Archive for the ‘store’ tag
XBMC Nightly Builds Available for Adventurous Android Users [Video]
Android: XBMC was announced for Android back in July, with the caveat that the software would not be available in the Google Play store until it was stable across a wide range of devices. However, if you don’t mind doing a little tinkering with your Android device, nightly builds are now available in the XDA Developers forums. More »
Outside Lands: The festival where rock ‘n’ roll and tech startups collide
Outside Lands may be the only major outdoors music festival in the world where you’ll receive push notifications about your favorite acts from your iPhone, mingle with executives from trendy tech startups, and be offered gigabytes of storage instead of free beer.
It’s San Francisco, so I’d expect that tech companies would dominate the proceedings this year. If you’re headed out to catch the evening shows or you’re simply curious, here are some of the winning music-meets-tech moments of Outside Lands 2012:
In the Bay Area, you’re never quite free of the advertising push for cloud-based computing. SugarSync, a competitor to Google Drive, Sky Drive and others, gets my vote for the best showing at Outside Lands for its handy recharging station near the main stage, and offer to passers-by of 10 gigabytes of free storage.
But most of all, for convincing one its senior-level executives to don a unicorn mask and SugarSync t-shirt (see below). Now that’s dedication.
Outside Lands Mobile Apps
Outside Lands launched its own mobile apps, which are designed to make it easier for festival-goers to get around. If you’re headed to the festival this afternoon, make sure you download either the free iPhone or Android app. The app includes maps, and a list of options for food, beer, and wine. The in-built GroupMe messaging made it far easier for me to connect with friends, and avoid an annoying string of Facebook messages.
If you’re lucky enough to be attending the festival today, I recommend making a list of your favorite acts via the app. You’ll receive a push notification when these artists take the stage.
The online ticketing service, where a large portion of the festival-goers purchased their passes, set up an air conditioned tent (not that we needed it, given the icelandic temperatures this year) with live DJs, beer and wine, and a sports bar. The tent was strewn with large-screen TVs, which streamed live sports, including major league baseball.
It was never jam-packed, so proved to be the perfect chill-out spot.
PayPal’s tent was absolutely rammed this year. The online payments company set up a tent on the Polo Field for festival-goers to recharge devices and sip Jamba Juice. The juices and smoothies were available to buy via credit card on Here (A PayPal-owned competitor to Square).
PayPal also set up a convenience store for people to pick up sunscreen, mints, and gloves. All the proceeds from the store will be donated to charity: water and the Seva Foundation.
There is still plenty of time to listen in to the live show for free, courtesy of TuneIn. If you’re not familiar with them, TuneIn is a popular radio app for iPhone and Android and is based in Silicon Valley.
Tune in today via the app, and you’ll still be able to catch some headline acts, including Jack White, Stevie Wonder and Bloc Party. Check out the full line-up here.
Filed under: VentureBeat 
Visual Marketing Is Here – 5 Ways You Can Use It To Sell Your Ideas
Editor’s note: Iris Shoor is co-founder and VP Product Marketing at Takipi, a service for managing software downtime in the cloud. Before that, Iris was co-founder and VP Product at VisualTao, a B2B web and mobile service acquired by Autodesk.
For a long while I thought about marketing as wordsmithing – putting an abstract idea into a sentence, picking just the right words. But then things started to change – less text please, more graphics – we’d rather see it than read it. This year more than ever, visual content is going mainstream. Pinterest is using imagery as its main content, and within a few months hundreds of different websites have adopted a ‘Pinterest like’ design. Companies are switching to Tumblr instead of traditional blogs, with little text and lots of imagery. Facebook is making your profile more visual with the Timeline and the new image gallery, not to mention Instagram. There’s a change in the air and this time you don’t need to smell it – you can actually see it.
I have to admit that I started using visual marketing not because I identified a trend but because as an architect by trade that’s the way I think – visually. I founded two companies (you can read more about our journey from 0 to 10M downloads here) where visual marketing is used as a main marketing strategy. To make things more interesting, both companies are as far away from being visual as you can possibly get – a B2B app for engineers and a Cloud/Big Data tool for developers. Here are 5 ways you can use visuals to increase traffic, get more buzz and reach more users:
“Say Cheese” – How A Team Picture Helped Us Get Better Reviews On The App Store
After every update to the App Store/Google Play we used to send a newsletter to our user base, highlighting the newest features and asking to review the version. On one release, after sending the newsletter we got 3X more reviews than usual (although there was nothing extraordinary about that version). It took us a while to figure out the reason. For that release we placed a picture of the team – the engineers who worked on the app right next to the ‘review us’ link. While traditional marketing uses people’s faces for just about everything (why do you always see smiling faces next to cheese, cars or real estate?), startups tend to restrict their team pictures to the ‘about us’ page. People are immediately attracted to human faces and react to action, when they feel it is called for by real people.
Want People To Remember Your Product? Look Different
When introducing a new product to a market, one of the main challenges is to have users remember your product and easily tell it from others. You want potential users to remember reading about your product two months ago, or recall seeing it being used by a colleague. Using a memorable image or a unique visual language is a great way to do just that. MailChimp is bringing their brand to life using a humoristic visual of a mailman monkey. DropBox is using childlike illustrations as a visual language, and by doing so differentiate themselves from other storage services. Heroku is using Japanese elements from Origami to Japanese mythology, so people would remember and emotionally relate to their product (which BTW has nothing to do with Japan).
[DropBox and Heroku using memorable visual styles]
Reality Check – Show Your Product In A Real World Context
Look at a screenshot of your product. Now take a step backward and look at the full picture. What does the user look like? Is the product being used at the office, at home or outdoors? Is it daytime or nighttime? When the product is displayed in context users can understand much more within seconds. This method is also more credible, as once you see a product used in a real world scenario it makes it harder to doubt it. For example, on Square’s homepage the main content is an image of the product being used in a farmers’ market. This picture is the main message and they’re not backing it up with text. With just a glimpse users can understand how the product works, where you’d likely use it and eliminate the ‘who needs it’ reaction.
Having A Hard Time Getting To Bloggers? Great Visuals Might Help
There’s no magic trick when it comes to getting media coverage. A great product and a trendy market surely help, but so do beautiful and funny images. A common mistake is to send bloggers product screenshots. Most screenshots don’t capture the essence and magic of a product. In fact, you’re asking the reader to work pretty hard to understand your product by looking at a screenshot. When placed in a minimized/cut version it will most likely become a ‘generic’ screenshot, looking like any other app or website you’ve seen before. Here’s an example from our first product where we tried to capture the essence of a localization feature with visuals, and without screenshots -
“Ouch, That Looks Painful” – Explain The Pain Using A Visual Analogy
Explaining the pain is always a main challenge when introducing a new product – no one really wants to hear what’s wrong with the way they work now. You can probably recall numerous videos of new products where almost half of the video is dedicated to telling you how much your life is a mess. With our second company, Takipi, the pain we’re trying to present is complex software debugging – looking for the source of a problem in the code. We’re not telling developers what they do today is wrong or difficult, but rather use a fun analogy for debugging and the pain they’re experiencing every day.
[Developers - know this feeling?]
Search In Pics: Google Spider Lights, Android Neon Lamp & Classic Urchin Sticker
In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more. Google Neon Light: Source: Google Store Android Listening To Music: Source:…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
MeeGenius Raises $2.4 Million To Bring Childrens Books To The iPad, Android Tablets, And Other Devices
Kids learning startup MeeGenius launched in 2010, with the idea of helping children learn by introducing highly curated apps full of licensed and original e-books. The app is available on the iPhone, iPad, and a wide range of Android devices, and has been downloaded more than 1.5 million times. Now it’s closed a $2.4 million round of funding to help it expand and add even more kids content.
The MeeGenius app is free to download and provides a single place for kid lit, where parents can buy titles and children can read them, all in one place. It has more than 700 titles available for purchase, and there’s no confusing flipping between a store for purchasing and downloading books and one for reading them.
It’s also very much a curated experience, providing high-quality content from a variety of sources. MeeGenius works directly with publishers, as well as authors, to bring their titles on board. The startup is also producing its own titles, working with writers, editors, and illustrators to create unique new stories. To date, MeeGenius has sold millions of titles to
MeeGenius was founded in April 2010 by Wandy Hoh, a mom of three and a former VP at Pomona Capital. And MeeGenius’s investors are equally passionate about serving kids. The $2.4 million round included investment Menlo Ventures and Sunrise Capital Partners, among others. In addition, Menlo managing director Sonja Perkins and Sunrise Capital principal Hemang Mehta are on MeeGenius’s board.
The app was one of the first to debut on the iPad, and has since expanded to a number of other platforms. It’s got an iPhone and Android app, as well as one for Google TV and the Chrome Web Store. The Chrome app was made to target the education market, and as such, comes with a free 20-book library for educators that have purchased Chromebooks. The startup is based in New York City, and has fewer than ten employees today. Still, it employs a number of freelance writers, editors and consultants, which it will use to add new titles and expand to new markets.
Remains of the Day: Steam Moves Beyond Games, Will Add Other Apps to Its Online Store [For What It's Worth]
Steam will be adding other apps besides games to its online store, Google Translate for Android updates with image translation, Microsoft is rumored to be dropping “Metro” from its Windows 8 vocabulary, and YouTubes built-in editor gets revamped. More »
Best Buy founder seeks to stop "2.0" plan to shrink retail chain
A decade after observers doubted that Apple could take on efficient big box retailers with its own retail stores, Best Buy is seeking to survive by scaling down its store sizes. Its founder thinks that plan might be fatal.
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Back To School: 5 Apps That Will Make You Fall (Even More) In Love With Your Phone
You’re heading off to college. You have no idea that the next four years of fun will fly by, likely leaving you jobless and in debt. You’re unconcerned with nonsense like that — you’re ready to achieve your dreams! You’re ready to party! You’re ready to meet your mate in life!
But before you pack up the family van full of clothes, collapsible IKEA furniture and school supplies, there’s one thing you can’t forget to pack: your trusty smartphone. It’s the one thing that no college student — not a drama geek nor homecoming queen, not a stoner nor a virgin — can live without.
And as we all know, apps are the life blood of a smartphone (aside from electricity). All that said, these are the ones you’ll come to know, love, and use every day as your pursue your dreams of higher education.
Sparrow
As is the case as you get older, email (and life) only become more difficult. If you’re an incoming college freshman, you probably just got your new .edu email address, which you’ll now add to the list of email addresses you already had like Gmail, Facebook, iCloud, etc.
You need something better than iOS’s default Mail application, and chances are you need something better than Android’s too. That’s where Sparrow comes in. It’s Mail on steroids. It brings all your messages into a unified inbox, lets you swipe to reply, star, forward, delete, etc., and even brings in cute little profile pictures next to conversations (if you use Facebook Connect).
The only caveat is that it doesn’t offer push notifications on iOS, but Sparrow was just recently purchased by Google to improve Gmail so I’d expect the $2.99 app to only get better as time goes on.
Astrid Task/To-Do List
As much fun as the phone can be, it’s also an incredible tool for productivity and efficiency. Apps are what help you make the most of your time and energy, and perhaps the best service to help you stay organized, prioritized, and ready to ace your life is Astrid Task.
The app lets you create tasks, complete with due dates, priority levels, and an add to calendar button. Each task can also be filtered into various lists, including the default Home, Work, Personal, and Shopping.
Even better, you can include other people in on your tasks in case you’re working on a group project for school, have a shared grocery list with your roommate, etc. You can also create reusable checklists for things you do every week or every month, and keep from re-creating them over and over. The app is free, easy, and pretty.
App Store Link
Google Play Link
Grindr/Blendr
College is all about trying new things. Sometimes that means using recreational drugs, and sometimes that means going goth for a month. Frequently, that means hooking up with the same sex. But how does a young, bi-curious new college student find the right “lab” partner for this type of experiment?
Well, if you’re a man, Grindr, and if you’re a brave lady, Blendr. As it stands now, Grindr is for men only while Blendr is for peeps of all genders and orientations. That means that girls seeking girls on Blendr are almost guaranteed to get hit on by men, so if you can shake that off than by all means, install and get your gay on.
The app/s work by pulling in everyone nearby, displaying who is online with a green dot by their profile picture. When you click on someone you can see their distance, a little bio information, and start a chat. With 4 million users globally on Grindr alone, you’re sure to find someone interesting. Plus, it’s free.
(College kids only — you must be 18 to download the app.)
App Store Link
Google Play Link
TheWhoot
Making friends, and even making time to hang out with them, can get difficult in college. On top of classes, you’ll likely involve yourself in other extra-curriculars like clubs, Greek life, sports, etc. Past that, we’ve become a progressively flaky generation, constantly cancelling at the last minute.
TheWhoot helps with these issues quite a bit. It lets you see what your friends are up to tonight as opposed to Facebook Events scheduled for the future (who knows how you’ll feel when the big night rolls around?). You start by giving an idea of what you’ll be up to tonight, within the bounds of four categories: Working, Staying In, Relaxing Out (as in hanging at a bar or something), or Partying.
You can choose to add context, like the location, name of the event, etc., or simply leave it as a category your general mood for the evening. After that, you’re given access to all your friends’ plans for the evening, and you can filter through categories to see whose mood matches yours.
For the new kid at school, this should keep your free nights busy and your busy nights busier, all for free.
App Store Link
Google Play Link
Songza
Music is a part of every college kid’s life. And knowing the coolest, hottest music before it’s played over and over on the radio as the coolest, hottest music definitely wins cool points. There is, therefore, no better app than Songza. You can know everything or nothing about music and I guarantee you’ll love the app.
When you first open up Songza, Concierge (the app’s core feature) serves up various activities you might be doing based on the time, day, what type of device you’re on, and your music preferences. This could be Working Out or Studying on a weekday morning, or Getting High or Getting Naked late at night on a weekend. Once you choose an activity, you choose a filter for that activity, like Hype Rap, Heartfelt, Feel-Good Oldies, etc.
After those two clicks, you have a list of highly curated playlists (assembled by music experts — Rolling Stone authors, DJs, etc.) at your disposal. Click, listen, enjoy. Of course, Songza also lets you get to playlists by choosing an activity, mood or genre.
App Store Link
Google Play Link
Check out the rest of our back to school suggestions here.
Following App.net’s Reboot, Smore Introduces App Flyers For DIY Mobile App Marketing
Smore, a startup which lets anyone quickly build attractive, single-page websites which it calls flyers, is rolling out a new version of its service today to specifically targets mobile app developers. Called simply “app flyers,” theses mini, customized websites can be built in seconds by pulling in data from the App Store itself, then allowing users to tweak the design using a handful of built-in styles.
“Most apps are not built by these huge companies that have a ton of money to spend on marketing,” says Smore co-founder Gilad Avidan of the new offering. “Most apps are small or micro businesses – and these people need help getting the word out.”
Smore, a TechStars Seattle 2011 alum, launched into public beta this April, and now has over 10,000 users on its service, who have produced 8,000 flyers. Combined, the network has seen 100,000 unique pageviews per month, with flyers averaging around 100 views each.
What makes Smore different from other DIY website builders, is not only that it focuses on the one-page, promotional websites, but that it’s thinking about the needs of marketers – or rather, those who have to do their own marketing.
“With Smore, because we have these cool promotion tools, our users average much higher views than anywhere else,” says Avidan. “The flyers work very well with social, and you can send them in email – and they look really cool in email as well. They work on mobile. They’re SEO optimized. All that stuff really makes a difference,” he says.
Like its flagship service, the new app flyers also include built-in analytics, and support Google Analytics integration. Plans to beef up the basic analytics are in development, as are plans to roll out even more promotional tools through integration of various APIs and new partnerships.
For example, the company wants to point its users to other useful tools, like email marketing services or event listings providers. It also plans to expand to new verticals, like music and education, and it plans to support flyer creation for sellers on eBay and Etsy, among other things.
Avidan says the new Smore app flyers will help fill the vacuum that’s been left in the wake of App.net founder Dalton Caldwell’s decision to shift his company’s focus away from those About.me pages for apps in order to build a paid Twitter-like service. “This vacuum is not just starting now with this pivot,” says Avidan. “It’s probably safe to say that for the last few months, they haven’t really been doing anything for their market.” He also notes that there are several DIY website builders out there, but Smore’s key selling point is not just its design, it’s the focus on bringing professional marketing tools to everyone.
The service is will always be available as a freemium product, with things like multiple flyers, better analytics, and more tools available as paid features further down the line.
App developers can begin building their own flyers here, for free.
Note: Image is an example only, not a customer.
HP opent kleinste pop-up store in abri
Printerfabrikant HP heeft de kleinste pop-up store van Nederland geopend in de abri op het Leidseplein. HP en exploitant JCDecaux hebben de drukke tramhalte ingericht als winkel die geheel gewijd is aan de nieuwste ultrabook van HP, de Spectre.