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Despite the fact that they rarely ever get to use the newest version of the OS when it’s launched, Android fans are still patiently and enthusiastically waiting for their Ice Cream Sandwich updates.
The latest version of the OS was released alongside the Samsung Galaxy Nexus back in December, and is probably in the hands of about 2 percent of users as we speak. But after seeing Verizon’s updated ICS update device list, I’m thinking that figure will change dramatically in the coming months. → Read More
Online and mobile data research company comScore has just released monthly mobile usage data from its MobiLens service, which reports mobile usage stats for the three month average period ending January 2012. One of the notable data points from the report is that over 100 million U.S. mobile subscribers (101.3 million to be exact) are using smartphones, which is up from 97.9 million in the previous period. That’s up 13 percent since October 2011. During the period ending January 2012, 234 million Americans age 13 and older used mobile devices in general.
Similar to last month’s findings, Google’s Android OS continued to grow its share in the smartphone market, accounting for 48.6 percent of smartphone subscribers (up 2.3 percentage points) followed by Apple with 29.5 percent market share (up 1.4 percentage points). RIM ranked third with 15.2 percent share, followed by Microsoft (4.4 percent) and Symbian (1.5 percent).
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Google’s Android Market has undergone some tremendous changes over the last year or so. What started as just a standalone app store has quickly grown to encompass e-books, music, videos, and now Google feels like the “Android Market” moniker is getting to be too restrictive, too constraining for what they’re really trying to deliver to their users.
That’s why Google is officially putting the Android Market name to rest. Starting today, all of Google’s digital media services have been rebranded to fly under a brand new banner: Google Play. That’s right gadget buffs, despite some delectable new rumors, Google Play isn’t a new tablet from the folks at Mountain View, but rather a unified brand that seeks to tie the company’s digital media services together. → Read More
SignNow, a startup that develops an e-signing service, has raised $2 million in funding from Khosla Ventures. SignNow raised $500,000 in a previous round.
SignNow’s goal is to revolutionize consumer use of e-signatures and eliminate the need for fax machines, scanners and printers. Today, the company is also announcing a free iPad app (joining iPhone and Android apps), which allows people to sign any document from their iPad and get other people’s signatures. → Read More
Big Fish Games is having some significant firsts this year, a decade after Paul Thelen founded the casual game developer and publisher. One is its largest acquisition to date: Oakland-based Social Concepts, the parent company of mobile social casino game developer Self Aware Games. Another is strong revenue growth — up 30 percent over 2011, to above $180 million, he tells me today.
Now, with Social Concepts, Big Fish will also be able to crack some areas that it has mostly stayed out of so far. → Read More
Just when you thought this space couldn’t get any more saturated, yet another ambient location app throws its hat into the ring as SXSW prepares to kick off. Introducing INTRO. But wait, before you groan “enough already!“, you should know that INTRO at least has a unique take on the location-based social introductions market. Unlike the majority of this year’s crop of location-based networking apps, INTRO’s angle is business introductions. Built on top of LinkedIn, the app lets you specify who you’re looking to meet by both industry and profession, then enables you to make that connection.
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Lars Albright, co-founder of Quattro Wireless, announced his new company SessionM?nearly a year ago. Now he’s ready to talk about what it actually does.
Quattro, of course, was acquired by Apple, which used the mobile ad network as the foundation for its iAd program. Albright, who led business development for iAd and is now SessionM’s CEO, describes the startup as an attempt to tackle one of the biggest problems he saw in the mobile industry ― engagement and retention. → Read More
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Mobile component marketplace (and Disrupt finalist) Verious is announcing the launch of its App Services platform and Mobile Developer Network today, as well as a number of new partnerships. With the new platform, the company is introducing several pre-built software modules created with APIs from its new partners, which can be used by app developers in their mobile applications.
This platform includes components from partners like CityGrid Media, The Sports Network and Weather Decision Technologies, whose data has been included in the software components. → Read More
IBM may not be the earliest mover among B2B companies offering more social features to its clients, but it is definitely trying to make sure it stays in game: today it announced that it would extend the social media features it offers through IBM Connections — roughly, the company’s enterprise equivalent of a social network for work colleagues and contacts — to include integration with Microsoft Outlook email, courtesy of a partnership with Israel-based enterprise startup harmon.ie.
The new service will see IBM Connections appear as a sidebar for those who use Outlook. That will give people the ability to do things like access SharePoint documents, see who is online and message them while still remaining in the email application.
(And to draw a line between what IBM is doing in enterprise with what’s happening in the consumer market, this is somewhat equivalent to Facebook offering a desktop messaging app to use when you’re not directly on its site.) → Read More
True social networks bring multiple birds of a feather together across vast expanses of time and space. Look at Facebook – it’s mostly for finding bullies you went to grade school with, allowing you to gloat over their misfortune. Now there’s another, decidedly more positive social network: JuggaloBook, a social network for those down with the clown.
The site is fully-featured with video chat systems, announcement walls, and friending capabilities. It is based on phpfox, an open social network project, with a few unique additions. It is up and working – albeit a bit slowly.
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Edmodo, an online social learning and communications network for teachers and students in K-12 schools, is opening up its API to third?party web developers to enable the creation of educational applications built on top of the platform.
Edmodo, which just raised $15 million from Greylock Partners and Benchmark Capital, is a free service that allows teachers to create and maintain their own safe and secure, collaborative classroom communities across mobile and web platforms. It’s sort of similar to a Facebook for the classroom. But Edmodo is completely private and secure, and allows teachers to also manage class content, collaborate and more within the platform. → Read More
Alltel Wireless, a Little Rock, Ark.-based carrier that serves six states, has today announced that it will use Nuance’s Dragon Voicemail to Text transcription to power its own Voice2Text service.
The service will basically let users read their voicemails straight from their inbox, rather than waiting through voice prompts and having to sit through a message. The beauty is that once a voicemail is transcribed, you no longer feel the need to call the person back. Simply respond to the text and save both parties a little talk time. → Read More
Reconnecting with high school classmates is such a popular social networking feature that?schoolFeed has managed to carve a registered user base of 10 million out of Facebook in the year since it launched. Today it opens a new feature where users can mail in their yearbooks, have them scanned and uploaded to schoolFeed, and mailed safely back to them.
Led by former co-founder and CEO of RockYou Lance Tokuda, schoolFeed wants to beat Facebook and competitors like Classmates.com by nailing a single critical use case with a free product. → Read More
On the surface this may seem like an unlikely interview. I mean, we’re a tech blog and Andrew Bird is a musician. But beneath the organic and strikingly analog sounds of Mr. Bird’s beautiful music there is this whole sea of technology at work ― especially during live solo performances.
Andrew was kind enough to take some time out of his touring schedule on the eve of the release of his new album called Break It Yourself in order to tell me a bit more about the different gadgets and pedals he uses to achieve his unique sound and also about his vision and approach to making music. An approach where technology is involved, but is certainly not the master.
TC:
Andrew Bird, I want to thank you for taking the time to talk with us here at TechCrunch. Before we get started, I thought maybe you could, in your own words, describe your music for people who may not be familiar.
AB:
Well, my main instrument is violin, but I think of myself as a songwriter who happens to play violin. I also play guitar. I will often times loop my violin to expand the instrument beyond its linear restrictions. So I do a lot of live looping and manipulate the instrument to get a wider set of sounds ― from double bass to metallic sounds. → Read More
Cloud collaboration company YouSendIt is debuting a new product today called Workstream. Designed specifically for enterprises, Workstream is a file sharing platform for businesses, and offers deeper integration with Microsoft SharePoint and helps users securely share content beyond the firewall and across mobile devices, desktops and the Web.
For background, YouSendIt was one of the pioneers of file sharing, offering a service that mainly appealed to behind-the-firewall customers who were unable to send large files via email due to Microsoft Exchange limitations.
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“Small things in our lives are important to us. Our pets are important. Travel is important. It’s the small thing that means everything.”
That’s what Stephen Ebbett, President of Protect Your Bubble, told me in a phone interview last week. And I agree. The little things are important and worth protecting.
Protect Your Bubble is probably a new name to most Americans but the Assurant Direct company launched in the U.K. in 2009 where it now insures 400,000 consumers. Starting today the service is available to US consumers as well. This version of Protect Your Bubble is slightly different ‘cross the Pond. Here in the states the company promises “simple but comprehensive” plans for gadgets, pets and trips. → Read More
From Foursquare to Pinwheel and Highlight and many, many more besides, we’ve seen a lot of apps created for users to share location, information and pictures with friends and like-minded people. So it seems inevitable that to help set themselves apart from the pack, newer launches will start coalescing more and more around particular features.
The latest is Wallit: a new app that, yes, lets users check in at particular locations and leave messages for others; but also has the added bonus of letting users add augmented reality-style photos to get their points across more visually.
Wallit comes from the mind of Veysel Berk, a Berkeley-based post-doc candidate in image processing, who has taken some of his know-how to give the app an AR twist. So far, Wallit has raised a round of seed funding totaling $1.2 million from a host of backers including Masao Tejima, president of OpenTable Japan; ex-HP and Netscape exec Sharmila Mulligan; David Kellogg and Daniel Terry, CEO, Pocket Gems. The angel round also included participation from Storm Ventures, Tenex Capital Fund, DBO Capital and Orrick Venture Fund. → Read More
There are few things in my life that seem less exciting than razors, but a new startup called The Dollar Shave Club wants to disrupt the market. And it has convinced some big names in the venture world, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Andreessen Horowitz, to back its vision.
Dollar Shave Club is relaunching today and announcing that it’s the latest company to emerge from Science, Inc., the incubator whose partners include former MySpace CEO Mike Jones and Color co-founder Peter Pham. The basic model is simple ― at pricing that starts at $1 per month (plus $2 for shipping and handling), customers get a monthly shipment of razors delivered to their home. → Read More
The onward march for Android and Apple continues apace, and leaves a big question mark for how other platforms can hope to compete, at least in the U.S. market: New figures out from Jumptap indicate that in the month of January, the two combined made up 91 percent of all smartphone traffic on its U.S. mobile ad network — representing a new high for the two most-dominant mobile phone platforms.
But while Apple has seen a huge jump in smartphone users following the launch of the iPhone 4S last year, Jumptap’s figures indicate that in tablets it has a strong competitor in the form of the Kindle Fire, which now accounts for 33 percent of all tablet traffic on the network. → Read More
The issue of information privacy around free services like some mobile apps and social networks has often been met with a rebuttal from the other side of the argument: if the service is free, you the user are the product, and so you shouldn’t be surprised when your information is “sold” as part of that business model, the so-called “hidden cost” of free.
That can seem like an uncomfortable arrangement, however, so now some academics at Cambridge University in England are coming up with a way of fixing that, and are revealing some striking research about data collection in apps as part of their effort. → Read More
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