http://www.wsj.com/articles/mobile-chat-service-kakaotalk-faces-growing-pains-1424885119?mod=e2fb
South Korean startup’s profit growth slows as it tries to expand user base of 170 million
2015년 2월 26일 목요일
2015년 2월 24일 화요일
New payments startups face an uphill battle to disrupt the massive, entrenched credit-card processing industry
http://www.businessinsider.com/card-payments-market-competition-2015-1
BuzzFeed Expands Mobile Team By Acquiring “Visual Conversation” Startup GoPop
http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/19/buzzfeed-acquires-gopop/#7K29tS:gaL
BuzzFeed just announced that it’s acquiring San Francisco startup GoPop.
The startup was originally known as Zeega, and it was part of the first class at Matter, the Knight Foundation- and KQED-backed incubator for media startups. GoPop’s current offering is an iOS app for “visual conversation,” combining photos into simple animations (that’s a sample animation of the GoPop team above).
You can probably see some kinship there already, given BuzzFeed’s well-known fondness for GIFs. It sounds like the acquisition’s aim was to bring on some key team members to help with BuzzFeed’s mobile app development.
BuzzFeed says GoPop CEO Jesse Shapins will be leading product for the core app team, while his co-founder and CTO James Burns will lead a new experimental app group. Mobile designers and developers Joseph Bergen and Filipe Brandão are also joining. (And yes, they’ll be moving to BuzzFeed’s New York office.)
“We believe BuzzFeed is rapidly becoming the most impactful global media company, and the opportunity to lead new initiatives as the company expands its mobile footprint was irresistible,” Shapins said in the acquisition release.
A BuzzFeed spokesperson told me that the GoPop app will be taken down, but the company will host “a public archive of all Pops ever created, where each user will have a web profile with everything they’ve ever made.”
This is also the first acquisition to come out of Matter (which announced six new media partners yesterday). Matter managing partner Corey Ford told me via email that it was “incredibly rewarding” to see a team that “started Matter without exposure to mobile-first, user-centered, prototype-driven design process” become so strong that it was acquired by “the most innovative news company on the planet right now.”
The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. GoPop had also raised funding from The Knight Foundation and Chris Sacca’s Lowercase Capital.
2015년 2월 9일 월요일
Smartwatch App Helps Track Glucose
http://www.wsj.com/articles/smartwatch-app-helps-track-glucose-1423443067?mod=e2fb
Medical-device maker DexCom Inc. is designing an app that will display readings from its diabetes glucose monitor on Apple Inc. ’s smartwatch, giving the watch an early foothold in the health-care market at a time when regulatory treatment of such systems has eased.
DexCom’s glucose monitor tracks a person’s blood-sugar levels continuously. The company has shown a picture of the app, which converts that data into a simple graph that is just a glance at the wrist away. It says the app is expected to be ready when the Apple Watch is launched in April.
Apple declined to comment. The company hasn’t accepted any apps for the coming watch yet but has provided guidelines and code to developers for creating apps for it. The latest iPhone operating system increased its health and fitness offerings.
The Food and Drug Administration had been closely scrutinizing such applications. But the agency loosened its oversight in late January, months after a group of software engineers, many of whose children have Type 1 diabetes, developed a system for monitoring diabetes patients’ blood sugar over the Internet. The system was distributed without first getting regulatory approval.
The group’s effort challenged the slow pace of innovation and regulatory approval in the field. It also highlighted the growing role that Silicon Valley companies and software developers hope to have in monitoring and maintaining people’s health.
Some 29 million Americans have diabetes. Between 5% and 10% of them have Type 1, an autoimmune condition in which the body is unable to convert glucose into energy. People with Type 1 diabetes rely on taking insulin and regular monitoring to make sure their blood sugar doesn’t go dangerously high or low, both of which can cause life-threatening conditions.
The DexCom monitor uses a hair’s-width sensor under the skin to measure blood glucose levels every five minutes.
Previously, the FDA considered glucose monitors and any associated software to be Class III medical devices, meaning they received the highest level of regulatory scrutiny. But the spread of NightScout, the system developed by the group of software engineers, and DexCom’s submission of a separate iPhone app for review prompted the FDA to change course last month.
DexCom’s monitors will remain Class III devices, but software that helps display the data they produce on mobile devices or smartwatches now only needs to be registered with the FDA and doesn’t require prior marketing approval.
The FDA has been reassessing its health-apps policies. “We felt that the risks that the app imposed weren’t as high,” said Alberto Gutierrez, director of the FDA’s Office of In Vitro Diagnostics and Radiological Health.
The issue came to a head last year when the group of software engineers, working on their own time, developed NightScout, which met a critical need. The software takes data from a glucose monitor made by DexCom, mainly for Type 1 diabetes patients, and uploads it to the Internet. That allows parents—and caregivers—to keep track of their children’ blood sugar from afar via their cellphones, tablets and Pebble watches.
NightScout spread quickly to thousands of users who found each other on Facebook andTwitter . By bypassing the FDA, the system’s creators skipped a process that had snarled or deterred formal development of similar products by medical-device companies.
Last fall, the group did take the invention to the FDA. The agency’s new rules give NightScout a pathway to regulatory compliance, according to FDA officials.
DexCom still needs to make sure its Apple Watch app complies with FDA rules. But thanks to the rule change, it doesn’t need to get approval before bringing the app to market.
Steve Pacelli, DexCom’s head of strategy, said the regulatory nod for the iPhone app came in January, much faster than the company expected.
2015년 2월 5일 목요일
The App Developer Checklist: 6 Ways To Keep Your Users Happy
http://readwrite.com/2015/02/02/app-developer-checklist-features-performance
1. Win the Performance Race
In the world of mobile apps, speed sells. On-the-go users don’t want to wait for apps to load or updates to install, and they don’t care if an app’s sudden popularity creates a bandwidth bottleneck. They just want it to load quickly and work smoothly.
In worst-case scenarios, users simply delete poorly performing apps. In fact, according to a survey by Compuware, 59% say they would drag an app to the trash if it’s too slow. Others find ways around the app—for instance, some savvy Facebook and Twitter users find that the websites often outperformthose apps on speed and performance.
2. End Wild Goose Chases
When it comes to app design, less is more. Often times, apps that have beenpraised for their design are laid out logically and simply, and they perform how users expect them to. When users click on a menu, they have a reasonable idea of where they will end up, without having to guess where to find what they’re looking for.
It’s critically important that developers get the design right. According to an EPiServer poll, as many as 47% of users will delete an app if it's too difficult to use. That’s exactly what many iPhone users did back in 2012, when the iOS 6 software came equipped with a “disaster” called Apple Maps. The app was so difficult to use and inaccurate that it even spawned the Tumblr page, “The Amazing iOS 6 Maps,” which collected screenshots of Apple Maps glitches. Many iPhone users turned to Google Maps and then stayed there.
3. Keep The Same Experience, No Matter The Device
Some users spring for in-app purchases in a tablet app—like a new game character or extra features—only to find that the upgrade doesn't carry over to the same app on their phones. Or they start listening to a podcast on an iPhone, only to waste time on the iPad version to find where they left off.
A user should be able to easily jump back and forth between different versions of the same apps on different devices, without feeling like they are starting from scratch. Unfortunately, these types of performance problems are only going to become more prevalent and frustrating for users as more people switch between multiple devices. In fact, Cisco estimates that there will be 1.4 mobile devices per person by 2018.
Switching devices should be easy—like changing lanes on a highway. You may be in a different lane, but you’re still on the same journey. App users crave that same type of experience, and it’s up to app developers to ensure that theuser journey stays consistent across devices.
4. Banish Count Appula
According to AVG's CTO Yuval Ben-Itzhak, "Apps are what make a phone, but they’re also what break it." There's some truth to that. Apps create millions of different experiences for users, but that potential can be wasted if they're "vampire apps."
Vampire apps eat up battery life, rack up data charges and dramatically impact overall device and app performance. Users can take steps to mitigate those effects. They can reduce data usage and battery drain by turning off location services or by using Wi-Fi instead of mobile network services whenever possible. New apps like Normal, which crowdsources information about how apps deplete battery life, also help. But ultimately, it shouldn't be up to the consumer to make up for these failings.
App developers need to find ways to minimize data usage and streamline processing to improve performance and battery life.
5. Remember Murphy’s Law
If an app's function doesn’t perform as expected, users will be sure to zoom in on it. Some will complain about it to friends. Others will give the app a one-star review or even delete it altogether.
Let’s say you have a car rental app. It displays all available vehicles' make, model and year in a beautiful map of your surroundings. That’s all very helpful—but what if, because of unreliable network connectivity, the app can't actually book it? Or a glitch stopped the confirmation email from coming through, leaving you unsure if the request was received. Sounds like a fairly minor failure, but it leaves users with no confidence in the app.
6. Play Nicely with Other Apps
The apps with the richest performing experiences don't stubbornly trap users in one environment. Instead, they interact with each other, so users won't have to duplicate their actions or zigzag between stock apps—even if they do roughly the same thing.
For instance, Instagram users are probably happy that they can have all of their pictures automatically saved to the “Photos” application on their iPhone. They can apply Instagram filters before posting it on the network, or share the original, unedited versions with friends who don’t use Instagram.
Strong app performance isn’t just about how an app functions in a vacuum—app developers have to think about how their app fits into the larger ecosystem, as this is how users will derive true value.
App-ortunity Knocks
If you could send a new iPhone 6 owner back in time to 1998 to play Snake, he or she wouldn’t describe the game as fast, easy to use, responsive, interactive or compatible with other apps. But as technology has evolved, so, too, have user expectations.
For developers to live up to them, they need to understand that optimal app performance hinges on how well data is managed on the back end. If app makers need to think about how they can apply intelligent data distribution to make apps more lightweight, they can ensure that the data traveling across the network isn’t redundant or out-of-date.
The backend is invisible to users, so they may not know whether apps are designed using intelligent data distribution. But they will notice when apps don't perform as expected.
How Open Source Succeeds In The Cloud—It Trades Freedom For Simplicity
http://readwrite.com/2015/02/04/open-source-big-data-simplicity-not-freedom
Those new to open source won’t remember just how much of the early code amounted to little more than crappy-but-free clones of popular proprietary products. Boy, how times have changed.
Open source, once a clumsy (but free!) imitator of proprietary innovation is now doing taking the lead on industry innovation, with Big Data being the most obvious example. While this is a hugely positive industry shift, it also introduces complexities. Namely, with so much exceptional open source software contending to power your next Big Data project, how do you choose which to use?
Opening Up Innovation
Black Duck Software recently named its annual “Open Source Rookies of the Year,” pulling data from thousands of projects relative to project activity, commits pace, project team attributes, and other factors. Spanning cloud and virtualization, mobile, social media and more, they reflect the ever-increasing scope of code that is successfully developed in the open, rather than behind closed doors.
Nowhere is this trend more evident than in Big Data.
As Cloudera co-founder Mike Olson declares, “No dominant platform-level software infrastructure has emerged in the last ten years in closed-source, proprietary form.” That’s a stunning assessment, but it’s absolutely true. Open source may have come to life as an imitator, but it’s innovating at a frenetic pace in Big Data land.
Which may be a problem.
Spoiled By Open Source Riches
Big Data projects are now being released at such a frenetic pace that developers struggle to keep up. In case you’re just getting your feet wet with Hadoop, for example, you now need to consider Spark, Samza or a variety of other oddly-named but increasingly important Big Data tools.
Importantly, these tools are largely being born within enterprises like LinkedIn that have serious Big Data needs that no commercial software can solve. Even the National Weather Service has jumped in, open sourcing the code that powers its global forecast system.
While most companies won’t need such niche code, they may want the sorts of things released by the big Web companies. Take for instance, LinkedIn’s release of Apache Samza:
This leads to fantastic performance. It also leads to the question: what should a developer use to tackle her organization’s data load?
On the database side, there are hundreds of options, ranging from NoSQL databases like MongoDB and Cassandra to relational mainstays like Oracle and MySQL. Should a developer choose the most popular database, picking from a list like DB-Engines’ ranking? That’s one approach, but you could easilyend up with a big mismatch between the workload and the tool managing it.
If this seems like a trivial problem, it’s not. At all. I spent years working for Big Data infrastructure providers, and now work for a company trying to make sense of the deluge of open source Big Data tools. It’s hard to keep up, and very difficult to know which to use.
Closing Off Choices
One reason that Amazon Web Services (AWS) has become the go-to public cloud is that the company has managed to simultaneously offer a broad array of open source solutions to run (supported and unsupported) on its cloud, and a suite of proprietary services for everything from email to data warehousing.
Developers, anxious to “get stuff done,” can turn to AWS and know that they’ll have both a variety of options and the safety of a paved path.
Microsoft Azure has followed suit. Not content to roll out a Hadoop-based analytics service, for example, Microsoft is now close to releasing Cosmos, its parallel processing and storage service. Or take the company’s support for MongoDB, an open source document database, to appeal to those that want the popular NoSQL database. At the same time, Microsoft has rolled out its own document database as a service, for those that want a document database but may prefer Microsoft’s packaging of it.
Microsoft, in short, wants to provide choice to its customers, but curated and nicely packaged.
This looks like the future of open source infrastructure: free to download, but perhaps more useful rolled into a cloud service that removes complexity (and choice). It may not be what the open source crowd would prefer, but it may end up being the ideal way to turn open source Big Data innovation into solutions mainstream enterprises can actually use.
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