News about en-us Last week we reported that MessageMe, one of the latest messaging apps to hit the smartphone market, had picked up a $10 million Series A round of funding, and today, the company is officially confirming the news, along with some more details on how it's been doing in the 2.5 months since it launched. It now has 5 million users across both iOS and Android -- a five-fold increase on the 1 million that downloaded the app in its first 10 days. ]]> Browser maker Opera's first WebKit browser has exited beta. The full launch for the browser previously code-named Ice adds a few additional minor updates to the meaty feature-set demoed at the Mobile World Congress tradeshow back in February. The Android browser represents a huge shift for Opera as it moves away from its own Presto framework to the de facto standard WebKit engine, plus Chromium.]]> Today, Google updated its Google+ app for Android to get up to speed with all of the changes announced during last week's I/O Developers conference. In all, there were 41 new updates, including a new stream, photos experience and Hangouts. The Android version has all of that, and one new feature -- a new location section.]]> Jolla has finally taken the wraps off the smartphone hardware that will be paired with its "unlike" Sailfish UI. Being a startup is challenging enough in any business sector but Jolla is seeking to compete in the fiercely competitive smartphone space against Samsung and Apple. So it's hard not to dismiss their efforts as too late. But it's a lot harder to accuse them of doing too little. ]]> Sprint has decided to get deeper into the social and mobile space, announcing today that it has acquired Handmark and its subsidiary OneLouder. The acquisition is meant to beef up its Pinsight Media+ advertising group, specifically. Through Handmark, OneLouder has built social apps like Twitter clients Tweetcaster and Slices, and Friendcaster, a Facebook client. The acquisition price hasn’t been made known, but it’s a huge win for the Kansas City tech space, a place that I visited just a few weeks ago. Sprint hopes that this acquisition will bring a more “entrepreneurial spirit” to its mobile program, hoping to lure developers to use its own advertising platform. Mike Cooley, VP of New Ventures at Sprint shared: “The business, culture and technology they bring will be a huge asset to our business, and ultimately the customers of Pinsight Media+.” Through building all of its apps, OneLouder found a niche in advertising, having its own team that has worked on the ad platform and used its own apps to test it out. This deal also brings Sprint some strategic partners like CBS, which has a sports app powered by OneLouder. Tying the work that OneLouder has done on its ad platform with Sprint’s customer base should juice its mobile advertising efforts immediately. The great thing about the acquisition is that Handmark and OneLouder will stay in its current home of Kansas City, serving as an example of what a budding tech hub it really is. Sprint has been trying to get involved with the KC tech crowd, as all of the activity surrounding Google Fiber has inspired companies to be formed and money and time to be spent on building communities and refocusing on making the area attractive to both coasts as an alternative base.]]> Sensopia, a company which actually uncovered a practical application for augmented reality, has raised a $1.2 million Series A round for its floor plan capturing application called “MagicPlan.” The app allows users to hold up their phone and then scan the dimensions of the room around them in order to create an instant floor plan that can be exported to various formats, including DXF, PDF, JPEG and HTML, the latter for viewing the plan on the web. To perform the scan, the app “sees” the room in the camera’s viewfinder, and then you tap on the screen to label things like corners and doors. Participating in the new round were Partech International, Tekton Ventures, Normandy Ventures, and other private investors. The company says it will use the funding to accelerate growth and further develop the application, making the software easier to use and allowing for the capture of rooms in three dimensions. The startup had released an updated version of the MagicPlan app around a year ago, which at the time had introduced an upgraded user interface, a full HD iPad version, and improvements to the “MagicPlan Cloud” service – a web service that allows for data-sharing with partners. Although consumers are, of course, welcome to use the app themselves for free (for non-commercial use), Sensopia’s revenue comes from its subscription plans and enterprise adoption. The company had previously formed agreements with Seloger (France’s Zillow), RTV (Real Tour Vision – a provider of real estate tours in the U.S.), Moobz (the Century 21 technology provider), and Cocontest (a crowd-sourced platform for interior design). This March, it rolled out version 3.0 of the MagicPlan software, and announced a key partnership with Home Depot. Through this agreement, users could share their floor plan with Home Depot and make an appointment with an associate who would then use the plan to better assist the customer while in the store. To reach its preferred market (i.e., paying customers), Sensopia is also releasing its MagicPlan software development kit today, which will allow MagicPlan’s technology to be integrated into other applications. The first customer to launch using this SDK is Symbility, a software company that makes claims processing applications for insurance companies. Symbility will allow its inspectors to create floor plans while on site, while completing a claims adjustment using their iPad. “It would not be a stretch to imagine that, in the future, claim management data for]]> There's no shortage of channels for brands and celebrities to stay in touch with their customers, followers and fans in these socially connected times. Today's addition to the mix is the launch of broadcasting and animation platform Headcast, which lets brands and celebrities record and push out short voice messages to their audience -- accompanied by an animated, virtual avatar.]]> Android UX and interaction design leads Helena Roeber and Rachel Garb gave a talk at Google I/O this year about the Android Design Principles (ADP) they helped create and introduced back in 2012 with the launch of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. The ADP foll three simple principles, essentially "enchat, simplify and amaze," but there's much more to those principles that that relatively slippery and non-scientific language might lead you to believe.]]> It’s still practically a newborn but Indian mobile messaging app Hike is already channelling almost a billion messages a month between its 5m registered users. Those numbers sound insignificant when you stack them up against the big beasts of the messaging space – WhatsApp claims 200m+ monthly active users, and 600bn messages – but Hike’s growth is impressive when you consider it's 4 months old. ]]> Google held a session today at I/O 2013 about how to make money on Android, and in the initial few minutes it shared some updated stats around Google Play revenues and how those are progressing. Not surprisingly, the big growth is coming with in-app purchases, though Google's recently launched subscription model is also making headway.]]> Tripshare, an iPad application for travel planning, is joining a crowded space. But its CEO knows a little something about the industry – Bob Dana was the former employee No. 1 and first CFO of Virgin America. He once wrote the business plan and feasibility study for Sir Richard Branson in 2003. And now he’s doing a travel startup. Dana tells us the inspiration for Tripshare was based on a personal experience he had years ago. As CFO, he spent 10 hours on a plane each week flying back and forth from New York to California. In 2006, Dana was trying to convince his family to come out to California for a vacation, so he put together a proposed itinerary to help sell the idea. “I ended up preparing this 10-page Word document that included text and photos I cut and pasted from various websites. It was intended to be persuasive in nature, and collaborative, too,” he explains. “I thought afterwards, that collaborative travel planning was something that was rather difficult to do.” But not only was it difficult to plan, it was also hard to move from the point of inspiration and discovery to actually booking the trip. This idea later formed the basis for Tripshare, which he founded two years ago. The app was originally built in conjunction with then co-founder and CTO Ken Goto, a former director of engineering at Apple. Goto has since moved on but his ex-Apple development team, including acting CTO Eric Kapke, now continues the work. The app itself has actually been live in the iTunes App Store as unpublicized beta since August 2012. However, though that app was functionally similar, it drew some criticisms from early users because of its user interface. Today’s version is an overhaul and much improved. Still, despite having done no publicity or marketing, Tripshare has been downloaded nearly 20,000 times while still a work in progress. In other words, today’s release is technically a version 2.0, but for all intents and purposes, this is the big debut. Designed for those planning vacations or other complex trips with multiple destinations or activities, Tripshare allows you to browse, collect and share information with others before booking. Using the iPad’s big screen, you can flip through photos of destinations and lodgings, create itineraries and discover flights, hotels, restaurants, activities and more. Today, the app allows you to explore more than 20,000 cities worldwide, plus 500,000+ lodging]]> Vevo, popularny serwis muzycznych teledysków, og?osi? oficjaln? dost?pno?? w Polsce. Us?uga, wcze?niej niedost?pna w tym regionie geograficznym, b?dzie zawiera? video-clipy najpopularniejszych polskich gwiazd jak Brodka, Pezet, a mo?e i nawet David Hasselhoff. ]]> Emotions play tricks on our memories, making our recollections of events much happier or heart-wrenching than they actually were. Smartphone app Expereal seeks to cut through those cognitive traps by allowing you to rate your day on a 10-point scale and organizing that data into easy-to-read charts.]]> MessageMe -- a messaging app that launched in March with a little Facebook controversy thrown in -- has raised another $10 million, according to an SEC filing earlier today. The Series A round was led by Greylock Partners; and as part of it, John Lilly, the ex-CEO of Mozilla who is now a partner at Greylock, will be joining the board of LittleInc Labs, makers of MessageMe. ]]> I remember waking up 6am, going downstairs, and firing up my Atari 800XL. The disk labeled Karateka inserted, the drive would grunt a few dozen times and the screen would flash. Suddenly, with barely any warning, the opening titles would appear and then the music would start - six notes to signal a game that was menacing in its simplicity. The story was simply told. Characters stood in darkened rooms. The Shogun aimed a finger at a door and the princess was forced into bondage. You were the Karateka, the hero, your pixelated motion was as fluid as any humans. I marveled at the realism. The whiffed punches sounded like a fist smacking a ham hock. The fight music, the little fanfare of victory, was all I needed for those few hours before school. Karateka was a marvel in an era of cheap gaming. In a world populated by Pac Men, Karateka foretold the future. ]]> eBay has just updated its mobile app with a whole host of new features and a revamped look. To start, the refreshed UI makes it clear that eBay wants a more heavy-duty offering for its mobile users. You can now enjoy larger photo views, a better system for auctions that are about to end, and the added feature of being able to checkout multiple items at the same time. But all that's just fluff when you consider the stand-out feature in the update: eBay now lets you scan your drivers license from the app for a quick and easy sign-up process. That way, if you're new to the platform, you don't have to go through the never-ending clicks of typing out your information into multiple fields. ]]> Google I/O, the company's sixth annual developer conference, got officially underway in San Francisco on Wednesday, and it was an eventful day. It took the company every minute of its epic three-hour keynote to unfurl a laundry list of announcements and updates, seemingly across every product category in its arsenal -- from Android, Chrome and Search to Maps, Google+ and Hangouts -- each with a fresh coat of paint. We even saw the arrival of Google's very own subscription music service, today, which is already being touted as a potential Spotify killer. ]]> Apple had a bit of a head start when it came to mobile software sales, since it launched its App Store earlier than the Android Market (which would later become what we call Google Play today). But the gap was more pronounced in terms of downloads when they kicked off, but lately the gap has been closing, and today both Play and the App Store announced very close milestones.]]> Time for a back-up plan for your Twitter back-up plan. Backupify -- the cloud-based backup, search and restore provider for online services -- is shutting down its TweetBackup service for Twitter users. The company has posted a note about the closure on its site, as well as -- yes -- on its Twitter account, noting that new signups are stopping as of today, and that existing users will have 30 days, until June 28, to keep logging into their accounts and back up their data. ]]> Today at I/O, Google rebranded "Hangouts" as a new unified, cross-platform messaging system. It lets people text, photo, and group video message across Hangouts' Android and iOS apps, plus its Gmail and Google+ site integrations. Hangouts rolls out today, replacing Google Talk [GChat] and G+ Messenger. While it doesn't support SMS yet, it could challenge Facebook Messaging and Apple's iMessage. ]]> Fresh off its $2 million in Series A funding, in-app mobile payments platform ZooZ is announcing a new product today: in-ad payments. Yes, that’s right, “ad” not “app.” The big idea here is to streamline the checkout process for consumers by addressing some of the challenges with e-commerce on mobile’s small screen, and now connecting that process to mobile banner ads to increase click-to-buy conversions. With in-ad payments, mobile users will be able checkout by tapping once on a visible banner ad within a mobile app, which then launches ZooZ’s checkout flow. As with ZooZ’s previously launched in-app payments product, the fully native checkout experience here doesn’t require the end user to re-enter their credit card or payment details after their initial sign-up. For those unfamiliar with ZooZ, the company has been focused on rethinking e-commerce on mobile, with a checkout process that’s designed to reduce cart abandonment. As CEO Oren Levy explained to us last summer, when announcing a partnership with MobiCart, “despite the fact that there’s a lot of m-commerce going on, there’s a lack of uniformity in checkout schemes. Each app creates it own checkout, its own colors and you don’t know how secure it is.” The first time a user checks out on mobile using ZooZ, they will have to provide their credit card or other payment details (e.g. PayPal, Dwolla, etc.) in a mobile-optimized screen. But afterwards, all subsequent checkouts become one-tap payments. At that point, instead of entering in payment information again, ZooZ simply presents you with an interface where you can flip through your saved credit cards and other payment methods, then tap “pay now” to complete the process. Today, ZooZ’s in-app payments product has been adopted by 5,500 mobile developers. The company offers a ZooZ SDK for developers, which integrates ZooZ’s checkout into mobile (iOS, Android, or HTML5) apps, and it works with several app building platforms, including Appcelerator Titanium, Phone Gap, and Basic4Android. Levy says the idea for in-ad payments came to him when he was stuck in an airport playing mobile games and clicking on banner ads within them. “We were seeing a horrible experience where we were redirected to another webpage and then the whole process was so cumbersome – very long and unfriendly, to say the least,” Levy explains. Screens weren’t optimized for mobile, he says, and you would have to zoom in on the forms provided. “Then, when we started exploring]]> Cydia, a platform commonly thought of as the alternative app store for jailbroken iPhones and iPads, has just today arrived on Android, of all places. Though Android is by its nature more open and customizable than Apple’s locked-down iOS, it now has a growing collection of apps designed for power users who root their devices – a process that’s similar in spirit to the iOS jailbreak. Cydia for Android could soon become home to some of those same tweaks in time – or at least allow developers to port them to the Android ecosystem, whether or not they’re housed in Cydia directly. Jailbreaking an iPhone makes a lot of sense because customizing Apple’s software, including its lockscreen and homescreen, is all but impossible. However, on Android, the perception is that many of the quirks and customizations you may desire can be managed through the installation of third-party apps, ranging from Android launchers that can change everything about the device (like Facebook’s Home application, for instance) to very specific tweaks that can change the device’s default behavior. That being said, rooting an Android phone gives users even more power to do things outside of the scope of what’s possible out of the box. In addition to being able to upgrade to newer versions of Android ahead of “official” releases, various apps for rooted phones and tablets allow users to adjust CPU settings, define custom multitouch gestures, record video of their screens, undelete files, gain access to  apps not offered in their country, adjust cache size, change permissions, and a host of other delightfully geeky things. Cydia for Android could one day become a centralized place to find all those things, but at launch it is merely the framework. The only Cydia-enabled extension available at this time is WinterBoard, the “theme engine” that grew popular on iOS over the years as a way to customize more than just the phone’s background. On Android, WinterBoard works with themes provided by other customization platforms, including ADW Launcher, GO Launcher Ex, Launcher Pro, dxTop, and the T-Mobile/CyanogenMod Theme Chooser platform. According to a lengthy and detailed description on the Cydia Substrate app in Google Play, the software will run on Android versions 2.3 and up, plus “equivalent” versions like CyanogenMod or the Kindle Fire. It will also work on ARM or Intel CPUs and even on Google Glass. (Are people rooting Glass? Do tell.) The Cydia substrate has been tested]]> Nokia has added another device to its burgeoning Lumia portfolio of smartphones today, with the introduction of the Lumia 925: a sleek, PureView-branded handset that will be its first flagship on T-Mobile U.S. At today's London launch, Nokia executive VP of smart devices, Jo Harlow, sat down with TechCrunch to field a few questions.]]> Parents of preschoolers can finally let go of "iPad guilt" - the term that refers to that terrible feeling you get when you use the iPad as babysitter. Today, a company called Kidaptive is launching one of the most comprehensive feedback systems for parents to date, allowing them to get a hand of their child's learning and development by simply handing over the iPad and letting their child play.]]>

]]> Realmac Software is showing off its latest app today, ahead of a launch to come later in the month. The app is called Analog, and is an iPhone version of its desktop quick and easy photo manipulation software. I’ve been beta testing the software, and the experience it provides is in keeping with Realmac’s other recent mobile releases, like the super simple to-do app Clear it created in concert with Impending. So why does the world need yet another mobile photo app with filters? I asked Realmac Software head honcho Dan Counsell to find out. “It seems like most of the current popular photo apps are competing on features, they keep cramming more and more into them to try and outdo each other,” he explained. “In doing this they have become overly complex and confusing for new users. Camera apps should be fun to use with a minimal interface that just stays out of the way allowing the user to focus on what really matters, their photos.” That’s what Analog manages to achieve. It inherits this approach to simplified photo editing from the desktop version, but adds touch-specific interfaces and controls that are much better suited to the iPhone’s screen. These use a bold, flat design that emphasize clean lines, large hit hit points and a grid-like pattern that provides all your sharing and editing options in as few screens as is possible. Another aspect of Analog’s simplicity is that it doesn’t try to replace the social networks you already use with a new one. That’s by design, according to Counsell. “Online services come and go but by having an app that’s service agnostic we can easily adapt to change.,” he said. “Not to mention the fact that it’s easier for users to have one app that posts to multiple services rather than having to hop in and out of a bunch of different apps.” Analog started out as an idea that was actually pretty far removed from mobile photography. Counsell said the original Mac app was inspired by his own love of photography, which inspired a need for software that wasn’t quite as daunting or involved as something like Photoshop. “I love my DSLR and take the majority of my photos with it, so developing Analog for the Mac first was an easy decision,” he said. “After the Analog for Mac launch we had a lot of requests from]]> Rightware, a Finnish startup that sells embedded user interface software and performance benchmarking tools to car makers and consumer electronics companies needing to build graphical user interfaces has announced it has closed a $5.2 million Series B round. Investors in the round include Inventure and Nexit Ventures, along with new investor Finnish Industry Investment.]]> I'm addicted to Dots. It's betaworks' new game. 389. That's my high score. No power-ups. I'm pretty proud of it. The game consumes my time. I no longer browse reddit during my "private times"; I play Dots. Dots is simple. It's elegant. The game has restored my faith in mobile game development. But more importantly, it's fucking addicting. I can't put it down.]]> In the interest of protecting children, a new iOS application called AppCertain has debuted a monitoring application aimed at parents. The app, whose goal is to alert parents about the nature of the applications their kids are downloading, involves the use of a “configuration profile” – special software Apple originally intended for enterprise use, not consumer-facing apps sold through its App Store marketplace. But Apple reviewed the application – for longer than most, founder and CEO Spencer Whitman tells us – and subsequently approved it. For how long that will remain the case is, however, unknown. “We think we are on a gray line with respect to Apple, but we don’t really know,” Whitman admits. Configuration profiles, for those unfamiliar, were designed for the enterprise environment, allowing I.T. departments to manage the iPhones and iPads used by a company’s employees. They’re typically employed by Mobile Device Management solutions, for example, which use the software to configure, track and/or restrict a number of system-level settings like Wi-Fi, VPNs, app settings, permissions, and more. But more recently, a handful of startups have started using these same profiles to work around Apple’s App Store’s restrictions in order to accomplish tasks which wouldn’t otherwise be possible. Apple is aware this is happening, and seems to be handling each app submission on a one-off basis for now. We’ve seen mobile data compression utilities like Onavo and Snappli take advantage of the technology to intercept, re-route, and compress web data in order to save users’ bandwidth, for instance. Social search engine Wajam also uses a configuration profile to inject its own search results into Safari, though this is done outside of the Apple App Store. Onavo is still live on the Apple App Store today, though Snappli has since disappeared. (We reached out to the company for details, but have yet to hear back. It’s possible that Apple simply didn’t care for the fact that Snappli had publicly shared data showing how iOS users were dumping the then newly-launched Apple Maps application.) But frankly, it seems odd that Apple would knowingly ever let these types of applications into its consumer-facing app store in the first place, given the security risks they could pose. If used unscrupulously, a malicious configuration profile could remote control a user’s device, manipulate user activity, and hijack their sessions, or so explained security researchers at Skycure back in March. AppCertain isn’t a malicious developer, though,]]> Q: Why does a to do list application need $3.5 million in funding? A: Because it’s becoming more than a simple to do app. Today, Any.DO one of the more popular to do list applications for web and mobile, announced a seed round of funding led by existing investor Genesis Partners, with participation from both current and new investors Innovation Endeavors (Eric Schmidt’s fund), Joe Lonsdale, Blumberg Capital, Joe Greenstein and others. The company had previously announced $1 million in angel funding in late 2011 from Innovation Endeavors, Blumberg Capital, Genesis Partners, Palantir (Joe Lonsdale), Felicis Ventures (Aydin Senkut) and Brian Koo. For those unfamiliar, Any.DO got its start on the Android platform after the success of the team’s first app, Taskos, which proved the market was ripe for such a concept. That app had grown to 1.3 million users by the time Any.DO arrived in November 2011, and today has more than doubled its install base. Any.DO, however, has since surpassed it. The company says its flagship application now has more than 5 million users across iOS, Android and web. Referencing data from Onavo Insights, Any.DO claims to be the market leader in the to do list app space. (Its nearest competitor, Wunderlist, announced earlier this month having more than 4 million users.) Unlike many apps, Any.DO has more Android users than iOS, having initially taken advantage of that platform’s popularity, its need for well-built apps, and the potential built-in install base coming from Taskos, who were encouraged to switch over to Any.DO when it first debuted. Any.DO is beautifully designed, which has the side effect of making the app appear deceptively simple. But in reality, there’s some heavy lifting going on under the hood. “We believe the tools you have on your homescreen are going to be smarter and smarter over time,” explains Any.DO founder and CEO Omer Perchik. “In terms of the to do list…it will help you accomplish the things you have on your list, and we’ve developed a semantic engine that extracts intents and tries to find the relevant action,” he says. “And on the other hand, it’s basically predicting what you’ll be interested in doing.” So for example, if you tell the app today that you want to plan a trip or workout at the gym more often, it will recommend other applications that will help you complete those tasks, including things like Kayak, TripAdvisor, MyFitnessPal, and many others. Also, if you]]> Glympse has been in the news for its deals with the likes of Ford, Mercedes Benz and BMW/Mini to integrate its location-sharing and tracking technology into in-car systems on connected automobiles. Today it's taking its expansion strategy one step further, with the release of a new software development kit, giving app developers and others the ability to include Glympse-powered location-sharing technology into their services with a few lines of code. ]]> Apple's AirPlay streaming media technology has a neat trick up its sleeve for game developers, enabling them to create multi-screen experiences that allow a player to interact with an interface on a portable device like the iPad or iPhone, and see something different broadcast through their television attached to an Apple TV. One game that takes advantage of this is from Toledo, Ohio-based entrepreneur Matt Braun, who spoke to me about why the tech is so promising, and also about why we haven't seen wider adoption of it for gaming purposes as of yet.]]> Amazon today is taking a step into social gaming with the launch of Amazon Coins, its new virtual currency that is now live in the U.S. To kick it off, Amazon announced that it would put $5 worth of the currency -- equivalent to 500 Coins -- into all Kindle Fire users' accounts to use on apps and in-app purchases on its platform. The company says that this is equivalent to "tens of millions of dollars" worth of Amazon Coins. ]]> Flipboard has just updated its iOS app to add a few more features for its 50 million+ readers. Back in March, Flipboard announced a new feature that would include user-created magazines, which seems to have excited Flippers. In fact, the company announced that users have already created 500,000 curated magazines. Like our's. ]]> Groupon is once again expanding its portfolio of mobile payment services, putting it in closer competition with the likes of Square and PayPal's here targeting local merchants: today it has released Groupon POS, which appears to be an iPad-specific version of its mobile payments service aimed at local merchants, working as a dashboard to make and track payments. ]]> Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo has announced it plans to invest around $50M into Japanese digital entertainment company Pioneer Corporation, which makes in-car electronics, to acquire approximately seven per cent of the company. The pair described the investment as "a business and capital alliance", and said they plan to jointly develop an intelligent transport system for launch this year. ]]> Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has quit his position as a U.K. director of the company, days after Twitter subsidiary Tweetdeck was dissolved as a separate U.K. business by business registrar Companies House, according to Sky News. We've reached out to Twitter for confirmation and comment and will update this story with any response. ]]> Though it's but a baby in the app world, Vine is already making brands, advertisers, and especially media industry members chomp at the bit for some 6-second looping action. The latest to join the herd is Marvel, who has posted a six-second teaser trailer for its upcoming "Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D." TV series. For those who were fans of the Avengers and other Marvel films, this should be a sweet little Sunday afternoon treat. But if it doesn't satisfy, have no fear. A real teaser, one that lasts longer than 6 seconds, will debut tonight during ABC's Once Upon A Time. ]]> The global mobile messaging app space is the new social battleground. Startups that would have had little chance of unseating Facebook’s dominance on the web are attacking Zuckerberg’s empire by refocusing social networking around the mobile phone contacts book. Enter your phone number, and these apps already know who all your friends are. No need to go laboriously recreating your social graph. ]]> Google Now is a great feature for Android users, and now those who are on iOS devices. The idea is that the more you use Google products, the more it learns about you and the better information it can spit at you proactively. However, if you try and interact with Google Now, specifically on which sports teams you’d like to follow, the app will crash. Not only will Google Now crash, but you’ll get continual pop-up messages telling you that Google Search has crashed, the app that runs the Now experience. It’s quite annoying and it’s something that people have been reporting on Google’s message boards for the past month or so. Even though Google employees have interacted with the community, there’s still no real fix. I tried to delete the Giants, since I’m a Phillies fan, which you can do by tapping on the information button of the Card: It will let you add or remove teams without any problem, but once you go back to Google Now, it crashes and you start seeing this beauty over and over: There’s no official fix from Google, with the only employee feedback on this thread being “Thank you for staying engaged on this issue. We’re continuing to look into it.” The employee then encourages you to send feedback to Google from within Google Now…which you can’t do because the app crashes. The only real fix that I’ve found for the issue is to go into your app settings for the Google Search app and clear out the app data and cache. That will at least let you open up Google Now again and put an end to the annoying crash alerts: Once you open up Google Now again, you’ll have to go through the original process of agreeing to use it and sit through the tour of example cards. However, don’t go ahead and edit the same Card again, or it will start the hellish loop all over again. It reminds me of another Android bug, the one where the team left December out of its date picker entirely. It’s probably something that should have been picked up on during a regular QA process. Let’s hope that Google releases an update to its OS at the I/O conference, so that us sports fans can actually enjoy one of Now’s core functionalities. Or maybe, Googlers just really hate sports. Maybe its users]]> Facebook didn't realize just how important widgets, docks, and app folders were to Android users, and that leaving them out of Home was a huge mistake. That's because many of the Facebookers who built and tested Home normally carry iPhones, I've confirmed. The lack of "droidfooding" has left Facebook scrambling to add these features, as complaints about their absence are keeping Home from growing.]]>