Ex-Googlers Launch Avocado, An App For Couples Backed By Baseline, General Catalyst, And Lightspeed

There’s a growing market for mobile apps designed to help couples stay closer. The phenomenon first came to my attention with thelaunch of Pair at Y Combinator’s most recent demo day. But since then, I’ve seen a whole bunch of new apps popping up, all seeking to offer up a tight little social network for two. The latest such app to launch is Avocado, which was created by a couple of former Googlers looking for a way to get closer and better organize their life together.

Avocado, available on the iPhone and Android mobile devices for $1.99, was created by ex-Google employees Chris Wetherell and Jenna Bilotta, who first met while working on Google Reader during their 20 percent time at the search giant. Key to the app is the user experience, which is designed to mimic the way that couples actually interact with each other.

It allows couples to create to-do lists and cross items off, upload pictures to share with one another, and send private messages to each other. It also lets users create and send “quick notes” to one another, over and over again, as well as “quick faces,” which swap out common emoticons for unique facial expressions of each partner.

The app is named as such because avocado trees, Wetherell tells me, only bear fruit when they grow near each other. Avocados also grow in pairs. Oh, also because “avocado” was the name of one of his computers while he worked at Google.

The Avocado team tries to differentiate itself with identity verification and advanced encryption, to ensure that users are who they say they are when they sign up. Couples have to provide a shared password to connect with one another, which is designed to keep impersonators from logging in and pretending to be someone that they’re not.

Not only are Wetherell and Bilotta founders, of course, but they’re also users — and the app has helped them get through the process of a major house renovation. Nowadays they conveniently use the app to create and manage bug reports.

The two tell me that work on the app began before the influx of social apps for couples really took hold, and the two have been a little surprised by how quickly competition has sprung up — particularly since all the major couples apps have emerged over just the last six months or so. But Wetherell said that the move to more intimate applications is only natural, as maturing platforms like Facebook and Twitter lack functionality to provide real private sharing.

To prepare for that competition in the nascent couples app space, the two closed a $1.3 million round of seed funding earlier this year, which included participation from Baseline Ventures, General Catalyst, Lightspeed Ventures, FeedBurner founder Steve Olechowski, and TV director Greg Yaitanes. The team has already hired a couple of developers, but they’re looking to hire a few more.

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FB Launches Facebook Camera – An Instagram-Style Photo Filtering, Sharing, Viewing iOS App

Insta-who? Today Facebook begins rolling out Facebook Camera for iOS to English-speaking countries, a standalone photos app where you can shoot, filter, and share single or sets of photos and scroll through a feed of photos uploaded to Facebook by your friends. Developed by Facebook’s photos team without the help of Instagram because the acquisition deal hasn’t closed yet, Facebook Camera looks a lot like the app TechCrunch leaked images of a year ago, and is designed for quicker publishing than Facebook’s multi-featured primary mobile app.

Facebook Camera lets you rapidly pick one or more photos, apply filters, tag friends and locations, add a description, and post. While its 14 filters, batch uploads, and streamlined interface are a big step up from Facebook for iOS, the design isn’t as beautiful as Instagram and neither are the photos you’ll see in it. When asked if Facebook Camera would become a direct competitor to thephotosharing network it bought last month, a spokesman told me “As Mark asserted, we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently, so I anticipate some healthy competition.”

Though for now Facebook Camera is just for iOS in English-speaking countries (and will become available as soon as Apple can populate the App Store with it, if you don’t see it already) it will roll out internationally over the next few weeks as Facebook gets it translated. As for versions for Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone, I’m told “While we don’t comment on future products we are carefuly looking at what might make for agood Facebook photos experience across other platforms.”

But now Facebook has three apps for consumers — its primary app, Facebook Messenger, and now Facebook Camera (plus Facebook Pages Manager for Page admins). That means users might have to choose which to keep on their home screen, or could end up sticking all three in a folder and become less likely to use any of them.

The app’s homescreen includes a camera button for shooting new photos, and quick access to the last few images in your camera roll for instant uploading. By default you’ll see a feed of photos from your friends that’s basically your news feed but only photo posts. You can also view a feed of just photos you’ve taken or been tagged in. The feeds update in real time, you can Like with a single click, and the comment button pops up as an overlay rather than forcing you to load a separate screen. The browsing experience is smooth, though browsing can only be done in portrait mode so standard photos appear square with their sides or top and bottom cut off. You have to click them and sometimes turn your device to view them in full.

How It’s Better Than Instagram

The best feature of Facebook Camera and its one real selling point over Instagram is multi-photo uploads. This helps you tell a story or share the best photos from a day’s outing in a single post. It’s great for if you can’t decide which shot is best and don’t want to go through the sharing flow over and over. The feature basically steamrolls Batch, a photosharing app specifically designed for uploading sets. Browsing multi-photo stories is smooth too, as they appear as one story in the feed showing the first photo, but you can swipe side to side to view the rest of the set.

Rather than having to wait for a photo to load when you browse by like on Instagram, it appears as a blurry placeholder at first and then sharpens up, which is nice. Facebook Camera’s 14 filters are also more sensibly named with titles that describe how they change photos, such as Bright, Emerald, and Copper, rather than Instagram’s less indicative Hudson, Sutro, and Brannan. Facebook’s photos product manager Dirk Stoop tells me “We do hope to bring the best stuff from Facebook Camera to the other app” so filters, cropping, and batch uploads could appear in the main Facebook app soon.

How It’s Worse

Unfortunately, there are several flaws in the current version of Facebook Camera that seem especially glaring compared to Instagram. Like and comment icons and counts are overlaid on the photos, disturbing their appearance. When you click to view existing comments on a photo they take a few seconds to load, which can fool you into thinking they aren’t there. Instagram also has more filters, 17, plus light adjustment and tilt-shift that Facebook’s new app lack.

But the first thing you might notice is the photos are decidedly less beautiful than what you’ll see on Instagram. Most weren’t uploaded with Facebook Camera but rather through Facebook’s web interface, primary app, or other third-party apps, so they’re unfiltered, and weren’t necessarily taken with artistry in mind.

While Facebook may be late to the standalone photo app scene, you have to remember that while Instagram has hit 50 million downloads, Facebook has over 500 million mobile users, and somewhere around 220 million on iOS and Android. As the social network’s user base shifts to mobile, the app will be crucial to keeping people engaged.

Facebook Camera may not be perfect, but for those who don’t want to start a whole new social network for photosharing on Instagram, and want an app that sucks in photos shared by their Facebook friends from anywhere, including Instagram and Path, Facebook Camera could earn a spot on the homescreen.

Download Facebook Camera here

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Apple sells 3 million new iPads in 3 days

(USA TODAY) - It was "the strongest iPad launch yet," says Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing.

The first iPad in 2010 sold 300,000 on its first day, and it took 28 days to get to 1 million. Apple didn't announce initial iPad 2 sales in 2011, but estimates ranged from 400,000 to about 1 million during its first weekend on sale.

By contrast, Apple sold 4 million iPhone 4S smartphones in the first weekend last October.

Shaw Wu, an analyst at Sterne Agee, calls the 3 million haul for the new iPad "bigger than I expected, a big number."

Wireless carrier AT&T also said Monday that the company set a "single-day record" for iPad sales and activations on March 16, the day it went on sale.

The new iPad - which starts at $499 for a Wi-Fi-only model with 16 gigabytes of storage - has received a mixed reaction online, where consumers have questioned just how big an improvement the new sharper screen is and the speed of the faster 4G cellular network. There are scattered reports that the new iPad is prone to overheating after about 30 minutes of use. Apple declined to comment.

But those concerns didn't stop consumers from snapping them up.

Wu says the new features are "huge upgrades, enough to drive incremental buyers."

Shipments for online sales are backed up two to three weeks, and in-store stock is hit and miss.
A clerk at an Apple Store in Seattle said iPads that connect to the AT&T network were sold out, while a store in downtown New York City also had run out of AT&T iPads in black.

Details about iPad sales for Verizon Wireless were not immediately available.

In its release, Apple said it would expand iPad sales Friday to 24 new countries, including Italy, Greece and New Zealand. The iPad went on sale last Friday in 11 countries, including the United States, Canada and Australia.

As happens with most new Apple releases, lines formed outside Apple Stores the night before it went on sale as consumers looked to be the first on their block with the new device.

In Los Angeles, Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, who regularly joins the line for new products, was part of the consumer rush - spending the night outside an Apple Store.

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For carriers, the iPhone is a bittersweet drug

Could the wireless carriers actually be addicted to the iPhone?

By now, it's well understood that the iPhone is a double-edged sword for the wireless carriers. On one side, Apple's smartphone is a pricey device to carry, requiring an unusually high subsidy that carriers must pay to keep it affordable enough for the masses. On the other, it leads to more loyal customers who pay more each month.

Furthermore, the telecom companies get to wrap themselves in the hip vibe that Apple brings to its products and partners, and can you put a price on being cool?

Apparently, you can, and it's a steep one. The dilemma for the carriers is that with each successful quarter of iPhone sales, there is a corresponding hit to their profit as a result of the extra subsidies paid out, as illustrated by Verizon and AT&T's fourth-quarter results. (Sprint Nextel hasn't reported yet, but will likely see a similar impact.)

While the carriers have argued that the short-term hit will lead to longer-term gains, the desire for constant upgrades--and the subsidies that go with it--blunt any benefit they get in the long term. Customers who own iPhones aren't just content with their current model; they will re-up as soon as possible. There lies the problem: a never-ending loop of subsidy payments that the carriers can't get out of, largely because the iPhone has become so key to their growth.

"At this point, the iPhone is like a drug, and the carriers are hooked," said Craig Moffett, an analyst at research firm Sanford C. Bernstein. "The question isn't whether it's worth it. It's whether they can get by without it. "

The 'new normal' 
Moffett said he is concerned that while more people will use smartphones, there will really never be a any real rebound in profit from iPhone customers because of the constant upgrade cycle.

"Is the iPhone margin effect transitory, or is it a 'new normal'?" Moffett said. "The fallacy is the idea that the iPhone upgrade cycle is a one-time event."

The demand for the iPhone is staggering. Verizon, for instance, said on Tuesday it activated 4.3 million iPhones, or more than half of the smartphones sold in the period. Most of those activations came from existing customers; Verizon added 1.2 million net new contract customers.

All of that came at a cost. After taking out one-time items such as pension-related costs, the company earned 52 cents a share, two cents shy of Wall Street expectations. Excluding income tax, depreciation and amortization, earnings fell 1.1 percent from its year-earlier period. A year ago, when Verizon didn't have the iPhone, it saw 5.5 percent growth.

Verizon, however, was upbeat about the customer growth driven by the iPhone, acknowledging that margins would fluctuate in the next few quarters.

"The sales volumes in the fourth quarter exceeded our expectations, but obviously will create more opportunity for growth in 2012," Chief Financial Officer Fran Shammo said during a conference call on Tuesday.

AT&T, meanwhile, said today it activated 7.6 million iPhones--a vast majority of customers choosing the iPhone 4S--but only added 717,000 net new contract subscribers. AT&T's results over the past few years illustrate Moffett's concerns. Since getting the iPhone and moving to a subsidy model, the company has seen lower margins, he said. Its fourth-quarter wireless margins dropped by a third from a year ago.

Like Verizon, AT&T remains bullish on its ability to derive more longer term value out of its iPhone customers.

"All in, I continue to be a big-time bull on the smartphone category and the iPhone in general," AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said during a conference call today. "I'm not shying away from this market."

While acknowledging some of the margin pressure, Stephenson said he sees the smartphone as a platform to sell more services, including tablets and other connected devices.

Others aren't so optimistic. Morgan Stanley analyst Simon Flannery said he expects average revenue per user growth to slow for the wireless carriers. Beyond data, the companies face pressure from shrinking revenue on the voice and text message side of the business.

Sprint, meanwhile, has more at stake than anyone else. The company has basically bet its financial future on the success of the iPhone, reportedly committing to pay Apple $20 billion for 30 million iPhones for the next four years.

Sprint CEO Dan Hesse and his leadership team have been nothing but ecstatic over getting the iPhone, with one executive likening it to getting a seat at the cool kids' table.

But with three national carriers (and one regional one) carrying the iPhone, how exclusive is this club?

"Sprint decided to mortgage its entire future just to make sure it has the me-too status of saying they had the iPhone for sale," Moffett said.

Factoring in capex 
Further complicating the actual cost of the iPhone is the amount of capital expenditures needed to ensure the network is up to par when it comes to handling iPhone and other smartphone traffic. Carriers tend not to break out their network expenses in regards to specific devices, but there's no question the companies have spent a significant amount bolstering their infrastructure.

AT&T said it is still working on boosting coverage and improving the quality of service in major markets such as New York and San Francisco. The company said it made 150,000 improvements to its network last year.

Before it got the iPhone, Sprint executives coyly said they were prepping to handle any major influx of traffic from such a marquee device.

While Android devices have been shown to be major bandwidth hogs in recent years, the introduction of the iPhone 4S and the voice-command feature Siri has proven to be a data hog of its own. Because Siri constantly pings Apple's servers for information, the iPhone 4S has been shown to use twice as much data as the iPhone 4.

Remember, the iPhone runs on the carriers' 3G service, necessitating further investment there even as the carriers turn their attention and most of their resources to the faster, more efficient 4G networks.

Consumers are already seeing some of the steps the carriers have taken to offset the impact of the iPhone. AT&T was the first to move to a tiered pricing, and recently raised the price of its smartphone data plans, although it also lifted its limits too. Sprint, meanwhile, eliminated a slew of customer-friendly perks such as early upgrades, while enacting higher early termination fees and a shorter window for product returns.

Tangible and intangible benefits 
Of course, the iPhone brings its share of advantages to a carrier.

Sprint's flagship Manhattan store prepping for the launch of the iPhone 4S back in October.

(Credit: CNET/Marguerite Reardon)

Some are obvious. The device's ability to win over new customers and retain existing ones has been proven over and over. That has remained the case even after AT&T lost its exclusive hold over the iPhone. AT&T's answer has been to offer up the older models for a heavily discounted price, expanding the potential base of iPhone customers.

Without the iPhone, neither Verizon or AT&T would have been able to show the impressive customer growth that they did.

Perhaps the biggest benefit is in reduced customer turnover, known in industry parlance as churn. Sprint's Hesse has long complained that the availability of the iPhone at its two bigger rivals was a primary contributor to why he couldn't keep his subscribers. His belief is that by getting customers to stay on longer, he'll be able to eventually turn a profit on them.

It's a risky tightrope Hesse is walking on. In addition to the hefty iPhone subsidies Sprint has committed to paying, the company is building out its 4G LTE network, two moves that are expected to depress margins for the company over the next two years.

Because the iPhone was only available on one carrier for so long, there was an air of exclusivity about it that aided both Apple and AT&T. Verizon and Sprint, however, won't be reaping those benefits, since the iPhone no longer has the cachet of a hard-to-get device.

Still, some analysts maintain the iPhone will pay dividends in the long run. Robert W. Baird analyst William Power said Verizon could be poised for further earnings growth this year. Verizon on Tuesday backed its per-share earnings forecast for 2012.

And with all of its potential drawbacks, T-Mobile USA, the only national carrier not to get the iPhone, desperately wants to have it. At a press conference during the Consumer Electronics Show, T-Mobile CEO Philipp Humm acknowledged the lack of the iPhone had hurt the company's ability to keep subscribers. But the carrier is hoping to get the phone soon; Chief Technology Officer Neville Ray told CNET that the next version could technically support T-Mobile's unique spectrum.

The only undisputed winner here is Apple. On Tuesday, the company reported a massive gain in profit, with quarterly earnings more than doubling to $13.06 billion, thanks to strong sales led by the iPhone 4S. Unlike the carriers, its margin only increased, rising to 44.7 percent from 38.5 percent a year ago.

The carriers, meanwhile, are falling over themselves paying for the privilege of selling the iPhone. While everyone is lauding Apple for its blowout quarter, no one's getting excited for the carriers' financial performance.

Updated at 8:32 a.m. PT: to include an additional comment from AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson.

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Meet the Internet’s newest boy genius -

Meetings, travel, Le Web and pitches from countless startups have left me exhausted. I have hardly slept for nearly a week. I am tired and a little irritated and in need of a pick-me-up. An espresso shot isn’t enough. What I need is a conversation that would sharpen my senses dulled by repetitiveness of ideas and marginality of ambition.

And in the nick of time (pun intended), enter Nick D’Aloisio — founder and for now chief executive officer of a London-based company, Summly. (Download the app) On paper, it is yet another start-up with yet another iPhoneapp. Summly essentially looks at the content of a web page and creates a quick summary of that web page, then formats it nicely for the iPhone screen.

It is solving the problem that many others are trying to solve — how to make sense of the web overrun by factory-produced, SEO-optimized diahrrea of words. Making sense of Googlesearch results has become the equivalent of playing Russian Roulette. Finding information has regressed, even as the web as progressed at neck-snapping speed.

Except D’Aloisio turns out to be a 16-year-old kid from Wimbledon, England who drops phrases like “heuristics” and “natural language processing.” After hanging out with his friends, he heads home to read papers about machine learning. We are sitting in the reception hall of the moderately priced Motel One, a stone’s throw from Berlin’s main train station. The weather outside is miserable — cold, gray and wet. D’Aloisio, who woke up at 4 a.m. is bouncing with energy and is busy telling me his story and his dreams. The more I listen, the more I am swept up by his enthusiasm.

In my life I have met many smart people — Jeff Bezos, Andy Bechtolsheim, Larry Page, Andy Grove, Sergey Brin, Vinod Khosla and Bret Taylor. D’Aloisio belongs with them, I am convinced. Not because he has started the next hot company — who can predict what will be hot? But instead, he is a self-taught polymath, who is so adept at learning from reading, listening and observing. He is an old-fashioned technologist who was born this way.

Nick O’ Time


Let me share his story. Nick’s dad is an investment banker and his mother’s a lawyer. He grew up in Perth, Australia, where he fell in love with rugby and cricket. The clear, big night skies made stargazing a fun activity and before you know it, he was learning everything about stars and galaxies and black holes. He was not even 5. At age 7, his family moved to London. A year later, he annoyed his parents into buying him a MacBook Pro.

Why? He wanted to learn how to replicate videos he saw on television. He figured out iMovie, Final Cut Pro and some Autodeskprograms. Of course, he couldn’t recreate the commercials he saw, but started getting close enough. In 2007, he got an iPhone and a year later when the App Store launched, he went out to learn the iOS SDK.

A couple of months later, he created an app, SoundStumble — a geo-local music discovery app that allowed you to see what people were listening in your vicinity. Encouraged by that app, he came up with Facemood, an app that looked at your friend’s Facebook timeline and summarized what kind of mood they were in. Facemood was followed by TrimIt, an iOS app that was downloaded and used by 100,000 people. His logic for developing the app? Information overload.

“Seven months ago I got into Twitter and was getting a lot of URLs, but being on a slow phone network it would take 15 seconds to load up a page and I couldn’t view the content ahead of time,” he recalls. It was frustrating. The situation on Google is even worse. ”I don’t have enough time whilst on the go to click in and out of every article and story on the web,” he says. What he wanted was to figure out a way to skim-read its entire content before deciding to read through its entirety.

Sentiment is everything


D’Aloisio confesses that he is obsessed with sentiment analysis and each app is a step forward into his obsession with making sense of large data sets. He reads paper on natural language processing and machine learning in order to pick up the best techniques and learns from the masters. He uses iTunes University. And what he doesn’t know, he asks. He is not shy. He has emailed experts, without making them aware of his age or background.

The success of TrimIt didn’t go unnoticed. A few press mentions caught the attention of Solina Chao, a key investor with Horizons, the private equity investment vehicle of of Li Ka-Shing, the Chinese billionaire and owner of the 3 Group. Their previous investments include Skype, Facebook and Spotify. She convinced Nick and his parents that it was time for him to take the next step and turn TrimIt into a company. Of course, Horizons’  made the seed investment in what is now known as Summly, a service that allows webpages and news articles to be automatically compressed into succinct summaries.

Summly uses a text-summarizing algorithm that has been trained with sample pages from across the web and has trained itself to use optimized metrics when formulating a summary of any article or webpage. The service uses an ontological detection so that the “algorithm detects what kind of webpage has been entered into Summly e.g. a technology article, and applies our appropriate technology article summarizing metrics accordingly.” The algorithm’s preliminary evaluation showed that it outperformed other text summarizers by a factor of 40 percent, D’Aloisio claims. And it supposedly works across many different languages.

I have no idea of knowing whether his claims are accurate. Being on the road, I have not even had time to do my due diligence. All I know is that the early version of the app (that is going live sometime later today) works quite well. It allows me to get summaries of articles from publications like The Guardian. I get summaries of news items via News APIs of Google and Bing. Smart tagging allows me to discover more information. It just seems to work.

“This is the right time for us to be tackling this product,” he says. Nick points out that even Google knows that something needs to be done. It has launched Google Previews, but again it is not the ideal solution. “Google’s UI hasn’t kept up with the changing nature of the web and the Internet,” says D’Aloisio and is of the opinion that the click-centric web behavior is going to soon be a thing of the past. Whether it is video, text or photos, there will be a lot more automation in how the information is surfaced to us, Nick says, arguing that it is a journey that has only just begun. “I think of artificial intelligence as applied to everyday life,” he adds.

Best is yet to come


We walk over to the train station, looking for sustenance. There aren’t many options, so we settle on a German version of a diner. I have currywurst, Nick tucks into another kind of sausage. But we mostly talk about his “tech” life and how he reconciles it with his other life, one that of a student and a teenager. “I enjoy school and being with my friends, and I do indeed have to work hard at school,” Nick explains. “School is a lot of work.” He is learning Russian, Mandarin and a smattering of other languages. As our conversation progresses, Nick, being a little impatient points out that “It is the project that has got me here and not being a kid.” He doesn’t want to be seen as a kid with an app. Instead, it is an app with a kid behind it.

When I ask if he will get a CEO to help him out, D’Aloisio says of course, in time. For now he wants to focus his tiny little company on the product. He points out that most founders have a vision of the product and they can see it and when that vision isn’t brought to fruition, it causes irritation. It is one of the reasons he is still obsessive about controlling every aspect of the product. “I want to ensure it is my true vision,” he emphatically states.

From design to coding, D’Aloisio is obsessive about controlling the product — much like one of his idols, Steve Jobs. He is currently reading Jobs’ biography and we discuss it for a bit before both of us concluding, thank god for Macs. A minute later we are discussing typography and the importance of design and user experience. We talk cricket and how the current Australian team sucks. We talk some more about design and typography.

After a while we shake hands and part ways. As a parting comment I tell Nick that this might not be his last company for his quest to make sense of data is still a journey incomplete. He smiles, he says. “I know.” I will hazard a guess — the world and all of us who believe in technology will be hearing about the exploits of this young man for a very long time.

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Google Testing New Email Subscription Ad Format

Google is experimenting with its Google Adwords offerings, attempting to go beyond regular text ads with Google Email Subscription Ads, allowing companies to buy ads that automatically fill in a “Subscribe to newsletter (or whatever, I’m assuming)” slot with a given searcher’s Google email address during a search.

Emailblog pointed out earlier this month that the ads were running with automaker Honda (ads which I still can’t see), and it seems like those offerings have expanded to results for email marketing services AWeber and Constant Contact (ads which I can see). Clicking on the “Privacy” button next to the subscription button lets you know that your email will be sent to the advertiser — In case that wasn’t clear(?).

When asked to explain what exactly was going on, a Google representative gave me the following statement (which is basically a more official sounding version I just said):

“We’re currently running a small experiment of a new ad format that helps users sign up more easily for email subscriptions or other free newsletters. This new ad format contains a box within the ad that displays a user’s Google email address (if logged in). If a user chooses to click ‘Subscribe to newsletter’ then the email address is sent to the advertiser directly, which is clearly disclosed within the ad itself.”

Something tells me TONS of email marketing companies will be using this once it’s actually official. My requests about whether or not (and when, if so) this will become a permanent feature have as of yet gone unanswered by Google.

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Stop Making Apps

There are a bunch of iPhone apps I own though I have no clue what they do. These apps include but aren’t limited to; FLUD, Apptitude, Cartoonatic, Can’t Wait!, Punch, Pah, Prize Claw, Traveler, Concur, Jajah, Fast Customer, Pimple Popper and many more whose names I can’t even remember.

Occupying my valuable homescreen real estate are also a bunch of apps whose purpose I remember only because they were built by people I know or am friends with, but that I sadly never use. And in some cases I really wish I did, because it would make my friends happy and the world a better place.

The few apps that I actually open daily (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Foursquare, Spotify, Reminders, Safari, Messenger, and Yammer sadly enough) are securely fastened to my homescreen. For those relegated to the “app ghetto” I usually either substitute Google or SMS because I’ve forgotten that I’ve downloaded them and am too lazy to swipe past my first screen.

Dispersed throughout my app ghetto, or the neighborhood ten or so swipe screens past the iPhone homescreen, are things I’ve downloaded for work, apps that people joke about not using (Color, Path), new apps that people are still trying to figure out (Batch, Oink) and perfectly legitimate apps that lend themselves to more casual usage (Uber, Quora, Yelp). And all the apps that fit into one or more of those categories. Oh, and I just bought Camera+ (not to be confused with Camera Plus) — it’s  not homescreen worthy just yet though it might just be the best 99 cents I’ve ever spent.

If I ever want to use an app ghetto app I just use iPhone search (a swipe right) because there are just too many! There should be some sort of app that makes your app ghetto apps disappear if you haven’t used them in a while.

Sure we’ve written before about app fatigue, but it seemingly hasn’t discouraged app makers from continuing to churn out countless useless apps or SocialMobileLocal offerings that would be better suited as sub-features of Foursquare. And it doesn’t look like they’re going to stop anytime soon; Android growth is insane, iOS influence is crazy. Coupled with minimal development costs, you get the fact that the Bump app has 50 million downloads. Yes, Bump, that thing that lets you “bump” contact info over your phone and nobody I know uses.

If Bump’s existence proves anything, it’s that many SoMoLo apps are basically competing with SMS. Why go through another tiresome two-second increment of human communication and exchange your contact info WHEN YOU CAN “BUMP”? YES THERE IS INDEED AN APP FOR THAT.

I realize that asking y’all to stop making apps is a quixotic endeavor (so go ahead and have at me in the comments); 74% percent of you think that the world needs more mobile apps even though we’ve already got over 500K of them with 18 billion plus downloads– on iOS alone.

The app economy is/will be huge and is inexorable, and I don’t want to deprive anyone of the jobs it will eventually create, even though a lot them will be building things that will eventually fail. Oh well. The truth is that if you imagine the homescreen of your phone ten years from now, your favorite apps will be ones that don’t even exist yet. And that’s pretty amazing.

So if you can’t beat them join them. But if you join them I’m going to ask you to consider one thing; rethink the notion of an app versus a service; Stop making apps, or gimmicks, things that don’t solve problems. Don’t build something silly and ill-thought out just because you have a celebrity co-founder and/or lots of investor money that will help you scale initially no matter what.

The truth is that the hardest part is hanging onto that first spike of users, and there is no number of TechCrunch posts about your every-single-decimal point update that will get you there, you actually need to solve a problem – even if that problem is “How the hell do I entertain myself for the next fifteen minutes?”

Focus on building a service not just an app; a service may have an app component — like Spotify, for example — but that app component must only exist to make life easier for the user of your service, exist to add value not just to be cool.

Listen to PG; start with a problem, then let your mind wander just far enough for new ideas to form. It’s pretty simple, solve a problem and focus on solving that problem across as many platforms as you can, even if one of those platforms is an app store.

This whole “solving a problem thing” is why people are liking Batch, even if they’re skeptical at first, because it solves the real problem of, “What do I do with all these random photos on my phone?” Maybe that’s not enough to be a long-term business? Well, at least it’s a start.

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Can We Stop The Copycat Apps?

Last month, Alexia posted a short manifesto (“Stop Making Apps - Start Making Sense”), which basically expresses a serious case of app fatigue. It’s something most of us can relate to, at least passingly, in spite of knowing there’s no end to app production in sight. As long as there are downloaders, more apps there will be.

While I encourage developers to continue making great apps, I do question the need for both making and for approving the parade of — for lack of a better word — “rip-off” apps. What am I talking about? Example: Over the last week, I’ve watched another fairly blatant copy of Angry Birds hover inside the “Top Free iPhone Apps” list on the App Store, even grabbing the second spot at one point.

I’m not naming the app explicitly, because I don’t want to give the game free publicity. That’s what they want, and it’s probably a good idea to avoid promoting the production and downloading of spammy (cr)apps. But needless to say, the scenario is familiar: The game’s icon is practically identical to that of Angry Birds, it has “Angry” in the title, the design and gameplay — while notexactly identical — have enough similarities to make for some serious eye-rolling. Not to mention, the game is awful. One-star reviews abound.

Again, this isn’t a new scenario. Om wrote about this last month. GamePro went a step further,publishing an awesome article which highlights the top ten Angry Birds rip-offs. They point out that, yes, Angry Birds itself is somewhat a mashup of games that came before it — some would say, a rip-off itself. And it’s no surprise that imitators keep popping up: Why wouldn’t you want to copy what is basically the most well-known mobile game on the planet? Of course, most app developers aren’t this lazy, but they suffer anyway right along with users.

The Android Marketplace, too, has seen more than its fair share of Angry Birds rip-offs. But it’s not just Angry Birds. This happens across categories. And the very presence of these plagiarizers in app stores is at the very least annoying, but in light of Apple’s “vaunted” approval mechanisms inside its precious walled garden, it becomes even more so.

Now, I understand that it’s not Apple’s job to catch all rip-offs — nor should it be. Unless an app is directly infringing on copyrights or IPs, there’s nothing they can do. If developers like Rovio have a problem, they can contact distributors and ask them to remove the copycats.

Maybe for Apple to simply reject apps that seem too similar to others is a bad thing, as these rip-offs just represent micro-side-steps in a larger process of innovation and evolution — moving forward. But these imitator apps still crap-ulate app stores, take up space, and many of them are just terrible. Yes, it would be naive to think that the gaming of app stores doesn’t happen or, flatly, shouldn’t, but it still feels wrong. It’s stuff like this that leads us to mutter (or blog) “stop making (cr)apps”.

So, what do you think? Is this just an idealistic or unrealistic lament because the market will fix itself (among other reasons)? Are these imitators, in fact, good for business, or is there something we/disributors can do to curb the parade of rip-offs?

Excerpt image created by Constantin Potorac

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Already On Everything Else, Angry Birds Ported To Rovio Exec’s Wife’s Dress -

Going to a fancy State Gala? Married to a Rovio executive? Angry Birds dresses are SO IN this season.

If you’ve ever met Rovio CMO Peter Vesterbacka, you’ve probably learned two things: 1) Peter is good people, and 2) he really, really likes his Angry Birds sweatshirt. It’s rare to see him not wearing one. I’m convinced he travels with a suitcase full of them and burns each one after wearing as some sort of sacrifice to the App Store Gods.

Vesterbacka was invited to an event at the Finnish Presidential Palace, where, alas, the dress code called for something a bit less sweatshirt-y and a bit more tie-and-tailcoat. Fortunately, Peter’s wife Teija found a way to rep the bird: her entire dress.

To anyone unfamiliar with the game, the dress’ pattern probably looked like nothing more than a strange arrangement of shapes. If you’ve spent even a minute or two flingin’ birds, though, the cameo is clear: that’s the Red Bird, glarin’ from somewhere you shouldn’t be starin’.

Some folks (including some forumgoers over at Neogaf, who were seemingly the first english speakers to notice it) were quick to criticize her choice of attire; I think it’s genius. Peter Vesterbacka (pictured above, just in front of his wife) is something of a celebrity in Finland and Angry Birds is something they’re mighty proud of (hence the invite to the party) — this just celebrates that. Way to go, Teija.

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