The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Bump’s Mini-Pivot: Photo-Sharing From Your Phone By Bumping With Your Keyboard
- BBC Bets On HTML5 Games; Invests Millions In Mobile Game Creation Platform Spaceport.io
- Lost Amongst Its 60 Million Travel Tips? TripAdvisor Highlights Reviews By Friends Of Friends
- Mobile Payments Startup Beamit Raises $2.4M From Founder’s Co-op, Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt & Others
- Meteor: Etherpad Founder & Other Rockstars Team Up To Make Web App Development A Breeze
- After Years Of Holding Out, Verizon Wireless Will Start Charging $30 Upgrade Fee On April 22
- U.S. Files Antitrust Charges Against Apple, Book Publishers (UPDATE)
- Amazon Now Lets You Trade In Your Old CDs In Exchange For Gift Cards
- Amazon, eBay Among Latest To Add Pinterest Buttons
- With 350 Investors On Hand, TechStars Debuts New Cloud Accelerator’s Inaugural Batch
- Attn. Evernote & Pinterest: Springpad’s New Social Experience Turns Interests Into Action
- Google+ Gets A Big Refresh With New Navigation, A Redesigned Stream, A Dedicated Hangouts Page & More
- RIM’s Updating Spree Adds BBM Support To Their Facebook, Twitter, Travel And Music Apps
- Want A Google Hangout But Without Google? YC-Alum Meetings.io Have A Solution For You
- How French Presidential Candidates Can Learn To Spell ‘Entrepreneur’
- Uh-Oh: Nokia Lowers Its Q1 Forecast On Pressures In Emerging Markets, Margins On Smartphones
- Jon Stewart Tackles Google Project Glass And Facebook Buying Instagram [Video]
- Citrix Acquires Cloud-Based Social Business Collaboration Platform Podio
- OneID Grabs $7M From Khosla & North Bridge To Replace Usernames And Passwords
- AppCentral: Enterprise App Store Nabs Top McAfee Execs, BlueRun Ventures Co-founder
| Bump’s Mini-Pivot: Photo-Sharing From Your Phone By Bumping With Your Keyboard Posted: 11 Apr 2012 09:05 AM PDT  Bump, mobile sharing app that lets users exchange photos and information by bumping their phones together, is getting in touch with a new device: the computer keyboard. And it appears to also be taking on a new frontier: cloud-based photo-sharing. A new, very simple service that the company is currently running in beta lets someone using the app select a photo on their phone, bump their space bar with the phone, and then see the image magically appear on the screen. From there, a user can (so far) keep it in the Bump cloud, download it to their computer, post it to Facebook or send someone a link. Photos.bu.mp is very basic at the moment, and Bump itself hasn’t done much yet promote it. There’s precious little info on the site itself, too — although that make discovering what it does part of the fun. According to this post from the Dutch blog iPhoneclub, it seems to only work if your phone and computer are on the same network (that is, both on a WiFi network, which is what I used to test it). But it is a very nifty little trick and a great alternative for getting pictures from your phone to computer, and beyond — especially when they are big files. There are other options for how Bump could use this technology for longer term. For example, if you are buying something online, and you have payment information stored in your phone you could use the phone-tap-to-space-bar route to quickly pay for things (reminiscent of how NFC will supposedly one day work for all of us). Payments are one of the new areas of service that Bump has been exploring, with a recent PayPal integration. Bump, which currently has somewhere north of 75 million installs of its app on iPhone and Android devices, has, as we’ve pointed out before, so far cornered the market for the mobile-to-mobile sharing space. It’s services like this one using the space bar that point to just how much potential that simple idea has.
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| BBC Bets On HTML5 Games; Invests Millions In Mobile Game Creation Platform Spaceport.io Posted: 11 Apr 2012 09:00 AM PDT  Spaceport.io, a HTML5, mobile game creation platform, has raised a strategic round of funding from a number of investors including BBC Worldwide and YouWeb, a previous investor. While financial terms of the funding were not not disclosed, we hear the round was in the millions. Spaceport allows game developers to build a game once, using Javascript, and have it play across all smartphone operating systems, with a native app-like experience and fast performance. The web-based games run as a hybrid HTML5 – native app, and the code for the game is written once, in a simple scripting language, so that they can then run on any device. And developers can also create native iOS apps as well using Spaceport. Basically, Spaceport allows developers continue writing games with Adobe's Flash desktop-based authoring and content creation tools while making the games instantly usable on iOS, Android and HTML5. The platform automatically converts Flash animations created in Adobe tools as “SWF” files into Spaceport vector graphics. These are then rendered on iOS and Android devices by the high performance GPU-based rendering engine in Spaceport as opposed to the much slower and battery-hogging Flash plug-in which utilizes the CPU. As part of the investment, BBC Worldwide will be using Spaceport.io's technology to design a number of games and apps. Spaceport.io’s Chairman Peter Relan tells us that the BBC intends to develop three types of applications : pure games, edutainment apps, as well as pure entertainment apps. Robert Nashak, BBC Worldwide EVP Digital Entertainment & Games said of the partnership: "Spaceport is the leading HTML5 game development platform for creating high-performance game applications. This partnership signals our continued support of innovative new businesses like spaceport.io and will allow fans of BBC Worldwide brands to access to our latest games on a wide variety of platforms and operating systems." BBC Worldwide has already been playing in the game development space, releasing almost 40 titles with over 6 million physical and download versions of games such as Top Gear Stunt School and Doctor who Mazes of Time. The first project from BBC Worldwide and Spaceport.io is due for launch summer 2012. The new funding will be used to hire additional staff as well as develop Spaceport.io’s HTML5 technology and flash compatible native performance technology. A deal with the BBC is a big deal for the company. Until now, Spaceport.io has been focused on the Indie game developer community, explains Relan. A partnership with a major media organization should help to expand the reach of the platform.
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| Lost Amongst Its 60 Million Travel Tips? TripAdvisor Highlights Reviews By Friends Of Friends Posted: 11 Apr 2012 08:59 AM PDT  Paralysis can set in quickly when you’re faced with the infinitude of products and reviews on sprawling sites like Amazon or Yelp. To help you find your way, TripAdvisor has just begun showing reviews by Facebook friends of friends atop results. The site already featured tips from friends, but with 60 million reviews on the site, surfacing content from friends of friends (FoF) means you’re 10x more likely to get help from someone you’re connected to. TripAdvisor pulled in a staggering $650 million in revenue with a 30% profit margin last year. Spotlighting FoF reviews could lead to less exhausted bounces and more commissions on sales. Other big content sites should look to get friend of friendly too. Facebook and TripAdvisor have been on a long journey together. Five years ago TripAdvisor launched the viral hit profile app Cities I’ve Visited. It added the useful but controversial Instant Personalization to automatically feature content from friends without the need to authenticate. Most recently it hooked Cities I’ve Visited into the Open Graph to auto-publish where you’ve been. TripAdvisor knows the value of socially relevant content as well as anyone. 15 million of its reviews of hotels, restaurants, and sights were published by Facebook connected users, allowing them to show up in the FoF highlights. When you search within TripAdvisor, you’ll first see places reviewed by friends, then FoF, and then all the others sorted by popularity. Drill into a destination and you’ll see reviews by friends, then FoF up top. You won’t see the name of the FoF, just that “Eric Eldon and Kim-Mai Cutler are friends with the reviewer”. If you don’t want your own reviews showing up to 1st- or 2nd-degree connections, you can opt out in your privacy settings. Regarding its vast sea of content and content-heavy pages (see above), TripAdvisor’s VP of Global Product Adam Medros tells me, “It can be overwhelming, we hear that from users all the time. Some people love the immersive travel advice experience and want to dig in, but others just want to know what’s the travel experience that’s best for me.” Review and ecommerce sites are just going to keep piling up reviews. No amount of browsing and search options can make sense of it all. But FoF content is more attractive and trusted. By mirroring “Oh hey, my friend told me about this awesome hotel in Bangkok. You should stay there”, TripAdvisor and other sites can lead us where we want to go.
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| Mobile Payments Startup Beamit Raises $2.4M From Founder’s Co-op, Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt & Others Posted: 11 Apr 2012 08:35 AM PDT  Mobile payments platform Beamit, which focuses on international money transfers between the U.S. and developing markets, has just closed a $2.4 million seed round led by Founder’s Co-op, with participation from Bezos Expeditions (the personal investment company of Jeff Bezos), TomorrowVentures (the investment vehicle for Eric Schmidt) and a small group of angel investors. The funds will be used to further product development as the company moves towards public availability, currently slated for Q3 2012. The company says the first market being targeted is the Philippines. Beamit CEO Matt Oppenheimer formerly ran Barclays Bank’s mobile banking unit in Kenya, which has given him first-hand experience in both mobile banking and the challenges that come from working in developing markets. “Before starting Beamit, I was living in Nairobi, Kenya where I was running Mobile and Internet Banking Initiatives for Barclay's Bank Kenya,” explains Oppenheimer. “Many Kenyans received money in an old and antiquated way using a cash-based system on both ends but it was an expensive and a painful customer experience. I knew that there was the opportunity to leverage digital channels, including mobile phones, to improve the lives of our customers, so I returned to the USA in May 2011 to start Beamit.” Oppenheimer partnered with Josh Hug, Chief Product Officer, during the TechStars Seattle 2011 program. Hug, whose past experience was CEO and co-founder of Shelfari, a social reading startup acquired by Amazon in 2008, gives Beamit its Bezos connection. Says Oppenheimer of his partner, “he is committed to reducing inefficiencies across borders and bringing transparency to this market. His decision to partner with me was a game changer as his product and startup experience perfectly compliment my financial services and emerging markets background.” He also notes that Hug’s passion for the space arises from his partner’s own global travels (Oppenheimer says he himself has visited 30 countries and worked in three), as well as his family connections. The startup is all about meeting the demand for international remittances – that is, the sending and receiving of funds internationally, which today is still often done through physical branches for both the deposits and withdrawal of the cash. According to the World Bank, $374 billion in remittances are transfered home every year, with the average cost of a $300 transfer over $27 (9.3%). As Beamit rolls into beta, the startup is now inviting a select number of customers to transfer money from the U.S. to the Philippines, a country that receives roughly $7 billion in annual transfers from the U.S. Sign up to get on the waiting list here. Seattle-based Beamit had previously raised $750,000 in angel financing. The new $2.4M round of equity financing includes the conversion of the $750K convertible note.
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| Meteor: Etherpad Founder & Other Rockstars Team Up To Make Web App Development A Breeze Posted: 11 Apr 2012 08:30 AM PDT  Web apps look a lot different today than they did a decade ago. Today, in the era of smart clients, web and native apps have to communicate with an array of distributed cloud services, and, while legacy infrastructure remains, these new frameworks present ever-trickier problems for app developers. Having to deal with creating software that runs across data centers, communicates with intelligent devices, and integrates with software built by scores of third-parties? Not so simple. Launching without much fanfare today is a new startup called Meteor that is looking to significantly reduce the friction inherent to developing modern web apps with “a new application platform for this new era.” According to the startup’s mission statement, the platform is based on “smart packages,” or bundles of code that are essentially adaptable, allowing them to run on a client or a cloud service and can “manage their lifetime inside the modern distributed environment.” And even though the team behind Meteor is small at this point, it’s packing a lot of talent, as the co-founders include Geoff Schmidt, an inventor of audio fingerprinting, one of the original authors of decentralized web TV platform, Miro, co-founder of MixApp, and early employee at Asana; Matt DeBargalis, the founder and operator of fundraising platform ActBlue; Nick Martin, who most recently was building the infrastructure behind Mochi Media and who co-founded MixApp along with Schmidt; and David Greenspan, the author of Etherpad, which he sold to Google before going to work on Google Wave and Google App Engine. Greenspan is also the founder of AppJet. From what we can tell, the team has been working on Meteor for about eight months, before soft-launching today. Meteor remains in “early preview,” meaning that its platform is still in flux, with “major API changes” likely in each release, according to the startup’s website. Without stumbling through a more technical description, for a little more on that, you check out the site’s FAQ, Meteor’s goal seems to be to radically simplify the process of building powerful apps, apps that will be prepared “to handle the next two decades of technological change.” As developing apps and writing software is a painful, demanding process, Meteor wants to find a new way to create software that is simple, elegant, and is accessible to as many people as possible. According to the site, Meteor is open-source software licensed under the GPL, and v1.0 of the platform will be made available in “more than a month, less than a year,” and it’s going to “mature faster than any framework you could afford to build in-house, unless you’re Google or Facebook.” Judging by the promotional blurbs about Meteor on its home page, this ambition seems justified, with words of support from Facebook and Asana Co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, Posterous co-founder and Y Combinator partner, Garry Tan, and Founder of Graffiti Labs, Ted Suzman. As a matter of fact, not long after launch, Tan tweeted his approval of Meteor, calling it the “dawn of a new era of JavaScript.” Look out, tweet below!
It remains unclear as to whether or not Meteor has raised any outside funding, or whether the team plans to bring on additional staffers. We’ve reached out to the team, and will update when we learn more. For more, check out Meteor at home here, or check out the startup’s video walk-through below:
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| After Years Of Holding Out, Verizon Wireless Will Start Charging $30 Upgrade Fee On April 22 Posted: 11 Apr 2012 07:46 AM PDT  All good things, as they say, must come to an end. For years now, Verizon has been the only one of the Big Four wireless carriers not to charge their customers an upgrade fee when they re-signed a two year contract, but that's all about to change. Starting on April 22, Verizon will start charging a $30 upgrade fee whenever an existing customer extends their contract in order to snag some new hardware. According to a statement put out by Big Red, the new fee will help the company "continue to provide customers with the level of service and support they have come to expect." That apparently includes Verizon's online support tools, their in-person Wireless Workshops, and "consultations with experts who provide advice and guidance on devices." AT&T enacted a similar move earlier this year when they doubled their upgrade fee from $18 to $36, which put their fee right alongside Sprint’s in terms of cost. At the time, I half-jokingly wrote that I hoped Verizon wouldn't take the hint considering the two carriers history of gleaning ideas from from each other — as it turns out, being right sucks. It’s worth noting that T-Mobile’s upgrade fee is still sitting pretty at $18, though I have to wonder if they too will jump on the bandwagon. In fairness, it’s a fee that doesn’t come into play but once every two years or so (unless something tragic happens to your device before that), but it makes for an unsightly bill that can temper the joy of new phone ownership. Families in particular will have it rough — the bill for a bog-standard four-person family plan could easily double if everyone gets a new phone at the same time. Verizon notes that budget-conscious consumers can trade in their old phones in an attempt to offset the fee, but your mileage will definitely vary on that one — if you’re rocking a beat-to-death handset, it may be worth keeping just for the sentimental value rather than fork it over for a pittance.
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| U.S. Files Antitrust Charges Against Apple, Book Publishers (UPDATE) Posted: 11 Apr 2012 07:41 AM PDT  The U.S. Justice Department just formally charged Apple, along with book publishers, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Penguin in regards to e-book pricing. The DoJ alleges that the companies colluded in anticompetitive practices involving pricing and sales. This comes after a year-long investigation into the matter after Apple switched to an “agency” model where they retained a portion of the sale of e-books sold through its platforms. This is said to have resulted in higher prices industry-wide, since the power to set prices rested in the hands of only a few sellers. Bloomberg reports that several publishers are seeking to settle with the DoJ. Simon & Schuster, Lagardère SCA's Hachette Book Group and HarperCollins could settle as soon as today. (Update: They just settled) However, Apple and Macmillan reportedly refused to engage in settlement talks, so far denying the claims. This might get ugly. With e-book sales rising rapidly, the DoJ is seeking to ensure the consumer isn’t seeing unnecessary price increases caused by this so-called agency model employed by Apple. This model lets the publisher–rather than the vendor–set prices, which is why the big five publishers jumped onboard. Apple just asks for 30% of the end sale. “Traditional” booksellers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble have stuck to the wholesale pricing model, in which they purchase the rights to a book and set their own price. This often stiffs the publishers as the retailers turn bestsellers into loss leaders, causing them to be undervalued in the publisher’s view. But with Apple, the big five can price books how they see fit. Both sides can be effectively argued as pro-consumer. Even if the DoJ rules against Apple, its agency business model might stay intact. Apple and the publishers would likely simply have to comply with stringent regulations. Update: Minutes after the initial report hit, Bloomberg is reporting that Simon & Schuster, Lagardère SCA's Hachette Book Group and HarperCollins just settled with the DoJ over unspecified terms.
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| Amazon Now Lets You Trade In Your Old CDs In Exchange For Gift Cards Posted: 11 Apr 2012 07:31 AM PDT  Online retailer Amazon is extending its Trade-In Program today to also cover CDs – you know, those round, shiny things collecting dust in the back of your closet? Starting now, customers can send in their old CDs to Amazon in exchange for Amazon.com Gift Cards, which can then used to purchase anything on Amazon.com, including, of course, any of Amazon’s 19 million MP3′s. The Amazon Trade-In Program, for those unfamiliar, is a service that allows customers to send in items to a third-party merchant in exchange for Amazon gift cards. The program currently supports a wide variety of merchandise including movies, textbooks, video games, electronics (including phones, iPads, iPods, Kindles, non-Kindles, laptops, etc.), and more. The items can be packed up and shipped in one box, so if you want to throw your old iPod on top of your CD collection, you can now do that too. Trade-ins take somewhere between 6 to 10 business days to process, depending on how you shipped them in (e.g., UPS, Post Office). Once verified, you’ll be notified that your item was accepted by the merchant, which you can track in your Trade-In account. Although the addition of CDs to the program is being announced this morning, the Trade-in website isn’t yet showing them as an option when you go to list an item, nor are they available yet for browsing through in the site’s navigation. Also currently unavailable is pricing information – that is, how much you’ll be able to get for your CDs once sent in. Surely pricing will be variable depending on artist, we would guess. After all, your Beatles CD will probably sell fast…your Barry Manilow, not so much. We’ve reached out to Amazon for more details on this, and will update when we hear back. Image credit: miskan, flickr
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| Amazon, eBay Among Latest To Add Pinterest Buttons Posted: 11 Apr 2012 07:15 AM PDT  The Pinterest-ing of the web continues at Amazon and eBay. Ryan Spoon pointed out that the massive online retailers recently added tiny Pinterest buttons to their deck of social media sharing options on product pages. And why not? With Pinterest being the fast-growing social network, these buttons give users easy ways to share while at the same time allowing the retailers to cash-in on the pinning craze. The two site’s implementations are very similar. Both use Pinterest’s tiny social sharing button, which act as expected, triggering a popup for easy pinning. See Amazon’s here on the right column under the buying options boxes. The move works nicely with Pinterest’s focus on products. Pinterest is arguably more relevant for retailers than blogs or new outlets. But watch out, spammers will no doubt utilize the button paired affiliate links. As paidContent notes, the only thing missing is a Pinterest Android app for even more Amazon integration.
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| With 350 Investors On Hand, TechStars Debuts New Cloud Accelerator’s Inaugural Batch Posted: 11 Apr 2012 07:08 AM PDT  In September, national startup accelerator and seed fund, TechStars, launched its first program focused on providing mentorship and capital to companies working in a particular space. With cloud computing and services growing like gangbusters, the company saw fit to focus on cloud-based startups, launching TechStars Cloud, a sub-accelerator that focuses exclusively on backing cloud computing and infrastructure startups. Today, the inaugural batch of 11 cloudy TechStars startups will be demoing in front of what TechStars Co-founder and CEO David Cohen tells us is expected to be a throng of 350+ investors. Today’s demo showcase marks the culmination of a three-month-long program that kicked off in January and is based in San Antonio, Texas. As part of the $24 million in funding that TechStars raised last September, the accelerator now offers an additional $100K of seed funding to each startup, allowing the early-stage businesses to stay focused on their products throughout the duration of the program, without having to worry about shipping on top of pitching investors. This is on top of the $18K startups are given upon acceptance into the program, bringing each founding team’s potential funding to $118K. This was a big move for TechStars, considering the fact that Yuri Milner and SV Angel teamed up early last year to offer the companies housed in fellow startup incubator Y Combinator $150,000 in convertible debt. Aside from funding, 2011 was a big year for the accelerator, as it also open sourced its model, announcing the Global Accelerator Network as part of the White House's Startup America initiative to spur entrepreneurship. The incubator's model is now being used by over 35 programs globally. What’s more, beyond its Cloud accelerator in San Antonio, the incubator now boasts programs in Boston, Boulder, New York, and Seattle. Today, TechStars is offering readers a sneak peek at the 11 startups demoing their wares in San Antonio, which you can check out below. We’ve learned from the accelerator that each of the 11 companies already has commitments for (or has recently closed) a seed funding round, and Cohen says that he expects the entire batch to be funded by outside investors post-demo day. But, without further ado, here’s a look at TechStars’ newest 11: Appsembler is a "business in a box" for companies that want to sell software as a service. Like other platform hosting companies, they offer scalable and push button application hosting, but in addition to simple hosting, their service also gives a company integrated billing, support tickets, and SEO optimized web content for SaaS products. Callisto.fm is a next generation media analytics company. Built specifically for media creators, they can tell who is actually engaged with content. The service is cloud based, realtime and can work with any type of media and on any device, platform or service. They capture rich analytics around interactions (play, pause, seek, shares, likes, and more) in order to give content producers actionable insight into their audience. Cloudability monitors and manages spending in the Cloud. They help companies better understand where they are spending in the cloud, identify waste, and make suggestions about how to optimize spending. They also allow companies to bring all their accounts, from any of hundreds of vendors and for dozens of internal accounts, into one consolidated view. Cloudability is currently managing over 53 million in cloud spending for 2,200 companies and this week announced a partnership with Rackspace allowing all 175,000 of Rackspace's Cloud customers to use Cloudability for free. Customers include companies from StockTwits and Slideshare to Adobe and Pega Systems. CloudSnap is integration as a service. They allow a user to connect any of hundreds of SaaS products together without writing a single line of code. This lets you do tons of useful workflow and data synchronization such as connecting Mailchimp leads to Salesforce deals or importing Shopify invoices into Netsuite. And all of this is push button and requires no developer time or ongoing maintenance. Conductrics is a decision optimization service that goes way beyond simple A/B testing and reporting. Conductrics uses machine learning to take a customer supplied set of choices and dynamically and adaptively learn what the best choice is. When conditions change, the service learns and automatically updates for the new optimal choice. This allows a website or application to always have the highest converting content in use. Customers like Under Armour are integrating Conductrics directly into their CMS, which lets them bring adaptive behavior directly into the content creation process. Distil is the world's first Content Protection Network. The cloud service sits in front of customers' web servers and identifies and blocks attempts to scrape data. Google punishes sites heavily in search results for having non-unique content and by using Distil companies can contain the loss of SEO, visitors and revenue by blocking content theft. EmergentONE is the first API generation platform. Using a simple web UI, a customer can connect to their existing application's database and auto-generate a robust and well-designed API. Startups can generate a complete and customized REST API for an existing application in minutes. In addition to the API itself, EmergentONE generates developer documentation, language specific libraries and back-end analytics views. The startup allows customers to only expose the data they want, and data will not be included in the API unless they ask for it, explicitly. The solution works with all relational databases, and offers fine-grain access controls. Pretty cool. Flomio is a platform for building NFC and RFID enabled applications. The service is hardware agnostic and cloud based. This means Flomio can work with any NFC enabled devices and masks all the complexity of NFC, exposing the service as a simple web API. They also sell tags, readers and a 'Square-style' audio jack plug-in that can convert any phone into an NFC reader. In addition, Flomio offers its customers an aggregated view of their data in an analytical dashboard. Keen.io is an analytics platform for mobile and application developers. Rather than morphing data into some pre-packaged analytics service, Keen believes that app creators should be able to collect all their data in its natural form. Once a customer's data is in the Keen.io service, they can be their own data scientists and slice and dice data and run experiments against historical data in order to gain insight into app users behavior. Tempo is a hosted time series database. Time series data is becoming a huge component of the 'Big Data' landscape. Every device and sensor is creating millions or billions of data points and existing big data systems are not optimized specifically for this type and quantity of data. Tempo is purpose-built for time series data and allows companies to hold unprecedented amounts of this data letting us finally get value out of all the data our new measured world is generating. Vidmaker makes it easy to manage and edit videos on any device, anywhere and with anyone. The service has an integrated web based video editor, Google Docs-style video collaboration, a built in community stock footage library and tons of other features that make the process of creating, editing and publishing video content a joy rather than a chore.
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| Attn. Evernote & Pinterest: Springpad’s New Social Experience Turns Interests Into Action Posted: 11 Apr 2012 07:00 AM PDT  Springpad was founded back in 2008 with a simple mission: Help people “remember stuff today so that they can make better decisions tomorrow.” For those unfamiliar with the digital organizer, the startup is the maker of free web, Android, and iOS productivity apps that constitute a multi-platform, cloud-based digital notebook, designed to help you discover, save, and share the things you care about. Springpad lets users jot notes, save websites, images, products, at which point its semantic data-parsing tech comes into play, analyzing your content and serving you alerts on relevant news, offers, price drops, and coupons. Today, the startup is unveiling a completely redesigned Springpad 3.0, which boasts a new social experience that makes it easy for users to collaborate and share notebooks, discover ideas and information from trusted sources, i.e. your friends. The goal of the new app is to free users from the fleeting nature of social media streams by giving them anytime, anywhere access to their notebook’s content. With the ever-growing noise and mess of content on the Web and on social networks, people are increasingly looking for better ways to curate their digital experiences and channel that white noise into signal. While the realtime web is unparalleled in serving news and enabling serendipitous discovery, Springpad wants to funnel the fire hose by giving users control over when and how they discover and filter information, including who they get that information from. With Springpad 3.0, users can now create and share notebook content in any form, be they recipes and books, or products and links. There’s also a new “Explore” section, which offers search functionality so that you can find and follow notebooks of interest from other community members. The new version of Springpad adds much-needed, additional levels of sharing to let users make notebooks public, or keep them private, while offering the ability to co-curate and collaborate on notebooks with your friends. So, beyond being able to follow individual notebooks, Springpad 3.0 offers new filtering and organization options to let users tag, sort, change views, and find notebooks via category and tag pages. The new version also adds to the apps’ alerts functionality, offering useful information like movie showtimes, as well as price comparison and reservation links, while alerts provide updates on price drops and offers on items you’ve saved in your notebook. And, of course, the startup’s apps offer online support on all devices, for all personal notebooks. Lastly, Springpad has also added the ability to create personalized notebooks by choosing themes and accents, or take advantage of its new “Quick Add” bar, which offers bookmarklet and browser extensions to boost the apps’ search and saving experience. In terms of social functionality, the startup’s platform upgrade today builds on the company’s announcement last year that it would begin offering users the ability to discover the likes, check-ins and recommendations from your Facebook friends so that you can view movies, TV shows, books, music, and places your friends recommend — even sorting that info based on friend and information type, by places, zip codes, and more. Springpad has long been considered a rival of the popular productivity app, Evernote, as both fundamentally seek to act as a memory aid for busy people, allowing users to capture anything and everything within apps or on the Web, and easily search content by keyword and tags. Yet, while Evernote has blown up in the past two years, soaring past 20 million users, Springpad has quietly been plugging along — adding features and building a viable competitor. While the startup has traditionally stuck to its guns on being a memory aid, Springpad 3.0 is most importantly aimed at making its data more actionable. Storing and filtering information is certainly important in the face of the realtime web, but it’s all about how smart a platform can be in terms of learning one’s individual preferences, and serving them content based on those interests. A hard thing to do, but Springpad is taking the right steps by enabling people to collaborate with families and friends on upcoming parties and projects, for example, or by allowing them to follow content from their favorite bands. Again, following is one thing, but serving users updates on discounted tickets, relevant tour info, and just offering an experience that makes it more likely for users to get off the couch and out to see live music — that’s where “it’s at,” as the kids say. Sure, in terms of competing with Evernote, at 3 million users-plus, Springpad has a long way to go. But it’s features like its apps’ built-in barcode scanner that users can take advantage of to save info about products they come across in the real world that make Springpad an interesting alternative. Side-by-side, it’s also about beating the competition in terms of ease of use and simple, good-looking design. From what I’ve seen, Springpad has both. What do you think? Is Springpad a viable competitor to Evernote in the long run — or more importantly, does it even need to be? With its new notebook sharing features and look, Springpad almost seems to follow into more direct competition with Pinterest … For more on Springpad 3.0, check out the apps here.
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| Posted: 11 Apr 2012 07:00 AM PDT  Google this morning is announcing a new look for its social network, Google+, which introduces a revamped navigation, with drag-and-drop elements and actions that appear when you hover over each item, as well as the introduction of new features aimed at making it easier to discover conversations to join, new profile pages, a dedicated page for Google+ Hangouts (Google+’s multi-person video chat offering), and more. It’s interesting that Google+ has now changed its design, after its first efforts received such praise. But, after using the service for some time, it became clear that Google+’s navigational elements became a little cluttered. That “share a YouTube video” feature, for example, which popped out a box on the right side of the screen, felt tacked on. The new interface drops the static icons at the top and moves all the navigation off to the side, allowing users to reorder the icons as they wish. The list includes access to all of Google+’s features, including Hangouts, Photos, Circles, Games, your Profile page, an Explore option for browsing the site, and an icon called “More” which will hold all the icons you don’t care to see. As you hover over each icon, related actions will appear. For example, hover over Photos for access to a big red button to “Add Photos” from either your phone or your albums. The Explore icon is also a new addition, and takes you to a page showing the trending and popular content across the network. Meanwhile, Google+’s version of the News Feed has been redesigned, too, and now features full bleed photos and “conversation cards,” which better separate each post and the discussion from the next by wrapping it in a box. Activity surrounding the content – like how many people “plussed” it or re-shared your post – is also now available directly beneath your shared item in a drop-down box (the “activity drawer”). Hangouts, which have always been one of the network’s main selling points, are now being better highlighted in the refreshed site, and now have their own dedicated page, featuring a list of Hangout invitations from people in your Circles, easy access to live and public Hangouts, and a rotating billboard showing popular Hangouts, and other information. There are other improvements, too, including a new profile page with bigger photos, and a new chat list that’s now in off in the sidebar. In highlighting the new features, Google also mentions that Google+ now has over 170 million users. However, it’s still counting those who share via Search, Gmail, YouTube and other places across Google’s network – so, again, it’s not a real count of how many users are visiting Google+ as a destination of its own.
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| RIM’s Updating Spree Adds BBM Support To Their Facebook, Twitter, Travel And Music Apps Posted: 11 Apr 2012 06:58 AM PDT  The folks at RIM are no doubt devoting plenty of time and effort to their long-awaited BlackBerry 10 operating system, but they've found the time to whip up a few app updates to please the nearly 55 million BBM users out there. First up on the list are a pair of newly-updated Facebook and Twitter apps — users will be able to share their sparkling wit with their BBM buddies from within each of the apps, ensuring none of their friends will be able to escape their ironic jabs and repartee. While RIM is smart to tie engagement with these two major social platforms into their own, they haven’t stopped there. Take BBM Music, for instance — I've been pretty critical of RIM's BBM Music service in the past, but RIM just keeps plugging away at it. If you're not familiar with the service, the key concept behind it is that users can access to the music stored in their BBM buddies' playlists, which incentivizes the social experience that RIM has been so keen on building with BBM. With the new update in place, new BBM friend recommendations will appear right in the app, which should help bolster some of those fledgling music collections. Apps like BlackBerry's Travel and App World are joining in the BBM-connected fun as well, and will allow users to share their travel plans and recently downloaded apps respectively. Oh, and last but not least, the BBM app has itself has been updated to version 6.2. What does that mean for users? Animated avatars and the ability to send voice notes! What would we have ever done without those? Alec Saunders, RIM's VP of Developer Relations, noted that over 800 BBM-connected apps have been released since the company officially opened up their messaging platform to outside devs last July. Sadly, most of the apps listed above won’t officially join the BBM-connected roster just yet — the updated Twitter app is available now, but the rest will hit the company’s app store within the next 10 days.
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| Want A Google Hangout But Without Google? YC-Alum Meetings.io Have A Solution For You Posted: 11 Apr 2012 06:52 AM PDT  A startup launched this week is vying to be the next great leap forward for the world of videoconferencing, the promising-but-still-relatively-niche service that lets groups of people in different locations hold Internet-based conversations with each other: Meetings.io, a Y-Combinator alum, has hit the market with just under $1 million in seed funding from (among others) Yuri Milner and SV Angel, and the promise of making a free group video call as easy as clicking on a link, with nothing else required. Meetings.io is the latest step in the evolution of videoconferencing services, a classic example of enterprise-focused social networking, which have always held much potential but also frustrations. Starting out as services only for the biggest enterprises that could afford expensive equipment and software, eventually videoconferencing offerings trickled down to Internet-based, mass-market products for anyone (business or consumer) to use with a connected PC or mobile device equipped with a microphone and camera. But even so, they came with a catch: with Skype, GoTo Meetings and WebEx, you need to download software, and pay fees (as you do with Skype to enable more than a one-to-one conversation); with Google, you need to join its social network to use Hangouts. “But you may not want to do that for someone who may be only a short-term contact,” says co-founder Arend Naylor (via a Meetings.io link). And that’s before any and all technical glitches. These are all barriers that Meetings.io is attacking with a very simple, peer-to-peer service aimed not at early adopters and those more technically-minded, but those who need to make a group call for work and without the painful process of setting that up. The aim: “Something lightweight that works without software,” says Naylor. The result: to initiate a call, a registered user simply sends out a link, or invites people to visit a meeting room. With Meetings.io going after a clear hole in the market to make videoconferencing easier, it has attracted some good interest early on. Within the first eight hours of launch, the service signed up 13,000-15,000 users, and hosted 3,000-4,000 meetings — good numbers for a service that didn’t launch with any fanfare and is essentially aiming at enterprise users, not consumers. Among investors, Milner and SV Angel, TechCrunch understands, both doubled down in the seed round. Currently the free service maxes out at five people, but there are plans to raise that number for those who want to pay for a premium offering. Registered users also get their own “meeting rooms” where people can visit to talk, as well as other free services, such as document transfer, notes, live chats and screen shares. Services that the team hopes to add (and potentially charge for) might include extras like SMS, says Naylor. The company is also considering APIs, as well as versions in development that work on iOS and Android devices. Another issue Naylor and co-founder Denis Mars wanted to address was that, in their view, Skype also doesn’t scale well enough to account for short-term and long-term contacts. “It just gets too bloated,” says Naylor. One example of that problem was at Y-Combinator itself. The group now uses Meetings.io to interview candidates and prepare successful teams before their arrival in Mountain View. But before that, YC backers were using Skype. “The problem was that they had 400-500 alums, people in the network, plus the same again in candidates who didn’t make the cut. All of them were on Skype.” That meant that every time a YC partner signed on, there would be hundreds of people trying to get in touch. “To have people meet in an intermediary place is a lot more useful.”
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| How French Presidential Candidates Can Learn To Spell ‘Entrepreneur’ Posted: 11 Apr 2012 06:15 AM PDT  This is a guest post by serial entrepreneur Nathalie Gaveau. As we get closer to the first round of Presidential elections in France on April 22nd and everyone is focusing on the French economy, it seems like a perfect time to talk about supporting and promoting entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship in France. Yes, we invented the word. But sometimes in the past it’s felt a little like we didn’t have it in our vocabulary, as President Bush, in a rare moment of clarity, once pointed out. Despite the criticisms, the government has clearly been more entrepreneur-friendly in recent years. The set-up of the Agence pour la création d'entreprises (APCE) in the late 1990s and the special fiscal treatment of independent or "auto-entrepreneurs" has led to a dramatic increase in the number of startups. Moreover, France offers generous tax incentives to young SMEs, companies pursuing R&D even wealthy individuals investing in a startup (known as ISF). From my own experience as an entrepreneur previously in France and now in the UK, I can say that there are clear advantages of working in both countries. France, for example, offers incredible technical talent – often for a more affordable price than in the UK – and phenomenal infrastructure (broadband). And regardless of what people say, productivity in France (at least in my experience) has been high. But there are still areas in which France can definitely improve. Naturally the UK has an advantage because of its linguistic and cultural proximity to both Europe and the US. This would be tremendously difficult for France to replicate. However, France can strive to match the UK's flexible employment laws, low corporate tax and easy access to funding. Now, as we head into the final weeks before the Presidential elections and the candidates will begin to clearly define their economic reforms, it would be particularly smart for them to focus on entrepreneurs and SMEs. Why? Because entrepreneurs and SMEs have been at the heart of job creation in France, producing 2.3 million of the 2.8 million of the jobs created in France over the last 20 years. In order to win over the entrepreneurs, here are 3 core areas the candidates should focus on: 1. Education: mandatory technology training and the development of entrepreneurship programs Hiring and retaining skilled people is an on-going challenge and we need to build a strong pipeline of talent to remain competitive. Young people – and their teachers – need a greater awareness of the job prospects in entrepreneurship and new technology. Our education system urgently needs to tackle 2 domains:
2. Administrative red tape: let's make it light and simple. Administrative red tape and complex filing rules pose a huge obstacle to setting-up and operating a business. Entrepreneurs need time to focus on developing their business, yet many often spend far more time dealing with administrative complexities. When time is of the essence, making forms simple and accessible online is very important. In the UK – where my current company, Shopcade, is based – people can start a company online within a matter of hours. The amount of paperwork involved later while running the business is fairly straightforward, and most importantly key tasks can be entirely performed online. In addition, user friendly e-learning guides are available online to teach new starters how to deal with corporate tax. 3. Easier access to capital If there is one area that the UK often seems well ahead of France, it is probably in terms of access to capital. Young companies in France need to have easier access to business angels and venture capitalists. Private investors in France get some wealth tax or "ISF" reductions for investing in small and medium companies, yet it is quite limited and was even reduced in 2011 to 50% of the investment and/or € 45,000. In comparison, the equivalent UK scheme is more appealing, as it goes up to £1 million per investor, and allows investors to potentially offset losses against capital gains in the year of disposal. With incentives like these, it's no coincidence that the UK has 2.5 times more business angels than France (18K vs 7K), investing nearly 10 times more capital. Despite the difference in incentives, France has recently seen a lot of growth in the amount of early stage capital. Funds like Kima Ventures, ISAI, Jaina, 360 Capital Partners, Alven, Ventech and more have been particularly active in supporting early stage companies – and have clearly made a difference. Finding ways to encourage the growth of these types of funds as well as business angels is crucial to developing and maintaining a strong startup ecosystem. France does offer some attractive fiscal incentives, like the "Jeune Entreprise Innovante" status started in 2004, which offers a tax credit to startups investing a minimum of 15% in R&D. More than 2,300 companies were part of this scheme in 2009. The scheme was partially revoked in 2010 with a new proposal to be presented in June 2012, which will hopefully resume support to innovative entrepreneurs. It may seem like a lot of work still needs to be done to make France a leading hub for entrepreneurs – but it can be done. France can be a leader in new technologies and entrepreneurship, just like it is in other industries. But the administration has to recognize that the global economy is becoming increasingly focused on digital innovation. Hopefully the candidates will realize this and be quick to act upon it as the election date approaches.
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| Uh-Oh: Nokia Lowers Its Q1 Forecast On Pressures In Emerging Markets, Margins On Smartphones Posted: 11 Apr 2012 05:23 AM PDT  Not great news for Nokia this morning in its ongoing attempt to reverse declines in its sales and market share in the world of mobile phones that it once easily dominated. The company has announced it is lowering its outlook for the first and second quarters of this year, citing lower-than-expected sales in its devices and services segment. In a market statement today, Nokia did not specifically give any numbers on overall revenues but it said that operating margins in the first quarter are expected to be at negative three percent — down from earlier estimates of being either breakeven or within two percentage points of that; it also said that Q2 margins will be similar to or below Q1 levels. As for the the silver lining, Nokia also noted that it has sold more than 2 million Windows Phone Lumia smartphones, with the average selling price at €220 ($262). There are now over 80,000 apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace app storefront, it added. The financial revision come on the same day that the company launched a new NFC device, and one day after it said it would offer Lumia 900 customers credits on devices due to data faults on handsets. Q1. Nokia will be presenting full quarterly results on April 19. Today it noted that it estimates net sales in the devices & services segment in Q1 were €4.2 billion. Within that, feature phones brought in €2.3 billion (on 71 million units), smartphones €1.7 billion (on 12 million units), and all other services bringing in €0.2 billion. Nokia said that’s actually within the 4-6 week range it had provided earlier but also represents a decline on the previous quarter. In the statement, Nokia does not give any guidance on Q2 revenues but highlights that it is seeing a lot of pressure in two specific areas: emerging markets — particularly India, the Middle East, Africa and China — as well as margin declines in the smart devices unit. In a conference call, CEO Stephen Elop spelled out a bit more here, which hints at continuing margin pressures ahead as the company looks to continue to compete against lower cost Android devices and other cheap handsets from what Elop referred to as white-box Chinese manufacturers. The pressures, Elop said, are at the low end of smartphones, and the high end of the feature phone markets — precisely where Android handset makers are being so aggressive in emerging markets. “We are taking the first step of pushing down the prices of Lumia devices with the 610,” he said. “And we are accelerating the rate at which we do that to compete better.” He also noted that the continuing investments that are being made to develop its new business around Windows Phone comes at a price: “With this third ecosystem effort we have to really break through, with the U.S. and China just starting… you see a lot of things that [need to] build,” said Elop. “We need the right levels of investment to break through.” Nokia and Microsoft’s efforts to break the stronghold that Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android have put on the smartphone market have yet to bear fruit. Figures from Gartner estimate the Windows Phone platform accounted for less than 2 percent of smartphone sales at the end of 2011. The other question to ponder going into next week is where its legacy smartphone OS, Symbian, will be sitting in all of this and whether its Lumia strategy will be able to offset ongoing sales declines in that line of devices. Full release below.
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| Jon Stewart Tackles Google Project Glass And Facebook Buying Instagram [Video] Posted: 11 Apr 2012 05:20 AM PDT  Bubble or not, the tech world is operating at a level of craziness right now. Google announced they’re working on connected augmented reality glasses that just might change everything. Then, just a few days later, Mark Zuckerberg actually did change everything for the employees of a tiny but very important photo sharing app. Of course Jon Stewart had to weigh in including making what might be the best Google Glasses parody video yet.
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| Citrix Acquires Cloud-Based Social Business Collaboration Platform Podio Posted: 11 Apr 2012 05:06 AM PDT  Citrix has just announced the acquisition of social business collaboration platform, Podio. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Podio is a social network for businesses that lets those who use it create apps to enhance the functionality of the service. We’ve compared it to a "Yammer with apps.” Founded by Anders Pollas, Jon Froda and Kasper Hultin, the Danish startup has raised $4.5 million in funding. With Podio you can manage everything from expense reports to hiring, and instead of following fellow users, you follow "Spaces" where these things happen. You can see Frequently Used Spaces, Contacts and Calendar on the right, with an activity stream of all actions on the left. From here you can get to anything, even adding or creating your own task-specific app. As mentioned above, Podio offers an App store, where users can add App bundles for specific workflow purposes like a CRM Management tool, Project Management tool or individual Apps like Candidates, an app to manage job candidates, Twitter, an app to monitor tweets and Bugs, an app for internal bug reporting. "This acquisition represents an exciting new chapter in our collaboration business. Podio extends our ability to provide a simple, secure and 'works for everyone' collaborative work platform in this post-PC era," said Brett Caine, SVP and GM for Citrix Online Services Division in a release. Podio has also integrated with other workflow and storage tools in the enterprise including, Box, Campaign Monitor, Dropbox, Evernote, FreshBooks, Google Apps, Google Docs, Google Alerts, Instapaper and Zendesk. Citrix says that Podio will be part of the GoTo cloud services portfolio, which includes GoToMeeting. The acquisition isn’t too surprising since we know Citrix has been trying to boost its collaboration and file sharing offerings. The company tried to acquire Box last year, and also bought a DropBox-like service, ShareFile, last Fall.
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| OneID Grabs $7M From Khosla & North Bridge To Replace Usernames And Passwords Posted: 11 Apr 2012 04:59 AM PDT  Fragmentation isn’t just a problem reserved for mobile operating systems, it’s inherent to our online identities as well. Our digital identities exist in a loose and fragmented consortium of usernames, email addresses, scree names, social media accounts, passwords, and sitekeys. Many have tried to capture the single sign-on holy grail, and most have failed, because as much as we are inconvenienced by fragmentation, no one wants to hand over their personal information to one entity. Last month, we covered the beta launch of OneID, a San Jose-based startup founded by Steve Kirsch, a serial entrepreneur, Silicon Valley veteran, and one of the co-inventors of the optical mouse. With OneID, Kirsch is looking to topple the current username/password digital identity paradigm and replace it with a system that uses public key cryptography to assert users’ identities across PCs, smartphones, tablets, and more. There are already a number of services which attempt to handle the single sign-on problem, and while OneID wants to eliminate passwords from memory, oftentimes these identity plays just end up in offering one more competing standard, rather than achieving the opposite. (See Randall Munroe’s humorous take.) If the service can offer real value to the end user, and reach the kind of scale required to make a difference, there’s hope — but that’s a tall order. Kirsch says that OneID’s value prop is that it operates like a secure Facebook Connect, keeping payment and address info secure by encrypting it in its distributed architecture, which is only then readable by your particular mobile device. As with single sign-on plays, the goal is to reduce friction and fraud inherent to authentication (and security) that is part of every digital financial transaction. That, and on the consumer side, it comes with the benefit of speeding up the sign in and check out process by way of single-click purchases — like Amazon one-click without the login. While it’s a big infrastructure play and a tall order, OneID has some help. Kirsch developed OneID’s technology with veteran engineers Jim Fenton, Adam Back, and Bobby Beckmann, and today the startup is bringing on veteran security executive Alex Doll as CEO. Before coming to OneID, Doll was most recently an executive-in-residence at Khosla Ventures, where he was working on new approaches to the digital identity problem. Before Koshla, Doll was a founding executive at PGP Corp, the makers of public-key cryptography tech, which he led from zero to its integration with Symantec’s anti-virus technology. As a result of Doll’s appointment, founder Steve Kirsch will become acting CTO. On top of its new CEO, OneID is also announcing that it has raised $7 million in series A financing. The round was led by Khosla Ventures and North Bridge Venture Partners. As a result of its new funding, Khosla Ventures General Partner Shirish Sathaye and North Bridge Partner Jonathan Heiliger will be joining the startup’s board of directors. OneID’s new leadership, coupled with this significant infusion of capital, should be a serious leg-up as the company expands. As mentioned, for OneID to work, it’s going to need a significant user base, because there isn’t a whole lot of value for other sites in adding this tech, even if it’s something consumers are dying for. According to Kirsch, OneID is currently live on over 1,000 sites (that reach over 100 million users), and we can expect that the new leadership to focus on adding zeroes to that number. Stay tuned. For more on OneID, check out the company at home here.
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| AppCentral: Enterprise App Store Nabs Top McAfee Execs, BlueRun Ventures Co-founder Posted: 11 Apr 2012 04:57 AM PDT  The consumerization of enterprise is taking place at a breakneck pace, and it’s changing the face of enterprise software and business computing. While on the whole a positive, the effects of consumerization can put a lot of stress on IT departments, as they struggle to balance BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) mentality and the growing demand and requirements of applications with information security. Consumerization means ease of use and the ability to quickly adopt always-there tools and technologies. Yet, meanwhile, some businesses have chosen to restrict their employees to enterprise-owned or developed devices, but this isn’t sustainable in the long run. AppCentral, a startup best known for its enterprise app storefront and management console, and as the new face of Ondeego (one of the first enterprise app stores), is looking to bring a real, honest-to-goodness productized offering to enterprise app distribution. To help push its solution forward, the company is today announcing a bunch of key hires, the first is the addition of Richard Greene as President and CEO. Greene was previously the VP of Global Partners at anti-virus and security giant, McAfee, where he oversaw the adoption of SaaS-based mobile security solutions. Prior to McAfee, Greene held leadership positions at Securify (acquired by Secure Computing/McAfee), Orbital Data (acquired by Citrix) and Sanctum (acquired by Watchfire/IBM). The second hire is Pete Buhl, who will be taking over as COO. Prior to joining AppCentral, Buhl spent over 13 years at BlueRun Ventures, where he was a co-founding partner. At BlueRun, the partner helped raise $1 billion across four funds, while focusing on enterprise and mobile investments. Buhl has served on the boards of Netli, Like.com, PayPal, and Location Labs, to name a few. In today’s world of fragmentation in mobile OSes, businesses are hard pressed to manage and support the diverse array of mobile apps their employees use on a daily basis, so AppCentral has designed a solution that provides a cross-platform app store to let businesses continue to support the many mobile devices used by their employees, while maintaining security and control. To do this, AppCentral focuses on offering easy enterprise app distribution, in addition to secure wrapping, post-completion, and server-based administration. In addition to Greene and Buhl, AppCentral is boosting its leadership team with a couple of former McAfee executives who have followed Greene, including John Dasher, formerly senior director of marketing, and Michael Barnes, who joins as VP of engineering, having previously led the development of enterprise firewall products at McAfee. The new leadership team will be focused on removing the friction that is often associated with IT departments, while giving them the ability to define boundaries for apps that they need to maintain security. As new VP of Products John Dasher wrote in a recent blog post, a new generation of apps are starting to emerge that go beyond simply being desktop ports, solving problems “that are uniquely mobile.” It’s this kind of new mobile app that AppCentral is looking to accomodate, making it easy for big business to distribute and leverage those apps to push enterprise mobility forward. For more on AppCentral, check the company out at home here.
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