Now in its fourth year, tech conference Echelon will spotlight 52 of the Asia Pacific region’s most promising startups from June 4 to 5 in Singapore. The event will also feature more than 50 speakers and judges, including 500 Startups’ Dave McClure and Sahil Lavingia, who raised $8.1 million for his startup Gumroad when he was just 20 years old, and was an early employee at Pinterest.

“It is our vision at e27 and in organizing Echelon 2013, that this region is given the platform it deserves to find global success in Asia’s emerging knowledge-based economy,” said Mohan Belani, CEO and co-founder of e27, the tech media and events platform that hosts Echelon.

Echelon 2013 will take place at Singapore Expo MAX Atria. Startups participating in the event were picked at the conference’s satellite events, which took in nine countries this spring. The ten startups that will compete for the title of Echelon’s Most Promising Startup are:

POP (Taiwan): an app that allows developers to turn paper sketches into app prototypes.

GridMarkets (Malaysia): a marketplace for institutions to sell their excess CPU capacity and monetize a depreciating asset while allowing buyers to source capacity for much less than primary market public cloud costs.

MathSpace (Australia): a cloud-based math learning software.

MyLegalWhiz (Philippines): a mobile-optimized database that simplifies the tedious task of legal research for lawyers and paralegals

NoonSwoon (Thailand): a dating app that introduces users to other singles who are friends of their friends.

Stamp (Thailand): a cardless mobile loyalty program that generates a unique code with each transaction instead of relying on QR codes or GPS check-in functions.

TanyaDok (Indonesia): a health consultation platform for people seeking quick answers to medical questions

TradeHero (Singapore): a finance app that allows users to practice trading with virtual money using real-time stock market data.

TopAdmit (Taiwan): an online college application editing company

Waygo (Taiwan): a mobile app targeted to travelers that uses optical character recognition to translate Chinese phrases into English

For more information about the event, visit Echelon’s site.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Gaming has evolved from single-player to head-to-head to massively multiplayer, but it’s also retreated from public arcades to isolated homes. Today’s launch of the Xbox One makes the whole console experience social, not just the gaming itself. You’ll still be battling other humans, but how you communicate with them and choose what to play is about to change.

Think back 20 years ago, before home gaming devices became the powerhouses they are today. You’d go to an arcade, and the way you’d discover what was fun and popular was looking for which game cabinet drew the rowdiest crowds. I remember discovering Street Fighter 2 in a hotel arcade while on vacation. I couldn’t even see the machine, as it was surrounded by older boys swearing like sailors at every Haduken and thousand-hand-slap.

I knew I wanted to play that game. And when I finally got my turn to get beaten mercilessly as the mob swelled around me, it didn’t feel like I was doing anything nerdy. I was partaking in a new culture, a new community.

That’s the promise of the new Xbox One’s trending section. It surfaces games, apps, video on demand, and other media popular with your friends and the whole Xbox user base. Gamers won’t have to go searching for reviews to see what’s the hot new first-person shooter. The wisdom of the crowd will clue you into what game has captured the zeitgeist, even if you’re playing alone in your basement. Microsoft also hopes to turn word-of-mouth recommendations into an algorithm that shows you what to play next. Because the suggestions come from friends, you might trust them enough to buy a new sports game like NBA Live ’14, listen to a classic album, watch Firefly, or try out a fresh app like Hulu.

Microsoft is also bringing these custom recommendations somewhere that was never really social: television. Live TV can be piped into your living room through the Xbox One; its TV guide features a trending section too. While we’ve gotten used to intelligent suggestions for video-on-demand thanks to data crunchers like Netflix, Xbox one could show you what sports match or awards show your friends and the whole world are watching right now.

Microsoft will have to figure out who your real friends are, possibly through social network integrations, and how to use other factors like geography to massage the trending picks. There will also be privacy design challenges to face, as not everyone wants to share what they do with their controller. But if Xbox One Trending succeeds, it could make games and television viral in a whole new way.

Snap back to the arcade, and 10-year old me is learning all the naughty four-letter words. Each time someone sees their health bar go red, they let out a stream of angry obscenities while onlookers let loose cuss-modified cheers for the victor. But it wasn’t just the sounds. You can hear kids swear at each other all day on Xbox 360 Live. It was the look of anguish in a defeated combatant’s face, the relieved body language of the winner whose reward was one more game and “a new challenger!”

Xbox One’s new Skype group video chat feature means you can play face to face with friends around the world. It’s infinitely more vivid than the audio and text chat capabilities of the Xbox 360. Smile at each other after a successful dungeon raid, or dance around as you brag about your touchdown in Madden. Skype for Xbox goes beyond games so you can watch TV, use apps, and more while having a conversation. Social doesn’t even need to be banished to a second screen. Xbox One “Snap Mode” lets you use voice commands to open video chat in a slide-out, overlaid window on the edge of your TV.

Skype for Xbox takes video chat and puts it in your comfiest chair. Rather than hunching over your laptop, leaning back on your couch could inspire long conversations over your console. You might – *gasp* – even pause your game to chat full screen with your little brother back home. Or it could usher in a new era of simultaneously consumed content, where you having distributed viewing parties for sports and movies rather than cramming your friends in the same room.

Xbox One also comes equipped with automatic, background matchmaking that lets you watch TV or play another game while you wait for a new opponent with a gaming DVR so you can record and share videos of your greatest triumphs or most gruesome game-overs. More people posting those videos to Facebook and Twitter could push serious console gaming ever further into the mainstream.

Of course, some gamers might not want social invading their safe space. Some may use it as a safe space to turn off their good graces, be a bit more primal, and just relax. Pings from friends wanting to Skype chat might be an interruption. Fighting alongside or against other people is all the social interaction they want. But the occasional eye-to-eye encounter could make gaming more fulfilling. If you’ve ever stayed up late playing only to feel a bit empty afterwards, you see the hole a more social Xbox could fill.

Gaming has become a bigger industry than movies. Mobile phones and social networks are bringing games to a wider audience than ever. Yet there’s still a stigma that it’s the realm of unwashed shut-ins and anti-social misfits. The Xbox One and the next generation of social consoles could change that, so even if you play games alone, you’re not a loner anymore.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Clueful, the mobile privacy app Apple booted from its App Store for being too revealing — or possibly because of its own behavior – is staging a comeback. This time around, Clueful’s maker Bitdefender is targeting Android users instead, with plans to reveal what the apps on your phone are doing, and how your privacy may be compromised in the process.

Bitdefender, a company that makes a variety of anti-virus, anti-theft, and other security applications for web and mobile, first launched Clueful a year ago as a $4 iOS app that detailed how the apps on users’ phones handle – or mishandle, as the case may be – personal data. The app launched in the wake of a number of high-profile security events, like address book-gate and locationgate, for example. (And you know they’re bad when there’s a “gate” attached, right?)

For “unknown reasons,” Apple removed Clueful from its App Store shortly after its debut. The company spins this as “we revealed too much!” of course, but the more informed answer points to the fact that, to work, the app itself had to pull a list of apps from a user’s device, send them to Clueful’s servers and then cross-reference those with the apps it had in its database. Apple might not have cared for this process, especially considering the end result may have discouraged app downloads. Clueful later returned in a watered down web version.

Apple mobile device users, of course, don’t have much to fear in terms of malware because of how Apple tests and approves apps ahead of making them publicly accessible in its iTunes App Store. However, Clueful still plays on the sometimes misguided fears some have, who believe that software makers are always purposely and maliciously trying to track your location, acquire your personal or financial data, spam you or your friends with unwanted messages or emails, and more.

Often, apps accused of doing some or all of these things are more the result of a rush to launch or shoddy coding, more so than malicious intent. And sometimes, they’re just early stage startups, making mistakes. Then there’s the fact that some apps are designed to work with this “sensitive” data in ways that help you – an app that wants to help you find nearby events or set geo-fenced reminders, for instance, needs to know where you are.

Yes, there are malicious, virus-laden apps as well as those over-reaching in terms of what they need to function, but many operate in a gray area. So to the uninformed, being told that some app is “tracking you” can perhaps cause concern when little to none is warranted.

To Bitdefender’s credit then, at least the Android version of the application now ranks applications as low, medium or high risk, based on their “danger levels.” And you can also filter to just see those with “intrusive ads” that “send unencrypted data,” or “are viruses,” for example, which could be useful if you’re not prone to being careful with your installs or are worried you have a problem app on your hands.

On Android, Clueful is available for free, with an option to upgrade for added security, including a real-time web scanner, on-install and on-demand app scanner, and more. This is provided by the company’s anti-virus app, which costs  $9.95 per year. That undercuts competitor Lookout’s Premium option, but it also lacks Lookout’s more comprehensive feature set which also includes remote wipe, lock, signal flare, locating lost phones, backup and restore, cross-platform support, and more. (Some of these options are available through Bitdefender’s other freemium apps, but not all.)

Clueful may find better footing on Android, though, where users do have to be more cautious because apps are not vetted ahead of launch. Plus, a good chunk of Android’s user base are those upgrading from feature phones to a low-cost smartphone, and are still technically unsophisticated when it comes to sorting the good apps from the bad.

The new version of Clueful is available here in Google Play.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Automated Insights, a startup that translates raw data into plain English, is launching a new product could make analytics data a lot more accessible.

The new product, called Site Ai, pulls data from existing systems (it started with Google Analytics and Clicky, and the company is currently taking votes on which service to integrate next), then it summarizes that data in normal sentences. For example, it can crete a daily or weekly report that will tell you how current traffic compares to past patterns, what referring sites are driving the most searches, what keywords are driving the most searches, and so on. (You can see a sample report near the end of this post.)

Is it really all that difficult to get that information from Google Analytics? I don’t think so, but there’s still value in going that final step and distilling the data into bullet points that everyone can understand. (At TechCrunch, for example, all the writers have access to our analytics, but we still send out a weekly email summarizing the major trends, and I had to create a similar team email when I wrote for VentureBeat.) Automated Insights founder and CEO Robbie Allen wrote a blog post in January criticizing the dashboard-based approach to analyzing data:

The problem with dashboards is that they don’t directly provide insights or deliver knowledge about the data. Even worse, most visualizations require the user go through the mental exercise of interpreting the results. Unless the user knows something about the way a visualization is constructed, (e.g., X-axis, Y-axis, units, scale, etc.), the results can be difficult to understand. For a segment of your audience (arguably a small segment), requiring this level of analysis and interpretation is probably ok. However, this also means many users will be excluded from being able to get anything meaningful from the data (I refer to this group as data novices.)

Put another way: With a Site Ai summary, you shouldn’t have to do too much thinking.

As the company name implies, all of the summaries are automatically generated by Automated Insights’ technology, not people. Allen told me that’s a big challenge: “Turning data into text is difficult because it requires marrying two skills that traditionally don’t play well with each other: programming and writing.” The reason Allen said he can do it is because he has a background in both technology (he worked at Cisco and has degrees from MIT in computer science), but also in writing (he’s the author of a number of books published by O’Reilly).

The company is doing something unusual with the pricing too. It’s offering free sign-up for 60 days, but after that, the price will depend on how many people sign up. If there are more than $10,000 registered users at the end of the trial period, the price will only be $4 per user. So people who like the product have more incentive to tell their friends — Allen called it “viral pricing.”

Beyond its new product, Automated Insights says it will produce 300 million personalized stories in this year for customers like Yahoo, Microsoft, and the Cleveland Indians. The company, formerly known as StatSheet, has raised $5.3 million in funding.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Square’s not just for businesses apparently, as an invite-only page for a product called “Square Cash” has popped up. Not many details are known about it, but we’ve reached out to the company for comment.

UPDATE: A Square representative sent us the following statement on Square Cash: “We’re excited to share Square Cash with our friends. We’ll continue to invite others to try it out in the coming weeks.”

The splashy animated page shows an email to a friend with a $25 payment, with a Square email address in the CC line:

There’s only the promise of email sending at this point, but you can imagine that this could become a permanent part of Square’s native apps at some point.

This approach is similar to other personal payment solutions, like Venmo and PayPal. Google wants you to send payments to people via Gmail and Wallet. Even Visa got into the act at one point. You can view the page right now, and that’s it. Sending money to friends is a social experience that really hasn’t been cracked yet, and it makes complete sense that a service like Square step up to take the crown. The space is officially hot again.

The page promises that you can send money directly to someone’s debit card, even if they’re not signed up for Square. They’ll be given a link to attach a debit card with their first received payment, which serves as a fantastic way to onboard new Square users:

The invites are being controlled by the company, not even allowing you to enter your email address. There’s also a help page set up for the “Cash” product already, sharing that it will cost the sender $0.50 per transaction and will be free for recipients. You’ll both get receipts for each transaction. The company says on the page: “Square Cash is the easiest way to send money to anyone, using just email and your debit card.”

The company just announced a new, pretty iPad cash register for businesses, but Square clearly wants to be in all of our pockets…and bank accounts.

While it’s hard to decrypt CEO Jack Dorsey’s tweets and Vines, Square Cash might have been the reason for this recent little celebration:

Celebrating an excellent little something. vine.co/v/b9JqebYq1wj

—
Jack Dorsey (@jack) May 20, 2013

We’ll let you know when we get our invites.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Today, Google updated its Google+ app for Android to get up to speed with all of the changes announced during last week’s I/O Developers conference. In all, there were 41 new updates, including a new stream, photos experience and Hangouts.

The Android version has all of that, and one new feature — a new location section.

Where the Anroid app really shines is with the photo capabilities. The updated Google+ app now has the auto backup, highlight, enhance and “auto awesome” functionality that the desktop version has. It’s really handy to be able to enhance your photos directly within the app, rather than waiting until you get back to your computer or relying on Google to do its magical synthetic wrinkle removal, even though it’s cool.

To make it easier to “make plans and meet,” Google+ has broken “Locations” out into its own section. Now, when you share your location with certain Circles, your friends can easily find you by tapping on that section. Naturally, it drops everyone’s location onto a Map, which makes it seamless:

Location is something that hasn’t been a great piece of Google+ to date. The service currently picks up where you are and asks you for your explicit location, not really telling you who will get to see it. With the Location section and controls, it’s easier to manage and can turn into an experience similar to that of Foursquare.

The stream is getting all of the features from last week, too. The auto hashtags will let you drill into new content, hopefully sucking up all of your free time. It turns the Google+ experience into something like Wikipedia, where you can just keep tapping on relevant content and hopefully find some new people to follow along the way. While you’re not going to get the new three-column layout on your smartphone, the drilling down is actually fun.

We’ll await the iOS update, but expect the same items to find their way into that version. All of these enhancements are made to entice you to do a little bit more in Google+, as the company doesn’t really expect you to jump ship from one network to another. The features are more complementary to one another in this update, giving a better experience to new users, which is the most important demographic for Google to focus on right now. Those of us who have tried Google+ already have our minds made up as to whether it’s useful or not. It’s the stragglers who haven’t seen it from the beginning that need to be wowed.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

If the last few years have all been about building compelling mobile-first or mobile-only experiences, the latest trend seems to be bringing those experiences back to the web. (Just look at Instagram!) Anyway, with that in mind, social TV startup Dijit became the latest to follow this lead, with the launch of NextGuide Web.

The new web experience is kind of like Dijit’s NextGuide app, in that it helps people search for and discover new shows they’d like to watch, while providing ways to easily get alerts and set notifications for shows and movies when they come on. That includes shows that are on both live and on the web, providing a way to manage both traditional TV and streaming services like Netflix or Hulu.

The site, like the app, is highly personal — when making recommendations, it takes into account shows that you’ve liked, either in NextGuide itself or on Facebook. It also allows you to see what shows and movies your friends have liked or shared, giving you a sense of what’s cool or popular.

But it also includes the necessary search and browse functionalities necessary for “social discovery” apps. And while it hooks into a whole lot of online services — like Amazon Prime, Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Hulu Plus, and, of course, Netflix — it also lets you know when your favorite shows and movies are going to be on TV.

NextGuide Web allows users to create watchlists and queue up shows they will want to watch later. And it will remind users when a show is on live TV, or when a new episode is added to a streaming service. For those who have DirecTV, it’ll even allow those users to record to their DVR with one click. (Dijit CEO Jeremy Toeman says other cable TV providers will be added as time goes on.)

Those who are already users of the NextGuide iPad app can log in with their account credentials or Facebook Connect right now. But for others, the Web experience is being launched in a closed beta, with Dijit sending out new invitations each week.

NextGuide is just one product that Dijit has rolled out over the years, but it’s the one that the company is (obviously) most focused on. It also still supports the Dijit Remote app. Oh, and not too long ago it acquired Miso and all of its products.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Keith Teare is the founder of just.me and a partner at Archimedes Labs. He is also the co-founder of TechCrunch. Follow him on Twitter @kteare.

Because of Google I/O, this was a momentous week for those of us who are watching the rapid transition that is taking place from desktop computing to mobile, and particularly for those focused on mobile-social as I am because of my job at just.me. Here is my take on what we just witnessed.

Standalone Hangouts. Google announced at its I/O event that Hangouts was to be launched as a separate app from Google Plus, taking personal conversations out from the G+ app and putting them into their own space.

Facebook Home problems. AT&T was reported to have decided to discontinue distribution of the HTC First – the Facebook Home Android phone – due to lack of sales. This comes on the back of publicity pointing to a large number of one-star reviews for the software on the Google Play store.

What is at stake?

There are many common themes and questions that underpin the launch and evolution of Hangouts as a separate app and previously led to the decision to launch the Facebook Home product. These products represent two very similar answers to a common question. The primary question is who will users look to to enable their social communications needs on mobile devices?

To set the context for an analysis let’s acknowledge the elephant in the room that is partially driving these decisions.

Mobile Messaging is rapidly becoming the primary way users engage socially on mobile. Figures released this week imply more than 41 billion messages a day are now being delivered via various “Over the Top”  (OTT) messaging apps.

Phones were created as social tools. Smartphones are especially good at being social, integrating text, voice, video and images in an endless number of apps that can serve a user’s needs, and all without the need for a web-based social network.

Users are able to communicate with anybody in their address book anywhere in the world with almost any content mix at any time. This has been compelling to users and has driven the growth of apps like iMessage, WhatsApp, LINE, WeChat, KakaoTalk and some other smaller competitors. Almost 750 million users out of a smartphone population of 1.2 billion are already using these apps.

If you are Google, Facebook or almost any other major provider of social communications platforms originally developed for the web, this move to mobile messaging represents a considerable challenge.

Similar challenges exist from media-sharing apps. As users flock to Vine, Snapchat and, previously, Instagram, the social platforms are challenged to continue to be the primary provider of these services to the growing army of smartphone users.

The other core feature of Facebook and Google+, publishing to an audience for all or many to see, are increasingly becoming activities only a few engage in on mobile — and certainly less often than was the case on the web.

What Is A Platform Provider To Do?

If we look out a few years there is really only one product approach available.

That is to build single apps that embrace and extend the current features of the messaging market leaders — hoping to win users over from WhatsApp, LINE, KakaoTalk and WeChat — while also integrating the features of media sharing, private memory collection and publishing into single unified experiences.

Google and Facebook both seem to be pursuing this approach.

Breaking out Hangouts and going after the messaging audience with enhanced features makes sense. But Google also showed Google Now and Voice Search as possible points of integration for all of its mobile-social features. It’s early days here, but Android clearly wants to find a point of integration for all the users’ needs.

Facebook, with Home, revealed its integrated approach, while under the hood it has Messenger, Camera, Pages and the full Facebook app. Poor as Home’s reception has been, Facebook will certainly continue to deepen and refine its integration efforts and its attempt to be the primary UI a user needs on a smartphone.

Vulnerabilities And Strengths Of Mobile-First Companies

WhatsApp and its clones can be thought of as mobile-first companies. Their apps sit on top of the smartphone, particularly the mobile address book, and just help a user chat to their friends, family or colleagues.  Their success is their simplicity and the singular purpose they have addressed.

Insofar as they are vulnerable, it is due to being very narrowly focused on brief “in the moment” conversations in the form of a chat or instant messaging UI. They have added the ability to include media in those conversations, and some voice-calling abilities. But their goal is really momentary interactions with individuals or groups. Their requirement to have both sides of the conversation install the app is another liability.

Human beings have broader needs that are currently served by other single-use apps. Evernote for private memories, email for longer more enduring interactions, social networks like Facebook, Google+ and Twitter for public statements of all kinds and Path or Instagram for photo sharing. This is a little like the era of Windows before Outlook when apps tended to do only one thing and users used many apps.

Can Web Companies Beat Mobile-First Companies?

These recent moves by Facebook and Google represent early moves by the web-era companies to react to the successes of the mobile-first messengers. They certainly do not represent end points in any way, impressive as they are. And there is plenty of time for the mobile messaging apps to respond by offering a broader range of social features. 

There are already clues to the future – provided by users. The continuing use of email on mobile (trillions of messages in 2013) indicates that  users are not entirely catered for by the chat-centric conversational UI. The growth of Vine and Snapchat (single-feature based as they are) indicate not all media-sharing needs are catered for by these apps. There is a lot still to play for.

If we look five years out, it is likely that the iOS and Android core will support a far more integrated set of messaging tools that cater for many of the needs we use single-use apps for today.

Message saving for private use, shared messaging to individuals or groups, media sharing, video and voice messaging (both synchronous and asynchronous), Timelines to look back and recall what we did in the past. These will all be features of the operating system.

As mobile moves from its Windows 3.1 — single-use apps — era to its more integrated future, apps that used to stand alone will have their features sucked into the operating system. Google and Apple have an advantage here of course as they own the operating system.

The Future Is Being Fought Over Now

In that sense the current product focus – decisions about what features to separate into single apps, and how to integrate those into a unified UI all represent the first moves in defining who wins.

Facebook has Messenger, Camera, Pages and its primary app with Home as an integration point.

Google has Talk, Contacts, Mail, Plus, Hangouts perhaps with Now as a point of integration.

Apple is a little behind but has iMessage, FaceTime, Photostream, Mail and Contacts. iOS itself may be the point of integration.

WhatsApp, LINE, KakaoTalk, WeChat and the others will need to move beyond the chat-centric user interface into a broader set of asynchronous messaging features, and a new set of social features, probably with Timeline support, in order to stay ahead of the curve.

The End Of Social Networks And The Start Of A New Era?

The ground has been set for a fascinating next few years as the web-based social platforms seek to own mobile-social messaging and the mobile messaging apps seek to extend into more fully integrated social features.

As of this moment the mobile-first apps have the lead measured by number of users and levels of engagement. To keep it they will need to continue to innovate.

The human race is already social, and the smartphone has everything needed to enable them to act on their social needs. As the growth of OTT messaging and media sharing shows, a user’s social needs are being met with no need for a social network.

In this mobile-social world the only question is, whose software will we all use to enable human social activities? That is what this week was all about.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Zynga has apparently told the makers of the dating website CupidWithFriends that they need to change the site’s name, because it allegedly infringes on Zynga’s trademarks.

CupidWithFriends was built by the startup Apartment 7 (which also released the dating apps Flock and Wednesday Night). The site launched a couple of months ago, allowing users to build and edit dating profiles for their friends.

Apartment 7 co-founder Jared Tame just forwarded me a copy of the letter from Zynga’s lawyers. I’ve pasted the full letter at the end of this post, but the gist is that users are likely to think that CupidWithFriends is associated in some way with Zynga (which acquired the developer of the With Friends mobile gaming franchise, a franchise that recently expanded with the launch of Running With Friends). So the social gaming company is demanding that CupidWithFriends change its name by May 24.

Tame said he has “no plans to change the name of the product,” adding,”At the end of the day, we’re busy trying to innovate in the dating space and dealing with Zynga would be a major distraction to us. I think they should be more focused on innovating rather than targeting month-old startups like us.”

I emailed Zynga for confirmation and details, but a spokesperson declined to comment. When I ran a search on the US Patent and Trademark Office’s website (direct links to specific filings don’t seem to be working for me), I did find a trademark filing for “With Friends” in relation to computer game software and entertainment services.

Tame isn’t the only one building an app named using a “with friends” name. There’s also Bang With Friends (which has other problems, as it was recently booted from the Apple App Store) — I asked the company whether it has received a similar letter from Zynga, but it declined to comment.

Here’s the full letter to CupidWithFriends:

Dear Sir or Madam:

We serve as intellectual property counsel to Zynga Inc. (“Zynga”). Among other things, Zynga publishes and owns intellectual property rights in the ‘WITH FRIENDS™ family of social games, which includes Words With Friends®, Chess With Friends®, Scramble With Friends®, Hanging With Friends™, Matching With Friends™, Gems With Friends™ and Games With Friends®, as well as other ‘WITH FRIENDS games in various stages of development (collectively the ‘WITH FRIENDS Family of Trademarks). Each of Zynga’s games using the ‘WITH FRIENDS Family of Trademarks is published and played by millions of users on various social networking portals, including Facebook, Android and iPhone.

Zynga has consistently used and promoted the ‘WITH FRIENDS Family of Trademarks together as a family and, as a result of Zynga’s extensive marketing efforts and commercial success, the ‘WITH FRIENDS Family of Trademarks is strongly identified by consumers with Zynga’s reputation for quality.

It has come to our attention that CupidWithFriends has developed and launched an application called “Cupid With Friends”. CupidWithFriends’ use of the name “Cupid With Friends” for an online application is confusingly similar to the ‘WITH FRIENDS Family of Trademarks owned by Zynga, and users are likely to believe, erroneously, that CupidWithFriends’ application is published, sponsored, endorsed by or associated with Zynga. CupidWithFriends’ use of “Cupid With Friends” also dilutes the distinctiveness of Zynga’s famous ‘WITH FRIENDS Family of Trademarks.

Zynga has invested substantial time and resources in developing and promoting the ‘WITH FRIENDS Family of Trademarks, and it vigorously protects its rights in its marks, both collectively and individually. Zynga hereby demands that CupidWithFriends immediately cease use of the name “Cupid With Friends” in connection with its online application, and refrain from further exploitation of the goodwill that Zynga has developed in its ‘WITH FRIENDS Family of Trademarks.

We anticipate that you will accede to this demand, and ask that CupidWithFriends confirm by Friday, May 24, 2013 that it has ceased use of the name “Cupid With Friends” in connection with its online application. Nothing contained in this letter constitutes an express or implied waiver of any rights, remedies, or defenses of Zynga, all of which are expressly reserved.
Very truly yours,
/s/

Dennis L. Wilson
Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton LLP

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Uh oh.

Less than ten days after Bang With Friends made its mobile debut on the iOS App Store, Apple has changed its mind and given it the boot.

As I noted in our first post about Bang With Friends going mobile, I was actually a bit surprised to -see Apple green light this one to begin with. The guys behind the app tried to chaste things up a bit for Apple, changing the name for the iOS version of their app to the slightly more inconspicuous “BWF” (The Android app, meanwhile, was still “Bang With Friends”. Google don’t give no damns.)

Alas, it seems that wasn’t enough for an extended stay. Apple has allegedly pulled the app without notice or explanation, with requests for the app in iTunes being met with the error below:

So what happened here? Did someone higher up at Apple get word of the app and decide to drop the ban hammer? Or could it be… something else? Note, for example, that Zynga just went after dating site CupidWithFriends for using their “With Friends” trademark, requesting that the name be changed. We’re looking into what happened.

So is the Bang With Friends team, it would seem; a page put up by the team says they’re “working with Apple to get BWF back in the App Store shortly”.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch