Temple Jump, Tiny Birds, Numbers With Friends. These are not the apps you love. They’re fakes designed to scam you out of $1.99 when you go to buy Temple Run, Tiny Wings, or Words With Friends. Today Apple took a stand against plagiarism, kicking these rip-offs out of the US App Store. Good riddance, but how can platform owners stop these developers before they rob users of thousands or even millions of dollars? This morning, The Guardian wrote about how Anton Sinelnikov who made the fakes listed above and other scam developers are essentially stealing money from hardworking independent studios like Imangi and Andreas Illiger, as well as industry giants like Zynga. Temple Jump even reached the top of the paid app chart. Apparently that was the last straw, and since then Apple has removed many of Anton’s apps so they’re no longer available for download. This morning, Keith Shepard, found of Temple Run maker Imangi Studios tweeted that several other rip-offs had been removed as well. In the past, Apple has gone after developers who cheated the review system, booting 1000 apps by one developer back in 2009. The problem has continued, though, with scam developers relying on curiosity stemming from outraged tweets and Facebook messages to drive sales, as seen in this off-hand graph submitted by developer Kode80. The App Store and Android Marketplace are too big to be entirely policed without the help of users. That’s why Apple needs a new predefined option in its “Report A Problem” button shown on App Store apps. Right now there’s only “This application has a bug”, “This application is offensive”, “My concern is not listed here”, and an open comment field. “This app is a fake version of another app” should be added. Android, Facebook, and other platform owners should ensure they have Read More
Eric Eldon is a writer at TechCrunch. He was previously the cofounder and editor of Inside Network, where he managed publications including Inside Facebook, Inside Social Games and Inside Mobile Apps. Before that, he spent a couple years covering technology and finance at VentureBeat, a leading Silicon Valley publication where he was the first employee. While Inside Network sold... → Learn More Most popular mobile sports apps are trying to feed you scores and news, or show you fantasy numbers. OnSports, by HitPost, is in a smaller class of apps that’s focused on users running the discussion themselves. And now, ahead of the Super Bowl this Sunday, viral growth and featured spots on the Android Market and the iTunes App Store are helping it step up against larger competitors. The app, which lets users make their own reports and polls with professional photos, is now #2 on the Android Market free sports app section, and climbed to #13 in the iTunes version of the category since yesterday. This has translated to around 50,000 daily active users, chief executive Aaron Krane tells me, with 60% of new users returning within 24 hours. He says the app, which makes it easy to share activity to Facebook and Twitter, is generating 30,000 posts to Facebook each day, and 300 tweets per hour on Twitter. OnSports is also sending about 3000 SMS messages per day. Some of these metrics are of the vanity variety — and they’re certainly not of the scale of social mobile games — but they all indicate an engaged group of core users, in an immature category of mobile usage. Most significant sports apps, including ones from ESPN and major sports leagues, are focused on broadcasting scores and professional news to users; while they may have social features for commenting and Read More
Jordan Crook studied English Literature at New York University before entering the tech space. Prior to joining TechCrunch, Crook dabbled in mobile marketing and mobile apps as well as doing device reviews for MobileMarketer and MobileBurn. Crook is fascinated with alternative energy production and greentech. She is now a writer for CrunchGear. → Learn More The Super Bowl is just around the corner, but unfortunately most of us won’t be able to attend the big game. Parties are fun and all, but there’s nothing like leaving the stadium with arms full of jerseys, footballs, foam fingers and the like. How else are you supposed to relive the excitement over and over without any mementos? (In a non-serial killer kind of way, of course.) Well, the good news is that Shazam and Delivery Agent have partnered yet again to let you buy Super Bowl XLVI goods from your phone, PC, or tablet while you watch the game. You may remember a similar situation with the TV show Covert Affairs, which we reported on in November. The Super Bowl version works in the same way. If you’re using the Shazam app during the big game, the app will serve you contextual promos for certain products that you’d only be able to buy if you were in the stadium. It’s pretty simple, since you can purchase the product straight from your device. Cablevision customers will be able to buy straight from their remote, with products becoming available within the channel guide. Then, once the Giants beat the Patriots (go New York!), a whole new assortment of merchandise will be made available. If you don’t already have the Shazam app, head over to the Apple App Store or Android Market for a free download. Shazam® is the world’s leading mobile discovery company, enabling people to Read More
You know what’s funny? If you Google “how do you get kids to learn” (sans quotes, even), the first result goes to this TechCrunch blog post about an app that lets kids draw butts on the iPad. Really! The post details the company called Madbrook (aka Everything Butt Art), which launched at TechCrunch Disrupt NY in May. It’s the brand behind a series of printed books, all of which are meant to teach creativity and step-by-step drawing while using humor and silliness to appeal to the young demographic. Now, the iPad app promised at Disrupt has finally arrived. The company’s first digital creation, Butt Art -Kids Learn to Draw Zoo Animals Step-by-Step, has gone live in the App Store. OK, seriously. Butts? Yes, butts. The interactive app teaches drawing by starting everything with a butt shape (a rounded, lowercase w). The end result is not actually a picture of a butt, mind you, but a fairly cute animal drawing instead. In the printed books, Everything Butt Art at the Zoo and Everything Butt Art on the Farm, the results are zoo animals and farm animals, respectively. In the new iPad app, however, kids don’t just draw and trace shapes, they can also decorate the drawings with stamps, play a hidden shape game (Butt Hunt!), and read a full-color e-book, too. While parents may roll their eyes at this sort of thing (is this really a blog post about drawing butts?!), the key takeaway here is that Everything Butt Art is a company that has managed to tap into how kids think. They’re making learning fun, by making it silly and giggly and yeah, kind of stupid…but it works. (Butt it works?) Don’t believe us, though, just ask your iPad-happy kids to try it out. The new app is available as a free download Read More
We covered the launch of Summly an application that summarises text last year, but I recently caught up with Nick D’Aloisio, the16 year year-old programmer who came up with the application for a video interview. Its sounds almost boringly simple but the sheer amount of online content means the eco-system for these apps is rising. Formerly known as Trimit (which we covered back in July), Summly was developed by D’Aloisio from his bedroom in South London over a Summer break from school. Nick then managed to attract the attention of billionaire Hong Kong investor Li Ka-shing and his investment vehicle, Horizons Ventures and secured a $300,000 seed round. The boy Om Malik calls “the Internet’s new boy genius” has now built a startup team to exploit Summly’s potential. Summly can condense content into 1,000, 500, or 140-character summaries, offering a world of simpler browsing and search experiences. Indeed, researchers at MIT, D’Aloisio says, found Summly outperformed the “highest academically published results” by a factor of 30 percent. Read More
The big promise of location-based mobile apps is that they can help you find something great in real life without you meaning to look for it. But that hasn’t usually been my experience. Instead, whether because of the friction of having to check in, the lack of adoption by friends outside of tech, or whatever else, I simply forget to use them. That has changed with Highlight, a new passive location app for iOS that shows you when Facebook users with friends and interests in common are nearby. Since it launched last week, I’ve gotten in touch with an old friend/source who’s now at a big new company, discovered a couple previous acquaintances who happen to live or work near me, and got the heads up about a fellow blogger creeping behind me at work. My experience is more or less on track with what founder Paul Davison is hearing from other users so far. But before I get into that, what’s different about Highlight from the million other location apps out there? At first, it doesn’t seem like much: you install it on your phone, sign in with Facebook, and continue your life as normal. But there is no check-in. Instead, you get notifications showing up whenever Facebook friends, friends-of-friends or just people with shared interests (that is, Liked Facebook pages) are close. If you click through any of the notifications, you can see their Facebook profile photos, the specific shared friends and interests you have, and the option to message with them or leave a comment. The combination of the Facebook social graph and the frictionless sharing experience makes discovery uniquely automatic. The closest app I’ve seen to it is Sonar, which lets you find Foursquare users with things in common, but still requires a check-in. Maybe everyone else doing location will evolve Read More
Eric Eldon is a writer at TechCrunch. He was previously the cofounder and editor of Inside Network, where he managed publications including Inside Facebook, Inside Social Games and Inside Mobile Apps. Before that, he spent a couple years covering technology and finance at VentureBeat, a leading Silicon Valley publication where he was the first employee. While Inside Network sold... → Learn More Sincerely, the maker of mobile apps that let you send your photos as print postcards, is pushing out a new version of its Sincerely Ink app today. The main change is that the theme now features Valentine’s Day cards, as well as other themes like Birthdays or New Year’s. Not huge news in and of itself, but get ready for many more updates like this — the Christmas season went so well for the company that it’s doubling down on holiday editions Its largest mobile app, Postagram (a regular top app in the iTunes photo app category) saw 39% of its users also install and send a card using the Sincerely Ink app, founder Matt Brezina tells me. Postagram also lets you mail high-quality print versions of phone photos, and it could theoretically also be used during the holidays. So, the cross-promotion number means that lots of users are serious about themed cards for special occasions, and that Sincerely’s theme changes are hitting home with them. The Ink app includes 20 Valentine’s Day-themed cards, although there are also new Thank You and Birthday cards available now. Brezina says they’re adding more designs all the time without the app itself needing to be updated. Customization options include photo filters and a section for including a personalized message. Cards cost $1.99 for a glossy 5×7 inch photo print, including postage in the US, Canada and the UK. Photos ship within 3 to 7 Read More
Social video browsing app Showyou just launched version 3.0 of its iPad application, a major update with a ton of new features. Competing in a hot space with competitors like Fanhattan, Shelby.tv, Squrl, Vodio and others, Showyou offers a grid-like view for browsing the videos your friends are sharing on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube and Vimeo. Once connected, you can watch any of the over 30 million videos indexed by the Showyou search engine. With version 3.0, four months in the making, the focus is offering users a better way to find content and new ways to drill down deeper into their favorite videos and topics. The Showyou application now pulls in over 5,000,000 videos retrieved from users’ Facebook and Twitter feeds per day, and includes nearly 700,000,000 “social signals” (data from tweets, other metadata) in its search index. According to founder Mark Hall, Showyou is now handling a video volume of 150 videos per second and 5 million videos per day – numbers which represent the incredible amount of videos being socially shared across various networks. With the new version of the iPad app, the aim was to use this massive archive of data to improve Showyou’s social discovery mechanisms. In Showyou 3.0, users can tap on friends’ user icons within the app which will then launch a grid of the videos they’ve shared. Another update involves a new category grid feature that lets you see the top videos within a given topical area. You can also now browse the videos by social network (e.g. those shared on Facebook, Twitter, etc.), toggle between popular and recent videos, and browse through videos associated with Twitter hashtags, among other things. There are actually dozens of features in this new update, some of which involve user interface improvements which, like the above, are easier Read More
Sarah currently works as a writer for TechCrunch, after having previously spent over three years at ReadWriteWeb. Prior to becoming a professional blogger, Sarah worked in I.T. across a number of industries, including banking, retail and software. → Learn More Photo organization service (and TechCrunch Disrupt finalist) Everpix just launched its first iPhone application. The app does two key things: it offers you a way to access your entire photo collection from your phone, plus it automatically uploads all your iPhone photos to the Everpix cloud. The app is a crucial part of the overall Everpix experience, which, for those of you unfamiliar, works primarily as a Mac application at present (Windows coming) to automatically organize and combine all your photos, whether they’re stored on your computer or in the cloud. The service supports photo uploads from iPhoto, Aperture and Lightroom, plus photos from your online collections on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and Picasa. With Everpix for iPhone, your on-device photos can now be more easily uploaded to the Everpix cloud. Instead of having to first sync your phone to your Mac, download the photos into the software program of your choice, then wait for Everpix to upload them, you can now just use the new app to have those uploads happen automatically. In some ways, it’s similar to Google+’s “Instant Upload” feature in its Android app, but unlike Google+, when you delete an app from your iPhone’s camera roll, it’s also deleted from the cloud. Nifty! Of course, the magic will only happen when Everpix is running in the background. For obvious reasons, while Everpix can’t perform uploads offline, it does allow you to browse your photos when offline. And, like the Everpix cloud service, the photos are organized in thoughtfully created collections after they’re online. You can even quickly re-share photos to Facebook and Twitter Read More
Mint.com, the financial service we first mentioned at TechCrunch40 in 2007 (wow, that seems like a long time ago), announced that they have launched a new native app specifically for 9 and 10 inch Android tablets running Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich. This new app, available in the Android Market, will join the previously available versions for iPhone, iPad and Android mobile phones. Curiously, there is no mobile web version (that I have been able to find). 7 inch tablets should work, but this new app is not specifically optimized for them. No word as of yet, when this new version will be available for the very popular Kindle Fire since there is already a version of Mint in the Amazon app store. For the unfamiliar, Mint is an app/web system for aggregating and managing all your disparate financial accounts and then graphically expressing that data for easy, “at a glance” understanding of your expenditures. With the exception of some slight usability tweaks (like reordering some modules) and a few subtle font changes, this latest version offers no new functionality. What it does do, however, is make the service available as a native app for the growing number of Android tablets out there. “In the next few months, Android tablets are expected to hold more than 40 percent of the market share,” said Aaron Forth, general manager of Intuit Inc.’s (Nasdaq: INTU) Personal Finance Group. “As tablet use rises, more mobile-savvy people will look for ways to manage their lives across multiple devices, so we developed our Android tablet app to bring simple money management tools to their fingertips.” Making the service available in as many emerging channels as possible is a credible strategy — a wise move for any financial service these days — but beyond those projections, Mint.com has some Read More
Coming Off Big Holiday Season, Sincerely Ink’s Mobile Postcards Now Ready For Valentine’s Day - TechCrunch
