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iOS Still First Priority For Mobile Developers In North America & Europe, Ahead Of Android - Forrester
iOS remains the first priority platform for mobile developers to support, still several steps ahead of smartphone market leader Android. This is according to a new report from research company Forrester, drawing on data from its Forrsights Developer Survey, Q1 2013, which polled more than 1,600 software developers in North America and Europe on a spectrum of topics.
Forrester found that more than a third (35%) of respondents target iPhones as their first priority device vs less than a third (27%) who target Android phones first. Compared to Flurry data from last year Android certainly looks to be closing in on Apple’s lead — as you’d expect, being as Android commands a far greater chunk of the global smartphone market (now approaching an 80% share, according to IDC‘s latest figure).
For the time being, iOS continues to punch above its weight by being the platform developers tend to choose to launch apps on first. Examples of some well known apps developed for iOS first include Vine and Instagram (now both also available on Android). Better app monetization on iOS is typically cited as the reason developers choose to go Apple first (although Forrester’s report does not delve into developers’ rational). Developing on Android also typically requires more resources owing to high levels of ecosystem diversity on both the OS and devices side resulting in a greater number of OS versions and screen sizes to support.
Despite iOS getting this first app mover advantage, more developers target Android phones overall than target iPhones (84% rank Android phones as a priority vs 77% for iPhones). This is to be expected, with Android being on so many smartphones at multiple price-points vs Apple’s limited iPhone portfolio. However the iPad does help to expand Apple’s developer mojo, with 27% of respondents ranking the iPad as their second priority device vs around a fifth putting the same level of importance on Android tablets. By contrast Windows RT tablets are being largely ignored by developers, according to Forrester’s data.
The survey also makes miserable reading for BlackBerry, whose relaunched BlackBerry 10 platform languishes behind its last-gen BlackBerry 7 OS as a developer priority, with a sub-10% priority overall — albeit the company formerly known as RIM only officially launched BB10 at the end of January. Both BlackBerry platforms lag far behind Microsoft’s Windows Phone, which comes in fifth place overall, with a just under 50% priority score.
Despite these, at times, wildly differing platform priorities, Forrester’s data indicates that developers are effectively splitting their time between native app development and HTML5. Mobile app developers said they spend on average 41% of their time developing native apps vs 46% of their time either building mobile web apps (24%) or hybrid apps with web view components (22%). Cross-platform apps have a long way to go to bridge all the platform development gaps, however.
The mobile platform prioritisation portion of Forrester’s survey concerns a subset of the polled developers, being as less than a third (30%) of the survey respondents said they have worked on mobile apps or websites in the past two years. For all the attention lavished on mobile apps (and devices), web apps and websites (63%) and SQL-connected apps (62%) were the most commonly used development technologies identified by the poll.
Berlin's Startups Consolidate As The Much-Hyped Amen Is Acquired By Tape.TV
If hype equalled success then by rights Amen should have been as big as Twitter. After all, at the height of their media powers as Hollywood couple, Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore where using and promoting Amen, one of the hottest startups to emerge from the primordial soup of Berlin’s young startups scene. But $3 million in backing from the likes of Dave Morin and Index Ventures, not to mention the Hollywood pixie dust still couldn’t make, what was – admittedly at the time – a radically different looking social product turn into a Twitter or a Facebook. Thus, today it’s announced that Amen has been acquired – not by one of those latter companies – but by an older, fellow Berlin-based company, Tape.TV. Terms were undisclosed and the team as it stands will shift over to Tape.
Providing “a way for users to voice strong opinions” the Amen app had – almost – a perfect launch. It started with amazing buzz. It then seeded a large beta group of people who loved the quirky interface and the battle-like way you would tell friends about the best or worst things in the world such as places to eat, drink, live. Users would respond Hell Yes or Hell no – at the time it was innovative, fun and refreshingly simple.
As I sat in the Lois Cafe, just up from their first office on GormannStrasse in Summer 2011, Co-founders Felix Petersen (CEO) and Caitlin Winner (CPO) excitedly demo’d the app to me prior to its eventual launch in the Disrupt stage in San Francisco that September. It seemed they, and co-founder Florian Weber – were really onto something – a catchy, addictive way to rate people, places and things. It certainly appeared like they had a dream team: Petersen had founded Plazes, an early location based social network, Weber had been one of the first engineers at Twitter, while Winner was an MIT grad and a renowned product guru, formally with Nokia.
And they had some firepower, raising $3 million from Ashton Kutcher’s A-Grade Investments, Index Ventures, Sunstone Capital, Dave Morin’s Slow Ventures, SoundCloud’s Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss, and Berlin investment leader Christophe Maire. Even Madonna’s manager invested.
Amen’s launch at Techcrunch Disrupt in 2011 also fired the starting pistol on a new boom in the Berlin startups scene which, after giving birth to bigger companies like Soundcloud, Wooga and ResearchGate, started to see an explosion of mobile apps. Amen was joined by Toast, EyeEm, Moped, ReadMill and Gidsy, among others. An Amen was also seeing US-based startups appear which were ploughing the same opinion-based social furrow, such as Oink (from Kevin Rose’s abortive Milk Labs project) and Stamped (later acquired by Yahoo).
Despite the well-funded competition, Amen kept on going.
“We were part of the first in mobile social cycle in Berlin along with Moped and Gidsy,” Petersen told me in an exclusive interview. “The original concept was slick and simple and we figured if you couldn’t do it with that then it would be very hard to establish a new social network.”
“I would not change a thing. We created some great addiction. I know what I would do differently, but pivoting would not have added more to it. I had issue with Plazes – adding features later on doesn’t work,” he said. “We said Amen would either take off they way we envisioned it or we should just shut it down”.
Ultimately, with the acquisition, it hasn’t quite come to that, but it’s clear that the early enthusiasm around Amen didn’t translate into a product of Twitter proportions.
In June 2012, when Amen reached one million “Amens” it still hadn’t reached a million users. Indeed, it never hit the Appdata leader board and XYO listed a total of 121,000 downloads, despite good reviews.
It was clear the Amen app as it stood was having difficulties. A pivot of sorts produced a new ‘sister’ app based on the Amen data. “Thanks” was a discovery app instead of a ‘battling’ app which exposed all the great recommendations from Amen about the best of everything – largely what people want anyway, given that most people consume content rather than contribute it. Thanks was closer to what Amen promised to be, and included far better location features.
However, it’s clearly hard for any startup to get traction for a whole new branded service with a different name.
It subsequently emerged that Amen was in acquisition talks. TechCrunch understands from sources close to Facebook and Yahoo that Amen was approached about an acquisition. In at least one case discussions reached a relatively advanced stage before ending, in part, due to legal and immigration issues.
Then in June reports started to emerge that cofounder Caitlin Winner had left the startup, moving to the US to work for Facebook.
As any founder knows, acquisitions get tough when founders depart.
But what has happened may be the signs of a new kind of startup ecosystem in Berlin – one where larger, more successful startups start to acquire their smaller counterparts.
Tape.TV – largely unheard of outside the huge internal German market – has had a slow but steady growth, and gradually booked significant revenues from its media partners and music labels, who pay to break new artists on its site.
What it doesn’t have is a genuine technology platform, apps or as much social know-how as it could use, and that’s where the Amen team can now slot in.
CEO and co-founder Conrad Fritzsch Pictured below) tells me: “Tape.tv´s strength is content. By acquiring Amen we will be able to offer a more personalized tape.tv and enable our users to start a dialogue with and about the content. Thereby we will become the first truly social music television.”
Petersen says: “Tape TV could be the new new MTV.”
Tape has raised $6.2 million from Atlantic Capital Group and German angel investors and has international plans. TechCrunch understand that investors in Amen were happy with the deal all round.
Indeed, as Petersen says: “The Amen mechanic in connection with music will make a lot of sense on the product level. TapeTV appreciates the potential of the product. A lot of Amen will find it’s way into Tape.”
The question is, where to now for Berlin’s ecosystem, now one of its loudest rising stars is gone? We could be seeing the end of a cycle in Berlin and the start of a new one. Certainly the US exit route still looks tough for only a lucky few. For now, failing startups like Gidsy are being acquired by other German-based firms. Of the rest of the 2011 vintage, Toast closed, while EyeEm, Moped and ReadMill continue. So far.
Unfortunately, the tantalising prospect of Amen becoming the next big social network (and out of Europe no less) did not come to pass.
As Petersen ruminates: “We didn’t manage to build a second version fast enough. But it’s tough – Foursquare has spent $44 million turning around its perception as a game to a utility. But no-one has taken that opinion space, yet…”
Clipless Debuts A Deal Finder With Location-Based Alerts, Goes Android First
Clipless, a new mobile application built for Android first, is launching today as a tool to collect nearby offers and coupons, then alert users when they’re nearby a given deal. Currently, the company aggregates data from sources like Yipit and 8Coupons, as well as deal providers like Yelp, Groupon, Amazon Local, Foursquare and LivingSocial. Consumers can also set location parameters and search for specific keywords if they’re looking for a particular type of deal.
CEO Michael Barnathan sees Clipless more along the lines of a personal assistant than a standard deal finder. “Apps are no longer simply responding to you, but predicting your needs and providing assistance before you need it – sometimes even before you know you need it,” he explains. “Siri and Google Now are great examples of this, but they’re simply the leading edge of a paradigm shift.” Clipless, he says, works with the end users, rather than forcing them to go out of their way or plan trips in advance.
Barnathan is a serial entrepreneur who previously founded Living Discoveries and The Polymath Foundation, and is now CTO at CoatChex, which pitched to TV’s Shark Tank in 2012, notably turning down Mark Cuban’s offer for a third of the company.
He admits that the deal space is pretty saturated today, but thinks it still lacks a useful way to deliver location-based deal alerts.
Since the app has to run in the background to send those alerts, Clipless has implemented battery-saving technologies through the use of Google Play Location Services and other optimizations, some of which he plans to file provisional patents on in the near future.
While for consumers, the app simply provides a way to find nearby deals with minimal effort, Clipless’ business model, which today is supported by affiliate commissions, will ultimately involve providing merchants with analytics on their deals on a subscription basis. For example, Barnathan explains, Clipless could tell a restaurant that their deal is heavily visited by those who also like jazz music. Further down the road, Clipless may enable users to share their check-ins with a business, to give them access to surprise deals, similar to Foursquare.
There are a number of location-based deal finders on the market today, including things like Shopular, Shop Alerts, Retail Me Not, Shopkick, and more, but Barnathan believes these are often limited to big box stores and shopping malls, and can also tend to be more like having circulars than having a personal assistant. “We aim to build one of the most comprehensive deal sources on the Internet, then continuously deliver [deals] to you on-location,” he says.
The company went Android-first because they received more interest from Android users when shopping the concept around, and because it was easier to write both the backend and frontend in the same language (Java), Barnathan says. However, the plan is to debut an iOS version in a couple of months.
Also coming soon is a deal with two large providers in Europe to expand outside the U.S., and more social features that will allow users to share deals with friends.
Clipless is free for Android users here on the Google Play Store.
Send In Your Questions For Ask A VC With Bessemer Venture Partners' Ethan Kurzweil
This week on TechCrunch TV’s Ask A VC show, we have Bessemer Venture Partners’ Ethan Kurzweil in the studio. As you may remember, you can submit questions for our guests either in the comments or here and we’ll ask them during the show.
Kurzweil joined Bessemer in 2008 where he focuses on investments in consumer web and mobile technologies and cloud computing – and leads Bessemer’s roadmap on developer platforms. He has led BVP’s investments in the consumer/social web (Playdom, Zoosk, Twitch, Reputation.com, Life360 and Piazza), developer and marketing platforms (Twilio, SendGrid, Crowdflower, Simply Measured), advertising technology (adap.tv), and Skybox Imaging. He currently serves on the board of directors of Twitch, Simply Measured, Piazza, Crowdflower and Sweet Labs.
Prior to joining Bessemer, Kurzweil worked at Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life, and Dow Jones & Co.
Please send us your questions for Kurzweil here or put them in the comments below!
As Badgeville Homes In On Gamification For Large Enterprises, It Launches A New Behavior Lab
Gamification — the idea of adding gameplay elements into services to get people to interact more with them — has been one of the more buzzy features in the last few years of social media services, but it’s also been one of the more problematic. Last year, Gartner estimated that some 80% of apps with gamification incorporated into them are liable to fail in their purpose. And if you look at companies like Gowalla and Foursquare, you can see that consumer apps that incorporate these have had mixed success.
In that context, today, Badgeville, a $40-million backed startup that has developed a platform for third parties to incorporate gamification elements, is getting much more serious about how it positions its product, and who might be the most receptive audience for it. Today the company is launching a “Behaviour Lab” aimed at enterprises and their systems integrators to help test out gamification systems and put more research and development into how to improve them more in the future.
The new lab getting launched today is a mark of how Badgeville has been sharpening its focus under Comee, who joined the company four months ago with a specific intent to grow the company’s large enterprise business.
“We are going hard after the enterprise,” he told TechCrunch. In Badgeville’s defense, Comee notes that the company does “significantly better” than Gartner’s 80% failure estimation, ”but this is still a nascent space, so part of that involves educating our customers, helping them figure out the best behavior for engagement.” He says that Badgeville has already seen some strong success in working with large enteprises directly and also via systems integrators Cap Gemini, PwC and Accenture. Current customers include American Express, Oracle and Universal Music.
That shift to enterprise customers has also meant a rebalancing of another kind at the company. We had heard, now confirmed, that Badgeville has laid off employees, 13 to be exact. “Yes, I took 13 people out of the business,” CEO Ken Comee told TechCrunch, “but we’ve also hired over 20 in replacement.” He says the company was “overstaffed” with sales people who weren’t performing, “and I’ve put those resources back into development, and services and support, as well as a different breed of salesperson who is very comfortable selling into large enterprises.”
It’s a widening of the funnel for Badgeville, which first debuted at TC Disupt in 2010 (and then won the audience choice award) with a plan to become the gamification layer for the web — giving consumer sites the ability to add incentives like badges to get people to engage more.
By expanding its business to serve not just consumer sites but also enterprises, Badgeville is positioning itself further as a platform for gamification services. This also raises the question of what may be next for the company. Comee notes that Badgeville has several patent applications in progress and refers to Salesforce when he talks about how a cloud-based company based around a single focus can evolve by working with third parties to court business users.
For now, he says the company is not planning to acquire or otherwise move into offering actual applications incorporating gamification: for example, for now, AmEx’s travel expense applications that use Badgeville’s technology will not compete against anything from Badgeville itself.
Rather, Comee believes there is still a lot of business to be gained in what Badgeville is pursuing today. We’re faced, he says, with an older workforce who’s retiring, and the a new workforce weaned on the internet replacing them. The big question, he says, is “how do you get them more engaged? By 2020, 70% of the workforce will be Gen X’ers who are gamers by nature, who care about their online reputations, and who like to collaborate. Organizations will have to address all of that to keep their employees motivated.”
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