Facebook Could Jumpstart HTML5 Platform With App Bookmarks On News Feed

Facebook’s late-comer HTML5 mobile app platform lags way behind the Apple App Store and Android Marketplace. Yesterday I spotted Facebook’s latest effort to catch up — a test showing bookmarks for third-party applications at the top of the mobile news feed. Currently, Facebook buries HTML5 app bookmarks at the bottom of its mobile site’s pull-out navigation menu, and only shows them in the iOS or Android Facebook app’s search bar. Placing them much more prominently atop the mobile home page could increase engagement — the first step in ...
The Peek Bites The Dust

You may remember the Peek , a device that showed up back in 2008 (so long ago, now!) offering nothing but email. That’s right, nothing but email in an age when smartphones were already becoming popular, and the iPhone was changing the way people thought about interacting with their data. In a way, it was genius: limiting the service and the device made it easy to explain and simple to use. It does email, period. An interesting tack, and one that kept them rolling for a few ...
New Everpix iPhone App Automatically Uploads Your Photos To The Cloud

Photo organization service (and TechCrunch Disrupt finalist ) Everpix just launched its first iPhone application . The app does two key things: it offers you a way to access your entire photo collection from your phone, plus it automatically uploads all your iPhone photos to the Everpix cloud. The app is a crucial part of the overall Everpix experience, which, for those of you unfamiliar, works primarily as a Mac application at present (Windows coming) to automatically organize and combine all your photos, whether they’re stored on your computer ...
Appafolio Lets You Make Native Multimedia Presentations On iOS

Like how there are all sorts of companies offering tools to let you build your own web site today, a new wave of them is doing the same thing for mobile apps. Appafolio stands out among the various options because it lets you create a polished native presentation for iOS without having to do any coding. Instead, you either download the Appafolio app ( here ) or use its web site to select the text, icon and images you’d like to feature. The interface reminds me of ...
Apple’s Off-The-Charts iPhone And iPad Sales

Sometimes you have to see things to truly appreciate their magnitude. Apple’s latest quarter was so massive that MG had to write two posts about it: $46 billion in revenues, 37 million iPhones sold, 15 million iPads. The chart above, which comes from Francesco Schwarz, using data from Apple and Asymco (see a fully interactive version here ), shows how unusual this quarter was for Apple. The quarter was driven by iPhone and iPad sales. And you can see that by looking at the blue and red ...
Android Smartphone Round-Up: December/January Edition

We took a break from the Android round-up in December because, well, to be honest I was on vacation. But January gave us a few extra smartphones and the holidays are over, so we’re back. What we’ve got for you today leans into more expensive turf, and unfortunately, our favorite Android devices for the past two months are also exclusively at Verizon, so Big Red subscribers should pay attention. Without further ado, these are our favorite December/January releases of the Android persuasion: The Samsung Galaxy Nexus , ...
Dirty Money

The New York Times has published a long article on Foxconn which, while it doesn’t provide much in the way of new information, does act as a sobering reminder of just how companies like Apple can make so very much money. When our own John Biggs visited Foxconn , he focused on the company itself, its scale, its intentions. When I wrote about Apple’s suppliers failing to meet environmental standards , it was more about the laxity of regulators within China. Today’s NYT piece depicts Apple as ...
Daily Crunch: New Eyes

Here are some of yesterday’s stories on TechCrunch Gadgets: HumanBirdWings Guy Survives First Test Flight Marketing Genius: Two Twins Giggling As They Sell You Designer 3D Glasses Math-Blind AI Teaches Itself Basic Number Sense Watch This Delightful Crowdsourced Star Wars Fan Film Immediately iPhone 4S and iPad 2 Finally Get Proper, Untethered Jailbreaks
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iBooks Author and iTunes U released

In addition to the release of iBooks 2, Apple also announced the launch of iBooks Author – a free app downloadable from the Mac App Store that lets anybody easily create textbooks suitable for the iBooks App. GarageBand for iBooks? Sure sounds like it. While I haven’t given iBooks Author a spin, it is supposed to be easy to use and powerful. Best of all, it doesn’t cost a thing – so you can expect a ...
Gucci covers for your iPhone and iPad

If you’re looking for a functional and stylish case for your iOS devices and you’ve got some money to throw around, how about picking up a designer case for your iPhone/iPad? The folks over at Gucci have decided to put their experience and expertise behind making fashionable suits, bags and accessories into creating stylish designer cases for iOS devices. They’ve recently come up with silicone covers that are decked ...