Polar Mobile, a digital media platform provider that builds apps for some of the biggest media companies, today announced it has secured an additional $6 million in funding. The new round, led by growth equity firm Georgian Partners, joins more than $3 million invested in the company previously from private investors, bringing its total funding to $9 million.
The company is also announcing its plans for a new product line called MediaEverywhere, an HTML5-based content distribution solution for smartphones, tablets and desktops.
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Six months ago, Brass Monkey had built and released some well-developed software development kits (SDKs) for Android, iOS, and beyond that, simply put, enabled gamers to turn their mobile devices into remote controllers, with support for Flash, Unity3D, and desktop games and apps. The Brass Monkey team, CEO Chris Allen tells us, believed that bringing the functionality of a Wii controller to smart devices was something gamers could get excited about — but, at the time, they were missing one important piece. Support that would allow gamers to play on the browser. So they went about acq-hiring Emotely and its Founder and CEO Francois Laberge, bringing him on as CTO. → Read More
Following its November launch, OnSwipe competitor (and TechCrunch Disrupt finalist) Pressly is bringing another major media outlet’s content to the tablet interface. The company is today announcing the launch of a new publication called Electionism. The app was built for the Media Lab, an internal product innovation team inside The Economist Group, which includes The Economist, CQ Roll Call and other businesses.
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The Financial Times has acquired London-based application development firm Assanka, which built a nifty HTML5 web app – and other applications – for the publisher.
(Hat tip to Benedict Evans)
FT staffers such as Katie Morley and Jonathan Wheatley started spreading the news on Twitter, garnering retweets from FT.com managing director Rob Grimshaw and PR rep Tom Glover, who confirmed the acquisition to me but declined to share more details.
Read more at TechCrunch Europe. → Read More
Once upon a time, Facebook game companies like Zynga fattened up their user counts thanks to viral distribution to non-gamers through the news feed. Facebook later curtailed this channel, forcing developers to concentrate on paid marketing and true word of mouth to grow. A new boom period could be coming, this time for mobile developers, as Facebook announced today that it is testing game stories in the mobile news feed. This could attract devs to its recently launched HTML5 mobile gaming platform with bait of reaching hundreds of millions of daily active Facebook mobile users.
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From tech titans like Zynga, Facebook, Microsoft, Google and Apple, to startups just launching, the battle lines of 2012 will be drawn across the landscape of HTML5. Below are 14 bold predictions for how HTML5 will evolve in 2012.
Welcome to a more interconnected web:
In 2012, HTML5 will be adding support for some really useful and cool APIs that allow one
website to connect to another.
For example, Zynga games on Facebook run inside of iframes. Using the new postMessage API these games will be able to communicate within the containing Facebook frame directly. Before HTML5, inter-window communication had to rely on a remote server – or use unreliable hacks. → Read More
You know how the Internet works, right? Of course you do: you’re a TechCrunch reader, a power user. You know what that “HTTP” means in your address bar (if you’re not using Chrome.) You know that behind the scenes, the Domain Name System translates your requests for domain names like techcrunch.com to numeric addresses like 76.74.254.121, and secure connections are encrypted by SSL. You know that web servers send HTML, the lingua franca of the Web, over the wires (or the air) to your computer, and that web developers write JavaScript to control what your browser does with it.
…Unless you’re actually a techie. In which case you probably already know that the above description — let’s call it the Classic Web — is increasingly completely false.
What follows is a little technical, but bear with me, I have a larger point. (Also, even if you’re not a techie yourself, you need to have some understanding of what today’s tech does, and how it does it, in order to make intelligent decisions.)
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There will be one billion HTML5-capable phones sold in 2013, according to new research from Strategy Analytics. The number represents a (huge, huge) increase from the 336 million units sold in 2011. As expected, much of the growth will be driven by sales in North America, Europe and Asia, as well as support from vendors like Apple, Adobe, Google and Microsoft.
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Jilion, the makers of the cloud-based HTML5 video player SublimeVideo, are today making the product more accessible through the introduction of a freemium offering. When the service launched earlier this spring, commercial plans were available, starting at the relatively affordable rate of under $10 per month. But when it comes to user adoption, nothing beats “free.”
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Adobe’s mobile Flash efforts have recently gone the way of the western black rhino, and Principal Product Manager Mike Chambers isn’t too pleased with how the Adobe chose to broke the news. In fact, he feels so strongly about it that he’s offered up his own clarifications on the matter.
“Our goal was to be very clear about WHAT we were doing, but in doing so, we didn’t pay enough attention to explaining WHY we were doing it,” he said on his blog today. Fair enough — the official Adobe announcement was pretty abrupt. So, now that everyone’s settled down a bit, why did Adobe really pull the plug?
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Restaurant reservations service OpenTable is launching a completely redesigned mobile website today based on HTML5. The company says it was prompted to make the changes due to customer demand. Since 2008, the company has seated more than 15 million diners through both its mobile website and apps, representing over $600 million in revenue for its restaurant customers. These days, OpenTable mobile solutions account for more than 1 million diners seated per month.
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In what I think is an interesting experiment, CBS this morning debuted a “60 Minutes” application that you can find in and launch from the Chrome Web Store (which just got a major facelift).
Granted, “adding it to Chrome” doesn’t really do anything but take you to this page, which you can just open in Chrome just like you would any page, but the Web app does look pretty nice. → Read More
Amazon has announced an update to the Kindle file format integrating many HTML5 tags and CSS attributes. Many expected a concession by Amazon in the form of an EPUB-compatible upgrade, and this comes as a slight surprise — but it’s a natural evolution of the format, really, and of course everyone is already familiar with the toolset.
In a way this makes Kindle formatted books nothing more than extremely long webpages, but that’s really a matter of perspective. Flexible layouts and well-known rules for handling text, fonts, images, and so on mean that the file format is adaptable to many devices, zoom levels, resolutions, and so on. → Read More
Motorola is today announcing the launch of RhoElements, a Web-based application framework made possible through its acquisition of the cross-platform mobile app development platform Rhomobile. Motorola acquired Rhomobile on July 29, 2011.
Motorola says it plans to announce additional cross-platform development tools, enterprise integration components and cloud-based services for its channel partners and customers in the months ahead. → Read More
Earlier tonight, Alexia found and posted some screenshots of something that sure looked a lot like the mythical “Project Spartan“. Shortly thereafter, Facebook took down the page in question. And for good reason. That was Project Spartan, we’ve now confirmed.
Whoops.
Well, to be fair, I’ve heard numerous times that they don’t actually call it that internally. That may be a name that external developers use. No matter — we all know what I mean. It’s the HTML5-based mobile platform that Facebook has been building in secret for months. And now it’s done. In fact, it has been done for a while. From what I hear, it has been waiting on one thing… → Read More
HTML5, HTML5, HTML5 — it seems to be the only thing anyone wants to talk about these days. And that excitement could get kicked into overdrive next week when Facebook unveils Project Spartan, their platform for HTML5 apps. But why wait? A startup that launched at TechCrunch Disrupt has already built an entire HTML5-based OS: Carbyn.
The great thing about Carbyn is that there’s nothing to install. Because it’s HTML5, it works in the browser. Well, any “modern” browser, as Google often likes to say — that means essentially anything but the older versions of IE. You simply open a browser and log-in to Carbyn and you’re ready to go. The team showed it to me running on both an iPad and a BlackBerry PlayBook. Soon it will work on smartphones as well, they say. → Read More
TechCrunch Disrupt finalist Pressly is an HTML5-based platform that turns online publications into tablet-friendly websites that work on the iPad, Android tablets or the BlackBerry PlayBook. The sites it produces are nearly indistinguishable from their native counterparts, like Flipboard and Zite for example, offering a similar experience for browsing through articles, images and videos. Navigation is designed for the tablet interface, using common gestures like multi-touch swipes and pinches.
Pressly’s platform includes five customizable templates as a starting point, each designed with the needs of different publishers in mind. One template is more text-driven, while others are better for browsing through photos or videos. Like native apps, navigating a Pressly-built site uses intuitive gestures, like a 2-finger swipe up or down to reveal quick navigation and a pinch to close articles. → Read More
Today, Strobe Inc. is launching a new platform that helps developers build HTML5-based Web applications for desktops, smartphones and tablets, and centrally manage them from a single interface.
The launch is a major leap forward in HTML5 app development. From one interface, teams can manage code (both test code and production code), configure the app’s deployment across platforms (Web, Android, iOS, etc.), add additional services (social, push notifications, authentication, etc.), and even track analytics within an easy-to-use dashboard.
In short, it’s a comprehensive platform that makes building apps with Web technologies, like HTML5 and JavaScript, not just possible, but easy, straightforward and fast. → Read More
Nitobi, creators of the HTML5-based mobile app framework PhoneGap, have today launched the PhoneGap Facebook Connect plugin. The addition of the plugin means that developers building apps using Web technologies like HTML and JavaScript can now simplify the log in process for their apps by allowing users to login with their Facebook credentials.
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Bizness Apps, the startup that gives small businesses the tools to quickly and easily build mobile apps, launched in October 2010 and has been growing like gangbusters, reaching over 1,000 applications, 10 languages, and over 20 countries in less than 9 months. It also recently partnered with WuFoo to give SMBS the ability to create and seamlessly add contact forms, online surveys, and invitations to their apps. The startup also has an interesting founding story that provides some useful lessons for your entrepreneurs. Check out our April coverage here.
Bizness Apps’s value proposition is simple: The startup wants to make mobile apps affordable, customizable, and simple to make for small business owners. Thus, the startup offers a DIY iPhone, iPad, and Android app platform that enables SMBs to create, edit, and manage mobile apps without any programming experience required. You start with a template, customize them to suit your business, and then Bizness Apps makes them native apps and distributes them on iTunes and the Android Marketplace. → Read More
