In the interest of protecting children, a new iOS application called AppCertain has debuted a monitoring application aimed at parents. The app, whose goal is to alert parents about the nature of the applications their kids are downloading, involves the use of a “configuration profile” – special software Apple originally intended for enterprise use, not consumer-facing apps sold through its App Store marketplace.

But Apple reviewed the application – for longer than most, founder and CEO Spencer Whitman tells us – and subsequently approved it. For how long that will remain the case, however, is unknown.

“We think we are on a gray line with respect to Apple, but we don’t really know,” Whitman admits.

Configuration profiles, for those unfamiliar, were designed for the enterprise environment, allowing I.T. departments to manage the iPhones and iPads used by a company’s employees. They’re typically employed by Mobile Device Management solutions which use the software to configure, track and/or restrict a number of system-level settings like Wi-Fi, VPNs, app settings, permissions, and more.

But more recently, a handful of startups have started using these same profiles to work around Apple’s App Store’s restrictions in order to accomplish tasks which wouldn’t otherwise be possible. Apple is aware this is happening, and seems to be handling each app submission on a one-off basis for now.

We’ve seen mobile data compression utilities like Onavo and Snappli take advantage of the technology to intercept, re-route, and compress web data in order to save users’ bandwidth, for instance. Social search engine Wajam also uses a configuration profile to inject its own search results into Safari, though this is done outside of the Apple App Store.

Onavo is still live on the Apple App Store today, though Snappli has since disappeared. (We reached out to the company for details, but have yet to hear back. It’s possible that Apple simply didn’t care for the fact that Snappli had publicly shared data showing how iOS users were dumping the then newly-launched Apple Maps application.)

But frankly, it seems odd that Apple would knowingly ever let these types of applications into its consumer-facing app store in the first place, given the security risks they could pose. If used unscrupulously, a malicious configuration profile could remote control a user’s device, manipulate user activity, and hijack their sessions, or so explained security researchers at Skycure back in March.

AppCertain isn’t a malicious developer, though, and its intentions are not to control or restrict how an Apple device is used, which would then be stepping on top of Apple’s own, built-in Parental Control features. Instead, it only monitors app downloads and reports back to parents via email that an app was downloaded, explaining what the app does, as well as what sorts of permissions it requests, and more.

The idea is to alert parents about the apps their child uses, including whether or not they have educational value. It doesn’t prevent the child from actually downloading or installing apps.

The service, staffed by a number of Carnegie Mellon University alumni, first launched to the web in February after being incubated by seed and studio fund Birchmere Labs.

Whitman explained at the time that the company wanted to help busy parents, who often have a hard time keeping up with what their children are installing and using. It’s not only a problem that affects tech novices, he had said. Even savvy parents often forget or get too busy to keep a close eye on their children’s devices. And these devices, little mini-computers that they are, are not without risks.

Parental Controls Outside Of Apple’s Control

While AppCertain is trying to go the official, Apple-approved route with its creation, another company, a small German app consultancy called Mocava, is not. Its new Parental Control application is an over-the-air install only, knowing that Apple would never approve it for App Store download.

Mocava owner Vinh Phuc Dinh says that he created the app to address a situation he found himself in all the time. “I have many nephews, and would pass on my device for them to play,” he tells us. “Unfortunately, there is no easy way to restrict access on the iPhone and save the desired preferences. So we built it ourselves.”

What he means is that though Apple offers parental control features, it’s not the right solution for those who only need controls on occasion. With his Parental Control App, you can quickly turn on restrictions without having to reconfigure them from scratch them each time you hand your phone or iPad to a child. Even if Apple’s restrictions are turned off, the tool will remember your settings.

You can restrict certain default apps from being accessed or certain content from being viewed. You can disable in-app purchases, or specify that an App Store password is always required, and more. To get started, you configure your settings on the web, then download the profile the company provides.

The mere fact that this app and AppCertain even exist speaks to one of the problems with Apple’s strict control over its OS. Unlike on Android where apps like  KIDO’Z, Kytephone, Play Safe, Kid Mode and others allow parents more granular control and insight, Apple’s settings are cumbersome. If you turn on age restrictions, for example, the child can’t watch Netflix. You can disable the web browser, but not whitelist websites, and so on.

These devices are computers, and while parents may disagree on what level of involvement on their part is necessary, it’s fair to say that as with “real” computers, children – especially young children – shouldn’t be given free rein with no parental oversight. Too many parents think of iPads as toys, blindly typing in their password every time their kid begs for a new app. They, perhaps, put too much trust in Apple’s “family friendly” policies – just because apps are rated and ranked, pornography or gore-free, that doesn’t make everything appropriate for every child.

It will be interesting to see how far Apple allows these companies to push into this new territory, before it decides to crack down or otherwise change its policies.

AppCertain is available for download here on iPhone and iPad.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A number of startups have been trying their hand at subscription-based children’s books services, or something like a “Netflix for kids’ books,” so to speak. Today, another entry called Zoobean joins the flock, with the debut of its own handpicked catalog which parents can either subscribe to, or choose to just shop online like a standard e-commerce website.

The company was co-founded by Jordan Lloyd Bookey, Google’s head of K-12 Education Outreach, and her husband Felix Brandon Lloyd, who is a former Washington, D.C., Teacher of the Year. Like the founders of similar services in this space, including the recently launched Sproutkin and The Little Book Club, for example, Bookey and Lloyd are also parents.

“About a year ago, when our daughter was born, we were looking for a book for our son that would help him understand what it would mean to be a big brother. And in this particular case – we’re a multi-racial family – we were looking for something that might have kids that more resembled our family,” explains Lloyd.

That challenge proved harder than they thought.

The parents wanted a way to find a recommended book that matched their interests, but one they knew was also quality reading. So they built Zoobean to address this problem.

The site, at launch, has nearly 1,500 books for sale, all of which are parent-recommended, curated by a team of parents, teachers, librarians and others, and which are cataloged more extensively with topics, characters’ backgrounds, recommended ages, keyword tags and more. That way, when a parent is looking for a specific book on a topic, they can click to see all those that address that topic – like “self-esteem,” “anger and frustration,” or “growing up,” for example, as well as find books that match their own family structure and characteristics (e.g. “brother & sister,” “mother & child,” “black,” “Chinese Americans,” etc.)

The site will directly sell five featured items per month centered around a theme, and one of these will be available through an optional subscription. Subscribers pay $14.95 for the featured book of the month, a high-quality, hardcover. However, the majority of the cataloged books on Zoobean are being sold through affiliates like Amazon. Zoobean also offers a weekly reading guide for parents detailing the books in its featured collection along with activities parent and child can do together to learn more about the topic.

Though when the founders were speaking of their site’s uniqueness, their focus was on the curation aspects and the way the books were cataloged in more detail. But one of the more interesting things about this service with respect to its competitors is the diversity its selection reflects. There are books about many different ethnicities and subjects, and even harder-to-find books that cover transgender issues or bullying, for example.

“Any kid, parent or loved one who’s coming to find the right book can find one that the child can see him or herself in,” explains Bookey of the Zoobean collection.

The company has raised $500,000 in a seed round led by Kapor Capital, along with other private angels, friends and family. The plan is to raise another $250,000 on top of that.

Until today, Zoobean was in private, invite-only beta with some 200 testers. Now, it’s opening its doors to all parents or anyone else in the market for kids’ books. Users can sign up or browse the collection here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Viewers are asking for more live streaming video, and surprisingly, broadcasters are willing to give it to them. Gone are the days where live events need to be watched on the TV, because I mean, who watches TV anymore? When I watch the game, I’m gonna do so on a seven-inch tablet in the privacy of my bathroom, because there’s nowhere else I can concentrate when the kids are watching Dora the Explorer on Netflix in the living room — or whatever it is the kids are watching these days.

Anyway, keenly aware of this trend, thePlatform — which already helps a number of broadcast and cable networks manage their on-demand libraries — is taking steps to make live event streaming easier for their customers. The company, which is a subsidiary of Comcast, is launching a new, SaaS-based platform which will allow networks to schedule and manage live events, with everything they need, like signal acquisition and encoding, dynamic ad insertion and metadata creation, and automatic archiving of programs when they’re done.

The new live video offering will integrate seamlessly both with thePlatform’s existing on-demand video management system, as well as with the encoders that broadcasters use to take analog signals and make them digital. To start, that integration will include Elemental encoders, although thePlatform’s VP of marketing, Marty Roberts, promises that other encoders will be added soon. But anyway, once your encoder is hooked up to thePlatform, you’re good to go!

After you’ve taken care of that, there’s all sorts of stuff you can do with it. Wanna hit each and every device your device-specific rights contract allows you to stream to? NO PROBLEM.

Let’s say that you can stream to the desktop and laptop, but not mobile phones because you’ve got some exclusive legacy contract with a mobile phone provider where only their subscribers get the game. thePlatform has you covered. It even gets extra bonus points for streaming to the iPad, which no one could have imagined when that contract was put in place and isn’t considered a mobile device. (Yeh, I don’t understand it either.)

How about making money? After all, you’re not gonna stream that football game for free now, are you? NO WORRIES! thePlatform has live ad insertion. You just tell those ads when to run and you’re golden. Cha-Ching!

Wanna add funny graphics or live info while viewers are watching? NOT A BIGGIE. In the same way you just ran an ad, you can also dynamically queue up pretty much any type of media, just like it’s an ad!

And once your live show is over, don’t you worry your little head about re-encoding it and putting it into some on-demand library for all the lamers who didn’t watch it live to come look at it later. thePlatform will auto-archive that shiz for you and feed it right into your on-demand library, with whatever rights management and ad rules and whatever else you want to apply to it.

That way, it doesn’t have to be lost to the ether when all the action is over — the content will have all the same ad cues, chapter breaks, and metadata that was associated with it while it was streaming live. But now viewers will be able to search for it, and find just the moments they want to watch.

So thePlatform has been working with a few different networks — like some of Fox’s regional sports nets and NBC Sports — and things have been all good on their live events. So now the live streaming offering will be generally available to other folks who want to try it. Got a network and wanna do it live! Call thePlatform!

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

I’m pretty much out of superlatives when writing about Dylan Collins’ latest venture.

Box of Awesome, which we previously described as a “free Birchbox for kids“, has acquired Swapit, the site that lets kids and teens trade unwanted items for stuff they do want and operates an accompanying ad network with a reach of 7.3 million. And with it comes a change of name. The newly formed company, which Collins says is now the leading kids and teens discovery platform in the UK, is to be called SuperAwesome.

That’s right, just when you think it can’t get any more ____________ [INSERT SUPERLATIVE].

The terms of the deal remains undisclosed, though I understand it was for stock not cash and that Swapit’s 9 person team will be joining the newly-formed company, including Tom Impallomeni as COO and Lee Veitch as VP Sales.

Box of Awesome launched back in February as a way to solve the discovery problem faced by physical and digital products targeting the 8-14 year-old kids market. It consists of a bi-monthly box delivered in the post to subscribers, stuffed full of games, music, books and other kid-friendly stuff. The draw for brands who pay for space in each Box of Awesome is the opportunity to be discovered by influencers in that hard to reach demographic — and to get valuable feedback from the mandatory surveys the kids take if they want to receive the next box.

The following month, the UK startup launched a version targeting girls, cleverly named OMG!, and there’s also a digital-only version to keep kids happy while they sit it out on the waiting list.

Meanwhile, Swapit has been around for a lot longer. Founded in 2001, it has three legs to its business. First is the online swapping and trading community for kids and teenagers. On the site, members earn virtual currency called “swapits” for every item they trade in, which they then use to bid on items they do want. But here’s the clincher: They can also earn “swapits” from leading brands and organisations for various activities. This includes mini-games, competitions and taking surveys. Swapits can also be used to bid on brand-promoted items. All of which makes sense from a SuperAwesome point of view.

In addition, Swapit operates an extensive ad network targeting kids, and has a research arm, too. Both also of value to the “kids discovery” proposition offered by the new company.

“Our vision is to create the next generation discovery platform for the kids and teens market,” says Collins in an email. “This generation of kids is enormously disruptive: they exist on multiple platforms and locations. And this maps exactly to how we’re building our company. As well as being experts in understanding kids and teens, Swapit has always shared this hybrid view which is why we realised there was a genuine match here.”

Collins also reckons that by combining forces, SuperAwesome has a reach of about 65% of the UK kids/teens market.

In a statement, Tom Impallomeni, CEO of Swapit, adds: “With SuperAwesome we’ve created the biggest kids and teens discovery platform in the UK which is safe, compliant and effective. I think our awesome customers, who include the likes of Warner Bros, Topps, Activision and Random House (amongst many others) are testament to this. For many brands, we are already a required part of their marketing mix.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Purchext, a new app/service that increases communication between parents, their youngsters and the purchases their youngsters make, is on display at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013. The concept behind the startup is a way for parents to approve purchases their kids are making. In reality, it works more like a way for kids to submit expense reports to their parents.

For each purchase a dependent minor makes, they can scan the receipts with the Purchext app and those receipts are submitted to their parents for approval. If the parent approves it, the amount of money on the receipt will be released to the kid’s bank account that is connected to their Purchext account.

In practical terms, the service can also be automated via a series of rules set up to filter purchases.

I’m not going to say the concept is not “gameable” by the kids using it. Surely enterprising minors could figure out ways around this, or could forgo submitting those purchases altogether. However as a concept, it could still streamline allowances and keep many relevant purchases on parents’ radar.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Thanks to GM’s new app platform, keeping track of family members, as well as learning their driving history, is easier than ever. One hack from our Disrupt NY Hackathon, called Kar Nanny, seeks to let users see where their kids are driving and get notifications if they’re being unsafe. Or you can see where your spouse is. Or, if you own a car rental fleet, this will give you the opportunity to keep tabs on how renters are using your cars.

The app can be installed on the GM infotainment system, but it runs transparently in the background. The real power of Kar Nanny comes from mobile apps that connect with the on-board system to grab info and display it on users’ mobile phones. In addition to real-time location data, it also keeps track of driving history, so you can see how fast your kids were driving or how much gas is left in their tank.

Users can also receive alerts based on user-defined criteria. So, for instance, parents can get texts if they know that their kids were driving over the speed limit. Or they can set a geofence and find out if their kid drives into the city with the family car.

For fleets, the app can provide a history of renters that have driven aggressively. And if there’s ever an accident, the app can help to reconstruct what happened, showing the speed the car was driving at impact or whether there was sudden braking, for instance.

The revenue model is to have a monthly subscription, $5 for every car and driver per month that are monitored. While Kar Nanny will have a freemium model for the first driver in a family situation, the team expects that fleet monitoring is where they’ll actually make their money.

Of course, Kar Nanny used the GM API and app platform to get info related to a user’s driving history. The team used Appery.io to prototype the mobile app and Pusher‘s real-time messaging API to send mobile notifications.

The team is made up of Haris Amin, a software engineer at Dailyburn; Dan Karney, a software engineer by day at the digital audio ad network TargetSpot; Raquel Hernandez, a full-stack software developer who’s working as a senior technologist in an innovation lab making mobile apps for the hospitality industry; and Justin Isaf, former director of community for the Huffington Post.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Last week,  Jive Software‘s Oudi Antebi came by the house to show off the company’s new platform. I don’t usually have people stop by for briefings but he was insistent, so I agreed. I had to meet this guy willing to come out to my house even if I was taking double shots of Nyquil.

Oudi joined Jive when the company bought his startup, OffiSync, in 2011. In his words, all was going well in the post-startup life. More time with the kids, a job with nowhere near the pressures that come with a startup. Then CEO Tony Zingale called and said he wanted Oudi to take over product management for the company. And so here arrived Oudi at my front door, back in it, deep in the product, wanting to show me how Jive had returned to its roots.

What Oudi showed me has its roots as a blog platform with the immediate feedback that comes with social networks. Here’s a look at what it offers and why it has value, but also some sticking issues that give room for alternative services such as Moxie Software.

The new Jive has enough in-line features to make it a service that is a viable alternative to email. Its microblogging platform shows all the impact metrics such as viewers and sentiment analysis. Send an update and you get immediate feedback.

An update can include images, tables, bullet points and the rich-text features found in a standard email service. But as it is an activity stream, it looks a lot richer, cascading down the page in a river of news style. Questions that get answered can be marked and tasks can be assigned. I’d like to see it offer the social knowledge engine that Moxie now offers to make the collaboration deeper and more contextual.

Outside the discussion is a new context engine that connects anyone using the Jive platform to the web page or third-party service you may be using. Pull up a profile on LinkedIn, click the tab and it extracts all the conversations that are associated with the profile. The tab reveals a window that shows the conversations that people are having about that particular blog post or whatever it might be.

Jive added 25 templates to provide a deeper purpose to groups. They allow users to create groups, such as a deal room, campaign planning, vendor collaboration, etc. The group can be marked according to different levels of permission such as public, private or “secret.”

In a deal room, for example, a customer can receive live data from Salesforce. “You never have to go to Salesforce,” Oudi said. “You can use Chatter right there.”

Jive’s update has the right touches, including baseball-card-style employee profiles. And people can customize their activity streams in a manner similar to Google Circles.

Oudi says Jive is seeking to move away from standard lightweight activity streams and instead help people get their work done.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Timbuktu, an adorably designed educational and entertainment-focused iPad app for kids, has finally revamped its business model, which had previously been a terrible example of how children’s apps too often try to grow their revenue by tricking kids into purchasing in-app content. The company now admits that its virtual allowance mechanism was too misleading, and has moved forward with a much simpler subscription option. The new app is worth the download.

The 500 Startups-backed company, founded by Elena Favilli (CEO) and Francesca Cavallo (Creative Director), had launched the original version of the app at the beginning of last year, followed by a major revamp towards year-end. There was a lot to like about Timbuktu, which is cleverly designed, with bright colors and illustrations, offering kids a magazine-like experience which later became more of a playtime idea board, filled with daily activities for parents and kids to do together, including stories to read, printables, craft ideas, and more.

The problem was that the way users paid for content was less than ideal. Some days, content would be free, but other days you would have to pay. Worse, the app used “virtual bubbles” which users would pop to buy the premium content and stories. Obviously, this type of design encourages younger users to interact – and possibly then pay for – items their parents didn’t approve.

Of course the iPad has parental controls and other mechanisms to prevent purchases like this from happening – but that’s not been enough to prevent some rather high-profile examples of what can go wrong when kids are left in charge. And to actually design an app in such a way to make the purchases seem like content, is pretty awful.

Co-founder Elena Favilli recently reached out to us about the new version, saying that the concerns we brought up in our previous review have now been addressed.

“You were rightfully complaining about our purchase model,” she said. “We got rid of bubbles, because they proved to be too misleading. In our intention, parents could give kids a virtual allowance to spend on Timbuktu, but – as a matter of fact – they liked to pop bubbles too much and parents felt it was out of their control,” Favilli explains.

“We saw from our data and from our user testing sessions that parents didn’t like bubbles and children didn’t want a new story every single day,” she says, detailing the app’s recent adjustments. “So, on one side we had parents asking for a clearer and safer purchase process; on the other side we had children asking to see the same stories for a longer period of time. Those are the two biggest motivations behind our change.”

The new version of the app introduces a different, simpler subscription model. Now parents can make purchases in a “grown-ups area” to unlock all of Timbuktu’s content for $29.99 per year, or $4.99 per month. This area is separated from the other content areas so that children are not exposed to in-app purchases, Favilli says.

And as noted above, the app will now receive content updates monthly rather than daily. There are currently three available issues with nine stories each. Each issue offers two stories for free.

Also gone are the social sharing options, which helps to make the new version COPPA-compliant. Going forward, the new app focuses more on stories, and is now developing some of Timbuktu Magazine’s favorite characters: for example, Bello is a detective who solves math mysteries, Betty is a wiener dog who loves skating and is bad at grammar, and Lars and Yoko are seven year-old twins who create funny science experiments.

“We’ve been working a lot on the design and development of a strong set of characters because children are more engaged if they can relate to a character and can feel that learning is part of a great shared adventure,” says Favilli. She adds that the company is also working on  international licensing agreements to bring Timbuktu Magazine in other countries, and is moving to make its technology available for other publishers interested in the children’s app space.

Despite the content’s quality, it was difficult to fully recommend Timbuktu before. Now, it’s a much better app from the parent’s point of view. The new version is live here in iTunes.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Alert.Us, a recently launched mobile family safety application, has some interesting ideas about the direction that these sorts of GPS tracking apps should go. In fact, says CEO Antoine Martin, the company’s goal is to have kids actually accept and recommend the app. That’s a bit different from the other parental control or safety apps on the market today which generally launch with the needs of parents, not their offspring, in mind. It’s also a fairly lofty goal, since kids don’t generally want to be tracked.

Currently, the app currently offers the usual round-up of family safety functions: a geo-fenced alerting function to let others know when someone has arrived at home or school, for example, as well as an emergency alert button which, when triggered, sends out a message to a pre-configured list including family, friends, neighbors, and anyone else who can rush in to respond.

Though these types of “emergency” alerting functions haven’t yet been seen to thwart any serious crimes – like kidnappings, for instance, families can still take advantage of the functionality for more common incidents, like a kid who falls off his bike or the little brother calling on his older brother for help with bullies, maybe.

Some of these ideas have been tried before, through apps like Life360, iHound, Norton Safety Minder, React Mobile, Rapid protect, and others. But Alert.Us also offers a few extra tools not all the apps have, including a family message board for the everyday missives between family members (can you get the milk?) – something which would somewhat compete with other startups like Tango or newly launched Hubble.

Alert.Us offers a battery monitoring function, too, which is one of its smarter features at launch. When a child’s battery is empty, the app alerts the parents. It’s such a simple idea, but it goes a long way to help parents to avoid the panic they encounter when a child doesn’t answer their phone. (It also helps with the kids who claim “oh, my battery was dead,” when it wasn’t. Gotcha.)

But back to the problem of getting kids to actually like the app? Martin tells us that will be the focus in the months ahead, and hints at plans to head into the Quantified Self space to add value on top of basic GPS tracking.

Alert.Us quietly launched two months ago, but the company hasn’t done much outreach or marketing. The cross-platform application has already added over 25,000 users (70 percent on iPhone) during that time, and now finds that active parents open the app six times per day.

The Paris-based company had a launch partnership with e-commerce site vente-privee.com to drive initial downloads, and on the first day after launch, the app climbed to number three in the French App Store, and remained there for two days. It also spent a week at the top of the Lifestyle category, Martin adds.

Parents can use the app on a trial basis for up to 900 minutes and/or 3 alerts, then it’s $6.99 per month ($64.99 per year) afterwards. To date, the app has converted 100 of its early adopters into paying customers, out of the 10 percent of the user base which has reached the end of the trial period.

Alert.Us is backed by $500,000 in angel funding, from an undisclosed group that include four “super angel moms.”

The app is available here in the Apple App Store, on Google Play, or for BlackBerry.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Indie and vintage clothing site ModCloth has arrived on the iPhone, following the launch of the iPad native application earlier this year. The move comes at a time when the e-commerce company reports seeing tremendous growth on mobile, with mobile devices serving a quarter of its traffic today. To its credit, ModCloth has moved quickly to meet that demand – CEO Eric Koger even now says that the company is pushing to become “mobile-first,” in terms of development.

“All of our development is mobile first now,” he explains. “Early on, we realized there was this huge opportunity to innovate the experience of shopping for fashion and building it with a community-first mentality,” says Koger. “In 2008, we started development of our own platform and made technology development a core competency for ModCloth. And with the incredible rise of the iPhone and mobile platforms, we’re now doing all of our development mobile-first.”

While an iPad version of the online shop makes sense in terms of browsing, and flipping through big images of ModCloth’s indie products which now range from fashion to home decor and more, the iPhone version was a necessary next step for the company, not only because of its increasingly mobile traffic patterns, but also because of its business model.

ModCloth is an online-only retailer of vintage-inspired fashion and decor, which now works with thousands of indie designers to stock its virtual shelves. At any given time, there are 700 indie designers’ items featured on the site, and throughout the day, new products are made available as others sell out – roughly 50 new styles appear on the day each day, many of which sell out quickly.

“We tend to buy in relatively small lots, testing out which designers have good products which work well for our customers,” says Koger. “We’re very experimental.”

Koger says that Susan, ModCloth’s co-founder (who’s also married to Eric), and her team of buyers often fall in love with items that don’t really have a mass market appeal. So the company developed a business model that allows them to test out the new products to see which ones really resonate with ModCloth’s user base. This is not only reflected in the size of its buys, but also in various site features like the crowdsourced “Be the Buyer” section which lets users vote on samples they would like to see placed into production.

Other e-commerce companies like the kids clothing shop One Jackson (later acqui-hired by TaskRabbit) mimicked that model to some degree, though arguably with less success than ModCloth.

But because of the site’s quickly-changing inventory, as well as the way it allows users to track out-of-stock styles for reemergence, going the mobile app route makes a ton of sense. Both the iPad and iPhone app can tap into the device’s push notifications feature to immediately alert shoppers wherever they are when the items they want to have returned to the site for sale.

The iPhone app also introduces a more streamlined checkout process, making the sometimes painful m-commerce experience easier on ModCloth customers. It also keeps users’ payment info on file so they don’t have to re-enter it each time they shop.

Outside of its mobile plans, ModCloth will be focused on better serving its large Pinterest user base (over 2.5 million followers) in the near-term, and over the next few years expanding its reach by offering plus sizes (sizes 16-22), as a longer term strategy.

The new ModCloth iPhone application is available here in Apple’s App Store.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch