a cardigan — but they didn’t have it in my size.

Bloom Studio, which was founded by three stewards of data science and visualization, is working on a suite of iOS applications that present social media and streaming data in playful visualizations with personal context.
Bloom, which refers to its applications as “instruments,” is now pushing its first iOS release, Planetary, through the Apple App Store approval process, just as co-founders Ben Cerveny, Tom Carden and Jesper Andersen are closing the company’s seed round of funding.
Planetary turns music data into a solar system-inspired visualization experience. In the app, music is sourced is from the user’s iPod library and reconstructed so artists are seen as stars, albums as planets and tracks as moons. The user can fly between entities to build playlists.
“It’s about seeing your collection in a new way,” says Cerveny, who shares that the application will understand the relationships between songs, genres and artists. Future versions of Planetary will incorporate streaming music services — think Rdio or Spotify — and work the user’s social graph into the galaxy to allow for new music discovery.
Planetary is just one of many little instruments that Bloom is working on. The startup aims to present the user with new ways of understanding, interacting with and acting on data visualizations for many social data streams. They’re all playful and game-like visual search applications, says Cerveny. He hints that a visualization around Netflix is in the works and that the startup will eventually bring these instruments of discovery to the living room.
To finance its endeavors, Bloom has closed a seed round of funding led by Betaworks with participation from Ron Conway’s SV Angel and individual investors. Cerveny says the financing will provide the four-person, San Francisco-based team with enough funds to operate through the year. Bloom is actively considering a follow-on addition to the seed round.
Those anxious for a sneak peek at Bloom’s idea of fluid playful discovery can take a look at demo applications Fizz and Cartagram, which offer up visualizations for Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, scorpion26
More About: betaworks, Bloom, data visualizations, iOS, Seed funding, sv angel
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