In 10 days, Google’s RSS feed-reading service Google Reader will shut down for good. In its wake, developers working on products in the RSS ecosystem have been stepping up to deliver apps, tools and other services to fill the void. Today, one of the frontrunners, Feedly, is transforming itself from RSS application to RSS platform, with the public debut of Feedly Cloud, the infrastructure that has been powering Feedly’s own apps and those from a small handful of approved developers.

That infrastructure will also now power a new, standalone web version of Feedly (one that doesn’t rely on a browser extension), something that’s been among Feedly users’ top requests.

The company first announced partnerships with RSS app makers Reeder, Press, Nextgen Reader, Newsify and gReader earlier this month, all of which are moving to support the Feedly API ahead of the Google Reader shutdown. For end users of those applications, Google Reader often powered the backend of their feed-reading experience, but the front end (the visual interface) was handled by a third party. Now those users can seamlessly transition away from Google Reader dependence, without any extra effort on their part.

Feedly, through its “Normandy” project,” has been working to clone the Reader API, and it’s now running that on Google’s App Engine platform. Today, in addition to Feedly’s own apps for iOS, Android, Chrome, Safari and Firefox, and now web, as well as those select third-party partners listed above, the company is making its backend infrastructure more broadly available. It’s adding new Feedly Cloud partners IFTTT, Sprout Social, gNewsReader for BlackBerry 10 and Symbian/MeeGo, Press, Pure News Widget, and Meneré, in addition to those above, and will onboard others still in the weeks ahead.

Though Feedly once struggled in the shadow of Google Reader, it has emerged in recent weeks as one of the top alternatives for end users in need of a new home for their feeds ahead of Reader’s demise.

On the iPhone, Feedly’s app is currently No. 4 in the News section of the iOS App Store in the U.S., according to rankings from Distimo, and it’s No. 6 on Android. And while its overall ranking in the top charts has been sometimes sporadic, it has consistently stayed at the top of the news section in both stores for several months.

Feedly says it now reaches 12 million users, up from 4 million pre-Reader retirement. Millions of new users have come to the service, and, more importantly, the company says that 68 percent of new users become weekly actives. Maybe 12 million users is a drop in the bucket for a web giant like Google, but for a small startup, these are notable numbers. However, Digg.com is preparing to launch its own RSS reader, too, just before Reader’s shutdown, which could change the current landscape if it’s any good.

Ahead of today’s public launch of Feedly Cloud, Feedly has been processing over 25 million RSS feeds daily, accounting for billions of articles, and has seen over 200 developers getting in touch to request access to the Feedly API.

The new version of Feedly on the web is live now.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Back when Rockmelt killed off its social-centric desktop browser to focus on mobile, they promised that an Android version was on the way. Today, it arrives.

While the Rockmelt app for Android shares the same “core experience” as its iOS counterpart by focusing very, very heavily on a personalized homescreen that brings in content from your social networks and Rockmelt’s curated stuff, they’ve overhauled the UI pretty drastically.

Why? “Because Android screens are so much bigger”, Rockmelt co-founder and CTO Tim Howes tells me. On the iPhone, most users don’t have too much trouble reaching their thumb across the entire screen. On any of the many jumbo screen Android phones (like the Galaxy Note or the HTC One), however, reaching the top of the screen means using a second hand, unless you’ve got big ol’ sausage thumbs.

With that in mind, Rockmelt’s Android build moves most of its UI elements down to the bottom of the screen. They float around in free space, and fade away as you scroll down the page. Scroll up, however, and the swoop back into place. In landscape mode or on tablets, this UI elements are moved to the lower right corner, so as to be within reach of your thumb. You can see the iOS app and the Android app side-by-side here.

Also new to their Android build is a feature that Rockmelt calls “elevator buttons”. As you scroll through your personalized content feed, a button will appear whenever new content has popped up at the top (or whenever you swipe up a few pixels). Tap the button, and you’re taken back up to the top — but you’ll also see a new down arrow button fade into place. Tap that, and you’ll drop back down to exactly where you were before. Alas, this feature only seems to work on Rockmelt’s built-in personalized content feed, not elsewhere on the web.

Rockmelt first launched in 2010 as an attempt to bake all sorts of social media functionality (like sharing, chat, and popular content feeds) into the desktop browser. By December of 2012, they’d started to realize that they just couldn’t compete with the likes of Chrome and Firefox on the desktop; by April of this year, they’d cut their losses on the desktop and shifted their focus to mobile.

Rockmelt says around 1.1 million people have tried the service since they relaunched their iOS app a few months ago. Alas, only 1/2 of those people come back the next day.

The company has high hopes for Android, though.

“In 3 weeks, we had as many iPhone users as we had in 3 months on the iPad,” says Howers. “In 3 days, we had as many on our web-based version as we had on iPhone. We can’t wait to see how the nearly one billion people on Android like it.”

I’ve tried both the iOS and Android apps… and, to be honest, I’m not sure I get it. While it definitely has some neat tricks (like a one-swipe ‘Read It Later’ saving feature), I mostly just found myself confused. Then I started getting notifications that strangers had liked the same content that I’d “emoted” (content that I didn’t actually intend to emote with to begin with), and, er, yeah, I was done with Rockmelt.

Rockmelt hadn’t appeared in the Google Play store at the time of publishing, but we’ll update this post with a link as soon as we spot it.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Teambox has added high-definition video conferencing, adding to a list of providers that are adding video to their collaboration platforms.

The Teambox offering is of particular note, as it fully integrates video conferencing and screen sharing directly into the collaboration platform through Zoom, a video-conferencing service. The service allows for video conferencing of up to 25 people across desktops, tablets and mobile devices. It supports iCal, Outlook and Google Calendar.

Teambox has earned recognition for its capability to integrate third-party apps for an inline experience. It’s in some sense a framework for aggregating apps such as Box and Evernote.

But is it that much better than using third-party services in conjunction with a collaboration platform?

Tibco’s Tibbr activity stream product now integrates third-party web-conferencing tools. A customer can start a live meeting by choosing their own platform. The intent is to allow enterprises to leverage the platforms they have invested in.

So there are benefits to both ways of integrating video conferencing with a collaboration platform. Most of the services, such as Microsoft Office 365,  have integrated video conferencing, mostly as an add-on.

But the tide is shifting. Services such as Unison now offer video chat through WebRTC, the real-time communications technology that is native to the browser through a JavaScript API. Google Chrome, Firefox and Opera now support the open-source project.

Then there are the services like Pexip, which I looked at last week, which is making video conferencing available as a software.

In all of this, there is one theme. Video conferencing is now moving to software, making integration into collaboration services easier than ever before.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

As we continue to see more details brought to light in how the government requests and uses information about what we do on the web and on our mobile devices, an ex-Googler and a consumer rights attorney who have dedicated themselves to helping users remain private have raised some funding to do this better and in more places.

Disconnect, the startup behind the Disconnect.me extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Safari browsers, which lets users of Facebook, Google and Twitter keep themselves from being tracked by third party sites, and the Disconnect 2 app that covers some has raised a $3.5 million Series A round.

At the same time, as a measure of dedication to its principle of being positioned not for profit but for social good, Disconnect has been designated as a B Corporation, a semi-charitable certification. With the tax breaks and other help that this offers, it will let Disconnect dedicate time to raising awareness and campaigning as well as to creating for-profit products.

“As a B Corporation, we’re able to spend more time than a traditional company on activities such as consumer education, petition drives, and close collaboration with non-profits,” Gus Warren, a former Venture Partner at FirstMark Capital who is part of Disconnect’s executive team, noted in a statement. “Disconnect is committed to benefiting not just shareholders but all stakeholders, including the public.” Warren will run the company’s New York office.

This most recent round of funding was led by FirstMark Capital, and comes on the back of a $600,000 seed round announced in March 2012. That round was led by Highland Capital Partners with participation from Charles River Ventures, and angels including David Cancel, Mark Jacobstein, Ramesh Haridas, Vikas Taneja, Chris Hobbs, and Andy Toebben.

Founders Brian Kennish, formerly an engineer at Google who left to work on this full-time, and Casey Oppenheim, a consumer rights attorney, say the startup will be using the funding first of all to help with the launch of Disconnect 2 for Safari and Opera browsers.

Disconnect 2, launched in April 2013 as a Chrome and Firefox extension, blocks some 2,000 third-party websites that track you across the web. That vastly expands the power of the service that initially focused on a handful of portals Disconnect.me first kicked off when Kennish was still at Google and created the Chrome extension for Facebook specifically, in October 2010.

Kennish notes that Disconnect 2 has gotten more than 250,000 new users since launching in April and that all the startup’s apps combined have more than 1,000,000 weekly active users. Within the current range of software, it is charged on a pay-what-you-want model. “Like Humble
Bundle,” says Kennish, who adds, “Some of our upcoming releases will also include freemium
features.”

In addition to helping block some 2,000 third-party sites that track users’ browsing histories, the Disconnect 2 extension also helps filter out malware and encrypts data that you share on sites “to prevent wireless eavesdropping.” The company also promises that by cutting down on a lot of the tracking noise, users are actually able to see faster-loading pages and use 17% less bandwidth on average.

“Increasingly, people want to know who’s tracking them online and want to have a say about what information is being collected about them,” Oppenheim noted in a statement. “Our software is designed to put users back in control so they can decide how their personal data is used,” adds Kennish.

Longer term, the company also hopes to focus more on protecting users around the various features of data mining. “We’ve always thought one of the biggest threats to people’s online privacy is just how big data mining is getting,” noted Kennish. “There’s so much personal data being collected about us in so many places now and all that data is susceptible to being used in ways we don’t want. So our goal is to help people minimize the unwanted collection and use of their data. We started by tackling third-party tracking because most people don’t know their browsing history is being tracked by thousands of invisible websites they’ve probably never even heard of.”

The company is also becoming increasingly focused on security services? “We think there are way
too many holes in online consumer security, which recent events have made even more obvious, and we want to help plug some of those holes.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

You might not have heard of Spanish social network Tuenti, but it was acquired by Telefonica back in 2010 for $99 million and has garnered over 14 million users. Since then it’s opened up to worldwide users in most languages, launched new apps (Android, iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and Firefox OS) and moved heavily into messaging.

It’s also become more than just a social networking app. Last year it launched an MVNO – Tuenti Móvil – and now it’s unveiling a new strategy. Tuenti Móvil customers will now be able to call, chat, and share without using data or phone credit. It sounds crazy but in fact it’s clever. It will draw more customers to the Tuenti MVNO because it’s tied to this social network.

Just over a year ago, they launched in Spain a data-centric MVNO offer with 1GB for a €6 tariff which is very competitive in Europe.

Here’s how it works: The free (called “Zerolimites”) data tariff on Tuenti Móvil is automatically activated as soon as the user purchases a data bundle with any of Tuenti Móvil’s tariffs. If the user consumes the entire Gig of data they are allowed, they still get to use the Tuenti app, and send messages, without it being reflected on their bill. If they run out of cash and can’t top up the account (kinda important in cash-strappedSpain right now) they can still continue to use the Tuenti app for 30 more days. The fair use policy of Tuenti is 1GB per month of exclusive use of the Tuenti app.

But here’s the secret sauce: there is an enormous viral factor in that anyone on any operator can use the Tuenti app. So when your friend on Tuenti Móvil runs out of credit, they can still chat with you though the app. That just incentivises more people to sign up to Tuenti Móvil, knowing that their temporary cash flow issue won’t be a problem. This is a big deal for younger mobile users, of course.

The numbers are not big right now. Tuenti Móvil has so far reached 150,000 customers in its the first year. In theory this new service will help those numbers.

CEO and founder Zaryn Dentzel says “we’re not just a social network anymore, but rather an integrated social communication multi-platform, primarily mobile, that’s backed up by innovation and added value.”

Like Twitter, Tuenti’s messages are limited to 140 characters and Facebook you can share photos etc — “moments” in Tuenti lingo — that appear in your contacts’ timelines. Users broadcast to everyone (Twitter), to your close friends (like Facebook), or just directly to single contacts, a little like you would on an app like Pair.

In Spanish “tu enticed” means ‘your entity, your identity’, hence the name and in English it’s a pun on the number 20, or 20 close friends.

Note also that the data is sent via SSL – an interesting point in the age of Prism. It means none of the activity on Tuenti is ever indexed in Google…

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It’s still not quite clear what PRISM really is, but what has become clear is that the NSA is doing its best to tap into as much online communications as it can. To protest this, Mozilla, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Reddit, the ACLU and numerous other organizations with both technical and political backgrounds have launched StopWatching.Us. The campaign, Mozilla’s Alex Fowler writes, wants to call on “citizens and organizations from around the world to demand a full accounting of the extent to which our online data, communications and interactions are being monitored.”

Given last week’s revelations that the NSA is likely tapping into a wide array of Internet communications, it’s no surprise that a number of Internet-based organizations are now banding together to protest the agency’s surveillance programs. As Mozilla’s Fowler notes, we now have a number of technical means to help us protect our privacy online, but “exposures resulting from government-sponsored online surveillance are entirely separate from whether we choose to share information and what those sites say they will or will not do with our data.”

The group specifically asks the U.S. Congress to form a special committee to investigate the allegations and demands “legal reforms to rein in spying and that public officials responsible for this unconstitutional surveillance be held accountable for their actions.” It also asks for a reform of Section 215 of the Patriot Act – the “business records” section that allowed the NSA to get phone records from all the major U.S. phone companies, to reform the FISA Amendment (there seems to be some movement on this front already) and to amend the state secrets privilege.

StopWatching.Us, of course, also aims to bring more attention to this issue, similar to the SOPA/PIPA protests last year. Mozilla will link directly to the site from its Firefox start page, for example, though it’s not clear how the other organizations will support the effort.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Kevin Marks is VP of Open Cloud Standards at Salesforce.com, and a host and co-founder of TummelVision.tv. Over the last 20 years he’s moved between giant companies and founding startups – BBC, The UK MultiMedia Corporation, Apple QuickTime, Technorati, Google, BT. He is one of the driving forces behind microformats.org, activitystrea.ms and portablecontacts.net. Follow him on Twitter @kevinmarks.

As someone who uses both Android and iOS regularly, I’m getting increasingly frustrated by fragmentation. However it’s not on my Android devices I see this, but rather on the iOS ones.

I install a popular, well-funded application like Instagram, Flickr or Circa on my iPad, but when I launch it, three-fourths of the screen is black bars, with a teensy little app in the middle. Or I can choose to scale it up without smoothing, so jagged pixels I haven’t seen since the 1990s reinforce the sense that I am doing something wrong by attempting to run the app. Every affordance is pushing back at me saying I’m doing it wrong.

By contrast, on Android, applications scale up to fill the space sensibly — buttons stay button-sized, text and image areas expand well. Developers can add alternative layouts to better handle varying sizes, but if they don’t, things remain legible and touchable.

One Hand Or On Your Knees?

More pernicious is the artificial dichotomy into which the iOS world leads our design thinking. You’re either on the held-in-one-hand phone, briefly standing somewhere, or you’re sitting down in the evening using your iPad (so big and heavy that you have to rest it on your knees – Steve Jobs even brought out a sofa to sit on at the launch). This false “mobile versus desktop” dichotomy even misled Mark Zuckerberg when he said “iPad’s not mobile, it’s a computer.” and at the Facebook Home Launch, a tablet version was said to be “months away,” though a working version was hacked together by outside programmers within days.

Meanwhile, nobody told Barnes & Noble, whose 7-inch Nook did so well that Amazon launched a Kindle range the same size, leading to the lovely Nexus 7 from Google and finally to the iPad Mini from Apple. This is the form factor, tested for years by paperback books, that makes one-handed long form reading comfortable. If you spend any time on public transit, being able to read standing up or in narrow bus seats is an obvious benefit. But the hermetically sealed company-coach commuters at Apple missed this for years.

Steve Jobs even said you’d have to file down your fingers to use it. The thing is, on iOS it does feel like that. The iPad sized apps have too-small buttons, the iPhone ones are too big if zoomed. There is no way for an app to know how big your finger is compared to the screen, let alone a website.

The supposed advantage of iOS is fewer sizes to design for, but now you need 12 different layouts to cope with the horizontal and vertical orientations of each device, and the general layout tools don’t handle this as well as Android, requiring complex updates. Chiu-Ki Chan explains the pain, whereas Android Studio just made this even easier for developers.

No App Is An Island

The other fragmentation problem on iOS are the missing links. Not in the evolutionary sense, but the ability to readily connect between applications using URLs, as we’re used to doing on the web. Applications can’t claim parts of a URL, only a whole scheme. As Apple says:

If more than one third-party app registers to handle the same URL scheme, there is currently no process for determining which app will be given that scheme.

On Android, any app can claim any scheme, host and path, and the OS will resolve as appropriate, giving you a choice if more than one possibility is available.

On iOS, each app ends up embedding webviews inside it rather than linking to a browser, fragmenting your web history. I have to remember whether I got to the page via Twitter, or Facebook or email to go back to it later on, and I only get to share it to the iOS-approved places, Twitter, Facebook, email or iMessage. On Android, any installed app that can handle that type of media is an option to share to, or create a photo, make a phone call, any of hundreds of “intents” that act as bridges between apps and, through browsers, the web.

This means that Android apps don’t end up doing everything, but hand off to each other as needed, meaning that you can replace any function cleanly across apps. Better keyboards are the obvious example here, but camera apps, browsers, and SMS apps can drop themselves in, with the choice made by the user.

On iOS, you have to explicitly link to the scheme, which is per-app. Ironically, this means that Google (or Facebook) can release a set of iOS apps that connect to each other preferentially, leaving the Apple applications out of the loop. But it also makes it harder for developers to specialize in doing one thing well and linking to the rest.

What Of The Web?

The other pernicious influence of iOS fragmentation has been the rise of the mobile-only site: the “m.” layout that was tuned for iPhone use, then slightly adapted for other mobile users, often giving rise to farcical single-column layouts with huge whitespace on tablets. In the early iOS days this was a bonus, as it encouraged function-first design without the organisation-chart-inspired cruft around the edges that websites accumulate over time. As the effective resolution of mobile devices has increased, now often exceeding what is available on desktops, the assumptions that drove mobile-specific sites are breaking down.

Now that Android is the dominant operating system, Google is getting serious about it as a web platform, too, which is very welcome. The Android browser was installed as part of the OS and didn’t get upgraded over time. This has changed, with Chrome now the default Android browser, and it is on a regular update pipeline like Desktop Chrome and Firefox. iOS’s Safari updates are frequent too now, and Microsoft is now pleading with developers to give them modern web apps.

Truly responsive design has succeeded mobile-first as the best choice for websites, and we’re seeing this spread as browsers converge on HTML5 features. What this means is that the web platform is now evolving rapidly, without any one browser provider being a bottleneck. The installed base for SVG passed Flash a while back, and even Adobe is now backing the web fully, bringing its design know-how to HTML5 features such as regions and exclusions. Also in the pipeline for HTML5 is browser-to-browser audio, video and text chat via WebRTC.

Hoping Apple Continues The Revolution

This web platform revolution was catalysed by Apple with WebKit and Mozilla with Firefox, and picked up by Google, Microsoft, Adobe and others. We now have a Browser Battle to be more standards-compliant and consistent, rather than a Browser War to be different and proprietary. What I’ll be hoping for from Apple at this week’s WWDC is a clear recognition of these design lacunae and new and better ways for developers to succeed both with native apps and on the web.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

If everybody switched from Chrome and Firefox to Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8, we could save enough energy to power 10,000 U.S. households, a new study (PDF) commissioned by Microsoft says. The reason for this, Microsoft says, is its focus on making IE fast and the fact that IE taps into modern PC hardware like native graphics cards to speed up its rendering performance.

Let’s face it, when you think about browsers, the last thing you think about is how much power they consume. Indeed, this sounds like a pretty unusual question to ask, but given that we probably spend more time browsing the web than doing anything else on our laptops, using about 18 percent less energy, as the study claims IE does, could make a difference.

Overall, Microsoft says, switching to IE would save 120 million kWh in electricity and remove as much carbon dioxide as growing 2.2 million tree seedlings for 10 years.

This isn’t the first time Microsoft has commissioned this kind of study. In 2011, IE9 also bested Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera in a similar study. In today’s test, the researchers focused on a set of popular websites and benchmarks. They also played a number of Flash and HTML5 videos.

Overall, the study’s results look legit, but I doubt it will make many Chrome and Firefox users switch browsers just for this reason. Still, as Microsoft tries to change the public’s perception of IE and maybe win some market share back from Chrome and Firefox, this will give it a little bit more ammunition in its marketing campaigns.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

“Maybe we shouldn’t even call it a browser anymore,” Mozilla’s VP of Firefox engineering Jonathan Nightingale told me a few days ago. “‘Browser’ is really an antiquated word. People don’t really browse all that much anymore.” Instead, he argues, we now mostly use our browsers to access sophisticated web apps, web-based productivity tools and social networks.

For browser developers, this means they have to start to rethink what their browsers should look like now that usage patterns have changed and that the majority of users have become pretty experienced Internet (and browser) users.

Australis: Simplicity Through Curvy Tabs

The project that has been guiding Mozilla’s exploration of what a modern browser should look like is Australis (because Mozilla apparently likes to name projects after star systems) and the fruits of this project will soon find their way into the Firefox release channels, starting with Nightly once it hits version 25 soon. After that, it will make its way through the usual release channels, though Nightingale told me that the team may hold it back from the stable channel a bit longer to ensure that everything works smoothly.

If you feel really adventurous, you can already install a version of Firefox from Mozilla’s relatively obscure UX branch and test it in its current state (but don’t blame us if it crashes a lot or shreds your hard drive).

So what’s Australis all about? At first glance, it looks a bit more like Chrome than the Firefox we know today. In its current iteration, the Australis theme features rounded corners for tabs and the same three-bar icon to the right of the URL and search boxes to bring up a drop-down customization and settings menu.

As Nightingale told me, the idea behind Australis was to design a browser that was just as capable as today, but simpler to use. The team was also tasked to look closely at how people actually use their browsers and then design the user experience around this. The new design, he believes, is cleaner and more intuitive. One example he cited is that in the current iteration of the design, unselected tabs basically blend into the background and don’t even have the usual tab borders around them. Instead of just shrinking tabs as you open more of them, even though you can’t even see the individual tabs’ icons anymore (the way Chrome does), the Firefox team has also decided to set a minimum width for tabs and then move to a scrolling tab bar once the maximum number of tabs has been reached.

While the main Australis theme won’t land in the stable channel before October, Nightingale did stress that even today’s version of Firefox was already influenced by the results of the project. The combined stop/load/reload button in Firefox, for example, came out of this group. So did the new download manager and the fact that Firefox now doesn’t show the forward button anymore when there is no page to go forward to. The customization and tools menu now also uses icons in a three-by-three arrangement and dedicated buttons for copy, select and paste, as well as for increasing font sizes instead of just using a regular drop-down text menu.

Quite a bit of this, of course, is already visible in the Firefox for Android app, too, which in Nightingale’s words had a bit of a “rebirth over the last year.” It’s getting close to 40 million downloads now, however, and this success means a larger user base and the need to slow down radical changes that could confuse users on Android. (And just in case you are wondering, Mozilla still regularly looks at iOS and its opportunities there, but Apple’s current rules still don’t work for Mozilla. The team is, however, looking at “other things” Mozilla could do on iOS.)

Customization

Australis is not just about the design, though. One area that’s also changing with Australis is how you customize the look and feel of your browser. Mozilla currently offers quite a few tools for this, but the team believes they are hard to find and not “fun” enough to use. As Mozilla’s Gavin Sharp told me, the idea here was to get users to enjoy customizing their browsers for the way they use it. Unless users can find these features, though, they could just as well be left out, so the team is working on ways to make it a bit more obvious that users can rearrange and remove virtually all the parts of the Firefox interface to suit their needs.

Now that Firefox is on a rapid-release schedule, the team obviously can’t change the user interface with every update, so the current thinking is to roll some things out together once they are ready and, where it makes sense, roll others out individually. This means that while we’ll see Australis and its curvy tabs in the nightlies of Firefox 25 very soon, it may not actually land in the stable version of Firefox 25.

Building the browser of the future, of course, is not just about design. Mozilla is also trying to adjust to how its users now use their browser through tools like its Social API, as well as more perfomance-oriented initiatives like OdinMonkey and asm.js.

Still, the first thing users will notice once Australis rolls out is the new design. It’ll be hard not to look at it and think that it looks a bit like Chrome – and that will surely stir up a bit of controversy.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Everything.me, is a clever mobile app that lets users search for specific content across both native and mobile apps. The app, available in beta, is a replacement app launcher and home screen for Android devices. You just talk at it as if you would to Siri, and it makes apps appear that are relevant to your request. From there you can download the relevant content or apps. It’s launching its app in the UK and Spain tomorrow.

The company also announced that the platform has reached 350,000 downloads in just over a month of availability on the Google Play store. Not astounding, but clearly showing traction.

Last Everything.me year pulled in $25 million in a round led by Telefonica Digital, with participation from Mozilla, Singtel and existing investors, which include Draper Fisher Jurvetson, BRM Group, Horizon Ventures. The company has now raised $37 million to date. Telefonica and Mozilla are to implement Everything.me into their mobile services.

The app’s integration with Firefox mobile platform, might well give it an edge over Android, iOS, Windows Phone and others. Everything.me currently has no revenue model but it could be used to offering better placement to advertisers for instance.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch