It’s been a busy couple of weeks for the folks over at SkyFire. They launched their Flash Video-friendly browser for the iPhone back in early November, only to pull it down almost immediately to ease the onslaught of users hammering their video transcoding server. Even with that temporary App Store absence, however, SkyFire for iPhone managed to pull in just shy of a million bucks in its first weekend alone. There wasn’t much time to celebrate, though, as SkyFire had another device in its sights: the iPad. With their first stab at iOS proving to be a pretty friggin’ hot success, it wasn’t a question of if — it was a question of when, and how much. We’ve just been clued in on the answers to both. → Read More

Just a few weeks back, SkyFire (a browser most known for its ability to play Flash videos on handsets that otherwise couldn’t) came along and turned the App Store upside down. In its first three days alone, it managed to pull down over $1 million in sales — and that’s without any sort of offering for iPad users.

Well, iPad users, SkyFire is coming your way soon. How soon? As soon as Apple says it’s okay. → Read More

After a slightly rocky (but still crazy fruitful) U.S. launch and a seemingly less painful debut in the U.K., SkyFire for iPhone is continuing its international roll out today. Best known for being that browser that offers up Flash Video playback support on iOS by way of some monkey-in-the-middle proxy magic, SkyFire has been surrounded by its fair share of hype & controversy. Now, everyone in France, Germany, and Italy gets to join in on the fun! → Read More

Just a quick note for all of our friends in the UK: that SkyFire application that was such a big deal just a few weeks back for kinda-sorta allowing Flash video playback on the iPhone? You can get it now; 21 days after the slightly bumpy US launch, SkyFire has pushed the browser up for sale on the UK App Store. Just in time for the Doctor Who Christmas Special next month! Hurrah! Thanks to currency conversion, Brits will pay a wee bit more than their US counterparts — but don’t worry, you won’t get gouged too bad: at €2.39, it works out to about $3.15 (versus $2.99 in the US.) It could be worse; you could be an Australian trying to buy games on Steam. → Read More

Given the underwhelming past few years in Flock‘s history and the seemingly lukewarm post-launch response to RockMelt, I’m not entirely convinced that anyone actually wants a bunch of social networking stuff tied into their browser. So far, the browsers that pull the bigger numbers are the ones that suck the least, not the ones with the most feature bloat. Keep It Simple, Stupid. Alas, you can’t have a trendy feature without every little guy taking a swing at it. Next up with the bat? SkyFire. → Read More

Just about every time I write about SkyFire, the cross-platform (and generally free) smartphone browser capable of churning through most Flash videos, someone always says: “Great! But uh, how are they going to make money?”

Well, looks like they’ve figured that out. In their first weekend on iOS — the first and only current platform on which SkyFire isn’t free — SkyFire managed to pull in right around 1 million bucks in sales. → Read More

Didn’t get a chance to check out the Flash-friendly-ish SkyFire browser when it went live in the iPhone App Store earlier today? Sorry Charlie, it’s gone — and not because Apple decided to reverse their approval. → Read More

After a two month journey, the SkyFire browser’s seemingly endless voyage onto the App Store has come to a successful end. After word got out yesterday that they’d got the green light from Apple, we figured it’d show up sometime in the next day or two — sure enough, it just went live. Haven’t been paying attention, and are now wondering what all the hubbubs about? Here’s the trick: SkyFire can play Flash video. Sort of. It’s actually converting Flash video into an iPhone-friendly format through some server-side trickery. The solution has its ups and downs (see our early hands-on here), but it’s definitely worth checking out [iTunes Link]. → Read More

As soon as we heard that the SkyFire browser was coming to the iPhone, we just knew it was going to sit in the approval queue for a while. With Apple/Adobe’s infamous squabbling, anything that claimed to support Flash — even through some server-side conversions, as with SkyFire — was going to be subject to some major scrutiny.

1 month, 20 days, and 2 hours later, our buddies at SkyFire Labs say that they think they’re getting pretty close to approval. With that in mind, they’ve sent over the latest pre-release build of the browser, and I’ve been dabbling with it for the past 12 hours or so. So, what’s it like to use the first Flash-video friendly browser on iOS? Find out after the jump. → Read More

It’s been a while since we’ve heard from Skyfire, the folks behind the Flash-friendly smartphone browser of the same name. They’ve presumably been sitting quiet in anticipation of Skyfire for iPhone — which, by the way, has been in Apple’s approval queue for a month and a half now.

Earlier today Skyfire reached out to us with a bit of exclusive info: they’ve got two new executives joining their team. They poached one of’em from Adobe’s Flash team, while the other comes from Akamai (who, for those unfamiliar, pretty much hosts the Internet… or at least its videos. Hulu, Whitehouse.gov, Apple — all their videos are belong to Akamai). → Read More

Just last week, a couple of much-trusted birdies popped into the MobileCrunch office, claiming to have some details on SkyFire (a Flash-friendly mobile browser already available on a number of smartphone platforms) and its impending iPhone release. “They’ve entered the very final round of testing!” they said. “It’s going to get submitted to Apple early next week!” We’re one day past what we’d personally consider “early next week”, but sure enough: SkyFire has just announced that they’ve submitted the browser for Apple’s oh-so-important stamp of approval. Start the timers, folks. → Read More

SkyFire. Heard of it? It’s the smartphone browser that was chewing through Flash video and other rich media long before any of the built-in browsers were supporting such things — and on a number of platforms, it’s still the only option.

We’ve known that SkyFire Labs was crackin’ away at an iPhone port for some time now — the company confirmed it after Opera got a surprise App Store thumbs up. But when would it be done? More importantly, when would it be submitted for that oh-so-important stamp of approval?

Soon, say our sources. → Read More

We’ve written about Skyfire before. Plenty of times, actually. It’s the smartphone browser that, by way of data-compression proxies (and tiny wizards), can chew through Flash video and other Rich media formats on Android, Windows Mobile, and S60 handsets. Thus far, Skyfire has been an entirely business-to-consumer operation. Today, Skyfire makes the good ol’ jump to business-to-business with the launch of Skyfire Rocket. Rocket comes in two parts: Rocket Device Client and Rocket Cloud Platform. To my understanding, Rocket Device Client is essentially a white-labeled version of Skyfire 2.0. Debuted on Android just weeks ago, Skyfire 2.0 differs from versions prior in a few major ways: it’s build on WebKit, only video data is sent through Skyfire’s data conversion proxy, and that happens only once the user specifically selects a video to view from the “Skybar”. The Rocket Platform, on the other hand, is for carriers and manufacturers who want what Skyfire has to offer, but want it in their own browser. In other words, Skyfire is licensing out the video streaming, data compression, and content recommendation tech they’ve built to any third-party willing to cough up the dough. It’ll be interesting to see how this one goes. Smartphone platforms tend to come with their own browsers, with OEMs and carriers only supplanting the built-in offering when it’s.. well, when it’s pretty terrible. Will this see enough adoption to warrant its creation? → Read More

Back in February, Skyfire (makers of the popular, Flash-enabled smartphone browser of the same name) announced that they’d snatched up Kolbysoft, the company behind the well-established Steel browser for Android. Today, we’re seeing the first fruits of that purchase coming to the market: Skyfire for Android is here. Skyfire’s flagship feature is that it supports Flash video playback, so you’d expect their Android port to do the same, right? And it does! It just does it… a bit differently. → Read More

By the time I got wind that Skyfire was looking for Alpha testers, the sign-up sheet had already been filled to the brim. Bummer, right?

Fear not! As luck may have (the “luck” here being for early adopters, if not necessarily Skyfire), a Beta copy just leaked out for all to enjoy. → Read More

You might want to take a seat, BlackBerry fans. Remember all those pictures and details about the BlackBerry port of the Skyfire browser that leaked way back in April of last year? Those are all you’re going to get for a while.

Skyfire CEO Jeff Glueck has just stepped out to announce that development of the BlackBerry port has been put on an indefinite hiatus, with the Android port becoming their primary focus for now. → Read More

We’ll keep this one brief, because the news is likely as much of a bummer for most as it is good news. Skyfire, which is still the only mobile browser able to churn through Flash, Silverlight, Quicktime, and just about any other media you throw at it, just opened up the signups for the Alpha test of their upcoming Android client. Hurray! We knew the Android port was coming after they bought up the already-established Android browser, Steel — we just didn’t think they were progressing this quickly. Here’s where the news goes sour. → Read More