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Clue, Or, The Story Of How We Got Pregnant And Broke Up In The Same Day
It had been more than a year since John and Asia began trying to get pregnant. The failure of one, or both, of them to produce an heir to the Biggsian throne had created a palpable distance between them.
John shaved his beard in the his and hers bathroom, while Asia powdered her face for yet another day of childless grocery shopping and laundry.
“What’s for dinner?” he asked, without looking at her.
“Meatloaf,” she said coolly, picking up her phone and flipping through her notifications center. A hint of hope crossed her face before she added, “I’m ovulating tonight.”
“These ovulation sticks are costing us a fortune, and for what?” he said, growing exasperated. “Nothing ever happens!”
“No, honey, look!” she said, holding out her phone. “I got a new app called Clue that helps me track my cycle. It tells me when I’ll have my next period, when I’m going through PMS, and shows me the fertility window each month! See! Today is a fertile day!”
Asia smiled to herself, looking lovingly down at the app as if it was her baby, newborn and luminous.
“Let me see that,” said John, taking the phone from her and flipping through the app. “Wow, this is pretty cool. You can mark down your mood each day, your sex drive, and note if there are any strange discharges going on down there.”
John amused himself, poking around the app for a while, as Asia finished her makeup and began putting on that day’s outfit. As she slipped on an A-line floral print skirt, John let out a gasp.
“You marked today as having a very strong sex drive,” he mused from the bathroom, just loud enough for her to hear.
“Yes?” she said playfully, pulling a red blouse down from the closet.
“Well, um, so do I,” he responded, walking over to her and snatching the blouse from her hand. John kissed Asia passionately for the first time in a long time, finally realizing that his wife still wanted him. They fell into bed together, as he mumbled that he only had fifteen minutes before he would be late for work.
Passion ensued.
As they picked up their clothing, strewn across the room, and began dressing once again, John picked up Asia’s phone and opened up the Clue app.
“I’ll mark that we had unprotected sex today,” he said, grinning in a way that showed just how pleased he was with himself. Until suddenly, a look of horror overwhelmed his expression. “Why does it say you had protected sex on July 23? I was in Scranton for a site visit that night…”
Ready For A “Web” Of Apps? Quixey Launches AppURL, A New Way To Enable Deep Linking Across Mobile Applications
Mobile app search engine Quixey is today introducing a new initiative called AppURL which proposes a way to make mobile apps work more like the web. Instead of apps existing as standalone silos, AppURL would allow users to navigate from one app directly to a specific piece of content found in another – like an article within a news application, a restaurant listing on Yelp, or a particular friend’s profile in a social app, for example.
This concept is called “deep linking,” and it’s not an altogether new one. There have been a few attempts to kickstart its adoption in the industry before, most recently with the debut of Cellogic’s new service called Deeplink.me, which is essentially a bit.ly for mobile app deep linking. Earlier efforts have also included things like OneMillionAppSchemes.com, a database that tried to open source the unpublished custom URL schemes for iOS applications, and PhotoAppLink, an older open source initiative aiming to simplify photo editing by tying multiple photo-editing apps together using similar app-linking technology. (I’ve personally advocated for deep linking myself, I have to note.)
“The idea for deep linking isn’t necessarily new,” agrees Quixey co-founder and CEO Tomer Kagan. “Twitter has their cards,” he says, referring to Twitter’s push to have developers publish additional HTML on their webpages in order to create more media-rich tweets. ”And other companies have their own proprietary schemes. But we’re saying that not every company should redevelop their own way of doing this. There should be a universal way of doing this – a universal initiative that everyone gets behind that doesn’t benefit one person over the other.”
So, why then, is Quixey pushing out its own ideas instead of allowing the developer community to more jointly and collaboratively agree upon the process, then put it to use? Frankly, says Kagan, because no one has done that yet. And it’s been years.
“When Liron [Shapira, Quixey CTO] and I started Quixey over three years ago, we discussed a concept exactly like AppURL, and said ‘wouldn’t it be great if something like this existed?’,” Kagan explains. But they didn’t take further steps to progress the idea externally, because they just assumed it would happen on its own. “Us putting this out there is more like us saying, ‘Really? People didn’t get their act together?’,” he says.
As with the efforts from Celllogic on Deeplink.me, the AppURL initiative emerged from other things the company was already working on – in Quixey’s case, its app search service which partners like Ask.com, Microsoft, Sprint, Nokia, and others use to power their own app search offerings. However, unlike with Deeplink.me, Quixey is not interested in turning AppURL into another business.
“We think deep linking is vital to the ecosystem in general. We don’t think it’s something any one company should own, exclusively monetize, or have control over,” Kagan says. Instead, Quixey is just publishing how they’re doing things, since they’ve heard from a lot of developers that theirs is a more elegant solution than how some others are hacking around the problem, and hoping that the community will agree and adopt the idea.
How It Works
Here’s how AppURL works, in three steps:
The first step is for an app developer to pick a URL scheme for their app. The second step is make their apps handle URLs. And the third step is to publish an appurl .json file, which is basically machine-readable documentation that explains how an app is connected is connected to the http web.
By doing so, not only does the system enable app deep linking, it also makes its possible for search engines to crawl in-app links – an engine can do an http request to a URL that’s in an app, and index the information that comes out. (Of course, given that Quixey is in the app search business itself, getting everyone to adopt AppURL would mean that its core business could improve, even if it’s not monetizing AppURL directly, we should point out.)
Quixey has also set up an AppURL redirection service at appurl.org/go, which is the easiest way to link to an AppURL-enabled app. When you click one of these appurl.org/go links, the link will redirect you to the app on your mobile device (Android, iPhone, iPad, Windows Phone, Blackberry, etc.) if you have it installed, or to the website if you do not.
But, explains Quixey CTO Liron Shapira, the AppURL service is there for convenience’s sake. The better way for developers to use AppURL is to host their own JavaScript redirect on their own website – that would allow them to use the AppURL scheme without having to use appURL.org/go at all.
All the details on how developers can take advantage of AppURL are documented on the AppURL.org website.
At launch, a handful of mobile app developers and other industry folks have announced support for AppURL, including DuckDuckGo, Gogobot, hubbl, Swrve, Blekko, Appurify, and UCWeb. Quixey has also set up a database of appurl.json files to help developers deep link within popular apps like Ebay, Evernote, Flixster, Foursquare, IMDb, Instagram, Pandora, Skype, Spotify, Twitter, Yelp, Wolfram Alpha, and others. Developers can submit their own apps to this directory here.
Making it just as easy to move from a website to an app, or app to app, or from an app to the web, may not be something that those benefiting from the closed ecosystem today, like Apple, would want to see happen. But the open web can be a powerful force – one that even Apple may not be able to control forever.
Rakuten Global E-commerce Expansion Weighs Down Q2 Profits
The aggressive international expansion of Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten has continued to put pressure on the firm’s bottom line but it is confident the “super sales” and B2B2C business model, popular in its homeland, will help it steal Amazon’s mantle as the world’s No. 1 e-commerce firm.
On Friday it announced second quarter earnings for the six months ending June 30, 2013, when revenue increased to $2.4 billion, up 32 percent compared to the previous year; Operating income rose to $475 million, while net income in this period was $256 million, up 18.9 percent year-on-year.
In Q2 2013, Rakuten’s internet services group, which includes leisure travel services, did most of the heavy lifting ringing in profits of $275.5 million on revenues of $1.4 billion over the period. However, the profit result was actually down by 4.8 percent on the corresponding period in the previous year, the legacy of large acquisitions in 2012 as well as moving away from the inventory sales model.
The marketplace move appears to be paying off as its overseas properties, such as Buy.com and Play.com as well as Rakuten’s international properties, recorded gross merchandising revenue of $141 million, up 37.3 percent year-on-year. Over the same period “other sales,” including white label and direct sales, were down 12.2 percent, to $1.3 billion.
Beyond the marketplace, it will take a personal approach to “organically” expand into new markets.
On the supply side, it allows merchants to design their own sites and use e-mail and social networks to engage directly with customers, which is akin to shopping in a mall. It’s also banking on the “super sales” promotion, which reaches over a billion impressions and promises triple digit growth in sales and web traffic. To participate, merchants must aggressively discount their products, including one product at 20 to 50 percent off RRP.
For customers, it will replicate the Rakuten ecosystem, popular in Japan, which engages customers via multiple channels, including ebooks, media, and travel, and uses a rewards points system to circulate these buyers amongst its various products, such as credit cards, securities, and life insurance.
Specifically, it will leverage its foreign properties, acquired last year: Canadian e-reader Kobo, which boasts 15 million and saw content sales rise 40.5 percent year-on-year in the latest results; as well Spanish video streaming service Wuaki, which was recently launched in the UK.
“Our Group, using this advanced business model, plans to fuse global e-commerce services, and aims to offer a borderless digital content platform across various devices,” Rakuten said on its website.
“The Rakuten Group will promote a horizontal penetration of our unique business model started from Japan as well as the know-how for success in each country and region. Also, we will develop a highly synergetic global management platform and will enlarge the Rakuten Ecosystem globally, striving to become the world’s No. 1 Internet services company.”
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