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Urban Airship , a Portland, Oregon based iPhone “push notifications as a service” company, announced this morning that it now offers push notifications for BlackBerry applications and will soon offer Android push as well. “We are going to see at least four, and potentially five, extremely relevant platforms for mobile applications in the near future,” the company said, “and we intend to provide the push messaging and content delivery infrastructure for all of them.” If you’ve seen push notifications from Gowalla (a great use case, by the way), Tap Tap Revenge, Yowza or Urban Rivals, then you’ve seen Urban Airship’s service on the front end. On the back end, the company is developing push and in-app purchase infrastructure for numerous apps and devices, including the forthcoming iPad. Sponsor Airship developer Michael Richardson put the company’s cross-platform efforts into context for us this morning: We want to make it extremely simple for mobile publishers to communicate in a real-time fashion with their users. The mobile phone is the perfect channel for that and we want to provide the ability to reach any user, any time, immediately, without the high cost or difficult implementation of SMS. Bringing that paradigm to BlackBerry and Android will open up big new markets for the company and easy new functionality for developers. The company is offering BlackBerry push right now by integrating with BlackBerry’s own API. Android push will be handled end to end by Airship and isn’t ready yet. “We’ll handle the details of managing the persistent socket connections from the device and sending the notifications as needed along that connection,” the company says. That’s easier said than done. Richardson: “We’re taking it slow to make sure that we do it right.” The downside to using a service like this of course is that it’s a form of reliance on a small outside service provider. Quite a few companies have been willing to forgo building this kind of tech in-house to date, though. Urban Airship reports that it delivered 100 million push notifications in its first 6 months and 60 million more in just 4 weeks after that. Into mobile? Check out the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010 . Discuss
Tuesday night Google announced the creation of the Google Apps Marketplace , a place for third-party applications developers to share their work with the community of Google Apps users. Currently, businesses can use enterprise versions of Google’s popular suite of web apps, and with the new Apps Marketplace, they can integrate outside applications into these services. One of the applications launching in the App Marketplace is Expensify , an online tool for gathering and reporting expenses. Sponsor Expensify, whose motto is “Expense reports that don’t suck,” prides itself on its ability to create detailed and IRS certified expense reports without the need for a single scrap of paper. Users can associate a credit card with their account for automatic tracking of purchases, and Expensify will create electronic versions of the receipt, eliminating the need for paper receipt hoarding. For expenses like hotel and travel reservations that require special treatment, users can email the confirmation to Expensify and the app will generate the data and include a PDF of the email in the report. If you use the wrong card or pay with cash, mobile applications for iPhone, Blackberry, Android and Palm devices allow users to snap a picture of the receipt and send it to Expensify. When sending reports, Expensify makes full color PDFs with tables, charts and graphs of the data. Recipients can accept, modify or reject the expense reports and can even reimburse the expenses from directly within Expensify by printing a check or sending a payment via direct deposit. Or, if need be, the reports can be send to third-party bookkeepers for review. Expensify’s CEO David Barrett hopes, however, that small businesses and startups taking advantage of Expensify will be able to cut bookkeepers out of their work flow entirely. “Expense reports affect everyone of all business sizes, from sole proprietorships to million dollar businesses…Everyone has this problem and everyone hates the current solution,” Barrett told ReadWriteWeb Tuesday. “One thing that makes Expensify unique from other applications is it’s not built for accountants; it’s built for the people actually doing it.” With the new Google Apps Marketplace, companies looking to implement the app into their business can simply add it as an extension of Google Apps. This means that employees won’t have to create new Expensify accounts; the application does that automatically in the background when added to Google Apps through the Apps Marketplace. From anywhere within Google Apps, users can click the “More” tab at the top of the screen, select “Expenses” and they are directed to Expensify’s site with the help of OpenID. “We are very excited to have Expensify in the Google Apps Marketplace,” said Scott McMullan, Google Apps Partner Lead for Google Enterprise in a press release Tuesday. “Through the Google Apps Marketplace, software vendors like Expensify are helping us build a rich ecosystem of integrated apps that work seamlessly with Google Apps.” One of the large benefits of the app is that it is relatively inexpensive. It is free for users to send reports, but costs $5 per month, per submitter for managers with the first two submitters free. Integration with FreshBooks and QuickBooks makes Expensify a solid choice to track and report expenses for small businesses and startups. Additionally, Expensify is a great example of how third-party developers can now use Google’s new marketplace to build, integrate and market their products. Startups can use and develop on Google apps like Gmail, Calendar and Docs instead of creating their own. This makes it much easier to quickly launch products and features, but running a business built on the shoulders of Google may not necessarily be a long-term solution. The marketplace does, however, provide great exposure potential for apps. Discuss
Forget days at the beach and fun-filled trips to the amusement parks. We already know what will really entertain us during summer 2010 — reality shows! Here are some the shows scheduled for summer 201o. The Bachelorette starring Ali Fedotowsky will arrive on May 24 on ABC. True Beauty (yes, it was given a season two) premieres May 31 on ABC. So You Think You Can Dance will return Thursday, May 27 on Fox. America’s Got Talent begins a new talent search on June 1. Last Comic Standing will return to NBC on June 7. A new season of Hell’s Kitchen will premiere on June 10 on Fox. Which show will you be watching this summer? Let me know in the comments! Which Reality Shows Are Set fo Summer 2010? originally appeared on About.com Reality TV on Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at 07:53:24. Permalink | Comment | Email this
The e-book hype reached its apex just before the holiday season. Now seems like a good time to take a closer look at the e-book market, especially given that this business is heading for another disruption once Apple’s iPad launches. According to the latest stats from the Book Industry Study Group (BISG), e-book usage is growing fast, but continues to represent a very small part of the publishing industry’s bottom line. Currently, only about 2% of American book buyers over 13 are active e-book users. Sponsor E-Books Today: PCs, Kindles & iPhones While 2% is still a very small number, the BISG (which represents numerous large publishing houses) found that e-book usage increased about 25% over the holiday season. Most people still read e-books on their PCs (47%), followed by the Kindle (32%) and the iPhone and iPod Touch (21%). As Michael Mace notes, it’s important to remember that this doesn’t take into account how many e-books these users actually bought. Chances are that Kindle users buy a lot more e-books than those who read e-books on their PCs. According to the BISG, a slight majority of e-book buyers is men (51% compared to 42% for paper books) and, unsurprisingly, these buyers have a higher than average income. How Many Kindles has Amazon Sold? Amazon, sadly, doesn’t give us any hard data about how many Kindles and e-books it has actually sold so far, which makes it rather hard to pinpoint any exact numbers for e-book usage. Based on the BISG’s data, Mace extrapolates that there are currently about 200 million active book buyers in the U.S. – which would mean that Amazon has sold roughly 1.3 million Kindles. What About the iPad? While a lot of (digital) ink has been spilled about Apple’s (and the publishing industry’s) pricing structure for e-books on the iPad, the far more interesting question is how publishers will use the iPad (and similar devices) to adapt their content for this new environment. While traditional e-book readers like the Kindle are great at recreating a book-like reading experience, the iPad, with its color screen and fast processor will be able to do a lot more – and readers will expect iPad e-books to be more interactive because of this. Earlier today, Penguin showed off some of the e-books it plans for the iPad (including DK’s guide to the human body and various travel guides). We can only hope that more publishers will follow Penguin’s lead. We already know that a lot of magazine publishers are planning to launch their own native iPad apps. It’s interesting to see that Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch are already the Kindle’s closest competitors. As Mace notes, iPhone users are probably less active e-book buyers than Kindle users, but Apple has clearly managed to capture a lot of the e-book mindshare thanks to the third-party e-book apps that are currently available for the iPhone and iPod touch.mindshare thanks to the third-party e-book apps that are currently available for the iPhone and iPod touch. Discuss