Legimi Wants To Be The ‘Spotify For Ebooks’ With A Business Model That Relies On You Reading Less

Legimi is definitely a startup I’ll be watching closely in 2013. Put simply, it aims to be the ‘Spotify for ebooks,’ in which for a monthly subscription, users get access to a potentially infinite library of reading material, all accessible via the cloud. But more than that, this Polish startup, whether it succeeds or not, epitomises the collision of old media business models with new technology and new consumer habits.

After years of being told that one day consumers will access all of their media from the cloud, anytime and anywhere, thanks to the likes of Spotify, Deezer and Rdio (music), or Netflix, Lovefilm and Hulu (film and television), that day has finally arrived. The subscription, cloud-based model, combined with new consumption devices — tablets, smartphones, and Internet-connected TVs and set-top boxes — and near-ubiquitous broadband, has ushered in an era where consumers no longer feel the need or desire to own the media they consume. So, why not apply that same consumption model to ebooks?

Well, as it turns out, there are a number of companies who already are, but in many ways it’s still very early days. Niche offerings, such as Safari Books Online, which specialises in professional and developer-related content, have been around for a while, where a subscription model is viewed by publishers as less-risky because the audience is already somewhat ring-fenced, and content becomes outdated quickly. More mass-market is Amazon’s Kindle Owners' Lending Library, but this is still very limited and can hardly make the claim to be anything close to a ‘Spotify for ebooks.’ Then there’s the much-hyped and Founders Fund-backed Oyster, which is yet to launch but plans to offer an all-you-can-eat subscription model with an emphasis on mainstream content.

However, the New York-based startup is remaining tight-lipped about which publishers are signed up, and it’s here where many commentators predict that any subscription-based ebook service will fall down at the last hurdle: They simply won’t be able to strike the content licensing deals required, with the number of publishers needed to make the all-you-can-eat proposition a reality. That’s because the new consumption model requires a new licensing model where publishers are given a share of subscription revenue based on the number of books accessed.

Or does it?

This is where we return to Poland. Legimi thinks it’s found a way to change the consumer offering without having to tear up the legal or commercial framework that already exists for ebooks on a pay-per-download basis.

“Our approach is different; we pay the whole price of an ebook once an end user exceeds its free sample (approximately 10 percent of the book),” Legimi co-founder and CEO Mikolaj Malaczynski tells me in an email. The premise being that most readers never make it past the free excerpt, but if they do, the company pays the full wholesale price to publishers. “We have statistically calculated the average consumption for tablet users and smartphone users, which is lower than one book per month,” he says.

Or maybe another way of looking at it is that the business model relies on a tl;dr generation (my words, not Malaczynski’s) where multiple content and services are constantly vying for a user’s attention, and that this is especially true when content is consumed on an always-connected tablet or smartphone. Whether or not consumers are reading less long-form content or not, however, perhaps misses the point. As long as the number of books read past the free sample remains inline with the overall economics of a monthly subscription, then the model could work, or at least act as a bridge until such time when publishers are more willing to embrace the idea of a subscription model.

To that end, Legimi has already launched an MVP in the form of an iPad app in the startup’s native Poland, while an iPhone version should follow in January, with Android and Windows Phone also in the pipeline. I’m told that major publishers locally are playing ball, too, such as W.A.B., Insignis, Muza, and Buchmann, enabling Legimi to offer a range of popular international and domestic titles.

Moving forward, Malaczynski says that the priority is to keep expanding the available catalogue and to optimise the business model, presumably to find the sweet spot in terms of what to charge. But much more ambitiously, Legimi is planning to launch in two additional European markets next, likely Germany and the UK. It’s at this point when the licensing ‘loop hole’ and assumptions about consumption will really be tested.

“If you ask about the average consumption of one book per month, I am not sure if it’s a universal figure,” concedes Malaczynski. “We will need to test it market by market, but we have an algorithm to verify it.”

On the upside, Malaczynski says that the rights infrastructure for publishing doesn’t differ too much between countries, meaning that Legimi can hopefully avoid spending “years negotiating new agreements with publishers, which don’t really understand the subscription model.”

And that’s where we come full circle. In the end, a ‘Spotify for ebooks’ seems inevitable, as consumer habits find themselves ahead of the market once again. It’s probably more a case of when not if. Perhaps Legimi, or another startup willing to take its model and run with it, can help to make it happen sooner rather than later. Here’s to 2013.

Reference: MobileGames.vn

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Innovate Or Die: Nokia’s Long-Drawn-Out Decline

Ask a European about Nokia and a faraway look will come into their eye, a wistful tone creep into their voice. During the late 1990s and early 2000s the 147-year-old Finnish company became a global technology star: the world's No. 1 mobile maker and the first brand of phone everyone owned. In some emerging markets, so the story goes, the word 'Nokia' became a generic term for 'mobile phone.' But becoming synonymous with phones is where it all went wrong.

There can be little doubt that Nokia's mobile glory days are behind it. Korean electronics giant Samsung now occupies the once Mighty Finn's former throne at the top of the global mobile tree, while Google's Android OS is the dominant smartphone platform (Android overtook Nokia’s legacy smartphone OS Symbian at the end of 2010, according to Canalys). In Q3 this year, Android was on an average of three out of every four smartphones sold worldwide (IDC’s figure). In October, IDC also noted Nokia’s exit from its top five global smartphone vendors – the first time the Finnish company had dropped out of the top five since IDC started tracking vendors in 2004.

Even if Nokia's strategy of switching from its legacy smartphone platform, Symbian, to Microsoft's Windows Phone OS — a strategy it outed in February 2011 — ends up being relatively successful, in terms of profitability and device shipments, the company will never hold sway over the industry as it once did. Now it's just a passenger on Microsoft's train. However many fancy apps Nokia adds to Windows Phone, the underlying platform is directed in Redmond, not Espoo.

From Hero To Zero

The Nokia of today is a very different, much diminished company compared to the giant of the mid 2000s. If not a spent force, then certainly a much reduced one: smaller, less profitable, with fewer assets, and resources at its command — and dwindling cash reserves (net cash fell to €3.6 billion by the end of Nokia’s Q3 2012, down from €4.2 billion in its Q2). It doesn’t even own its own headquarters any more: earlier this month it agreed to sell and lease back the building to raise €170 million. Rumours of Nokia being an acquisition target continue to swirl — helped by the company’s historically low share price (currently around $3-$4, it has dropped as low as $1.33 this year) — with Microsoft and even Apple named as potential buyers.

Since Nokia’s first non-Finnish CEO, Stephen Elop, was appointed in 2010, job cuts have been a regular headline story for the company. Nokia now has 44,630 employees in its mobile and location division — down from 60,995 in Q3 last year. The company’s changing shape is the result of Elop ‘realigning’ the business to fit the new strategy of using Microsoft’s OS, rather than developing smartphone platforms in house — leading to various in-house software efforts to be discontinued from Qt, to Meltemi, to Maemo/MeeGo. But Nokia’s CEO has also had to slash costs as profitability plunged.

If you look at any of the handset manufacturers that have had really hard times and they come back — they come back half the company they were.

Nokia swung to an operating loss of €1.073 billion 2011 and has reported a string of quarterly operating losses this year: €1.34 billion in its Q1; €826 million in its Q2; and €576 million in its Q3 – with a “challenging” Q4 expected. A full-year 2012 loss of more than €3 billion looks likely. Combine those losses with dwindling cash reserves — and Nokia’s apparent failure to ignite significant consumer interest in its Windows Phone-based Lumia line of smartphones and the company’s very survival looks to be at stake. Nokia hasn’t broken out sales of its new Windows Phone 8 devices yet, but sales of WP 7.x devices have been unimpressive to date: Nokia reported 2.9 million Lumia sales in its Q3; 4 million in its Q2; and more than 2 million in its Q1. (For context, worldwide sales of smartphones rose to 169.2 million units in Q3 alone this year, according to Gartner.)

Yet wind the clock back five years and Nokia was riding high as master of its own mobile hardware and software, and a hugely profitable business (its 2007 operating profit was €7.985 billion). Today it’s neither profitable  nor in control of its own destiny. Its smartphone business depends on Microsoft's fortunes. And, in a market dominated by Android and iOS, even a company as typically bullish as Microsoft can only talk about trying to become the "third ecosystem" (in the event, Windows Phone still trails Symbian's global marketshare: 2.4 percent vs. 2.6 percent, according to Gartner’s Q3 figures). In short: Nokia had it all, and now it's gone.

"Overall if you look at the dominant market position that Nokia had – 40 percent marketshare, if you go back a couple of years — there is no way even with a successful Windows Phone 8 story, and even with the strategy they laid out, that they're ever going to return to that kind of marketshare, that kind of dominance," says Adam Leach, principal analyst at Ovum.

Leach is better placed than most to comment on Nokia's decline, having previously worked at Symbian – including on projects such as the Nokia Communicator: arguably the world's first commercial smartphone (a device that included the ability to download apps — some 10 years before Apple 'invented' the iPhone App Store).

"Even if they achieve their plans and achieve them well, it's unrealistic to think Nokia is going to come back anywhere near like the company they were. If you look at any of the handset manufacturers that have had really hard times and they come back — they come back half the company they were," he adds, name-checking the likes of Motorola and Sony Ericsson.

Nokia’s Big Misstep

So where did it all go wrong for Nokia? The cause of the company's decline looks very simple with hindsight: Nokia should have moved off its smartphone platform Symbian and onto its next-generation platform, MeeGo, much sooner than it did. Years sooner.

By the time Nokia released its first MeeGo-powered smartphone – the N9, in 2011 — it was far too late to compete with Android and iOS. In any case, by that point Nokia had already publically committed to Microsoft and in starting down the Windows Phone path, Elop made the decision to abandon in-house alternatives such as MeeGo – meaning the N9 was effectively DOA.

"Nokia needed to have MeeGo ready to go into the market two years or even now perhaps three years ago," says Leach. "They needed to be on their new platform probably round about 2008, 2009. If you think 2008 was just when Android entered the market, it was just a year after iPhone was finding its feet. Nokia really needed to be there at that point with its platform for growth — offering some kind of computing experience on the device."

Leach describes the mindset he encountered when working at Symbian, between 1999 and 2004. "Symbian was always very phone-centric," he tells TechCrunch. "In my own experience of being at Symbian working with Nokia there was always a frustration of [Nokia saying] 'it's got to be a phone first, it's a phone, phones sell.' And we'd be saying 'there is different stuff you can do, you can adopt more of these kind of computing paradigms' — and they really didn't want to hear that."

The core problem that brought Nokia low is not unusual for successful public companies that have worked their way into a position of marketplace dominance over a period of years (see also: BlackBerry maker RIM, for instance). Nokia's business was cooking on gas in the mid 2000s, with massive profits and phone shipments keeping their shareholders happy and clamouring for more of the same. But this success evidently made it  harder for them to change their business to react to the looming threats from internet-focused companies. You could also argue their view of the landscape ahead was clouded by their "blinkered, phone first" view, as Leach puts it.

Point to the CEO — apart from Steve Jobs – who relishes telling the shareholders it's time to retire the gravy train, and start out afresh on a hand-cranked cart. But that, in effect, is what Nokia needed to have begun doing in the mid 2000s to survive disruption by a new generation of web companies who understood the future was data, not voice.

"What Nokia was looking at was their feature phones, which were still selling healthily then," says Leach. "That mid-range feature phone market was the sweet spot and [their view was that] Symbian had to, in some way, be a feature phone with a little bit extra. That thinking really stifled them. And the problem then, when they realised they needed to do more, was that Symbian was a bit too old and wasn't extendable enough to do the things they really needed to do."

IHS Screen Digest analyst Daniel Gleeson makes a similar point: Nokia wasn’t thinking big enough when it really counted – and without a grand plan they weren't able to act decisively to fix the strategic weaknesses that were being exploited by others. "Their emphasis was on incremental innovation of existing products rather than aggressively pushing a disruptive innovation," he says.

"Their smartphone strategy was muddled at the time to put it politely,” he adds. “Symbian was the principal OS, but with Maemo/MeeGo also in development; Nokia was far from clear in its long-term commitment to either platform. Even if it could execute well, overly risk-averse management prevented Nokia making this decision. By attempting to juggle both, Nokia showed another fundamental problem, it did not understand the importance of ecosystems."

The Significance Of Software

Dig a little deeper, and Nokia's problems with its smartphone OS strategy are evidently problems with software more generally. The company fundamentally didn't get software, says Gleeson — so they didn't understand the crucial significance of apps and building an ecosystem around apps. “Nokia has almost always produced high quality hardware; but it was its software that was the weakness,” he says. "Nokia vastly underestimated the importance of third-party applications to the smartphone proposition. Each Symbian UI required its own custom build of the OS which limited the addressable market of any third-party apps.”

"Furthermore, Nokia had a blasé attitude towards compatibility of apps; breaking backwards compatibility on OS upgrades on multiple occasions e.g. S60 third edition, Windows Phone 8; and developing phones incapable of using some games available for earlier devices (e.g. Nokia 500, Lumia 610),” he adds. “Consumers are attracted to smartphones for their ability to be more than just communication tools, and so the lack of apps hinders adoption. One can simply look at the lack of some key apps such as Spotify from Nokia's latest flagship as a continuation of this problem (Spotify is available on the Lumia 800 and 900 however).”

Nokia has almost always produced high quality hardware; but it was its software that was the weakness.

Gleeson argues that Nokia still hasn’t fixed its attitude to software — evident in the recent issues with the schism between WP 7.5 and 8. “This is an issue that Nokia has not fully addressed yet,” he says. “While this may seem to be Microsoft's problem now, Nokia were well aware that there was going to be a break from WinPho 7.5 to 8.”

It's not too surprising that a company that started life as a paper mill, way back in the 1800s, might be more comfortable with physical, tangible things, than digital stuff. But the problem for Nokia wasn't just that it was slow on the update where software was concerned, it was also now competing with companies born and bred in the digital era – with bits and bytes in their blood.

Nokia's decision to open source Symbian in 2008 to try to compete with Android was of course too little too late. The platform itself was not competitive with next-gen rivals in the ways that counted: It still put the phone function first, rather than Internet-connected services. Regardless of how technically powerful Symbian was – something die-hard Symbian fans will always point out (yes it could have apps and 'true' multitasking) – there was no getting away from the problem that it was legacy technology, built in and for an earlier mobile era when phones were phones first, not pocket computers.

As Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi puts it, Nokia was guilty of "trying to fix Symbian for too long." It was also too busy worrying about not upsetting the apple cart of its current customers to start making the disruptive changes needed to win future ones, she says. Or to put it another way, Nokia was fiddling while its platform burned.

Foresight without leadership

Despite clinging on far too long to Symbian — and not having the quicksilver thinking of a native web company — you can't accuse Nokia of lacking ideas. Nokia has a history of coming up with new stuff. The company started life as a paper mill in 1865 but it didn't stick with pulp forever, turning its hand to cranking out rubber boots, tyres and cables, among other things, before moving on to electronics and finally mobile phones.

In mobile too Nokia has not been short of new ideas. The company pioneered various key mobile concepts that are now absolutely mainstream — from cameraphones and music mobiles to apps and tablets. But despite getting its futuregazing right in one sense – by coming up with the ideas in the first place, often years before others got there — Nokia the company was still stuck in the past, mired in its phone-first mindset, which meant it failed to recognise and deliver on the true potential of its creations.

Nokia's R&D held the key to unlocking the future success of its business – but the corporate culture of the company failed to turn futuregazing into an agile strategy to advance its business by breaking with the lucrative present. Without visionary leadership and exceptional execution good ideas are just a series of disconnected dreams. There's no doubt Nokia had plenty of dreamers within its walls but it desperately needed a visionary CEO capable of turning its ideas into the future of the business. Nokia had done it with paper and boots and even mobile phones, but the leap to mobile data proved a leap too far.

"The ‘phone first’ mindset ran through everything they did,” says Leach. “And although the R&D guys came up with some great innovative things they were slow to get those to market. So they were very good at coming up with concepts – 'this is what the future's going to look like; in the meantime what's selling in the market is these feature phones with additional Internet capabilities,' and they were kind of caught between the two. And I think they never really got that leap right to R&D working to breed products to market as opposed to just being all the blue sky activity."

"It's difficult to comment on Nokia's internal management structures, as all I have to go on is speculative and the complaints of disgruntled ex-employees but it is likely that issues [such as underestimating the importance of apps and ecosystems] would be symptoms of a management with no clear long-term vision and the resulting in-fighting between product teams," adds Gleeson.

Leach points to the example of the Nokia Communicator – a pioneering forerunner of today's smartphones, which launched way back in 1996 — as an example of how Nokia failed to deliver on its own great potential. While the device included the ability to download apps, Nokia missed the opportunity to capitalise on them long before anyone else could have.  "Nokia felt that downloading apps and all of that was only something a minority of people would do," he says. "It wasn't really the main point, no one would get that concept. And then a couple of years later you have Apple doing a mainstream TV commercial about downloading apps to your phone.

"Now the tragedy really is that Nokia had that capability. If they had been a bit more confident with it – confident that this is where the future was, they could have had that market, they could have been there. But looking at that TV ad of downloading apps to your phone there's no way anyone in Nokia would have ever believed that it was mainstream enough to get to do that sort of advertising around it."

Nokia had the scale, the connections with manufacturers, the relationships with operators and the brand strength to 'out iPhone the iPhone' — if it had reacted fast enough.

"Nokia's cardinal sin was not as many would suspect lack of foresight about the development of the market such as touchscreens, large displays and tablets," adds Gleeson. "Nokia had the scale, the connections with manufacturers, the relationships with operators and the brand strength to 'out iPhone the iPhone' — if it had reacted fast enough. Samsung's success has shown that being a 'fast follower' is a viable strategy for a market leader to avoid being usurped by early movers."

The key line there is if it had reacted fast enough. Nokia was simply not capable of matching the speed of innovation of a Google or an Apple – hardware was in its blood, not software. So, as Gartner's Milanesi points out, Nokia got bogged down in the alien detail of the task facing it — platform transition and building a sustainable software ecosystem — and therefore wasted time. Time that could have been spent on developing MeeGo from, in her words, a "good platform (N9 demonstrated that)," to a competitive ecosystem.

IHS screen digest analyst Ian Fogg describes Nokia’s fatal flaw as a failure of execution. "Historically Nokia repeatedly saw the future and adopted a strategy to seize the opportunity but failed to execute," he says. "For example: they saw the importance of smartphones and secured a smartphone OS when they invested in Psion’s software division to create Symbian way back in 1998. But their Symbian smartphones were a pale shadow of what they had bought: they took a touch screen UI and converted it to a keyboard-only OS."

As another example of forward thinking but flawed delivery, Fogg points to Nokia's prescience around mobile gaming. "Nokia realised mobile games was a massive opportunity. Twice they tried to become the dominant mobile games player with Ngage and twice their execution let them down," he notes. And when Nokia began pouring even more effort into mobile services – with the Ovi app store and initiatives such as Comes with Music – its plans were still "full of holes in execution."

Windows Phone vs. Android

Fogg believes Nokia's current set of problems with Windows Phones are not explained by a failure of execution; now it's their strategy that's the problem. While Elop "rightly saw" that mobile was becoming a "war of ecosystems," choosing Windows Phone to fight the dominant players of Android and iOS has simply dragged Nokia down, he argues. "Now it's Windows Phone that is holding Nokia back. Windows Phone is proving a hard sell because of the success of Android and iOS.”

Adopting Windows Phone also means Nokia is now reliant on Microsoft’s execution — and Redmond continues to lag behind the pace of development on the dominant smartphone platforms. "Microsoft has been slow to innovate with Windows Phone, which has held Nokia back," says Fogg. "The current version, Windows Phone 8, is little different in consumer features to Windows Phone 7 of two years ago. In the meantime, Apple and Google have piled on numerous more features to iOS and Android.”

"Elop chose Windows Phone also because he could reduce costs by lowering the number of Nokia staff working on content and services. Ironically, Nokia is having to stimulate the Windows Phone ecosystem by content deals to attempt to get the platform moving," Fogg adds.

Choosing Windows Phone was of course not the only option open to Nokia: There is one more lost opportunity to add to Nokia's case file. With the benefit of hindsight, Leach believes it's possible to say that Nokia should have adopted Android — and that by not doing so it missed the opportunity to be the company Samsung is now. Ironically that is also the company Nokia used to be: the dominant force in the mobile industry.

Also ironic: Google's Android could have saved Nokia, instead of helping to bleed the company of its blue blood. Nokia was mobile royalty – now it's just Microsoft’s foot soldier.

"Samsung has been the victor over Nokia more than Apple has," Leach argues. "Success for Nokia now would be being Samsung – if, at that key point in 2008, 2009, they'd made that step to adopt Android. It wasn't really clear at the time that was the right thing for them to do — at that time they really needed to be on their next-gen platform; that was clear. They needed to have MeeGo ready and in the market. But, if we put on our hindsight vision, we could say that rather than MeeGo, probably the best thing to have done would have been Android… With hindsight it's a lot clearer."

Fogg hammers this point home by arguing that differentiating its smartphones on Windows Phone has actually been harder for Nokia than it has been for its rivals to make a success of adopting Android. "Elop argued that Windows Phone would make it easier for Nokia to innovate and differentiate its phones than if Nokia had adopted Android. Ironically, Microsoft’s UI rules have made it hard for Nokia to do this while Sony, Samsung and HTC have successfully built custom user interfaces and applications on top of Android.”

Success for Nokia now would be being Samsung – if, at that key point in 2008, 2009, they'd made that step to adopt Android.

It's hard to beat Nokia up for not predicting how successful Android was going to be; few would have predicted how swiftly Google would take over the smartphone space. But it's easy to accuse Nokia of complacency at a time when there were plenty of warning signs the winds of technology change were whipping up a storm. Nokia even saw what was coming — what smartphones were becoming — sooner than most, but they failed to realise how quickly they needed to change, or that the time they had to prepare for their next business leap was shrinking exponentially.

And, finally, when they did realise they needed to turn their business upside down, choosing Windows Phone over Android was a flawed strategy that kicked the company into the long grass. No matter how well they executed, Windows Phone could not turn their business around because the race for smartphone dominance was being run by Android OEMs and Nokia wasn’t even in the running (leaving the field clear for Samsung to rise and rise).

What’s even worse for Nokia is that the story of its long-drawn-out decline is not a new tale. And the lesson it teaches is not original. Put simply it’s this: Innovate or die.

Reference: MobileGames.vn

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Storm8 Grabs 2M Downloads In One Day On Christmas

How big is Christmas for mobile app developers? For one San Francisco Bay Area-based game maker, it meant 2 million downloads in a single day.

Christmas is unsurprisingly the biggest day of the year for many app makers as consumers unwrap brand-new phones and rush to the store to test out new apps.

Storm8, which is a bootstrapped casual game developer out of Redwood Shores, saw four times the number of downloads they normally experience on a Tuesday. They also saw about 2.5 million hours of gameplay that day and up to 4.5 times the level of average revenue per daily active users, as consumers spent more on in-app purchases. Holiday-themed items like virtual Christmas trees and snow globes were the most popular.

The 4x increase that Storm8 saw is consistent with what other analytics companies have picked up over the holidays. Flurry, an analytics company that tracks more than 260,000 apps, reported that device activations more than quadrupled to 17.4 million on Christmas Day. They saw a similar quadrupling effect last Christmas. On top of that, app downloads more than doubled to 328 million on Christmas, they reported.

How does Storm8′s 2 million downloads in one day compare to other developers? Well, when Instagram released its Android version, it saw 1 million downloads on the first day and 5 million downloads over the first six days for the app. Rovio also said last year that it was seeing about 1 million downloads a day for its Angry Birds franchise.

As for Storm8, it’s a casual game developer that was co-founded by a few early former Facebook employees. They’ve grown to have more than 150 employees and 400 million downloads without taking any venture funding (as a matter of choice and as the funding environment for gaming developers has changed substantially over the last year).

Reference: MobileGames.vn

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7 Apps That Will Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions Alive

A brand new year is upon us, and it’s time to start thinking about the changes you want to make. But it can be difficult to follow through on New Year’s Resolutions, especially without any help or support.

But nine times out of ten, there’s an app for that. We pulled seven of Time Magazine’s list of the top ten most broken New Years Resolutions, and determined which apps would be best to help with each.

So without any further ado, here are the best apps to help you live better in the new year.

Lose Weight and Get Fit: Fitocracy

Fitocracy is a fitness app that uses social tools and gamification to make working out easier. Losing weight and working out more often is the most popular and common New Year’s Resolution every year over, but many people give up after a few days or weeks. Staying motivated can be tough.

By automatically including friends and adding a similar level of competition that you’d find in a video game, Fitocracy keeps users focused on their goals without having to focus on the pain of working out regularly.

Honorable Mention:
Nike+ Running
Workout Trainer

Eat Healthier and Diet: Lose It!

Lose It! is a great app for tracking calorie intake and diet. You simply record everything you eat, whether at a restaurant or homemade, and the app starts tracking your weekly calorie budget, the ratio of carbohydrates to proteins to fats, and integrates with social networks to let you keep up with your friends’ progress.

The worst thing about dieting apps is that inputting your food intake can become tedious and annoying, but Lose It! has streamlined the process as much as possible with restaurant menu integration and a full database of foods and ingredients. I’ve been using Lose It! for a while, and the best part is that after a while, you start learning about the general caloric value of different foods, which helps you make better, more informed decisions when choosing what to eat.

Honorable Mention:
My Fitness Pal
Nutrition Menu

Learn Something New: Snapguide

Snapguide is a beautiful iOS app that brings “How To” to the digital world. It lets users create and share guides, fostering a peer-to-peer community of users who can teach each other. You can look up all kinds of guides within the app to help you get started on your new craft.

The app doesn’t go too in-depth on each guide, so if you’re looking to become an expert on something this may not be the best choice. However, if the goal is to learn a little something new each day, or to discover a new hobby or passion, Snapguide is certainly the app for you.

Honorable Mention:
Khan Academy
MindSnacks

Quit Smoking: My Last Cigarette

My Last Cigarette helps users quit smoking by mapping out the changes in their health as they quit. Simply enter in your smoking habits, and the app keeps you informed on how you’re bettering your life through quitting.

There are over ten different readouts, with indicators that display how your lifespan is increasing, your circulatory and lung functions are improving, and how much money you’re saving by not buying a pack a day. By seeing these improvements in your quality of life, the app can be used as a reminder each time you feel the need to light up.

Honorable Mention:
Livestrong My Quit Coach Lite
Quit Smoking by Azati

Decrease Debt/Save Money: Betterment

Even if the terms “high-yield account” and “portfolio” make you nervous, Betterment can help. The Disrupt alumni helps you earn more money than a standard savings account with more flexibility than a higher yield account. After signing up with an account on Betterment.com, users can check the balance, composition, and returns of their investment portfolio in real time from the app.

Users can also add/withdraw money, change the allocation to stocks and bonds, along with reviewing goals and account activity. Obviously, the best way to get out of debt is to cut spending, but earning a few extra bucks while you save is even better.

Honorable Mention:
Mint
Pageonce Money & Bills

Travel To New Places: National Geographic Traveler’s Magazine

National Geographic’s Traveler’s Magazine for iPad is the absolute best place to find your next destination spot. It’s loaded with content from all of the world’s most beautiful locations, letting you feel like you’re actually there and helping you understand what to expect from each spot.

The app includes maps, photo galleries, and even 360-degree photos of places like the Taj Mahal. Users will also have access to travel tips and live feeds from the Intelligent Travel blog and NatGeo Twitter Feed from various locations.

Honorable Mention:
Apple Maps
Kayak

Spend More Time With Family: Path

I live thousands of miles from my family, but I’ve found that Path is the best way to stay close to them, even when I’m far away. Since Path, a beautifully designed social networking app, only allows up to 50 followers for each user, it’s not as crowded as other social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Plus, Path offers interesting features like the ability to tell followers when you’re waking up or going to sleep. You can also let your followers in on what movies you’re watching, music you’re listening to, and which restaurants you love. The app is free, easy to set up, and enjoyable to use thanks to an award-winning user interface.

Honorable Mention:
Skype
Pair

Reference: MobileGames.vn

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Samsung And DoCoMo Reportedly Team Up To Offer Tizen Smartphones In 2013

Samsung and Docomo, Japan’s largest mobile communication company, are joining forces to develop Tizen, an open source OS that supporters hope will cut into the 90% marketshare held by Google and Apple. The smartphones may be on the market by next year, reports the Yomiuri Shimbun. DoCoMo is the only firm among Japan’s three top mobile operators that does not sell iPhones, which has caused it to lose a substantial amount of subscribers over the last four years.

According to the Yomiuri Shimbun, the Tizen-equipped smartphones are likely to be released in Japan and other countries around the world at the same time. The Next Web speculates that one likely platform for a first look at the devices is the Mobile World Congress in February, though Samsung’s focus on the Galaxy S4 means that launch dates are harder to predict. The Korean company is diversifying its OS offerings: it also plans to release Window Phone devices around the same time Tizen smartphones are expected to make their debut.

Tizen was launched by Samsung in conjunction with Intel to replace the MeeGo platform, which was cancelled by the Linux Foundation in September 2011 in favor of Tizen, but consumers have had to wait a while to try out the OS (the Linux Foundation had originally hoped to release Tizen devices by mid-2012). The open source, Linux-based operating system offers a contrast to Android and iOS by making it easier for mobile phone service companies to offer their own services.

Reference: MobileGames.vn

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Samsung And DoCoMo Reportedly Team Up To Offer Tizen Smartphones In 2013

Samsung and Docomo, Japan’s largest mobile communication company, are joining forces to develop Tizen, an open source OS that supporters hope will cut into the 90% marketshare held by Google and Apple. The smartphones may be on the market by next year, reports the Yomiuri Shimbun. DoCoMo is the only firm among Japan’s three top mobile operators that does not sell iPhones, which has caused it to lose a substantial amount of subscribers over the last four years.

According to the Yomiuri Shimbun, the Tizen-equipped smartphones are likely to be released in Japan and other countries around the world at the same time. The Next Web speculates that one likely platform for a first look at the devices is the Mobile World Congress in February, though Samsung’s focus on the Galaxy S4 means that launch dates are harder to predict. The Korean company is diversifying its OS offerings: it also plans to release Window Phone devices around the same time Tizen smartphones are expected to make their debut.

Tizen was launched by Samsung in conjunction with Intel to replace the MeeGo platform, which was cancelled by the Linux Foundation in September 2011 in favor of Tizen, but consumers have had to wait a while to try out the OS (the Linux Foundation had originally hoped to release Tizen devices by mid-2012). The open source, Linux-based operating system offers a contrast to Android and iOS by making it easier for mobile phone service companies to offer their own services.

Reference: MobileGames.vn

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Iterations: It’s Early Innings For Digital Pictures

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch, you can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

In the few years I’ve been in Silicon Valley, if someone asked me to sum up — in one word — what defined and dominated consumer technology applications during that time, I’d have no choice but to answer: “Photos.” Now, it’s easy for others to sit back and roll their eyes at the thought of it. “Why not solve big problems?” an aggravated chorus might wail. Looking back over this time period, the big events touching on digital pictures gained outsized attention: The launch of iPhone 4, with its incredible camera; the meteoric rise and acquisition of Instagram; the technical achievement unlocked by Lytro; the influence of the Pinterest design on nearly every e-commerce site; our narcissistic addiction to Timehop or delight in depositing checks through our bank’s mobile app; today’s fascination with exploding pictures, courtesy of Snapchat; and on the horizon, one of the most anticipated interface advancements: Google Glass.

Because our digital photographs are inherently social objects, and because mobile platforms now create a massive global audience for companies to directly provide tools and software to, digital pictures have transformed into a strange, fierce battleground where bigger platform giants test the limits of privacy, throw friendly punches at their rivals, and experiment with new business models. Most coverage and analysis of this trend focuses on the end consumers, but for the purposes of this post, let’s consider digital photographs as being a byproduct of the advances in mobile camera technology, as the camera itself is perhaps the single most important sensor on our phones and tablets.

As the camera sensor improves over time, the opportunities around photosharing increase with it. Therefore, my belief is that we are still in the early innings of this digital photography craze, so if you’re tired of the meme, brace yourself because it will take years to unfold, and if you’re excited about this future, it’s a great time to get your hands dirty. First, let’s briefly consider what hardware changes we can anticipate: device battery life and processing speeds will only improve with time, perhaps opening the door for richer image capture, video capture, and so forth, and RGBd (“D” for depth) cameras will allow cameras to capture not only more of the the light field, but also the depth of objects from the sensor and in relation to each other which has big implications for the advancement of 3-D modeling. (Google Glass will eventually, we hope, have huge implications for passive image capture, both for consumers and for commercial activities.)

As the hardware advances the camera sensor capabilities, software will not be far behind. So far, consumers have glommed onto applications that filter, organize, and/or erase photographs. Lytro’s technology enables the capture of the entire light field with for post-capture focus (though I’m not sure if their technology will be incorporated or licensed in other devices). Moving forward, I’d expect more camera applications to offer more context around each photograph, such as auto-image/object detection, auto-tagging and classification (especially around location, such as Findery is working on), and auto-arrangement or organization. I’d also expect more technologies (like Stipple) to auto-fingerprint photographs to preserve their provenance as they’re shared across the web or before being screenshot and manipulated on mobile devices.

The tricky thing here is that only in hindsight do filters or boards or exploding pictures make sense. “Of course teenagers will want to make their pictures disappear like Tiger texts!” Therefore, in the future, we won’t really know what consumers will want until we see the new applications and experiments live, in the wild, and monitor their usage. What is certain, however, is that all of these advances will create opportunities for developers to build new applications and advance the collection, documentation, recognition (and more manipulation, including distortion), and sharing of digital pictures in ways that we’ve yet to imagine.

While I’m unable to articulate just what this future will look like, I do feel we will see more and more activity in this space, more experiments, more applications, and more things that perhaps start out looking like toys that may ultimately be new channels and modes of communication — as well as the societal implications we can expect when nearly everything “can” be captured. And, we don’t even know how the world will react to new image-based interfaces that will surely come to market, starting with Google Glass, perhaps a touch-enabled television with its own camera, and so much more. When it comes to images, it’s early innings, indeed.

Photo Credit: Tony Ratanen / Flickr Creative Commons

Reference: MobileGames.vn

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Foursquare To Start Using Full Names, Sharing More Of Your Data With Venues From January 28, According To New Privacy Policy

Foursquare — which this year passed its three-millionth check-in, added 15 million more users to its network, and in October kicked off a new chapter as a stronger competitor to Yelp with more local information and reviews — is now updating its privacy policy to keep up. It has been sending out an email to its users informing them that as of January 28, it will add in two new items that will reveal more user data than before: the use of full names and the ability for businesses to access longer data logs for individuals.

And, perhaps taking a cue from all the drama around Instagram and Facebook’s recent changes to their terms of service, the location-based social information app did two other things: it picked the Saturday evening between Christmas and New Years (when we’re all still full of good cheer) to tell users about it (mine came into my inbox at 4.37AM London time, although Phandroid seems to have noticed it earlier); and it is once again pointing users to its simplified explanation of its terms — called Privacy 101 – to help explain it.

Both of the changes are a signal of how Foursquare is beefing up its big data offering: more information being shared with more people — and importantly, businesses as part of Foursquare’s local-commerce dashboard play. The explanations in the email, printed in full below, are a little more nuanced:

“Full names.” Foursquare says that from the end of January, users’ full names (not necessarily real names, though) will show up with each of your check-ins, available for all to see. Foursquare implies that it’s making the change to be less confusing: it’s been providing full names already, which come up when you search for your friends on the Foursquare network, but “when you click through to their profile page you don't see their last name.” These have prompted comments from users saying this is confusing.

But, important to note here that Foursquare makes a point of noting “full names” in quotes. If you don’t want your full name on the network, it notes that you can update your own settings to set whatever “full name” you want.

Extended user data for businesses. Again, here Foursquare is couching the change as a move for more practical use: it says that businesses in the past were only able to view the last three hours of check-ins, in addition to most-recent and most-loyal users, but that many do not check their Foursquare data until the end of the day. Again, as with the “full name” setting, users can turn off the permission for business to see their data.

Hello Foursquare community!

2012 has been a pretty huge year. We've released over fifty new features, welcomed nearly 15,000,000 new people to Foursquare, and had our 3,000,000,000th check-in. It's a bit clichéd to say this, but your support really is what keeps us going day after day.

As our product evolves, one of the things we do is update our policies to match it. And a big aspect of that is privacy (something we think about a lot). This email lays out a couple changes that we'll be making to our privacy policy in the coming month, and explains how they affect you and what you can do about it.

We know that privacy policies can be dense, so we put together a high-level document that we think of as our "Privacy 101." It describes, in an easy-to-read way, how we build privacy into our product. While it doesn’t replace the legal need for the complete description of our privacy practices (which you can read here), we hope it helps you better understand how we think about privacy. We've also added new explanations of how privacy works throughout the app in our FAQs, including our default privacy settings and how they can be adjusted.

In addition to creating and refining those documents, we want to point out two specific changes to our policy, both of which will go into effect on January 28, 2013.

1. We will now display your full name. Currently, Foursquare sometimes shows your full name and sometimes shows your first name and last initial ("John Smith" vs. "John S."). For instance, if you search for a friend in Foursquare, we show their full name in the results, but when you click through to their profile page you don't see their last name. In the original versions of Foursquare, these distinctions made sense. But we get emails every day saying that it’s now confusing. So, with this change, full names are going to be public. As always, you can alter your 'full name' on Foursquare at https://foursquare.com/settings.

2. A business on Foursquare will be able to see more of their recent customers. Currently, a business using Foursquare (like your corner coffee shop) can see the customers who have checked in in the last three hours (in addition to the most recent and their most loyal visitors). This is great for helping store owners identify their customers and give them more personal service or offers. But a lot of businesses only have time to log in at the end of the day to look at it. So, with this change, we’re going to be showing them more of those recent check-ins, instead of just three hours worth. As always, if you’d prefer not to permit businesses to see when you check into their locations going forward, you can uncheck the box under 'Location Information' at https://foursquare.com/settings/privacy.

The Foursquare of today is so different than the first version that launched in 2009, and we appreciate that you let us continue to evolve and build our vision. This occasionally means altering our privacy policy. When we do, we make it a priority to come up with clear ways to help you understand your privacy choices, and to communicate them clearly. If you have any questions or want more details, head over to our updated privacy policy or support.foursquare.com.

Have a lovely holiday, and thanks for being part of the nearly 30,000,000-strong Foursquare community. We have a lot planned for 2013!

- Team Foursquare

Reference: MobileGames.vn

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Trade A Bit Of Facebook Privacy For Free Samsung TecTiles, Flip Covers

The gift-giving has ended as we head into the new year, but many of us still need to pick up a few things. For example, if you happen to be a new owner of the Galaxy S III or Galaxy Note II, you probably need a few extra NFC-powered TecTiles and perhaps a brand new flip cover.

Samsung has announced it will give away six free TecTiles and a flip cover for every customer that registers their Galaxy S III or Galaxy Note II to Samsung’s Owner’s Hub on Facebook. That means that you’ll be giving Samsung some personal info, like access to your Facebook Timeline, in exchange for the swag.

A cover is always important, so if you don’t have one already this is a good way to check that off your list. But the real value is in the TecTiles, in my humble opinion.

TecTiles allow you to leverage the power of your NFC-equipped phone. Samsung has made great strides in the NFC department, equipping many of its major phones with an NFC chip. This lets users share photos and other content by simply tapping their phones, as long as both have NFC. They’ve shown this magic in multiple commercials recently.

But if you want to enjoy the seamless wonder of NFC by your lonesome, TecTiles are the way to go. They let you program certain commands to each specific tag, such as a Facebook check-in, changing your settings to enable Wi-Fi, or turning on your ringer. So each time you tap your phone against a specific tag, it initiates that already-programmed action, automating your phone.

Normally TecTiles cost $15 for a pack of five, so this is a great deal, as long as you’re willing to give Samsung a little extra access to your Facebook.

[via Engadget]

Reference: MobileGames.vn

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Trade A Bit Of Facebook Privacy For Free Samsung TecTiles, Flip Covers

The gift-giving has ended as we head into the new year, but many of us still need to pick up a few things. For example, if you happen to be a new owner of the Galaxy S III or Galaxy Note II, you probably need a few extra NFC-powered TecTiles and perhaps a brand new flip cover.

Samsung has announced it will give away six free TecTiles and a flip cover for every customer that registers their Galaxy S III or Galaxy Note II to Samsung’s Owner’s Hub on Facebook. That means that you’ll be giving Samsung some personal info, like access to your Facebook Timeline, in exchange for the swag.

A cover is always important, so if you don’t have one already this is a good way to check that off your list. But the real value is in the TecTiles, in my humble opinion.

TecTiles allow you to leverage the power of your NFC-equipped phone. Samsung has made great strides in the NFC department, equipping many of its major phones with an NFC chip. This lets users share photos and other content by simply tapping their phones, as long as both have NFC. They’ve shown this magic in multiple commercials recently.

But if you want to enjoy the seamless wonder of NFC by your lonesome, TecTiles are the way to go. They let you program certain commands to each specific tag, such as a Facebook check-in, changing your settings to enable Wi-Fi, or turning on your ringer. So each time you tap your phone against a specific tag, it initiates that already-programmed action, automating your phone.

Normally TecTiles cost $15 for a pack of five, so this is a great deal, as long as you’re willing to give Samsung a little extra access to your Facebook.

[via Engadget]

Reference: MobileGames.vn

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TigerLogic Acquires Storycode For Up To $7.25M To Bolster How Brands Reach Mobile Users

TigerLogic, a company with a market cap of about $56 million that provides data management and app development solutions for enterprises, said it agreed to acquire Portland mobile developer Storycode for up to $7.25 million in cash and stock today.

The Irvine-based company says it will integrate Storycode’s technology into its social visualization platform called Postano. Yes, “social visualization” platform is a little vague, but basically Postano lets brands embed widgets with content froms social networks on their sites. They also offer an internal dashboard that lets clients monitor what people are saying about them on Twitter or Facebook, and they can also help with creating custom Facebook tabs and apps.

Storycode has a mobile app publishing platform that media companies like Thomson Reuters, USA Today, NBC and CBS use to create iPhone and iPad apps. The mobile publishing platform will plug right into TigerLogic’s Postano product.

According to an SEC filing, each share of Storycode’s stock will be converted into $6.75 million worth of TigerLogic’s stock. On top of that, a single share of preferred stock in Storycode will get converted into the right to receive $250,000. TigerLogic is also giving Storycode $100,000 in bridge financing and is taking on up to $150,000 in the company’s liabilities.

Storycode actually has been through one previous acquisition. It was previously called FreeRange Communications after it spun out of Handmark in 2011. The company changed its name to Storycode last May after acquiring a Portland-based mobile agency.

Reference: MobileGames.vn

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Instagram Denies 25% Holiday User Drop From TOS Backlash, And Here Are Real Explanations For A Usage Dip

Sure, it’s not unlike the New York Post to be sensationalist. But in this case it misinterpreted data to suggest Instagram was hit harder by backlash to its terms of service changes than it actually was. Combined with it being a quiet-ish holiday news week, I am taking a story it published today on a 25 percent drop in Instagram users with a little more than a grain of salt.

Basically, it notes that figures from AppData demonstrate that Instagram lost 4 million daily active users — nearly a 25 percent drop to 12.4 million from 16.4 million — between December 19 and December 26. And as the NYP terms it, people are walking away in a “rage against rules.” The Post blames the decline on Instagram’s new, more commercially-minded terms of service — which it rolled back on December 21, i.e., in the middle of its DAU plummet, in response to public outcry.

To balance out that one-sided view, here are some further observations that give a slightly bigger picture about what is going on:

– Yes, AppData notes that Instagram lost 4 million DAUs over the holiday period, as based on Facebook logins via the app. But it’s also seen some gains (according to the same data): weekly active users in that period are up by 1 million (currently at 28.5 million), and monthly active users are up by 1.1 million (currently at 43 million). DAUs also seem to be up a bit since Christmas, and they are now down by only 3.5 million over the last seven days.

– AppData doesn't show an app's full user count or even a representative sample. In this case it shows users who connected their Instagram accounts to Facebook and either logged in with their Facebook credentials, searched for their Facebook friends, or shared to Facebook. That leaves out tons of users who use Instagram independently. The decline in Instagram usage may have been more pronounced amongst Facebook-connected users as they may have been exposed to more viral backlash to the TOS change via the news feed.

– There are other photo apps that have seen fluctuations in DAUs and MAUs in the last week. Look at Hipstamatic, or Snapseed, or Flickr, whose well-timed launches made some people wonder whether it could replace Instagram.

– The NYP story compares this to last Thanksgiving, which was rich pickins for Instagram. Then it celebrated record postings as people rushed to snap their turkey, stuffing, and cranberry sauce. But this time around, the Christmas “Poke” effect may be at work:

As Josh pointed out in reference to stories of how another photo app from Facebook, Poke, is slipping after an initial burst of interest, people who would have received new iOS devices will be downloading essential apps this week rather than the second wave of nice-to-have apps. The same could apply to apps like Instagram — not just on iOS but Android as well.

– A week and a half ago, we published some data looking at whether Instagram traffic had dropped off as a result of the removal of preview “Cards” on Twitter. The answer: Yes, referral traffic went down from Twitter, but Instagram traffic overall appeared to be holding up, at least at that point.

In that post, I noted that any decline could have to do with Twitter, but could also be related to the hullabaloo over terms of service; or even a newer version of the app that is getting worse ratings than older versions. The same applies here.

In short, there are a number of reasons for a decline in daily active users at Instagram (some alarming, some seasonal). Yes, it may be that people are voting with their fingers, and if that’s the case it will likely be something that Facebook and Instagram will have to consider as they think of how to make money with the app. But to directly relate it to an already overblown situation smells off.

The scare caused Facebook’s share price to drop nearly 3% this morning, but as the truth proliferates and the markets close, $FB has recovered and down just 0.5%.

Update: Instagram itself has now sent us the following statement:
“This data is inaccurate. We continue to see strong and steady growth in both registered and active users of Instagram.”

[Additional reporting by Josh Constine]

Reference: MobileGames.vn

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Instagram Denies 25% Holiday User Drop From TOS Backlash , And Here Are Real Explanations For Any Usage Dip

Sure, it’s not unlike the New York Post to be sensationalist. But in this case it misinterpreted data to suggest Instagram was hit harder by backlash to its terms of service changes than it actually was. Combined with it being a quiet-ish holiday news week, I am taking a story it published today on a 25 percent drop in Instagram users with a little more than a grain of salt.

Basically, it notes that figures from AppData demonstrate that Instagram lost 4 million daily active users — nearly a 25 percent drop to 12.4 million from 16.4 million — between December 19 and December 26. And as the NYP terms it, people are walking away in a “rage against rules.” The Post blames the decline on Instagram’s new, more commercially-minded terms of service — which it rolled back on December 21, i.e., in the middle of its DAU plummet, in response to public outcry.

To balance out that one-sided view, here are some further observations that give a slightly bigger picture about what is going on:

– Yes, AppData notes that Instagram lost 4 million DAUs over the holiday period, as based on Facebook logins via the app. But it’s also seen some gains (according to the same data): weekly active users in that period are up by 1 million (currently at 28.5 million), and monthly active users are up by 1.1 million (currently at 43 million). DAUs also seem to be up a bit since Christmas, and they are now down by only 3.5 million over the last seven days.

– AppData doesn't show an app's full user count or even a representative sample. In this case it shows users who connected their Instagram accounts to Facebook and either logged in with their Facebook credentials, searched for their Facebook friends, or shared to Facebook. That leaves out tons of users who use Instagram independently. The decline in Instagram usage may have been more pronounced amongst Facebook-connected users as they may have been exposed to more viral backlash to the TOS change via the news feed.

– There are other photo apps that have seen fluctuations in DAUs and MAUs in the last week. Look at Hipstamatic, or Snapseed, or Flickr, whose well-timed launches made some people wonder whether it could replace Instagram.

– The NYP story compares this to last Thanksgiving, which was rich pickins for Instagram. Then it celebrated record postings as people rushed to snap their turkey, stuffing, and cranberry sauce. But this time around, the Christmas “Poke” effect may be at work:

As Josh pointed out in reference to stories of how another photo app from Facebook, Poke, is slipping after an initial burst of interest, people who would have received new iOS devices will be downloading essential apps this week rather than the second wave of nice-to-have apps. The same could apply to apps like Instagram — not just on iOS but Android as well.

– A week and a half ago, we published some data looking at whether Instagram traffic had dropped off as a result of the removal of preview “Cards” on Twitter. The answer: Yes, referral traffic went down from Twitter, but Instagram traffic overall appeared to be holding up, at least at that point.

In that post, I noted that any decline could have to do with Twitter, but could also be related to the hullabaloo over terms of service; or even a newer version of the app that is getting worse ratings than older versions. The same applies here.

In short, there are a number of reasons for a decline in daily active users at Instagram (some alarming, some seasonal). Yes, it may be that people are voting with their fingers, and if that’s the case it will likely be something that Facebook and Instagram will have to consider as they think of how to make money with the app. But to directly relate it to an already overblown situation smells off.

The scare caused Facebook’s share price to drop nearly 3% this morning, but as the truth proliferates and the markets close, $FB has recovered and down just 0.2%.

Update: Instagram itself has now sent us the following statement:
“This data is inaccurate. We continue to see strong and steady growth in both registered and active users of Instagram.”

[Additional reporting by Josh Constine]

Reference: MobileGames.vn

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Stuck For New Year’s Eve In London? YPlan Takes Last-Minute Booking Mobile

With over 5 million Twitter followers, UK actor/author Stephen Fry is the closest thing we get to an “Ashton Kutcher”, given that he has a big following and occasionally takes an interest in tech startups (sometimes a financial interest). But his choices are hit and miss. One was a startup which allowed you to put virtual post-it notes on websites… But his picks have improved and recently Yplan, a VC-backed startup with real execution credentials, benefitted from his largesse. Like HotelTonight, YPlan [iTunes link] is a way to book events (like plays, shows and concerts) via iOS mobile with literally a couple of clicks. And it’s going to come in handy for New Year’s Eve and other holiday events in the UK capital.

Founded by Viktoras Jucikas and Rytis Vitkauskas, YPlan provides handpicked London highlights and an ability to then book them, drawing on a team with experience at Time Out, toptable, Songkick and lastminute.com.

The smartphone app has already garnered $1.7 million (£1.06 million) from Wellington Partners and Octopus Investments and is very much part of this new wave of “effortless transactions” on mobile. Taxi apps like Uber and Hailo in London are educating user to the idea of a simple app, with credit card details plugged in, that can literally make your life easier.

In the U.S., there is WillCall, currently only available in SF. It’s a talented, small team and does web/mobile and general ticketing, but tends to focus on gigs and theatre rather than YPlan’s full range of events. There is also ScoreBIG, but it focuses only on sports.

Of course, YPlan’s ‘competitors’ are myriad. Time Out, for one. But the latter is an editorial business, not transactional, and mobile and bookings are an after-thought. Ticketmaster stops selling tickets online 24-48hrs before a show starts, so it’s not set up for the last-minute ticket market which is pretty big in a city like London. It’s also not really a mobile business. And whereas Groupon is focused on 50%+ discounts, their mobile offering has been stillborn.

YPlan’s other backers include Lastminute.com co-founder Brent Hoberman, Sherry Coutu (advisory board member at LinkedIn), Songkick’s Peter Read and Andy Philips of booking.com, Tom Hulme (IDEO), Gi Fernando (Techlightenment) and Robert Linney (Chemical Brothers) and Baltcap, a VC fund directed at the Baltic region.

Reference: MobileGames.vn

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Instagram Denies 25% Holiday User Drop

Sure, it’s not unlike the New York Post to be sensationalist. But in this case it misinterpreted data to suggest Instagram was hit harder by backlash to its terms of service changes than it actually was. Combined with it being a quiet-ish holiday news week, I am taking a story it published today on a 25 percent drop in Instagram users with a little more than a grain of salt.

Basically, it notes that figures from AppData demonstrate that Instagram lost 4 million daily active users — nearly a 25 percent drop to 12.4 million from 16.4 million — between December 19 and December 26. And as the NYP terms it, people are walking away in a “rage against rules.” The Post blames the decline on Instagram’s new, more commercially-minded terms of service — which it rolled back on December 21, i.e., in the middle of its DAU plummet, in response to public outcry.

To balance out that one-sided view, here are some further observations that give a slightly bigger picture about what is going on:

– Yes, AppData notes that Instagram lost 4 million DAUs over the holiday period, as based on Facebook logins via the app. But it’s also seen some gains (according to the same data): weekly active users in that period are up by 1 million (currently at 28.5 million), and monthly active users are up by 1.1 million (currently at 43 million). DAUs also seem to be up a bit since Christmas, and they are now down by only 3.5 million over the last seven days.

– AppData doesn't show an app's full user count or even a representative sample. In this case it shows users who connected their Instagram accounts to Facebook and either logged in with their Facebook credentials, searched for their Facebook friends, or shared to Facebook. That leaves out tons of users who use Instagram independently. The decline in Instagram usage may have been more pronounced amongst Facebook-connected users as they may have been exposed to more viral backlash to the TOS change via the news feed.

– There are other photo apps that have seen fluctuations in DAUs and MAUs in the last week. Look at Hipstamatic, or Snapseed, or Flickr, whose well-timed launches made some people wonder whether it could replace Instagram.

– The NYP story compares this to last Thanksgiving, which was rich pickins for Instagram. Then it celebrated record postings as people rushed to snap their turkey, stuffing, and cranberry sauce. But this time around, the Christmas “Poke” effect may be at work:

As Josh pointed out in reference to stories of how another photo app from Facebook, Poke, is slipping after an initial burst of interest, people who would have received new iOS devices will be downloading essential apps this week rather than the second wave of nice-to-have apps. The same could apply to apps like Instagram — not just on iOS but Android as well.

– A week and a half ago, we published some data looking at whether Instagram traffic had dropped off as a result of the removal of preview “Cards” on Twitter. The answer: Yes, referral traffic went down from Twitter, but Instagram traffic overall appeared to be holding up, at least at that point.

In that post, I noted that any decline could have to do with Twitter, but could also be related to the hullabaloo over terms of service; or even a newer version of the app that is getting worse ratings than older versions. The same applies here.

In short, there are a number of reasons for a decline in daily active users at Instagram (some alarming, some seasonal). Yes, it may be that people are voting with their fingers, and if that’s the case it will likely be something that Facebook and Instagram will have to consider as they think of how to make money with the app. But to directly relate it to an already overblown situation smells off.

(And yes, I’ve reached out to Instagram, Kevin Systrom and AppData for further clarification. Happy Holidays.)

Update: Instagram itself has now sent us the following statement:
“This data is inaccurate. We continue to see strong and steady growth in both registered and active users of Instagram.”

[Additional reporting by Josh Constine]

Reference: MobileGames.vn

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Flying Home? Airport Chatter Brings Airport Info To iPhone, Socializes Travel

Airport Chatter, which debuted just in time to take advantage of the busy holiday travel season, is a new mobile application aiming to be the one-stop shop for everything related to air travel, from the time of departure to the time of arrival. The app includes venue profiles for the shops and services inside airports, allowing users to not only discover the hours of operations and other business info, but also post check-ins and reviews. That makes it something like a miniature version of Yelp, specifically designed for airports.

But co-founder and CEO Mark Wagner explains that the company’s goal is bigger than that – the venue listings feature is only one of many they have in store. The goal is to go beyond becoming the next “Gate Guru,” for example, in order to offer users a more complete travel platform that can help them with every aspect of their trip, including tracking flight status, booking ground transportation, tracking the progress of checked baggage, and most notably, socializing with fellow travelers.

Some of these features are further along in development than others. For example, Airport Chatter’s website speaks of a forthcoming feature called “Radar” which will allow users to meet new friends to “make trips more exciting.” Radar, however, is not yet available in the current iOS release. Wagner says the team debated about the launch timing, but decided that it would be better to launch before the holidays to gain that early boost in new users.

That bet paid off, it seems. Since its late December debut, Apple has featured Airport Chatter on two of its lists – “New & Noteworthy” travel apps, and another featured list called “Traveling Home.”

Wagner explains he came up with the idea for Airport Chatter around a year ago, having always been a big aviation geek, who loved everything about airports, airplanes and travel. “For me especially, [it was about] ‘what can technology do to help the travel experience?’ because A) there are so many travelers, and B) everyone is on smartphones,” he says. He and his friend Izzy Kirsh began working on an earlier version of what is now Airport Chatter, and launched it as a web app this April.

Not surprisingly, they soon found that the majority of the traffic hitting their website, essentially a list of airport venues, was coming from mobile. After joining forces with Sydney-based Rab Memari, who had been working on a similar concept, Wagner then tracked down developer and CTO Ygor Lemos using AngelList, to help them move to mobile.

The end result, created over six months of remote teamwork, is today’s iOS app, Airport Chatter. At launch, the app features 30 airports across the U.S. and 4,600 venue profiles offering the hours, phone numbers and other business listing details. Users can check-in and review these locations, as well as track the live feed for their airport, or the global feed for all airports within Airport Chatter.

The startup has also partnered with SITA, which provides air transport communications and info technology. This will allow Airport Chatter to integrate other flight-related information into its app in the future. For example, one of the more promising features the SITA partnership will bring is baggage tracking. “You’ll be able to enter your baggage number and we’ll provide you real-time updates throughout your trip,” says Wagner. This service is still in beta on SITA’s side, so it will be some time before it’s available in the app, however.

Airport Chatter is available for free from the iOS app store, and the startup plans to develop an Android version in the future. Eventually, the goal is to monetize by offering mobile coupons for the venues in the airports, as well as by helping users with bookings for ground transportation and hotels.

Airport Chatter is currently bootstrapping, but plans to start raising seed funding after the holidays.

Reference: MobileGames.vn

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