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By now, South by Southwest is wrapping up and the legions of nerds and geeks that partied heartily over the last two weeks are slowly crawling back to their homes with their SXSW hangovers. Here at ReadWriteStart, we've kept on truckin' through that time, so here is this week's Weekly Wrapup. This week we discuss whether tracking pageviews is still worth it, how micropayments and subscriptions could be the future of startup business models, which mobile platform is best for small business development, and how credibility is your best friend.
As the month of March trudges on, we are getting closer each day to spring and eventually summer when numerous startup incubators hold their camps for early-stage companies. Many incubators are still taking submissions, including TechStars Boulder, but in case of Y Combinator, the deadline has since come and gone. Theoryville is a startup that has already been asked to interview for a spot with Y Combinator, so if you are still looking to apply for one of this summer's incubators, you may want to heed its founder's advice.
According to recent data analysis from mobile analytics firm Localytics, iPhone application usage peaks in the evenings and on weekends and is much lower during the hours of a typical business day. From this, the firm concludes that the iPhone is still primarily a personal gadget as opposed to one that's used for business purposes.
But is app usage the true measure of the device's success at making corporate inroads? Or does it just show that people don't play with their iPhone apps while at work?
Tuesday night Google announced the creation of the Google Apps Marketplace, a place for third-party applications developers to share their work with the community of Google Apps users. Currently, businesses can use enterprise versions of Google's popular suite of web apps, and with the new Apps Marketplace, they can integrate outside applications into these services. One of the applications launching in the App Marketplace is Expensify, an online tool for gathering and reporting expenses.
What important Web browsing feature is sorely missing from mobile Safari, the iPhone's built-in browser? If you're like us, you probably said the ability to search for text within a Web page. We're accustomed to using this feature in the grown-up Web browsers on our desktop and laptop machines, but sadly, it's lacking when we switch over to the mini-browser built into our mobile phone.
Until now, that is. In yet another case of "there's an app for that," there is, in fact, a new iPhone application that adds the "find within a page" feature to the iPhone browser. And it's well worth the $0.99 fee to finally have this function at our disposal again.
A regional development firm in the UK is the first to announce a development fund for the Apple iPad, offering up to £40,000 ($64,500) for iPad application ideas. The introduction of this fund comes less than 24 hours after Apple's chief executive Steve Jobs demoed the company's highly anticipated touchscreen tablet computer on stage at an event in San Francisco. Although this fund is limited to developers in the UK, there's little doubt that this firm will soon be one of many offering similar incentives to developers in order to encourage the creation of an entirely new ecosystem of applications tailored specifically for this unique handheld device.
With the highly anticipated Apple event finally underway in San Francisco, tech fans around the globe are already speculating how Apple's new iPad might change the state of computing. Another group of people listening intently to the happenings at the Yerba Buena Center are iPhone application developers, who are curious to see when they may be able to begin developing apps for the iPad.
As we've seen, the iPad is a blend of the iPhone OS and OS X, and it opens up opportunities for new business models for developers, so we thought we would point out a story of a man who rejuvenated his business by taking advantage of new iPhone and iPod Touch business models.
Have we reached app store saturation yet? Apparently not. PC manufacturer Acer has just announced plans to launch its own application store designed for all the operating systems is supports, including Microsoft Windows, Windows Mobile, Google's Android platform and Google Chrome. The new store will launch mid-year for the first three platforms listed, with apps for Chrome set to launch later on. Although no exact time frame was given, the Chrome apps are likely to appear by the third or fourth quarter of 2010 to coincide with the debut of Acer's line of Chrome OS netbooks, a group that will account for 10% of Acer's ultra-portable PCs.
According to an independent analysis performed by investment-watching blog 24/7 Wall St., Apple's iTunes App Store has lost $450 million due to iPhone app piracy since it opened for business back in July of 2008. Although that number sounds high, they note it is small in comparison to the overall size of the App Store marketplace and the millions it generates in revenue each quarter - revenue that ranges from $60 million to $110 million according to previous estimates from a Bernstein analyst report cited in 24/7 Wall St.'s post.
However, in order to generate the $450 million figure, the author of the post uses some questionable back-of-the-envelope calculations that raise some flags. Our sources say that the real number is closer to $15 million to $20 million instead.
If you procrastinated on applying for TechStars Boston and missed Monday night's deadline but still want to attend a TechStars event, their summer program in Boulder, Colorado is now accepting applications.
TechStars is a highly competitive funding and mentoring program based in Boston, Boulder and Seattle that helps young startups jump-start their businesses. Their impressive list of over 50 mentors includes Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg, venture capitalist Fred Wilson and Foundry Group director Brad Feld.
Emanuele Vulcano is making waves with his latest Infinite Labs release. The grad student recently released SwapKit - a new iPhone OS exchange protocol that allows developers to share data between locally installed iPhone apps.
Research firm Gartner has just put out a list of the top ten mobile applications of the future. Well, not the distant future, but the far off year of 2012. Nothing on the list is all that surprising or, in many cases, even all that new. Instead, the list includes the sorts of technologies that are just now coming into their own and haven't yet seen widespread adoption as well as the already common technologies that are still experiencing growth.
These days, everyone wants to build their own iPhone applications, but not everyone knows how write the code necessary in order to create them. Fortunately, there are now a number of tools that allow non-developers the ability to create their own iPhone apps without knowing programming or scripting. Some are general-purpose app builders designed for small businesses while other target specific needs, like apps for musicians or for eBook authors. Still others let developers familiar with simpler programming languages like HTML write apps using the code they know and then will transform that code into an iPhone application which can be submitted to the iTunes Store.
Below we've listed 13 different tools that let you create your own iPhone applications, none of which require knowledge of Objective C, the programming language used to build apps for the iPhone OS .
Recently, Roger Thompson, chief research officer at security firm AVG, discovered over half a dozen Facebook applications that had been compromised by malicious hackers. Although the apps' reach was small with relatively few users being affected, Thompson was concerned because it was the first time he had seen apps themselves hacked as opposed to something like Facebook profile pages, a common target for the still-spreading Koobface worm.
While this incident alone wouldn't generate much excitement given the low-profile nature of the applications affected, it's not the only example of unsafe applications on Facebook. Another researcher just spent an entire month scouring Facebook apps for security vulnerabilities and what he found is disturbing: six of the hacked apps were in the top ten, 9700 applications were affected, and the potential victims totaled 218 million users.
We sure are hearing the chickens running around in a panic about the dangers of cloud computing following the massive data loss involving T-Mobile Sidekick customers. And as usual, the cacophony sounds more like a bunch of pundits ruminating about the great dangers that may be ahead instead of the reality at hand.
The problem is, most of them are making zero distinction about what constitutes a cloud computing service. The Sidekick disaster was not the result of a cloud disaster. It was a centralized data center that had poor oversight.
Virginia-based company WhereMark has just released a preview of its upcoming app for the iPhone 3GS. By now we're all familiar with augmented reality applications that place data above a real-time mobile camera view. Companies like Wikitude, RobotVision and Layar have wowed us with their ability to color what is sometimes described as an "outernet." While it is not yet available to consumers, it will be interesting to see if WhereMark's application weaves a similar web of intrigue.
Do you jokingly refer to yourself as an "app addict?" That is, are you someone so obsessed with your mobile phone applications that you've filled numerous screens full of apps, play with them anytime you have 5 minutes to spare and sleep next to your phone just so it can be the first thing you grab in the morning? While there haven't been any studies yet on the impact of mobile phone application use and health, USA Today recently ran an article practically dubbing "app addiction" a real thing. "What is app addiction doing to people's health?, the article asked. What indeed?, we wonder. How about nothing at all?
European researchers have been working for years on a system that allows developers to create internet applications that can manage and fix themselves. Called SELFMAN, the project aims to address the challenges inherent in large scale applications. According to Peter Van Roy, project coordinator, "The central challenge when you build big internet applications is how to keep them running without having to tweak and manage them all the time. We wanted to make big internet applications easy, so that all the management problems you normally have are handled by the system itself. It will take the internet to the next level."
Indeed it will.
Eight years ago job titles like "social media marketer" and even "community manager" were few and far between. As netizen and social networking populations have grown over the years, so too have the number of opportunities to earn money online. Enter AppBank - the first crowd-sourced paid content service for Facebook. With AppBank, users build quizzes, polls and games and earn money by getting their friends involved in their creations.
A 22-year-old iPhone application developer by the name of Red Daly is claiming that Apple rejected his new application from inclusion in the iTunes App Store due to its political nature. His app, iSinglePayer, was designed to educate its users on the benefits of a single-payer health care system, a hotly debated issue here in the U.S. In addition to data-filled bullet points, the app also taps into the phone's GPS to determine who the user's local congressperson is, how much money the health care sector donated to their campaign, and a "tap to call" button to connect app users with lawmakers.
According to Daly, an Apple representative spoke to him by phone to inform him that the rejection of the app was due to its "politically charged" nature. Well that, and the fact that Apple doesn't allow political apps from single developers.
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