22May

Amazon Appstore For Android Now Lets Users Test Drive Apps Right On Their Devices

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Unless an app you have your eye happens to have a free demo version to muck about with, there’s little one can do to try out an Android app on a device in advance. Sure, you could buy the app straight from the Google Play Store and get a refund within 15 minutes if you’re not satisfied, but Amazon has a new solution in place that helps take the friction out of that testing process.

The latest update for the Amazon Appstore Android app packs a welcome surprise — instead of being stuck Test Driving your apps on your PC, you’ll now be able to do it from directly within the app.

Well, some of you will be able to do it. Not every Android phone will be able to take part in the Test Drive program quite yet, as Amazon points out that the service is only set up to work with certain devices for now. My Galaxy Nexus doesn’t seem to be on the list at the moment, and Engadget reports that the immensely popular Galaxy S II is similarly shut out of the fun.

Still, it seems to be quite a treat for the devices that do work (Amazon doesn’t have a list of supported hardware just yet). Once you’ve got the updated app in place, you’ll see a nice big Test Drive button under the images on an app’s landing page.

The new feature leans heavily on Amazon’s massive EC2 backend — once the Test Drive button is pressed, an instance of the app starts running on EC2 server, with inputs being sent to the server and video/audio being sent back to the device. It’ll be interesting to see how well the feature actually works, but methinks I’ll have to dig through my box of Android gadgets for a bit before I find something that plays actually plays nice with it.



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16May

“Who was Steve Jobs” book tells youngsters who invented their computer

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Screen Shot 2012-05-16 at 5.38.35 PM

  It has been a little over 8 months since Steve Jobs died, and there are still novels, movies and other forms of entertainment rolling out about the legendary Apple co-founder. Just yesterday, it was announced that Aaron Sorkin (the guy behind The Social Network) would be writing the official Steve Jobs biopic, and it was known a few weeks ago…

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16May

Verizon To Axe Unlimited Data Once Their New Data Share Plans Go Live

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Verizon Wireless has been working on bringing shared data plans to market for months now, but it turns out not everyone may enjoy making that transition.

Verizon CFO Fran Shammo said at an investor conference earlier today that users on those wonderful old grandfathered unlimited data plans will soon have to give them up if they want to move into a 4G device.

“A lot of our 3G base is unlimited,” Shammo remarked. “As they start to migrate onto 4G, they will have to come off of unlimited and go onto the data share plan. That’s beneficial for us for many reasons.”

Though the move doesn’t come as a surprise — they’ve been running promotions to incentivize migration to their LTE network for a while now — but hearing their intentions actually spelled out like that probably won’t please many long-standing Verizon customers. The carrier is aiming to roll out their shared data plans “mid-summer,” though I expect more new details to trickle out soon.

But let’s back up a bit here — how will these things actually work? Though most of the details are still hush-hush, customers will be able to pay a set rate for tiered data plan that can be shared by all the devices on the account. Even though these new data plans are set to make their debut sooner rather than later, there’s still no information available on what they’ll actually cost. Verizon isn’t exactly known for being the most price-conscious wireless carrier (don’t get me started on the rise of $299 smartphones), but we’ll have to wait and see what they’ve come up with.

The concept of shared data plans would is wonderful for families and other multi-line accounts, but it doesn’t do any favors for the individual customers who don’t need more than one device. The status of existing customers who have had their unlimited data plans grandfathered over to their new 4G devices is also unclear — Shammo makes it sound like only customers who upgrade after the change takes place will have to pick a new data plan (for better or worse), and with any luck they’ll leave the lucky souls who have already locked their old data plans alone for now.



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15May

Three Ways Facebook Can Leverage Mobile To Grow Their Revenues

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Editor’s note: Hussein Fazal is CEO of AdParlor, an ad management and technology company for Facebook campaigns. AdParlor manages over 1 billion daily ad impressions on Facebook for clients such as Ubisoft, SEGA, Groupon, OMD and Starcom.

I must say that I have been a little bit disappointed recently in the many, many, many analysts who have been knocking the Facebook valuation with very limited insight into what is going on with their advertising business. Their revenue potential is as strong as it has ever been and the social network continues to grow its users and roll-out innovative advertising products.

While there are many things that Facebook can do to drive revenue related to display, search, and mobile – let’s take a look at three immediate steps Facebook could take to ramp up revenues from its 500 Million+ monthly active users on mobile devices.

1. Show more Sponsored Stories in the mobile news feed – A sponsored story is a piece of news that you would see in your news feed anyways – turned into an ad. It is relevant, social and most people who see a sponsored story wouldn’t even recognize it as an ad. Simply put – sponsored stories work. Looking at campaigns AdParlor has run across numerous verticals show that on average, sponsored stories have a 17% higher click-through-rate and a 38% higher conversion-rate than regular marketplace ads.

When sponsored stories were first introduced they were only shown on the right-hand column. They were then rolled out into the news feed on the web version of Facebook. At fmc they announced that they would begin to serve sponsored stories on mobile, and on April 26th it seems to have gone live. However, most users have seen few if any sponsored stories in their mobile news feed as Facebook is slowly rolling this out while monitoring user experience. Facebook can easily flip the switch on this, increasing the volume of sponsored stories it shows in the mobile news feed and increase their mobile revenues.

2- Combining Location & Offers – A while back Facebook attempted to compete with Groupon and other daily deal sites by creating a deals product. They quickly shut that down for multiple reasons – and then re-emerged recently with an offers product. These offers are coupons which any page owner can create for free – and will begin to appear in a user’s news feed on the web. The real benefit will start to roll in when Facebook begins to serve these offers in the news feed on mobile devices to users who are near the store providing the offer. Even though an offer is free to create – if Facebook can leverage location-based mobile offers – page owners will begin to see the ROI and will purchase ads and sponsored stories against these offers to get more distribution beyond what is given for free. Additionally, brands will now have a very clear path to seeing ROI when buying fans. The investment question around the value of growing your fan base – at least for physical location retailers – will be answered. This is sure to increase the ad spend these companies will make on growing their fan base.

3 – Open up mobile device-specific targeting – There is currently a Facebook broad category targeting option for mobile devices. Advertisers can choose between Android, iPhone, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone. However – this targeting simply means that a user has accessed Facebook through one of these devices. Creating an ad and selecting this targeting will show ads to these users – however they could be accessing Facebook via the web or even a different device. If Facebook were to tweak this and allow advertisers who select iPhone to have ads show specifically ON the iPhone to a user accessing Facebook from their iPhone – this would mark a significant opportunity. Specifically – one of the largest advertising categories on mobile devices is for apps – and the massive gaming subcategory. If Facebook were to enable actual mobile device-specific targeting – iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry application developers could then leverage Facebook advertising to drive application installs – taking the user right from the click of the ad into the corresponding app store. It seems that right now Facebook wants to limit mobile ads to be sponsored stories in the news feed for many reasons – to maintain user experience, to keep users within Facebook, and an effort to make it not feel like advertising. Given this – it is unlikely that Facebook would allow ads from the mobile news feed to direct users anywhere outside of Facebook. However – the opportunity is there – and the revenue potential is huge.



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15May

Smule Finally Makes Their Android Debut With The Auto-Tuning Songify App

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Smule has been churning out scores of popular music-making iOS apps for years now, but they’ve been notoriously gun-shy about bringing those apps to other platforms.

As of today though, that streak has finally come to an end — the company has just released their auto-tuning Songify app into the Google Play Store.

Originally developed by Khush (whom Smule acquired toward the end of last year), Songify turns user-recorded speech into surprisingly listenable songs by tuning those voice inputs to go along with preset background music. The iOS version peaked at #1 on Apple’s Top Free Apps chart shortly after its launch in July 2011, and Smule now hopes for similar success as it expands into new territory.

For a while though, it seemed like this day would never come. Late last year, Smule co-founder and CTO Ge Wang told InsideMobileApps that Android app development was under consideration by the company, but issues of audio latency in certain devices meant that not every user would have a consistently solid musical experience. Though company representatives are quick to note that latency is becoming less of an issue over time, Songify sort of side-steps that issue because it doesn’t rely on instantaneous audio feedback like some of Smule’s other apps (say, Ocarina for example).

Still, that didn’t stop the company from testing the waters ahead of today’s official launch. A preview version of Songify was recently published in the Google Play Store to generally positive reviews, though they did point to a few issues that were addressed in the final build.

So what’s next for the team at Smule? In case Songify doesn’t provide you with quite enough musical mirth, Smule has also revealed that their Magic Piano app is set to make its Android debut in just a few weeks, though it too is currently available in preview form for those who just can’t wait.

For now though, Smule is content to hunker down on Android and iOS — company representatives confirmed (again) that expansion into platforms like Windows Phone isn’t in the works at this time.





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