What Does Scoreloop Do?

Scoreloop's focus has been to provide a "one-stop shop" for gaming developers by offering billing and social services for Android, iOS, Windows Phone and Samsung's bada. Interestingly enough, RIM's BlackBerry platform was not even supported at the time of acquisition.

The company's SDK (software development kit) provides features like leaderboards, achievements, social interaction capabilities (for things like challenges between friends), integration with social networking sites, push notifications, personal news channels, virtual currencies and goods, in-app purchases, support for multiple payment options and more.

Scoreloop also helped gamers reach new players by providing cross promotional marketing opportunities within its community, access to a range of industry partners, assistance with pre-installs on carriers and OEM handsets and access to other distribution channels.

In many ways, the company is similar to the more widely known cross-platform offering from OpenFeint, which also provides social features via an SDK, virtual goods and virtual currencies and promotional opportunities to developers.

What Will Happen to Non-BlackBerry Platforms Using Scoreloop?

So what will become of Scoreloop's cross-platform support, now that's it's a part of RIM? In a message posted on the Scoreloop homepage, CEO Marc Gumpinger assures users that the company will continue its cross-platform approach, despite the acquisition. "As a part of RIM," he says, "we'll be in the unique position to integrate deeply into BlackBerry platforms to take mobile gaming to the next level together."

The Bing SDK map control will sport Bing's road, aerial and hybrid aerial map styles. It will be able to access user location through GPS and locate the iOS device on the map as well as be able to add pushpins to maps.

In its blog post, Bing takes a gentle jab at Apple's map SDK: "We think you will find that the terms of use are less restrictive than what you find with the Apple Map Kit, with no sacrifice in functionality."

Bing Maps has an SDK for both Windows Phone and Android platforms and Microsoft has a full suite of SDKs for building mobile applications for its services.

In terms of maps and smartphones, when Nokia and Microsoft release a Windows Phone together some time later this year, some of the mapping technology and location-based services will be supplied by Nokia, building on the experience it has had with its Ovi Maps service.

Jay Wright, Qualcomm's Director of Business Development, introduced the features of the SDK during a session today at Uplinq. Qualcomm is setting its sites on the future of mobile AR applications, which it believes will center around vision-based tracking. Many applications thus far have used GPS, compass and accelerometer data to create AR views, but as Wright explains, the quality of the user experience is much lower than vison-based views.

Vison-based AR hasn't taken off as fast as sensor-based AR because the technology is difficult to develop (partly due to a dearth of tools) and device hardware has lacked the necessary computing ability to handle it properly. With improved mobile processors the latter is becoming less of a burden, and Qualcomm hopes its SDK will take care of the former.

SDK Tools and Features

The SDK will launch this fall and will initially only support applications built for Android 2.1 and higher. To develop the apps, developers can use he SDK as a C++ library within the Android Toolchain as well as with the Unity 3D game development tool as an extension. Unity co-founder and CEO David Helgason showed off how to port an existing 3D game into a mobile AR game using Unity and the Qualcomm AR SDK, which seemed to be a relatively easy thing to accomplish.

Qualcomm is also providing a web-based tool for uploading images that can then be used as targets for image-based AR tracking. The service detects all of the trackable points on the image and automatically rates it from 0 to 5 stars based on how well it could potentially be tracked.

Some of the features of the SDK include the ability to track 2D planar surfaces, like standard markers or more sophisticated image markers. It also allows for what Qualcomm is calling "virtual buttons," which allow users to interact with virtual 3D objects in real space. An example used to describe this feature was a "Whack-a-Mole" game where players could theoretically use their hands to smash virtual moles popping up on the AR view in their camera.

Game Studio & Developer Challenge

Also announced this week along with the SDK is the creation of the Augmented Reality Game Studio at Georgia Tech. The lab will be run by Blair MacIntyre, professor at the university's College of Computing and director of its Augmented Environments Lab. In the lab, students will have the opportunity to experiment with both Qualcomm's SDK and the Unity game development tool.

To encourage development with its SDK, Qualcomm is sponsoring an AR developer challenge that will award the creator of the most innovative application with $125k. Second and third place will also receive $50k and $25k respectively, and each will be invited to attend the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain next February where the winners will be announced.

The SDK is currently in private beta, and developers can apply to participate online. One of the first companies working with the SDK right now is toy manufacturer Mattel which demoed an AR version of its classic Rock'em Sock'em Robots game. This fall the SDK will move to an open beta, and the deadline for challenge submissions will be in January of 2011.

Why Just Android?

Android is a logical starting point for Qualcomm's SDK. Vision-based augmented reality, as mentioned above, puts a unique stress on the processor (and the battery) since it is essentially the simultaneous combination of 3D gaming and video recording. Wright says the technology runs best Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor - a chip with deep penetration in the Android market.

Wright did confirm that the SDK would be included in Qualcomm's Brew mobile platform in the future, but fewer Snapdragon devices run Brew than Android.

Qualcomm is apparently attempting to use its augmented reality SDK as a selling point to boost the sales of devices carrying its processors. With that in mind, it would be unlikely to see Qualcomm provide an iOS version of its SDK since Apple uses its own chipsets. However, this does mean that the SDK could appear on other phones, including Palm, HTC, Samsung and RIM devices, in the future.

Disclosure: Qualcomm covered the author's travel costs to attend Uplinq 2010.

"Think of SkypeKit as a 'headless' version of Skype - that is, a Skype client with no user interface that runs invisibly, not only on PCs, but also TVs, notebooks, and other connected devices," the company said in a blog Tuesday morning. "Developers communicate with SkypeKit through the SkypeKit API, surfacing Skype calls through their own applications."

What About Mobile? What About the Web?

The new SDK is only open for desktop app development and for integration by consumer hardware manufacturers. Skype says they are aware of demand for an SDK for Web developers, but has "nothing to announce at this time." As far as mobile goes, smartphone users can already download official Skype apps, but mobile chat clients may be left out of the development fun until the SDK is expanded.

It seems likely that Skype will make its SDK available on Web and mobile platforms eventually, since the company's idea is "that every connected device can become a communications device, with the addition of SkypeKit." For now, desktop developers and hardware manufacturers have the chance to create some interesting Skype integrations with the new SDK.

Previously, the Bing Map App Gallery - a collection of map mashups for showing data overlaid on Bing maps - has been fenced-off to third-party map app development. The gallery has only featured Microsoft-built apps, like Photosynth, or those from partner sites, like Twitter or Foursquare. Now, however, Microsoft is opening the gates for anyone to create and upload a map app - well, almost anyone.

To build apps, developers will need a Microsoft Live ID to access the SDK, a Windows box running Visual Studio 2010 to build the application, and a browser with the Silverlight plug-in to view the apps. Microsoft is also placing an Apple-esque app store submission process in place for the map mashups, requiring developers to submit apps for review and approval.

To kick off the opening of the SDK, Microsoft has also unveiled a pair of new apps from partner sites today. An app from WeatherBug lets users visualize various weather related data on Bing Maps, and another from panoramic and 3D image service EveryScape helps users find interesting imagery from inside restaurants.

Bing Search Library for PHP

Announced last week, the Bing Search Library for PHP is a wrapper that allows developers to easily harness the power of Bing Search on dynamic Web pages. In the example shown by creator Cal Evans, developers can contextually place domain restricted search results from Bing onto web pages based on any search query - and it's all done from within the PHP written to power the site.

"The Bing API is very straightforward and most importantly, consistent in design," says Evans. "The Bing API is easy to work with, powerful, and since Google doesn't give you access to this information from an API, unique."

Evans says the current wrapper only includes support for the Search API, but that he hopes future releases will support other Bing API hooks, such as News, Translation and more.

The announcement highlights the escalating tensions between the two companies, initially kicked off by Apple's decision to not allow Flash on its mobile devices, a line up which includes iPhone, iPod Touch and now, the iPad.

More recently, Apple made changes to its software development kit license, the agreement developers sign prior to building mobile applications for Apple, which again seemed like a shot at Adobe more so than anyone else. It stated that developers could no longer use cross-platform compilers to develop for iPhone. They had to develop using native code. ("Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine." it reads.)

That change effectively killed Adobe's plans for its Flash-to-iPhone packager, a tool that would have allowed Flash developers to port their creations to Apple's platform.

But is Adobe worried? Not really. In fact, they sound more angry than concerned. Especially if you read employee rants like Adobe platform evangelist Lee Brimelow's, who titled his diatribe* "Apple Slaps Developers in the Face."

*Not officially endorsed by the company.

But even Chambers can't resist the opportunity to berate Apple as he makes the announcement on his blog. He writes, " ...as developers for the iPhone have learned, if you want to develop for the iPhone you have to be prepared for Apple to reject or restrict your development at anytime, and for seemingly any reason."

To some extent, he's right. Apple has also added language to the agreement that appears to ban non-Apple ad and analytics frameworks from the iPhone. (More on this later).

Hello, Android

But instead of continuing to take potshots at the Cupertino company, Adobe employees - in general - may be better off highlighting Adobe's plans for other platforms.

Chambers gets to this himself, but slowly. Six or so paragraphs into the post, he hits on what may be the more important news: Adobe's new BFF is Google.

"Android-based phones have been doing well," he says, and it's the understatement of the year. The truth is, the platform is growing like crazy. Only months ago, we were reporting the market share doubling for Android, plus how Android's Marketplace is rapidly becoming one of the fastest-growing app stores around and, more recently, the insane levels of growth in new Android apps, with over 9,000 added in March alone.

Chambers notes that Adobe is now working with Google to bring Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR 2.0 to Android-based devices. The company plans to have Flash 10.1 ready for Android (and Palm and RIM) by the end of the first half of 2010.

That's only months away.

Prepare for your mobile apps to get a lot more pushy.

With Xtify-enabled applications, messages can be customized and sent to users based on their exact location. For example, local search and discovery applications could send you messages about businesses close by. Shoppers could be sent mobile coupons as they walked through the mall. Restaurant guide applications could ping you with recommendations about top-rated nearby establishments. Travel apps could pop up interesting facts about landmarks, historical sites and other points of interest as you went sightseeing.

While obviously marketers are going to glom onto the opportunities a local-aware messaging platform like this offers, Xtify's SDK, as you can see in the examples above, could be used for more engaging mobile messages than just coupons, ads and geo-spam.

Why on Android First?

It's not surprising that Xtify launched first on Android instead of iPhone. Just prior to the platform's debut, Apple announced that location-aware ads would not be allowed in all of its mobile applications. Likely concerned with the potential for abuse, Apple posted a notice to their developer center reading:

"If you build your application with features based on a user's location, make sure these features provide beneficial information. If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user's location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store."

Android has no such restrictions due to its nature as a more open platform where apps don't have to go through a review process prior to arriving in the app marketplace. That should help Xtify get a head start since developers can simply take the SDK and run with their ideas without fear that their app will be rejected.

The Demo Video

A few weeks ago at the CTIA Wireless conference, Motorola had the chance to demo the Xtify geo-aware push notification platform for Android and recorded a video of that experience. Motorola Program Manager Randy Ksar has just now posted the demo to the Motodev blog here. As the video shows, notifications can be completely customized and then tracked on the backend, displaying what notification was sent, when, to who and what actions were taken after it was sent. (Skip to minute 4:10 if you just want to see the message demo on the Android phone itself).

Xtify can also be integrated with existing content management systems or CRM systems, or it can run independently. On the platform, developers can create campaigns, trigger rules, run scheduled events, create personalized, dynamic messages, set geo-fences (e.g. apps know when you're at "home" versus at "work" and adapt accordingly) and access advanced reporting and analytics for evaluating a message's success and the campaign's ROI.

According to Xtify's VP of business development, Joshua Schiffman, the company has several very large media companies that are close to launching, but is not permitted to announce who and when at this time. He does note, however, that Xtify has seen interest from some "online and mobile publishers with tens of millions of users each month and location-relevant content," including those running movie booking services, restaurant review services, city event finders and travel services. They've also fielded inquiries from some big-box retailers, national brands, mid-size companies with a few million users and traditional publishers looking to deliver news updates.

Image credit on original post: FoneHome.

iPhone developers will be able to download the new firmware today, while the rest of us will have to wait until it is released to the public later this summer.

Overall, Apple will give developers access to over 1000 new APIs. Apple also announced that it sold 13.7 million iPhones in 2008, which is far more than the 10 million Apple itself had predicted.

New Homescreen

The new homescreen will be tightly integrated with the new universal search feature on the iPhone, which will allow you to search through your email, calendar, notes, and iPod library from one single interface. The new homescreen is basically Apple's iPhone version of Spotlight, as it allows you to find and start apps by searching for them.

Highlights

We detailed some of the most interesting additions to the new iPhone firmware below, but here is a summary of the highlights:

• copy and paste (just like Kevin Rose (and others) predicted)
• push notification
• P2P over Bluetooth
• MMS
• embeddable maps
• landscape mode for all Apple apps
• ability to send multiple photos
• tethering is supported by the phone, but carriers get to choose if they enable it
• no tablet

Copy and Paste

As usual, Apple kept some of the best things for last, but, as rumored, the iPhone will now get copy and paste functionality. Users simply have to double click a word, after which a dialog appears that allows you to cut, copy, or paste. A longer press will automatically mark a complete paragraph. If you paste in the wrong thing, you can simply shake the phone to undo your action.

MMS

Apple will also finally support MMS.

No Background Processes - But Push Notifcation is Finally Coming

In Apple's tests, background apps turned out to be a major battery drain, so Apple clearly decided against this. Using background processes, Apple argues that even just a standard IM client reduced the battery life by 80%, while the standby time of the phone only dropped by 23% with push notifications. There will be three types of notifications: badge, audio alerts, text alerts.

Apps that are already open will communicate directly with the third-party server, while closed apps will go through Apple's servers.

New and Better Apps: Calendar, Voice Memos, Stocks

The built-in Apple calendar app will now finally support the CalDAV standard. The stock tracker can now display relevant news stories right in the app, as well as new details like the highs and lows for the day.

Apple also introduced a new app which will record voice memos.

Subscriptions/In-App Purchasing

Besides the new APIs, the most exciting announcement for developers is surely that Apple will now give them the ability to sell subscriptions, extra game levels, and other add-ons from within their applications. Thanks to this, users will, for example, be able to buy a new Kindle book right from within the app, or new outfits for their Sims characters from within the game.

To us, this seems like a smart move, as it will create additional revenue streams for both Apple and the large contingent of iPhone developers.

Bluetooth P2P

Apple will also introduce peer to peer connectivity over Bluetooth, which will, for example, allow game developers to easily create multiplayer games.

At the same time, however, Apple will also allow other third party accessories to communicate directly with the phone. Lifescan, for example, one of the apps that Apple demoed during the announcement, is an app for diabetes patients that can get glucose readings from a medical device and then calculate the necessary insulin doses.

Maps and Directions

Another highlight of the new iPhone firmware is the new Public Maps API, which makes it easy for developers to embed maps into their apps. Maybe even more interesting, Apple will also now allow developers to create GPS-enabled apps that can do turn-by-turn navigation. For licensing reasons, however, Apple's own map application will not feature this function.

APIs

Apple will introduce a large number of APIs in this new release. Among these are APIs for accessing the iPod library from other applications, streaming audio and video, as well as voice chat and a battery API. One interesting feature of the streaming video feature (and presumably also of the streaming audio API), is that it will adjust the video quality according to the connection speed.

One of the first applications to make use of all of this is Meebo's new native iPhone application, which was demoed during the announcement.

Send Multiple Photos

One feature that was always missing from the iPhone oddly was the ability to email more than one photo at a time. In the new version of the firmware, this has finally been rectified.

We would like to thank our friends at VentureBeat and Engadget for their great live coverage of the announcement!

As Freshbook's Sunir Shah rightly points out, an open source ecosystem can only thrive when enough developers decide to join the community. Right now, the open source iPhone apps that are available are quite good, but there are also very few of them. Apple itself puts too many road blocks in front of potential developers, which, as Shah argues, will lead most of these collaborative projects to develop web apps instead of native apps. However, given the limitations of the web apps platform compared to the native iPhone platform, these applications won't be able to really harness the power of these devices.

Android

For open source advocates, Apple's closed operating system is clearly no match for Google's Android, however. After all, Android not only makes open source collaboration easier by making the SDK available for free (Apple charges $99 Update: Apple makes the SDK available for free, but developers need to pay to get access all the other developer resources and a chance of inclusion in the App Store), but Google has even open sourced the operating system itself.

We hope that more developers will join these open source iPhone initiatives, but currently, Apple isn't exactly making things easy for developers. Even something as simple as giving an application out to a large group of beta testers is still cumbersome.

Opera's widgets will be able to run on the company's wildly popular mobile browser, Opera Mini excluded, the desktop version of Opera, the Nintendo Wii and any other devices that run Opera 9.5. We covered the launch of 9.5 here.

Opera differentiates itself by being highly standards compliant, cross platform and feature-rich. While not nearly as popular inside the US as it is internationally, the company's fans are many and outspoken.

Can freely developed and distributed widgets from Opera challenge the awesome wow-power of iPhone apps? As the initial shock of the iPhone interface wears off and an increasing number of rival handsets begin offering similar functionality, that may be possible. The delays in opening the iPhone App Store have already begun to frustrate developers, but the expected release of a 3G iPhone and a big subsidy driven price drop may extend Apple's lead by the time the App Store launches.

Below is a video released by Opera explaining the SDK. To see the video in greater detail click menu and select fullscreen.

The Developer Platform

The API for the phone, called Cocoa Touch, comes with an iPhone version of the same developer tools Apple offers Mac developers today. The Cocoa Touch toolkit will include the following, succinctly summarized by Mark Hendrickson at TechCrunch: "Interface Builder, Instruments, and iPhone Simulator. Interface Builder lets you drag-n-drop an interface together for your new iPhone app. Instruments is a suite of performance analytics tools. And iPhone Simulator simulates the entire API stack of the iPhone letting you test an iPhone app from your Mac."

The announcement focused extensively on the location awareness capabilities the phone has and by all accounts developers are very excited to get their hands on it. Apple will open an iPhone App Store and take 30% of all transactions made there. Apps will not be allowed to be distributed in any other way. Mac developer and Daring Fireball blogger John Gruber talked to a variety of other developers today and has a good discussion about details from a developer perspective and how excited his community is.

Venture Capitalists Kleiner Perkins announced at the Apple event that they are launching a $100 million fund to finance companies developing applications for the iPhone.

Enterprise Ready

Apple's iPhone SDK has overshadowed a flurry of other mobile news this week, including the announcement that Nokia devices will carry Microsoft's Flash competitor Silverlight, but it's all just evidence that mobile really isn't dead. Quite far from it. You can follow the latest news and debates on issues like location awareness/privacy and user interface via the mobile resources in the RWW Toolkit for Key Topics in 2008.

Syndicated from last100, our digital lifestyle blog

In the meantime, Apple announced the other day it will release “the iPhone software roadmap” on March 6. Many around the Web believe this will be the much-anticipated software developer kit (SDK), although there is speculation that it might be just a roadmap and that the actual SDK won’t be released until later in the Spring.

No matter when it’s released, the SDK is important because it will allow third-party developers to write specific applications for the phone, essentially giving it a “new” feeling — let’s call this one iPhone 1.5.

Taken together, iPhone 1.5 and iPhone 2.0 bring the future into focus, propelling Apple toward its oft-stated goal of selling 10 million iPhones by the end of the year.

Third-party applications appeal to holdouts like the enterprise market who have been waiting for the additional functionality found on smartphones from Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia, and Research in Motion (Blackberry), among others.

Another set of holdouts are those who want the faster data capabilities of 3G networks, which is important to the overseas market. Assuming iPhone 2.0 is released early enough to impact sales, Apple should hit its mark of selling 10 million iPhones by year-end.

Reading between the lines, Tim Cook, Apple’s COO, hinted at this timing. The iPhone is already an “incredible accomplishment,” he told the Goldman Sachs Technology Investment Symposium Wednesday, but it has far more potential in the long term (Cook’s presentation).

“I need a bigger word than ‘enormous’ to describe it,” he said.

This post is syndicated from last100, our digital lifestyle blog covering Internet TV, digital music, Mobile Web and more. You can subscribe to last100 here.

PaidContent's MocoNews points out that though Go "comes preloaded on some phones made by Motorola, LG, Samsung and Nokia, carriers in the United States strip the software from the phones."

In as much as handset manufacturers are open to platform-type innovation, and software vendors are obviously moving in this direction - it seems obvious that the foot-draggers are the telcom carriers. Their stranglehold over the mobile world seems in direct conflict with efforts to make the most of the mobile user experience - but telcoms are used to being the among the most hated companies on the planet.

To draw an analogy with major record labels and DRM - this is almost the opposite type of situation. The case for mobile openness seems to remain based in hopefulness more than a survival imperative for vendors faced with a market threat.

To draw another analogy - might this be comparable to Comcast telling Mozilla that it can't start Comcast customers who are Firefox users out on Google's search page, that it has to make a Comcast search page the default home page?

While telcom execs will likely get theirs in the afterlife, the rest of us will probably have to keep on wishing - unless 3rd party software becomes the only meaningful means of monetization and major revenue sharing comes about.