It’s official: The startup formerly known as Art.sy is now, simply, Artsy.

The New York-based Artsy, which runs a website where people can discover and collect artwork, confirmed today that it has indeed permanently changed its web address from Art.sy to Artsy.net. TechCrunch first reported on the apparent switch yesterday.

Artsy, which launched in the spring of 2010, has attracted a good deal of attention over the years with its domain name — Art.sy was certainly a clever web address, but it was also controversial, as .sy is the official domain suffix for the Syrian Arab Republic, which is in the midst of a very violent civil war.

In a press release issued this morning, Artsy said it had been planning to move off the .sy domain later this year, but escalated the switch to this week after experiencing a 36-hour outage due to issues with DNS servers in Syria. (Internet access has been unreliable in Syria for months now, in several cases the government itself has reportedly blocked access to the web for days.)

From the release:

“We first registered the art.sy domain in 2009, and chose the name Art.sy because it is the shortest spellable English
language domain that begins with the word “art.” In April of 2011, we renewed the contract for another two years, extending our registration through the end of 2013. Subsequently, as the conflict in Syria escalated, we realized it
might not be possible to renew the domain again due to U.S. sanctions. We also did not want a domain that could be construed in any way as supporting the Syrian government. As such, we purchased the artsy.net domain in 2012 in preparation for a transition later in 2013.

Although as of early yesterday morning, we were fully back up and running on our old domain, given this unprecedented disruption to our service, we decided to accelerate the transition, and all of our services are now fully accessible on http://artsy.net.“

Meanwhile, on the business side Artsy seems to be bigger than ever. The site now has more than 21,000 artworks from over 4,500 leading artists, which are discoverable via Artsy’s Pandora Radio-like “Art Genome Project” search engine that is meant to find artwork that suits each visitor’s personal tastes. This move seems like a very smart choice to ensure that going into the future, Artsy’s service is as reliable as possible — and the company’s conscience is clean as possible.

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Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Lookout, a company that offers security services for a number of smartphones, is releasing a new study today examining the Android Market and Apple’s App Store for U.S. users. It’s worth a look—the report has a number of interesting data points relating to growth, developers, mobile ad networks and more.

According to Lookout, the number of apps available for Android increased approximately 127% since August 2010, while iPhone saw a growth rate of 44%. Of course, the fact that the Android Market is growing faster isn’t new. And if apps continue to be developed for each platform at the same rate, Android apps will overtake iPhone apps in mid-2012.

While the Android Market may be growing at a faster rate than the Apple App Store, the Apple App Store continues to attract a significant portion of developers. The App Store attracted nearly 24,000 developers between August 2010 and February 2011, whereas the Android Market attracted just over 4,000 developers in the same time period.

The number of unique developers in the Apple App Store grew by approximately 48% over the past 6 months, while the number of unique developers in the Android Market grew by just over 40%. The Android Market generally has more apps per developer than the App Store. The average number of apps submitted per developer is 6.6 in the Android Market and 4.8 in the App Store.

In terms of free versus paid apps, previously, apps in the Android Market have been primarily free; however, over the past 6 months, the Android Market has seen an influx of paid apps. In contrast, the Apple App Store has seen an increase in the proportion of free apps, with prices of paid apps remaining steady, says Lookout. The Android Market saw its prevalence of paid apps grow from 22% to 34% during the past 6 months. The number of paid apps in the Apple App Store decreased from 70% to 66% in the past 6 months.

In terms of mobile ad networks, the AdMob SDK is integrated into more free apps in both the Android Market and the Apple App Store than any other ad platform. However, Lookout says that iAd is quickly gaining traction on the App Store and expects to see iAd surpass AdMob in prevalence amongst free Apple App Store apps during the first half of 2011. iAd has grown in prevalence from just 5.6% of free Apple App Store apps to 15% during the past 6 months

Lookout also examined the number of apps that access users location, claiming that the App Store has a higher percentage of apps that access contacts and location. According to the report, 28% of all apps in the Android Market and 35% of all apps in the Apple App Store access location. Plus, 7% of Android Market apps and 13% of Apple App Store apps have the capability to access contacts.

Lookout’s web-based, cloud-connected applications for Android, Windows Mobile and BlackBerry phones help users from losing their phones and identifies and block threats on a consumer’s phone. Users simply download the software to a device, and it will act as a tracking application and a virus protector much like security software downloaded to a computer. The startup also sponsors the App Genome Project, which is a mobile app dataset created to map the anatomy of mobile applications across multiple mobile platforms and app markets, to provide insight into mobile market dynamics and identify security threats in apps.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Lookout, a company that offers security data backup services for smartphones, is growing rapidly. Less than two months after the startup surpassed one million users, the company has crossed the 2 million registered users mark. It took just over six months to reach 1 million users.

Lookout, which recently raised $11 million from Accel, Khosla and others, says the growth in smartphone adoption, mobile app downloads and increased consumer awareness of mobile security threats have made consumers aware of the security threats on mobile phones.

While smartphone use is growing rapidly, there are security risks associated with the increased data and application usage on these devices. Similar to a PC, users need to protect their phones from malware, viruses, data loss and more. Lookout’s web-based, cloud-connected application indentifies and block threats on a consumer’s phone. Users simply download the software to a device, and it will act as a virus protector much like security software downloaded to a computer.

Lookout also recently launched the App Genome Project which identifies applications that carry the same characteristics of established dangerous applications, quickly isolate them, and protect users. To date, Lookout has analyzed over 300,000 apps.

In less than one year in business, the company has also found lost or stolen phones for users more than 700,000 times, with a phone found every 15 seconds over the past two months. And Lookout has backed-up over 130 million photos and backed-up over 625 million contacts.

Lookout is of course riding on the growth in smartphone adoption, and the increased use of apps on these phones. For now Lookout, which is on more than 400 mobile networks in 170 countries, is only available for BlackBerry, Android and Windows Mobile devices. Lookout has over 80% of its users on Android and BlackBerry with the remaining users on Windows Mobile. And 70% of users are in the US.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Lookout, a company that offers security data backup services for smartphones, is announcing the results of its App Genome Project, a continued effort to map and study mobile applications to identify security threats in the wild, and determine how apps are using users’ personal data.

The App Genome Project has already scanned nearly 300,000 free applications, and fully mapped nearly 100,000 applications available in both Android Market and the App Store.

Early findings show differences in the sensitive data that is typically accessed by Android and iPhone applications and a proliferation of third party code in applications across both platforms.

For example, results found that Android applications are generally less likely than iPhone apps to be capable of accessing a person’s contact list or retrieving their location, with 29% of free applications for Android having the ability to access a user’s location, compared to 33% of free applications on iPhone. Of course, this isn’t a huge difference, but again, this is early data.

Additionally, Lookout says that nearly twice as many free applications have the capability to access people’s contact data on iPhone (14%) as compared to Android (8%). The App Genome Project also found that a large proportion of applications contain third-party code, which is used generally for advertising or analytics. The project found that 47% of free Android apps included third-party code, while that number is just 23% on iPhone.

Lookout’s web-based, cloud-connected application indentifies and block threats on a consumer’s phone. Users simply download the software to a device, and it will act as a virus protector much like security software downloaded to a computer. Lookout, which just raised $11 million from Accel, Khosla and others, says the growth in smartphone adoption, mobile app downloads and increased consumer awareness of mobile security threats have helped make the offering a popular and necessary option for users.

For now Lookout, which is on more than 400 mobile networks in 170 countries and recently topped one million users, is only available for BlackBerry, Android and Windows Mobile devices. Lookout has over 80% of its users on Android and BlackBerry with the remaining users on Windows Mobile. And 70% of users are in the US.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch