This may seem a bit of inside baseball, but it’s a fairly interesting fact for folks looking forward to thin-and-light Win8 devices running ARM chips rather than Intel. According Computer World, devices running ARM versions of Win8 will not be able to run other OSes, like Android, thanks to something called Secure Boot.
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CloudMagic, the personal search service that indexes your Gmail, documents, contacts, calendar and Twitter updates, is now available as a mobile app. The release follows a major update for the service this past fall, which added the ability to search Twitter and a move to host your personal index in the cloud.
This switch is what enables CloudMagic to work across multiple devices, including now, iPhone and Android smartphones. Using the new mobile app, CloudMagic is surprisingly fast – and far more useful than the phones’ built-in search functions alone. → Read More
Following its November partnership with TinyCo, social games outfit ngmoco (now a DeNA-owned company) is partnering with game publisher Glu Mobile, Inc. The deal will brings Glu’s popular Gun Bros game to ngmoco’s Mobage gaming platform for Android.
No word yet on whether the rest of Glu’s titles – many of which are more well-known than Gun Bros – will port over as well. → Read More
Cloud storage platform Box (which you no longer have to refer to as Box.net as it now owns Box.com!), has seen incredible growth over the past year, both on the consumer and on enterprise side. Much of the growth has been driven by mobile, with the company seeing a 140% increase in mobile customer implementations each month in 2011, leading the total number of new mobile users to jump up by 171% monthly.
By year end 2011, Box’s total mobile user count reached 1.9 million, up 9 times over 2010. But nowhere has mobile’s impact been more felt than in the enterprise, where iOS and Android especially have driven business adoption of not just mobile apps, but the cloud in general. → Read More
Analysts at Credit Suisse are forecasting slower growth in mobile phone shipments worldwide for this year, at a growth rate of 2%. The increase is higher than previous forecasts but is down from the 12% growth it had projected for 2011, according to this Reuters report.
According to the firm, they’re expecting to see 1.85 billion handset sales in 2012, up from the 2011 forecast of 1.82 billion. They’re also surprisingly bullish on Nokia’s fate in the new year. → Read More
Getting featured in the Android Market is starting to have a meaningful impact for mobile app developers. According to the recent news from fitness app maker RunKeeper, the company saw a 637% increase in downloads since November after just a few days of being a featured app in the Android Market “Health & Fitness” section.
But is RunKeeper seeing the boost because of the New Year’s resolution-making crowd? Or is being featured in the Android Market really bumping up download numbers in the extreme for anyone who makes it there? → Read More
Today, MetroPCS has announced a partnership with the Mobile Content Venture (MCV) on a new service that will bring live digital television to the carrier’s customers. The service, called Dyle Mobile TV, will be available on phones that are pre-loaded with the Dyle application, starting first with unnamed, Android-based Samsung devices.
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Marketing technology company Fiksu tracked the impact of the iPhone 4S on iPhone app downloads and found that download volume of the top 200 free apps increased 15% from October’s previous record high of 4.91 million daily downloads. In November, the firm’s “App Store Competitive Index,” which measures this trend, peaked at 5.65 million downloads per day – the first time it has topped the 5 million mark. That’s an increase of 83% over November of last year.
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Verizon will be rolling out a new Media Server product for its FiOS customers late next year, which will be a single hardware device that will eventually eliminate the need for a set-top box altogether. The server will be capable of streaming HD TV to all devices in the home, including the TV, of course, but also gaming systems, mobile devices and tablets like the iPad. Although the company has not officially announced details, timeframe or pricing, we were given a sneak peek into the company’s plans.
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There are now over a million mobile applications available across the top seven major app stores, according to mobile analytics firm Distimo in its year-end report for 2011. And, not surprisingly, the iTunes App Store is still the one to beat, especially if you’re a developer looking to make a profit.
The iPhone App Store generates about four times the revenue that is generated by the Google Android Market, the report finds, in terms of total revenue generated by the 200 highest grossing apps. Meanwhile, the App Store for iPad generates more than double the revenue of the Android Market. → Read More
Remember Word Lens? That crazy, awesome mobile application that translated words inside of images, like road signs, posters, menus, and the like, from Spanish to English (and vice versa)? Well, now the app has added a third language to its repertoire: French. With the most recent app update, Word Lens can translate from English to French and back again, but not between French and Spanish.
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Nokia played Grinch this year by barring a small, Lapland-based maker of iOS games from a Santa Claus Foundation delegation at Wanda Plaza in Beijing, China. The delegation, consisting of a number of Finnish tech companies, including Nokia, was to show off the best tech Lapland had to offer.
The smaller company, Lapland Studio Ltd, created a game called Elf Rescue in honor of the studio’s nearest neighbor, Old St. Nick. The Santa Claus Foundation invited founder Ilkka Immonen to the event where he would be able to show the game to Chinese press.
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According to new research from mobile analytics service Mobilewalla, Sunday is the best day to release a mobile app, but Wednesday is the most popular day among developers. The company studied the apps released in the iTunes App Store and Android Market over a 17-week period between May 16th and September 8th, 2011, to determine its findings. During this time, there were 91,754 iOS apps released into the iTunes App Store and 122,220 apps released into the Android Market.
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Doing some online shopping but don’t want the package shipped to your house? Maybe you won’t be home, or worry about packages left on your doorstep. Or maybe the package is a gift for someone in your household? Here’s a cool idea: pick up your online orders at a local store instead. That’s the premise of the young startup called Kinek, which has partnered with a number of brick-and-mortar stores across the U.S. and Canada to serve as “KinekPoints” – secure locations where you can pick up your deliveries.
Now, the company is releasing its first iPhone application, allowing you to find nearby KinekPoints, check their hours, get directions, track packages and receive push notifications when the package has arrived. → Read More
Mobile games network PapayaMobile is launching a new accelerator for mobile, social game developers called “The Games Academy,” which will kick off in Q1 2012. Like most accelerators, Papaya will be providing developers with office space, support from a team of industry veterans, legal advice and an opportunity to pitch VC’s.
However, there won’t be any seed capital provided, nor is the company taking an equity stake in the startups who join. Instead, Papaya only requires the teams use its Social Game Engine in their game’s development. Then at the end of the program, a “winning” team will be awarded with a grand prize of 100,000 guaranteed downloads. → Read More
You remember Jotly, right? The hilarious and absurd spoof of our mobile/local/social app obsession? To refresh your memory, Jotly’s humor was so on target, people wondered if creator Alex Cornell (founder of Nosh) was actually making fun of Kevin Rose’s Oink with this parody video. He swears he was not, just of the “proliferation of absolute ridiculousness when it comes to apps and startups these days.”
Well, guess what? Jotly is now an app itself. Says Cornell, “we just couldn’t help ourselves.” → Read More
Playd is a new mobile application that lets you check in to games the way Foursquare users check in to venues. Actually, the app is more akin to something like Miso, GetGlue or IntoNow - apps which extend the check-in metaphor to other activities, like watching TV or seeing a movie.
The company is one of the first to launch from the NewMe Accelerator, the startup accelerator whose focus is on giving black founders a leg up in Silicon Valley. It was also featured in CNN’s documentary on race and tech entrepreneurship – yep, that one – but lets not hold that against Playd, OK? → Read More
App discovery company AppsFire is debuting a new iOS application today called Logostream, which offers a curated view of the iTunes application store. The app provides users with an easy way to find new apps to try, through the use of high-level categories and app icons you can flip through with your finger as they stream by. It’s a simplified alternative to what can sometimes be the overwhelming experience of browsing through the iTunes App Store itself.
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Amid talks of a Groupon acquisition, the smart local recommendations app Alfred has arrived on Android. Alfred serves up personalized suggestions for nearby restaurants, coffee shops, bars and nightclubs using a combination of artificial intelligence and machine-learning algorithms to develop personal “taste graphs” for its users.
Previously an iOS-only app, the big news for Alfred’s second platform launch is not just the expanded reach, but also how the team at Clever Sense has approached the Android port. → Read More
Very interesting, Bango. Sometimes the biggest deals are the ones where everyone is keeping mum. That seems to be the case with this little blip of news coming out of the mobile phone payments company Bango today. The company announced it has signed a deal with Amazon.com, Inc. to provide “services.” And yep, that’s just about all it’s saying.
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