Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta

Launch Pad class

d.school

startup life

iPad

The application, called Pulse, is essentially a visually attractive RSS-based news aggregator. On sale for $3.99 (iTunes link), the app is aimed to please both hardcore RSS reader users and people who are willing to pay top dollars for single publication apps.

via Stanford Graduates Release Pulse, A Must-Have News App For The iPad.

When I did my inaugural round-up of iTunes alternative last year, I was looking for ways to avoid the high price of iTunes, and I succeeded. I found six rivals that offered significant savings—at least 10% and potentially much more. My criteria included services aimed at music lovers who want the option to buy music by the track or by the album. Several of the alternative services included interesting differentiating features, with the biggest being the all-you-can-listen-to subscription model.

I looked at three main factors: price, selection, and ease of use. To make price comparisons, I created a basket of 10 rock, folk, country, and classical albums, six recent releases and four back catalog choices from the previous century.

On price, iTunes was once again the most expensive, with the highest price for the collection. See the chart at right for details; the asterisk in the Cost column indicates that two of the five alternative services didn’t offer the entire selection of albums—Zune Marketplace was missing two and eMusic had only six of the ten albums on my list. To figure the total price tag for those two services. I calculated the cost of the missing albums using the prices from the iTunes store. Amazon MP3 and Lala offered significant savings over iTunes, with total savings of 11% and 20%, respectively. Rhapsody offered only trivial savings over Apple’s store, and the Zune prices were all over the map, with three albums costing more than their iTunes rivals.

Read the rest of this article via Alternatives to iTunes: how 5 rival music services match up | ZDNet.

P.S.: I’ll be back. China is behind me

Continue reading at KeyesLabs Fights App Piracy with Automatic Application Licensing | AndroidGuys

The demo starts with some small pieces, so if you’re short on time, jump to about the 2:50 mark (halfway point) for the more impressive stuff. I’ve been getting great results filling in missing areas around a panorama, as Bryan shows at the 4-minute mark. Full-screen viewing makes it easier to see the details.

via John Nack on Adobe: Video: Sneak peek of Content-Aware Fill in Photoshop.

via Knocking lets you share live video between iPhones and Android smartphones | VentureBeat.

via Gartner Outlines 10 Mobile Technologies to Watch in 2010 and 2011.

Zumodrive

Android

Palm

Y Combinator

Zecter,

The startup launched an iPhone app last year, which let users sync their content to their phone without having to deal with local storage capacity issues. The Android and Palm apps include much of the same functionality. The apps allows users to sync their entire iTunes library on their phones even though the songs are not locally saved. Plus, ZumoDrive allows you to import your files. photos albums and videos onto your Android and Palm phones.

Additional features include video streaming from ZumoDrive directly to devices in MP4, H.264 format, music organized by artist, albums, and even playlists created on other devices, the ability to stream music in the background and listen to music over both 3G or EDGE networks.
Additionally you can access and view Microsoft Office documents and PDF files.

ZumoDrive has been gaining traction over the past year. Fresh off of a $1.5 million funding round, the startup scored a deal with HP in January to to power the backend of the technology giant’s CloudDrive on all HP Mini netbooks.

Last year, ZumoDrive released a new version of its system that wirelessly syncs playlists between devices, auto-detects content, and lets users link file folders on their devices to ZumoDrive only once so that changes in that folder will always be linked to ZumoDrive. The service was also upgraded to integrate well with media applications, like iTunes, so users can play entire music libraries saved in ZumoDrive on multiple devices without manually syncing content. We initially reviewed Zumodrive here.

Zecter previously launched a product called Versionate, an office-wiki product, that we first covered in July 2007. We wrote about them again a year ago. ZumoDrive faces competition from Dropbox, SugarSync, and Box.net.

via ZumoDrive Brings Cloud Storage And Syncing Application To Android And Palm Devices.

So, why 74? Simply put, according to Apple, the original iPhone reached 1 million units sold in that many days. [...]

The chart below compares the sales results through each of their respective first 74 days. The launch dates were: iPhone, June 29, 2007; Droid, November 5, 2009; and, Nexus One, January 5, 2010.  Please note that we forecasted the last few days of Nexus One’s first 74 days sales based sales of the first 70 days we tracked at the time of writing this report.

Inspecting the graph, it’s immediately clear that Nexus One sales continue to pale in comparison to iPhone 1G and Motorola Droid, with each besting Nexus One sales by roughly 8 times over the same time period.

At the same time, an interesting side-story is that the Motorola Droid edged out iPhone 1G over the first 74 days, coming in at just over one million sold through, by our calculations. This was surprising enough that we re-ran our estimates several times and still came up with the same results. Thinking about the differences associated with each launch (operator, year, etc.), we believe there are three underlying drivers of Droid worth keeping in mind compared to the other two handsets:

1. Consumer Perception & Demand: Motorola Droid launched over 2.5 years after the iPhone 1G. (Nov 2009 vs. July 2007). When the iPhone launched, consumers’ concept of a mobile computing device as we now understand it, was very different. Since then, Apple has spent millions of dollars training and educating consumers about capabilities of such a device, which was no small feat especially after its first foray into the handset business (Motorola ROKR E1 in 2005). Until the iPhone was introduced, most consumers, especially in the U.S. had thought of their phones as, well, just phones.  Finally, it’s worth noting that the Motorola Droid could be considered Android’s “third generation” handset, which benifitted from generated awareness by preceding G1 and MyTouch 3G handsets.

2. Relative Subscriber Bases: Droid launched on Verizon, a larger network with more subscribers than AT&T, especially when considering AT&T’s 2007 size (63.7 million at the time of iPhone launch) versus Verizon’s 2009 size (89 million at the end of Q3). Additionally, there was pent up demand among the Verizon subscriber base for an iPhone killer, which is exactly how Verizon positioned the Droid. Finally, Verizon backed the launch with advertising support of at least $100 million.

3. Holiday Season Sales: Droid benefited from launching on Nov 5 and having its first 74 days lifted by the holiday season, which is the highest selling period of the year for handsets. Neither iPhone 1G nor Nexus One’s first 74 days spanned a holiday period.

As Google and Apple continue to battle for the mobile marketplace, Google Nexus One may go down as a grand, failed experiment or one that ultimately helped Google learn something that will prove important in years to come. Apple’s more vertically integrated strategy vs. Google’s more open Android platform approach offer strengths and weaknesses that remind us of PC vs. Mac from the 1980′s. A key difference this time around is that Apple is enjoying much more 3rd party developer support, whose innovative applications push the limits of what the hardware can do. Ultimately, however, developers support hardware with the largest installed base first. For Android to make progress faster, from a sales perspective, it needs more Droids and fewer Nexus Ones going forward.

via Day 74 Sales: Apple iPhone vs. Google Nexus One vs. Motorola Droid.

AppStoreHQ has solved the problem with a browser-based Android directory at AppStoreHQ.com/android-apps. The directory works like AppStoreHQ’s iPhone directory.

The company has also made it possible for other sites to tap into their Android listings. You can see the API-like info at DroidDog and AndroidTapp.

AppStoreHQ founder Chris DeVore sent me this list of features:

• Keyword search and category browse for any app in Android Market.
• Web-based profile pages for each app that include price, description, screenshots and recent user feedback.
• Direct buy links for Android device users.
• For Web visitors, barcode-based buy links and an email-to-phone option.
• Easy social share actions for any Android app via Twitter, Facebook and email.
• “Hottest Apps” rankings based on worldwide Android app mentions on blogs and Twitter,with results updated several times a day.

Seattle-based AppStoreHQ is run by DeVore, and funded by Founder’s Co-op, also in Seattle. The company won Best Mobile Service Startup at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat 2009 conference.

via Now you can shop for Android apps without Android | VentureBeat.

PayPal will let companies accumulate so-called micropayments until a certain volume is reached, at which point PayPal will charge merchants a single processing fee, Francesco Rovetta, director of the San Jose, California-based company’s mobile unit, said in an interview. The new plan will be rolled out later this year, he said.[...]

PayPal’s standard fee for processing a transaction is about 3 percent of the transaction plus a flat rate of 30 cents. For purchases less than $10, it charges 5 percent plus 5 cents.

That means when a consumer buys a 99-cent song online, the merchant would pay PayPal about 10 cents, or 10 percent of the transaction. Under the aggregation model, PayPal wouldn’t charge the merchant until consumers bought, say, 10 or 20 songs, thereby reducing the percentage of the transaction the merchant is charged.

$30 Billion Market

The company is still working out details on how many goods must be purchased before it charges the merchant and how long it will give the merchant to aggregate purchases before a fee is levied, Rovetta said.[...]

via PayPal to Introduce Cheaper Way to Process Small Transactions – BusinessWeek.