Hardware is so hot right now. So hot, in fact, that another European hardware startup is formulating an attack on the smartphone hardware space — joining the likes of Finland’s Jolla and Spain’s Geeksphone to have a go at handset making. The newest comer stepping in with a plan to shake up the “status quo” is called Kazam: a startup co-founded by a pair of former U.K. HTC execs, Michael Coombes and James Atkins.

Coombes, who spent just over a year and a half as a U.K. head of sales for HTC, according to his LinkedIn, is Kazam’s CEO. Prior to HTC he apparently worked for mobile and telecoms companies including Nokia and Vodafone. While Atkins, Kazam’s CMO, spent just over a year as HTC’s head of marketing for U.K./Ireland, and has previously worked in U.K. marketing roles for freesat, LG and Panasonic. The pair’s professional network is clearly tied tightly to the local market, hence, presumably, Kazam’s focus on Europe first.

“Kazam will focus on Europe at the outset,” Atkins tells TechCrunch via email, adding with some typical marketingspeak embellishment: “We are currently establishing a network of regional sales and marketing offices to ensure we deliver outstanding products and customer service.” The startup has a U.K. base in Mayfair, London.

Details of how exactly Kazam plans to assault the Samsung and Apple smartphone duopoly were not forthcoming when I asked. Atkins declined to answer the bulk of my questions — including such specifics as whether Kazam’s planned smartphones will run Android and be skinned with a  custom UI or keep the experience familiarly stock. Instead, he trotted out a repeated PR mantra: “Today we are just announcing that the Kazam brand is here, for the rest you will have to wait and see.”

It’s notable that this startup has already engaged a PR company (Noire) — and talks about creating a mobile brand — even before having a great deal to talk about. Which does serve to underline how smartphones have become a game of who can shout the loudest. A game of brash tones (as I have previously described it).

What did Atkins say? Not a whole lot. He declined to reveal how much funding Kazam is backed by at this point, or whether it is currently looking to raise a round. He did at least confirm it has backers, and that those backers have links into Asian mobile manufacturing companies — which suggests it’s following Jolla’s manufacturing playbook.

“Kazam Mobile has been set up by a group of private equity investors, who have previously launched and operated successful mobile telecommunications companies and technology businesses. Some of their current investments include NF Technology Limited, an R&D company specialising in developing and customising mobile phone devices and tablets and Nichefinder (S’pore) PTE Limited, a proven technology procurement and supply company,” he told TechCrunch.

He also confirmed Kazam’s plan is to launch “a range of smartphones at different prices point/specs” later this year. Asked whether it will look at other types of mobile devices, such as tablets, he said only that its initial focus is on smartphones. He added that he and Coombes left their roles at HTC earlier this year “with the desire to build a new brand that really stands out in the mobile space”.

He also declined to be drawn on the differentiation question but in Kazam’s inaugural press release today Coombes said: “We believe your smartphone is a digital reflection of who you are, and since we are all different, it’s important that we don’t adopt a one size fits all approach. Kazam’s dynamic structure and focus on local markets means we can react quickly to the ever evolving and diverging needs of today’s consumer. We aim to provide quality smartphones that are accessible to everyone.”

The release also includes a statement from Atkins hinting that aftersales service might be how Kazam attempts to stand out in a crowded market: “There is a real opportunity for a new mobile brand to disrupt the status quo. We are passionate about delivering a truly positive mobile experience that doesn’t just stop once you’ve bought the phone. Kazam is about stunning design, robust hardware and intuitive technology, underpinned by outstanding customer service.”

Further details about exactly what kind of customer service opportunity Kazam reckons it has identified were not forthcoming.

So there are huge question marks over any startup entering such a fiercely competitive space, especially with so many better resourced former mobile giants continuing to struggle. Disruption often starts small but in a market so beholden to carriers, where the bulk of phones sales occur, it’s especially hard for an upstart to get traction. Carriers tend to be risk averse and have established distribution partnerships and (incentivised) relationships with the smartphone giants so have  disincentives to push anything too new. Going it alone with online retail distribution is the alternative, but that route requires a sizeable marketing budget to even get noticed.

Creating handsets for an underserved niche may be one way to carve out a business, as Geeksphone has been. Securing carrier distribution agreements to carry your hardware is another strategy, as Jolla has with Finland’s DNA. For now, it’s unclear whether Kazam has any similar moves up its sleeve, but it will certainly be hoping it has enough local telco connections — and financial backing — to give it a regional chance of inching in. To say it has its work cut out to make any kind of impact is an understatement.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It was a big week in gadgets, and thus, a big TC Gadgets podcast it shall be. This week, we discuss developments at E3, including Xbox One and PS4 pricing, the death of Nokia’s Symbian OS, and of course, WWDC.

Will you buy a PS4 or an Xbox One? Does despair fill you from nose to navel when you remember the good old days of Symbian? Is the new iOS 7 design repelling, attractive, or some bizarre combination of the two? John Biggs, Matt Burns, Jordan Crook, Darrell Etherington, and Natasha Lomas touch on all of this and more.

Enjoy!

We invite you to enjoy our weekly podcasts every Friday at 3pm Eastern and noon Pacific.

Click here to download an MP3 of this show.
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Intro Music by Rick Barr.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Not content with following Nokia’s past playbook, by saturating the mobile market with countless iterations of its smartphone hardware, pushing a whole Galaxy of gizmos at every price point and form-factor fancy you can think of, Samsung has gone one further. It’s opened an R&D centre in Espoo, Finland, right on Nokia’s doorstep. Literally on Nokia’s doorstep. If you were in any doubt that Samsung is the new Nokia, this really has to be the final call.

Samsung said the R&D facility, its first in Northern Europe, is being located in Finland because of “the excellent technology development eco-system in Finland”. Which is basically another way of saying ‘thanks to Nokia, and the tech skills of the local people who likely acquired them working at or with Nokia at some point over the past several decades’. Nokia’s presence in Finland has helped build a thriving startup culture, thanks to the pool of local tech skills and experience but also as Nokia has had to reduce its own headcount it has actively encouraged entrepreneurship through its Bridge Programme by supporting former employees leaving to found their own startups. The irony now is that Samsung is looking to tap into an ecosystem Nokia has been helping to build up.

The R&D center — which is part of Samsung’s strategy of ramping up spending in this area this year, up from the circa $10 billion it spent on R&D activities last year — will focus specifically on development of open source software and “advanced technologies in the domains of graphics, web & security for digital devices such as smartphones, tablets, Digital TV and PCs”.

Another irony here is that as Samsung has gobbled up the marketshare Nokia used to own, the Finnish former phone giant has been forced to pull in its horns – to operate with far fewer resources than it had during its mobile heyday (when it too could produce a phone for every price-point and pocket) — thereby limiting the types of devices it can push into. Which in turn leaves room for a company like Samsung to target more development cash at other device type categories, like tablets, a category where Nokia used to play. In a sense, Samsung is just expanding into the footprints of Nokia’s past success.

Samsung said it plans to recruit at least 50 experts in the various technical domains that the R&D center will focus on in the coming years. It also plans to “steadily grow” the facility, pushing research into whatever tech areas it decides it needs to down the line.

As well as thumbing its nose at Nokia by tapping into local Finnish talent, siting an R&D Center in Northern Europe will give Korea-based Samsung a base to plug into a regional network of research and academic organisations, as well as getting close to European startups and businesses.

Europe has been a stronghold for Samsung smartphone hardware, so building closer ties to the region makes sense to futureproof its lead here. A lead Nokia has been trying to dent with its Windows Phone-based Lumia smartphones. Evidence of a slight uplift in sales for Windows Phone in markets such as the U.K. may be another factor pushing Samsung to drive deeper into Nokia’s territory — hence its stated intention now, with the Espoo Centre, to “actively build relationships and co-develop cutting edge technologies with our Finnish partners”.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

This summer the veteran Symbian platform, which started life back when handhelds weren’t phones but PDAs, will quietly pass into development history. Or at least its primary supporter over the years — Nokia – will cease producing any new handsets running the OS (or so says the FT). Unsurprisingly Nokia is keeping officially schtum this time around. Presumably it’s learnt its lesson after the original burning platform memo, in which it publicly declared its intention to jump ship from Symbian to Windows Phone, ended up burning a huge hole in its coffers as people stopped buying phones running a zombie OS.

It’s technically possible smaller entities might look to keep the Symbian flame alive, as the former Nokians, Jolla, are attempting to do with MeeGo. Symbian does still power a fair amount of phones in China, for instance. But Symbian’s assets have been passed over to Accenture to maintain, and it’s no longer open source, so its days as an active development platform are likely numbered. Regardless, it’s certainly true that Symbian is the platform of a bygone 2G era, when phones were phones first and foremost, not today’s data-gobbling pocket computers.

All of which means that even if Symbian lingers a little longer — Nokia is apparently intending to sell off existing Symbian phone stock, so that may well take some time judging by how sales have dropped drastically (it now sells more Windows Phones than Symbian devices) — its end times are approaching. So what better point to take a look back at the platform that powered so many devices and dominated the mobile landscape for so long.

From PDA Roots To Candybar Phones

Symbian’s origins are firmly routed in the PDA world. It sprang from an OS developed by Psion for its handheld organisers — pictured below is a precursor OS to the one that evolved into Symbian.

EPOC32, the OS that would become Symbian by Release 6, debuted on the Psion Series 5mx around 1997. In the video below you can see the its text-menu-based GUI heritage. A PDF flavour was certainly evident in some of the Symbian variants that subsequently made it to market on different hardware.

In mid 1998 Psion Software became Symbian Ltd — a joint venture between Psion and phone makers Ericsson, Motorola, and Nokia — and EPOC was renamed the Symbian OS. As befits a joint venture, the OS was splintered into distinct platforms/UIs as each of the various mobile makers put it to work with their own devices.

These included Nokia’s PDA-style Series 80 platform — shown below running on the Nokia 9300 — and the icon-based Series 60 UI platform shown running on the candybar slider Nokia 7650, bottom left, and the N80, bottom right.

Nokia also developed Series 90 atop Symbian, shown on the following pair of sci-fi-looking PDAs: the Nokia 7710 and (bottom) the Nokia 7700.

SonyEricsson and Motorola’s UIQ flavour of Symbian also skinned the OS with icons designed for portrait-oriented device and softkey inputs, such as the Motorola M1000 (below).

MOAP(S) was another platform developed on top of the Symbian OS, which was used by Asian mobile makers including Fujitsu, Mitsubishi and Sharp. Here’s Fujitsu’s Symbian-based F-022 clamshell handset.

Caught Out By Capacitive Touch

Symbian’s clear run extended right through to the mid noughties, as Nokia pumped out a steady stream of candybars, flips phones and other weird/wonderful form-factors from cylinders to spherical squares, all powered by its various flavours of the OS. This was Symbian cooking on gas.

The crunch time for the OS came when Apple’s iPhone arrived in 2007 to usher in the capacitive touchscreen era, putting a new more fluid touch-centric user experience at the fore and elbowing out keypads, Qwertys and fiddly menu systems that relied on wielding a stylus to navigate. The iPhone’s arrival was of course compounded by Android’s debut in 2008. Soon a whole army of touchscreen iPhones and iClones were crowding into a mobile playground that had formerly been Nokia’s and Symbian’s to rule. 

Unlike Symbian, these incoming platforms were starting fresh — designed for the Internet era, not the quaint pocket PDA. They didn’t carry legacy baggage. Their only heritage was connected computing. They were built with the touchscreen at their centre, and they offered a perfect platform for delivering apps. Of course Symbian could run apps too, but all the various flavours of the OS meant its app ecosystem was far more fragmented than its rivals. And although Symbian’s PDA roots incorporated touchscreen tech this older generation of resistive screen tech — which went hand in glove with fiddly drop-down menus designed to be pecked at with a stylus — bore no relation to modern touchscreens that focused on fingers and true touch computing.

All these factors gave Android and iOS a huge advantage over the decade-old Symbian platform. Symbian was stuck in its own folder-strewn rut, desperately needing to evolve to compete in the slick new mobile world order. Add to that, Android was free for mobile makers to use vs Symbian’s licensing fee model. Symbian was being outgunned and outpriced. A crushing combination for any long-in-the-tooth technology.

Last ditch efforts to spur Symbian on

Nokia, the main Symbian user ergo the company with the most to lose as the OS fell behind, made the decision to open source Symbian in 2008 to try to accelerate its evolution to compete with its younger and more agile rivals. A rebooted version of Symbian designed for a touchscreen era was to be created by merging various platform strands — including S60 and technology from UIQ and MOAP(S) — to be pooled into a new unified touch-focused platform.

The first touch-enabled release of the new OS, Symbian^1 (or Symbian S60 v5) — is shown below running on the first device to carry it, the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, released at the end of 2008.

But the usability gap between Symbian^1 and its upstart rivals remained a gulf. It wasn’t until Symbian^3 (demoed below in a Nokia promo video) that a more fully-featured touch-centric experience started to emerge. Although, at this point, development work was already pushing into 2010 meaning Symbian continued falling further behind.

Symbian^3 added multiple homescreens with support for widgets, faster graphics and scrolling, pinch to zoom, visual multitasking with app previews and switching, among other new features. But this was still playing catch up with Android and iOS. Too little, too late remained Symbian’s problem, as its two rivals streaked ahead with their own platform evolutions and went on to sew up the smartphone market between them.

In a last ditch attempt to fix Symbian fast, Nokia took development back in house. Two more versions of the OS followed, Symbian Anna, which brought browser speed and text input improvements and ushered in a new rounded icon-based UI. Followed by a final update: Symbian Belle.

Belle added additional modernising touches such as more customisable widgets, extra homescreens, a pull down status screen for accessing settings and viewing missed missives, notifications on the lockscreen, and support for NFC. The problem was Android already had all those things.

The old folder based menu hierarchy that Symbian had carried with it from its PDA days had finally been entirely flattened. But it had taken far too long to level the playing field. Symbian’s work was almost done.

At the start of this year Nokia confirmed that the Symbian-based 808 PureView – announced in 2012 with much fanfare thanks to its 41MP camera sensor — would be the last device it makes on the Symbian platform. This summer it’s also going to stop producing even the remaining few Symbian devices in its portfolio.

After some 15 years, many of them as the leader of its field, it’s the end of the line for this venerable technology stack.

Symbian’s development challenges

Lee Williams, formerly the executive director of the Symbian Foundation — the entity created to oversee the open sourced Symbian in 2008 — takes the view that while the PDA heritage of Symbian was initially off-putting, the platform’s robust underlying architecture and flexibility gave it the ability to power through its legacy past. After all, they were the key strengths that had allowed it to travel so far and find its way on to so many devices for so many years in the first place.

“I remember Symbian as that upstart competitor in the GEOS/BeOS/Palm days. I was at Be at the time, and we discounted the system due to it’s role as Psion software with a stodgy approach to usability and programmability.  By the time I got to Palm, and we were wrestling with how best to provide a multicore platform for smartphones, we started to realise that Symbian had some real potential. Namely, the right architecture for a broad range of devices and a robust programming model for applications,” he tells TechCrunch.

Williams’ take on Symbian’s demise is therefore not that the technology itself was the problem, but rather that Symbian spread itself too thin: it was beholden to too many other partners who all wanted a piece of the pie and that meant fragmentation, development retardation and a fatal inability to innovate quickly enough when others were flying forward.

“When I landed on the board at Symbian U.K. Limited, and then took the reigns as the head of the Foundation, the platform appeared to be the preeminent system for the mobile age. What was ironic, was that its strengths ended up being the soul of its demise. The broad level of Operator/OEM support and the extensive range of technology and device types couldn’t help but make the platform difficult to market and ultimately difficult for others to accept as a good solution for the marketplace,” he says. “Ultimately, politics and perception killed what is arguably still the world’s best operating system for our era of seamlessly connected and extensible products.”

That’s the view from the top. But what about the view from the development trenches? Roopesh Chander, a Qt developer who dabbled with writing Symbian apps after Nokia added support for the cross-platform development framework to Symbian in 2011 — having found Symbian C++ “too arbitrary” and “complex”  – argues that in the post-iPhone years, Symbian struggled simply because it remained dated vs the competition.

Even though Nokia improved the development environment for Symbian by adding support for Qt — meaning developers no longer needed to struggle with Symbian C++’s random API call names and requirements for even simple things to have low level setting up of memory and stacks – the platform itself continued to show its age. And that ultimately dragged down the more modern-looking apps now being developed for it. In short, Symbian Belle was great but years too late.

“Though the apps started looking nice and modern [after Nokia added Qt support], the OS itself (Symbian^3 and Symbian Anna) was still looking dated,” says Chander. “For example, though running on a touchscreen, they had two text buttons in the bottom taskbar, a legacy from the buttoned phones. When the phone orientation changed, weird things happened on the screen before the screen settled in the new orientation. If you wanted to type in portrait mode, you had to make do with a telephone keypad (that has 2 and ABC on the same button). Stuff like these made it quite bad at a time when iPhone and Android were shipping much much better touch-centric user interfaces on their phones.

“Nokia fixed most of those problems with Symbian Belle, but it was too late (and Belle merely brought it to the level of the competition, didn’t elevate it to a higher level),” he adds. ”The pinnacle of Symbian was obviously the Nokia 808 PureView, and I think even that can just about compete with the UX in iPhone/Android (not considering the number of apps and the ecosystem). So, I think Symbian didn’t make it because it couldn’t adapt to the touch-centric UX quick enough. If it had shipped Belle two years earlier, it could have garnered the app ecosystem that Android now enjoys.”

As is often the case with dominant technologies, not changing fast enough got the better of Symbian. Whether the platform proving itself a laggard was down to complacency and leadership mis-management, the complexities of its legacy baggage, industry politics or a combination of all those things is hard to say. Regardless of the specific combination of reasons, the cautionary outcome remains the same: innovate or die.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

When it comes to online video networks, Google’s YouTube is the oversized and undisputed king of the hill with 1 billion monthly unique visitors. Yet that domination sometimes obscures some of the interesting developments that are afoot among the smaller startups also working in the same space. Vuclip, the California-based mobile video streaming network that focuses its efforts mainly in emerging markets, is today reporting that it now has 80 million monthly unique users, nearly double the 45 million it reported back in February, along with 1.5 billion minutes of mobile video served every month across 700 channels+ of content from Disney, Sony and other premium providers.

Backed by $27 million from the likes of NEA and SingTel, the startup’s CEO, Nickhil Jakatdar, tells TechCrunch that with the current rate of growth, it expects to be profitable by the end of 2014, without needing to raise any more money.

That, and Vuclip’s video streaming inventory and the technology underpinning it, are now making the company an acquisition target. We have heard from well-placed sources that Vuclip has been approached both by large portal companies, as well as carriers, looking for assets like these.

On the portal side, it seems that the interest may be in the video platform and the technology — both offering inventory and ways of monetizing it to companies looking to sell more rich-media online advertising. Carriers, meanwhile, might be more interested in picking up Vuclip’s captive video audience as a way of connecting and selling services to mobile consumers. (Reminder: one of Vuclip’s investors is the carrier Singtel.)

Jakatdar avoids commenting on the details of who may have approached the company, but he does admit it has been, and that he has said no for now, partly because he wants to see how much further he can grow the company before it either gets transformed or shut down by a new owner (not uncommon practice in the world of M&A).

“We’re not ready to hand over the keys,” he says, but he also adds that the company is interested in buying more assets itself.

In February, Vuclip made its first acquisition, the mobile video company Jigsee, to expand its own premium content inventory and app capabilities in India, one of Vuclip’s biggest markets. Now the aim is for “a few more” acquisitions in the next year. These, he notes, will be about picking up more technology to improve its platform, rather than to acquire users or content (which it seems to be doing fine on its own steam).

The fact that Vuclip is significantly smaller than YouTube has pushed it to think beyond advertising when considering how best to make money.

Not only does it lack the scale needed to get any kind of decent return on ads placed alongside premium content — let alone those trying to monetize long-tail content — but mobile advertising is still a small-time game, especially in the emerging markets of Asia and Latin America where Vuclip is used most.

Mobile data networks constrained in these parts of the world, and the mobile ad business is simply not big enough there yet. “In the U.S., mobile advertising is only now starting to become an interesting business,” he says — mobile ads cracked the $1 billion mark a couple of years ago, and are rising rapidly to $15.8 billion worldwide in 2013, says eMarketer — but emerging markets are still getting a small proportion of that. Recall, too, that overall digital ad spend in 2012 was nearly $100 billion; mobile ads are still relatively small.

In addition, Vuclip’s user base is not yet premium enough to merit high CPMs: the majority of devices, he says, are “the Asha’s of this world, not the Galaxy’s,” referring to Nokia’s low-end smartphones and Samsung’s high-end Android devices. That’s changing, of course. In the Middle East, he notes, iPhones are booming on their network; but not fast or big enough to drive a mobile ads business.

And so Vuclip is turning to something else to make money alongside mobile marketing: paid content and carrier billing. The company offers content on an a la carte, bucket pre-purchase, and subscription basis, with one-off and “valuepacks” seeing the most usage, Jakatdar says. Right now, the conversion rate on paid content offerings is between 5% and 6% — meaning of all the video views it sees on its network, that’s the percentage that are paying for the privilege, usually for cents per view.

The carrier billing decision is because these are emerging markets we’re talking about, where users often don’t have payment cards and so cannot hold iTunes accounts and the like.

But while carrier billing, charging purchases to a user’s bill or off a prepaid account, is often touted as a very easy, user-friendly, successful way to charge for content on phones, it also has its challenges.

Interestingly, the company’s projections on breakeven are based on the fact that right now, only 25% of its user base is actually being offered paid content. That’s because many carriers in the markets where Vuclip is most popular are not offering carrier billing yet themselves. Jakatdar says that it will be adding 10 more carriers to the roster this year in Asia before focusing on adding carrier billing in Latin America next year.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Rovio is continuing to cycle in new executive level management with Nokia veteran Teemu Suila taking over as chief operating officer after former COO Harri Koponen stepped down after about two years in the role.

Koponen is moving on to do business development for the main investment company behind Rovio, presumably controlled by chairman Kaj Hed, who is the father of CEO Mikael Hed and owns about 70 percent of the company.

Koponen isn’t the only longtime senior exec at Rovio to move on in recent months. They also recently brought on a new executive vice president of games in Digital Chocolate’s Jami Laes after Petri Järvilehto also moved on. Järvilehto is taking time off.

Another Rovio SVP of brand marketing, Ville Heijari, also recently went to gaming monetization network Playhaven.

I’ve reached out to Rovio to get more background on the moves. The new COO Suila used to oversee startup activities and corporate strategy at Nokia after working for the Finnish handset maker for almost 20 years ago. That experience working on relationships with startups could help Rovio as it has been quietly scouting for studios to acquire for game development talent.

Koponen held the role for about two years as the company scaled up to make $195 million in revenue in the past year and roughly 650 employees throughout Helsinki, Tokyo, Shanghai, Los Angeles and Seoul.

Revenue doubled-year-over-year into 2012 with $71 million in net income as the company focused on a heavy merchandising strategy. Games revenue was about 55 percent of the company’s overall in-take last year, but Rovio has been making extra strides in doing more licensing deals with soft drinks and amusement parks. They also recently added Mika Ihamuotila, the CEO of Marimekko, a globally-known design company, to the board.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

When I buy gadgets off of eBay, I’m lucky if half of them haven’t previously been gnawed on by dogs. Meanwhile, this redditor who picked up a second-hand Nokia Lumia 920 from the auction site seems to have gotten much more than he bargained for — he’s been posting screenshots from the device for the better part of a day, because the thing appears to run a previously unreleased build of Windows Phone 8.

The big tip off? Well, there’s a handful of UI changes (including the newfound abilities to kill apps from the multitasking screen and sort them based on frequency of use), to say nothing of a slew of curious pre-installed test apps that seem tailor-made for internal development use. Really though, the most notable addition to the device is a notification center, one of the features that’s notably missing from current versions of Windows Phone.

As the story goes, the notification center was being considered for inclusion in the initial Windows Phone 8 release but there just wasn’t enough to time to complete it, prompting the company to play up its ever-updating Live Tiles as a sort of replacement. Those sorts of sentiments certainly jibe with other accounts of WP8′s last frenzied days of development — one senior Microsoft official told me last year that the whole Windows Phone team was “coming in hot” just prior to the OS’ official reveal in October 2012.

Sadly, a centralized spot for app notifications may not be in the cards for Windows Phone after all. According to a follow-up from WPCentral, Microsoft’s WP team was indeed working on that notification center until it was removed in later builds for reasons that haven’t been made clear yet. Meanwhile, The Verge leaned on some unnamed sources to determine that these screenshots are actually from an early build of the Windows Phone Blue update (released on May 9 or thereabouts), so if the notification center really did get the axe, that decision should have been made very recently.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Buddy.com today announced a mobile analytics service that’s supposed to give publishers and brands a better sense of who’s actually using their apps and how they’re using them.

There’s plenty of competition on this front — Andreessen Horowitz-backed Mixpanel, for example, has increasingly become a mobile analytics company, and it makes a big deal out of not focusing on “bullshit metrics” like downloads. Buddy CEO and co-founder David McLauchlan was similarly dismissive of using downloads as a meaningful way to measure app engagement.

“That’s analogous to figuring out TV ratings by looking at how many TVs they sell in Best Buy,” he said.

McLauchlan argued that Buddy is in a unique position because it sits in the intersection between companies that offer backend tools for building apps and those that offer mobile analytics. Most analytics companies have to “hook” into an already-built app, and then they count whenever the app performs a certain function, which he said is a very limited approach. Buddy, on the other hand, is capable of “prewiring” the app so it provides a fuller picture of user behavior and track the information that’s important to the publisher.

So what can Buddy actually measure? Well, you can get a sense of it in the main analytics dashboard shown above. McLauchlan said it covers things like user demographics and location, as well as data on in-app commerce and conversions. It can also connect those data points in interesting ways, for example showing average time in the app based on age.

McLauchlan argued that this is particularly important for the brands and agencies that have used Buddy to build their apps — he called this a step towards creating an industry-wide “good set of metrics or standardized analytics that you can use to buy and sell” advertising and marketing.

Buddy says that there are 16,500 applications on its platform, and it’s customers include Nokia, A&E Television Networks, and Microsoft (which also invested via its Bing Fund).

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

After unboxing last week’s Galaxy S4 Mini, Samsung is keeping the pedal pressed to the metal by announcing another new launch variant of its current flagship smartphone — this time aimed at users who want their device to be made of slightly tougher stuff. Iterating its portfolio in this way is how Samsung squeezes the competition by making it harder for them to differentiate on price, size or special features like water-resistance. Sorry Sony.

The Galaxy S4 Active is being badged as a phone for outdoorsy types — hence it’s dust and water resistent to IP67 (one below the highest possible rating) and has a fully sealed design. This means it can be submerged in water one meter deep for up to 30 minutes, so great for dropping in puddles and streams, not so great for dropping when you’re scuba diving.

Although Samsung’s marketing material makes it sounds like a rugged phone, there’s no specific mention of impact resistance or especially toughened glass in the specs — so if you’re after a phone to take to work on a construction site you’re probably better off with one of these bad boys (having seen my TC colleague Chris Velazco do his best but fail to crack the CAT B15′s will by throwing it at some fake rocks). The thing is, truly rugged phones are necessarily chunky so there is always a trade off.

With the S4 Active you’re getting flagship smartphone power and looks in a slightly less fragile package than usual but not one that looks like it belongs on a building site. The S4 Active is 9.1mm thick and 151g heavy vs the S4′s 7.9mm and 130g. So, basically the S4 Active is a phone for Samsung fans who don’t want to have to worry about taking their expensive phone to the beach. Aside from its sealed design, the one notable hardware design change on the Active vs the S4 is the single home button being replaced by three physical keys: menu, home and back.

Under the hood, the Active has a 1.9GHz Quad-Core Processor, plus the same 2,600mAh battery as the S4. The 5.0’’ Full HD TFT LCD screen includes what Samsung calls its ‘Glove Touch’ feature, meaning it can be operated while wearing gloves — a trick the company appears to have borrowed from Nokia.

On the S4 Active’s rear is an 8 megapixel camera (the S4 has a 13MP lens) to which Samsung has added a new software mode — called Aqua Mode — to improve the clarity of underwater photography and video. The camera’s LED flash is also co-opted into acting as a torch via the shortcut of long pressing on the volume key. So handy if you’re trying to stumble back to your tent in the dark.

Other software features include ‘S Travel (Trip Advisor)’ – which offers “travel assistance, local information, and recommendations” — plus Samsung’s ‘S Translator’ software for text or voice translation.

The S4 Active will go on sale this summer, initially in the U.S. and Sweden. Pricing has not been confirmed — nor has specific market availability for the three  colour options: grey, blue and orange.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Talk to most developers and they will invariably say that the status quo of app discovery through rankings can’t really last.

People have, of course, been saying this for a couple years. While Apple did make a few strides in acquiring app search startup Chomp, rankings still have an overwhelming influence over how consumers find and discover new apps. This leads to a winner-take-all effect where the long tail of apps have little hope of acquiring a meaningful number of downloads except through aggressive app store SEO or through paid marketing.

So another app search company, Xyologic, has quietly built its own engine plus personalized recommendations platform. They found that while people would come to Xyologic to look for apps, they often didn’t know exactly what they were looking for. Instead of installing apps directly from search results, they’d browse through “Similar” apps and apps that “People also like”.

“The problem we all have in the industry is that people don’t know what to type. Most of the queries show little intent of what people want to use,” says Xyologic co-founder Matthaus Krzykowski.

In response, the Berlin-based company built an recommendations system based off people’s Facebook likes, their friends’ preferences and hundreds of topics their engine has categorized.

“Personally, I think the pre-selected knowledge of your friend’s interests in search results is the way to go,” he explains.

When you log into the new Xyologic search engine, you’ll use Facebook Connect to pull your “likes” and interests into the recommendations engine. It will then come up with suggestions. For example, I was recommended magazine app Zinio because I’ve liked The New York Times and The New Yorker. I was also recommended categories of apps like cooking apps because I like certain cookbooks.

The company can also integrate many other kinds of preference data easily.

“The point about this Facebook integration is not Facebook. We can use YouTube or any other data that tells us something about the personal preferences of a person,” Krzykowski said.

The company’s business model could come from the licensing deals it has with companies like Nokia, which uses Xyo’s app search engine to help Lumia owners find Windows Phone apps they might like based on the Android and iOS apps they know and like.

Xyologic picked up funding last fall from Rick Thompson’s Signia Venture Partners, GameForge’s Klaas Kersting and Soundcloud founder Eric Wahlforss.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch