MobileBeat | VentureBeat

Hipmunk Hotel & Flight Search

| FREE | Hipmunk

Travel search service Hipmunk launches new Android app | VentureBeat - MobileBeat | VentureBeat

September 29, 2011 | Tom Cheredar Travel and hotel search service Hipmunk launched a new mobile app for Android devices today. Much like Hipmunk’s website, the Android app aggregates ticket fares from airlines and allows people to sort them by time, price, flight duration, airline as well as “agony,” Hipmunk’s algorithm for discovering the most enjoyable flights. Similar to its iPhone app, Hipmunk for Android’s visual interface optimizes the travel search experience for a mobile device without sacrificing any of the key features that makes the service so desirable to use. The app also lets you see which flights have Wi-Fi access, lets you save searches and sends you directly to an airline’s website or third-party travel service to book your tickets. Hipmunk faces competition on the Android Market from competitors like Travelocity and Kayak. Co-founded by Adam Goldstein and Steve Huffman in 2010, the San Francisco-based startup has $5.2 million total funding from Ignition Partners, Y-Combinator and a handful of angel investors. The company has a total of 10 employees, including Hipmunk Senior programmer Christopher Slowe, formerly of Reddit. Images via Hipmunk    Tom Cheredar is a writer at VentureBeat and freelance journalist. He graduated from Middle Tennessee State University with a degree in Journalism. He also co-hosts weekly tech podcast The Drill Down with Andy Sorcini and Devindra Hardawar. In addition to covering technology, his work can be found at Geeks of Doom. You can reach him on Twitter at @tched Please send all pitches to tips@venturebeat.com. Read More

AppESP

| FREE | AppStoreHQ

AppStoreHQ introduces appESP for personalized recommendations on Android apps | VentureBeat - MobileBeat | VentureBeat

Discovering new and useful Android apps isn’t easy. That’s why AppStoreHQ is introducing appESP, a personalized discovery platform for finding new apps on Android phones. The company is releasing the app today at DiscoveryBeat 2010, our conference on getting apps noticed. The appESP “discovery engine” generates recommended apps using three sources: statistical analysis, or comparing installed apps across all Android users; social, leveraging your own friends to boost recommended apps your friends use; and something called Zeitgeist, analyzing media and social discussion about apps. The Zeitgeist feature uses technology that analyzes thousands of blog posts, tweets and news about Android apps. The result is individually personalized recommendations delivered straight to your phone, said Chris DeVore, chief executive of AppStoreHQ. You just install the app and the recommendations are delivered to you automatically. The recommendations are recalculated on a daily basis, based on your shifting preferences. You can tune the recommendations by marking each suggested app as “like” or “dislike.” You can also get access to the AppStoreHQ “hottest apps list,” which is updated aily. The recommendation is available to users via the appESP site and is supported by a cloud-based applications programming interface that can by licensed by third parties such as carriers, phone makers and app publishers. The company was founded in 2009 and has four employees.The company’s main business is its web-based discovery and distribution platform for iPhone and HTML5 apps. Rivals include the Android Market, AppBrain and DoubleTwist. A slide show describing appESP is here. The company is founded by Founders Co-op in Seattle. The app has been in beta testing and has 10,000 users. Dean is lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He covers video games, security, chips and a variety of other subjects. Dean previously worked at the San Jose Mercury News, the Wall Street Journal, Read More

Tango Video Calls

| FREE | Tango

Tango’s iPhone/Android video chat app takes off with 1M downloads | VentureBeat - MobileBeat | VentureBeat

Tango, makers of a cross-platform mobile video chat application for iPhone and Android phones, announced today that its app has been downloaded 1 million times in its first 10 days of release. The company reports that Tango debuted as the number one social networking app on the App Store in nine countries, including the U.S., Taiwan, South Korea, Spain, and France. It has ranked in the top 10 Android communications apps since its release on September 30. Why all the fuss? Tango’s app enables simple video chat across iPhone and Android with a user experience reminiscent of Apple’s FaceTime feature on the iPhone 4. Competitors like Fring have had cross-platform video chat for some time, but Tango wins out with its ease of use and high quality video. The service can also make calls over 3G and 4G cellular networks, making it more useful overall than Apple’s WiFi-only FaceTime. In a video chat interview, Tango’s executives mentioned that the service is using peer-to-peer (P2P) technology to handle the video calls. That means the service is highly scalable and doesn’t rely entirely on the speed of the company’s servers. Tango has six patents pending surrounding its video chat technology, three of which are related specifically to its P2P technology implementation. Not only is it easy to make calls with Tango, it’s also very easy to find your friends on the service. The application combs through your iPhone or Android Address book, and when it finds that one of your contacts is already using Tango, they’re added to your list of contacts within the app. The setup process for the app is also much simpler than services like Fring. Based in Palo Alto, Calif., Tango has raised $5 million in funding from individual investors including Bill Hambrecht, Michael Birch, Bill Tai, and Daniel Read More

The Dealmap

| FREE | The Dealmap

Dealmap Android app lets users filter nearby offers for the best deals | VentureBeat - MobileBeat | VentureBeat

Activity-planning site Center’d is launching its Dealmap Android app today that will let users filter out the chaff and find the best deals in the vicinity. The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company says it can aggregate daily deals from almost 100 sources and put them all in one place. Center’d previously launched an iPhone app that has been downloaded more than 175,000 times in its first six weeks. The app sorts through more than 350,000 local deals and coupons and makes them available to consumers where they want them on web sites, social apps, daily emails and mobile apps. More than 375,000 people get these updates daily. The service can filter by 10 business categories and eight deal types. Sifting through the chaff is a big part of daily life. If your mobile phone can help you do that, it will become an even more indispensable part of your life. Consumers and businesses can upload their own deals to Dealmap, so the company takes advantage of user-generated content. This app can aggregate daily deals from companies such as Groupon and Living Social. It then organizes the deals and maps them, using relevance algorithms. Center’d has raised $10 million from Norwest Venture Partners and KeyNote Ventures. Angel investors include Bill Harris, former PayPal and Intuit chief executive. Competitors include 8coupons and Yipit, neither of which have a mobile app yet. Center’d was founded in 2007 and the Dealmap web site launched in May. The company has eight employees. Getting content noticed is a challenge for everyone making apps. Join us at DiscoveryBeat 2010 and hear secrets from top industry executives about how to break through and profit in the new cross-platform app ecosystem. From metrics to monetization, we’ll take an in depth look at the best discovery strategies and why they’re working. The Read More

my6sense: Smart Social & News

| FREE | my6sense

My6sense looks to soften information overload for Android users | VentureBeat - MobileBeat | VentureBeat

There’s a lot of information coming through the tubes of the Internet these days, like RSS feeds, Facebook updates and Twitter posts. Most of them aren’t worth reading for the everyday user. My6sense’s new Android app, launching today, hopes to cut through most of that chaff. The phenomenon of information overload online has opened up wide a new market for applications to chop out content readers don’t find interesting. My6sense’s app uses an intuition engine to figure out what users are interested in reading and getting rid of the rest of the noise. Its information isn’t ordered chronologically but by relevance as determined by the engine. The focus for My6sense is on links: The app automatically removes any status update that doesn’t provide some kind of new content. Of the 20,000 updates that someone typically sees each day, the only ones that pop up in the feed are updates that contain some kind of link. The Android app now integrates the oft-maligned Google Buzz as well, in addition to the usual assortment of media feeds. My6sense is a graduate of DEMO Spring 2010 conference, the product-launch event coproduced by VentureBeat. It started its offerings with an iPhone app. The Israeli company has raised $2.5 million to date. Read More

Bing on VZW

| FREE | Microsoft Corporation

Microsoft launches Bing Android app for Verizon, but will anyone care? | VentureBeat - MobileBeat | VentureBeat

After releasing an iPhone app for its Bing search engine last December, Microsoft announced an equivalent Android Bing app today for Verizon users. But since Android is much more deeply integrated into Google’s search and navigation offerings than the iPhone, the release of the Bing app honestly strikes me as curious. Who would actually use this thing? And is Microsoft doing anything with it to entice Android users to choose Bing over Google’s myriad services? At first glance, the answer to the last question would be a simple “no”. The Android app is a dead ringer for its iPhone sibling: The main page features the Bing image of the day, and from there you have access to the app’s various sections, like “Images”, “Movies”, and “Maps”. Also like the iPhone app, the Bing image search is attractive and easy to use, and Microsoft has integrated voice search capabilities into pretty much every aspect of the app. By bringing over the basic features of the Bing iPhone app to Android, Microsoft has managed to deliver a competent product. But, at least as it stands right now, there’s little reason for an Android user ever to launch the Bing app. All of Google’s search and navigation services are better, and it also has already integrated voice commands into the Android OS. The Bing Android app also appears to be missing some of the newer features of the iPhone app, including social search, and “visual scanning”, Microsoft’s take on the Google Goggles camera search feature. Like Yahoo’s simplistic Android search app, Microsoft most likely brought Bing to Android just to have a presence on Google’s mobile platform. But aside from simply being on the Android Market, it doesn’t seem like there’s much it’s going to accomplish with the app. Microsoft is planning to bring Read More

Voice Search

| FREE | Google Inc.

Control your Android phone with Google Voice Actions | VentureBeat - MobileBeat | VentureBeat

August 12, 2010 | Anthony Ha Google is dramatically expanding the ability of users to control their Android smartphones by speaking. Today, it unveiled a new feature called Voice Actions. The feature is being included in the latest version of the existing Google Voice Search application, which will be installed on Droid 2 phones, and is also available for download on other devices using Android version 2.2. Voice Actions are a set of verbal commands for the phone, specifically: Google spokespeople demonstrated this feature on-stage at a press conference in San Francisco this morning. The translation of spoken words into commands, and the performance of the actual tasks, seemed to happen quickly and accurately, although it remains to be seen how they perform in a less controlled environment. The company said this will be particularly useful in cases where it’s not convenient to type. Lead engineer Mike LeBeau offered the example walking to a bar where he was running late for meeting friends, so he was able to dictate a text message saying he would be late then bring up a map to the bar. (And there will still be places where it makes sense to type, such as a library or rock concert.) This seems to go beyond any of the capabilities Apple has built for the iPhone so far, though that may change since the company brought the startup Siri, which also allows users to perform tasks by voice. Google’s approach is pretty different from Siri’s in the sense that it’s focused on a specific set of commands, whereas Siri built a complex language model for translating complex commands into actions. Also unlike Siri (which planned to make money by taking a cut of the business transaction it enabled, though it remains to be seen whether Apple keeps that), Read More

YouTube Mobile

| FREE | Google

YouTube blows away iPhone app with faster HTML5-powered mobile site | VentureBeat - MobileBeat | VentureBeat

...Interpreting Innovation VentureBeat Profiles Events Jobs Videos Newsletters Entrepreneur Corner Conversations on Innovation Main MobileBeat GreenBeat GamesBeat DealsBeat DemoBeat SocialBeat MediaBeat YouTube blows away iPhone app with faster HTML5-powered mobile site July 7, 2010 | Devind... Read More

Twitter

| FREE | Twitter, Inc.

Twitter keeps filling holes, launches an Android app | VentureBeat - MobileBeat | VentureBeat

...Interpreting Innovation VentureBeat Profiles Events Jobs Videos Newsletters Entrepreneur Corner Conversations on Innovation Main MobileBeat GreenBeat GamesBeat DealsBeat DemoBeat SocialBeat MediaBeat Twitter keeps filling holes, launches an Android app April 30, 2010 | Kim-Mai Cutler | Vi... Read More

Rhapsody

| FREE | Rhapsody International Inc.

Rhapsody plays offense: iPhone app allows downloaded playlists | VentureBeat - MobileBeat | VentureBeat

One of the original pioneers in streaming music is still making waves. Rhapsody released a new version of its iPhone app that allows people to wirelessly download playlists to their iPhones, iPods or iPads and listening to them whenever — even if they don’t have an Internet connection. The move comes just weeks after the company, which was revolutionary at the beginning of the decade for offering an all-you-can-eat subscription model, began life as an independent company after been spun-off from RealNetworks. The ability to cache playlists is a much sought-after feature that hadn’t yet landed in the U.S. before. Berkeley-based competitor MOG plans to launch this feature on both Android devices and iPhones with a $10 a month subscription service in the second quarter of this year. The much-hyped Swedish startup Spotify offers this already. But sadly, it hasn’t been able to cross the pond from Europe. Rhapsody recently launched its first Android app and is at work building one for Blackberry devices. The company’s app is free, but to download playlists, users will have to pay either $10 a month for access from a single device or $15 for access on up to three devices (think computer, phone and iPad). The company was spun-off from Real Networks about three weeks ago. Real and Viacom each own about 47.5 percent of the company. Vivendi’s Universal Music Group also owns a small stake of under five percent. Don’t miss MobileBeat 2010, VentureBeat’s conference on the future of mobile. The theme: “The year of the superphone and who will profit.” Now expanded to two days, MobileBeat 2010 will take place on July 12-13 at The Palace Hotel in San Francisco. Early-bird pricing is available until May 15. For complete conference details, or to apply for the MobileBeat Startup Competition, click here. Read More