Not all of Portland, Oregon is dreaming of the ’90s. As proof of that, the region’s transit system, TriMet, is taking a step into the future by launching the beta test of an electronic ticketing system that lets riders purchase fares from their smartphones. The ambitious effort extends to all of TriMet’s major operations, which includes city busses, the MAX light rail, the WES commuter rail and the Portland Streetcar. As it stands, 150 participants will take part in the beta trial before the program opens to all riders later this summer. The push toward modernization is made possible by a Portland-based company, GlobeSherpa, which has developed a payment system and ticket validation app that also allows for fleet optimization and provides service alerts to riders. Currently, the TriMet app is available for Android and iOS, but GlobeSherpa tells us that it’ll deliver future versions for BlackBerry and Windows Phone. Hit up the break for a peek at what’s in store for The City of Roses.
Filed under: Transportation, Software, Mobile
Jackthreads is a Thrillist company that features clothes and accessories for men. The style is all over the place – goofy t-shirts sit next to nice blazers and jackets – but it’s decidedly urbo-hipster in the design and sizing. Full disclosure: I try my damnedest not to buy their stuff but I still find my self idly clicking through and buying age-inappropriate streetwear. It’s pretty addicting. That said, they’re going gangbusters. The company will see $ 75-100 million in revenue this year and their iPhone app just passed 2 million downloads. The app has been a consistent top free lifestyle app and it pushes millions of pageviews and sales sessions. “It’s a huge driver for the business in every single way,” said CEO of Thrillist Media Group, Ben Lerer. “The native app experience killed for us,” he said. “It drove tens of millions of dollars of revenue.” They have just launched a new iPad app that acts as a catalog for their daily deals and pushes notifications when new sales are added. Lerer is excited about the new platform and has seen mobile usage explode. “We anticipate the highest conversion rate on any channel,” he said. “I know I’m buying more frequently on the iPad. Mobile is a huge driver for the business in every single way.” Given that Jackthreads is one of Thrillist’s most profitable properties and thanks to solid growth over the past few years, it’s clear that Lerer and team have found the goose that lays the lightweight golden track jacket with scorpion detail on the back.
Google continues to increase the reach of its Google+ platform, and today the company is launching a new mobile content recommendation service powered by Google+. These recommendations will appear as small widgets at that bottom of the screen as users browse a news site that has enabled this service. Google’s launch partner for this service is Forbes, but others can implement these recommendations by just adding a single line of code to their mobile sites. Recommendations, Google says, can appear regardless of whether a users are signed in to Google+.
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.
Most people may not yet be using smartphones to pay for goods when they are out shopping, but that doesn’t mean that they are not glued to their handsets anyway. Some 
You know, it’s been a pretty good few days for the (still mostly undercover) dudes behind Bang With Friends, the app that aims to help you do exactly what its name implies. 
Boston-based Localytics is fleshing out its mobile app analytics and marketing platform in a major way today with a variety of new features to help not just with customer acquisition, but also with monitoring and maintaining customer relationships over the lifetime of an app. The three big new areas Localytics now addresses with its platform are Lifetime Value Tracking, Customer Acquisition Management and Real-Time Funnel Management, all of which serve to help determine long-term engagement value.
It’s fair to say that the “ambient location” craze has passed. Several of the mobile apps intent on connecting people with friends and other recommended users nearby are still struggling to find mainstream adoption. Some, like Glancee and Glassmap have sold. Others, like Kismet, have moved into new product categories. And today, the business-focused networking app Intro, is pivoting. Gone are the “ambient location” features which once alerted you to nearby users based on things like geotagged tweets or check-ins. With the new version, the company has shifted the focus solely to making one-to-one introductions between members of LinkedIn or Meetup groups. Explains co-founder Anthony Erwin, the decision to make this switch came from observations of user behavior. The best and most powerful introductions the app enabled were those where the members were each in the same group already. 90 percent of the time when an intro was created and members would connect, they cited being in the same group as the reason, he says. “I think what’s happened in this space, is because it’s dealing with connecting strangers – people are kind of wary of that,” says Erwin. “If you’re going to create connections that work, they’re going to have to be very familiar; almost not like strangers, in a way.” Users told him that when they were shown other group members, those people didn’t feel like random strangers. Intro has always been more sensitive to the potentially creepy nature of ambient location apps, having previously introduced features that would allow users to switch of networking with those not outside of a set of preferred groups, for instance. The revamped version of the app is something of an extension of that earlier concept more than it is a hard pivot to an entirely new vertical. In the updated application, available now on iOS and for Android in a few weeks time (currently the Android app is the older version of Intro), you’ll still be shown other group members who are nearby, but now the app take a wider view of your location. It begins by offering you connections across your city, as opposed to at your exact location. You can then quickly swipe through the suggestions to connect or reject the proposed connections. However, when there is an event or other congregation of members in the same location, the app’s algorithm will immediately adjust to sort its recommendations by degrees
Over the last few years, Samsung has been working hard on building technology to improve the communication between its connected TVs and mobile devices, whether they be iOS or Android phones or tablets. Well, the company has acquired 
When you’re spreading like wildfire, why douse the flames to make a few bucks? Facebook’s willingness to wait on advertising helped its site and mobile apps grow massive, and now it’s applying the same strategy to Instagram. Wall Street is clamoring for Facebook to earn back the $ 700+ million it spent buying the photo app, but Mark Zuckerberg refuses to trade tomorrow’s dollars for today’s dimes.
In this day and age, if you own a small business, you need a web (and mobile) presence. It’s just the way it is. Some might opt just to go for a social media approach, a Twitter account and a Facebook page, but the likelihood is that you want something a little more flexible, high-quality and something that gives you more control over the user experience. More and more, people are turning to Wix and Weebly. The two big “W’s” in the website creator world. For those unfamiliar, Weebly is a service that lets you, your mom, grandmother, four-year-old cousin and anyone you know create a quality website for free. Launched out of Y Combinator in 2007, Weebly has had over 15 million sites created using its service to date, which collectively attract more than 100 million unique visitors each month. This week, Weebly has kicked its service up a notch with an all-new overhaul to its website builder — one that’s been a year in the making — and the launch of an interactive “Site Planner.” This new site planner is designed to help give people ideas and a little lightbulb-style inspiration that will help them walk through the creative process and vision for the site. Plus, Weebly now offers an HTML5 site creator that offers new themes and pre-fab building blocks to customize their new site, and, most importantly, a new mobile new editor that helps them optimize their site for mobile devices, along with a now-globally available Android app. In the lead-up to the big launch, co-founder David Rusenko tells us, Weebly surveyed several million consumers and found that about 56 percent of them, understandably, don’t trust a business that doesn’t have a website. And, yet, 58 percent of businesses don’t have a website. Pretty eye-opening in today’s world, when over a billion people are on Facebook and hundreds of millions have so much computing power in their pockets. Ask the Weebly founders who their core audience is and they’ll tell you, proudly, that it’s entrepreneurs — people who are trying to build their own small businesses, across every industry, not just techies. And, regardless of technical proficiency, the problem that most small business owners struggle with is how daunting it can be to face that blinking cursor, the blank page. It’s the same issue we scribblers deal with in cases of “writer’s block.” When building websites,
If, say, a company uses both Sharepoint and Salesforce inside a mobile app, to get that data into one app they need multiple levels of API integration. Because of the enormous boom in mobile and tablet apps, so-called ‘back-end as a service’ (BaaS) platforms like FeedHenry – which solve these problems – are hugely expanding. Thus, today FeedHenry has secured $ 9M (€7M) in a funding round led by Intel Capital, alongside a “seven figure” investment from existing investor Kernel Capital.
Search startup 
There are a plethora of options for mobile app crash testing, like Crashlytics, Crittercism and Bugsense. But what about before the day of the big launch? A startup out of India’s GSF Accelerator called Little Eye Labs is looking to handle crash testing before developers go into post-production. They just launched an app and crash testing service within the last few weeks. “We want to catch the bugs before the app reaches the app store,” said co-founder Kumar Rangarajan. The company has built a way for developers to monitor an app’s performance on a single or a handful of devices for how it consumes memory, power and wireless data during a test-run. Basically you either plug the phone into your computer and watch how it performs, or you can disconnect it, and observe how the app performs for a 30-minute run on these metrics through their software. Other competing products like Crashlytics instead look at crash reporting for when a developer’s app is already released, out in the wild and being used on perhaps thousands or millions of devices simultaneously. Little Eye records what’s happening live on the screen as it monitors other less visible stats like data and memory usage. Once the test run is over, it shows charts and a side-by-side video recording that can tell developer what happened while an app was running. “When doing app testing, you need a lot of context around what a user was doing at certain points,” he said. “You can actually deploy this in your lab, run multiple apps on a series of devices. Our main value proposition is that context; it’s the whole video aspect of it.” Rangarajan said the closest comparable service out there is Android’s Dalvik Debug Monitor Server, which comes as a tool for developers using the platform. “It’s very rudimentary, but what we do is more visual, advanced and easy-to-use,” Rangarajan said. Rangarajan and his co-founders previously worked on developer tools at Rational Software, which is a company that IBM acquired for $ 2.1 billion back in 2003. They have a freemium model, naturally. A full annual subscription is about $ 500 per developer, and the monthly costs are roughly $ 50 per developer.
I’ve already told you about Donna, the new mobile personal assistant from Incredible Labs. But if you haven’t actually had a chance to play with the app yourself, it’s difficult to explain how it’s different from the growing list of smart calendar and assistant apps now on the market.
The team behind mobile video app Socialcam just keeps on trucking. The company, which is now part of Autodesk, is releasing a new version of its app today, adding a bunch of features that users have asked for, like expanded profile pages, as well as the ability to switch back and forth between front- and rear-facing cameras and hashtags and @ mentions that actually do stuff. It’s been nearly a year since Socialcam was acquired in a deal that was worth about $ 60 million. Since then, the team has added a few members, boosting its ranks from four to seven. And that team continues to iterate on the app, posting eight updates across its iOS and Android apps since acquisition, some bigger than others. That said, Socialcam co-founder Michael Seibel wants to increase the rate at which the company puts out updates, getting it back to its pre-acquisition pace of an update every three weeks or so. With that in mind, the company just issued a pretty major update today which answer some of the demands its users had from previous version. That includes better support for hashtags and @mentions of other users. See, people were hashtagging their stuff all the time in Socialcam, but being able to search or follow or click through those hashtags wasn’t as fully built out as some would like. So users can now search via hashtag, and hashtags are now clickable. Socialcam has also added autocomplete for hashtags and @mentions, so users can get at what they want sooner. And if what they want to get at is another user page, Socialcam has given them a little more to look at. According to Seibel, the company found that its users weren’t just leveraging the app to share their videos with other social networks, but were actually using it as its own little social network, following and interacting with the other folks there. One of the requests the team got was to expand user profiles. So it did that, giving them more that they could do to express themselves and tell strangers on the platform who they are and why they should be followed. Socialcam also has added the ability to switch between front- and rear-facing cameras on its iOS app, allowing users to shoot a video intro with the front-facing cam, and then switch to the other one to show people what’s going on
Facebook today unveiled three new products at its Mobile Developer Conference in NYC that will put the company on an even faster track to becoming a mobile-first platform. The company announced Open Graph mobile, which takes Facebook’s social graphing product to the mobile platform for the first time. Facebook is also improving Login via mobile, and releasing a new Facebook SDK 3.5 for iOS. Alongside unveiling the latest initiatives toward a mobile-focused Facebook, the social network also released its latest figures for mobile, which include over 680 million mobile users and the fact that over 81 percent of iOS apps and 70 percent of top 100 grossing Android apps integrate with Facebook. In terms of Open Graph mobile, Facebook simply wants to make it easier for developers to integrate the Open Graph into their mobile apps, a feat that has proved difficult in the past. But with a new Object API, Facebook is cutting out the web server. “With the Object API, you can directly create Open Graph objects and no longer need to host webpages with Open Graph tags. This API is available for both mobile and web apps,” reads the press release. Facebook has also released an Object Browser, which is a visual interface that lets developers interact with their published object data. Alongside the Object Browser, you’ll also notice that Facebook has introduced a new object privacy model that improves sharing of user generated content within native apps. Past that, the company also released Native Share Dialog, a tool that lets users share experiences from native mobile apps without needing to log in to Facebook first. It also has built-in support for publishing Open Graph actions, so it makes sharing within developers’ apps much better “with just one line of code.” Where log-in is concerned, Facebook is launching a faster login dialog (20 percent faster, to be exact) that gives users more control over their permissions and privacy. Facebook realized a few months ago that their newest permission model on the FB platform was seeing a 5 percent increase in mobile conversions, and so they decided to bring that feature to their developers as well. Starting today, the new login dialog will automatically be applied to mobile and non-game web apps with no change required to the code. Last, but certainly not least, Facebook is launching the Facebook Technology Partners program to help developers leverage these new
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