Kim Dotcom's Mega cloud storage service launches iPhone app

Kim Dotcom's cloud storage service, Mega, has launched a new iPhone app, four months after launching an Android app for the service.

 
The Mega iPhone app allows users of the service to browse and manage their Mega cloud storage account and perform fast file transfers. 
 
It also lets users preview and stream supported document and file formats, export and send file and folder links, and also import file links into the users' Mega account.
 
Mega has said that it will soon introduce a Photo sync feature and bring support for the iPad.
 
The Mega app for iPhone also features in-app purchases, allowing users to upgrade their storage space and bandwidth quota by subscribing to Mega Pro with a monthly or yearly subscription.
 
The app offers a $10.99 per month subscription and a $119.99 per year subscription. The Pro subscription gives 500GB of storage space and 1TB of bandwidth per month. The subscriptions are renewed automatically for successive subscription periods of the same duration and at the same price as the initial period chosen, if users opt for them. 
 
Users can also switch off automatic renewal of their Mega Pro subscription, 24 hours before their next subscription payment is due via their iTunes account settings page. 
 
The Mega app for iPhone is available for download through the App Store.
 
Mega had released (read re-launched) an Android app in July. It was essentially a third-party client which was acquired by the file-sharing service and repackaged as an official app. It also supports automatic picture uploads through the phone's camera. The company had said that it's also developing a Windows version of the app for syncing files with Windows PCs.
 
Mega competes with the likes of services such as Dropbox, Box, SkyDrive and Google Drive. It offers 50GB of free cloud storage space and claims that it's more secure. 

Apple Updates App Store Search Engine To Handle Spelling Errors

Sarah Perez at TechCrunch reports Apple has updated their App Store search engine to help with misspellings, typos and other “fat-fingered” searching mistakes.

Sarah said she has “sources” that have confirmed these “App Store search engine changes went into effect a few weeks ago.”

One example I can personally attest to is when someone searches for [rusty brick] in the app store, normally it did not return apps from my company. Now it does. Here is a picture of the search results for [rusty brick] in the app store returning one of our apps with the name “RustyBrick” as one word.

Sarah said the same was true for the app named “QuizUp” that now comes up in the search results when you search for [Quiz Up] with a space.

Developers are expecting this to have an impact on the download and revenues they generate through Apple’s App Store.

As a developer, helping searchers find what they are looking for, especially on mobile devices, is a good thing.

Apple Prevails in iPhone App Privacy Case

A California judge has once again tossed a lawsuit that accused Apple of producing devices that allow ad networks to track a user's app activity.

California district Judge Lucy Koh determined that the plaintiffs could not prove that Apple's policies caused them significant harm.

The case dates back to 2010, when the first of five separate lawsuits on this issue was filed in California. By Aug. 2011, the cases were all combined into one suit, but one month later, Koh threw out the case. She did, however, give the plaintiffs the option to revise their complaint, and the case dragged on for another two years.

Earlier this week, however, the judge ruled in favor of Apple, finding that the plaintiffs could not prove that they suffered harm as required under Article III of the U.S. Constitution, California's Consumers Legal Remedies Act (CLRA), and California's Unfair Competition Law (UCL).

"To have Article III standing, a plaintiff must plead and prove that he or she has suffered sufficient injury," Judge Koh wrote in her decision. "To have standing under the CLRA, a plaintiff must allege that she relied on the defendant's alleged misrepresentations and that she suffered economic injury as a result. Likewise, to establish standing under the UCL, a plaintiff must demonstrate that she 'suffered injury in fact and ... lost money or property as a result of the unfair competition.'"

Basically, the plaintiffs had to prove that "Apple misrepresented its data collection and privacy practices, thereby luring plaintiffs into spending more money for their iPhones than they would have had they known the true nature of the data being collected by Apple and the third party apps." The judge concluded that this was not the case.

The original suit, filed by Jonathon Lalo, cited a 2010 Wall Street Journal study that examined 101 mobile applications and found that iPhone apps distribute more personal data without the users' permission than Android apps.

The "leakiest" apps, according to the Journal, include Pandora, Grind, Paper Toss, and TextPlus 4, which sent age, gender, ZIP codes, and user IDs to multiple ad networks. The most commonly submitted information, usually sent back to either the app maker or sold to an ad network, is the phone's unique user ID number, which can give companies valuable information on what an owner does with his or her phone.

Facebook messenger starts app war with WhatsApp, WeChat on iPhone, Android phones

 

Facebook, with its messenger, is planning to take on other popular standalone messaging apps in India, such as WhatsApp, WeChat, LINE and Hike with the launch of its new version of Messenger for iPhone and Android. The social media giant, which has around 82 million users in India, also launched the popular ‘Chumbak Expressions’ local stickers this week with Indian content to ward off competition from home-grown players like Bharti's Hike.

With the explosion in usage of smartphones, more and more users are spending time on mobile devices, making it imperative for Facebook to provide a seamless experience across mobile devices, tablets and desktops. In emerging economies like India, the company is also seeing mobile-only users, a generation that has leapfrogged personal computers.

With the new version, Facebook has tried to make the app work faster on all the versions of Android, especially Gingerbread and Ice Cream Sandwich, used in old and lower-end devices. “This will work across various versions of Android like Gingerbread, Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean, and will be a lot faster than it used to be. That is because its every aspect is looked from a mobile-to-mobile world and has a lot of focus on performance and snappiness of the app,” said Peter Martinazzi, product manager for Messenger at Facebook, adding that the focus was on maintaining the standard across Android.

But Facebook faced problems in emerging economies because of the fragmented nature of Android that is more popular in countries like India, Indonesia and Brazil, which are also its major growth markets. Mobile monthly active users (mobile MAUs) were around 820 million at the end of June, an increase of 51% since Q22012, and it also had around 220 million mobile-only MAUs, 15% sequential growth during the aforesaid period. 

According to Martinazzi, Facebook has focussed on the platform and tried to bring the best possible Android app. The app will now have a common navigation bar, an action bar on the bottom and a compose button, which are same on all Android phones. "We have made sure that the experience is not compromised even when you are not using the Single Page Format

Personal Finance Startup BillGuard Adds Analytics And Smart Savings Features To Its iPhone App

 

Personal finance startup BillGuard is launching an update to its iPhone app that will not only help users defend against fraudulent charges on their credit cards, but could also lead them to be more proactive with their money. The addition of new Spending Analytics and Smart Saving features will provide new tools for consumers to analyze their spending and save based on discounts they might not have known were available.

BillGuard was founded with the goal of helping users save money. By connecting their accounts to its big data platform, the company provided a way for its users to track and dispute fraudulent charges or billing errors on their credit and debit cards. Soon after it moved to tackle the problem of so-called “gray charges” - that is, monthly or yearly subscription charges that users either unknowingly signed up for or signed up for and forgot about.

But all that provides is a reactive approach to personal finance. After helping users to save some $50 million in gray charges, the company wants to help users save money by making more proactive choices about their spending. With the latest update to its iPhone app, it's doing that with the addition of two new features: Spend Analytics and Smart Savings.

“Our core mission is to use data to save people money,” BillGuard CEO Yaron Samid told me via Skype. “We're really good at saving people from the bad stuff, and now we want to find the good stuff… [The app] is like the perfect accountant running in the background and trying to find ways to save money.”

With Spend Analytics, BillGuard is beginning to move from being just a “personal finance security” company to also offering personal finance management tools. In other words, it's entering Mint territory.

But unlike Mint, BillGuard isn't trying to shoehorn users into an unrealistic budget. It's built to provide a wide range of analytics to enable them to see how their spending stacks up against an earlier period, and also to better understand where their money is going by organizing expenses by category. Since it's mobile, the hope is that users will be able to make more conscious financial decisions on the go.

The second feature, Smart Savings, is designed to help users save money in their everyday lives by notifying them whenever there are coupons or discounts available for items they're likely to purchase. Because BillGuard knows your purchase history and your location, it can predict when you're likely to make a purchase and can suggest savings you might not have known about.

Samid said Smart Savings will hopefully address the data inefficiency that exists for users who aren't aware of coupons or discounts available. By doing so, it can reduce the amount they are about to spend at any given time when preparing to make a purchase. That could mean taking advantage of a discount at the local coffee shop or becoming aware of a sale at a user's favorite store.

In either case, Samid said BillGuard is going to be ultra picky about the coupons that it sends to users. And since it's scanning the web for new discounts and it's not working with merchants to pitch discounts to users, it's not incentivized to spam them with offers.

Our core mission is to use data to save people money. - BillGuard CEO Yaron Samid

But if users find they're getting coupons that aren't relevant, they can provide feedback to the app saying so. Users will be able to either “redeem” and “reject” any coupon that appears, and the app will learn from those actions accordingly.

Of course, other apps have tried to help users save money through analytics and local discounts. So what makes BillGuard think it can succeed where they've failed?

It all comes down to the engagement the company sees from users, according to Samid. Personal finance management apps normally see users sign up and quickly lose interest once the novelty wears off. But BillGuard is seeing its users open up the app an average of four times a week. In the same way that people clean out their inboxes, BillGuard users are going there to clear away questionable charges, almost every day.

BillGuard has raised $13 million from investors that include Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund, Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavors, Bessemer, IA Ventures, Saul Klein, and Joe Lonsdale. The company now has 23 employees, most of which are based in Tel Aviv, Israel… but it's looking to hire more. (*hint, hint*)

This Is 'SportsCenter'...on Your iPhone

The sports media giant has renamed its ScoreCenter app after ESPN's famed sports newscast "SportsCenter." The rebranding coincides with a major update that aims to make the iPhone and Android app more of a full-fledged sports media destination than a source for the latest scores.

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The rebrand is "signifying a tie-in to the TV show and really signifying for us a blending of adding more content and branding personality," said Ryan Spoon, senior VP-product development at ESPN Digital Media. With more than 50 million downloads since its June 2009 launch, the mobile app "can be our largest digital property," he said. Currently, the app is No. 2 among sports apps on iTunes to NFL Mobile.

An iPad version is expected to be available in the first quarter of 2014.

The redesigned app does away with the old tabs separating scores, videos and headlines. The app still features that content but commingles them in a way that resembles what Twitter would look like had ESPN acquired the newly public microblogging service. It even syndicates Twitter feeds and has ads that can, at times, be described as "native."

The launch sponsors are MillerCoors, Kay Jewelers and Bud Light.

Upon opening the app, users are presented with the new "SportsCenter" tab that defaults to show game scores. People can swipe horizontally to the "news" section housing articles and video clips and again to a section called "now" that displays an ESPN-curated Twitter feed populated with tweets from ESPN's official Twitter accounts and those of employees like "Outside the Lines" host Bob Ley. People who connect their Twitter account to the app can retweet or favorite tweets like they would in one of Twitter's official apps.

The app also features a tab called "Inbox" that pulls much of the content appearing in the "SportsCenter" tab but limited to a user's favorite teams and organizes them into a single feed.

Given the new design's emphasis on feeds, it shouldn't be surprising that ESPN is opting for feed-based ads. It also shouldn't be surprising since seemingly every new mobile ad format hitting the market these days -- like Yahoo's stream ads and YouTube's new mobile takeover ad -- stakes itself within the stream of whatever regular content people are using the app to consume.



The SportsCenter app's in-feed ads are bespoke like a truly "native" ad. For example, Coors Light could take one of the "Cold Hard Facts" items of sports trivia it sponsors to appear on SportsCenter's TV broadcast and have it show up in the mobile app's "news" section. Mr. Spoon said these feed-based ads are "a new format for us," though they've appeared in the ScoreCenter app's "headlines" section for at least the past week.

ESPN is also introducing interstitial ads that will pop up as people swipe between sections in the app and can run videos or display static images. These ads that are the mobile display equivalent to commercial breaks between "SportsCenter" segments "make sense contextually to the user interface," Mr. Spoon said.

And of course there will be preroll ads airing before game highlight clips and other videos. In addition to the videos occupying the news section -- which can be streamed to someone's TV through Apple TV's Airplay feature -- the app connects to ESPN's TV-streaming Watch ESPN app. A "live" button will appear next to scores of games being currently broadcast on one of ESPN's TV networks will open that game in the Watch ESPN app when clicked.

These new ads will most likely be hoarded by brands who advertise across ESPN's properties; the overwhelming majority -- 98% -- of ESPN's mobile advertising revenue comes from deals signed to span multiple ESPN properties, said Brian Doyle, senior director of mobile and digital sales strategy at ESPN.

So, why didn't ESPN just call it SportsCenter from the start? Well, back when ScoreCenter launched in 2009, it was really just about scores since mobile video wasn't really a thing yet. Now, ESPN can offer a "SportsCenter"-like experience in mobile. "Video is at the forefront of this app," Mr. Spoon said.

Twitter announces upcoming iPhone app update with new search filters

  

Today Twitter has announced they will be updating their official app for iOS, making it easier to discover what is happening on the microblogging network. The update adds new search filters that allow you to quickly navigate to specific people and Tweets. The filters also allow you to toggle between all relevant Tweets and only the most popular “top Tweets.”

Filters will also allow you to filter by different media types, such as photos and videos. There’s also an option to see Tweets only from the people you follow. The update includes includes a new timeline in the Discover tab that makes it easier to see what’s currently trending. This trending timeline will show topics that are associated with nearby events and TV shows.