Category: Mobile

As many in the Twitterverse have dubbed this week, the battle of location based apps continues, as both Gowalla and Foursquare release yet another update to their iPhone apps today. And these are some big guns coming out to accompany the various real-life incentives, contests and whatever else these the two companies can do to take the focus at this year’s SXSW.

Both apps are showcasing new design features the companies are calling “fresh” and other such things, and while they surely are, some of these other features are what really stand out.

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Foursquare is surely the less notable in this release, in our opinion, as it’s list of new features is shorter and less impressive. It’s boasting a faster, more efficient check-in and shout flow, a “Places” view that supports categories, a history view of places you’ve been and a “pull-to-refresh” feature. These are nothing to sneeze at, but we think Gowalla is releasing some functions that blow these away.

First of all, Gowalla is bringing photos to the location based game, allowing users to upload a photo after checking in. Users can also browse their friends’ photos and look at any that have been taken at that specific location.

Next, it’s bringing some interactivity to the game, with check-in commenting. When a friend checks in at a place down the street, you don’t need to change over to your Twitter client and send them a DM, you can just comment on their check-in. And if you forgot to type a check-in message when you checked in to a spot, you can go back and add it.

In addition to these, Gowalla is bringing out new friend browsing features, enabling you to look through friends, friends of friends, and even their bookmarked spots and trips. With “spot details”, including address, phone, Twitter name, Facebook page and website, Gowalla is adding that Yelp (or should I say Foursquare) aspect that was really missing – real world connection information.

And one more feature that may be overloaded next week or may be the talk of the town, “Hot Spots”, tells you what the most popular spots near your location are. We haven’t had time to really play with it yet, but it sure sounds interesting.

The updates just popped up in the App Store right now so go get updated and let us know what you think – who is going to win the location based battle of SXSW 2010? As far as this round goes, we’re calling it for Gowalla.

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Like many other developers, uLocate works closely with ad networks to monetize WHERE, its free mobile app that is available on a number of carrier networks and Android, iPhone and Palm (NSDQ: PALM).

But WHERE often struggled to keep its fill rates high, and when campaigns ran out, it had to use less desirable banner ads pushing ringtones and wallpapers, said uLocate’s VP of Marketing Dan Gilmartin. Today, the Boston-based company is launching an ad network that it created internally to remedy the problem and has been using since December. The ad network, which it calls the WHERE Ads hyper-local advertising network, is now available outside the company, and is being used by various publishers, including Geocade, Jambase, MocoSpace and Superpages.com.

The problem WHERE is solving is a common one that many mobile application developers and publishers are encountering as they generate audiences and millions of page views faster than brands adopt mobile as a potential advertising platform. Gilmartin said it continues to use Quattro Wireless, which was recently acquired by Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), but new sources of local ads dramatically increased click-through rates and CPMs.

How is WHERE doing it?: Gilmartin was a bit reluctant to give away all of its secrets, but said they are working with about a half a dozen local ad providers that work in other mediums, such as directory services, coupons, event sources, and other aggregation services. They provide local offers and ads that can be matched to users who search in the WHERE app for activities or nearby restaurants.

The reaction: Gilmartin said they were able to start replacing ringtone ads for ads that were relevant based on what a consumer was looking for…if they were searching for a nearby restaurant, an Italian restaurant may have popped up. Customers’ reactions were surprising and thanked WHERE ‘for removing the ads,’ Gilmartin said. “It’s contextually relevant to what the consumer is doing, and it’s locally relevant to where they are, and it’s designed to look good in the app, so it’s not an obnoxious banner.”

How things have changed: He said now instead of getting paid per click, often the ads are paid for based on performance, a person may have to visit to website, a menu, or click to call. Then, when a user clicks, they are redirected to a mobile landing page that Where’s made, and can deliver local information to the consumer.

How it is different: All mobile ad networks aspire to provide local ads in their network, but inventories are often low. Results can also vary based on how locally targeted the ad is—is it based on the person’s country, state, city, or neighborhood level? Obviously, the neighborhood ad will be more relevant, but often time is the hardest one to get.

Urban Airship, a Portland, Oregon based iPhone “push notifications as a service” company, announced this morning that it now offers push notifications for BlackBerry applications and will soon offer Android push as well. “We are going to see at least four, and potentially five, extremely relevant platforms for mobile applications in the near future,” the company said, “and we intend to provide the push messaging and content delivery infrastructure for all of them.”

If you’ve seen push notifications from Gowalla (a great use case, by the way), Tap Tap Revenge, Yowza or Urban Rivals, then you’ve seen Urban Airship’s service on the front end. On the back end, the company is developing push and in-app purchase infrastructure for numerous apps and devices, including the forthcoming iPad.

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Airship developer Michael Richardson put the company’s cross-platform efforts into context for us this morning:

We want to make it extremely simple for mobile publishers to communicate in a real-time fashion with their users. The mobile phone is the perfect channel for that and we want to provide the ability to reach any user, any time, immediately, without the high cost or difficult implementation of SMS.

Bringing that paradigm to BlackBerry and Android will open up big new markets for the company and easy new functionality for developers. The company is offering BlackBerry push right now by integrating with BlackBerry’s own API. Android push will be handled end to end by Airship and isn’t ready yet. “We’ll handle the details of managing the persistent socket connections from the device and sending the notifications as needed along that connection,” the company says. That’s easier said than done. Richardson: “We’re taking it slow to make sure that we do it right.”

The downside to using a service like this of course is that it’s a form of reliance on a small outside service provider. Quite a few companies have been willing to forgo building this kind of tech in-house to date, though. Urban Airship reports that it delivered 100 million push notifications in its first 6 months and 60 million more in just 4 weeks after that.

Into mobile? Check out the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010.

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Robert Buderi wrote:

Xconomy held another sold out forum yesterday afternoon, with more than 225 people pouring into Microsoft’s New England Research & Development Center for our Mobile Madness conference.

A writeup and photo spread of the afternoon’s events and the insights provided by the great array of speakers—including the results of the Mobile Smackdown between iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and Windows Phone advocates—are coming soon. But right now, we wanted to reiterate our deep thanks to the speakers, sponsors, and underwriters who made it possible.

First, a special thank you to Microsoft and Gus Weber, for once again opening the beautiful NERD facility to the innovation community.

A big thanks as well to our event sponsors, each of whom supports the mobile community in a variety of ways: AT&T, Cisco, Hosted Solutions, Invest Northern Ireland, McCarter & English, and UK Trade & Investment.

As always, we’d also like to thank our underwriters and venture members, who support what we do on an ongoing basis. In reverse alphabetical order, our underwriters are: Wolf & Company, WilmerHale , UK Trade & Investment, the Science & Technology Directorate of U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Schwartz Communications, MFA—Moody, Famiglietti, & Andronico , McCarter & English, the Kauffman Foundation, J. Robert Scott Executive Search, Invest Northern Ireland, EMC, Cisco, Biogen Idec, AT&T, and Alexandria Real Estate Equities.

The venture member list includes: Polaris Venture Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners, Launch Capital, Flybridge Capital Partners, Flagship Ventures, Boston Millennia Partners, Atlas Venture, and Advanced Technology Ventures.

We’d also like to thank our Mobile Madness event partners: the Mass Technology Leadership Council, MITX, Mobile Monday, and MOITI, the Massachusetts Office of International Trade & Investment.

And needless to say, the stars of all of Xconomy’s events are the leaders and innovators who volunteer to speak. We’re enormously grateful to our Mobile Madness speakers and showcase participants; you can see the whole list here.

It was another great day-and we couldn’t have done it without you! And there are plenty of other Mass Mobile Month events coming up—hope to see you at one of them soon.

One last thank you on a different front—to Mozy, which will now be providing its MozyPro online backup service to all Xconomy computers across our network. Thank you to the folks at Mozy and its parent, EMC. Our writers will no longer be able to say the computer ate their story!

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T-Mobile USA executives explained that it abruptly ended its year-old exclusive search deal with Yahoo, and replaced it with Google (NSDQ: GOOG), because it is what their subscribers wanted. “It was customer led; the Google brand is associated with Internet and search,” Ian McKerlich, T-Mobile’s director of mobile web and content, told mocoNews today.

We were the first to report last week that T-Mobile dropped one search provider for the other, leading to to significant shift in control of the U.S. mobile search market away. Google now has deals with T-Mobile and Sprint; (NYSE: S) Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) works with AT&T (NYSE: T) and Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) has partnered with Verizon Wireless. Clearly, the space continues to be fragmented, but T-Mobile’s sudden change of heart raises an important question: Will carriers continue to be able to lock-in lucrative contracts with search providers with the promise of directing traffic their way when consumers are demanding to use other services?

McKerlich said for other reasons, the switch made sense. T-Mobile was the first carrier to work closely with Google on rolling out its Android-based devices, so having a “single partner across our own portfolio,” allowed it to cut down on the number of messages T-Mobile had to deliver.

T-Mobile said it started updating its web2go Web portal with Google search back in February. As part of the switch, it made other updates to the service, including making it more touch-friendly and easy to personalize. But it also changed the way it lumped together both mobile content results with web results into a single page. If a subscriber searched for “Beyonce,” both ringtones and general web results would be returned. McKerlich: “We believed in federated search being well suited for mobile devices, but federated results were confusing to the consumer. Now we have more of a pure play search.” Seattle-based Medio Systems continues to index and return content results in the Google deal, just as it did for T-Mobile with Yahoo, but they will only show up when someone searches the download store.

The web2go portal is now available on 94 percent of all T-Mobile phones, including the Motorola (NYSE: MOT) Cliq, BlackBerry devices, a majority of feature phones, and even the upcoming HTC HD2. T-Mobile said the changes, including the switch to Google, has led to a 300 percent increase in traffic per customer, and in the case of the Cliq, 25 percent of customers have customized their home page. Of course, users can still opt to open a web browser and go to any search provider it would like, such as Yahoo or Bing.

McKerlich declined to discuss the financial arrangement between T-Mobile and either Google or T-Mobile. “In either relationship, both of them were attractive deals when we did them.” Is T-Mobile concerned that it is becoming to reliant on Google? McKerlich: “I don’t really think so. Certainly if the consumers say they like Google, we’ll give it to them.”

Related

• AT&T Strips Google’s Search Off Android; Will Verizon Or T-Mobile Follow?
• Yahoo Loses Exclusive T-Mobile USA Search Deal To Google
• Yahoo Disbands Mobile Group As Part Of Reorganization

The FCC said today that as part of its National Broadband Plan it might allocate spectrum for a free or low-cost wireless broadband network as a means to help address the affordability of broadband for poor people. If all this sounds familiar to you, maybe you recall the efforts of M2Z Networks, a Kleiner Perkins backed venture that tried to offer filtered, low-cost broadband using WiMAX.

A source at the FCC assures me that the agency’s efforts, which will be detailed next week when the National Broadband Plan comes out, are not similar to M2Z’s plan. M2Z  wanted to offer free subscribers dialup-like speeds of 768 kbps and would have provided filtered access to the web. The source said the FCC’s plan would offer speeds “that are real broadband” and would likely involve using proceeds from the Universal Service Fund reform to offset the cost of building out a network.

However, any federal involvement in the network could lead to to a return of the filtering issue that bogged down M2Z. Those in power are easily swayed by the argument that allocating a federal resource (spectrum) to provide free broadband which children could use to access porn, could lead to negative publicity. A cynic might say this offers excellent cover for the lawmakers who may also be swayed by the telecommunication’s industry’s obvious reluctance to see low-cost or free broadband.

Any company focused on free or low-cost wireless  broadband would also have to figure out how to build a network — a multibillion-dollar proposition. For example, M2Z estimated its network buildout would cost $3-$5 billion. To put that into perspective, the stimulus dollars allocated for broadband are limited to $7.2 billion, and the USF (Universal Service Fund) is currently an $8 billion program.

Getting around a filter, offering real speeds and finding the billions needed to build out a nationwide network are all essential to any FCC plan to “consider use of spectrum for a free or very low-cost wireless broadband service,” as was stated in today’s release on the topic. I wish them luck.

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Image courtesy of Gavin St. Ours on Flickr.

The NFL has signed a new four-year deal with Verizon Wireless, putting an end to a roughly five-year partnership with Sprint (NYSE: S).

The deal is valued at $720 million, including a rights fee and advertising spending, according to the WSJ, which quotes people familiar with the negotiations. NFL fans on the Verizon Wireless network will have access to the popular NFL RedZone channel from the NFL Network, including access to live streaming games on Sunday and Thursday. Verizon will kick off things next month with coverage of the 2010 NFL Draft on April 22. Release.

Sprint reportedly signed a five-year, $600 million deal in September 2005, so either it was not able to renew the deal or did not try to renew the deal. However, the deal has been sweet to Sprint, which packaged it together with its Simply Everything plans, or sold it separately for $15 a month. Sprint said that its NFL Mobile Live app reached 1 million downloads quicker than any other application in the company’s history during the 2008 season, and consistently drove more usage than any other application Sprint offered.

Verizon is not currently saying what phones will be supported or how it will be priced until closer to the start of the NFL season in August.

Other features of NFL Mobile on Verizon Wireless will include:

—Video: Game highlights and a collection of on-demand video, featuring analysis and access to the NFL Network and NFL Films.
—Audio: Live radio broadcasts of every regular season and playoff game from both home and away teams.
—Fantasy: Access to fantasy information, news, and player and team statistics.
—Customizable NFL alerts, ringtones and graphics.

Related

• Sprint Launches NFL Mobile Live App; Live Radio Broadcasts
• Sprint Layoffs Will Include Gutting Content Staff

Motricity increased revenues, narrowed its losses and even generated cash in 2009, according to new documents filed today as part of the company’s IPO ambitions.

When the company first filed paperwork in January, it reported results for the first nine months of the year. Today, in an updated registration statement filed with the SEC, Motricity reported complete results for 2009 that put the company’s performance into a more positive light.

Still, the company’s net losses continue and its revenues going forward are uncertain given that contracts for its two largest customers—AT&T (NYSE: T) and Verizon Wireless—are up for renewal this year. The company is seeking $250 million to expand into international markets, to develop new technologies and to acquire companies.

The company, which provides back-end infrastructure to carriers for managing portals and delivering mobile content, such as ringtones, said revenues in 2009 totaled $114 million, up 10.7 percent from the year-ago period, and the company’s net loss attributable to common shareholders was $40.3 million, shrinking from $100.5 million in 2008. The company’s cash flow from operations totaled $33 million—reversing two straight years of significant negative cash flows. At the end of December, the company’s cash balance grew to $35.9 million.

The company explained that cash flows were positive despite a net loss of $16.3 million because of non-cash items included in the operating results that negatively affected earnings.

Going forward, a loss of either AT&T or Verizon’s business would be devastating to the company. In 2009, it generated about 53 percent and 20 percent of its total revenue from contracts with AT&T and Verizon Wireless, respectively. Both of those contracts are up for renewal this year, it said.

There were few other changes made since the original document was filed in January. Perhaps, most notably, the company appointed two new directors to the board in January 2010: Brett C. Icahn and Lady Barbara Judge. Icahn serves as an investment analyst for various investment funds on behalf of Carl Icahn, who has invested in Motricity. Judge is chairman of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, and previously was deputy chairman of the United Kingdom Financial Reporting Council in London. She was tapped for her corporate governance, compliance, disclosure and international business conduct experience, which includes a stint as a former commissioner of the SEC.

Related

• Motricity Files For $250 Million Public Offering
• The Man Behind Motricity’s $250 Million IPO & His Incentives

Smartphone ad network Todacell has added another $1 million in funding to an existing $1 million round the Tel Aviv-based company raised back in June. Israeli VC AfterDox, which provided the last $1 million, also ponied up the same amount this time as well. In addition to the $2 million total funding from AfterDox, which is comprised of current and former execs from mobile tech company Amdocs (NYSE: DOX), Todacell has also received $350,000 seed funding from the Fore Group when it first opened its doors nearly three years ago.

The company plans to use the new funds to set up five new sales offices in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, London and Bombay. Todacell boasts that it only works with a small number of mobile publishers, including Fring, MobiLuck, Mocospace and TuneWiki, and that it allows them to better optimize the respective pubs’ ad inventory.

That said, Todacell is also looking beyond the smartphone. Its ad network extends to placement on non-phone devices, including hand-held gaming consoles by Nintendo, Playstation and Sega. Todacell is now planning to make ads available for the Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) iPad and Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) Kindle. The Kindle’s broadband service is hardly used by the majority of its owners, though MediaMemo speculates that Amazon may be revamping its approach, making it more appealing to users, publishers and advertisers that Todacell caters to.

Related

• Mobile Ad Network Toda!Cell Raises $1 Million

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If your Foursquare check-ins could be limited to backyard outings and trips to the mailbox, you may be interested in a new mobile application called Miso. With this service, a startup from Bazaar Labs, also the makers of a social network called Flixup! for movie chatter, you can perform Foursquare-like “check-ins” when watching a particular TV show or movie. Homebodies, this app is for you.

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With Miso, instead of checking in to locations outside of your home, like bars, restaurants and events as you do with popular mobile applications like Foursquare, Brightkite, Loopt and Gowalla, the Miso app takes the “check-in” model and uses it to connect people enjoying TV shows and movies. Although you could check-in when watching a movie at a local theater, the app is just as useful to those who tend to stay at home.

Foursquare for the Boring?

For those with the heyday of youth behind them, social outings to bars and restaurants and other “fun” events are slowly replaced with more boring trips to the grocery store, playgroup meetups and other errands unworthy of sharing with a mobile social network. In addition, tighter household budgets forced upon families by the down economy has many trading weekly evenings out for low-cost movie nights at home, cuddled up with the latest Netflix DVD – or even just good ol’ fashioned cable TV.

Thanks to Miso, even homebodies like this can participate in the check-in craze. Although you can still share what you see at the theater, if desired, the beauty of this app is that you don’t need a social life to socialize via your mobile. Instead, you can just chat it up with other fans of home entertainment, where you discuss the latest episode of “Lost” or the newest HBO original movie, for example.

Using Miso

To use the app, you “check in” by sharing what you’re watching. And as with Foursquare, you can unlock badges the more use participate on the network. (At last – couch potatoes can have badges too!) These badges help you show off your interests to other Miso users so you can connect with similarly like-minded folks.

According to news from MobileBeat, a new version of the app is set to go live this week during the South by Southwest conference. In the updated release, you’ll have the ability to add location along with your check-in – in case you ever make it out to the local cinemaplex after all. You can grab your copy of Miso from here (iTunes link).

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Springpad, a rival to Evernote’s popular cross-platform note-taking service, has just bumped the competition up a notch with a new release that integrates semantic technology to automatically enhance the notes you save with relevant info. What this means is that if you save a movie, Springpad is smart enough to know it’s a movie and it will offer you showtimes. If you save a product, Springpad displays price comparisons and links to shopping sites. Save a recipe and you get menu suggestions. And the list goes on. In other words, Springpad doesn’t want to just be a note-taking app, it wants to be a fully realized digital assistant.

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Evernote vs Springpad: the iPhone App

While Evernote is, at this point, still the more robust product when it comes to supported platforms -the company offers Windows, Mac, iPhone, Android and Blackberry versions in addition to a platform-agnostic “web clipper” – Springpad is starting to catch up. Along with the numerous enhancements launching today, the company now offers their own “web clipper” browser bookmarklet (previously in beta) along with an iPhone application for mobile note-taking and reminders.

Like Evernote’s iPhone app, Springpad’s app (iTunes link) lets you input text or snap a photo, but it also integrates a barcode scanner which takes advantage of the phone’s camera in order to record and save a specific product. In addition, the iPhone app lets you browse items by type in case there’s something you want to remember, but don’t have it right in front of you. This is ideal for adding things like restaurants or movies – the sort of things that come up in conversation (“You really should rent this movie – it’s great!”) but are later forgotten as we return to our busy lives.

The Smart Web Clipper Knows What You’re Bookmarking

Also new today is the web clipper. Now out of beta, this bookmarking tool lets you save anything you see on the Internet to your notes. This can be a product, a restaurant, a book, a movie, a recipe, a wine, a business or just a simple bookmark of a page which you can choose to annotate if desired.

What’s different about this tool is the way it uses semantic technology to understand what it is that you’re saving and offer relevant links to other information when you view it again in Springpad. For example, after adding a recipe, you’ll be provided with “quick links” for actions like “add to shopping list,” “search for coupons,” “send to me” (an email option) and “print recipe.” You can also add your own notes or personal tags (e.g., “March dinner party”) if desired.

The App Store: Do Something with your Notes

Springpad users also have an included app store that helps you do things with the items you save. Although not listed among today’s updates, this is arguably one of the company’s standout features which should appeal both to new users or those switching from Evernote. Instead of just providing a searchable repository of notes and saved items, Springpad lets you add apps that help you actually do something with the items you collected. There’s a wine notebook for those who want to record wine reviews and selections, a weekly meal planner for recipe snippers, a movie tracker for film aficionados, a travel checklist for vacation planning and even a blog post planner for scribes like us. And there are dozens more, too. Additionally, later this year, Springpad will launch an API for developers who want to build their own apps for this directory.

More of What’s New: Sharing Tools & a Smart Quick-Add Bar

Other new features today include social sharing option which lets you post to Facebook and Twitter, a personalized email address for sending in thoughts, notes, itineraries and confirmation numbers, and a smart “quick-add bar.” This bar lets you type in anything into Springpad’s web interface to receive a list of suggestions from across a number of web services and the publicly shared notes from other Springpad users. If you find yourself always coming across suggestions from particular users, you may want to “friend” them on Springpad. The friending model used here is one that mimics Twitter’s involving one-way connections betweens followers and “followees.” This makes Springpad more social than Evernote without the pressures of having to accept or reject requests like on Facebook.

As of now, Springpad has a lot to offer those interested in a web-based and mobile note-taking application. However, you may find Evernote to be a slightly more stable service. We ran into a couple of slowdowns when using Springpad’s website today. In addition, the suggestions displayed in the quick-add bar aren’t as speedy as your typical search engine’s autosuggest feature is. However, if you’re looking to do more with your notes than simply collect them, Springpad is shaping up to be a viable alternative to Evernote. It’s no longer a mere note-taking app – it’s more of a digital assistant…and who couldn’t use one of those?

Discuss

Where, a geo-enabled local search and recommendation service by Boston-based uLocate Communications, has launched Where Ads, a hyper-local advertising network. The company is launching the new network because it believes that its access to carrier infrastructure gives it an ability to deliver hyper-local and contextually relevant content — and by extension, highly targeted local advertising.

According to Dan Gilmartin, uLocate’s VP of marketing, the company has decided to scrap running generic ads (such as ones for ringtones and chat) on its app and replace them with local ads (for local merchants that also includes special offers and deals) aggregated from partners such as Quattro Wireless, which was recently acquired by Apple. Upon launching these new ads, the company saw clickthroughs almost triple and a boost to its CPMs.

“About 30 days ago, we reached to some other mobile content publishers assuming they were dealing with the same issues we had, poor ads that degraded the app experience and low revenue,” he said. The company launched Where Ads with 10 publishers that will run ads from Where’s ad network.

I like this move by the company: It’s not only solving the problem of low relevance of mobile ads, it is doing so by building what could potentially be a sizable business. Where offers its app on multiple mobile platforms including the iPhone and has seen its app downloaded over 10 million times.

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By Mercedes Bunz: The International Federation of the Periodical Press (FIPP) is considering making a complaint to Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) over the computer firm’s request that German publisher Springer censor the naked girls on one of its iPhone apps.

Springer-owned tabloid Bild’s “Shake the Bild Girl” app allows iPhone users to undress a model. Each time the user shakes the phone, the girl strips an item of her clothing. While Bild features naked women daily in its pages, Apple ruled that the girls in its iPhone app should wear bikinis.

The Association of German Magazine Publishers (VDZ) asked FIPP last week to approach Apple over the issue. FIPP is debating the issue, but has no further comment at the moment.

The VDZ chief executive, Wolfgang Fuerstner, has warned that Apple’s move might represent a move towards censorship. In an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel he said: “Publishers can’t sell their soul just to get a few lousy pennies from Apple.” Bild Digital CEO Donata Hopfen agreed: “Today they censor nipples, tomorrow editorial content.”

Apple asks publishers of general interest apps to respect its US “no nipples” policy. In November, German weekly Stern’s app was dropped from the App Store due to an erotic photo gallery.

When Apple approached Bild in January, the publisher censored the PDF version of the paper programmed for the iPhone.

According to Doepfner, Springer is Apple’s second biggest client worldwide after Google (NSDQ: GOOG). And Springer makes good money via Apple. The “Shake the Bild Girl” app costs €1.59 a month and can be topped up with a PDF of the printed Bild for €3.99 a month. Springer’s head of public affairs, Christoph Keese, said that the iPhone apps launched Bild and its other newspaper Die Welt have sold a total of more than 100,000 units.

Apple’s intervention has made it clear to publishers that they find themselves in a new role in a digital world.

When Apple announced at the end of Feburary that it would “remove any overtly sexual content from the App Store”, publishers had to follow that request. It is Apple that has final control over its platform, not the publishers.

Big In Japan, the company responsible for the popular ShopSavvy barcode-scanning app for Android and iPhone, has acquired Snappr. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The acquisition revives Snappr after it shut down in late 2009, reports TechCrunch, which broke the news of the acquisition. Big in Japan has already been busy integrating Snappr’s 2D barcode scanning technology into its ShopSavvy app. Snappr’s Founder Philip Stehlik will join Big In Japan’s board of advisors, according to the Big in Japan blog. With the acquisition, Big In Japan will attempt to raise American’s awareness of QR Codes, which is based on the open standard Quick Response. It’s free to generate a two-dimensional QR Code. The QR code can point any smartphone, with an app like ShopSavvy installed, to a website.