FourChords App Launched, Mixing Guitar Learning And Party Karaoke
Launched today is Fourchords - a new app designed to make playing the guitar accessible, especially for when you want to play and sing songs you're not so familiar with. The main point of the app is to break down songs to their simplest level to make it easy to start playing songs you know, especially when you want to play and sing familiar hits with friends. This isn't some app for precise fingering, the motto behind FourChords is that close enough is good enough.
Co-founder and CEO Topi Löppönen gave a demonstration of the app to me, and says when creating the service he kept two things in mind. "There should be a lower barrier of starting to preform music, as many people could play music as possible. But the app should also connect people."
Warrantify Releases Android App To Manage Receipts and Warranties On-The-Go
Lord knows everyone has a shoebox, folder, or some messy way to store receipts and warranties. Helsinki-based Warrantify seeks to take us into the paperless future, and just came out with a nice, clean redesign to their website as well as a free android app that plugs you into the Warrantify service on-the-go. An iPhone app is also in the works. The mobile app is a great extension of the service, which allows you to scan, store, and manage receipts and warranties on products, without being tied to a computer.
Angry Birds Coming To Facebook February 14th
Rovio has announced that Angry Birds will expand to Facebook on February 14th. They did this in a very subtle way, by inviting people to an event on Facebook itself. Angry Birds has been anticipated to arrive on Facebook since last spring. At the time of writing this there are only a little over a thousand people invited to the event, but this will surely grow as the date gets closer.
Estonia-based Creative Mobile Scores Big With Drag Racing Game
The Estonian startup scene isn’t exactly known for its mobile game developers, but Tallinn-based Creative Mobile is doing its best to rectify the situation. Founded in 2010, the company is the developer of freemium hit Drag Racing, a simple but addictive online racing game for Android and iOS that has garnered over 31 million downloads to date.
Freephoo Takes On VoIP Giants
Sweden-based Freephoo is a fairly new entrant to the fiercely competitive VoIP market. Going up against the likes of Skype and Rebtel, Freephoo is very similar in concept, offering free calls through 3G/WiFi and low-cost “premium” calls to mobile or landline numbers. The company does have some additional tricks up its sleeve though.
Interview With Kalle Koutajoki Of Foodie On Developing For Symbian
In our series with Nokia we continue to discuss possibilities of developing for Symbian. This time we interview Kalle Koutajoki of Foodie.fm about their application and why they decided to go ahead with development on Symbian. Foodie provides an online service around recipes and shopping. Their application is able to give you a shopping list based on the recipe and also helps you see where the products are in the actual store and order the goods to your home door. Let's go ahead with the interview!
The Mobile App Juggernaut Is Only Just Beginning
Editorial note: This is a guest post by Aman Ghei, an early/growth stage Investor at Accel Partners. You can follow him on twitter with @amanghei.
There’s a lot of noise lately about whether or not mobile apps are sustainable, or have any future. But so far, and despite some real challenges and issues, mobile apps have been nothing short of success.
The challenges for developers working on mobile apps range from visibility and pick up rates to loyalty and monetization. The majority of revenue generated by app stores today still comes from the top 100 apps and the “long tail” is often ignored. As the demand for smartphone real estate increases, the cost of acquiring new mobile customers is rising rapidly as well. Seamless payment and customer acquisition methods are other big challenges that apps are struggling to solve. Not to mention how inhomogeneous the two leading platforms - iOS and Android- are.
The Story Of Wooden Labyrinth 3D
The Wooden Labyrinth 3D was one of the more popular Finnish mobile apps before the arrival of Angry Birds from Rovio. To this date, Wooden Labyrinth has been downloaded some 10+ million times. The app was developed in 2009 by Elias Pietilä in February 2009. We've covered Elias Pietilä before when he ran into problems with a game called Pajazzo with the Finnish Moneygaming Association (RAY). We talked to Pietilä about the success of the game.
Since the launching of the game, it has generated a couple of hundred thousand euros for Pietilä. In the beginning of 2009 the game was immediately being sold for a few hundred euros a day. After giving out the free version of the game, the paid version improved sales as well.
Scoopshot Revolutionizes Media Photography
Scoopshot is a service by a Helsinki, Finland based startup PS2 Media Group Inc that changes the way media companies work with photos. It's a lot said, but I'm willing to back it up as a person running a media company myself. In all simplicity, Scoopshot makes smartphone owners photographers for media companies. Users can take newsworthy photos and send them to the service through the Scoopshot mobile app and sell them at a set price. Journalists writing stories can purchase the photos at the price the photographer has set. If they wish to purchase the exclusive right to use the photo, they pay ten times the set price. I talked with Petri Rahja and Jussi Liimatainen about the service and what the company is up to.
PhotoPoll Is The Way To Quickly Poll Your Friends
PhotoPoll is a new iOS application being developed by Nils Forsblom, one of our speakers coming to Arctic15 in September. The idea is really simple and appealing: you can create quick polls for your friends to comment with the help of images. Furthermore, if you're a bit more open with your privacy, anyone in the application can comment on your polls.
Mobile App Download Will Exceed 44 Billion By 2016
An app for everything is where we are heading onto as almost everything goes mobile. By mobile I simply point at mobility and not just smartphones in the likes of the Android, iPhone, Windows Phone, etc, although these are the devices that take the cake away the instant you mention mobility. We have witnessed how the app stores have swarmed with applications of all sorts, from those associated to communication, social networking to gaming. You think of it and there is something available, a major reason why there is a crazy number of downloads taking places each instant.
A recent study was published by ABI Research, the gist of which states that the current trend of smartphone apps will continue successfully for at least another 5 years. Before I proceed with the exact download numbers, it would be better to jot down the number of applications available for various mobile operating systems:
Is Stardoll Finally Making The Big Move To Mobile?
Last night Mattias Miksche tweeted that Stardoll is looking for iOS and Android developers in Stockholm. Miksche is the CEO of Stardoll. This could signal a change of things to come for Stardoll. The mobile platform, especially the likes of Android and iOS, is something that is becoming more available to even the teenagers and thus it makes sense for Stardoll to try and tap onto this market. Stardoll has a simple styling game on iOS called Stadoll Fashion Spin, but it's only available for the iOS.
Blow'em Now Available For iOS Devices
Ever thought about getting even with someone, but never had the courage to do so? There's a little iPhone app now on the market that might help you in this. The game is called Blow'em and it was started as a Garage48 project in Helsinki, Finland in January. It offers users a great way to have fun with its Perverted Candle, Retarded Tomato, Deep Throat or the Angry Egg. The instructions are simple; point, select your weapon and shoot. That’s it, you don’t really need a user guide on this do you?
Rdio Looking To Avoid Apple's 30% Cut With APIs
Rdio, the online music straming company founded by the former Skype founders, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, has announced that they will be releasing a set of APIs to developers, according to ReadWriteWeb. This comes as an attempt to try and go around Apple's counter announcement of them charging 30% of new subscribers that will come through their iPhone apps, a move which has been widely criticized for "killing the online music business". Margins are very low and online streaming services such as Rdio (and Spotify for that matter) are scrambling to find new ways to keep the business model afloat.
Russian Mobile Market's Trends
Yandex recently conducted a survey among the users of its mobile maps application. Turns out the majority of the people use the app for keeping track of traffic to avoid being stuck in traffic jams. Searching for addresses and places is only second on the list and most of those requests appear in the afternoon (between 13:00 and 16:00), which means most of the smartphone users live in populous cities and travel to unknown destinations for work or lunch. The report also gave an insight into the mobile platforms market in Russia. Nokia is the current market leader: Symbian phones are currently the most popular in the Russian market. However, their market share has shrunk by a staggering 12% last year. Apple is on the second position and during the past 12 months iPhone's marketshare has risen as much as Nokia's has fallen - by 12%. Finally, Android's popularity is growing even faster than iOS' - it grew by 14% in 2010.
iAssociate 2 Fuels TicBits Steady Growth
TicBits is a Finland based iOS developer that has released the successful iAssociate 2 brain game. You may have not heard of it, but it's become very successful over on the other side of the pond. ABC has featured the game in their Good Morning America show as a brain sharpening game last summer.
2010 Mobile And Wireless Trends From The VC Perspective
As the year is coming to an end, I had a quick talk with Nexit Ventures about their view on 2010 and how the mobile and wireless space has changed and if there are any conclusions to be drawn for 2011. There are, both in terms of industry as well as deal sizes. If you've followed the startup scene in the last 12 months, these won't come to you as a surprise, but it's great to see these being acknowledged from investors as well.
Angry Birds X-Mas Edition Is Angry Birds Seasons
Angry Birds phenomenon is through the roof again. Yesterday, Rovio released Angry Birds Seasons, which is the new and awaited Christmas edition of the game. It is also available as a free update for those players who bought the Angry Birds Halloween edition. The game is now available in the iTunes store as well as for the Android platform over here.
