HipLogic Launches *Spark, A Social Home Screen For Smartphones

Mobile application platform HipLogic is launching a new platform today at DEMO, called Spark. While many of HipLogic’s applications are designed to jazz up non-smartphone devices, *Spark aims to give smartphones the ultimate home screen experience. The free app is launching to Android and Nokia phones today.

The platform combines all a user’s essential social information – news, sports, weather, and social media profiles—on one home screen so everything they care about is front and center and updates in real time.

Once downloaded, *Spark’s home screen interface will allows you to update your status across multiple social networks (Twitter and Facebook); view and share news, sports and entertainment headlines; view the current weather conditions and view your Twitter stream. Via with partnerships with media companies like Astrology.com, CBS, Disney, ET and Sky, HipLogic plans to provide additional premium content.

As HipLogic CEO Mark Anderson says, “*Spark is like the love child between the iPhone’s intuitive interface and the powerful, personalized, multi-tasking engine of Android.” Essentially, HipLogic aims to save Android users from having to switch to a weather app, or a Twitter app, or a news app; Spark simply allows you to access this information from your home screen.

Founded by three veterans from Sun Microsystems, HipLogic brings sophisticated applications to the simplest cell phones by keeping all the complexity in the network. In essence, HipLogic is trying to bring the quick, easy interface of a BlackBerry to more simple, lightweight phones that are available for the mass market. Consumers can toggle between the original mobile operating system and an always-on smartphone-like interface for instant access to a collection of apps. *Spark is actually leveraging this technology to power its all-inclusive app.

Behind the curtains, HipLogic’s application platform features a lightweight, JavaScript virtual machine connected to the cloud and aggregates info from network operators and the web to create mash-ups on mobile devices. Formerly known has Numobiq, HipLogic has raised a total of $18.5 million in funding.