The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘application’

Pelago knows that just about every location-based app in the world is seeking coverage right now just prior to SXSW where they will all battle Highlander-style. So they approached me with a pretty smart pitch: curing the “social rut.” What they mean by that is these days, despite the prevalence of social networks, people are actually less social than ever because they’re being roped into playing games like Farmville and Mafia Wars for hours on end. Sitting in their rooms. Alone.

While that may be a part of social networking (a rather large, hugely profitably part), it’s not really social. That’s why location-based networks excite me: they have the potential to bridge social networking with actual social activity. And that’s exactly how Pelago is positioning the latest version of its location-based app, Whrrl 3.

The core idea behind the new iPhone app (which launched in the store today) is that people inspire others to do things. So when you see a friend is out doing something fun, you may want to join them. Or it may entice you to go out and do something else, and hope others see it on Whrrl and join in. It’s the grouping of people with similar interests into “Societies” that is a key to Whrrl 3. For example, a basic society is that each venue in the application has its own set of “regulars.” If you visit the place enough times, you unlock the badge making you a regular, and giving you access to member-level activities, such as recommendations and specials nearby.

One of these societies, launching alongside the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas this week is the Austin Underground which “will provide members with at-your-fingertips access to the hottest parties, events, and other fun things to do at the conference,” according to Whrrl. Over 50 merchants in Austin are participating to provide exclusive offers, apparently. To unlock the membership, you have to check-in at some of the following places: Four Seasons Hotel Austin, Outback Steakhouse, Cool River Cafe, Chuggin’ Monkey, J Black’s, Red Fez and Third Base, and others.

Other key features of Whrrl 3 include Recommendations — you create these (with photos, if you choose), to let others in your social graph (or your society) know fun things to do in an area. Ideas, are recommendations served up to you from societies you’re a part of, your friends, or Whrrl’s algorithms. Fun Facts are shown each time you check-in to a venue, with information about it. And of course, there is a point system (Influence Points) that turn the whole thing into one big game. What’s interesting about Whrrl’s game is that you can get point by inspiring others to do things with the app. Points also allow you to level up in your societies for more special deals.

All of this is an extension of the “footstreams” idea that Whrrl launched last December. That’s where they also first introduced the society idea as well. The key to both of those is about real people doing real things in the real world.  That, in turn, shows what you’re interested in, and allows Whrrl to clump you into these groups with out like-minded people.

So that all sounds great, but will anyone use the app? After all, adoption has been a problem in the past and this isn’t the first time Whrrl is pivoting its product. In fact, they actually did exactly a year ago with Whrrl 2 just before SXSW.

Their main problem is convincing people to use Whrrl instead of the current location-based darlings, Foursquare and Gowalla. That’s going to be difficult because those networks are quickly building up social graphs and once those are established, users are less likely to leave. So Whrrl needs something to differentiate itself, and while their pitch to me is good, it’s an entirely different matter convincing users. And the things that would seem to help differentiate networks like Whrrl actually hurt them sometimes. For example, since location-based services are still new to so many people, it’s best to keep things as simple as possible. But Whrrl is piling on features that, while maybe cool, are likely to confuse new users.

Still, if Whrrl is able to secure some solid deals around Austin to get people using the app and checking-in, that could certainly get people using it. Of course, Foursquare and Gowalla have their own deals too. Then the problem becomes one I’ve had this past week while testing out all these location apps: fatigue. I can’t possibly check-in with each of these apps each time I move from place to place. The people I’m with have started rolling their eyes at me while I take my 10 minutes to check-in to all the different apps.

I’m not saying there can be only one. But one would sure be nice.

Find Whrrl 3 in the App Store here.

It’s a little surprising to see a Twitter application coming out of Fuze Box (formerly CallWave), which creates visual collaboration product. The company has clearly caught the Twitter bug (albeit a little late) and today is launching Tweetshare, an third party Twitter app that allows anyone to immediately publish any type of content to the web, including HD video, presentations, images and more and automatically start Twitter conversation threads around their content. It’s kind of like FriendFeed meets Twitpic or Twitvid. Tweetshare has also rolled out a companion iPhone app that allows mobile users to upload content, tweet and create discussions on the Tweetshare platform.

A social alternative to static landing pages, Tweetshare aims to be a Twitterfied-Facebook Fan Page. Twitter users can post relevant content, such as presentations, images, videos and PDFs, and can also Tweet from the platform. Any comments made on a Tweetshare page or similarly, made on Twitter in response to posted content is also threaded on the page. A free application, Tweetshare also provides measurement and analytics tools, including polling functionality and the ability for users to become a fan of a brand’s Tweetshare Fan Page. And similar to YouTube channels and Facebook pages, Tweetshare Fan Pages can be branded and customized.

The site is missing Facebook connect, but Fuze Box says this will be rolled out soon. Of course, Mixx offers branded Twitter channels through TweetMixx, which offer some of the functionality of Tweetshare. And Tweetmeme also offers a similar product. Its unclear if there is any monetization that can be made from the Tweetshare, but the application seems that it could be useful.

Fuze Box has a pretty unique history as far as startups go. CallWave was founded in 1998 and went public in 2004, trading on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol CALL. After reaching a peak soon thereafter of over $15 per share, the stock dropped steadily, dipping as low as 50 cents early this year. Deciding to cut its losses, the company delisted itself from NASDAQ on Monday after buying back shares from public shareholders at a 44% premium over the current market value and paying out a total of $10 million. Last summer, the company rebranded itself as Fuze Box and launched Fuze Meeting, which it’s pitting as a sleeker, lighter, and cheaper alternative to services like WebEx.

Although the company has experienced some tough times over the past few years, it appears to be in a better place now. And the startup is obviously broadening its product base. However, while a little late to the Twitter frenzy, Fuze Box is moving in the right direction.

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Remember that guy who made the DuckPhone iPhone app ?

Original post: 
Duckshead Revisited: Apple approves DuckPhone after minor changes

Last month, Google acquired reMail, the startup behind a very powerful application that brought full-text search to the iPhone. That’s great news for the reMail team, but it had a major downside: Google was effectively killing off the product by removing it from the App Store (though it would continue to function for users that had already downloaded the app). Fortunately, today comes news that reMail will continue to live on in some form: the company has just announced that it’s open sourcing the product. You can find the Google Code site for the project here.

Founder Gabor Cselle outlines what the product’s code can be helpful for:

As someone who is passionate about mobile email, my hope is that developers interested in making email-related apps can use reMail code as a starting point. Part of the reason email apps are hard is because you have to pay the tax of figuring out how to download email via IMAP, parse MIME messages, handle attachments, and store data. reMail has already solved these problems. If you have a great mobile email idea, I hope you will find reMail’s source code helpful in your quest.

There’s a good chance that we’ll soon see reworkings of the app for the iPhone: the project’s documentation specifically details how to get it up and running on the popular platform. The Google Code site also includes some ideas on how to improve the application, based on some of reMail’s most common feature requests (suggestions include implementation of a landscape mode, more compatible email account types, and improved autocomplete).

Google did something similar to EtherPad late last year, after it acquired the application’s developer AppJet. At first, EtherPad was simply going to shut down as the team moved to Australia to work on Google Wave. But after significant backlash, Google and AppJet quickly made moves to open source the project.

Android users have a new way to search their phones today, and it’s pretty damn cool. Google has just released a new application called Gesture Search that lets you search your phone’s contacts, bookmarks, applications, and music simply by scribbling out letters with your finger. No hunting and pecking — you just draw out each letter as if you’re finger painting. The new application is currently only available for devices running Eclair (Android 2.0, which is currently only found on the Nexus One and Verizon Droid).

Using Gesture Search is quite simple. First, you boot up the Gesture Search application, which you need to download from Android Market. After installing it, your phone will prompt you to ask if you want to add the application to your home screen (which you’ll probably want to do if you intend to use it with any frequency). Tap the application, and you’ll see a black screen, where you’re supposed to start drawing the first few letters of your query. As you complete each letter, the application will refine your results. If you mess up, you can delete the last letter by drawing a horizontal line to the left (you can delete the entire word by swiping to the right).

I’ve been playing with the new application, and the character recognition seems to work pretty well. It’s still too early to tell how useful this will be on a day-to-day basis, but it has potential. For one, it’s great for people who don’t like having to flick through long lists or use the phone’s integrated keyboard. And because everyone knows how to draw these letters by heart, it makes for a good way to search when you can’t keep your eyes on your phone (don’t take this as a recommendation to use it while driving, though — that’s never safe).

At long last, webOS has been granted a Facebook application worth its weight in kilobytes. A completely revamped version of the Facebook application has just gone live in the Palm App Catalog – and boy, is it an improvement.

Palm has offered some level of Facebook support on webOS since the launch of the Pixi – but as we noted in our Pixi review, calling what it had “Facebook support” was probably exaggerating. You could sync your Facebook contacts, read your news feed, and.. well, that’s it.

The new app, however…

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

Valve is in the midst of a media blitz at the moment — not that you’d notice, since their idea of a media blitz is secretly launching a complex alternate reality game, or emailing single novelty screenshots to six different media outlets. You could be forgiven for expecting a full-site skin for 1UP, or a week-long series of “developer diaries” on IGN — that’s what every other game company out there thinks makes games sell. At any rate, GDC is coming up and the expected announcements are Steam on OS X (definite) and possibly a peek at Portal 2, Half-Life: Episode 3, or both (speculative).

Of course, the idea of Steam on the Mac makes fanboys of all stripes froth delicately at the mouth — but while an excellent game-distribution client like Steam would be welcome on the Mac, it may not be the gaming renaissance people are hoping for. It’s worth taking a bit of time to look at, since gaming is increasingly a major source of revenue and a wedge to increase market share. Let’s take a look at what Steam is up against.

Read the rest of this story on CrunchGear…

In the months following the iPhone App Store’s launch in July 2008, it became clear that the platform was turning into a gold rush.  Success stories of one-man companies earning $250,000 in a few months became common. And even though the odds of striking it rich were clearly much lower than the media portrayed, a huge surge of developers started building iPhone applications. Android Market, where meager sales have been the norm, was left in the dust.

Now Android Market is getting its own glimmers of hope. Edward Kim, who built the application “Car Locator” around five months ago, has just announced that he’s pulling in $13,000 a month from the application, which “started as a little side-project while [he] was vacationing with [his] family”.

Kim writes that the free version of the application has been downloaded around 70,000 times, while the paid application has been downloaded 6,590 times. The price was initially $1.99, but he moved it up to $3.99 (he notes that despite doubling the price, the number of downloads didn’t decrease too much).

So what was Kim’s secret to success? Well, a big part of it seems to have come from the fact that Car Locator is now a featured app on Android Market, which means Google more prominently displays it to users than ‘normal’ applications. Getting featured increased the app’s revenue by over four fold. This probably comes as bittersweet news to developers (you can’t exactly count on being featured by Google), but Kim says that he’s ranked between 100 and 200th place in the Market’s ‘Paid’ category, which means that there are probably at least 100 other applications seeing similar success.  Android Market is still far behind the App Store in many respects (except for openness), but it looks like it’s finally starting to mature.

Kim is very optimistic about the future of the platform, telling me “Android appears to have grown enough that developers can make some money off of it, but there’s not SO many developers that you’ll never get noticed.”

Here are some of Kim’s other observations:

• The application was netting an average of about $80-$100/day, until it became a featured app on the Marketplace. Since then, sales have been phenomenal, netting an average of $435/day, with a one day record of $772 on Valentine’s Day. Too bad I didn’t have a Valentines date this year — we would’ve gone somewhere real special!
• There appears to be clear peaks on the weekends and during holidays. This was always my hunch, but I think I can finally say this with certainty since the signal-to-noise ratio is much better now.
• Some may be quick to point out that a featured Android application is only able to net $400/day, while top iPhone apps make thousands. But the Android market appears to rotate applications in and out of the featured apps list in some psedo-random fashion. Every time I open the Marketplace app, the featured list is different and most of the time, I don’t even see my app on there.
• The price of the application was increased from $1.99 to $3.99. I ran a few price experiments and was surprised to see that though I doubled the price of the app, the number of purchases decreased by much less than half. Android users appear to have a willingness to pay more than a couple dollars for apps.
• Piracy appears to be an increasing problem. A quick search for Car Locator on Twitter reveals links where people can download the .apk file without paying. I tend to have the same attitude on piracy as Balsamiq, so I’m not too worried about it, but I would love to hear some typical statistics on Android piracy.

So say you’re really into Jersey Shore. And you want to make a phone like the duck phone in the show. And you’re like “Why not make an app that quacks like a duck and makes your phone quack like a duck?” Heck, it’s a free country, as far as you can tell. This is what our grandfathers fought the Battle of the Bulge for, right?

Well the cheese-eaters at Apple will say that your dumb quack app “contains minimal user functionality” and, as a result, deny your application to rock out on their App Store.

New York, the city that never sleeps, may finally meet its match. TechCrunch is coming, and we’re bringing three days of non-stop conference and startup-competition energy, May 24-26.

We call it TechCrunch Disrupt because we want to debate what’s really changing in media and technology right now, what’s causing disruption and what we need to do about it to survive and thrive in real time.

Each morning, we’ll explore media and technology disruption themes through hosted panel discussions, keynotes, roundtable conversations and select product demonstrations. We’ll bring the experts, thought leaders, top entrepreneurs and business leaders and others together to talk about what’s next. And why. With lots of audience participation.

Each afternoon, we take our morning debate into the field. New startups and products will be unveiled and will compete for recognition and a top prize in the Startup Battlefield.

This is a tournament-style launch platform where startups demo their products and impress the audience and panel of experts over multiple rounds of competition. Everyone gets stage time to show their stuff, and plenty of direct feedback. But then they’ll jump into head to head competition with the other startups.

Experts and seasoned veterans will be brought in to mentor and judge startups on product, business models, team, design and usability and more. And the final round will put startups in the hot seat where some of the most successful entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and business executives will grill them in front of the audience and see how they perform. It’ll be a little bit like pitching a top VC, except it will be done live on stage in front of thousands. Audience voting as well as expert feedback will factor into final competition scores.

One startup will emerge the overall winner and take home a $50,000 cash prize. But all of the startups get an incredible launch event for their product, and priceless feedback from people who can really help. And, best of all, it’s free for startups to launch at TechCrunch Disrupt. Save those dollars for your product.

Applications open today (March 1) and will be reviewed on a rolling basis through midnight pst, Friday, March 26. There are no fees to apply or compete in the Startup Battlefield, and startups from around the world are welcome to submit for consideration. In fact, we go out of our way to take help non-U.S. startups get the support they need during the application process to maximize their chances.

Where can you fit a battlefield in New York City, you ask? We found 100,000 square feet of space in the Soho-West Village neighborhood. We promise you haven’t been to a conference venue like this before. It’s actually an ex-Merrill Lynch office that’s available on short-term lease. It’s a perfect metaphor for disruption. And it gives us almost unlimited room for creativity, exhibits, lounges and demos. In typical TechCrunch style, save room for the after parties each night too.

Tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt are on sale now. Best rates are available through March 31.

Better to disrupt than be disrupted. Hope to see you there. More details will be coming on the Disrupt Blog.