Category: Mobile

If you were hoping that Spotify CEO Daniel Ek would use his South by Southwest Interactive keynote to announce a launch date for the U.S., no such luck (although Rafat has a source who says possibly end of May). Ek’s biggest bit of news: Spotify now has more than 320,000 paid subscribers, up from the 250,000 number the company last acknowledged earlier this year. Nothing specific on the pace.

What’s holding Spotify back in the U.S.? “We are seeing a lot of support. We want to get all of our ducks in a row to make maximum impact” when we do launch.” The number of parties involved makes it more complicated for Spotify to negotiate rights in the U.S. than in Europe. More from Ek:

—Not a social net: Spotify’s communal playlists may seem like a precursor to a social network but Ek was quite clear: “We don’t believe in being our own social network; we believe in working with social networks.” For instance, Ek has experienced first hand how frustrating it can be when someone messes with a playlist you’ve spent time and energy developing. One way to solve some of that would be to add permission levels for different groups of users so people have varying rights. If social nets add that feature, Spotify can incorporate it.

—P2P: I’m sure it was just a coincidence that I lost my wireless connection just as Ek was explaining how using Spotify’s p2p can reduce demands on bandwidth. “We’re consuming more internet capacity than Sweden has as a country … p2p solves the problem in an elegant way.”

—Apple: Ek doesn’t have any inside knowledge but expects Apple to launch a cloud-based music model. “People want to share, to access independently. I think it makes a lot of sense for them to do something in that area.” But, he added, “I don’t have any magical insight into Apple (NSDQ: AAPL). If I did wouldn’t be sitting here.”

Related

• Sony’s Hesse More Positive on Spotify’s US Chances
• Spotify Reportedly Raises New Funding From Founders Fund For U.S. Expansion
• @ Midem: Spotify CEO: Everything Hangs On The Library
• @ Midem: Labels Go Cold On Free Music Services; A Challenge To Spotify?

With pre-orders for the iPad off to a fast start in preparation for the Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) product’s release next month, the Audit Bureau of Circulations has modified its guidelines for counting sales of a digital magazine in the U.S. and Canada. The old standards have always required that in order to be considered as part of a periodical’s circ, the e-paper version must include an exact replica of a print edition’s full editorial content and advertising. The change is that an e-paper edition no longer needs to be presented in a layout identical to the print version. Replica digital editions will continue to be included in a magazine’s circulation guarantee, or rate base.

So far ABC (NYSE: DIS) has confirmed that Conde Nast’s Wired was the first publication to seek review of its iPad version and it will qualify as a digital replica edition under the bureau’s new guidelines. Its Conde Nast sibling GQ has offered an ABC approved replica app for the iPhone and iPod Touch since December 2009.

The Newspaper Association of America, which formed a joint task force with ABC on the issue of e-edition circ, sounds particularly gratified by the changes, which could help boost pubs’ ad rates by showing greater circ beyond print.

“The changes announced today, combined with the move toward a ‘total circulation model’ that has already been approved, will provide our advertising customers with more transparency and more market data than ever before,” said NAA president and CEO John Sturm in a statement. “The modifications define the concept of total circulation to include all the elements reported today: paid and verified circulation, electronic platforms and branded editions.  Newspapers will have the opportunity to report new products and distribution patterns in a report that also contains traditional paid circulation and audience information for their flagship publications.” Release

Related

• Esquire, GQ Apps To Be Sold Monthly; Hearst, Condé Nast Look To Apple As Another Virtual Newsstand

It goes without saying that timing is everything. You can be like Friendster and show up too soon to the social networking party and then blow it. Or you can be like the iPod and make a splash despite being a late entrant to the MP3 player market. Unity Technologies, a 3-D gaming platform, has seen this movie from all sides. After struggling for nearly six years, the company’s gaming platform took off when Apple released iPhone and iPod touch.

With a platform that lets developers build lightweight, online 3-D games — perfectly suited for the iPhone OS-based devices — Unity became a disruptor in the games business virtually overnight. And it’s been on a bit of a roll over the past year, with a client roster that includes big names like Electronic Arts, the Cartoon Network and Disney. Mobile developers love the company, which secured a $5.5 million Series A round led by Sequoia in October of 2009. But it wasn’t always salad days for the company, which was originally based in Copenhagen, Denmark and is now headquartered in the Bay Area, as is made clear in my chat with Unity CEO David Helgason.

Helgason recounts how the company made it through some some of the darker days during its eight-year history. Some highlights from our talk include:

• The co-founders would live off bread that was supposed to be thrown out from the cafe in which Helgason worked.
• Since the company had no money, the three co-founders could focus on development and customer support, building a loyal fanbase.
• When Apple included Unity at a developers conference, the company didn’t have the infrastructure to support the publicity, so that opportunity was wasted.

Perhaps the best (or grimmest, depending on your point of view) advice Helgason has for entrepreneurs is that when you find your idea, devote your whole life to it, almost like a religious movement.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Unity

When it comes to selling a lot of a new phones in a fairly short amount of time, an educated customer base, a pre-holiday launch and picking a carrier with a huge subscriber base are essential, according to an analysis released today by Flurry. The provider of high-end handsets app analytics looked at the first 74 days of sales for the iPhone, the Droid and the Nexus One to see how each had sold in that time frame. It chose 74 days because that’s how long it took Apple to sell 1 million of the original iPhones.

To the Flurry team’s surprise, however, even more Droids were sold in that amount of time, prompting them to come up with the above lessons. The Droid came out two and half years after the original iPhone, so people were primed for a touch-enabled, app-happy handset, and its November launch positioned it perfectly for holiday shopping. Launching with Verizon and its 89 million subscribers also helped.  So the moral of this story is that the Google experiment of making a really cool phone with the Nexus One and just tossing it over the fence isn’t working so far.

Gregory T. Huang wrote:

New deals are in bloom as we await the arrival of spring in the Northwest. In the past week, we’ve seen a modest amount of activity in business software, Internet, gaming, health IT, and biotech.

—Seattle-based Presage Biosciences has raised $3.1 million from unnamed individual investors, as Luke reported today. Presage, a spinoff from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center founded by Jim Olson, has developed a device that could help doctors and drug developers distinguish cancer drug winners from losers at a much earlier stage. The company has changed up its business plan to focus on partnerships with drug developers rather than selling to doctors.

—There was some big news in the emerging field of semantic Web search. Seattle-based Evri acquired San Francisco’s Radar Networks, makers of Twine, for an undisclosed price. Both companies are backed by Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital, and the merged company has an interesting consumer strategy for combining real-time search and semantic understanding of text, as CEO Will Hunsinger told me in an interview. Google, Microsoft Bing, and others are no doubt watching closely.

—Seattle-based Alliance of Angels program director Greg Huey told me about some notable startup trends he’s seeing this year, coming off AoA’s record-setting investments it made in 2009. Huey said the 2009 numbers were surprising, and that investors are still looking to make some of their best bets—and see some returns—in 2010.

—Redmond, WA-based WildTangent formed a partnership with Playdom, a Mountain View, CA-based developer of video games for social networks like Facebook. Playdom is using WildTangent’s advertising platform, called BrandBoost, in its popular Facebook game, Tiki Farm, and the companies are splitting the ad revenues. WildTangent has made some progress in applying its advertising business model to online social games.

—Portland, OR-based ActiveTrak has landed a $500,000 first round of funding led by ProtectCell, a mobile security company based in Michigan. ActiveTrak, formerly known as GadgetTrak, makes software to help consumers recover lost or stolen laptops and mobile devices.

—Three Seattle-area tech companies have integrated their Web services with Google Apps and are selling them in the new Google Apps Marketplace. Concur, Skytap, and Smartsheet have each paid Google a one-time fee of $100 and have agreed to give the search giant a 20 percent cut of each app sale, in exchange for a massive distribution channel. One angle to think about is how startups can now use Google and Amazon’s various cloud services to develop and market their products, while these tech giants can start to challenge Microsoft in the realm of business software.

—Seattle-based Kinetix Living Corp. was acquired by Regence BlueShield of Washington state, the largest health insurer in the Northwest. Financial details weren’t announced. Kinetix, which was backed by Seattle VC firm Maveron, provides customized health and nutrition programs to corporate customers and individuals.

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At our Mobilize 09 conference, Frank Meehan, CEO of London-based INQ, told me that his company was going to follow on the heels of its successful Facebook phone with more devices, including lower-cost smartphones targeting fast-growing mobile markets such as India. Today, the company launched its social mobile phones in India — and INQ has roped in MS Dhoni, captain of Indian cricket team, as its spokesperson. Aircel, a mobile carrier, will be selling the device to its customers. The INQ Mini 3G and the INQ Chat 3G will be available in India. The INQ Chat 3G is a QWERTY device. The highly competitive Indian mobile market has made it difficult for carriers to bank solely on voice revenues. The INQ devices are being made available at a time when Indian carriers are looking for ways to goose their data revenues.

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) whittled its mobile businiess down to the basics for its third ‘educational’ webcast of the year Monday. The company’s three main points:

1) Simple data plans, more powerful mobile browsers, and better smartphones are driving usage of the mobile internet. Specifics: Google alone has seen mobile search traffic jump five-fold over the last two years and there are now 50 million active users of Google’s mobile maps.

2) Google will invest in mobile apps. Executives showed off Google’s new mobile product search as well as ‘Goggles,’ which lets people search by taking a picture from their phones.

And 3) Google’s goal is to make mobile advertising easy. As an example, engineering VP Vic Gundotra demonstrated how an advertiser could target mobile phones simply by selecting a different radio button on a website.

Now for the hard parts, which came up during the question and answer session. Will mobile searches take away share from desktop ones? Answer: No (Think of a person going out to lunch who pulls out his or her phone on the way to make a search, Gundotra said).

As for the importance of the AdMob acquisition—which is in regulatory limbo—Gundotra said he was limited in what he could say but did mention that the mobile ad network space is “highly competitive as (Apple’s) acquisition of Quattro demonstrates.” And when it comes to Apple’s lawsuit against Google partner HTC, Google’s Mario Queiroz said that while Google wasn’t a party in the suit, “we stand behind the Android operating system and the partners who (we) have worked very closely (with) to develop it.”

CFO Patrick Pichette implied in response to yet another question that the company would maintain its Android business in China even if it shut down its search business in that country, as is widely expected. “China is another great market in which Android should flourish,” he said.

Class dismissed.

We’ve known some of the major details about the FCC’s sweeping National Broadband Plan—namely 100Mbps broadband in 100 million homes—for a while now, but today they’ve made it official. It’s a sweeping proposal, with six main long-term goals: More »

Mobile app startup Snaptu has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Sequoia Capital. Snaptu’s free app lets users access a series of services, including Facebook, Twitter, the weather, and a news reader. The selling point: It works on any phone that runs Java (which means most). So far, Snaptu says it has been downloaded four million times. Some more details in the announcement.

Latitude, Foursquare. There’s no shortage of mobile social location candidates stepping up. Now GeoSentric’s GyPSii of Holland has raised a further $11 million funding for its effort – bringing its total to $40 million.

The disclosure came in GyPSii’s announcement of a new Twitter app, Tweetsii, that puts tweets first, ahead of GypSii’s Foursquare-style place markers, which let users “check in” to a variety of locations. The funds come from Schroders.

GeoSentric previously got $13.1 from Horizon Group and Shcroders million in 2007 and is bundled on some Samsung, Nokia (NYSE: NOK) and Telefonica (NYSE: TEF) handsets.

It’s hard to imagine a dedicated location-based social network becoming successful unless location is just a part of a social experience, rather than its raison d’etre. And, while Twitter and Facebook have gained mass social adoption and Foursquare rising fast on the location front, GyPSii’s window may be challenged (hence, Tweetsii’s entrance). But can one imagine another mobile social acquisition by a handset maker or carrier, a la Nokia’s Dopplr purchase? Yep.

This funding is “to support marketing and additional development of GyPSii applications”, the company says. GypSii says its OpenExperience API powers locastion-based service for outfits like China Mobile, China Unicom, Telefonica; it’s likely there it makes its money.

Heavily-funded mobile broadcast software firm Roundbox is buying the technology and IP of Jacked, a startup which provides web-based dashboards that aggregate info related to live TV broadcasts. Roundbox says it will integrate Jacked’s technology into its ‘mobile broadcast suite’—which is used by broadcasters to deliver content, like video and TV listings, onto mobile devices. The dashboards will no longer exist separately.

Jacked’s dashboards have primarily been used by sports fans to track stats and player information on their computers while watching live games (The company talked about expanding the dashboards to other types of broadcasts, although nothing seems to have come of those plans). Jacked was founded by former American Greetings (NYSE: AM) Mobile head Bryan Biniak, who is joining Roundbox’s advisory board.

The company had raised about $7 million in funding from Provenance Ventures, Core Capital Partners and Gabriel Venture Partners since its start in 2006. Roundbox, meanwhile, has raised at least $43 million, including $20 million in a third round in December 2008.

Financial terms of the deal were not released.

Related

• Mobile Broadcast Firm Roundbox Raises $20 Million In Capital
• Social Media Site Jacked Gets $0.5 Million Funding

Steve Jobs calls the iPad Apple’s “most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device” and I’m certainly not one to disagree. The iPad boasts significant advances over the iPhone in terms of hardware and software which makes me wonder, how much of that advanced technology could make it’s way into a future Apple TV?

Hardware

While the current Apple TV boasts an Intel Pentium M 1.0GHz processor, Apple’s advances in its own chip design could pave the way for a custom processor fine tuned for the device. Apple’s reason for custom chips in the mobile arena is to provide them with what they need while giving them more control over other aspects, such as battery life. While this isn’t a concern with the Apple TV, certainly a more powerful chip while still being power efficient is desirable. A custom chip would give Apple more flexibility over performance as well. Consider the video formats the iPad can play. Many were shocked to see support for full 720p at 30 frames per second and support for .avi files up to 35Mbps. In terms of processing power, that’s more advanced than the Apple TV, and its a mobile device!

The iPad also brings support for an external keyboard through Bluetooth. That’s right. You can use your plain off the shelf Apple Wireless Keyboard with your iPad. Why not bring this same bluetooth functionality to the Apple TV? This could allow support for a wireless keyboard or any host of other Bluetooth-enabled devices. (What other devices might one use? Read on, my friend.)

Software

While the current Apple TV software runs on a modified version of the Mac operating system, there’s really no benefit provided from this approach versus an iPhone-like OS. Consider the similarities already between the two: only one “application” can run at a time and the official method of pushing content to both devices is either through the Internet or iTunes.

Another arena that Apple could pursue is to finally offer an App Store for the device. Now that the waters have been tested with the iPhone and iPod touch, an Apple TV App Store makes sense. Considering that the device has been hacked numerous times and there are many unsupported applications that can be run on the device, an official App Store would give the device more expandability and return a portion of the profit back to Apple. Since the App Store model allows the developer to reap profits from the app too, perhaps this will finally pave the way to bring Hulu into the living room via the Apple TV. If Hulu and Netflix both offered apps for the Apple TV, imagine how many of these devices Apple could move off the shelves? Game developers could build their own applications and provide interaction using an iPhone or iPad as a controller (gaining accelerometer functionality) or through their own Bluetooth-enabled peripherals.

The Apple TV is a product that has seen few updates and is referred to by Apple as a “hobby.” But what are hobbies really? It’s something done for pleasure and for leisure. Something that you work on slowly over time, but stay the course. Apple has reaffirmed their commitment to investing in the device but much like the iPhone and the iPad, it isn’t going to be a runaway success if its not the right product at the right time. The iPad will be wildly popular because of the success of the iPhone, which owes its own success to the accomplishments of the iPod. Apple has carefully built an entire ecosystem around iTunes and its devices. With the Apple TV, the best is yet to come.

Related Research from GigaOM Pro:

• Web Tablet Survey: Apple’s iPad Hits the Right Notes
• How AT&T Will Deal with iPad Data Traffic
• 5 Tips for Developers Targeting the iPad
• With the iPad, Apple Take Google to the Mat

Researchers at Stanford University have just made a major breakthrough that may impact the technology industry for years to come: they’ve built a better battery. The project, an attempt to use lithium-sulfur in place of the lithium-ion technology that is used in batteries today, has been in development since 2007. Recently, the scientists’ efforts were rewarded when they created a battery that lasts four times as long as its lithium-ion counterparts while also having the benefit of being “significantly safer” than today’s batteries which occasionally explode after short-circuiting.

Although still a ways off from commercial viability (and availability), the lithium-sulfur batteries promise advances like 80% more capacity, 10 times the power density and, theoretically, the ability to last four times as long as modern batteries.

Sponsor

The new battery technology represents the final step in our quest for always-on connectivity to the mobile web. We already have Wi-Fi hotspots, 3G and 4G networks for Internet everywhere and a host of mobile gadgets from netbooks to iPads and mobile phones to notebook computers. But what we haven’t had yet is a way to keep our gadgets powered up for more than a day or so without a charge. That may be soon about to change.

An Always-On Mobile Web

With these sorts of improvements, lithium-sulfur batteries could lead the way in the next phase of the mobile revolution. They could allow us to fully enjoy the web from anywhere in the world, without having to worry about dying batteries, access to power outlets or having to carry around battery replacements when planning long-lasting mobile computing sessions.

Far more than just a convenience, better battery technology would impact how our mobile devices are designed and how they behave. For example, Apple currently imposes numerous restrictions on members of their mobile device lineup for the sake of battery performance. On Apple iPhones, iPod Touches and the forthcoming iPad, applications aren’t permitted to run in the background and Adobe Flash technology has been banned altogether, supposedly for its CPU usage which rapidly drains battery juice. Other mobile smartphone makers, while not necessarily as restrictive as Apple, still have to weigh the benefits of providing these same types of features with the performance hit their gadgets will take if they do so. And as anyone who regularly fires up their smartphone web browser knows, too much Internet surfing during the day means a phone that dies out before nightfall.

Another example of the technology’s potential impact: e-Readers. Today, if you want to pack your Kindle or Nook device to take with you on vacation, you still have to go through the thought process: how long will I be gone? Will my battery last? Should I pack the cord? Now imagine that you could just throw your e-Reader into your bag without a second thought, just as if you were packing the paperback novel or newspaper these sorts of gadgets aim to replace. Would that encourage more people to make the switch from the analog formats to digital?

The Impacts of Better Batteries

What if, in the future, concerns like these were no longer a worry? What if phones, netbooks, e-Readers and other mobile devices could be used for days on end without the need for a charge? That would radically impact the way we think about and use our mobile devices.

There are a million other use cases that could benefit from this technology change, too, including sensor networks, computing from remote areas, faster news dissemination from areas impacted by disasters (either natural or man-made) where power outages have occurred, gadgets for hikers, campers and other explorers who spend weeks away from civilization and, therefore, away from electricity, mobile location-based services that run in the background on smartphones and other personal mobile gadgets and – OK, we’ll admit it – the ability to Twitter all day long without a recharge.

For the nitty gritty technical details about this new battery technology, MIT’s Technology Review explains everything from the cathodes to the conductivity as well as the challenges still ahead for this breakthrough technology. Most notably, the scientists still need to figure out how to maintain capacity. After five discharge/recharge cycles, the batteries lost one-third of their initial storage capacity and after 40 to 50 cycles, they ceased to function altogether. However, if the researchers can overcome that final hurdle and a few others, the new technology could one day become commercially viable. It’s too soon to know if that will actually occur, but as gadget lovers ourselves, we’re hopeful.

Discuss

iPhone users tend to use their devices in the evening and on the weekends, reports Localytics, a Cambridge, MA-based start-up offering mobile analytics services. According to as study conducted by the company, the mobile app usage in the US peaks at around 9 pm EST on week days. Over the weekend, the usage is at its peek during afternoon and nights.

These findings are not surprising — during regular week days, many of us are busy working and more often than not, use the device to make phone calls or send text messages. The report says that iPhone “app usage on weekends and weekdays is both different in usage patterns and overall scale.”

The iPhone users typically generate 7% more traffic on the weekend than the average weekday. Saturday traffic ramps quickly from a morning low at 6:00 am to over 90% of peak usage by 11:00 am—and stays near the peak for the rest of the afternoon and evening. By comparison, weekday app usage is more concentrated in the evening with a slow ramp during the working day and a peak at 9:00 pm EST, when East Coast users are at home and West Coast users are commuting home.

In short, iPhone is still quite a ways off from becoming a “business” phone. The report also concludes that these heavy weeknight and weekend app usage could be interpreted as a sign that consumers may be willing to try more convenient devices than their laptops to entertain themselves, plan a trip, check sports scores and listen to music. No wonder Apple has big hopes for its iPad.

Over the past few days I’ve watched this meme about the so-called “geowars” ahead of SXSW gather steam, both in the blogosphere and on Twitter. And it’s giving me a headache. For some odd reason, people believe that SXSW is going to be a full-blown coming-out party for location-based services that will launch at least one of them into the stratosphere.

Ever since Twitter made such a big splash in Austin a few years ago, many startups have come to believe that if they can do the same, they will subsequently become an overnight success — a foolish assumption. It took a lot longer than that for Twitter to go from an early-stage curiosity to a mainstream phenomenon.

Even last year’s debutante, Foursquare, took a whole year to sign up 500,000 users, including myself. Impressive, but not Facebook impressive! Its rival is Gowalla, a liberally funded startup that recently crossed the 100,000 subscriber mark (and released a much-improved and a fantastic upgrade). Others such as Pelago/Whrrl are literally spraying Austin to get the attention of SXSW visitors. Add to this dozens of unknown and/or little known services and you have the “geowars.”

My problem, of course, is not with the technology per se, but with its implementations. With the exception of Foursquare, most LBS startups have not found a way to even briefly engage me. Many of them are going to meet a fate no different that that of a moth flitting around a flame on a dark summer night. So in case you hadn’t noticed, I am a tad skeptical about this notion of geowars.

From GigaOM Pro: Location: The Epicenter of Mobile Innovation in 2010.

Once upon a time, smartphones were mostly about connecting busy professionals with their email accounts while on the go. Now that smartphones have reached the mainstream consumer market, however, people are looking for more than just email access – and a surprisingly large number of smartphones hardly ever leave their owners’ homes.

According to a new study from Web analytics firm Compete, 74% of smartphone owners now primarily use their devices for personal reasons, and they often spent the most amount of time with the device at home.

Sponsor

As we noted last October, when they leave their homes, a lot of consumers with iPhones and phones that use Google’s Android operating system are now also using their devices to compare prices and look up reviews while they are out shopping. Compete looked a bit further into this market and found that more than 35% of consumers with smartphones would be interested in receiving coupons on their devices. Another 29% would like to be able to scan barcodes with their phones and get more information about the product as well as access to coupons and other promotions.

Location-Aware Coupons

While it doesn’t come as a surprise that a lot of consumers would like to receive coupons, one surprising result from Competes report is that 21% of respondents would like to get SMS alerts with promotions when they walk by a store. Another 15% also would like to receive ads via SMS. Chances are that a lot of marketers would like to offer these kinds of location-aware ads and coupons that catch a consumer while they are already out shopping and close to a retailer. At the same time, though, most modern smartphones don’t allow developers to create these kind of applications. The iPhone, for example, doesn’t (yet) allow developers to run application in the background, which would be necessary if a developer wanted to create a service that could send out ads via SMS based on your location.

Discuss