The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘apple’

Apple doesn’t like HTC , not one bit.

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A cornucopia of Apple lawsuits

There are only two weeks left until the iPad’s April 3 launch date, and Apple has just started reaching out to developers to say that they’re accepting applications that were developed specifically for the device. We’ve included the Email below. The key takeaway: If you’re looking to have your app available at launch, you need to submit it by March 27, at which point Apple’s team will let you know if your application is ready for the grand opening.

The first few weeks after the iPad is released will be a huge gold rush opportunity, as users look to try out the device’s large screen for the first time. In short, if you can make it to one of the App Store’s ‘top apps’ lists, you’ll likely do very well for yourself. The only problem is that the vast majority of developers have never had access to an actual iPad — they’re all working off of emulators, save for a handful of extremely lucky developers who literally have their iPads chained to a desk. Developers can tweak their applications all they want on their computer monitors, but until they’ve actually gotten to try it out for themselves, they’ll have a hard time figuring out if their apps feel right.

I expect most developers will scramble to submit what they have by March 27, and that we’ll then see numerous updates immediately afterward as developers tweak button placement and other interface elements. Some developers may choose to simply wait until they have a device in their hands so that they can try out their apps before submitting, but the App Store’s discoverability issues make this a risky move (of course, given the hundreds or thousands of applications that will launch alongside the iPad, there’s no guarantee that you’ll get noticed on launch day, either).

Keep in mind that users will also be able to use scaled-up versions of iPhone applications on their iPads. Given the choice, though, there’s little doubt they’ll choose a native iPad app over an iPhone app every time.

One of Yahoo’s key chief technologists, Sam Pullara, is leaving the company to become an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) at Benchmark Capital. Pullara was the technologist how headed up the development of the the Yahoo! Open Application Platform, the Yahoo! Query Language and Yahoo! Pipes. His departure follows that of veteran Yahoo senior executive Ash Patel earlier this week.

Back in 2008, Yahoo was making a big push to open itself up to developers, and Pullara was one of the champions of that strategy. He was also Yahoo’s representative on the OpenSocial Foundation, which sought to create a counterweight to Facebook.

Pullara has been an EIR before. In 2004, he held that position at Accel Partners and created a startup called Gauntlet Systems, which he sold to Borland in 2006. At Benchmark, he will be looking for new startup opportunities. He will also be working again with Benchmark partner Peter Fenton, who was at Accel when Pullara was there. Pullara’s last day at Yahoo will be on April 1. Yahoo has no plans to hire a replacement.

Today, another Benchmark EIR, former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos, was named CEO of Eucalyptus Systems.

Jerome York – Jerry to the folks at Apple – joined the Apple board in 1997, the board that voted Steve Jobs back into the CEO position after a decade in the wilderness. York died of an aneurysm

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Tech world mourns the loss of Jerome York

In a brief statement, Apple has announced that one of the company’s board members, Jerome B. York, has passed away. The veteran auto-industry executive was hospitalized in serious condition after a burst brain aneurysm this morning, according to the WSJ, and he apparently died soon after.

York was chairman, president and CEO of Harwinton Capital. A former CFO of IBM and Chrysler, and former vice chairman of Tracinda, he joined Apple’s Board of Directors in 1997.

He was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1938. He graduated from the United States Military Academy, and received an MS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an MBA from the University of Michigan.

Trained as an engineer, York worked his way up through Chrysler to become CFO.

You can read more background on the man here.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs in a statement said: “It’s been a privilege to know and work with Jerry, and I’m going to miss him a lot.”

Jack Dorsey’s Square was unveiled last December as an innovative way to let people quickly and easily accept physical credit card payments from their mobile phone.

Since then, Square, which has been in limited beta, has been used in a variety of use cases. E.g. philanthopic organization charity:water recently used Square at the SXSW festival to collect donations.

A local flower cart in San Francisco is using Square to take payments from customers. Denim, a jeans store in New York is using Square to take payments from shoppers. We even used Square at this year’s Crunchies to raise money for the UCSF Foundation.

Here’s how Square works: A small device attaches to the phone via the headset/microphone jack. The device gets the power it needs to send data to the phone from the swipe of the card, and sends the information over the microphone connection. The device is compatible with both the iPhone and Android. It’s similar in some ways to PayPal, but anyone can now accept physical credit card payments, too. With no contracts or monthly fees. People are sent receipts by text and email. If you haven’t seen Square in action, check out this video.

And now, a new use case has popped up for Square: political fundraising.

Square is currently being used in two campaigns. Silicon Valley VC Josh Becker, who is running for state assembly in California’s 21st district, has been using Square at fundraising events. And lawyer Reshma Saujani, who is running for Congress in New York’s 14th district, is using Square at campaign fundraising events, including at an event in San Francisco on Friday.

Square is ideal for taking money at political fundraisers for several reasons.

Currently, if you want to donate money at a fundraising event, you often have to fill out a form and hand over a check or cash at the event. If you don’t have your checkbook or cash handy (which, many of us don’t), credit cards are the only option. You can write down your credit card number and info for fundraisers to charge at a later date, but you have to trust that the fundraiser keeps track of that information and paper.

With Square, there is both a convenience added for both the payee and fundraiser. The donation is instantly processed, and Square will send the receipt via SMS or email to the payee. Of course, political contributions and donations are a little more complicated because of the reporting requirements associated with donations.

For many types of donations, you need to take the donator’s name, occupation, address, and other information. Currently Square doesn’t allow users to input all of this information but Dorsey says that they are releasing Square’s API to allow fundraisers to build additional applications on top of Square, where they could input all of the necessary data. Once this is enabled, Square will allows fundraisers to eliminate paper collection and payments all together.

Dorsey says he’s already getting significant interest from politicians and political candidates across the country, but because Square is in limited beta, is being selective about how the service is distributed. Dorsey expects Square to be open to the public sometime in the next few months.

Valued at $40 million even before launch, Square is off to an impressive start. And technology’s most notable investors and leaders seem to think so as well.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, investor Ron Conway, Google’s Marissa Mayer, Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley, Digg creator Kevin Rose, investor Esther Dyson and a host of others have invested in Square. The company also raised funding from Khosla Ventures.

According to Opera Software, downloads of its latest desktop browser (10.5) have increased in number significantly after Microsoft started offering Windows users in Europe a choice in browser with a so-called ballot screen.

The Norwegian software maker says that on average, more than half of the European downloads of Opera’s latest browser come directly from that Choice Screen.

The increase represents more than a doubling from the normal download numbers. At the beginning of this month, Opera touted that browser downloads actually tripled at first, so maybe that growth rate won’t last forever.

I’m also very curious if Mozilla, Google and Apple are spotting the same trend for their respective browsers.

According to plans Microsoft has agreed to with the European Commission, the rollout of the Choice Screen will continue into May for existing Windows computers and for five more years on new installations.

No wonder Opera Software is trying to push for a global roll-out of the choice screen.

The following numbers are the percentages of country downloads of Opera’s latest desktop browser that originate from the Choice Screen, as part of the total Opera 10.5 numbers:

Not an easy thing to conceptualize indeed, but according to eMarketer there will be more mobile Internet users in China than the entire population of the US by the end of this year.

For your reference, the 2010 estimate of the size of the United States population stands at roughly 310 million people according to Wikipedia, so that’s a shitload of people browsing the Web from their phones right there.

The report, which you can purchase here, also says the number of mobile Internet users in China will grow fast to reach a staggering 957 million, and that the country will count approximately 1.3 billion mobile subscribers by 2014.

eMarketer points out that those mobile Internet users do not currently monetize as well as smaller mobile audiences in, say, the States, which means that mobile advertising spending levels in China are still low relative to the size of the mobile Web user base. Also, the company highlights another key trend in China, which is that mobile subscriber growth is actually slowing while mobile Internet user growth is accelerating.

More in this blog post (via Twitter).

(Photo credit: Flickr / lime*monkey / CC BY 2.0)

Mobile analytics startup Motally is bringing in a seasoned analytics executive, John Forese, as the startup’s new CEO. Forese was previously Nielsen Mobile’s Senior Vice President of Product Management. Additionally former Google Vice President of Product Development, Doug Garland, has joined Motally’s board of directors.

Prior to his tenure at Nielsen Mobile, Forese was a senior vice president at mobile metrics and research company Telephia where he led overall product strategy and had P&L responsibility across the company’s product lines. Telephia was eventually acquired by Nielsen in 2007. Forese also worked at several telecom and technology based start-ups, including Flashpoint Technologies, Netro and Pacific Bell Mobile Systems.

In addition to their new CEO, Motally has also elected Doug Garland to its board. Prior to joining Google, Doug was an executive in residence at the venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers. Earlier, he was a senior vice president at Yahoo!, where he led the launch of the broadband access business and the company’s mobile efforts.

Motally has been expanding and innovating at a rapid pace over the past several months. The startup just launched an analytics platform for mobile game developers, rolled out an extension of their mobile analytics to include content developed on Apple’s iPad and released a flexible API.

Currently, Motally supports analytics for applications on the iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry platforms as well as the mobile web. For a young startup, Motally has seen significant traction as a mobile analytics provider. Backed by renown investor Ron Conway, Motally’s clients include Twitter, Yelp, Fandango and Verizon.

SXSW Interactive is now over. While a clear winner in the “Location War” has yet to be determined, the truth is that many of the location-based services won, as all of them got a huge amount of exposure over the past week. And look for that trend to continue in a big way, as Apple is now highlighting several of them in the App Store.

As you can see in the images in this post, Apple is highlighting five of the key location players both in the App Store on iTunes, as well as on the App Store on the iPhone itself. On the iTunes version, the apps have their own area right below the “New & Noteworthy” area. On the iPhone, the five apps takes up the top five slots of the “What’s Hot” area. Simply put: This promotion is huge.

So what are the five apps? The names should be familiar to you because we’ve covered each very recently. Foursquare (our coverage), Gowalla (our coverage), Loopt (our coverage), Whrrl 3 (our coverage), and MyTown (our coverage). I’d like to think Apple picked these guys to feature after reading TechCrunch, but who knows what goes on behind the doors of the secretive company.

As any app developer will tell you, having your app featured can make or break it. Even the two most-hyped players, Foursquare and Gowalla (the two key players in the most recent Location War), stand to benefit from Apple’s ability to reach all kinds of different audiences with the App Store. Foursquare announced earlier that it had gained 100,000 new users in just the past 10 days — that type of growth may actually continue as long as Apple keeps featuring the app.

The other three, have all benefited in the past from previous Apple promotions. Notably, this helped MyTown surpass both Foursquare and Gowalla in size in under a month after its launch.

Game on, says Apple.