The Wall Street Journal reported this morning that Apple is currently ordering larger screens for the next iPhone. With the usual nonsense, the WSJ cited people familiar with the matter and stated these screens measure at least 4-inches diagonally. Production is set to begin next month, they say.
The Journal better be right, though. A 3.5-inch screen is just too small now. At this point to say anything to the contrary is pure fanboi nonsense. The standard argument that consumers don’t want a large phone is tired and overused. Besides, it’s effectively proven wrong by the 20 million Galaxy S II phones sold by Samsung last year. It’s time for a larger iPhone. → Read More
It’s hard to underestimate how important ranking in Apple’s top 25 in the iTunes store is for mobile app developers. After all, the top 25 is what one of the most important app discovery mechanisms for iOS users. But how many downloads does it take to make it into the top 25? Mobile analytics firm Distimo today published some interesting data that answer just this question. Turns out, in the U.S. store, the answer currently is about 38,400 daily downloads for free apps and 3530 for paid apps. To rank in the top 25 per category, of course, takes significantly fewer downloads, with games unsurprisingly being the most competitive category. It takes 25,300 daily downloads to rank in the gaming top 25 for free apps and 2280 downloads for paid apps. → Read More
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Verizon Wireless has been working on bringing shared data plans to market for months now, but it turns out not everyone will enjoy making that transition.
Verizon CFO Fran Shammo said at an investor conference earlier today that users on those wonderful old grandfathered unlimited data plans will soon have to give them up if they want to move into a 4G device. → Read More
Path co-founder and CEO Dave Morin is joining the board of the event ticketing startup Eventbrite, the company is announcing today. The news of the appointment follows what has been, so far, quite a busy year for the startup, which has now sold 60 million tickets, and is expanding globally with websites in eight different languages.
Morin, whose background includes time as the former head of the Facebook Platform and several years at Apple, will bring his knowledge of social to the ticketing company, says Eventbrite. → Read More
Mobile payments and identity verification company Jumio is introducing its Netswipe Mobile SDK today, which allows developers to add credit card scanning functionality to their mobile applications. The SDK (software development kit), is available now for iOS, but an Android version is coming soon, the company says.
To jump start usage, Jumio is also waiving transaction fees for the SDK’s first users for a temporary period of time. → Read More
The Galaxy S III is likely the most anticipated Android phone in existence. At least, today it is.
Samsung is the king of Android hardware, the Galaxy S II is its most successful phone to date, and a third iteration is only expected to follow in its predecessor’s footsteps.
Plus, we weren’t even comforted by the usual pre-announcement leakapalooza — Samsung reportedly kept early units locked in test boxes, which only made that glorious moment of unveiling all the more wonderful.
But we’re still waiting and wondering about a potential U.S. release date for what is sure to be Samsung’s most popular phone yet, meaning that getting a peek of the device in the wild is near to impossible until “later this summer”. But as is the case with almost any phone, someone has gotten their hands on a unit of the S III and set up the good ol’ handy cam for our viewing pleasure. → Read More
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Is the Twitter platform about to get a second wind of dedicated apps?
In the last few weeks, I’ve seen a handful of products that are starting out by filtering out the most relevant news stories, videos and photos from people’s personal streams. Thirst is one of them and it’s coming out with an iPad app today. The company is backed by nearly $1 million from investors including BlueRun Ventures, former Powerset chief operating officer Steve Newcomb and DCM general partner Jason Krikorian. It was started by two recent Berkeley graduates, Anuj Verma and Kunal Modi. → Read More
Here’s hoping that you already managed to get your hands on an HTC One X, because it may be a while before they appear on store shelves again.
According to a release put out by HTC last night, U.S. Customs has blocked shipments of AT&T’s HTC One X and Sprint’s Evo 4G LTE thanks to an ITC ruling handed down last year.
The news may come as an especially large bummer for Sprint customers looking to upgrade to the new EVO, as a new report from the Wall Street Journal indicates that device will miss its original May 18 launch date. Sprint has since scrubbed their website of references to the device’s forthcoming launch, and there’s still no word on a revised launch window. → Read More
The iPhone might be coming to the world’s largest mobile carrier, China Mobile. The world comes from Bloomberg quoting China Mobile’s chairman. The report also details that the phone might not hit the carrier’s 655 million subscribers yet this year. But the two sides are talking. That’s a start. Apple needs China Mobile and China Mobile needs Apple. → Read More
With smartphone penetration now at 50 percent in the U.S., the world of apps is seeing a knock-on effect in their popularity: according to a new report from Nielsen, mobile consumers are downloading more apps than ever before, with the average number of apps owned by a smartphone user now at 41 — a rise of 28 percent on the 32 apps owned on average last year.
But at the same time, there are hints of people possibly approaching a limit to how much they might use them: despite the rise in app numbers, the amount of time that people are spending in apps has remained essentially flat: collectively, they are being used for 39 minutes per day today, compared to 37 minutes in 2011.
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We’ve been covering Gogobot since it first launched in early 2010. It took the social travel discovery and advice site a little while to find its niche, but since about the middle of 2011, it’s been adding new members rapidly. Today, Gogobot is announcing that it has now surpassed the 1 million registered user mark. According to the company’s own data, a new member is signing up for service every 15 seconds. Overall, Gogobot now has 65 times as many members as just a year ago and its users have now shared over 5 million places on the service. → Read More
Fotopedia is quickly building a reputation for producing beautiful travel-focused photo apps for iOS. Today, the company is launching its latest free app, which focuses on Morocco. The app is optimized for the new iPad’s Retina Display and, as usual, features hundreds of stunning professional images. → Read More
It’s almost here. The big day. Can you feel the excitement? Yes, if all goes according to plan on Friday, Mark Zuckerberg will ring the NASDAQ bell in a hoodie, the big blue social network will go forward with one of the largest IPOs for an Internet company in history, the markets will hit a fever pitch, the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse will update their statuses — and the rest of us will just go back to using Twitter.
Nonetheless, Facebook is expected to go public at a valuation between $92 and $103 billion. As such, it’s pretty clear what Facebook is worth to us (really, to the market), but the real question is: How much are you worth to Facebook? Hmm? → Read More
Sign of a maturing marketing flattening out, a lack of compelling devices, or a contraction in the economy? Gartner today released figures that note that worldwide sales of mobile phones were actually down by two percent this quarter, to reach a total of 419.1 million units — the first time the market has declined since the second quarter of 2009, the analysts say.
Gartner’s explanation is a slowdown in demand from Asia-Pacific, because of a lack of compelling new devices getting launched in the period: users are simply holding out until something better comes along. Nevertheless, of the vendors that are doing well, Samsung is riding at the top of the list, with 20.7 percent of all mobile sales globally, and among smartphones, it is the only Android vendor to have more than 10 percent market share — with Android now accounting for 56 percent of all smartphone sales in the quarter.
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With Square yet to reveal when or where it might offer its mobile payment service in Europe, and PayPal apparently still only talking with would-be partners, the door is wide open for more local players to jump in and pick up some market share. Sweden’s iZettle, which often gets compared to Square, is now doing just that: today it is launching its iOS, dongle-based mobile payment service to the UK, four months after its pan-nordic live launch, and as it is preparing to launch an Android version of its product later this year.
iZettle kicking off its service by giving away 3,000 card readers to small businesses and sole traders in the country as part of its invitation-only beta, which it is running in cooperation with MasterCard, American Express and Diners Club. In its still brief life, it has seen some decent traction in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland, where it now has 50,000 active merchants on its network.
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Cloud-based telephony API startup Twilio has made significant inroads into VoIP and other carrier services like SMS by launching products that work on the web and in iOS apps, supporting 30,000 developers in the process. Today it’s widening that net considerably with the launch of a new Android client, the first SDK from the company to work on Google’s platform. And it hints that Windows Phone may be next in line.
Considering that Android is currently the most popular smartphone platform globally, this potentially gives Twilio a much bigger opportunity to deliver services to the wider smartphone market — with Android and iOS together accounting for 75 percent of the existing smartphone market, according to Gartner.
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Ask a VC is back this month (finally!) after a long hiatus. This week we have a freshly-minted VC, Nabeel Hyatt, of Spark Capital. Hyatt just joined Spark after 15 years of starting and building companies. His most recent company was social gaming outfit Conduit, which became Zynga Boston after it was acquired.
We have a couple of questions from readers — one from Nicky, who asks whether the VC model is “broken”, and another from a reader Alex, who asks about how the landscape for user acquisition is changing. User acquisition is Hyatt’s home turf. As a general manager at Zynga, which is the most data-driven company on the Facebook platform, he had to know the arc and decline of social games like the back of his hand. This is super useful in light of the explosive growth that apps like SocialCam and Viddy are seeing on Facebook and iOS. → Read More
Today, the Banters social experiment has officially come to a close, as the startup’s co-founder Lauren Leto said via blog post today that the team will be no longer actively working on the site beginning June 1st. However, in spite of its tumultuous road and final splash into the deadpool, the news came with a silver lining. Both Leto and her co-founder, Patrick Moberg, will be taking up residence at Betaworks, the New York accelerator that has incubated or funded startups like bitly, Chartbeat, SocialFlow, News.me, Kickstarter, TweetDeck, and many more. → Read More
Social magazine Flipboard may have to think up a new tagline for itself, as tonight the company is rolling out an update which greatly expands its focus beyond text-based content to also include audio. The rollout features integrations from NPR, PRI (Public Radio International) and social sound platform, SoundCloud.
Also of note, Flipboard is launching its third localized edition with the debut of a Flipboard app for Japan, following its previous launches in China and France. And there’s an update which will matter a lot to a smaller number of users: integration of Apple’s voiceover controls to provide better access for the visually impaired. → Read More
Over the past six months, the folks at OpenSignalMaps have been keeping tabs on the devices that have been downloading their network monitoring app, and so far they’ve recorded downloads onto 681,900 separate Android devices in 195 countries.
Now they’ve taken all that data and splayed it out for all to see, and it highlights rather nicely how big a headache fragmentation can be for developers.
→ Read More
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