Publification.com Creating Accessible HTML5 Publishing Platform For Ebooks
The digitalization of the publishing industry should make books easier for everyone to consume, but unfortunately ebooks are released into a world of fragmented platforms and formats. Publification, a new Estonian ebook publisher at the Springboard Accelerator, allows anyone with a browser to publish and read handsomely put together ebooks hosted on their HTML5 platform. Their browserbooks beta is set to be released sometime this fall.
Fortumo Releases HTML5 In-App Payments
On Monday Fortumo, the company probably best known for its in-app purchasing provider for Android developers, released an API for cross platform HTML5-supported mobile payments. This will allow app and game developers to easily integrate in-app payments for any mobile HTML5 based application. The service allows billing to customers' phone bills, which can open up a whole range of new customers who don't have credit cards.
GamesMadeMe Rides The HTML5 Wave With Dollar Isle (We Have Invites)
Run by Finns, from all over the world, GamesMadeMe is looking to ride the HTML5 tech wave all the way. Their first game, Dollar Isle, is now out. There's a lot more in the pipeline and we talked to Juha Paananen, one of the founders and also the CEO of the company, to learn more. Paananen himself lives in Singapore. He used to work there, but decided to start working with a startup as the chance came up. The company is relatively young, it was founded in May this year and it's registered to Finland. They've also raised a small seed round from Lifeline Ventures.
HTML5 Just Got Interesting - Facebook Releases iPad App, Updates iPhone App
Out of the blue, Facebook has announced that they have released a completely new iPad app (which actually is an iPhone app that works on the iPad as well). The iPad app enables games to be played in full screen and you guessed it, in HTML5. HTML5 allows the game play to continue across devices in a seamless fashion as users don't need to install any specific apps. More concretely, you can play a game in the office, continue on your mobile as you walk towards the bus and take out your iPad and continue where you left off. At least in theory.
Arctic15 Mobile App Now Available
The Arctic15 mobile app has now been made available. The mobile app is, bowing to web based applications, all HTML5 and it's been put together by the wonderful team at Webcrumbz. Their team will also be at Arctic15, so go say hi to them! The app is your digital guide to the event and through that you can check the schedule, speakers, sponsors and also send questions to our speakers. Furthermore - it's up to the audience to decide on the audience favorite, who will win 5000€ of sponsorship from ArcticStartup. All this is available in the mobile app.
Head over to http://m.arctic15.com on your mobile to check it out - voting will be enabled tomorrow morning!
Bypass Apple App Store With Majoobi
Oslo based startup Majoobi has published their application which helps anyone create an iPhone, iPad or an Android app - online. Majoobi makes use of HTML5 and users are essentially creating websites that are optimized for the iOS and Android operating platforms. The service is extremely simple to use and will have you up and running in minutes. It took me about a minute to understand it and create a simple site for ArcticStartup as a demo.
Rocket Pack Launches HTML5 Cross-Platform Social Game Warimals In Alpha
The Finnish JavaScript and HTML5 game engine and game developer Rocket Pack has released their new game Warimals: Cats vs. Dogs into open alpha. The new social game is playable both on Warimals.com and Facebook. As for the target devices - the game plays just as well on e.g. G2 Android phone, iPad, and iPhone - to name just a few (see video in our previous post). Any device with HTML5 and decent JavaScript performance should do. The game is a casual tower defence and attack game, based on asyncronous multiplayer gaming among friends and strangers. As the tagline puts it: "Warimals is the epic browser game about the everlasting battle waged between Cats and Dogs."
TheVideoBay to compete with YouTube?
Slashdot has an article about a new project coming from very interesting people, the guys behind ThePirateBay, competing against YouTube. Peter Sunde was questioned a few years ago in the Spectrial oral proceedings about a project they were working on that would compete with YouTube. Back then he answered the prosecutor that it was a project that failed. However, it seems that the Norwegian-Finnish computer guru has been working on the project since then. As it happens, TheVideoBay is about to be launched.
So what's the catch behind TheVideoBay? The most notable one is the fact that it uses a totally different technology for the media files than other sites out there. TheVideBay aims to take advantage of the new features in HTML5, more notably the <video> and <audio> tags with the ogg/theora video and audio formats.
The site itself is in its very stages of infancy and you cannot really talk about a functioning service just yet. One is able to browse the material there, but once you click on an audio or a video file, the user is prompted for a username and password.
There is no word on the launch schedule of the site or what other features it will have, compared to YouTube for example. Nevertheless, it is great to see some action coming out from ThePirateBay guys even though they must be going through difficult times.
