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
The latest to join the cadre of startups offering tools for more private sharing outside of Facebook’s massive footprint is not, in fact, another startup, but rather another media giant: Disney. Citing its “rich heritage in storytelling,” Disney’s Interactive division, best known for games, sites, and virtual worlds like “Where’s My Water?,” “Temple… → Read More
Crosswa.lk, a mobile application discovery which just over a year ago arrived on the iPhone as an improved version of Apple’s “Genius,” has been quietly building a new product over the past several months, as tides have turned against apps which serve to recommend or promote other apps. The new Crosswa.lk, instead of being a consumer-facing service, now offers tools to push apps… → Read More
So far, the Pebble smart watch has done little besides offer up watch faces for users to tinker with, but the apps are starting to come in, and today marks the much-anticipated debut of early marquee partner RunKeeper. RunKeeper was an early player in the smartphone-based activity tracker market, and continues to be an industry leader. It was a natural partnership for both Pebble and RunKeeper… → Read More
Founded in 2010, Israeli startup JoyTunes has been on a mission to become the Rosetta Stone of music — to help those looking to learn play an instrument do so by turning practice into a mobile game, activated by playing the instrument of their choice. The startup’s first app, a free iPad app called Piano Dust Buster, enables wannabe rockstars to learn and play songs at their own pace, using a… → Read More
Everyone’s favorite tiny video maker Vine just updated their app with a few important features. First, the service has added front-facing camera support, allowing you to swap camera angles mid-Vine. You can also now @ identify folks by pressing the “mention” button when publishing the post. → Read More
Once you’ve had a few drinks at a bar it’s easy to let loose and blow off steam. Unfortunately, while you’re having fun, you could end up annoying others around you, namely the staff at the venue you’re at. By acting like a fool, you’re jeopardizing your future visits, since bartenders tend to remember who was a jerk and who was a great customer. A project at our… → Read More
Like many avid sports fans, Shailo Rao, Sagar Savant and Vam Makam are well-familiar with how frustrating it can be to find quality, relevant sports content — especially on Twitter and other social media. Rao tells me over coffee that, as a PhD student at Stanford, he spent years trying to create and maintain a single realtime feed of content he actually cared about. Because no company or… → Read More
Founded by Dan Gellert and Jeff Arena, Time Warner Ventures and Yahoo! alums respectively, GateGuru is second behind TripIt in terms of users and downloads. The app helps you build itineraries with simple input methods including selecting flights by number or even emailing itineraries into the program. Once you’ve set up your itinerary, the company makes money by pitching last minute car and hotel… → Read More
In case you can’t wait for Jony Ive to give iOS a complete revamp, there’s Classic Note, an app that will bring back a bit of the Woz-Jobs magic in fully 128K glory. The app includes a note taker and calculator into a package that harkens back to the days of the original Macintosh. → Read More
TinyTap, a Tel Aviv-based platform that allows children to create their own mobile games and “playable” books, is now expanding from the iPad to the iPhone, as it also launches its own social marketplace for apps. Here, users can sell their TinyTap creations to others, or just share them for free. The move comes roughly six months after the company announced its half a million dollar seed round… → Read More
Today, our lives are spread across a growing array of digital devices, from smartphones and laptops to tablets and connected TVs. While each device tends to perform certain tasks better than others, as we use tablets to read books and shop, laptops for work-related tasks and smartphones to check the weather, stocks and email, increasingly, our devices are working together in concert and becoming… → Read More
Kik has raised a $19.5M Series B funding round, the company revealed today, led by Foundation Capital and including RRE Ventures, Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures. The Waterloo-based messaging app company will be using the funding to help continue to support its growth, and the new injection of cash comes at a crucial point for the company as it sets its sights on broader platform ambitions… → Read More
Where is Twitter Music for Android? With today’s launch of Twitter’s new music discovery platform, the company has again made a move to sideline the install base of around half the U.S.’s smartphone audience by failing to deliver a native application for users of non-Apple devices. It’s a strategy that still remains prevalent among tech companies today, both large and small. The reasons these… → Read More
The Android marketplace, Google Play, may now be catching up with the Apple App Store in terms of sheer number of applications available, but finding the better-quality apps outside of the big names is still something of a challenge. Today, an app discovery service called Appreciate has launched on the Android app store to address this problem. → Read More
Save for later service Pocket debuted a new feature today, which allows users to quickly send content saved to their Pocket accounts to contacts from within the app. The feature uses that most old-school of social sharing means, email, but updates it with more modern social features, adds in-app and push notifications, and saves frequently used connections for easy future access. The Send to… → Read More
Canvas is a portal for mobile business applications, used primarily by small businesses and contractors to replace their paper forms with smartphones apps. Today Canvas is announcing MyCanvas, a cloud service for their subscribers that allows anyone to access their personal service data history in the cloud. Canvas wants to make the paper form obsolete. They claim that if you factor in all of… → Read More
Appolicious, the app search and discovery portal which helps users find new mobile applications for iPhone, iPad, and Android, is today launching a new service today aimed at parents, teachers and others in search of the best educational apps for children: appoLearning. This new resource is Appolicious’ attempt solving the inherent problems with app search today, starting with a focus on apps… → Read More
Props are owed to companies like Blackboard and Moodle for being early movers in the educational software space, particularly in helping catalyze innovation in learning management systems (LMS). The problem is, of course, they got their start over a decade ago, and haven’t always elicited raving reviews from students and schools. → Read More
Cinemagram, a startup among those that pioneered short animated video clip sharing on the iPhone when it originally debuted back in 2011, has officially launched its Android app today. The new app brings Cinemagram’s “cine” creation tools to Google’s mobile OS, allowing users to create very short animated GIFs and share them with their followers and on social networks. → Read More
Today, Microsoft has leveled more accusations about Google’s practices by way of its “Scroogled” campaigns. This time, the complaints are about how Google handles users’ data when they purchase an application from Google Play. Previous “Scroogled” campaigns have targeted both Gmail and search over ads and privacy. In the two videos below, Microsoft uses… → Read More
Cisimple a startup that helps automate the build, testing and deployment process for mobile applications, is today exiting its beta and making its new testing platform available to all developers. The company is also the first to integrate with Kickfolio’s API, another newly launched startup which brings iOS applications to the browser using HTML5. → Read More
If you’re a developer building web or mobile apps that use Google Drive for storing information, you’ve probably found that users really can’t be trusted not to delete or move that data. Once the user does that, the app experience won’t be so great and the data that the app needs to run isn’t there to use. Today, Google has introduced “app data folders”… → Read More
Twitter is making a move to become the jumping off point for discovering, browsing and accessing the mobile app ecosystem, the company announced yesterday, in a somewhat understated event only developers were invited to attend. The event, due to its nature, was filled with geekier terminology like “footer tags,” “deep linking,” and “URL schemes,” making summaries of its announcements hard to parse… → Read More
Fresh from putting smiles on the faces of tabletop gaming geeks everywhere, with yesterday’s news that it would be helping to bring Dungeons & Dragons to iOS devices later this year, mobile game publisher Playdek has closed a $3.8 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Qualcomm Ventures, with IDG Ventures and ff Venture Capital also participating. → Read More
Mobile advertising network InMobi today took one more step in its bid to be a one-stop shop for developers’ app marketing needs, in the process taking advantage of the massive fragmentation that exists on the Android platform. It has launched App Publish, a distribution platform specifically for Android apps, which lets developers push their free, paid, or freemium apps to many different Android… → Read More
Today, TechCrunch has learned from sources that Crowdtilt has raised $12 million in Series A financing. It’s the startup’s second round of funding, following its $2.1 million seed round back in May, which it raised from SV Angel, Crunch Fund, Y Combinator partners Paul Buchheit, Alexis Ohanian, Harj Taggar and Garry Tan, and DCM and Felicis Ventures. → Read More
Amazon introduced Whispercast for Kindle back in October of 2012, and now the service is getting an update that allows it to deploy not just books and documents, but also apps. that means organizations like schools and businesses can now widely deploy apps across a number of Kindle Fire devices quickly and easily. → Read More
An iPhone app called Awesome Baby Names has a secret Game Boy Advance emulator built into it, as 9to5Mac has discovered. The emulator is easily unlocked via a simple sequence of taps (depicted below), but if you do want to unlock it you’d better get it quick because Apple is sure to pull this one quickly. → Read More
Redbox Instant, the video-streaming service that arrived to the public this week, won’t work on your jailbroken iOS device. Instead, upon launching the mobile app, users with jailbroken devices are presented with an error message informing them that their “device is compromised.” The app then fails to load. → Read More
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
Boston, MA
Disrupt Europe: Berlin Hackathon
Berlin, Germany
