Today Chris Jones,Microsoft Windows Live VP has unveiled what he says is a modern email for the next billion mailboxes.
He says in a blog post,” We’ve also been hard at work on a mission to reinvent personal email – from the datacenter all the way to the user experience”.
On Tuesday PayPal acquired card.io, a smartphone credit card scanner.
According to Hill Ferguson, VP Global Product PayPal, card.io will integrate its credit card information capturing technology to PayPal’s mobile wallet. The payment details were not made public.
In the fall of 2011 Apple introduced the world Siri your personal virtual assistant (PVA). Now for those with a iPhone 4S, Siri was an exciting new tool. You could talk to her, ask her questions, get your schedule, and even ask her for a joke if you were having a bad day. But what if you were on a phone other than the iPhone 4S? Well…you had to find your own jokes on that bad day.
Sometimes a picture just isn’t enough. Times when you just want to see something from all angles. With the growth of mobile apps and high-res cameras, people are out to change that experience. YouSpin is in on the forefront of that change.
Reinventing mobile search is exactly was Everything.me has done. Serial entrepreneurs Ami Ben-David, Rami Kasterstein and Joe Simon are the co-founders of Everything.me, a startup based in San Francisco and Israel. It’s a new HTML5 browser-based app that empowers users by putting everything they need at their fingertips.
Its always great to see your local startups making big moves. Today former Spotlight: LA Tech company ParkMe announced their partnership with Magnifis. ParkMe, a leading provider of parking information to navigation companies and smartphones, and Magnifis a voice-based driver assistant application.
Google Drive is a cloud-service for files that offers 5GB of space to use however you wish right out of the gate for free. The first question that came to mind, personally, was “How do I get more if I need to?” The simplest answer isn’t “spam your friends on Facebook and Twitter to get’m to use your referral code”, it’s “show me the money”. Apparently, Google just piggybacked the Google Drive storage space expansion off the already existing Picasa Web Albums service.
One thing Internet technologies have brought us over time is the increasing ability to create customizable or personalized content for ourselves. It started as basic as signing up for a newsletter from your favorite site to customizing a profile to display particular topics. Then we took a giant leap with social media integration. We could now not only see content we were aware of but we could discover new content via our friends and their friends.
Mobile social discovery is all the rage as evidenced by the early success of apps like Banjo, which achieved an astounding 500,000 downloads in its first six months alone.
Apparently the momentum is continuing. Earlier this week, Banjo announced it doubled its users in the last three months. For those of you who don’t do math, that’s one million people using Banjo in just nine months since launch.
So far, I’ve covered how to decide which type of app you’re looking to create and how to use your market research to decide what features you want your app to have. The next phase in making a great app is the creation of solid User Stories. Part of this will help you continue defining your feature-set, but it will also help you know what sort of brand you need to create and how you’ll eventually market your application to those users.
