Airpair, a newly launched service which connects entrepreneurs and expert developers over remote online sessions, aims to help startups build better software and speed their time to launch. The idea’s name, which brings to mind “pair programming” techniques, offers its users one-hour screensharing sessions where developers will help review your code, brainstorm architecture, assist with problems… → Read More
“This is the original concept shot for Fruit Ninja which was pitched to the company during Halfbrick Fridays. This is literally the very first piece of Fruit Ninja imagery ever created, so it’s historically significant,” Halfbrick Studio‘s Chief Marketing Officer Phil Larsen said in an email to me last week after I interviewed him and his colleague Richard McKinney, the… → Read More
Rollbar (formerly Ratchet.io), an error tracking product for developers, is launching its product out of a beta today, following nine months of private testing. Founded by former Lolapps engineers and inspired by tools they once relied on internally, the new company is backed by a small, “pre-seed” round of funding ($250,000+) from Resolute.vc’s Mike Hirshland, Hiten Shah of KISSmetrics, and … → Read More
Mobile app developers using a technology called “cookie tracking” (sometimes called “Safari flip-flop” or “HTML5 first party cookies”) are starting to have their apps rejected by Apple’s App Review team, we’ve heard from a few different industry sources. With this method in place, Safari is opened upon first launch in order to read a cookie that may exist there from a user’s past interactions… → Read More
Microsoft only provides sporadic updates to how the Windows Phone Store is doing, but today, it used the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona to offer a few new numbers. According to Microsoft, there are now over 130,000 apps in the Windows Phone Store, and the average Windows Phone user has now downloaded 55 apps. App downloads, the company says, have increased by 75 percent since the Windows Phone… → Read More
Startup Pack is back. After giving away 1,000 bundles of free web tools to newly established startups last October, the entrepreneur who set up the giveaway has gone ahead with a second, developer-focused Pack — with fewer packs up for grabs but a larger range of freebies on board, including from Github, Zencoder and Amazon Web Services. → Read More
Leanplum, a TechStars Seattle 2012 alum that wants to make A/B testing easier on iOS and Android, just announced that it has closed an $825,000 angel round from TechStars, Kima Ventures, VoiVoda Ventures, and several “high-profile individuals.” The service, which was founded by ex-Google employees Momchil Kyurkchiev and Andrew First, allows developers, product teams and product managers to… → Read More
Google just added the equivalent of an app store to Google Drive that lets you find Drive-enabled third-party apps like HelloFax, SlideRocket and the Open Office Document Reader right from within the service. Once installed, these apps now also live right in the Google Drive ‘Create’ menu. Until now, users had to go through the Chrome Web Store to find Drive-enabled third-party apps. → Read More
Google runs a Developers Live video channel for its developer ecosystem and starting today, Facebook will offer a very similar service under the Facebook Developers Live moniker. Starting today, the new channel will feature “the latest news, tutorials, speaking sessions and more.” The channel, Facebook says, will feature both pre-recorded videos and interactive broadcasts, “giving developers a… → Read More
In the wake of Twitter’s acquisition of crash-reporting tool Crashlytics, there’s been a renewed interest in and awareness of the bug tracking space. Sentry, a year-old service which also tracks application errors in web and mobile apps, is poised to take advantage of that interest, and is today debuting a redesigned version of its hosted platform, which now includes more integrations with… → Read More
Google recently changed its payout schedule for Android app developers, moving from a window which saw developers paid two days after the month ends, to a new window where the payout date is 15 days after the month’s end. The move will allow Google to hold onto payments longer, which benefits the company of course. But when Google informed developers of the change, it cited “new forms of payment”… → Read More
Fiksu, a Boston-based app marketing startup, is today rolling out support for Facebook mobile app install ad optimization. The company previously supported optimizations for display ads, video ads, incentivized installs and more, but the move to add Facebook is a testament to the social network’s growing influence as a way to drive app installs for publishers. → Read More
App store analytics firm Distimo released a new report today which examines the effect that price changes, and specifically price drops, have on iOS app sales. When the price drops for iPhone apps, on average, cumulative downloads grow by 1,665 percent for five days following the decrease. Not surprisingly, a price drop is more effective on the iPhone App Store than it is on the iPad App Store, as… → Read More
As Facebook continues to build out the App Center and its overall business as a platform for third parties, it’s also tightening up how payment policies work within it. In one of its latest moves, the company has changed how it pays out to PayPal accounts for new (not existing) developers who select that option. Specifically, Facebook now requires extra levels of authentication for new developers… → Read More
Segment.io, a Y Combinator-backed analytics startup for developers, offers an easier way for developers to integrate the APIs from multiple analytics providers into their own applications. The service currently supports 20 analytics providers, including those from Google, KISSmetrics, Mixpanel, Chartbeat and more, as well as enterprise providers like HubSpot and Salesforce.
Currently, both… → Read More
When it comes to developing for mobile platforms, Android and iOS — the top two mobile platforms by device sales worldwide — are also first in the mind of app makers. But surprisingly, beleaguered BlackBerry isn’t so far behind: an indication that, if RIM really connects on BB10, it could have a shot at some kind of comeback, or at least the support of developers to make sure it has the content… → Read More
Last year, James Smith and Simon Maynard left mobile gaming startup Heyzap, where Smith was the CTO, to build and launch a new venture that aimed to tackle one of the biggest problems they encountered in working with mobile developers: The need for better crash detection. In an attempt to bring some continuity to the fragmented set of point solutions developers use to monitor and capture errors in… → Read More
For all of you developers out there, you know how difficult it is to manage all of the bugs that pop up in the code that you push on a daily basis. Sometimes, you just don’t know when things will go wrong in production, so you have to be nimble and at the ready to fix quickly. Managing that workflow can be as difficult as fixing the code itself. Payment company Square has built an internal… → Read More
Most developers are famously not great designers, but some of the best products come from teams where developers know a bit about design and the designers know a bit about what the developers do. Hack Design wants to get developers up to speed with the basics of design by sending to developers a fresh and easy-to-follow lesson about design. There is clearly a need for this kind of project and… → Read More
WebRTC, the new in-browser framework for real-time video and audio chats, will likely be a major trend this year. While it’s exciting for developers to easily add browser-to-browser chat features to their apps, however, being able to call regular phones from the web and to integrate WebRTC into existing solutions is still a necessity for many developers. The YC-backed VoIP startup Plivo, which… → Read More
You know a mobile app store is still young and needs more content when the company behind it still writes its own blog posts when interesting new apps appear in it. With 150,000 apps, the Windows Phone store isn’t actually quite as empty as the Windows 8 store, but Microsoft could sure use some marquee apps for its mobile platform. To get developers and consumers a bit more excited about it, the… → Read More
Google just launched the latest beta version of its Chrome browser (version 25) for the desktop and Android and this one is chock-full of new tools for developers. The most important update – and the one that Google chose to highlight – is the inclusion of the Web Speech API in Chrome. This, says Google, will allow developers to integrate speech recognition into their web apps so that “in the near… → Read More
This year’s CES may have been about startups more than ever before, but over the last few years, the car industry has also increased its presence at the show. In previous years, we heard a lot about the connected car, but until now, those cars remained virtually closed for developers. In one fell swoop, that changed this year, as Ford and GM announced concrete programs with SDKs and APIs that are… → Read More
Appboy, the maker of a suite of customer relationship management (CRM) tools for mobile app developers, is now offering a new customer segmentation product that lets developers slice their audience into groups based on who they are and how they behave. After doing so, developers can then use other Appboy tools to target those users in different ways using push notifications, emails, and in-app… → Read More
Ford just introduced its new AppLink API that allows mobile apps to talk to its cars. Not to be outdone, General Motors just introduced its own API and SDK for its new in-vehicle app platform. the big difference here is that while Ford uses a driver’s smartphone, General Motors’s framework for its MyLink platform is meant to let developers run apps hosted in the car’s infotainment system. → Read More
Opera has long harbored ambitions to bring its technology beyond mobile and the desktop and into the living room. Just in time for the start of CES, the company today unveiled its new TV app store and framework, as well as its new Devices SDK. These, Opera says, will “make all the world’s living rooms more comfortable” and bring “solutions for improving TV surfing” to “millions of living rooms all… → Read More
As Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) continues to add more tools (there are currently 21 AWS services), the Management Console that provides a graphical user interface to services like S3, EC2 and CloudFront was starting to look a bit unwieldy. Today, Amazon is making a number of design changes to make the Management Console a bit easier to use for developers. In addition, Amazon is also launching a… → Read More
Pluralsight, an online training resource targeting professional developers, is today announcing its first outside funding, courtesy of a $27.5 million investment from Insight Venture Partners. The additional capital will help Pluralsight fund the expansion of its course library and will be used for hiring. → Read More
MobileDevHQ, a Seattle-based startup providing tools for App Store Optimization (ASO) and additional insights for mobile developers, has raised a $650,000 round of funding following its participation in the TechStars Seattle incubator. Investors in the round include Founder’s Co-op (Chris DeVore), Social Leverage (Tom Peterson), as well as other, primarily Seattle-based angel investors. → Read More
Seattle-based Appnique, a new startup from mobile industry veteran Jai Jaisimha, is focused on helping app developers achieve higher rankings and make their mobile applications more discoverable in both the iOS and Android app stores. It’s the latest company to target the ASO (App Store Optimization) space specifically, a new breed of optimization which looks at things like app keywords… → Read More
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