Posts Tagged ‘Top stories’
Google’s head of Android partnerships departs
Another day, another Android departure.
Google’s worldwide has left the company this month. He owned relationships with the major handset manufacturers and carriers for Google and led business development for the Android operating system. He was also a recipient of a Founders Award, which are generous Google stock grants that can be worth hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars and are used to protect employees from poaching.
We’ve reached out to Google for official confirmation.
Moss follows other key Android managers in leaving the company , , and .
Losing key people left and right might put a dent in Mobile is an incredibly competitive space for recruiting and keeping talent and there are plenty of opportunities to build startups for managers and engineers with a few years of experience working on Android under their belts.
We don’t know where Moss will head next, but we’re suspecting it might be a company of his own creation.
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Evernote, the startup that augments your memory, launches an app store
, a Mountain View-based startup devoted to helping people remember everything, is maturing as a platform with the launch of an app store today.
Called Trunk, the store has about 100 apps or add-ons from 67 companies, covering everything from games to productivity apps to add-ons that let you create physical, personal scrapbooks. About 30 of them are brand new and come from the company’s 2,000 developer partners.
“The next phase of Evernote is about being smarter and giving you the ability to leverage your memories to support everyday activities like scheduling, cooking and writing,” said chief executive Phil Libin. The company is still working out details of a revenue sharing program. There will be an affiliate program coming later this year.
Many of the Evernote partners that demoed today weren’t companies that were exclusively dependent on Evernote. They were startups like Seesmic or very large corporations like SAP.
Libin was cautious about using the phrase “app store,” saying that there are plenty of other channels to distribute and make money from apps. Instead, the point of Trunk was to show off what the company’s developer partners could do with its technology.
“The focus isn’t necessarily to build an app store. We want to be a showcase,” Libin said. “If the easiest way for a user to access these features is to buy something within Evernote, we’ll do that.”
Since publicly launching two years ago, Evernote has grown to support 3.7 million users, and Libin said revenue has grown 12 percent month-over-month for the past two years. About 6,000 new members join a day.
Evernote’s business model is relatively simple — it’s free for everyone, but if you want premium services, you’ll pay $5 per month. Libin said Evernote’s conversion rates, while low at first, rise the longer people use the service. A half-percent of users opt for the paid premium service in the first month. But eight percent of users choose to pay for Evernote if they’ve used it for two years.
The company has raised a little over $25 million in venture funding from investors including Morgenthaler Ventures and NTT DoCoMo.
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Motorola: We “doubled down” on Android and are “raving about it”
John Ellis, director of software and services for Motorola, said the handset manufacturer was happy with its big bet on Google’s Android platform.
“We doubled down on our bets with Google. We’re happy about it. Sanjay is raving about it,” Ellis said of the company co-chief executive Sanjay Jha. Jha said last week were supply constraints.
Two years ago, Motorola was servicing about 17 platforms. Its cellphone unit then shifted to focus on high-end smartphones, bolstered by Google’s mobile operating system, .
“The complexity for us was monstrous,” Ellis said at the MobileBeat 2010 conference today in San Francisco. “We would have internal development paralysis because we were afraid of breaking anything.” The company is following the success of its original Droid phones.
Ellis said the company wasn’t too worried about putting all of its eggs in one basket with Android.
“I don’t know if we’re necessarily paranoid about it,” he said. “Certainly, we’re very conscious about it.”
Other panelists agreed that they, too, would benefit from sharpening their focus to a handful of platforms.
“Over time, we believe that for developers to have consistency on how they make money, it will be easier if there are [fewer platforms] and consolidation,” said David Ko, senior vice president of Yahoo’s Audience, Mobile and Local businesses.
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A mobile payments breakout is still a few years away for the U.S.
A breakout hit for real-world mobile payments in the U.S. is still a year or two off, despite the emergence of superphones and rich ecosystems with hundreds of thousands of apps, said panelists at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat2010 conference today.
While there are notable mobile payments startups cornering the virtual goods market, like Zong, a viable phone-based rival to the credit card has yet to emerge. The primary barrier isn’t the technology itself, but rather the level of credit penetration in developed markets. In contrast to the U.S., in Asia and Africa, where the majority of phone owners have virtually no access to credit, sophisticated SMS-based mobile payments systems like Safaricom’s M-Pesa have emerged.
“The value-add has to be clear,” said Tarang Shah, the senior vice president of innovation at Bank of America. “In developing countries, the pain of moving cash is high. That’s not the case in developed countries.”
He added, “We’re still a few years away from real products.”
Still, he did say that finance institutions like his employer recognize that consumers are starting to demand banking solutions on their phones. Competitor JPMorgan Chase & Co. began letting customers deposit their checks via iPhone earlier this month, for example.
Panelists agreed that big brands and small businesses alike stand to benefit from mobile payments. Small businesses could use phones to track loyalty and offer rewards, while big brands could use payments apps as another avenue to market to consumers. Operators might be able to step in but only if they add “real value,” said Mohammad Khan, the founder of Vivotech, a provider of near-field or contact-free payments software.
Mobile payments applications may also raise privacy concerns as banks and credit cards companies like Visa collect even more granular data about consumer habits.
“We have data points about consumer behavior that are unbelievable, but we don’t use it unless we get consent,” Shah said. Indeed, other consumer-based location-apps like that want to predict the performance of retail stocks. (If a store receives more check-ins, that could serve as evidence that its earnings might fare well during a financial quarter.)
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Apple says sorry for selling out a record 1.7 million iPhone 4 devices
Steve Jobs in three days this morning, despite reception issues and problems with “holding” the phone properly.
Analysts had told Bloomberg that the company would on Saturday and 1 million phones on the launch day alone.
“This is the most successful product launch in Apple’s history,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Even so, we apologize to those customers who were turned away because we did not have enough supply.”
The sales, a record for Apple, came despite a reception problem many new buyers reported. The phone loses its signal if users cover the bottom left-hand corner of the device, where there’s a gap between the pieces that form the phone’s antenna.
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New Brightcove development kit supports Android’s embrace of Flash
Brightcove that includes mobile templates supporting Adobe’s Flash technology
Developers will be able to design native apps that allow video playback, search and discovery or use out-of-the-box templates that play video using Flash.
“I’m really happy that we’re standing tall with Adobe as they release Flash Player 10.1,” wrote Jeff Whatcott, Brightcove’s vice president of marketing, who was involved in the development of Flash at Macromedia. “The last six months of rhetoric have been particularly bruising for Flash, and it’s great to see Adobe answering their critics with code.”
Brightcove’s move comes as it has to support a fractured market with a plethora of competing devices and platforms. Android’s market share is on the increase, and the Google-backed operating system came to support more than 20 percent of mobile web traffic last month, according to Quantcast.
“We’ve entered an era where every website owner must have a strategy for the PC Web, Mobile Web, iOS Apps and Android Apps,” Whatcott added. “For our customers, it’s not about making high stakes either/or bets on one platform over another, it’s about a cross-platform both/and strategy.”
, the first full version of Flash to work on mobile phones, for download on Android last night. It says Flash 10.1 should be available on other phone platforms shortly.
Don’t miss , VentureBeat’s conference on the future of mobile. The theme: “.” Now expanded to two days, MobileBeat 2010 will take place on July 12-13 at The Palace Hotel in San Francisco. . Tickets are going quickly. For complete conference details, or to apply for the MobileBeat Startup Competition, .
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Facebook’s latest iPhone app offers video viewing, higher-resolution photos
Facebook to watch videos, read and write comments about events, and post higher-resolution photos.
The app has an , which probably makes it the strongest source of mobile use for the social network. In February, Facebook said it had 100 million monthly active users through mobile phones.
Facebook’s iPhone app has had the ability to post video for about a year, but hasn’t offered video viewing until now. The social network is quickly becoming a power in video consumption with 2 billion videos watched each month. Photos that are posted through the app can also have richer resolution now. They can be 720 pixels wide.
The app’s original developer, Joe Hewitt, who came to the social network via Parakey, its very first acquisition, dropped out of the project last November. It has since been taken over by Owen Yamauchi, who worked briefly at Apple before joining Facebook, and Jeff Verkoeyen, who was an intern for the social network according to their LinkedIn profiles.
There’s no word on when the social network’s much-awaited Facebook iPad app will come. We hear it will reveal several clues to the future direction of Facebook’s interface design.
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