posted 44 mins ago

Hotspot Shield Crosses 10M Installations On Android And iOS, Showing Strong Appetite For Mobile VPN

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Virtual private networking is a great way to accomplish a number of things, including making sure that your secrets stay your own, protecting against malware attacks, and getting around the geoblocking of audio and video content from networks, labels and basically anyone who wants to restrict your sweet, sweet access. It’s understandable, then, that as computing increasingly goes mobile, VPN would… → Read More

posted 1 hour ago

After Getting Booted From Apple’s App Store, Mobile Privacy App Clueful Returns On Android

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Clueful, the mobile privacy app Apple booted from its App Store for being too revealing — or possibly because of its own behavior – is staging a comeback. This time around, Clueful’s maker Bitdefender is targeting Android users instead, with plans to reveal what the apps on your phone are doing, and how your privacy may be compromised in the process. → Read More

posted 2 hours ago

Personal Profile Page Startup About.me Is Ready To Take Your Money With New Premium Service, Plans For Wefollow Integration

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About.me, the online identity platform that spun out from Aol* at the beginning of the year before acquiring the one-time Digg spinout Wefollow, is now lifting the curtains on its plans to generate revenue, with today’s debut of About.me Premium. Via this new, paid tier to the service, the company is adding some of the more advanced features users have requested, including domain mapping… → Read More

posted 4 hours ago

Burstly Debuts Its Testing-To-Revenue Restructure, Opens SkyRocket Monetization To All

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Burstly’s grand vision coming out of its TestFlight acquisition is getting full reveal today with the announcement of the company’s new corporate structure, which rebrands Burstly’s monetization tools as SkyRocket, and opens them up to all mobile developers and publishers with a new self-serve option, whereas previously they’d been accessible only to the biggest fish in the app ecosystem pond. → Read More

posted 6 hours ago

With A Media-Rich Platform To Stand Out From The Messaging Pack, MessageMe Hits 5M Users In 2.5 Months [Interview]

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Last week we reported that MessageMe, one of the latest messaging apps to hit the smartphone market, had picked up a $10 million Series A round of funding, and today, the company is officially confirming the news, along with some more details on how it’s been doing in the 2.5 months since it launched. It now has 5 million users across both iOS and Android — a five-fold increase on the 1 million… → Read More

posted 9 hours ago

Opera’s WebKit-Based Android Browser Exits Beta To Battle Apps For Users’ Attention

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Browser maker Opera’s first WebKit browser has exited beta. The full launch for the browser previously code-named Ice adds a few additional minor updates to the meaty feature-set demoed at the Mobile World Congress tradeshow back in February. The Android browser represents a huge shift for Opera as it moves away from its own Presto framework to the de facto standard WebKit engine, plus Chromium. → Read More

posted yesterday

Google+ Gets A Refresh For Android To Mirror Its 41 Update Extravaganza From I/O, Adds New Location Section

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Today, Google updated its Google+ app for Android to get up to speed with all of the changes announced during last week’s I/O Developers conference. In all, there were 41 new updates, including a new stream, photos experience and Hangouts.

The Android version has all of that, and one new feature — a new location section. → Read More

posted yesterday

Jolla’s Software Chief Says Co-Creation Is What Makes The MeeGo Startup’s Phone Hardware So Special

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Jolla has finally taken the wraps off the smartphone hardware that will be paired with its “unlike” Sailfish UI. Being a startup is challenging enough in any business sector but Jolla is seeking to compete in the fiercely competitive smartphone space against Samsung and Apple. So it’s hard not to dismiss their efforts as too late. But it’s a lot harder to accuse them of doing too little. → Read More

posted yesterday

Sprint Acquires KC-Based Handmark For Its Mobile App Development And Advertising Shop, OneLouder

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Sprint has decided to get deeper into the social and mobile space, announcing today that it has acquired Handmark and its subsidiary OneLouder. The acquisition is meant to beef up its Pinsight Media+ advertising group, specifically. Through Handmark, OneLouder has built social apps like Twitter clients Tweetcaster and Slices, and Friendcaster, a Facebook client. The acquisition price hasn’t… → Read More

posted yesterday

Sensopia Raises $1.2 Million Series A For “Magical” Floor Plan Capturing Application, MagicPlan

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Sensopia, a company which actually uncovered a practical application for augmented reality, has raised a $1.2 million Series A round for its floor plan capturing application called “MagicPlan.” The app allows users to hold up their phone and then scan the dimensions of the room around them in order to create an instant floor plan that can be exported to various formats, including DXF… → Read More

posted yesterday

Headcast, A Mobile Broadcast Platform For Celebrities’ & Brands’ Avatars To Talk To Fans, Launches On iOS, Backed By Stephen Fry

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There’s no shortage of channels for brands and celebrities to stay in touch with their customers, followers and fans in these socially connected times. Today’s addition to the mix is the launch of broadcasting and animation platform Headcast, which lets brands and celebrities record and push out short voice messages to their audience — accompanied by an animated, virtual avatar. → Read More

May 19th, 2013

Android’s Design Principles And The Calculus Of The Human Pleasure Response

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Android UX and interaction design leads Helena Roeber and Rachel Garb gave a talk at Google I/O this year about the Android Design Principles (ADP) they helped create and introduced back in 2012 with the launch of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. The ADP foll three simple principles, essentially “enchat, simplify and amaze,” but there’s much more to those principles that that relatively slippery… → Read More

May 18th, 2013

How Hike, India’s Fast Growing Mobile Messaging App, Is Banking On SMS & Local Diversity To Beat The Big Boys

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It’s still practically a newborn but Indian mobile messaging app Hike is already channelling almost a billion messages a month between its 5m registered users. Those numbers sound insignificant when you stack them up against the big beasts of the messaging space – WhatsApp claims 200m+ monthly active users, and 600bn messages – but Hike’s growth is impressive when you consider it’s 4… → Read More

May 17th, 2013

Google Play In-App Purchase Revenue Growth Jumps 7X In One Year, Subscription Revenue Growing 2X Each Quarter

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Google held a session today at I/O 2013 about how to make money on Android, and in the initial few minutes it shared some updated stats around Google Play revenues and how those are progressing. Not surprisingly, the big growth is coming with in-app purchases, though Google’s recently launched subscription model is also making headway. → Read More

May 17th, 2013

Social Trip Planning App Tripshare Converts Travel Inspiration To Bookings

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Tripshare, an iPad application for travel planning, is joining a crowded space. But its CEO knows a little something about the industry – Bob Dana was the former employee No. 1 and first CFO of Virgin America. He once wrote the business plan and feasibility study for Sir Richard Branson in 2003. And now he’s doing a travel startup. Dana tells us the inspiration for Tripshare was based… → Read More

May 17th, 2013

Vevo Dostępne Po Polsku

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Vevo, popularny serwis muzycznych teledysków, ogłosił oficjalną dostępność w Polsce. Usługa, wcześniej niedostępna w tym regionie geograficznym, będzie zawierać video-clipy najpopularniejszych polskich gwiazd jak Brodka, Pezet, a może i nawet David Hasselhoff. → Read More

May 16th, 2013

Life-Tracking App Expereal Is Your Personal Weapon Against Cognitive Biases

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Emotions play tricks on our memories, making our recollections of events much happier or heart-wrenching than they actually were. Smartphone app Expereal seeks to cut through those cognitive traps by allowing you to rate your day on a 10-point scale and organizing that data into easy-to-read charts. → Read More

May 16th, 2013

MessageMe Raises A $10M Series A Led By Greylock As It Gears Up For Money And Premium Services In Its Rich Messaging App

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MessageMe — a messaging app that launched in March with a little Facebook controversy thrown in — has raised another $10 million, according to an SEC filing earlier today. The Series A round was led by Greylock Partners; and as part of it, John Lilly, the ex-CEO of Mozilla who is now a partner at Greylock, will be joining the board of LittleInc Labs, makers of MessageMe. → Read More

May 16th, 2013

PSA: The Original Karateka Is Now Available For iOS And Android

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I remember waking up 6am, going downstairs, and firing up my Atari 800XL. The disk labeled Karateka inserted, the drive would grunt a few dozen times and the screen would flash. Suddenly, with barely any warning, the opening titles would appear and then the music would start – six notes to signal a game that was menacing in its simplicity. The story was simply told. Characters stood in darkened… → Read More

May 16th, 2013

eBay Updates iOS Apps With Revamped UI, Drivers License Scanning For Sign-Ups, And A Whole Lot More

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eBay has just updated its mobile app with a whole host of new features and a revamped look. To start, the refreshed UI makes it clear that eBay wants a more heavy-duty offering for its mobile users. You can now enjoy larger photo views, a better system for auctions that are about to end, and the added feature of being able to checkout multiple items at the same time.

But all that’s just fluff… → Read More

May 15th, 2013

With Google Play For Education, Google Looks To Challenge Apple’s Dominance In The Classroom

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Google I/O, the company’s sixth annual developer conference, got officially underway in San Francisco on Wednesday, and it was an eventful day. It took the company every minute of its epic three-hour keynote to unfurl a laundry list of announcements and updates, seemingly across every product category in its arsenal — from Android, Chrome and Search to Maps, Google+ and Hangouts — each with a… → Read More

May 15th, 2013

The App Store’s 50B Downloads Vs. Google Play’s 48B: Android Closes The Gap

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Apple had a bit of a head start when it came to mobile software sales, since it launched its App Store earlier than the Android Market (which would later become what we call Google Play today). But the gap was more pronounced in terms of downloads when they kicked off, but lately the gap has been closing, and today both Play and the App Store announced very close milestones. → Read More

May 15th, 2013

Twitter Archiving Service TweetBackup Hits The Deadpool As Owner Backupify Focuses More On Enterprise

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Time for a back-up plan for your Twitter back-up plan. Backupify — the Cambridge, MA cloud-based backup, search and restore provider for online services — is shutting down TweetBackup, a company originally founded in Sweden that Backupify acquired in 2010 for an undisclosed amount. Tweetbackup has posted a note about the closure on its site, as well as — yes — on its Twitter account, noting… → Read More

May 15th, 2013

Google Unites Gmail And G+ Chat Into “Hangouts” Cross-Platform Text And Group Video Messaging App

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Today at I/O, Google rebranded “Hangouts” as a new unified, cross-platform messaging system. It lets people text, photo, and group video message across Hangouts’ Android and iOS apps, plus its Gmail and Google+ site integrations. Hangouts rolls out today, replacing Google Talk [GChat] and G+ Messenger. While it doesn’t support SMS yet, it could challenge Facebook Messaging and Apple’s iMessage. → Read More

May 15th, 2013

Mobile Payments Startup ZooZ Debuts In-Ad Payments (Yes, “Ad” Not “App”)

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Fresh off its $2 million in Series A funding, in-app mobile payments platform ZooZ is announcing a new product today: in-ad payments. Yes, that’s right, “ad” not “app.” The big idea here is to streamline the checkout process for consumers by addressing some of the challenges with e-commerce on mobile’s small screen, and now connecting that process to mobile… → Read More

May 14th, 2013

Cydia Substrate Comes To Android (Cydia Store Next?)

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Cydia, a platform commonly thought of as the alternative app store for jailbroken iPhones and iPads, has just today arrived on Android of all places. Though Android is by its nature more open and customizable than Apple’s locked-down iOS, it now has a growing collection of apps designed for power users who root their devices – a process that’s similar in spirit to the iOS jailbreak. Cydia for… → Read More

May 14th, 2013

Nokia’s Smart Devices Chief On Instagram, Android, Phablets & The Continued Lack Of A 41MP PureView Lumia

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Nokia has added another device to its burgeoning Lumia portfolio of smartphones today, with the introduction of the Lumia 925: a sleek, PureView-branded handset that will be its first flagship on T-Mobile U.S. At today’s London launch, Nokia executive VP of smart devices, Jo Harlow, sat down with TechCrunch to field a few questions. → Read More

May 14th, 2013

App Maker Kidaptive Debuts “Parent’s Pad,” A New Way To Track A Child’s Educational Development On iPad

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Parents of preschoolers can finally let go of “iPad guilt” – the term that refers to that terrible feeling you get when you use the iPad as babysitter. Today, a company called Kidaptive is launching one of the most comprehensive feedback systems for parents to date, allowing them to get a hand of their child’s learning and development by simply handing over the iPad and letting their child play. → Read More

May 14th, 2013

Realmac To Enter The Mobile Photo Fray With Analog For iPhone, Explains Why We Need Yet Another App

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Realmac Software is showing off its latest app today, ahead of a launch to come later in the month. The app is called Analog, and is an iPhone version of its desktop quick and easy photo manipulation software. I’ve been beta testing the software, and the experience it provides is in keeping with Realmac’s other recent mobile releases, like the super simple to-do app Clear it created in… → Read More

May 14th, 2013

Finnish Startup Rightware Closes $5.2M Series B To Drive Global Growth Of Its Embedded UI Creation Tool Business

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Rightware, a Finnish startup that sells embedded user interface software and performance benchmarking tools to car makers and consumer electronics companies needing to build graphical user interfaces has announced it has closed a $5.2 million Series B round. Investors in the round include Inventure and Nexit Ventures, along with new investor Finnish Industry Investment. → Read More