At long last, Apple appears to finally be approaching a launch date for iTunes in Russia — and it could come as soon as tomorrow. A tipster has forwarded us an email, in Russian, inviting a small group of people to an iTunes event in Moscow on the evening of December 4. The email does not give much away, simply noting that team iTunes will be holding a musical evening, and that it’s a small… → Read More
What is it about taxi startups launching in time for LeWeb? Then again, you can’t beat a captive audience. And so it is that Taxibeat, the hail-a-cab smartphone app and taxi driver marketplace, has launched in Paris this week, just in time to help ferry a bunch of geeks to the LeWeb conference and countless after parties.
For Taxibeat it represents a fairly aggressive international roll-out… → Read More
Two weeks ago, France Telecom-owned carrier Orange announced Party Call, an app Orange said it created in “partnership” with Facebook for users to make mobile calls via the social network. Now a small startup, Telesocial, says the idea was theirs first. → Read More
For the first time in the history of comScore’s MobiLens U.S. mobile market share report, Apple has come in second overall among handset OEMs. Apple grew its U.S. market share by 1.5 percentage points from 16.3 to 17.8 percent in the three month period ending October 2012, according to the report. During the same period, Samsung also saw its share grow, but only by 0.7 percentage points, from 25.6… → Read More
The HTC 8S is a Windows Phone 8 handset that’s lightly specced compared to its more powerful sibling, the HTC 8X. The 8X is HTC’s flagship phone based on Microsoft’s mobile OS, and apparently the only one the U.S. market may ever see, according to an official statement from HTC issued late Friday afternoon. The budget 8S won’t make it to U.S. shores, an HTC official told Engadget, which shouldn’t… → Read More
Cinemagram, a startup founded in Montreal that’s now moving to San Francisco, today announced an $8.5 million Series A round via AllThingsD. The investment comes from Menlo Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Real Ventures and Atlas, and stands as an exception to the decidedly reserved climate for follow-on capital after a startup’s seed round. So what’s Cinemagram’s secret? → Read More
Kngine (pronounced kin-gin, short for knowledge engine) is one of those startups with a goal that’s both straightforward and impressively ambitious — it wants to build an app that can answer any question. In fact, when you open the app, it prompts you to “ask me anything.”
When I watched the promotional video (embedded below), the first thing I thought of was Apple’s Siri. And while Kngine… → Read More
Foodspotting is launching a new feature today that allows restaurants to promote themselves to hungry locals — and also provides one of the first big opportunities for the startup to make money.
Co-founder and CEO Alexa Andrzejewski said that the app’s development has had three distinct stages. First, it needed to recruit the “foodspotters” themselves, namely the people who want to share… → Read More
Apple wants to ensure that customer experience with its iPhone 5 lives up to what the company is promising, and it will take strong measures to do so, including telling carriers when they can and can’t make the phone’s LTE capabilities available to subscribers. Generally speaking, carriers test to ensure devices meet their own network standards, but Apple seems to be in a strong enough position to… → Read More
Apple has just announced the official release date of the iPad mini, 4th generation iPad and iPhone 5 in China. The tablets will go on sale next Friday, December 7 in that country, and the iPhone 5 will arrive on December 14, a week afterwards. This comes following news that the iPhone 5 has met all the regulatory requirements in China it needed to go on sale. → Read More
According to a new report from mobile app analytics firm App Annie, Google’s Play software store is gaining on rival Apple’s iOS app marketplace. The revenue gulf between the two stores is often cited as a reason why Apple is able to attract more top-tier developers and quality titles, so a lessening of the gap between the two in that respect is particularly significant. → Read More
Downloads on the iOS platform jumped by about 33 percent after the iPhone 5 launched in late September, according to Fiksu, a Boston-based app marketing startup that helps developers use lots of different channels to get users.
The seasonal bump up is actually pretty typical. App makers usually see a boost in downloads after Apple releases a new generation of devices. Around this time, buyers… → Read More
BlackBerrys are still wildly popular with a certain cash-strapped sub-set of mobile users in parts of Europe: namely teenagers. A wide-ranging research report looking at mobile users’ habits in France, Spain and the U.K found that BlackBerry penetration amongst teenagers in the UK and Spain was two and three times higher respectively than the overall “mobile media user” population. → Read More
The iPhone 5 received its final regulatory approval, the crucial “network access license” from China yesterday, but the original report of that news from the Wall Street Journal only found approval for the China Telecom version of the device. Now, however, Chinese news sources report that the iPhone 5 variant which works with China Unicom has also received network access approval. → Read More
Browser maker Opera has released its 2012 State of the Mobile Web report which measures social networking popularity by looking at the number of Opera Mini users who visit them. Data is aggregated from the servers powering the browser’s data compression — enabling the company to build up an (anonymous) picture of the mobile social web across more than 190 countries. → Read More
Plyfe, a startup that allows brands to promote themselves through games and rewards, is moving onto mobile today — Plyfe games can now be played on the company’s mobile website, as well as embedded in smartphone apps. The company is also announcing that it has raised $750,000 in bridge funding.
The basic idea: Games are a much more engaging way than traditional advertising for brands to… → Read More
Android phones! There are some that I love. The HTC One X was one of those, thanks to a very attractive external package alongside an Android skin (Sense) that had a fairly light touch and didn’t mess with most of Android’s good features, but brought some nice additional touches to the mix. The HTC One X+ is like the One X, but made better in nearly every important respect. Not surprisingly, that… → Read More
Apple has yet to release the unlocked iPhone 5 in the U.S., even though early on they let images leak depicting pricing of that device on its website. Now a new report from 9t05Mac claims that the company will start selling unlocked iPhones as early as tonight via its online store, with physical retail availability coming shortly thereafter. As we reported at launch, unlocked pricing for the… → Read More
Google has just posted research findings on how certain factors affect the launch of a smartphone, with data coming directly from search. According to author Matt Seitz, the senior analytical lead at the Google Agency Blog, searches predict smartphone sales “with over 90 percent correlation throughout the launch cycle.”
With this data, the search giant has uncovered the most important factors… → Read More
Waterloo-based mobile messaging app Kik, while immensely successful in its category, faced a problem: once you’ve nailed cross-platform messaging, and added group features, where do you go from there? Do too much, and you risk watering down the core product, the one that has helped Kik sign up over 30 million registered users who are coming on board at a rate of about 100,000 new user per day. Do… → Read More
Sincerely, the company known for its mobile photo postcard and greeting card apps, is today expanding upon its vision to become a full-on mobile gifting service with the launch of its latest application, Sesame. The new app allows users to browse, select and send themed gift boxes from their mobile phone. → Read More
The 500 Startups-backed app analytics firm SearchMan is debuting a new tool for mobile developers looking to quickly get a sense of how discoverable their application is inside App Store Search. This metric is more important than ever, following the changes to the iOS 6 App Store in September which have impacted developer rankings by removing or moving sections around and introducing a… → Read More
Xbox Music, Microsoft’s streaming music competitor to Spotify and iTunes that began to roll out to Xbox and Windows-powered devices in October, today filled in one part of the picture for how it will make revenues from the free portion of the service. Triton Digital has been appointed to provide audio advertising for it. Triton will also provide audience analytics so that Microsoft can make better… → Read More
For Quantified Self devotees, data hounds and fitness enthusiasts, it’s a good time to be alive. Recent improvements in sensor technology, battery life and connectivity (and lower costs) have given rise to a slew of wearable gadgets and apps that make it easy to track and make sense of our health data. Yet, as the space heats up and gets noisier, some have begun to ask: Do we really need another… → Read More
Poznan, Poland-based startup Zapstreak has just brought its AirPlay-style media streaming solution for Android out of beta, making the SDK it provides available to developers worldwide after a six-month extended testing period. The company’s tech allows Android developers to build music, video or picture-streaming right into their app. But will new options change Zapstreak’s chances at success? → Read More
Social video chat app Rounds has reason to be proud: the company has raised a total of $5 million in funding and now has more than six million users across the breadth of its platform, which includes Facebook, Chrome, and desktop. Today, however, the company is launching a brand new mobile app for the first time called Rounds Video Chat Hangout.
Along with facilitating a standard video chat… → Read More
The iPhone’s Calendar app is pretty good overall, and that’s something that even Fantastical creator and Flexibits co-founder Michael Simmons admitted to in an interview regarding the launch of Fantastical for iPhone today. But “pretty good” also means there’s plenty of room for improvement, and that’s where Simmons and co-founder Kent Sutherland saw opportunity. → Read More
Instead of anxiously searching Google or WebMD, people would rather turn to a real human being for answers to their pressing health questions — preferably one who’s been to school for 10 years. The problem is, of course, that visits to the doctor’s office cost money. Plus, you need an appointment and you’ll probably sit in a waiting room. Wellsphere’s Ron Gutman founded HealthTap in 2010 to give… → Read More
Things seem to be on track for the iPhone 5 to meet its December release timeline in Greater China, since the device has now received approval for the final piece in the regulatory puzzle required for it to go on sale. The Wall Street Journal reports that it has now obtained its “network access” license, and the notice mentions China Telecom by name, though not a version of the phone that would… → Read More
BlackBerry 10 devices are still months away from being launched but RIM is ramping up the noise about its next gen platform. In its latest play, it’s hoping to woo app-building platform Appcelerator’s 390,000 Titanium cross-platform mobile app developers to port their apps to BlackBerry10 — offering a variety of incentives. → Read More
The 6th Annual Crunchies Awards
San Francisco
New York City
