You can’t call StackMob a “backend service provider for mobile” anymore, because as of now, it’s a full end-to-end solution. The cloud-based platform for mobile developers is today launching hosted HTML5 services that tie to StackMob’s backend, making it the first platform offering integrated HTML5.

Developers can use the new service to host full HTML5 apps for desktop, tablet or mobile, or can use it to host the HTML5 running within their native apps.

“We had to start with backend first because it takes much longer to build in the flexibility and scalability,” explains StackMob CEO Ty Amell, “but now that we have that system down, now we’re launching our hosted HTML5 solution.”

What this means is that developers can now upload and run their HTML5 from StackMob. The company is also offering GitHub integration to make doing so even easier. There’s a service hook for StackMob, so when developers push changes to their GitHub account, StackMob will pull those changes and put them onto Amazon’s S3. The company has also created a streaming API, where it will stream and cache those resources for its developers.

The benefit for developers is two-fold. First, they no longer have to worry about hosting their own HTML5, it’s just a part of the StackMob service. (And there’s no fee increase to use the feature). Secondly, with hosted HTML5, there’s the ability to tie in to other StackMob features, both current and forthcoming.

For example, thanks to the GitHub integration, StackMob can keep track of the history of the HTML5 deployments, and offer developers the ability to roll back changes. But in the long run, there are other benefits to hosted HTML5.

“There’s a lot we can do to increase the performance of HTML5,” says Amell. “We can push these out to CDNs, we can do a lot of internal caching, we can do adaptive serving where we look at what URLs are being served and we pre-fetch the next one,” he explains. “We can do things around developer tools where we add JS templates, making your app use HTML5 app cache out of the box. There are a lot of different technologies that we can add in the future that we can do because we host [HTML5].”

Also planned for the future is a build service, where developers can add native wrappers to their HTML5 apps (iOS, Android, BlackBerry Windows Phone). This will arrive by Q1, followed by advanced access controls, the use of CDNs, and auto minifying.

For StackMob, going the HTML5 route has always been on the roadmap. The company envisioned itself being an end-to-end service from the beginning, but now was the right time to make that shift, according to Amell. “We’re getting very close to where there’s a massive increase in network-connected devices,” he says. “It’s smartphones, tablets, cars, thermostats, cars, TV, even consoles – so when we think mobile that’s what we’re thinking.”

He’s also a big supporter of HTML5 as a platform. “Eventually, HTML5 is going to win because of this network-connected device world. You’re not going to have the ability to write for whatever proprietary language all these platform devices are going to be on,” he explains. ”Even your toaster is going to be network-connected and have to talk to the cloud.”

Wait? Even my toaster? Oh dear lord.

“I bet you it will happen. Less burned toast.”

We’ve seen handset makers like HTC, LG and Nokia all warning of declines in smartphone sales. But if there is a slowdown affecting some, it’s not because people are not buying smartphones; it’s because they’re all buying iPhones.

Figures out from Gartner today say that smartphone sales totalled 149 million units in Q4 2011 — 47.3 percent higher than the same quarter a year ago, led by none other than Apple’s iPhone, which its analysts noted “saved” the smartphone market after two quarters of declining sales.

The mobile device market is also getting ever closer to a tipping point in terms of smartphone dominance: Gartner notes that they accounted for one-third of all mobile sales in the last quarter worldwide. The analysts predict that in 2012 smartphone sales will continue their march, growing by 39 percent compared to only seven percent growth for feature phones.

That is significant in that it shows how strong smartphones are playing in developing markets as well. In developed markets like the U.S., UK and Japan smartphone sales have been close to or already outpacing feature phone sales for a little while now.

Platforms. Moving away from specific vendors, Google’s Android platform grew even more dominant, and accounted for more than 50 percent of all smartphones sold, up from 30 percent a year ago. Apple’s iOS and bada from Samsung were the only other two platforms that grew in market share, with the rest all continuing to see big declines, including the Windows Phone platform from Microsoft, which accounted for 1.9 percent of sales.

Apple. On the strength of tremendous iPhone sales in the U.S. and Europe, Apple became the world’s biggest smartphone vendor, with a 23.8 percent share of all sales in Q4, which works out to unit sales of 35.5 million smartphones.

Apple is now also the third-largest mobile phone vendor in the world overall. That’s notable especially considering that the two vendors ahead of Apple, Samsung and Nokia, are also selling a range of much less expensive devices.

But one word of caution to note here, too: Gartner doesn’t expect Apple to have a blockbuster quarter like this again soon — saying that a lot of the boost was due to pent-up demand from consumers awaiting the newest model of the iPhone, which turned out to be the iPhone 4S. Famous last words or the canary in the coalmine?

Losers. More bad news for LG, Sony Ericsson, RIM and the newest charm on Google’s bracelet, Motorola: all saw declines in market share — not only because of fierce competition from Apple and Samsung in mature markets but also because of price pressure in developing markets from the likes of ZTE and Huawei.

The sub-$100 smartphone is only going to become a more prevalent theme in the future, and companies like RIM will have to address that if they hope to claw back some of their old leadership. (Yes, there is an irony here: Apple doesn’t dabble in cheap devices — putting aside handset subsidies that carries put on a range of devices, including the iPhone.)

What of Nokia? Still on top in the overall rankings by a good margin, and not losing nearly as much steam as you would have expected, given all the doom and gloom that gets reported. Its share is now at 23.4 percent compared to 27.1 a year ago. Indeed, in its last quarterly earnings, Nokia actually showed quite good results for sales of its feature devices, even as it saw huge smartphone declines. Samsung inched up a couple of percentage points to 19.4 percent of all sales — a testament to its strong Android-based smartphone sales and its equally strong line of feature phones built using its proprietary bada OS.

Clear, the heavily-anticipated touch-based to-do list app, is launching in the iTunes App Store tonight. And by heavily anticipated, I mean this app was getting tech blog coverage based on demos, previews and teaser videos.

Why the big draw for what’s typically been a rather ho-hum app category, the lowly to-do list? Clear is pure eye candy, for starters. But it’s also representative of a major leap forward in smartphone app design, as it’s been built from the ground up for the touch interface. The app is based solely on the use of now-common gestures: swipes, pulls and pinches. There are no buttons with Clear, and yet, it’s surprisingly simple to use. In fact, that’s the point.

If your current to-do list app needs are complex, you may not be in the market for Clear. But if you’re regularly turning to a simple to-do list app, or even the iPhone’s built in notepad to make your lists, Clear is definitely going to wow you.

The app is unique in that it forgoes common navigational elements – like buttons positioned either at the bottom of the screen or towards the top – in favor of an all-gesture interface. If you don’t know how to swipe and pinch, you could be lost for a second upon first launch (err, mom). But Clear’s design is meant to tap into what’s already common knowledge among smartphone users: you can swipe, pinch and pull down on on-screen elements to interact. Who needs buttons?

Somewhere, Steve Jobs, no fan of buttons (obviously – look at the iPhone, there’s just the one) is smiling.

With Clear, there are only a few gestures you need to in order to use the app: pull down on a list to add an item, swipe to the right to complete an item or to the left to delete it, pinch apart two items to insert a new one in between, and pinch vertically to close the current list and see all the lists in the app. Lists are also color-coded with a heat map to show the most pressing tasks at a glance. (See video below).

That’s it. It’s a quick learning curve, and what’s more, doing away with buttons can actually speed up the process of using to-do lists once you realize that’s how it’s done. Clear even pushes you to simplify here, too, by limiting to-do items to just 30 characters.

“There’s so much crap trying to get your attention in other to-do apps, you don’t even bother typing things in on the iPhone app version,”  proclaims the app’s co-creator Phill Ryu, “with Clear it’s so fast it’s sometimes even fun.”

But is the world ready for a buttonless app?

“Yes!” Ryu says, “Have you seen babies play with an iPad? They love swiping and manipulating things directly one-to-one on the screen. There’s nothing more natural than that on a touchscreen device.”

He’s got a point. This weekend, I watched in amazement as a one-and-a-half year old unlocked the iPad, tapped a folder, launched Netflix, browsed the queue and launched his favorite cartoon. Jaw-dropping, really. Clear is the kind of app that’s been designed for him, and for this new generation of smartphone users who grew up with gestures. Forget backward compatibility for those sad sacks who remember Windows and other things with archaic user interface concepts like “menus” and “buttons.” Design for the future. How can you not love the idea?

The app itself has an interesting background, too. It’s a joint project between Realmac Software, Milen Dzhumerov, founder of The Cosmic Machine and Clean Cut Code, and a new studio called Impending Inc. This is the first launch for Impending, which was founded by tap tap tap partner, the above-mentioned Phill Ryu and David Lanham of the Iconfactory. Prior to Impending, the team has been involved with a number of high-profile and popular apps, including Twitterific, MacHeist, Classics and more. Not a bad way to kick off your studio’s debut.

Impending has also been working on another project for the past year and a half, but isn’t talking about the details just yet. They’re working with a very talented team, however, including some of the “usual suspects.” And yes, we’ll probably be obsessed with that app, too.

Clear is available for $0.99 / £0.69 / €0,79 from the App Store on iPhone and iPod Touch here. It goes live at 8 PM PT.

Despite its long and boring name, Cisco’s “Visual Networking Index (VNI) Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update” is one of the more fascinating data-filled reports you’ll read this year. The report examines the dramatic growth we’re seeing in the mobile Internet space, including the massive demands for mobile data, the growth of mobile video, and the rise of the smartphone as new gateway to the web itself.

Globally, mobile data traffic grew 2.3-fold over 2011, more than doubling for the fourth year in a row. The traffic even grew faster than Cisco had earlier predicted: they had pegged growth at 131% year-over-year. In actuality, traffic grew by 133%.

In 2011, mobile data traffic was 8 times the size of the entire global Internet in 2000 (597 petabytes vs. 75 petabytes). That was only a dozen years ago, but it may as well have been eons.

And, in one of the report’s more telling figures, the number of mobile-connected devices will exceed the number of people on earth by the end of 2012. By 2016, there will be 1.4 mobile devices per capita. That year, there will be over 10 billion mobile-connected devices, including machine-to-machine (M2M) modules. Again, the number will exceed the world’s population at that time (7.3 billion).

VIDEO

The mobile web’s growth, and its unending need for more data, more connectivity and more bandwidth, shows no signs of slowing. One of the top activities for mobile users in particular, is mobile video. For the first time, video accounted for over half of all traffic (52%). This is, in part, due to the increases in connectivity and phones capable of video viewing. By 2016, video will be over 70% of traffic.

Video’s growth can also be attributed to the increases in devices that can do more, faster at greater speeds, which help to impact the global bottom line in terms of data usage. Case in point: 4G phones, only 0.2% of mobile connections, are already accounting for 6% of mobile data traffic. By 2016, 4G will reach 6% of all connections, but 36% of total traffic, or 9 times that of non-4G phones.

The top 1% of mobile data subscribers, meanwhile, account for 24% of data traffic. And smartphones as a group, still a minority representing only 12% of the total handsets in use today, now account for over 82% of global handset traffic.

MOBILE CLOUD

In some cases, mobile cloud apps are video apps (think YouTube and Netflix), but other times they’re music (Pandora, Spotify), gaming, or social networking apps. But the increases in mobile connectivity have allowed what would otherwise be limited hardware devices to function as tools for media consumption.

A user with an 8 GB smartphone who streams music and video will consume more content over 2 years that can be stored on the device itself. And a smartphone owner who uses Netflix, Pandora and Facebook will generate more than twice the volume of traffic as generated by a smartphone owner only using email and web apps.

SMARTPHONES

Smartphones are growing in popularity and usage, too, as indicated by the increases in the group’s data traffic demands. In 2011, the average smartphone usage nearly tripled, up from 55 MB/month last year to 150 MB/month today. By 2012, over 100 million smartphone users will be using over 1 GB/month of data. And by 2016, the monthly global smartphone data traffic will pass 10 exabytes per month, with the average smartphone generating 2.6 GB/month, a 17-fold increase from 2011′s average.

FEATURE PHONES

Even though the perception in developed markets like ours is that smartphones are everywhere, the majority of the mobile market is still using basic handsets. In 2011, these devices accounted for 88% of the mobile landscape, and their mobile data usage increased 2.3-fold to 4.3 MB from 1.9 MB last year. In other words, even “dumb phones” are getting smarter, and capable of consuming more mobile data.

TABLETS

But the mobile web is no longer accessed by handsets alone. Tablets are a growing group, too, with their own data demands. The number of mobile-connected tablets tripled last year to 34 million, each generating 3.4 times more traffic than the average smartphone (517 MB/month vs. 150 MB/month for smartphones). By 2016, tablets will be 10% of global mobile data traffic.

Or, in what may be my favorite number from the report: by 2016, mobile-connected tablets will generate almost as much traffic as the entire global mobile network does in 2012, 1.1 exabytes per month. (The global network will reach 1.3 exabytes/month next year). Think about that: the tablet Internet will grow that quickly to become the size of this year’s mobile Internet. If you’re working on anything in the mobile space and have put off addressing how you’ll meet the needs of the tablet user, you’re already behind. And it goes without saying that if you’re building for the web and haven’t addressed mobile, you’re basically just lost.

ANDROID VS IPHONE

Finally, what good mobile data could refrain from weighing in on the Android vs. iPhone battle? In terms of data consumption, it appears Android is winning (well, using more data – I’m not sure if that’s “winning.”) As Android apps are freer to run in the background, the figure is not so surprising. But this is also a function of Android’s increased global market share. Today, Android devices’ data consumption is 29% higher than Apple devices in terms of megabytes used per month per connection.

There’s tons more data in this report – I’m barely scratching the surface. To read more, head over here.

Editor’s note: Guest author Keith Teare is General Partner at his incubator Archimedes Labs and CEO of newly funded just.me. He was a co-founder of TechCrunch. Just.me is a stealth company in the mobile space and as such Keith’s opinions on this issue are likely to reflect his product focus.

The controversy that began last week with mobile startup Path being exposed for downloading users address books from their mobile device exploded over the weekend.

Fighting the good fight

Nick Bilton at the New York Times opined on the matter and declared Path to have been let off way too lightly due to the Silicon Valley echo chamber and its lack of concern for privacy. Path investors, and my good friends, Mike Arrington and MG Siegler weighed in, to resist Nick’s points, and now Kara Swisher and others have responded.

Oh boy…. Lots of  heat, but where oh where is the light? Well, it is beginning to be demanded.

Om Malik, who I love, has a has a post this morning asking developers who have apps that use the mobile address book to “do the right thing”.

Chris Dixon, angel investor, also has a post  and asks himself aloud:

 I don’t know what the product design motivations are for uploading contacts, but I assume there are legitimate ones.

So, what constitutes “the right thing”?

The address book was stolen by web 2.0, and remains captive today.

As I remarked in my TechCrunch post last week, the address book has evolved over the past 10 years from something that sat alone on your desktop or laptop, usually inside Outlook. Firstly into something shared (Plaxo), then into something mined for intelligence (Xobni) . And since Web 2.0 the address book has become something that is implicitly owned and managed by a service provider – usually Facebook or Google – on the user’s behalf. Of course it is mined too. The big unspoken fact is that Facebook is the biggest perpetrator of address book hijacking. Google + seems to be in the same bucket. Path simply copied their architecture, but because the address book came from the phone the act of “taking” was explicit whereas in Facebook, Google and other web 2.0 services it is implicit – part of the service.

Mobile – Taking back ownership of your friends/contact list.

For the first time the growth of smart phones, and the mobile architecture, makes it possible for the address book to once again be under the control of the user.

The incident with Path last week is mainly unfortunate in that it gave the impression that the mobile software ecosystem will be exactly like the web 2.0 ecosystem – one that requires users address book data to be stored or hosted on a service in order to be usable in various social scenarios. In this sense those who gave Dave Morin (who I have no reason to believe is anything other than a smart well intentioned guy) an easy ride, did nobody any favors.

This weekend Scottish blogger Matt Gemmell showed exactly why what Path was doing is unnecessary and even lazy, leaving aside its ethics. He described a method of building social software on the mobile platform, without compromising on user-facing features. His method (and in truth it is a well-known method) never (yes NEVER) takes the users address book from the phone and only uses partial, encrypted and anonymized data from the address book in order to provide social features like friend finding or matching .

After explaining the use of hashing and anonymous matching algorithms he says:

Everyone is happy. Your social friend-finding features are intact, and every bit as convenient as before. But, none of your friends’ email addresses are ever uploaded (in a readable, usable form) to some company’s server. Privacy is preserved along with convenience. It’s a mathematical miracle.

Peer to Peer through the cloud.

What Matt  is describing here is something I think of as peer to peer networking through the cloud. It isn’t true peer to peer because there is an intermediary. But the intermediary simply does the minimum necessary in order to glue the peers together. This architecture is a very good fit for the mobile ecosystem because it puts maximum control in the hands of each user on the device, without ever needing an all knowing vendor in the middle.

This architecture allows us to benefit from the growth of social features in a mobile context, without jeopardizing that by creating fear amongst users that their private data is being removed – either with or without their consent. The truly human needs being met by the smart phone – to communicate, to share, to discover people and so on – can be realized free of fear.

As Om Malik remarks in his piece today:

Today’s apps are inherently more social and thus by extension more human. The relationships on this social web are going from increasingly virtual to more real. In a sense, these apps have started to reflect our daily lives. As many have said before, we are the social web and the social web is us.

The smart phone can be a massive benefit to us humans if we can develop software for users first. That will require us to focus on different things than we focused on in the web 2.0 era. The events of the past two weeks make it pretty obvious that we need to start with a whole architecture.

OpenLabel, a startup that wants to augment everyday products’ barcodes with crowd-sourced information that helps you decide whether to buy, has raised $80,000 in seed funding in a round led by Peter Kirwan, also an investor in IFTTT. Also participating in the round were Tim Drees and Doug Taylor. According to OpenLabel co-founder Scott Kennedy, this $80K is just the first part of a larger $300,000 seed round, which the company expects to close prior to the April launch of the mobile application.

The app, previously in stealth mode, can best be thought of as a Twitter-like platform for sharing information around products. Unlike other barcode scanning applications like RedLaser or ShopSavvy, OpenLabel isn’t about delivering pricing information or product reviews, it’s about giving consumers the ability to share other information.

“We’re about everything but price,” says Kennedy, “we’re about actual information.”

For example, users could add notes about the manufacturer’s use of child labor, sweat shops, animal testing, toxic chemicals, and more, and then give the product a thumbs-down. While those types of things sound like they may give OpenLabel somewhat of an activist slant, there are other types of things that could be shared, too, like the company’s political leaning and donations, its support for or stance against particular political or rights issues, like SOPA or employees benefits for same-sex couples. OpenLabel could also be used to share information about whether the product was recalled or had child safety issues, contained allergens like gluten, or whether it was derived from GMOs.

However, the process of accessing this information wouldn’t be different than when you use a barcode scanning application. You would launch the app, scan the product’s barcode and then read the resulting comments or leave one of your own. All comments have to be accompanied by a buy/avoid selection, as well.

The Twitter model comes into play because users can choose to follow others also on the platform. So, for example, if animal rights was your hot button issue, you could follow PETA’s account or that of another animal rights supporter. (This is just an example – PETA has not stated it’s involved here).  

OpenLabel doesn’t police the crowdsourced commentary beyond controlling for spam and profanity, but instead uses Reddit-like up and down vote buttons to help surface the best reasons to either buy or avoid the product in question.

The idea for a crowdsourced “Internet of Things” type product has been tried before, perhaps most notably with Stickybits, before its creator Billy Chasen pivoted to build Turntable.fm. Says Kennedy, things like Stickybits (“they abandoned it too early”) and similar efforts failed due to timing, passion or both. However with his non-profit background and interest in transparency, OpenLabel is a project that’s right in Kennedy’s wheelhouse.

That said, the focus here is on building a for-profit platform that attracts the interest of brands, something that Kennedy says will come naturally.

“Once we get everyone out there scanning items and exchanging data about those items, the brands are going to want to be there. Mostly for damage control, at first, but also because you’re putting a sponsored message into someone’s hand at this really critical point.”

Besides Kennedy, who was the founder of Axcelis and BitStar, OpenLabel’s other co-founder is David Ng, the lead mobile developer from TomTom. In addition, the startup has lined up an advisory board that includes a wide range of folks from NASA Ph.D.’s to retail CEO’s, plus Tapulous co-founder Mike Lee, MacBrain creator Matt Jensen, Green Drinks NYC founder Margaret Lydecker, and others.

The application will launch first on the iPhone, but will also be available on Android. In its ramp up to public launch, OpenLabel is staying in a private beta, where only those interested in contributing to building the crowdsourced database are participating.

TechCrunch readers who want to join in, however, can get access by signing up here and entering “TC” in front of your email address.

Appcelerator, the company behind the popular Titanium app-building platform, is announcing its third acquisition today. The company is buying Cocoafish, a mobile app infrastructure provider that lets developers add various features to apps including messaging capabilities, push notifications, photo uploads, checkins and other social features, storage, discussion forums and more. Although the name implies an iOS affiliation, Cocoafish is actually a cross-platform backend service provider supporting iOS, Android, and even Flash and Ruby.

Starting in Q2 2012, the features Cocoafish previously offered will relaunch as “Appcelerator Cloud Services (ACS)” as a part of the company’s Titanium Platform, and as complete iOS, Android, REST and Javascript SDKs for non-Titanium customers.

The acquisition follows Appcelerator’s previous buyouts of other mobile app infrastructure providers, including the enterprise-focused Aptana and, more recently, Particle Code, which brought additional HTML5 capabilities to Titanium. With Cocoafish, Appcelerator is aiming for the broader mobile market, the company explains – not just Titanium users. Now developers using Objective-C, Java, PhoneGap, Sencha or HTML5 will have access to a scalable server-side backend, similar to what other backend service providers like StackMob, Urban Airship or Parse are offering.

According to Jeff Haynie, Appcelerator CEO, the company chose Cocoafish because it’s the “most complete solution.”

“We took a look at all these companies, and what we liked [about Cocoafish] was that they have 25 well-designed, well-tested services supported,” he explained. “They’re sets of interfaces that work together.”

However, it could be argued that other possible acquisition targets simply weren’t on the market. For example, Urban Airship has been doing a little acquiring of its own in recent months, snapping up SimpleGeo to fill out its own offerings. Asked if Appcelerator considered other companies prior to Cocoafish, Haynie said they “had all sorts of conversations at different levels” with competitors, but were ultimately drawn to Cocoafish for a few key reasons, beyond its feature set. The startup hadn’t raised money, were already profitable, and they were a small, 10-person bootstrapped team based in San Francisco. It just made sense.

The new Appcelerator-branded product will roll out on March 31^st, but the company is already planning to continue the work Cocoafish had started. By Q3, the plan is to launch an on-demand, private cloud offering so developers with increased security needs can run the whole stack in their own cloud. There are also plans to support Node.js, expand the common services to offer more features (like video), and offer more identity management options for enterprise customers, like RSA SecureID and Active Directory support, for example.

Appecelerator today has over 35,000 apps that have been built using the Titanium platform, and those apps have been deployed on 40 million devices. But there are also 1.6 million web developers with the company who already use a Javascript API to build native or HTML5 apps, all of whom could also take advantage of ACS.

Although the acquisition makes Appcelerator a direct competitor to the other backend services it already supports in Titanium, Haynie assured us that there would be no change in terms of which backend services developers can use. “Like any platform company, you compete on some things, but on other things you’re helping each other out,” he said of how the new offering impacts competing services.

Got FOMO? (That’s “fear of missing out” for those of you who don’t do slang.) There will soon be an app for that, or so says the $3.4 million in angel funding the stealthy D.C.-area startup called timeRAZOR has raised. In its pre-launch state, the curious company is already lining up brand partnerships with big names like Marriott and L’Oreal in preparation for its March debut.

But what the heck is a timeRAZOR?

According to CEO and co-founder, Jeff White (formerly the founder of govWin), timeRAZOR is a mobile application that will help people discover interesting and relevant things to do close to where they are.

“We’re an app that keeps you connected with what’s going on so you don’t miss out on the things you want to do while juggling the things you need to do,” he tells us.

Oh, so it’s like calendar 2.0 then? Well sort of. Maybe. The app is also using some sort of smart, patent-pending technology to offer serendipitous discovery of those “things going on” nearby the places you’re planning to be. This is where the brand partnerships come in, apparently.

“TimeRAZOR includes a predictive marketing element [brands] find enticing. Our ability to allow brands to be inserted in the highly intimate, welcomed, non-invasive engagement with our users is very enticing,” White explains. Companies currently working with the startup include L’Oreal’s Active Cosmetics Division, Marriott Renaissance Hotels, World Adult Kickball Association (WAKA), Vail Valley Foundation, JetSet Studios, several local retail properties (The Shops at Dos Lagos, The Village at Leesburg and West 7th), and Boston-area HWS Group’s four minor league baseball teams.

Additional details are being kept close to the chest, though. And frankly, none of this is much to go on. White says the company will announce exactly how the partners are working with timeRAZOR in the next few weeks.

Also interesting is timeRAZOR’s board of advisors, which include comScore co-founder Linda Abraham, former Microsoft exec Eddie Amos and Gene Riechers, co-founder and senior advisor at Valhalla Partners.

White and timeRAZAR co-founder Victoria Clark, also formerly of govWin, began work on the product back in June 2011. It looks like the funding actually closed in the fall, but the company is just now making the announcement as they ramp up to launch. It’s kind of intriguing to see that a few name brands (and other smaller brands) have signed on to participate in timeRAZOR when the service hasn’t even launched yet. However, without knowing the details it’s hard to say whether the brands were just having a case of FOMO themselves, or if there’s really something here.

Today, mobile promotion and discovery service AppsFire is launching a new toolkit for developers called App Booster. Meant to boost user engagement and retention, two of the toughest challenges developers face today, the App Booster SDK (software development kit) introduces a suite of tools for things like in-app notifications, user feedback, analytics and mobile app cross-promotion.

According to AppsFire co-founder Ouriel Ohayon, mobile app engagement is not optimal today because developers don’t have relationships with their users. In addition, because apps are these walled off, sandboxed pieces of software, they’re often forgotten soon after download.

Push notifications, like those powered by Urban Airship, for example, can help address some of these issues, but they only work for users who agree to accept the notifications to begin with. Many don’t. Ohayon says that these notifications are only activated around 50% of the time – a figure that hints at users’ growing resistance to these interruptive type of alerts. It’s something that’s likely a function of the increased number of apps users have installed on their phones. The average smartphone user has over 60 apps today, and, let’s face it, not all developers have used push responsibly. The better option lately (especially when you’re just testing a new app), is to say “no” to the “allow push notifications?” message.

App Booster presents an alternative that can re-target those non-push users, in the form of in-app notifications. These are different from push, as pop-up messages aren’t involved, nor do they clutter the phone’s notification center. However, the in-app notifications can trigger the bubble on the icon of the app and appear in a News Feed-like way within the app.

Here, the developer can communicate with their users as much as they like, posting welcome messages to newbies, offering app tips, communicating about updates and changes, and attempt to re-opt in users who didn’t accept push notifications initially.

Developers can also solicit feedback and ratings from their users, something that has typically come in the form of a push message: “do you want to rate this app?” – again feeling more like an annoyance than a feature. App Booster’s in-app feedback system is structured differently, however, allowing users to submit different types of feedback, like bugs and ideas, alongside their review. And when the user leaves the feedback, the system re-routes automatically to the iTunes App Store or Android Market to post the review.

On the backend, App Booster provides a web dashboard for tracking engagement analytics, plus creating and targeting the in-app notifications. The latter can be filtered by geography, language, app version or OS version. Developers can also cross-promote their apps, or arrange free barter programs with other developers via the SDK.

In early tests, the company has seen engagement improvements of up to 50% and CTRs from 15% to 50%. It will be interesting to see what numbers a broader rollout provides. After all, many app users have become blind to red badges too. Will apps really be launched more? Or will it just be that those apps that are already popular will now have an improved way to enable developer-user communication?

Besides, it’s just as possible that the best feature in the toolkit turns out to be the less intrusive way it pushes users to leave app reviews. More reviews of a positive nature will in turn lead to better app store rankings, and that leads to more downloads.

But for now, the in-app notification center is the SDK’s top draw. Ohayon notes that many of the biggest apps (e.g., Facebook) have built their own notification systems, but it’s very hard for developers to create something like that for themselves. The App Booster toolkit, for example, has been in development for 8 months and still isn’t done.

Currently, the SDK is available for iOS and Android, and will arrive soon for HTML5 apps. It’s available as a free download here.

Disruptive payments network Dwolla confirmed today it has raised $5 million in Series B financing in a round led by Union Square Ventures. Also participating in the round are Village Ventures, Thrive Capital, Artists and Instigators and Paige Craig of Betterworks. As a part of the deal, Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures will join Dwolla’s board.

The company says that additional funding will be used to continue product development, expand its API and “maybe buy some Doritos.” (Yeah, you gotta love these guys).

Dwolla, which offers both an online and mobile payments platform, is primarily a new payments network, not a tool for enabling payments through the existing credit card network. In other words, it’s not the new PayPal. It’s an all-new payment option.  The idea behind the company is to rethink what a payments network would look like if it was built today using web technologies. By eliminating the legacy issues, fraud and overhead, it can lower costs for end users and merchants alike.

Explains founder Ben Milne, “Dwolla’s network isn’t just about mobile wallets and sending money to your friends with Facebook, it’s about creating an entirely new network architecture to disrupt the $332 trillion electronic payments landscape.”

The company has had a busy year, rolling out new features and services like Spots, FiSync, Proxi, GRiD and Instant, among other things.

Over the course of 2011, Des Moines-based Dwolla says it increased its userbase by 3,200% to over 80,000 accounts and increased its merchant community by 3,000% to over 7,500 accounts. It now processes between $30 and $50 million per month in transactions, both online and on mobile. Due to its lower fees, users end up saving 2%-8% over traditional transactions as well as the typical 30 cent processing fee.

Last month, BetaBeat reported that Dwolla was raising $10 million in financing, but today’s confirmation of the Series B is at half that.

Ansca Mobile, the Palo Alto-based mobile development company and makers of the popular Corona SDK, is accusing its partner PapayaMobile of ripping off parts of its SDK  for use in PapayaMobile’s Social Game Engine. According to Ansca Mobile COO David Rangel, his company recently discovered that Papaya’s engine is what he calls a “blatant copy” of some aspects of the Corona SDK.

In addition, says Rangel, some of PapayaMobile’s syntax and sample code is identical to Ansca’s, and the company is using graphic assets it took from the code on the PapayaMobile website.

The code PapayaMobile is being accused of copying is available here in the Corona SDK, a free download from the Ansca Mobile website.

You can also see that the image above the “Physics Demo” on this page of PapayaMobile’s website (as of the time of writing) is an image from Ansca’s sample code packages. It even has the Ansca logo.

If you were to download the sample code, you would see that it’s very similar to Ansca’s code, Rangel says. What this means, he explains, is that they “clearly based how their physics engine works very closely on ours.”

Ansca hasn’t yet settled on legal action, but Rangel says “we do think it’s egregious and is worth calling out.”

The situation is a strange one because Ansca and PapayaMobile announced an official partnership back in August which allowed PapayaMobile’s SDK to be integrated into Corona. This made it easier for mobile game developers to add social elements to their games.

Stranger still are the accusations that Ansca reached out to PapayaMobile to try and resolve the situation, but never heard back. PapayaMobile, meanwhile, claims to not have heard of these accusations until this morning, when we contacted them for comment.

As of right now, PapayaMobile doesn’t have an official comment on the situation. The company says it needs more time to research matter in order determine what’s really going on. They’ll let us know when they have more information.

Note: We’ll update this post with that info, when it becomes available. 

Mobile app marketing company Fiksu just released new data revealing the impact the holiday season had on iOS app downloads and user acquisition costs. According to the company’s App Store Competitive Index, a measurement of the average aggregate download volume of the top 200 free U.S. applications, December saw 6.04 million daily app downloads. That’s a nearly 7% increase from November’s 5.65 million, and a clear indication of how many folks were unwrapping new smartphones during the holiday season.

That last half of December was the most competitive for mobile marketers, says Fiksu, with the traffic and dollars spent in the final week up 100% over prior weeks. “December is a strategically critical month for app discovery,” said Micah Adler, Fiksu’s CEO. “What we witnessed during the month was a ‘land rush’ in which advertisers earnestly spent marketing dollars in order to achieve ranking before the traditional App Store freeze which then would generate substantial organic downloads through increased visibility.”

The App Store “freeze” being referred to is the time period when Apple itself goes on holiday, shutting down the queue for new app submissions and updates. For advertisers, it’s critical to get the apps in the best position possible before the freeze occurs, so as to improve discoverability during the December rush. Notes Fiksu, on Christmas Day alone, there were over 6.8 million new iPhone and Android devices activated.

The company also measures the cost to acquire loyal (that is, returning) users for mobile applications. In December, this index hit a record high: $1.81 per user, up 26.5% from November’s $1.43. The increase was due to brands participating in bidding wars, in their attempts lock in top ratings before the freeze.

Data for the Fiksu Indexes was sourced from more than 11 billion mobile app actions, including things like app launches, registrations and in-app purchases, as well as from the more than 200 million downloads recorded by apps marketed via the Fiksu for Mobile Apps user acquisition platform.

In a new research report from Distimo, the app store analytics provider examined two different ways that allow mobile developers to get a bump in both their download numbers and revenue. One way, which is within the developers’ control, is putting the app on sale. Within the first day, iPhone developers see an average increase of 41% in revenue using this method, and see revenue increases of 22% by the sale’s end. Android apps, however, rose just 7% on day one, but closed out the sale with higher percentage gains than either iPhone or iPad.

The second method Distimo looked into is getting the app featured in the app store. This is up to the app store’s operator, like Google or Apple, of course. (We’ll examine Distimo’s findings on featured apps in a subsequent post). 

When a developer decides to put an application on sale, there’s a delicate balance that has to be achieved. The sale price has to be low enough to encourage more downloads, obviously, but it also needs to be low enough that it encourages enough download volume to make up for the lost revenue.

To examine what happens during when apps go on sale, Distimo examined the 100 top grossing apps in the iPhone App Atore, iPad App Store and Android Market. On the first day of the sale, the average revenue increase by +41% in the iPhone App Store,  and by 15 days in, was up by +22%. On the iPad App Store, the day one effect was even greater: up +52% on day one and up +19% by day 15.

But the boost in the Android Market was the largest of all, although this couldn’t immediately be seen. By day one, revenue was just +7% on average, but by day 15, it was up +29%. These are percentage increases, though – not dollar amounts.

Keep in mind, too, that these gains are averages. Not all developers were so lucky. In looking closer at the numbers, Distimo found that 44% of iPhone apps lost revenue during the sale, with 23% seeing a decline in revenue by more than 20%. This is why the sale price setting is key to maximizing the gains. For example, a discount of a dollar on a $7.99 app lowers the revenue, but a discount of $3 increased revenue by 131%. In general, the tipping point occurred when the app’s price was cut in half or the app was offered in Tier 1 ($0.99) or Tier 2 ($1.99).

The graph below shows what happens when prices were cut by 40%, 50%, 60%, 70% or 80%. The conclusion here is that it can pay to put an app on sale, but to actually earn more revenue, you have to make a significant price cut.

This all begs the question, then: what price should a developer ask? There isn’t a simple ratio to use. The right price depends a lot on what kind of application it is, where it’s sold, what category it falls into and its overall complexity. Simple apps that are easy to make (and copy) are priced lower. You can see the variations by revenue, category and app store here:

Since this is a lot of info to take in, we’ll look at Distimo’s findings related to apps being featured in the app store in a separate post. You can find the full report here.

OLO, a web and mobile online ordering service for restaurants, is celebrating a lot of things: bigger office space in New York’s South St. Seaport district, hitting the 1 million customer milestone, adding new restaurant partners, and plans to launch its long-awaited GrubHub integration, nearly a year in the making.

For those unfamiliar, OLO is a B2B(toC!) service that allows customers to order ahead and pay online or on mobile (where available) for takeout and delivery at local restaurants. Customers input their order which is then sent directly to the business’s POS system, with OLO snagging a percentage of the transaction fee along the way.

OLO currently powers the online ordering systems for several big-name chains, including Subway (its NYC locations), Five Guys Burgers & Fries, Cold Stone Creamery and SONIC, for example.

It has also just signed an ice cream chain (hint: makers of the delicious ice cream cakes), a U.S. barbecue chain, San Francisco bakery La Boulange, Fatburger, and the South African-based Nando’s, which operates stores in the Washington D.C. area. This year, OLO will begin to power the overseas Nando’s locations, including those in the U.K. and Australia, too. The company also plans to expand into Latin America and Canada in 2012.

In March of last year, OLO announced a partnership with online ordering provider GrubHub, which, until then, had been focused only on independent restaurants, not chains. The partnership makes OLO the exclusive provider of restaurant chain ordering to GrubHub. Going forward, OLO will provide both restaurant and menuing information to GrubHub for its partner restaurants, allowing GrubHub customers to place orders and make payments via GrubHub for the OLO-powered chains.

Those integrations are now just a couple of weeks away from launching, starting with OLO-powered restaurants in the NY and Chicago areas. By the end of March, all of OLO’s restaurants will be live on GrubHub.

In addition to powering the ordering systems of major chains, OLO also runs GoMobo, a B2C service that lets customers order online or via text. But the company shifted its focus from B2C in December 2010, when it acquired the OLO.com domain name. “The name change was symbolic of the shift from being a B2C company…to being the backend technology for big brands,” says CEO Noah Glass.

For restaurants, signing up for OLO brings hundreds of new customers. “For every new door that we open, a restaurant will get 250 new customers joining the service,” Glass says. When brands launch on mobile (OLO provides white label apps, too),  they see even more signups – around 400 to 500 new customers, Glass estimates.

Although OLO is doing well now, it’s early days for the up-and-coming company which saw 10x growth over the past 16 months, and now counts over 150 restaurant brands and thousands of individual restaurant stores as partners. “There are 600,000 restaurants in the U.S. that we think would work well for the service – it feels like there are many more brands for us to sign,” Glass says of the company’s plans for growth.

“More and more customers are looking for self-service experiences – not just in food, but in banks, airlines, and online shopping – we’re taking one of the lowest tech industries and bringing that self-service capability to the restaurant experience.”

OLO received $7 million in additional funding from RRE, Founder Collective, and Core Capital in 2008, bringing its total funding to date to $8.75 million. Glass says they’re not looking to raise additional capital now.

Onavo, makers of the money-saving, data-compressing app mobile app, just raised $10 million in Series B funding. Horizons Ventures, the private investment arm of Li Ka-shing, led the investment along with Motorola Mobility Ventures, the strategic equity investment arm of Motorola Mobility, Inc.

The company’s previous investors, Sequoia Capital and Magma Venture Partners, also participated in the round.

As a part of the new funding, Jason Wong from Horizons Ventures joined Onavo’s board of directors.

Onavo, for those unaware, is a cross-platform mobile application which runs in the background, monitoring the data usage on your mobile device. When you use your phone’s data connection, the app steps in to route the data in a compressed format through its own cloud servers, before the data reaches the carrier. (Yep, it’s basically a proxy server.)

The app makes sense for price-conscious consumers, who can’t afford high dollar mobile data plans. It’s also helpful for travelers, who need access to data while overseas, but can’t afford the astronomical bill that accompanies such usage.

On iOS, the app actually compresses the data (the company claims up to 80%), but, in a weird turn of events, it’s actually the Android version that’s less powerful. For now, the Android app only warns users of data hogging apps, providing increased visibility into the apps and services running on the mobile user’s handset. It doesn’t actually compress data.

Although some consumers may see such an app as a way to thumb their nose at carriers’ and their high mobile data prices, the truth is that carriers, too, are facing the increased burden of users’ growing desire for more and more mobile data. They’re not as opposed to a data-saving app like this as you may think.

Says Jason Wong of Horizons Ventures, “mobile data use continues to grow exponentially, which creates issues for carriers and consumers alike…We believe Onavo’s unique data compression solution will prove compelling to both carriers and consumers.”

BuzzDoes, a newly launched word-of-mouth marketing tool for mobile app developers, has secured $750,000 in seed funding from angel investors and Proxima Ventures. The tool, which operates as a drop-in SDK (software development kit), allows developers to add a viral recommendation feature to their application using a single line of code.

Once installed, app users are “incentivized” (meaning rewarded), for recommending the app in question to their friends.

Getting a mobile app noticed in the increasingly crowded mobile app market is more difficult than ever, with some 600,000 iOS applications filling up the iTunes App Store’s shelves, and around 400,000 apps on Android. Although many companies have been experimenting with different means to get their app noticed, word-of-mouth recommendations from trusted sources (e.g. friends, trusted sites, etc.) is one of the only consistently proven methods that can help boost an app’s ranking.

Essentially, BuzzDoes is trying to kickstart the typically organic viral recommendation process where users tell friends about great apps they should try. To do so, app developers using BuzzDoes can choose to reward users who share an app with friends. The rewards come in the form of BuzzDoes points that users can redeem for cash (via PayPal), or users can donate the points to a charity instead. The secret sauce for this startup, however, is not just the sharing feature – it’s that BuzzDoes is also able to detect when a new user downloads and app because of the recommendation.

At first glance, the idea for a “recommendations-for-rewards” type mechanism feels like it could get a little spammy, but the way it’s implemented sounds rather smart.  When a user enters the section of the app where they can make the recommendation, they’re also able to see which apps their friends are downloading, something that adds a social element to the app discovery process. If they’re interested in downloading one of the other apps here, they just tap the app in question and their friend gets the points. For developers, it’s a win because they get new users, but for the app customers involved, this sort of in-app discovery feature feels far less intrusive than mobile ads. In fact, it doesn’t really feel like an ad at all – it feels like a feature.

Developers are offered the BuzzDoes SDK for free, and don’t have to pay unless they actually gain new users through the word-of-mouth recommendation network. That’s a different take than what traditional “incentivized” install companies (e.g. TapJoy, W3i, etc.) provide. In most cases, developers pay upfront for a set amount of downloads which are acquired through “marketing actions,” like offers or through downloading other 3rd-party mobile apps. According to BuzzDoes CEO Assaf Kolirin, the cost to acquire is as low as $0.20 per user, versus today’s averages of $1.50-$3.00 per user.

BuzzDoes launched a month ago at the AppsWorld conference in London, and went live just two weeks ago. It now has over 100 developers on the platform – something that speaks to today’s enormous and still unsolved challenge of user acquisition and app discovery.

The $750,000 in seed funding was raised from a few leading angels in Israel and South America, including  Avraham Gilat, as well as Proxima Ventures.

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.

Polar says that MediaEverywhere will help reduce its customers’ development time, so they can increase their monetization opportunities through its audience intelligence and personalization features. The HTML5-based apps created with MediaEverywhere will work on any device capable of running HTML5 code, not just phones and tablets, but on desktop computers too.

Adding in the desktop component is a slight shift for the company – its current product SMART is a white-label solution meant for creating apps across mobile platforms.  Specifically, SMART supports the iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry (including PlayBook), Windows Phone and Nokia.

Polar has also partnered with handset manufacturers and has existing commercial agreements with Microsoft, RIM, Nokia, Intel and Samsung.

Today, Polar counts several big media companies among its customers, including CBS Interactive, Conde Nast, Sports Illustrated, Shanghai Daily, Future Publishing, Rogers Media, Khaleej Times, TC.Media and The Wall Street Journal. In total, the company has worked with over 380 media brands in 12 countries, and its applications have seen over 1.6 billion pageviews served up to 11 million users to date.

Headquartered in Toronto, with a presence in San Francisco and Dubai, Polar expects to use the new funding to also double its team from 40 to 80 people this year and open new offices in New York and London.

The MediaEverywhere product will also roll out in 2012, first with existing customers before becoming more widely available.

I’m beginning to think the team at Firespotter Labs are marketing geniuses. Prior to launching their new iPhone app Jotly (you know, as a joke), they released a hilarious video featuring a “fake” app by the same name. In the video, a guy goes around rating things like parking meters, hiding spots, ice cubes, and a beer in the alley that was left in the sun (F-, if you’re curious). The video was meant to be a parody of our mobile/social app obsession, and perhaps our culture’s tendency towards over-sharing. It also was strikingly similar to Kevin Rose’s Oink, which launched soon after.

But here’s the thing: Jotly is no longer a joke. The company (also the maker of Nosh), has just released the Android version of Jotly. And an API, too.

Hey, wait. That’s not a joke – two apps and an API? That’s actually a bit of work. Of course, when I asked about metrics, Firespotter Co-Founder Alex Cornell got all cagey. ”Our engineering team became so tired of us asking these questions that they stored our metrics behind a wall of riddles and booleans. And then Wikipedia decided to wuss out today and our backend server went down.”

And when I pushed, he added, “unfortunately we are prohibited from confirming almost anything serious at Jotly headquarters. It would be *off-brand* I’m told.”

Ha ha. Ha?

But Cornell did point me to the fact that as of yesterday, this guy was the suckiest (I mean, lowest ranked) user, who was rated #73,845. Today, however, that guy has climbed to #25,511. I guess the soft launch on Android has been going well, then.

There’s also the new Jotly API, so developers can build something awesome like Cat vs. Dog, for example.

With a straight face, Cornell says:

We continue to be really excited by the growing popularity of Jotly. We never expected it to be A) real, and certainly not B) popular. There was a large demand for the Android app when we launched on iOS a few months ago and we are glad that we can finally let Android users in on the joke. After all, they need something to hold them over until Instagram gets their act together.

Joke, my a**. Guys, we’ve all been played – Jotly was never a joke, only marketed as one. As a refresher, the Jotly intro video, below:

Peter Rojas published a thought-provoking piece about RIM and BlackBerry 10. He said, in short, that the Canadian company should wipe out Blackberry OS and run Android or Windows or, barring that, sell out completely and offer a software package running on another OS. While both of those are logical positions, I think RIM will end up in far worse shape than those options allow.

RIM is popular for three reasons: the keyboard, BBM, and the back-end software. For most of this decade, IT shops have been able to send out fleets of BlackBerry products without concern simply because there was nothing better for email and messaging. Over the past three years, however, that claim has gone completely out the window. I would reckon that a nice IMAP server install is far easier and cheaper than any BB Enterprise Server ever was and, given this screenshot from the actual BBES “purchase” page, there is a lot of sales pressure involved.

What needs to happen (and what probably will happen) is fairly tragic: a major player, probably Microsoft, will buy the company and fold whatever patents and IP RIM has into its own cache. The buyer will pay lip service to the promise of a “bold new BlackBerry” and then, like Danger and the Sidekick, it will flatten the organization after all of the major talent leaves. BlackBerry will end up a footnote, BBES turned into Exchange, and WinPho 7 will make a “best-of-breed” keyboard phone. Given the improvements in batteries and materials, it should be hard to make a clone that runs as long as everyone with a BB expects it to. Plus, you’ve got the might and majesty of Microsoft behind it.

So, in the end, the question is not how BlackBerry will survive but when will it die? I’m bearish on the company – have been for years – and as good as those phones have been to millions of users, nothing bodes well for our cellphone neighbors to the North.

[Image: Asturianu/Shutterstock]

A month after its expansion to Android, Chartboost, the newly launched (already profitable) direct deals mobile ad marketplace for game developers is expanding to Asia. Starting today, the company is rolling out localized versions in Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Though serving the needs of the mobile app community’s need to monetize via ads, Chartboost’s marketplace isn’t like a traditional mobile ad network. Instead, it allows game publishers to do direct deals with each other, and avoid having to share huge chunks of their revenue with ad networks. It operates under a freemium model: the ad-server technology is free when used for direct deals or internal cross-promotion, but the opt-in ad network offers revenue sharing with publishers.

In Asia, the company has already been working with several leading game developers, including Animoca (Hong Kong), Com2US, Nexon Mobile and Devsisters (South Korea). Here in the U.S., it has well-known names like TinyCo, Pocket Gems and Storm8 on board.

Created by former Tapulous employees, Maria Alegre, now Chartboost CEO, and Sean Fannan, CTO, Chartboost closed $2 million in Series A funding in October, with Translink Capital, SKTVC and XG Ventures. At the time, it said it would focus on international expansion going into 2012, starting with Asia.

Says Algere, the new localized versions will allow Asian game developers to acquire U.S. traffic through the Chartboost marketplace.