Author: Gagan Biyani

When I was a kid, we used to play on the street in front of my house. Yeah, I know – seems like years ago. Nowadays, with children and families spending more time inside watching TV or playing video games; I feel like there’s nobody outside in my neighborhood anymore. In fact, most people don’t know their next-door neighbors.

DeHood, sponsors here at TechCrunch Disrupt, wants to crush that problem. Founded by Babak Hedayati, DeHood is a social network for neighborhoods. They are kind of like a one-stop local social network on iPhone (app available here). The goal is to be a one-stop shop for all the local social networking you need to do.

DeHood launches today with a plethora of features and functionality. Users can share what their doing in the local area via a feature called “local buzz.” It’s essentially a location-based Twitter feed of what’s going on in your local area. You can also stay in touch with your friends and other people in the neighborhood and “check in” to venues when you’re in a local area. Another feature is that you can view a map of the neighborhood and see what shops are nearby.

There’s a website version, which has a lot of the same functionality, but the app primarily lives on mobile. The company is funded by the founder, Babak Hedayati, a serial entrepreneur, and he’s hired a large team of seasoned startup veterans to help him with DeHood.

The key challenge for DeHood will obviously be gaining traction in a crowded space. It has been beta tested with a limited number of users and is only launching today, so time will tell whether Babak and team can figure out the secret sauce of user adoption.

Who’s nailed peer-to-peer live streaming video on smartphones such as iPhone and Android? It’s not Qik, Ustream or Justin.tv, it’s Knocking Live, an application by bootstrapped Point Heads Software. Interestingly enough, Knocking Live reached 1 million users faster than Foursquare or Gowalla did (see graph).

Pointy Heads released Knocking Live in December in collaboration with Sourcebits, and have since amassed 1.6 million downloads. They’re here at TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Alley, among a plethora of other great companies.

The app has all sorts of uses, but one crazy guy decided to strap their iPhone to an RC Airplane and stream a live feed of the view from the sky. It’s as cool as it sounds. Hit the jump for the video.

Knocking Live is the first (and only, to my knowledge) peer-to-peer video sharing. You can use it to stream a live video feed from your iPhone’s camera to another iPhone (or Android) anywhere in the world. You don’t need an iPhone 3GS, you can have a 3G.

Here’s the video of streaming video from hundreds of feet up using an RC Airplane and an iPhone with Knocking Live:

Here at MobileCrunch, we love numbers. We especially love numbers that make good stories. And we more especially love numbers that make good stories about phones. And so we love it when AdMob packages together data from 18,000 mobile ad publishers and sends us a little PDF detailing what they’ve found.

AdMob (which is being acquired by Google) released its March 2010 Mobile Metrics Report today. For this report, AdMob gathers data from the 18,000 mobile websites and applications that leverage AdMob for their advertising services. Because AdMob is the largest advertising platform on mobile with 40% market share, they do have a large pool of data to pull from. However, the data has some obvious selection bias and isn’t the best for cross-platform comparisons.

That said, the report showed the clear stratification of the Android handset market. Whereas in September 2009, there were only 2 major Android handsets, there are currently 11. In September, HTC dominated Android with HTC devices accounting for 96% of all Android web traffic. This month, Motorola took that throne, and accounted for 44% of Android web traffic. HTC was close behind with 43% of requests and Samsung sat at an abysmal 9%.

Though the focus was on Android, some interesting news came out on the iPhone. Just 2% of iPhone OS web traffic came through the 1st gen iPhone, compared with 39% for the 3GS, 25% for the 2nd gen iPod Touch and 20% for the iPhone 3G.

That shows two extremely interesting trends: first, nobody uses the 1st gen iPhone for web browsing anymore. Second, the iPod Touch is continuing to be used heavily for web browsing. More specifically, the 2nd gen iPod Touch is the most popular iPod, accounting double the traffic of the 3rd gen iPod Touch.

The Android market is becoming increasingly diversified, with 3 manufacturers and 11 devices accounting for Android’s web traffic. Based on my conversations with developers, this can be a bit frustrating – there are 3 popular OS versions for Android (1.5 – Cupcake, 1.6 – Donut, and 2.x – Eclair), whereas 95% of iPhone OS devices are running a 3.x version.

That said, Android is clearly continuing its assault on the iPhone. The Droid accounted for 4% of web usage in March, compared with 22% from iPhone devices. That’s a significant number, especially considering the Droid is 2.5 years younger than the iPhone.

It’s also important to note that BlackBerry and WinMo/WinPho are nowhere to be seen on this report. I don’t even know if you can call those phones “smart” anymore, given that their users rarely use them to access the internet.

The web is abuzz about the iPad again and frankly, I’m stoked. There are a lot of things about the new Apple tablet that are interesting, from couch computing to a portable media player. But the feature I’m most excited about is Multiplayer.

Multiplayer what? Multiplayer games, multiplayer browsing, multiplayer video viewing, multiplayer productivity apps. Say that five times fast.

The iPhone is the powerful application platform, which enables developers to build awesome touch-enabled apps on the OS. The problem is the iPhone is way too small for more than one person to use at a time. A tablet computer the size of the iPad completely changes that, and enables full-fledged multiplayer experiences like you’ve never seen.

You’ll see people walking around with a portable electronic board game. Set the iPad down on a coffee table and start playing Chess. Take it in the plane and watch a movie with your girlfriend. Lay it down on your desk and draw on a two-person white board. The iPad will be the perfect size for these activities, and a whole new crop of applications will come about from the new screen size. The iPad will be like the Microsoft Surface, except portable and without the $10,000 price tag. This video of the Windows 7 touch interface might give you a good idea of what’s possible on the iPad.

Multiplayer on iPhone is already an amazing experience. Apps like Words with Friends and Tap Tap Revenge have shown both online (Words) and local (Tap Tap) multiplayer can work. But the iPad blows this out of the water by enabling a rich, local multiplayer experience on a canvas that developers can really leverage.

While at GDC, I met with many game developers who all pointed to this feature as the one they’re most excited about. It was amazing how many developers were already building iPad-specific experiences and it multiplayer was a common theme in that experience.

Multiplayer will also be a killer marketing feature for Apple. At a previous employer, I extensively studied how Apple managed to successfully market the iPod and one word summed up the whole thing: ubiquity. Apple managed to make it seem like the iPod was everywhere; that everyone had one and those that didn’t have one wanted one. The same thing was true with their marketing efforts on the iPhone.

Multiplayer on the iPad is going to quadruple that effect. You’ll see people at restaurants, at work, and even at house parties sit down and use the iPad collaboratively. It will be incredible to see all the use cases that developers find for iPad applications.

Social Media is catching fire, and college sports wants a piece of the action. Row27, a company we profiled a few months ago, has just released CrowdCameo. The product is a suite of picture-sharing web and mobile apps which let fans post pictures directly to a college sports-branded web page. Basically, all those drunk idiots (including myself) at college sports games can now spend all day taking crazy pictures of themselves in their LSU gear and see it on the college’s sports site.

Better yet, select photos can be shown up on the Big Board (the huge video screen) in college stadiums. Basically, fans take pictures of themselves or others via mobile phone or camera and send those pictures to a generic e-mail address (say [email protected]). Then, LSU screens those pictures and decides which ones go up on the fan site or on the board during half-time.

The service was piloted at, you guessed it, LSU, which is one of the bigger college sports schools in the country. Within a month or so, they’ve processed over 6,000 mobile photos. The service is now being made available more publicly and other college programs can get involved.

As you may have noticed by now, I’m a huge college football fan and also an avid believer in the ability for web technologies to be used to augment real-world experiences. I can see any college that implements a feature like CrowdCameo seeing a lot of engagement – who wouldn’t start taking pictures and uploading them to the net?

This is the second great product I’ve seen from Row27. They, like many other smart entrepreneurs, do a great job of funding their own work by obtaining a “beach head” client (in this case, LSU) to front the cost of development. Then, they make sure they own the IP so they can go ahead and sell the same product in the future to other companies (in this case, college sports teams).

Monetization on mobile is a huge business and ScoreLoop wants a piece of the action. ScoreLoop, a white label social platform that helps developer implement social features into their iPhone and Android apps, is entering the monetization game by providing its developers with the ability to monetize their applications.

ScoreLoop will provide two primary monetization options for developers. First, they will enable virtual goods purchasing – similar to TapJoy’s virtual goods platform or Plus+ from ngmoco. Second, ScoreLoop will provide developers with a way of charging for downloadable content. For example, you could download a new theme or a new character by paying an extra $0.99.

CEO Marc Gumpinger admitted that their monetization features are not particularly new, but the value that ScoreLoop provides is white labeling. In fact, in the crowded sea of platform solutions for iPhone (more on that in a future post), ScoreLoop’s main differentiator is that it enables a fully white-labeled platform for developers. Big players such as MySpace, Astro Ranch publisher Tag Games, and Parachute Panic publisher FDG Entertainment are among ScoreLoop’s customers.

It’s interesting to see the various “platform” companies in the mobile space and their diverse moves into helping developers monetize. Due to the nature of the App Store, there is a huge need for developers to find the right method to monetize their free applications, and there’s a clear push in the industry of moving towards a freemium model on mobile. Analytics companies such as Flurry and Mobclix provide their analytics for free to gain a relationship with developers and have since turned that relationship into a monetization channel.

Others such as ngmoco’s Plus+, OpenFeint and now ScoreLoop, have created social networking platforms for the iPhone and are augmenting those by helping developers make money. I’m watching this sector closely and very interested to see how this dance shakes out.

ScoreLoop is based and founded in Munich, Germany, with offices in San Francisco and Beijing. They’ve raised $2.8 million from two of the biggest VC firms in Europe, Earlybird Venture Capital and Target Partners.

Brands are increasingly prominent on the App Store and Apple tends to love featuring folks like Britney Spears and Coca-Cola on the App Store’s front page. But who’s actually succeeding and which brands have managed to maintain high download numbers?

PositionApp, the app that lets you track how iPhone apps are doing on the App Store rankings, might have the answer. They track and record the top 300 apps across all demographics and have provided us with details on the top 15 apps in the US App Store. Hit the jump for the list.

The first two apps, Facebook and Pandora, are clear favorites and there’s no real surprise there. But then it gets a bit tricky. Somehow, Driver’s Ed.com and Gibson Learn and Master Guitar are the next two. Though valuable applications (or so it seems), it’s intriguing that folks like Disney and Comcast are managing to take a back seat to lesser known brands.

Of course, there are plenty of high-quality brands on here. Companies like eBay, MySpace, Bank of America and PayPal are all doing quite well, and have managed to sustain their high position for at least 4 weeks.

Ultimately, it’s hard to figure out from this list what exactly makes a branded app successful, though one thing’s for sure: brands have started to consume the iPhone and pretty much everyone has to have an “iPhone” strategy. Success definitely seems indirectly related to providing value, as applications like Facebook / The Weather Channel and Paypal show.

So what do you think? How did these apps become successful as compared to the hundreds of other equally popular brands who created apps that flopped?

It’s been around for 9 years, is on over 1,200 handset models, used by over 65 OEM’s, available in 25 countries, and has over 250M potential users. Yet you may never have heard of it. It is BREW, a mobile operating system developed by Qualcomm that powers anything from feature phones to low-cost smartphones. For feature phones, BREW is the OS of choice for AT&T and Verizon, the two biggest carriers in the US.

Recently, Qualcomm announced that over $3 Billion worth of transactions have occurred on its platform through app purchases on the millions of phones with BREW. Though that’s over the course of 9 years, it’s important to realize that there are only 18,000 applications on BREW across even fewer developers, according to Qualcomm. So the developers responsible for those applications have made a killing.

I met with Qualcomm at GDC and they’re quite proud of their success, citing a recent report from AT&T in which they committed to using BREW as the primary OS for all “non-Smartphones” (Android, iPhone, Symbian, WinMo). AT&T added that only 30% of its customers are buying Smartphones, and the “second tier” of customers will use BREW. To top it off, AT&T said that second tier of phones is growing faster than the Smartphone market.

The flip side, of course, is that BREW just doesn’t have the distribution platform of an Apple or Google, and clearly lacks the sex appeal. The browser still looks like it’s from the 1990’s and they hardly have more capabilities than a J2ME phone. Furthermore, the platform is light-years away from having the openness of Google or even Apple. It is extremely expensive to crack the distribution channels on BREW, which are dominated by the bureaucratic and largely inept mobile operators.

Qualcomm, however, doesn’t care – because it benefits regardless of whether you buy a smartphone or a BREW-based device. They are a chipset manufacturer and used in many of the smartphones on the market. Increasingly, mobile OS companies are putting their faith in Qualcomm’s new SnapDragon processor. It will be the processor of record for Windows Phone, most Android phones (including the Nexus One), Palm, and Symbian.

What do you get when you mix a Unicorn and a Nexus One? I’ve got no idea – but if you put an iPhone and Furby together, you get a Xachi pet. Announced last week at the American International Toy Fair, a Xachi (pronounced “ZAH-chee”) Pet is an iPhone-controlled toy. It looks kind of like a Furby with a giant LED screen in place of its face. And, yes, you interface with your Xachi Pet through your iPhone/iPod.

It’s pretty a simple concept, but it’s the first time I’ve seen someone pull it off. The closest thing to an iPhone-enabled toy on the market is a helicopter with your iPhone as a remote control, and that’s not exactly cute and cuddly.

The Xachi Pet is produced by Taptic Toys, and is not yet in production. They expect it to cost $40 or less. It’s got an 8-bit speaker, an accelerometer, robotic legs that can dance, and a LED screen for animation. Similar to a Tomagachi, you track and maintain its hunger, thirst, health, and happiness from your iPod/iPhone – you can feed it, give it water and play with it to keep it happy.

You can also play games with your Xachi Pet. I got to try out a few and found them to be enjoyable, and I can see a youngster absolutely loving this thing. There’s a game where you use your iPhone as a bubble blaster and try to burst the bubbles on the Xachi Pet’s screen. Another game lets you control the Xachi Pet so it dances to the tune of a track on your phone. There are learning games (like simple math or spelling games), and the possibilities go on.

Three of Taptic Toys’ four founders met at Battle Bots, a brutal competition where teams create robots that try to massacre each other in an enclosed arena. Yes, this is the same Battle Bots you watched with glee on Comedy Central 10 years ago.

Is there a market full of kids with iPod Touches? According to Admob’s report, over 65% of iPod Touch owners are 17 and under — so there just might be. I don’t know jack about what kids like to do these days, but my inclination is that Xachi Pets has a lot going for it. It looks like a Furby, feels like a stuffed animal, and has the added cool factor of being iPod Touch-friendly. It’ll be interesting to see how kids take to it, but for now, let us know what you think in the comments section.

Apple and Google are engaged in a fascinating battle of mobile OS’s. Among other things, they’re duking it out on patent infringement, developer relations and carrier support. Lines are being drawn, and everyone’s taking sides.

That begs the question: what’s the difference between the App Store and Android Market for developers? And how does this affect their bottom line? Mobclix, a TC50 Company, just released a report comparing the Android Market to Apple App Store. They are a mobile analytics and advertising platform whose footprint includes over 6,500 publishers including ngmoco, SGN, and NewToy (creators of Words with Friends).

The data revealed that about 60% of Android apps are free of charge, compared with 20% for App Store applications. Furthermore, about 20% of Windows Mobile and Blackberry are free as well. It’s an intriguing phenomenon and a difficult one to decipher. Are Android developers more inclined to use advertising instead of direct payment to monetize? Or does the more democratic nature of the Android Market make free apps more successful?

Another potential explanation is that Android doesn’t even allow paid apps in many countries, including Canada, China and India. That may be scaring developers off from the platform.

Mobclix’s data also showed clear differences between average price of apps in the various stores. While Android and Apple have the largest number of apps, they are also the cheapest: the average paid Android app costs $4.10 and the average paid App Store app is $3.37. In comparison, WinMo apps average at $7.48 and BlackBerry at $8.58. That doesn’t necessarily translate into more revenue, but it does mean that the market dynamics of each store are causing different pricing options for developers.

Vishal Gurbuxani, CTO and Co-Founder, also shared that Mobclix is nearing profitability and has served over 3.5 Billion ad impressions. By comparison, advertising network AdMob (recently acquired by Google) announced in November that they had served 1.7 Billion impressions by that date.

Below is the full presentation, with more interesting data like a comparison of Android vs Apple across all categories (e.g. Books or News):

“Bump is just a gimmick for young people” says DubMeNow CEO Manoj Ramnani. DubMeNow (“Dub” for short) is a real business, he implies, and he can prove it. Dub has been on a tear the last few months in all aspects of their business.

They’ve got real revenue: over $2.7M projected for this fiscal year. They’ve raised over $2.8 million in funding thus far, led by Syncom Ventures with other undisclosed angel investors participating. Furthermore, they have found traction in the education market and are soon-to-be deployed to over 750 Universities as a contact-sharing option for students.

Their mobile application, DubMeNow, has been downloaded nearly 1 million times – still dwarfed by the 7 million of their Y Combinator- and Sequoia-funded competitor, Bump. Bump and Dub are in a battle to become the de facto contact information-sharing application for mobile phones. Bump is clearly kicking ass in terms of users, and much of that is due to the love they’ve gotten from Apple and through PR. But Manoj doesn’t care – he argues that real revenue and partnerships are going to serve Dub better in the long-term. That statement may be suspect, but there’s no doubt that Dub is making headway.

Recently, Dub has created partnerships with DataTel and Moodle. DataTel is the 3rd largest ERP vendor for universities. Together, the two partnerships mean that over 1,000 universities will have access to Dub’s platform as a way of sharing contacts among students and faculty. Furthermore, they’ve announced partnerships with SXSW and Higher Logic, as a way for conference-goers to share information easily.

Dub was founded 19 months ago by a group of engineers who wanted to create a platform for users to share contact information. Their major product, originally available only on iPhone, launched less than 1 year ago. Founder and CEO Manoj Ramnani came to the US pursuing an MBA at George Washington University, and recently sold a mobile software services company.

Mobile business cards is a real problem and I definitely want to see some company – whether it be Dub or Bump – succeed. I’m sick of carrying around wads of paper in my pocket every time I go to an event, and then fumbling through the stack to figure out the e-mail address of that one person I want to talk to. That said, there’s a long way to go before we as a community standardize on one application – and it’ll be interesting to see which one becomes successful.

RightSide Capital Management is about to shatter the funding landscape. Led by David Lambert, Kevin Dick and John Lee, RightSide Capital believes that seed-stage capital needs a complete overhaul. RightSide will make 100-200 investments per year, and literally manufacture companies in a way that no firm has ever done. The fund, announced at TheFunded.com’s Future of Funding event last Thursday, will debut in the second half of 2010 and may give the angel funding market a much-deserved shakeup.

Partner Kevin Dick went on stage during a panel on alternative funding methods and laid out what he believes to be the future of funding. Quantity, not quality, is king in the seed stage. Entrepreneurs looking for funding won’t have to go the traditional route of begging for a meeting and then having a second meeting and then waiting 3 months for traction until finally closing a deal. Instead, they will fill out an application – similar to applying to College – and receive a response in 2 weeks.

Other aspects of the fund are equally revolutionary. The term sheets will be determined by a computer, and everyone will receive the same legal terms (the valuation and funding amount will vary based on the application). The fund will have a ranking method to rate applicants on a variety of categories such as experience/technical ability and systematically provide a pre-money valuation. They will also ask founders to put in their own money to ensure they have “skin in the game” and that they are invested in the future success of the company. The amount of money required will be determined based on financial documentation the founders are expected to provide.

RightSide explicitly claims on their website that they do not care about $100M exits. They are fine with a large number of $10-50M exits. The irony pervaded the room when Mike Maples later gave a speech on investing only in Thunder Lizards at the same event. Mike Maples proclaimed that he only wants to do 10 investments a year, and often makes his decision on investing within the first 30 min of talking to an entrepreneur. RightSide seems to balk at that philosophy, and seems to believe that identifying Thunder Lizards requires more luck than skill. Their website proudly proclaims: “Suspicious of ‘Gut Feel’”.

The RightSide model represents a stark contrast to the “traditional model” of raising early-stage capital. Entrepreneurs meet face-to-face with associates or partners of seed-stage funds. Seed fund managers are extremely elusive and often require multiple introductions to get a meeting. If you’re lucky enough to get this far, after a few meetings over the course of 2 weeks to 3 months (and sometimes longer), the fund gives you a term sheet.

The term sheet is kind of a “promise” that the investors will fund your company, and provides you with details around pre-money valuation and funding amount. Then, the lawyers draft the legal documents required for closing a funding round, which can cost between $10-40K depending on the type of deal. Finally, if everything works out (and it can all fall apart at any stage in that process), the startup gets a check and they are officially part of the seed fund’s portfolio.

RightSide believes this model is broken. First, they think that investors are generally unable to predict success of a company at the seed stage. As such, they are trying to systematize the funding process and minimize human bias. Second, Partner Kevin Dick argues that entrepreneurs shouldn’t have to pay thousands of dollars in legal and accounting fees. Instead, they are providing standard terms for all applicants, so the legal costs will be much less. Third, they are applying a “spray and pray” model of seed funding because they believe that they need to make a lot of investments to net a return. That’s why they’re going to do 100-200 investments per year.

If RightSide seems like an incubator on steroids, it isn’t. Unlike Paul Graham’s Y Combinator or Adeo Ressi’s Founder Institute, startups will have no set curriculum and may never meet each other in person. Kevin Dick says that they will set up educational sessions and events for portfolio companies, but will not be able to provide significant one-to-one mentoring for early-stage companies.

Pre-money valuations will be set by a formula, which takes into account the background of the co-founders and the stage at which their idea is developed (i.e., idea on a napkin gets less points than a working prototype). During the panel at the Future of Funding event, Kevin said that this formula would probably have given Mark Zuckerberg a poor valuation, but at least he would’ve gotten funding. He notes that many seed investors passed on him, but RightSide would not have.

The standard terms are yet to be finalized, but you can find a lot of the information on RightSide Capital’s website. Some tidbits have been provided: it will include preferred equity and not require the startup to give up a board seat.

Today, UK design firm ustwo has launched PositionApp, an iPhone application that provides data regarding the top 300 apps in the App Store from the last 6 months. The price of the app would have been $7, but AdMob (well, Google technically) is sponsoring the app so that it is free for the next two months.

Coupled with its launch, ustwo also provided MobileCrunch with some exclusive graphs showing which app categories have been most popular over the last 6 months. Unlike most App Store data, this data comes directly from scraping iTunes, which means that it is a 100% accurate assessment of the App Store. Anyone interested in the App Store should hit the jump and check out what PositionApp has found.

PositionApp is a simple application: ustwo crawls the App Store on an hourly basis and collects data from the top 300 apps across all categories and geographies. They’ve been doing this for 6 months and have now launched an application which enables you to see, in graphs and numbers, what apps have been successful for the last 6 months and what rankings they’ve held. The user interface is slick, but I found that I actually wanted even more data than this app had.

The app is kept up-to-date in real-time so PositionApp will provide you with the ability to check how your app is doing (should it be in the top 300) compared to others. Of course, it is a niche application and likely won’t ever be in the top 300 itself (ironic, isn’t it?), but developers will find it as a good on-the-go resource to tracking App Store successes and failures — or more accurately, successes and near successes.

PositionApp comes with more in-depth features such as country-by-country tracking so you can see how your favorite apps do in different markets. It also lets you see who the biggest movers are, which is a good way to get ahead on

The data that ustwo has been scraping also provides additional insights into the App Store. They put together some graphs to show MobileCrunch readers what app categories are the most popular, both free and paid. The graphs (shown below) show clearly that the App Store is dominated by games (over 50% in paid and 40% in free). Next up is Entertainment applications, followed by Utilities.

After that, it gets dicey. On the free side, Lifestyle and Music applications are clearly doing well (each with about 5% of the top 300). However, there is no clear winning category on the paid side after games, Entertainment and Utilities.

Perhaps equally as interesting are the categories doing the worst. Sports, Navigation, News and Travel are all doing fairly poorly among other paid categories. In free, Weather and Finance can be added to that list as well.

It’s important to remember that many apps go into the top 300 simply because of low price points (Games) and that high-priced applications don’t tend to get enough sales to make it to the top 300 (Navigation). That said, the numbers are surely interesting.

You can download PositionApp on iTunes here.

Booyah, the Kleiner Perkins iFund company, just announced that its hit location-based social game, MyTown, has passed 1 million registered users. MyTown is an extremely successful free iPhone game that enables users to buy and sell real world locations. Users then get points by “checking in” to locations through their iPhone. Competitors Foursquare and Gowalla (and recently Yelp) have similar features, but the real differentiator is MyTown’s integrated game mechanic.

Ultimately, MyTown is a full-featured massive multiplayer real-world game. You can own property and then earn money whenever another MyTown user, whom you do not have to know or have any relation with, “checks in” to that location. This means that instead of simply incentivizing engagement via “checking in” and social features, MyTown actually enables users to gain virtual currency and “level up” through the game.

We spoke with Keith Lee of Booyah a few days ago and he gave us some additional statistics. Not only is Booyah’s MyTown more successful than any of the other games in this category, it has also covered the map of the United States with check-ins. According to Keith, there has been a check-in at every single location that exists on Google Maps. I find that hard to believe, but it seems like they come close – a quick check while walking down the streets of Fremont or Berkeley (the two places I frequent most) shows that every single place has been checked into.

A couple more stats that Booyah shared with us:

-1 Million+ Registered Users
-Averaged 100K new registered users a week since launching in December
-40 Million+ Virtual items consumed each week
-25 Million weekly check-ins
-Daily engagement over 65 minutes

Clearly, this competition in this space is heating up and Booyah’s MyTown is the front-runner for now. It’ll be interesting to see how Yelp, with far more registered users (but a really new check-in infrastructure) competes over time.

Another aspect of MyTown that has gone largely unnoticed: it’s in Apple’s Top 50 grossing list. This means that users are not only engaging with MyTown but Booyah’s actually making revenue off of selling in-game virtual currency and other goodies.

TwitBit [iTunes link] is a fantastic Twitter client on the iPhone. With dozens of apps from which to Tweet, competition is stiff. Moreover, once you find a Twitter client you like, it’s even harder to understand why you should switch.

TwitBit, a Twitter client from High Order Bit, has finally made me change my ways and delete Tweetie from my iPhone. And though TwitBit definitely lacks some key features of Tweetie, there’s one major reason why I am now using TwitBit instead of Tweetie: Push notifications.

Sure, with Tweetie, TweetDeck, Birdfeed, and others, you can get Boxcar (which is an app that provides you with great push notifications for your iphone) to supplement the app’s lack of push notifications. But that ends up being a pain-in-the-ass sometimes; your iPhone first sends you to Boxcar and then to another app when you want to @ reply or re-tweet a post. Instead, now when I unlock my phone after a push notification saying I’ve been @ replied, TwitBit opens up right away.

TwitBit has been around since August, and has a similar user experience to Tweetie. Both do a solid job with providing the right options to the user at the right time (for example, easily accessible options to DM or @ reply when you click on a person’s handle). Both look fairly similar and present your Tweet stream in a user-friendly manner. Most importantly, TwitBit has all the bells and whistles of Tweetie – geolocation, support for lists and trends, and solid search options. It also has the standard photo-uploading with the added benefit of Flickr integration.

All the praise aside, TwitBit has its downsides to Tweetie and I can see many users preferring Tweetie to TwitBit. I feel like TwitBit doesn’t update the stream as quickly as Tweetie, but it is a minor issue at most. TwitBit also doesn’t do geolocation nearly as well as Tweetie (sometimes it doesn’t even seem to work). Furthermore, TwitBit’s UI is damned similar to the standard iPhone UI, so there’s very little ingenuity there. Finally, and this may be a compelling reason to keep Tweetie+Boxcar for some, TwitBit doesn’t “save” a history of the tweets you’ve viewed like Tweetie does.

I won’t rigorously compare TweetDeck for iPhone (or any other iPhone Twitter client) to TwitBit here, except to say that TweetDeck on my iPhone 3G hardly works. It often crashes and the UI often gets distorted due to a bug. Though TweetDeck’s UI is absolutely fantastic (and the list support beyond any other iPhone app), it doesn’t matter if it isn’t a serviceable application.

At the end of the day, I care about a Twitter client that provides me with the basic features I need to tweet my heart out. And the one thing Tweetie, TweetDeck, and most other Twitter iPhone apps don’t have is Push. And that’s what sold me on TwitBit. I generally don’t use push; it’s so damned annoying and poorly designed. But there are two applications for which Push is practically a godsend: Twitter and IM.

I have push notifications whenever someone @’s me (@gaganbiyani in case you were wondering) and DM’s me. Because of those two features, Twitter has slowly started to replace e-mail and text for me. I compared TwitBit’s Push against Boxcar to test how well it worked (which, to my knowledge, is the best Twitter Push app on the iPhone). TwitBit was at most 30 seconds to 2 minutes late, but never significantly worse than that. That’s really solid, considering that TwitBit is a full-fledged iPhone app (unlike Boxcar) and now I replace two apps with one.

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Like bad beer, cracker jacks, and drunken fans getting hammered in the parking lot, smack-talking and sports-betting are staples of American sports. And that’s why Bema Studios created Smackdaddy, a free iPhone app [iTunes link] that allows you to both bet on games (currently just NFL, NHL and NBA) and tell your friends they smell. I got a chance to play with Smackdaddy this Sunday and loved it – it is easy to use, intuitive, and addictive. Of course, you pretty much have to be a sports fan to like it, so I’ll assume you know something about sports (as you should, lest you burn in hell) going forward.

You can’t bet real money, and Bema Studios assures me that will always be the case (too bad). But you do bet “Smackers” – a fake in-game currency. You start with 10,000 and all of the best include the spread. That is one of Smackdaddy’s downfalls, which is that it is fairly limited at this point in terms of feature sets. Aside from only having one style of betting, it also only has 3 sports (that I can tell). Both of those will be improved upon in future releases, of course.

Aside from being a fake Vegas-in-your-pocket, Smackdaddy also has a wall-posting or micro-messaging feature that allows you to “Smack talk” your Facebook friends. This is a great use of Facebook Connect, because you can immediately see all your friends that are also using Smackdaddy with just your Facebook ID and password. The downside (at least for Bema Studios) is you can’t easily invite your friends into the app, which would be nice since I have tons of friends I know who would love this. The other knock on the smack talking feature is that it is not in real-time but rather asynchronous, and it is limited to 140 characters. I understand the penchant to be just like Twitter, but I don’t think its necessary in this context. If I’m just talking with my friends, longer messages seem like no problem. Plus, its hard to make the Niners look good in just 140 characters.

Smackdaddy joins a long list of sports-related iPhone apps. However, it is the first one I’ve seen that provides a viable social/viral component. I would love to see a large community of “Smackdaddies” playing next time I pop into the app – and will definitely keep this app on my iPhone. Of course, it could get lame fast: if you run out of Smackers (a real possibility for me; I went 1-4 this weekend), you have to pay for them via in-app purchase. Or you can win 1,000 via the “daily raffle.”

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Pageonce has quietly built a solid business by aggregating its user’s various online accounts into one place. They’ve got over 1.3 million registered users and recently raised a $6.5 million Series B round. And though Pageonce hardly gets neither the fame nor the fortune of its competitor (Mint), it is still a very solid way to manage your online accounts. Unlike Mint, which focuses on personal finances, Pageonce’s goal is to provide you with a one-stop view of all of your online accounts, including financial, travel, e-mail and social networking.

Though a single web interface for all of those accounts may be unnecessary, it is a perfect service for mobile devices. Specifically, the Pageonce iPhone App – “Personal Assistant” – is done extremely well, and I still use it to this day. It blows Mint’s iPhone App out of the water.

Today, Pageonce launches TripTracker [iTunes Link]. This is a free iPhone App ($1 removes the ads) that enables you to keep track of all of our trip itineraries – hotels and flights specifically – on the go.

As a consultant for Accenture, I travel basically every week, so the value proposition of having a one-stop shop for all my trip updates is extremely compelling. But obviously, TripIt already does that – so what makes TripTracker different? For TripIt, you forward all of your itineraries to an e-mail address ([email protected]) and it automatically parses your itinerary and populates your flight information. Instead, with TripTracker, you provide your frequent flyer and hotel rewards program ID and password, and it pulls all the information for you. They call it “automagically” updating your flight and hotel details.

Ultimately, the difference between TripIt and TripTracker is a matter of preference. For a frequent traveler like me, who has racked up over 60,000 miles in 4 months, it probably makes sense to go with TripTracker. I always use my frequent flyer ID when booking a reservation, and so why bother with forwarding my itineraries to TripIt (which is, though still easy, slightly more difficult). For someone who travels a bit less and doesn’t always bother with frequent flyer programs, TripIt is still the way to go.

TripIt also could not parse the data from the itineraries sent by my corporate travel program, whereas TripTracker goes around that issue by pulling the itinerary details from the airline websites. Furthermroe, the TripTracker iPhone app has weather reports and airport information whereas TripIt does a better job with push notifications and has a better user interface. Either way, now you never have to worry about losing your travel details while on the go.

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Talk of the Apple Tablet is in full swing as the wide world of web is in a frenzy over the upcoming Apple event tomorrow. Most of the discussion has centered around features: how will it use multi-touch? will it have a camera? what kind of OS will it run? But one thing that matters perhaps more than features is what kind of apps the tablet will have and what developers think about the product. Appcelerator, a company that provides web developers with the tools to build native mobile and desktop applications, has released a report that might give us some insight into what developers are thinking about the device.

The results are clear: Appcelerator’s 550+ developer respondents are overwhelmingly positive about the Apple Tablet. 90% of them said they were “very interested in building at least one Apple Tablet app within a year.” Furthermore, when asked about developer interest in the Apple Tablet as compared with other mobile operating systems, 58% of developers were “very interested” in developing for the platform.

Considering only the iPhone and Android were prioritized above the Tablet, that is ridiculous. The damn thing hasn’t even been officially introduced yet.

It is important to note that Appcelerator’s survey suffers from some significant survey biases. Specifically, the survey was sent out to Appcelerator’s existing customers, who are primarily web developers interested in building applications in web languages (such as Javascript) for desktop and mobile devices. CEO Jeff Haynie informed me that 46% of the developers in the survey are independent developers and 54% work in businesses. Furthermore, he shared that 52% of their developers are based in North America and that they only provided survey respondents with 48 hours to take the survey, which only augments the self-selection bias inherent to surveys.

The survey revealed that developers are treating the Apple Tablet differently from the iPhone. When asked what types of applications they are most likely to build for the tablet versus the iPhone, developers had very different priorities. While they viewed games as the most appropriate for the iPhone, respondents ranked business/productivity as the most important on the upcoming Tablet.

Another interesting find was the feature set that surveyed developers were excited about. It seems that developers are excited about features that are tablet-specific such as new multitouch gestures and the native tablet user interface.

CEO Jeff Haynie had additional insights that he shared with me. His thoughts are particularly interesting, because he interacts with hundreds of developers as part of his day-to-day job, and has a solid grasp of what his customers want. Furthermore, he interacts with Apple regularly, and though he wouldn’t confirm or deny, it’s plausible that he has some inside information about the upcoming tablet.

Jeff mentioned that the excitement around the tablet has been as big (if not bigger) as the excitement around the first iPhone launch. Additionally, though developers are thinking about Android, their mindshare and attention is still firmly in Apple’s hands. The iPhone completely dominates the market and only 12% of developers polled were “not happy” with Apple’s approval process (however, 64% were only “somewhat happy”). Symbian and Windows Mobile, despite large install bases, don’t even matter to most developers.

Regarding the tablet specifically, Jeff says that video conferencing is a big opportunity that is exciting developers. They are also interested in the education sector, and are treating the Tablet as a product distinct from the iPhone. Still, the majority of the developers (51%) believed that porting their existing iPhone apps to the Tablet is “very important.”

The rest of the survey can be found at Appcelerator’s website.

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Now that everyone knows the iSlate is real, the question is: what the hell is this thing going to be like? How will it work? What will wow us about the iSlate that we never really expected?

A tipster just dug up some great details about a new multi-touch gestures that may help answer these questions [CrunchGear summarized many other cool gestures here]. Obviously, we don’t know if Apple will use this technology, but patents from a company they previously acquired, Fingerworks, reveal two patents that might apply to the new Apple Tablet.

The first one enables you to write on a touchscreen in the same way that you would a piece of paper.

You clench your fist and pinch your thumb and index finger together like you’re holding a pen (see image above). Now, if you press your hand down to the tablet with this position, you can now write like you would on a piece of paper. Of course, it might be weird at first: you’ll probably hate the fact that you don’t have anything in your fingers, but we all thought the same thing about not having a keyboard. I’ll take the wait-and-see approach: if this does land itself on the iTablet, it’s definitely something I could see myself using. From the patent itself:

[0129] FIG. 15 is a proximity image of a right hand in a pen grip configuration. The thumb 201 and index fingertip 202 are pinched together as if they were holding a pen but in this case they are touching the surface instead. Actually the thumb and index finger appear the same here as in FIG. 14. However, the middle 203, ring 204, and pinky 205 fingers are curled under as if making a fist, so the knuckles from the top of the fingers actually touch the surface instead of the finger tips. The curling under of the knuckles actually places them behind the pinched thumb 201 and index fingertip 202 very close to the palm heels 206, 207. The knuckles also appear larger than the curled fingertips of FIG. 14 but the same size as the flattened fingertips in FIG. 13. These differences in size and arrangement will be measured by the pen grip detector 17 to distinguish this pen grip configuration from the closed and flattened hand configurations.

Another patent enables the touchscreen to identify if you are typing or if you just happen to have your hand on the screen. Similar to the way the iPhone detects that you are holding your phone up to your face to talk, this may be a small feature that goes a long way towards improving usability of the iSlate.

[0295] The typing recognition process described above thus allows the multi-touch surface to ergonomically emulate both the typing and hand resting capabilities of a standard mechanical keyboard. Crisp taps or impulsive presses on the surface generate key symbols as soon as the finger is released or decision diamond 792 verifies the impulse has peaked, ensuring prompt feedback to the user. Fingers intended to rest on the surface generate no keys as long as they are members of a synchronized finger press or release subset or are placed on the surface gently and remain there along with other fingers for a second or two. Once resting, fingers can be lifted and tapped or impulsively pressed on the surface to generate key symbols without having to lift other resting fingers. Typematic is initiated ether by impulsively pressing and maintaining distinguishable force on a key, or by holding a finger on a key while other fingers on the hand are lifted. Glancing motions of single fingers as they tap key regions are easily tolerated since most cursor manipulation must be initiated by synchronized slides of two or more fingers.

There is good reason to believe that Apple will be introducing a new language of touchscreen technology with the launch of the iSlate. The pen technology definitely has potential, and we’re excited to see whether it is implemented.

All of the information above comes from the US Patent website at http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=Fingerworks.AS.&OS=AN/Fingerworks&RS=AN/Fingerworks.

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Some mobile startups do something that can’t be done online. Others copy an online business and bring it to mobile. And then there are companies like Scoutmob [iTunes link]. They take a great online business and make it ten times better by allowing you to take advantage of the service on-the-go.

Scoutmob is Woot on mobile, done on a local scale. Scoutmob provides location-aware coupons directly to your mobile device. They launch in Atlanta, and their first offer is for 50% off at Murphy’s, which is a 4-star restaurant according to Yelp. The offers, according to CEO Dave Payne, have a rapid expiration time (in this example, 24 hours), so you need to use the coupon within one day. They’ll have a different offer every day, so don’t weep if you can’t fly into Atlanta by midnight – you’ll be able to hit up Octane Coffee Bar and Lounge tomorrow.

For those of you who caught it, one obvious downside is “they launch in Atlanta.” That’s not to say Atlanta isn’t a cool place (hey, they brought us Coca-Cola and the Dirty Bird), but just that I doubt there are as many iPhone owners there as in San Francisco or New York City. That said, Dave’s existing business, SkyBlox, is a company that provides WiFi to 2,500 local businesses in Atlanta, so they’ve got an incumbent customer base to draw on for their offers.

Scoutmob seems to be entering an interesting business at a great time. Real-time and location-based mobile apps are hot as balls right now, and the virtual coupon business is making headlines too. Of course, it’s also super crowded – as there are many location-aware coupon apps on the iPhone, including Yowza!, which has made headlines because its founder is Heroes star, Greg Grunberg.

An interesting side-story (and a knock against Scoutmob) is that Dave has no technical expertise himself and does not have a technical team to make or maintain the application. Instead, he outsourced the technology to a web developer friend from college who didn’t know Objective-C. How the hell did he make an iPhone app with Push, a native UI and geolocation with a web developer? He used Appcelerator’s Titanium product, which enables web developers to create iPhone and Android applications. I’ve sat down with CEO Jeff Haynie, and Titanium, which is free, seems to be a cool way for web developers to create native-looking iPhone apps without having to code in Objective-C.

Scoutmob is available on the iTunes store and their first promotion is today.

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