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Rovio’s FB App, Angry Birds Friends, Flies Out Of Beta With Tournament Mode, New Levels & More

admin — Wed, 23 May 2012 20:11:21 +0000

Well, well, well. As if you couldn’t get your fix of sling-shotting irascible fowl on every other mobile and social platform known to man, Rovio announced this morning that Angry Birds for Facebook (officially known as Angry Birds Friends ) has finally done flown the coop and left the warm nest of its beta. Avian double-speak aside, what does that mean exactly? It means that, having gone through the requisite user testing, tweaking, and multi-billion-dollar IPO-ing, Rovio’s Facebook app — with a handful of new features in tow — is finally ready for public consumption. As to those features, Angry Birds Friends brings a number of trendy social gaming features to Angry Birds, including tournament mode, new weekly levels, new ways to earn power-ups, rewards, and, of course, tons of social integration. As Angry Birds fanatics are well aware, Rovio launched Angry Birds Friends in beta earlier this year . On top of those things I mentioned earlier, the beta version of Angry Birds Friends has also been a testing ground for Rovio to test out new business models, like offering $1 power-ups beyond pay-to-download options or the infamous Mighty Eagle. The game’s port to Facebook likely had the social network excited, considering that Angry Birds has been a presence on Google+ and other Goog products for awhile now — not to mention the fact that massively popular games like Angry Birds could mean good things for Facebook’s revenue. But, as to Angry Birds Friends’ (what an awkward and clunky name to say aloud, by the way) new features, they’re pretty much self-explanatory, but its new tournaments feature allows user to compete with their friends on four different levels — from Monday to Sunday. The pig-popping user with the highest overall score earns a gold trophy, with silver going to second, etc, etc. And, thankfully, unlike crowns, users get to keep their trophies for ever. For. Ever. The “New Weekly Levels” refer, specifically, to those four new levels being offered in tournament mode, although Rovio hinted that it will be launching further levels every week. Third of all, there are those power-ups, which, on top of the daily rewards users can already collect, users can now earn power-ups in tournament mode. Earn three power-up bundles and you’ll receive a shiny gold trophy. As for context, in case it wasn’t already abundantly clear, Angry Birds is popular. More than five people use it. In fact, earlier this month Rovio announced that its coven of Angry Birds apps had amassed 1 billion downloads. To date, Rovio has released the original, Angry Birds, Angry Birds Seasons, Angry Birds Rio, newer arrival Angry Birds Space, and now, what one might consider its newest arrival, Angry Birds Friends. If you’d asked me two years ago if Angry Birds merchandising would be extremely popular, and that an Angry Birds movie would be in the works, I would have laughed at you. But, considering I’m wearing an Angry Birds t-shirt right now, eating Angry Birds cereal, and that Rovio’s 2011 earnings were about 10-times its estimated revenues from the year prior, with 30 percent coming from merchandising, well clearly I didn’t get the last laugh. More on Angry Birds Friends in Rovio’s blog post here . Updating in realtime

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Rovio’s FB App, Angry Birds Friends, Flies Out Of Beta With Tournament Mode, New Levels & More

The Final Six Disrupt NYC Startups: Ark, Babelverse, gTar, Open Garden, Sunglass, Uberconference

vertical8 — Wed, 23 May 2012 10:10:13 +0000

It has been a wild week so far at this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt in New York City . Rainstorms and traffic jams couldn’t stop nearly 2,000 people from making it to our big weekend hackathon, and our last two days of interviews, panels and startup presentations over at Pier 94 in Hell’s Kitchen. Tomorrow is going to be the grand finale. Following an announcement from the White House’s top tech officers, interviews with Brooklyn hardware makers, the appearance of an entrepreneurial movie star, and much more, we’re going to be hearing from the top final six companies from our Startup Battlefield. The winner will be selected tomorrow afternoon by our panel of all-star tech judges : top New York entrepreneur Chris Dixon , Google executive Marissa Mayer , leading New York investor Fred Wilson , Kleiner Perkins partner Chi-Hua Chien , Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha , plus TechCrunch founder and CrunchFund investor Michael Arrington . Here are the six finalists appearing on stage tomorrow, in alphabetical order: Ark, the people search engine that was so popular with users on Monday that the carefully-prepared company got taken offline. Babelverse, the human-powered translation service that won its way out of one hundred companies in Startup Alley. Gtar, the iPhone-guitar hardware startup that has blown past its goal on Kickstarter after launching on stage. Open Garden, the mobile app that lets you tether Internet connections across multiple devices. Sunglass.io, which is bringing 3D modeling to the browser for designers everywhere. Uberconference, the cross-platform service that makes conference calling easy for everyone. See you all tomorrow!

From SF Disrupt To 500 Startups, CardFlick’s Next Trick Is Managing Your Personal Connections

admin2 — Wed, 23 May 2012 02:00:03 +0000

The winner of the Audience Choice Award during TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco , CardFlick launched with an application for building digital business cards on your mobile device and sharing them with new contacts. Rather than bumping to share those cards, users “flick” them to other users who have downloaded the app. After that, the next step was refining things. To do that, CardFlick has joined the most recent 500 Startups Accelerator class and is working on the next big transition in its evolution. To start, it’s adding more features and functionality around its core card product. While CardFlick initially launched with a limited number of themes, it has been working on providing more customization for its users. The startup is currently doing that through its Instacards site. The next version of the CardFlick app — which will be released over the next few weeks — will bring similar customization features available to the app itself. But CardFlick founder Ketan Anjaria sees an even bigger opportunity ahead. The team brought on Jared Kopf, cofounder and CEO of deals company HomeRun ( acquired by Rearden Commerce last September), as an adviser. And as part of its 500 Startups experience, it’s begun working on expanding beyond just business cards and the way people present themselves to others. It’s all part of a pivot toward the introduction of a new product that will be introduced at 500 Startups Accelerator demo days on July 17-18 in Mountain View and July 23 in New York City.

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From SF Disrupt To 500 Startups, CardFlick’s Next Trick Is Managing Your Personal Connections

Clueful Scans The Apps On Your iPhone, Tells You Which Ones Are Doing Naughty Things With Your Data

bestcbstore — Wed, 23 May 2012 00:23:18 +0000

Remember address book-gate ? Locationgate ? I-don’t-know-what-my-apps-are-doing-on-my-phone-gate? (Oh, that last one might not be a real thing.) Regardless, we’re living in age where companies are pushing us to rethink the boundaries between what we consider private, personal information and what should be public. The resulting backlash is an overreaction(-gate) when we discover that some of the data we presumed to be ours alone was actually being stored, accessed and shared by others…in many cases, “others” being mobile app developers. Well, leave it to a security firm to capitalize on the privacy scare trend. And by capitalize, I mean launch a $4 app that tells you what the apps on your phone are doing. Introducing Bitdefender’s Clueful . Today, the security company has pushed Clueful into the iTunes App Store, claiming it can identify the “misdemeanant apps on your iPhone.” (I believe “misdemeanant” is fancy talk for “naughty.”) Of course, Apple iPhone users don’t have much to fear in terms of malware – Apple curates and tests apps prior to admission. Google has a bigger malware problem, as it only kicks apps out after they’re discovered to be malicious. That being said, even Apple can’t test everything. And some users don’t understand that a social feature on their phone may require an app taking a peek at their address book, for example (the horror!), or tracking their location (ack! I’m being stalked!). While Bitdefender acknowledges that most apps are not malicious, it’s true that app developers can be careless with the way they handle user’s data. With Clueful, Bitdefender says it can now answer questions about what your apps are doing. It shows which apps are accessing your location, tracking your in-app usage, reading your address book, linking your actions across apps to a single identity, needlessly keep GPS running, thereby draining your battery, accessing your UDID, and a host of other ills. To do so, Clueful examines what applications are running in memory and then retrieves audit information from the “Clueful Cloud.” (That’s the name for the space where Bitdefender maintains all the data on apps, and it’s also the way they ensure communication between the app and Bitdefender’s research labs.) To create the Clueful Cloud, Bitdefender built proprietary technology similar to what they use for their anti-virus products, but customized for iOS apps. But because it’s a proprietary technology and patent pending, the company won’t go into detail about the specifics of how it works. But the long and short of it is this: Bitdefender tests apps, creates a database, and then shares that info with the Clueful app to give you insight about the apps you use on your phone. The iTunes App Store has hundreds of thousands of applications, but Bitdefender’s Cloud “only” has tens of thousands at launch. However, the database is still growing, and you can submit apps to be tested using the application. I’ve got an embarrassing number of apps on my phone, but after installing and running Clueful , it still managed to surprise me. (Solitaire was accessing my address book? What?) But the news wasn’t all bad – most of my apps were behaving. Clueful nicely differentiates between apps that “can” do something (like access your address book) versus those that “could” do something (like track your location). Plus, it highlight the good things apps do for you, too, like encrypt your data, for example. I’m not sure the app is worth $3.99, but if you’re at all curious about your apps, or just privacy-sensitive, this isn’t a bad tool to use.

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Clueful Scans The Apps On Your iPhone, Tells You Which Ones Are Doing Naughty Things With Your Data

Appcelerator Partners With Geoloqi To Bring Location Services To Its 1.6 Million Developers

ACMAir — Wed, 23 May 2012 00:20:51 +0000

Geoloqi , the Portland, Ore.-based location platform, today announced that it is partnering with the popular mobile app development platform Appcelerator . Thanks to this partnership, Geoloqi is now available to the 1.6 million iOS and Android developers who have signed up for Appcelerator’s Titanium 2.0 platform. With this, Appcelerator developers can now easily create location-based apps on the company’s JavaScript-based Titanium 2.0 app building platform. Thanks to the new Geoloqi module, developers can now create geo-triggered events in their applications. This, says Appcelerator, will allow its developers to create apps that make use of geofencing and can, for example, send users a push notification when they cross the border into or out of a geofenced zone. In addition, Geoloqi offers standard location tracking features as well as location analytics. While the company’s partnership with Appcelerator focused on these areas, Titanium developers will also be able to use Geoloqi’s other features, including, for example, its Wikipedia layers. Appcelerator tells us that it also chose Geoloqi because it can smoothly transition between different location sources like GPS and WiFi triangulation, relatively conservative battery use and also because it features sophisticated privacy controls for users. Appcelerator, as its head of Head of ISV and ecosystem partnerships Spencer Chen told me at TechCrunch Disrupt earlier today, is looking to partner with forward-looking companies that can offer best-of-breed services to its users. Just last week, Appcelerator also announced a partnership with leading mobile ad network InMobi. About 70% of the company’s users, said Chen, currently develop consumer-focused applications like Hotel Tonight and the other 30% are working on apps mostly used internally in large enterprises. The company’s new COO Sandeep Johri was, among other things, responsible for implementing the overall strategy for HP’s enterprise business, so chances are that the company will continue to push even deeper into the enterprise market in the near future. Appcelerator is offering developers who sign up for the Geoloqi module before June 30, 2012 a free two-month trial of Geoloqi. After that, plans will start at $19.99 per month.

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Appcelerator Partners With Geoloqi To Bring Location Services To Its 1.6 Million Developers

To Capture New Users, Socialcam Redesigns Its Website And Introduces A Leaderboard

bestcbstore — Tue, 22 May 2012 22:30:23 +0000

Social mobile video startup Socialcam is rolling out a new website today, which is designed to create more engagement for users that might not have the mobile app installed. The company has also introduced a leaderboard to help highlight users to celebrities, brands and top producers on the Socialcam platform. For Socialcam, the new release is all about community , according to CEO Michael Seibel. In the website’s left column, Socialcam shows off all the videos from users that you follow, as well as likes and comments that follow. And in the right column, Socialcam hopes to introduce you to new users that you don’t yet follow, as well as showing your activity and what your friends are up to. The idea is to replicate a lot of the features that are available in Socialcam’s mobile app on the web. In addition, Socialcam is hoping to highlight some of its most popular users by releasing a leaderboard . Doing so will show off some of the celebrities and non-celebrities who have developed followings through the platform. Not surprisingly, Britney Spears is the #1 user on the platform, but she’s only produced one video. MC Hammer , Floyd Mayweather , and Lupe Fiasco are among other celebs with huge followings. A lot of people like to call Socialcam the “Instagram for Video,” but Seibel hates the comparison. “The two companies have very different challenges,” he wrote in an email. Also, he believes that social video apps are all about getting people out of the mindset that video is only for consumption, and “creating a new media creation trend by unlocking the video camera on your phone.” The average video length is about 60-80 seconds, compared with the maximum 15 seconds allowable through competitor Viddy — and the 2-5 minutes that is standard for user-generated YouTube videos. Users also spend a lot of time playing with filters and effects before uploading videos onto the platform. On average, they check out eight different effects on each video before publishing. In addition to the major revamp being released today, Socialcam has also rolled out a series of changes to the way its social tools work, mainly to ensure that users are aware of what they are sharing through the site and the app’s Open Graph integration. “We want people to understand exactly what it means to have social mode on and exactly what it does, so you always know what’s going on,” Seibel told me by phone. That addition comes after both Socialcam and Viddy have received some criticism for being “spammy” in users’ news feeds on Facebook. Thanks to Open Graph integration, Socialcam has added a ton of new users , but some of them might have inadvertently been added as a result of watching videos from services like YouTube that were ingested into Socialcam’s platform, rather than user-submitted videos from the startup’s mobile app.

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To Capture New Users, Socialcam Redesigns Its Website And Introduces A Leaderboard

Zimride’s Lyft Is Going To Give Uber Some Lower-Priced Competition

Achilles — Tue, 22 May 2012 22:00:29 +0000

If you’re like me and you live in San Francisco where cabs are few and far between, Uber has been a godsend. But the marketplace for on-demand transportation is about to get a lot more interesting. That’s because there are a few startups that will be doing on-demand, ride-sharing at a much more affordable price point over the next few months. Zimride , which has been around for a few years, will be one of them. They’re coming out of the gate with a product called Lyft today. It’s still in beta (so just friends and family). But basically you can use the app to request a driver immediately and get a ride anywhere in the city for a price that’s competitive to or even cheaper than a cab. Like Uber, Lyft faces interesting regulatory hurdles around doing ride-sharing that arguably competes with professional and government-licensed cab companies. It and another company that’s still in beta called Sidecar are getting around this by doing reimbursements or operating on donations. “It’s not revenue. It’s reimbursement,” said co-founder and chief operating officer John Zimmer . “Anything above and beyond that is a donation.” Zimride has an algorithm that suggests a recommended donation based on time and distance, but it’s up to the consumer to decide what to pay. Zimride keeps about a 20 percent share. The company is seeding the market with drivers that are willing to do longer shifts that take several hours. They’re using a thorough interview process that includes driving history, criminal checks and car inspections. On the consumer side, it will be easy to pick the app up and demand a ride. But on the supply side, there’s a whole vetting process. ”We just want to be very deliberate about how we build this market,” Zimmer said. Zimmer says Zimride has gained a lot of experience in growing two-sided markets. ”Ride-sharing is often called a chicken-and-egg problem,” he said. “But we’ve learned over time about how to take the right steps at the right time with supply and demand.” (Unfortunately, he didn’t share too many of his tricks as those are proprietary!) The company has actually been breakeven at many points in its life. Zimride is really three separate businesses under one roof. One is a university-focused program where they charge colleges for providing school-specific, ride-sharing programs. A second business is for long-distance ride-sharing. Los Angeles to San Francisco, for example, is a very popular route. Every time they’ve gotten one leg of the business to profitability, they’ve used it to fund the next piece. This one will likely be their most challenging endeavor yet. “There are three variables and each one makes it exponentially more difficult to get critical mass,” Zimmer said. “There’s starting location, ending location and starting time.” Zimride faces a number of upcoming competitors. Uber has mostly stuck to the higher-end of the market with private drivers and black cars, but there are signs it is moving downmarket . There is also another app that hasn’t publicly launched but is in beta around San Francisco called Sidecar. It has an extremely similar model. “Uber is this amazing, luxurious transportation experience,” Zimmer said. “Our vision for Zimride is to have everyone participate. We have to make that as frictionless as possible.” The company has raised more than $7 million from Mayfield Fund, Floodgate, Keith Rabois, K9 Ventures and fbFund.

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Zimride’s Lyft Is Going To Give Uber Some Lower-Priced Competition

Amazon Appstore For Android Now Lets Users Test Drive Apps Right On Their Devices

admin — Tue, 22 May 2012 18:23:09 +0000

Unless an app you have your eye happens to have a free demo version to muck about with, there’s little one can do to try out an Android app on a device in advance. Sure, you could buy the app straight from the Google Play Store and get a refund within 15 minutes if you’re not satisfied, but Amazon has a new solution in place that helps take the friction out of that testing process. The latest update for the Amazon Appstore Android app packs a welcome surprise — instead of being stuck Test Driving your apps on your PC, you’ll now be able to do it from directly within the app . Well, some of you will be able to do it. Not every Android phone will be able to take part in the Test Drive program quite yet, as Amazon points out that the service is only set up to work with certain devices for now. My Galaxy Nexus doesn’t seem to be on the list at the moment, and Engadget reports that the immensely popular Galaxy S II is similarly shut out of the fun. Still, it seems to be quite a treat for the devices that do work (Amazon doesn’t have a list of supported hardware just yet). Once you’ve got the updated app in place, you’ll see a nice big Test Drive button under the images on an app’s landing page. The new feature leans heavily on Amazon’s massive EC2 backend — once the Test Drive button is pressed, an instance of the app starts running on EC2 server, with inputs being sent to the server and video/audio being sent back to the device. It’ll be interesting to see how well the feature actually works, but methinks I’ll have to dig through my box of Android gadgets for a bit before I find something that plays actually plays nice with it.

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Amazon Appstore For Android Now Lets Users Test Drive Apps Right On Their Devices

CallApp Uses Social Data To Build A Smarter Smartphone Contact Book

jos — Tue, 22 May 2012 01:23:35 +0000

One of my least favorite moments of the day comes when my iPhone rings and the number isn’t in my contact book. Is it an important call from an entrepreneur? A random PR person pitching me? Or just a telemarketer? I won’t know until I pick up. CallApp , a startup launching today at Disrupt, wants to eliminate those awkward moments, for starters. It’s creating what CEO and co-founder Oded Volovitz calls a “universal social contact book.” It’s drawing data from social networks and other data sources to give users more context about phone calls and other communication. The data also comes from CallApp users — users can edit CallApp listings, and if they choose, they can add their contact book into the company’s general database. So when you get a phone call, even if it’s from someone who isn’t in your contact list, you should be able to see information about them — say a photo, their most recent update on Facebook, and your most recent email exchange if you’ve corresponded with them. Of course, if your phone is already ringing, you’ve only got a few seconds before you need to pick up, but at least you can glance at your screen and go into the call with some basic context. CallApp should be even more useful when you’re about to make a call. Then, the social network updates can give you a way to start off the conversation, or tell you when someone has traveled out of the country, so maybe now isn’t the best time to reach them. You can also attach personal reminders to CallApp contacts, share your location with them, or set up a meeting. In some ways, the concept is pretty similar to an email plugin like Rapportive ( recently acquired by LinkedIn ) or Xobni. However, Volovitz says that bringing this information to the smartphone puts it in a different context. After all, when he gets a phone call, “I cannot wait until I can go to the Internet to see who is calling me. This is about giving you real-time, immediate, the most relevant information you can get, and the tools to execute on that information.” Volovitz also says CallApp, despite the name, isn’t just about phone calls — he estimates that he only uses it for phone calls 50 percent of the time. The app also lists and connects to other ways for reaching people, like WhatsApp Messenger and Viber. The core of the experience isn’t the phone call but the contact itself, Volovitz says. Nor is CallApp limited to personal contact listings. It includes businesses too, showing you things like Yelp reviews, Google Street View, or a menu for a restaurant where you’re thinking about making reservations. Moving forward, Volovitz says the company will be adding features that are more about encouraging “serendipity.” The app is available on Android phones (you can download it from Google Play here ). CallApp is developing a version for iPhones too, though Volovitz estimates that it will have 80 percent of the functionality of the Android version, due to “some technical issues.” Volovitz says the company isn’t monetizing the app (which is free) yet, but there are a number of possible business models, including affiliate fees. The company has raised $1 million in funding from undisclosed venture capital firms and angel investors. Disrupt Q&A Q : How does the iOS app differ? A: There are more limitations than in Android, like you have to use the built-in dialer rather than any dialer you want. Q : What are the viral hooks? A: If you use CallApp to share information with someone, they get an SMS message linking to the content and asking them to download the app. Q: Tell us about the technology. A: What we do is artificial intelligence, big data. The system knows how to link the right person to the right number, for example using location to narrow the search. Q: Why do other improved contact books fail, and why will you succeed? A: It’s all about the execution and the ambition. If you build an app on the client side, you only get a limited amount of information about contacts on your phone, versus CallApp’s crowdsourced, cloud-based approach.

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CallApp Uses Social Data To Build A Smarter Smartphone Contact Book

Major Steal: King.com Poaches Talent Behind EA’s Sims Social To Lead New London Studio

bestcbstore — Tue, 22 May 2012 01:00:32 +0000

King.com , the European-casual-gaming-company-that-could, is cementing its ascendance on the Facebook platform by poaching one of the key producers responsible for EA’s Sims Social and opening a new game development studio in London. The company just hired Catharina Mallet away from EA to lead the new studio, which should have 40 people by year-end. King.com, which started in Sweden and hasn’t taken outside funding since raising $43 million seven years ago , is one of two European gaming companies that have made a serious run on the Facebook platform in the last year. While Zynga has seen its revenue growth slow and other longtime Facebook developers like Crowdstar and Funzio have mostly moved onto mobile games, both King.com and Germany’s Wooga have both climbed up the developer leaderboards. King.com has beat out EA and more recently, Wooga, for the #2 spot among game developers in terms of daily active users on Facebook , according to AppData. The number of game sessions has also blown up by tenfold to 3 billion per month, from 300 million a year ago. The company has a long, long history. It’s almost a decade old and started out building casual games for a destination site at King.com (naturally). That made for a decent business that’s been profitable for seven years. But King.com got turbo-charged when it started building Facebook games too. The company’s long history of building for an independent destination site has given it a few competitive advantages. Launching games outside of Facebook ensures that only the very best and most viral games make it onto the platform. “Because we see which games fail outside of Facebook, what we have managed to do is have a hit-proof business on Facebook,” said chief executive officer Riccardo Zacconi . It’s worth noting that Zynga and many other developers like Kixeye are ironically going in the opposite direction by pouring resources into standalone destination sites. The business now has several legs to stand on. It has a destination site for casual games, Facebook games and then mobile titles. Like Zynga, it makes money through virtual currency sales and advertising. But it also has a third revenue model. The company also recently signed a deal with AOL to provide skilled tournament games. Those are games where players have to pay a very small entry cost (like less than $1) and compete with others. This deal is financially material to King.com, although the company won’t say how much the partnership will bring in. All this said, King.com is starting to feel the competitive heat on Facebook. Zynga recently launched Bubble Safari , which looks a lot like Bubble Witch Saga, King.com’s top game on Facebook. “We have the leading bubble shooter on Facebook. While there are a fair number of copycats popping up, we’re pleased with the continued audience engagement that we get with Bubble Witch Saga,” said chief marketing officer Alex Dale . “We think that will improve further when we launch the game on mobile.” Zacconi adds that King.com’s model is more capital efficient than Zynga’s. “For one of their games, they might need 80 people,” he said. “But Bubble Witch Saga had a team of eight. To launch a new game on the web, we need two people.” He also says that the company hasn’t been feeling the effects that other game developers have as Facebook clamped down on viral channels, notifications and requests for games. He says King.com’s K-factor or viral coefficient is roughly 0.8. “For every user we get, we get almost another one for free,” Zacconi said. Keep in mind though, that number is still way down from the heights of 2008 and 2009, when apps ran wild on the Facebook platform. Other social gaming companies, which still have the institutional memory of that era, have had a harder time coping with the Facebook platform’s new realities. When Mallet comes on-board, she’ll be spearheading the development of casual games. Zacconi stresses that King.com is not going into resource management or sim games. Mallet was of the top producers behind Sims Social and she came to EA through the up to $400 million acquisition of social gaming company Playfish. Over the last year, EA’s social gaming push has faced several management changes. After Zynga poached John Schappert to be chief operating officer, Barry Cottle followed him over to spearhead mergers and acquisitions . That made room for Playfish co-founder Kristian Segerstrale to move up in the ranks and become EA’s executive vice president of digital. Another key Playfish executive, John Earner, recently left to be an entrepreneur in residence at Accel Partners .

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Major Steal: King.com Poaches Talent Behind EA’s Sims Social To Lead New London Studio