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Posts Tagged ‘application’

AngelPad Opens Up Its Summer 2011 Applications

April 13th, 2011 04:46 admin View Comments

AngelPad, the incubator found by ex-Googlers in order to help a select 15 startups make it here or anywhere, has officially opened up its application process for its summer 2011 cohort.

AngelPad selects startups twice a year and is looking for its third round of contenders today, putting out it’s application tonight in order to find the best and the brightest. In case you’re debating about whether to apply to YCombinator, 500 Startups or AngelPad, founder Thomas Korte tell me that what makes Angelpad different from other accelerator programs is its size (small) and its emphasis on product and market.

When I asked Korte what AngelPad was looking for specifically in a company, he said, “Well, anything that will get covered on TechCrunch. [Writer's/Editor's note: Ha.] Our founders are a little older than the typical incubator crowd, with some experience. And we need a technical co-founder, if you can’t code it, you can’t start a company in Silicon Valley.”

In addition to office space, mentorship and vetting, current and future AngelPad companies will receive $20K funding in exchange for 6% of the company in common shares (which means a valuation of about $333k, which isn’t the point).

Prospective applicants must supply their basic info, a LinkedIn profile and two minute video in stage one.  In case you think this sounds like a piece of cake, 95% of applicants don’t get to stage two so try hard if you’re applying. If you are in the fortunate 5% that make it, you’ll need to provide a a long form application and real life interview after you pass.

Korke says that the actual value add of joining AngelPad extends beyond equity, “The 10 week program covers all aspects of a company launch – from idea to product, market fit, customer acquisition and fundraising. We also take care of the less glamorous things like incorporation, immigration visas or setting up books.”

Those interested can apply here.

Source: AngelPad Opens Up Its Summer 2011 Applications

Pandora App Sends Private Data To Advertisers

April 7th, 2011 04:50 admin View Comments

Privacy

Trailrunner7 writes “An analysis of the popular free mobile application from online music service Pandora.com that is the subject of a grand jury investigation into loose data privacy practices in the mobile application market confirms that the application silently sends reams of sensitive data to advertisers. The analysis was conducted by application security firm Veracode and found that Pandora’s free mobile application for Android phones tracked and submitted a range of data, including the user’s gender, geographic location and the unique ID of their phone, according to an entry on Veracode’s blog.”

Source: Pandora App Sends Private Data To Advertisers

TweetDeck’s Web App Coming to All Major Browsers

April 6th, 2011 04:02 admin View Comments

TweetDeck’s Web application, which made its Chrome Web Store debut back in December, has generally proved to be a worthy alternative to the TweetDeck AIR application for the desktop. However, up until today, the Web app only worked with Google’s Chrome Web browser.  Now, says the company, TweetDeck is coming to all the major browsers, including Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera.

According to a company blog post, the new beta of TweetDeck Web is a standalone website that requires no downloads or installations. Currently, it’s working on Chrome, Firefox 3.6, Firefox 4 and Safari. Support for Internet Explorer 9 and Opera is arriving soon.

Tweetdeck banner

We covered the TweetDeck Chrome application back in December and found a number of things to love about it, including its support for HTML5 and drag-and-drop columns, its integrated inbox and replies section and its Foursquare column showing your friends’ check-ins. Others clearly loved it, too – TweetDeck says the app is the most popular one in the Google Web Store.

However, we didn’t have access to pop-up notifications, TweetDeck groups or streaming support at launch, which made it a little less useful than the desktop version at the time. Today’s new cross-platform Web app still does not support streaming, the company notes. That means if you need speed, the desktop app is still your best bet.

For now, the beta is limited to a select number of users, but it will open up to more over time.

To get access, users can sign up to test the new site here: http://www.tweetdeck.com/webbeta. You’ll need to specify what Web browser and version you currently use, so be armed with that information when applying.

Source: TweetDeck’s Web App Coming to All Major Browsers

Miso Media’s Snazzy Guitar-Teaching iPad App Is Now Live

April 4th, 2011 04:30 admin View Comments


Back in September at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, a small company called Miso Media won the People’s Choice Award for a very impressive iPad application with a musical bent. The application, which is now called Plectrum, acts as a virtual guitar teacher by actually listening to the notes you’re playing, then advancing the music displayed on the screen accordingly. Disrupt attendees weren’t the only ones who were impressed: the startup later went on to close a $600K seed round led by Google Ventures.

But while it’s gotten plenty of buzz, the application itself hasn’t been available to users. Until now. Today, the company is announcing that Plectrum is live on the App Store. You can download it right here for $2.99.

Fire up the application and you’ll see a handful of lessons and classical songs, like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and some scales. Tap a lesson and it will present music as TAB (a basic music notation system familiar to guitar players). And unlike other tab viewers, Plectrum will listen and scroll along as you play each note (it’s pretty cool). It also has fingering suggestions for each note and chord, which is a nice touch. In addition to guitar, the app supports music for bass guitar, ukulele, banjo, and more.

I fired up my acoustic guitar to put the application to the test, and came back with some mixed results (though there’s plenty of promise). The audio detection works pretty well, with notes scrolling across the screen as I played, but every so often a note I played on my guitar would register more than once in the app, causing it to ‘skip’ to the next note. Or sometimes I’d have to adjust the threshold setting because the app wasn’t ‘hearing’ everything I played. And there’s definitely a learning curve to using this on songs that move at anything faster than a leisurely pace — though I’m sure I would have gotten used to it after a couple of hours.

There are a few more superficial quirks as well. When I downloaded Yesterday, by The Beatles, I found that the audio detection wasn’t working at all. Turns out the song is actually supposed to be played a step down, but the app didn’t go out of its way to point that out. I’m also not a big fan of the integrated Strobe tuner, which looks snazzy and is accurate, but will leave guitar novices scratching their heads. But, again, this is still early days for the app, and it’s off to a solid start.

Miso Media generates extra revenue by offering plenty of in-app purchases. First, you can buy licensed virtual guitars in the app, with instruments from the likes of Fender and Martin & Co. More important is the application’s lessons store, which lets you purchase tabs for premium songs, like Blackbird by The Beatles. These songs range from around 99 cents to $2.99 depending on the publisher and take a few seconds to download.

CEO Aviv Grill says that the app will be adding dozens — and later, hundreds — of premium songs to the lesson catalogue every week. To do this, they’ve adopted a user-submitted content model. Using Miso Media’s tab editor, you’ll be able to construct your own tab for popular songs, which you can then submit to the company. If your tab is deemed to be the ‘best’ of the submissions, they’ll start selling it through the app, and you’ll receive 5 cents per download (if the song has multiple instrument tracks, then each person who tabbed a track gets 5 cents). Each app will be screened for quality, and if someone submits a more accurate version than yours, Miso will swap in the better one (there will only be one version of each song available at a time).

Source: Miso Media’s Snazzy Guitar-Teaching iPad App Is Now Live

The iPad App That Went Too Far: Media Says Cease & Desist to Personalized Magazine Zite

March 31st, 2011 03:13 admin View Comments

Aggregation and curation are seductive arts – they feel like they’re within anyone’s reach, they seem limited only by imagination and discerning taste and they can create a magical experience for audiences. The web is filled with people who think they can create new aggregation services that people will love – and in many cases those people are right. Aggregation can be awesome.

Not everyone sees it that way, though – especially among the aggregated. Yesterday the popular but new iPad app Zite, which calls itself a Personalized Magazine, got a nasty Cease and Desist letter from 10 big media companies very unhappy with the way their original content was being aggregated. The companies said Zite is manipulating their content without their permission and stripping out the ads. Zite says it’s respecting what’s communicated in the code on pages it indexes and that it’s willing to change on request. The tone of the industry letter is so noxious that I was immediately sympathetic towards Zite, but looking at the details and talking to the CEO of competitor Flipboard makes me think maybe this trailblazing startup took things a little further than it should have. I don’t know, I’d like to know your opinion.

What Zite Does

When you download Zite to your iPad, you can let it learn about what topics you’re interested in from your Twitter, Google Reader or Delicious data. The app then creates a magazine-like interface for you to scroll through stories from a wide variety of sources online about those topics. You can give very specific feedback about what you like or don’t like and then you get more stories like that. It’s like Pandora for news articles. Not a lot of control but smart personalized learning. We reviewed the app in more detail yesterday and said that if you like Flipboard (Apple’s iPad App of the Year) then you should try Zite because it’s even easier to use.

Zite: Personalized Magazine for iPad from zite.com on Vimeo.

What the Lawyers Say

Yesterday Zite received a Cease and Desist letter signed by ten lawyers from big, big media companies: Time, The Washington Post, McClatchy, E.W. Scripps, Getty Images, National Geographic, Gannett, Dow Jones, Advanced Publications and the Associated Press.

Here are a few excerpts from that letter:

“By systematically reformatting, republishing and redistributing our original content on a mass commercial scale without our permission in your iPad application, Zite directly and adversely impacts our businesses. Your application takes the intelletual property of our companies, as well as the hard and sometimes dangerous work of tens of thousands of people. It depreives our websites of traffic and advertising revenue. We do not know your intentions, but your actions harm our companies and the broader media and news industry on which your application relies for its content…

“The Zite application is plainly unlawful. Among other things, it intentially and pervasively infringes on our copyrights by reformatting and republishing substantial portions (and in many cases, the entirety) of our articles and large-scale reproductions of our photographs and illustrations. Further, it misappropriates and infringes our trademarks and falsely implies our affiliateion by prominently featuring certain of our logos on your home screen. Zite uses our content for commercial purposes in a manner that the law prohibits absent agreemnts with each of us. We demand that you immediately cease and desist all such infringing use of our intellectual property, both copyright and trademark, in or in connection with the Zite iPad application.

We encourage and support the development of new technologies that facilitate innovative uses of our content – but those uses must be subject to our advance consent.

Emphasis on that last line was added by me – it so incredibly misses the point, I think. Technology innovations don’t ask permission of the incumbents first. If they did, they would never be born.

That’s my take on it, at least. Not everyone would agree with that, though.

What Flipboard Says

“Publishers are justifiably concerned with anyone showing entire articles minus ads,” Flipboard CEO and Twitter Board of Directors member Mike McCue told me last night via Twitter when I asked for his opinion about the Zite C&D. Flipboard looks from the outside a lot like Zite does and was named the iPad App of the Year by Apple last year.

“Better to partner with them and explore together. We’ve only displayed what publishers syndicate via RSS (including their ads, related links, etc). Sometimes full articles are used in RSS and sometimes it’s just 1 line of text. We always respect that…True you can’t partner with everyone. The best strategy is to ask ‘would a publisher be happy with how we are displaying their content?’”

Hopefully McCue is right and publishers are generally supportive of the way his company aggregates content. Flipboard is also much better funded and better known than Zite, a smaller company and easier target.

What Zite Says

What does Zite have to say for itself? For context, I asked the company if it respected partial vs. full RSS feeds. It turns out Zite doesn’t look at feeds at all. Ali Davar, CEO of Zite, offers the following:

We acquire our data via a web crawl rather than via RSS, so we do not currently take it into consideration. We already take steps to discern automatically what the publisher wishes in this regard (looking for a NO_ARCHIVE tag which indicates that they do not want search engines to serve up cached content), and we will look into using RSS as another potential clue in this regard.

First, some insight into how Zite works with content:

  • Zite’s content comes from a web crawl, the same way content is aggregated in the indexes of search engines like Google and Bing.
  • Zite displays articles in reading mode, which changes how the page is rendered. Though we understand this can alter the layout and potentially eliminate ads, we made this design decision in order to give users a better reading experience. Reading mode is already common, e.g. Safari’s Reader.
  • We respect the decision of publishers who either use the noarchive metatag or explicitly tell us they want their content displayed in web mode – in either case, we render articles without reformatting.

We don’t look at this as an adversarial situation. If the formal cease and desist we received from the big publishing companies yesterday was a one line email from the world’s smallest blogger, we would treat it exactly the same: we would switch the content from reading mode to web view mode. That’s it. This is not our legal position, it’s just our policy. Zite is eager to work with publishers in a way that benefits everyone – most importantly end users.

It’s good to know that Zite doesn’t look at this as an adversarial question, but the lawyers who sent the letters sure seem to. Is Zite’s approach fair? Will it satisfy publishers? Is it disingenuous for Zite to say what it is doing is comparable to search engines serving up cached content? Caches aren’t intended primarily as methods of consumption – but Zite’s copies are.

Are publishers shooting the future in the foot by objecting? Maybe they should applaud any technology that helps them grow their audience, that people love to use to read their content, even if some percentage of them don’t see the ads.

What do you think, readers?

Source: The iPad App That Went Too Far: Media Says Cease & Desist to Personalized Magazine Zite

Will the Scoble Effect Be Enough to Make Convofy Competitive?

March 21st, 2011 03:30 admin View Comments

convofy_logo_0311.pngYammer and Salesforce Chatter are gonna have some significant new competition starting Monday,” Robert Scoble tweeted over the weekend. It turns out he was talking about Convofy, a new product from the Adobe and LMKR funded startup Scryb.

In response to Scoble, Spigit VP of Product Hutch Carpenter tweeted: “Given incumbents, better have some 9x secret sauce or be a big vendor.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Well, Scrybe isn’t a big vendor. So does it have some secret sauce?

Convofy certainly has a different approach to enterprise collaboration. It’s focused on integration with other applications. Up to now there have been two approaches to integration: aggregate or embed.

Aggregators, like tibbr for example, act as a universal inbox sucking in information from other applications and letting users have conversations about it all in one place. Another approach to this is the app store model that Qontext, Socialcast and Simplybox embed a conversation stream directly into an existing application.

The problem with aggregators is that it requires users to start to learn and start using another application, either as a replacement for existing apps or more often as an extra destination during the work day. It creates a new destination, which requires new habits.

The problem with embedding is that it can leave conversations scattered across several applications and may not fit nicely into one place. The scatter problem is usually solved by having a central site in addition to embeds, but that can cause the same problem that aggregators do.

Convofy combines both approaches. It has a browser built-in that employees will use to open any Web application, whether that’s an on premise CRM application or something like Google Maps. They can then use Convofy to discuss any item from those Web apps, such as a prospective customer, a purchase order, a Google Docs spreadsheet, a place in Google Maps or a blog post. Users can highlight a part of the item and have conversations attached to that specific area. The most comparable product I’ve seen is SimplyBox’s overlay.

Scrybe CEO and co-founder Faizan Buzdar is quick to point out that Convofy is not a replacement for a browser, but a supplementary tool for using work-related apps. You can find out more about it works by watching this demo video:

Scoble did a longer, more in-depth walk-through:

Convofy has a new approach – is it going to be enough? Buzdar says his team has worked long and hard on the product, making sure that it is unique and competitive. “I promise it won’t be like anything you’ve seen,” says Buzdar. But that might not mean anything if the company can’t get decision makers to try the product.

The endorsement from Robert Scoble may help with that. The problem, as Mathew Ingram wrote for Gigaom, is that the so-called “Scoble effect” can be a double-edged sword. And as Scoble himself has written, he can’t make a product that people don’t want into a successful product.

Time will tell whether Convofy’s approach is better than existing approaches. But it’s an innovative approach to enterprise collaboration, and it’s worth paying attention to. And it helps us remember that the changes facing enterprise collaboration aren’t over yet.

Source: Will the Scoble Effect Be Enough to Make Convofy Competitive?

Amazon’s Android App Store Launching Tomorrow (Report)

March 21st, 2011 03:30 admin View Comments

Amazon appsAmazon may be launching its Android App Store tomorrow, according to a new report, just in time to kick off this week’s CTIA Wireless 2011 conference in Orlando, Florida. An unnamed “trusted source” told Wired that the store will launch Tuesday, March 22. Customers will be able to purchase apps both online via the Amazon website and through a native application designed for Android devices.

Thanks to a post on the Amazon AppStore Developer blog, we already know that the store’s launch will come with at least one major exclusive: the latest in Rovio’s Angry Birds lineup, Angry Birds Rio, will launch first in the Amazon App Store before being distributed to other online outlets.

No Linking to Official Market, Says Amazon

In Wired’s report, the tipster told the news outlet that the apps sold in the Amazon store cannot link out to the official Android Market when promoting other downloads using links within a given application. Those links have to point to Amazon’s market instead.

A February blog post from Amazon explained to developers how they should configure apps to launch links like those using the Amazon Appstore mobile application. After downloading a third-party app using the Appstore client, users can return to the original app that had offered the link and continue using it, the post explained.

Amazon appstore dl

The post also noted that apps can be purchased via Amazon’s 1-click feature, whether the apps are free or paid.

Sneak Peek at the Amazon Appstore

Last week, the Amazon Appstore was accidentally revealed when a curious Android fan decided to check out the website address www.amazon.com/apps to see if anything was there. Much to his surprise, the website was up and running, with a horizontal slider that let him browse through 48 different mobile applications and see their prices.

Amazon apps 2

The poster took screenshots, of course, and then later compared the prices between the Amazon store and Google’s Android Market. In many cases, the apps were less expensive on Amazon’s site, he found. There were also several exclusive titles listed. (See the comparison chart here).

Why Amazon’s Store is Notable: Curation and Pricing

Amazon’s app store is an interesting development for the mobile application industry for several reasons, only one of which is because it hints at a future Android-based tablet from the online retailer. (An Android Kindle, perhaps?)

More importantly, the store represents the first attempt by a major retailer to offer a “curated” selection of Android applications for sale. That means the apps that stock Amazon’s virtual shelves will be reviewed and tested. According to Amazon’s rules, the apps must work properly and be safe, both in terms of consumer data privacy and the impact to the mobile device itself. In other words, it’s a selection of mobile applications that won’t slow your phone to a crawl or drain your battery. You can also stop worrying about whether or not an app is safe to use when it’s downloaded from Amazon, as all will be screened for malware.

In light of the recent malware outbreak on Google’s official market, which saw over 50 applications infected with a malware program called “DroidDream,” the need for increased security measures was highlighted. The worst part of that story was how a developer whose app was ripped off by the malware creator had contacted Google though all the official channels a week prior to the news breaking, and Google had taken no action.

App pricing screen

Amazon’s app store will also introduce a new pricing model for Android developers, which will be an interesting experiment. Instead of offering app developers the standard 70/30 split, developers will tell Amazon what they want to list the application for. Amazon, however, will set the pricing as it sees fit. Developers will then receive 70% of the revenue earned, unless Amazon deeply discounts or gives the app away for free. In that case, the developer will see 20% of the original “list” price.

This is a big departure from how competing application stores, including iTunes, sell apps. Traditionally, the app prices have always been set by the retailer. But Amazon knows how to list items to move. When it comes to setting pricing, Amazon’s experience may end up helping developers sell more apps than they would have otherwise.

Source: Amazon’s Android App Store Launching Tomorrow (Report)

With A New Name In Tow, MyPad’s ‘Facebook For iPad’ App Hits 3 Million Downloads

March 18th, 2011 03:43 admin View Comments


Back in January I wrote about an iPad application called Facepad, which drew heavy inspiration from Twitter’s iPad application to create a similar ‘swipable’ experience for Facebook that lets you jump between open pages by swiping left and right (it’s pretty slick). The application has hit a couple of speed bumps — Facebook asked it to change its name, so it’s now called MyPad — but it’s still drawing plenty of users, many of whom are spending a lot of time in the app every day. You can download MyPad on the App Store right here.

Cofounder Cole Ratias says that the application has now surpassed 3 million downloads since it launched in January, and that on average users are spending nearly 3.5 million minutes inside the application per day. They’re also uploading around 4,000 photos each day through the app.

MyPad makes money by placing ads in its free version and selling a premium version with no ads (the paid app is currently 99 cents). But it has bigger ambitions than just getting a lot of page views — it’s looking to take advantage the eyeballs drawn to its Facebook features to launch a gaming platform that’s integrated into the application, but doesn’t live on Facebook. Ratias says that the service will also be offering tools to developers that let them tie their games into MyPad’s platform, which we’ll be hearing about in the next few months. In the mean time the company is closing a “large seed round” and will be expanding beyond its team of three.

MyPad’s success — and that of its biggest competitor, Friendly — is made possible by the fact that Facebook doesn’t offer a native iPad application of its own, even though the hugely successful device has been out for nearly a year now. This is likely because Facebook is already having to grapple with keeping numerous native applications up to date (like Android, iPhone/iPod Touch, and Palm OS) — adding a bunch of tablet operating systems to the mix is only going to make things more difficult to keep the apps at feature parity. Instead, we’re probably going to see a tablet-optimized HTML5 site at some point.

For the time being, many iPad users are turning to apps like MyPad and Friendly. But these aren’t perfect — at their core they’re reskinned versions of Facebook’s touch.facebook.com mobile site, which leads to some quirks (Facebook Chat is unreliable, for one). Ratias says that in addition to the gaming-related features detailed above, MyPad is still planning to rebuild some of Facebook’s core features, like a new photo viewer and chat client that should have better stability.

Source: With A New Name In Tow, MyPad’s ‘Facebook For iPad’ App Hits 3 Million Downloads

Gtk 3.2 Will Let You Run Applications In a Browser

March 17th, 2011 03:28 admin View Comments

GNOME

An anonymous reader submits this intriguing tidbit: Gtk+ 3.2 will let you run any application in a browser thanks to the new HTML5 gdk backend. That means you’ll be able to run GIMP, Gedit, a video editor or whatever, remotely (or on the same computer), using a web browser. Just imagine the possibilities!” At this point, says the article, it’s only possible with Firefox 4.

Source: Gtk 3.2 Will Let You Run Applications In a Browser

San Francisco Pledges Support For Life-Saving ‘Fire Department’ Mobile App

March 16th, 2011 03:15 admin View Comments

Back in January I wrote about an ambitious new mobile application that has a very good chance of saving lives (perhaps even many lives). And it’s just gotten support from the City of San Francisco, which is the first major city to pledge support for this very important service.

The application itself is called Fire Department. Download it, and you’ll be asked if you’re trained in CPR. Click ‘Yes’, and the application will then passively monitor your location (without draining your phone’s battery). Here’s where the life-saving comes in: if someone calls 911 to report a possible heart attack victim, 911 dispatchers can send an alert to anyone in the vicinity with CPR training who has this app on their phone. They’ll immediately receive a push notification with the location of the victim, as well as the locations of any nearby automatic external defibrillators (AEDs). The whole process only takes a matter of seconds. Minutes are absolutely critical in these situations, and the immediate initiation of CPR before an ambulance arrives can be life saving.

But there’s still a lot of work to be done. At this point the service is only available in the San Ramon Valley Fire Protection District where the initiative got its start (Lucas Hirst, who has helped spearhead the effort, is a friend of mine from high school). San Francisco is now on board, and is asking volunteers to help build a map of AEDs (which frequently go unused in emergencies because people simply don’t know they’re there). San Francisco hopes to have the technology working by the end of the year. The city’s website for the initiative is right here.

The news was announced at an event today by SF Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White and City Attorney Dennis Herrera, along with Fire Fighters Union Local 798. Now if only they’d fix the startup tax situation.

Source: San Francisco Pledges Support For Life-Saving ‘Fire Department’ Mobile App