TechCrunch
Windows Phone Snags Second Place In Latin America, Validating The Nokia-Microsoft Relationship
Microsoft announced new data from IDC indicating that Windows Phone is the second-most-used mobile platform in Latin America. It would be simple to dismiss it as a minor victory in a secondary market, but the news is in fact a validation of Windows Phone’s strategy to grow its install base and accelerate its unit shipment growth.
Microsoft, obviously proud of the silver medal, reported the data, saying that “in one year, the operating system went from fourth to second place,” and that “there was 12 percent growth compared to the previous quarter.”
The context for this is twofold: Microsoft is gunning for volume while its low-cost handsets resonate in emerging markets, and while Windows Phone’s global aggregate market share is low, the platform is able to find traction in at least one hemisphere.
The news that Windows Phone is second place in Latin America is not a surprise, given the recent and steep sales volume of the Nokia Lumia 520 handset. The cheap device has quickly become the most popular Windows Phone handset, spanking earlier title holders, and not slowing down in its ascent.
The quick shift in Windows Phone market share in Latin America mirrors closely the rise of the Lumia 520 in the past few months, during which time — according to data from AdDuplex – its sales accelerated. Without too much mental stress, it isn’t hard to lash the trends together and deduce that Lumia 520 sales are helping to drive Latin American market share.
Microsoft implies as much: “In Latin America, there are more than 20 countries where the Windows Phone range of devices is available, from low-end smartphones, such as the Nokia Lumia 520 [...].” Does this matter? Yes, and more than merely implying that Microsoft’s long, expensive, and somewhat lumpen mobile efforts are finally paying off, but also that the strategy behind its bets is sound.
Nokia, as chief OEM partner, gave Microsoft avenues to secondary markets that it could not have hoped to build or foster itself. And those secondary markets appear to be driving unit volume for Windows Phone.
So Microsoft wants to reach all markets, with devices from the Lumia 520 to the almost comically ostentatious Lumia 1020, but it appears that its cheaper phones in developing economies are for now providing it with the sort of growth it has long sought.
Top Image Credit: Vernon Chan
Bunkr Is The PowerPoint Killer We've All Been Waiting For
French startup Bunkr is focused on one simple task: killing PowerPoint. To achieve this goal, the company’s well-designed web app will help you collect visual content and organize it into slides. The result is a very visual HTML5 presentation that works on your computer, phone or tablet. You can export your work in PDF or PPT as well.
“We realized that we spent a lot of time putting together beautiful PowerPoint presentations instead of searching for information and content, analyzing and providing strategies for our clients,” co-founder and CMO Édouard Petit told me. “That’s why we asked ourselves how we could become faster at formatting presentations,” he continued.
The answer lies in the two main components of the products — collecting content and creating a presentation. In order to do a PowerPoint presentation, you have to spend a large chunk of time searching for good images and videos on the web, downloading them and adding them to your presentation. You could use Evernote or a similar data capturing service.
Instead, Bunkr chose to take care of this part of the process. It is not only a presentation maker, it is an Evernote-like service for your presentations. Whenever you see something that you want to add to your presentation, just click on the bookmarklet and it will be in your Bunkr account. Users can collect images, videos, websites, articles, notes or quotes.
Bunkr didn’t reinvent the traditional slide metaphor. PowerPoint users won’t feel lost.
With Bunkr, you create your own Pinterest-like content database. Whenever you need to add an image or a quote, you tap into this database. You can easily reuse catchy quotes and inspiring images and save some time. That’s why Bunkr will appeal to executives who make presentations everyday — in other words, hardcore PowerPoint users.
“The idea behind Bunkr comes from our previous jobs,” Petit said. “With Alexis, we worked in an advertising agency and we spent most of our days doing presentations,” he continued.
When it comes to the presentation structure, Bunkr didn’t reinvent the traditional slide metaphor. Compared to competitor Prezi, it is very conservative. PowerPoint users won’t feel lost. But the main difference with Prezi is that it’s all HTML5. You don’t have to use Flash in your browser, you don’t have to install an app on your smartphone. You can just send a link to your presentation, and it will work in whatever browser you are using. Finally, you can easily embed YouTube videos.
Just like presentations in Google Docs, multiple persons can work at the same time on the same document. As for pricing, the service is free, but if you want to keep more than 2 presentations without having to download a PPT copy, you will have to pay a €2.50 monthly subscription. So far, 200 users are paying out of the 7,000 who tried Bunkr.
Part of TheFamily accelerator, the Rouen-based team of five will try to raise a seed round in the coming months. But the product is already very impressive. The design and technology behind Bunker already make it a serious PowerPoint contender.
Facebook Forces Developers To More Explicitly Ask For Permission To Post Back To Facebook
One of the things that has confused and sometimes even upset users of third-party Facebook apps is when and how apps will post information back to Facebook.
Over the years, Facebook has had to clamp down on apps that are too spammy. Now the company is taking another step in making developers be clearer on asking for permissions to post through a new log-in flow.
Now, Facebook apps will not only have to first ask for permission to access a user’s data, developers will also have to separately ask for permission to post updates or activity back to the social graph.
“Clearly separating sharing means people can decide whether they only want to use Facebook,” explained product manager Ling Bao in a blog post.
This isn’t a totally new thing, as Facebook had already encouraged top developers to do this through its published best practices.
Facebook log-in has been a beachhead for the company’s platform for years, allowing it to penetrate hundreds of thousands of apps. Developers rely on it to manage identity and to make sure that new users automatically have friends that they can interact with in third-party apps.
The company released a few new stats today on Facebook log-in’s usage. Facebook log-in is used more than 850 million times a month. The company is also making strides in mobile with 81 of the top 100 grossing iOS apps and 62 of the top 100 grossing Android apps in the U.S. using Facebook log-in.
This is a huge uptick from a few years ago. A few years ago, I went through the top iOS and Android apps and found that most of them had very few Facebook-connected users.
But since then, Facebook has improved its reach into the mobile app ecosystem with a multi-pronged strategy of offering identity management through log-in, distribution through mobile app install ads and back-end and server management through the acquisition of Parse.
Appcelerator Acquires Singly, A Developer Platform For Integrating Third-Party Services
Appcelerator has acquired Singly, a platform that integrates third-party services in both web and mobile applications. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Singly will soon start to integrate its AppFabric and DataFabric service into the Appcelerator Platform and Titanium.
Singly, founded three years ago, went into open beta last December. Sarah Perez wrote at the time that Singly offers methods to speed up the process of writing code to authenticate users via third-party services, pull in their friends list and other data (think photos, bios, etc.) from various social networks and other services. The service further allows users to share across different social networks. The company referred to this as its “app fabric.” Singly also can handle data syncing, storage, de-duplication of data, querying and filtering of data.
Singly’s founders include Jason Cavnar, previously of social reader startup Nsyght; Jeremie Miller, best known as the inventor of the Jabber/XMPP open source protocols for instant messaging and Simon Murtha-Smith.
API Analyst Kin Lane said in an email interview that Singly did all the hard work in writing code that authenticates and integrates with top APIs. “This is tedious work, and takes a balancing act to navigate the unique oAuth and API endpoints for each API. Additionally it had a growing number of passionate developers, which will boost Appcelerator uniqueness. While there are a handful of other API aggregators out there, Jeremie Miller’s (Founder) expertise in this area is unmatched.”
It’s this pedigree, deep understanding of the technology and passion for open-source and community that helped Singly gain notice with developers. This was embodied in its APIs&IPAs tour of cities across the United States. According to its blog the events were not meetups or conferences or hackathons but just happy hours. They would partner with local tech companies, choose a bar in a startup’s neighborhood, and promote the event in order attract the tech community. Classic developer marketing.
The news marks yet another milestone for the API management space. Over the past several months, Intel acquired Mashery, CA bought Layer 7 and Programmable Web, the noted API database, was acquired by Mulesoft.
Alleged Gold iPhone 5S Photos Leak
Gold is the new black.
According to countless rumors and MG Siegler’s sources, the gold iPhone 5S isn’t just something we tech bloggers have concocted to keep this summer interesting. It’s real.
Bits and pieces of proof continue to leak out, not least of which are these newly posted images on a Japanese website. Of course, as you can see from the images, the usual “Designed by Apple in California, Assembled in China” fine print that is emblazoned on the black and white models is missing.
However, this casing is clearly unfinished, as the prototype is not yet fully constructed.
A gold iPhone has left a number of us scratching our heads. Apple is all about keeping it simple (stupid), and for a long time it felt like a stretch that a white iPhone would become a reality. Expanding into even more colors with the champagne-style iPhone 5S just doesn’t feel right.
However, MG’s sources have confirmed it, and there are a number of arguments for why Apple would go gold.
The most poignant is that, while Apple keeps things simple, the company is all about evolution. At one point, our iMacs were the colors of tangerines and limes. Now they’re all silver. For a long time, iPhones were black plastic, and then Gorilla glass was introduced. Now it’s anodized aluminum, with white options.
The more we can do with manufacturing, the more freedom Apple has to evolve and stay relevant.
Plus, gold is in right now.
And, according to other rumors, it doesn’t stop there. Apple is expected to unveil two new iPhone models at its alleged September 10 event, an iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C, which is rumored to be a cheaper, plastic model that comes in various color flavors.
Of course, Apple is pretty good at keeping secrets (though not as good as they used to be under the Jobs regime), so we won’t know anything for sure until September 10.
[via Sonny Dickson]
Chrome 30 Beta For Android Brings WebGL And New Swipe Gestures To Mobile, Easier Search By Image To Desktop
Google today launched the latest beta of Chrome for desktop and Android. This release marks the first time Chrome for Android supports WebGL by default. Previous versions of the beta for Android already made WebGL the standard for rendering interactive 3D and 2D graphics in the browser, available behind a flag. It’s now enabled by default on all mobile devices that feature a relatively high-end GPU, including those found in the Nexus 4 phone and Nexus 7 tablet.
While virtually every modern desktop browser already supports most aspects of the WebGL API (with the exception of Internet Explorer, which will support it in the next version), mobile browsers have mostly lagged behind. While the BlackBerry 10 browser, Opera Mobile and Firefox for Android now support it, the mobile web is only now starting to catch up with WebGL. iOS for Safari still doesn’t support it, but the popularity of Chrome on Android will likely give more mobile developers the confidence to start experimenting with it.
If you have a compatible phone, give WebGL a try with this demo.
New Swipe Gestures
Google is also bringing a number of new swipe gestures to Chrome. You can now, for example, swipe horizontally across the top toolbar to switch between tabs and drag vertically down from the toolbar to enter the tab switcher view.
With today’s update, Google is also introducing the device motion part of the Device Orientation API in the Chrome for Android beta channel. That sounds pretty dry, but it allows developers to get information about the device’s acceleration and rotation rates. This feature has long been part of the API, but it looks like Google only got around to implementing it now. You can give it a try here.
The only other major new feature for developers is support for the MediaSource API in the beta channel for devices running Jelly Bean or higher. This, Google says, makes it easier to enable adaptive streaming and time-shifting live streams in the mobile browser.
Chrome Apps are also getting some goodies in today’s update, including APIs for webview.request and media gallery write and download support. Chrome Apps, Google says, will now also be able to use Chrome Web Store managed in-app payments.
Chrome 30 Beta For Desktop
The desktop version isn’t getting too many new features, but Google is now making it easier to search for a given image right from Chrome. Just right-click on any image on the web, select “Search google for this image” and see Google’s search results within a second.
The other interesting new features on the desktop is support for the WebRTC Device Enumeration API, which allows users to switch between microphones and cameras (just like in Skype) without having to restart the WebRTC call.
Facebook Makes Ads Prettier With Shutterstock Partnership To Offer Free Stock Images In Ad Creator
When ads look bad, Facebook, users, and advertisers all lose. So Facebook today announced a partnership to bake Shutterstock into its ad creator, allowing marketers to select from millions of free stock images for their ads. Facebook today also started letting advertisers upload multiple images at a time to build ad variants for A/B testing. Both could make Facebook ads more interesting.
On the mobile side, Facebook updated its Pages Manager app to let admins edit who else controls their page, and publish multi-photo feed posts. Android Page Manager users can tag people in comments and browse a Page Feed of other relevant Pages, while the iOS app now allows for creation of new Pages and events.
So what’s the point of all these updates? To make marketing content on Facebook as interesting as possible so it’s not a turn off for users. No one wants to see bland ads shoved in between fun photos from their friends.
Previously, advertisers had to supply their own images for their creatives, and upload them one at a time. For big companies running lots of ads, that meant they might run out of images to rotate through their campaigns, making them get stale faster. Meanwhile, small businesses that don’t employ a designer may have been forced to use bland logos or other low-quality images that don’t entice users to click or remember them.
Now thanks to Shutterstock’s API, advertisers will see a “Stock Images” tab in Facebook’s Ad Creator. From their they can search through over 25 million high-res images to instantly pull into their ads. The option is rolling out now and will be available to all advertisers over the next few weeks.
Advertisers can also now add multiple images to a campaign simultaneously, whether they’re uploading them or pulling from Shutterstock. This has long been an option in Facebook Ads API tools because it promotes A/B testing. By creating slews of ad variants, businesses can try them all out, see which perform best, and cancel the rest to maximize effectiveness. While comparing variants and choosing the top ones is still a bit cumbersome, multi-photo uploads is step in the right direction.
When you see a boring or irrelevant ad on Facebook, its not just annoying to you, it’s a waste of money or time for advertisers and drag on the social network’s popularity. Facebook has to make money, but it shouldn’t disrupt the user experience. Making ads pretty and relevant will help prevent sore thumb ads from sticking out in your feed.
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