Arie Abecassis and Michael Semegran (pictured) are the brains behind the operation at AppStori. They say that one of the biggest differences with AppStori is that it’s about more than just the crowdfunding. They also help developers with beta testing and app discovery, as well as more help through the blogging and social media support. Even if you don’t reach your funding goal, you can continue to use these features through the AppStori platform.

And unlike Kickstarter, AppStori is much more focused. You won’t find smartwatches or robot drones; it’s completely focused on mobile apps, though they’re open to every mobile platform.

Check out the full interview on MobileDevMag.com.

The post Inside the Minds Behind AppStori Crowdfunding Community appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

MM: John, can you tell us a little about your background in the social mobile industry.

When I founded Vringo in 2006, I saw a tremendous opportunity for smartphones. Smartphones have these beautiful, large screens created for displaying visual content. In 2006 the way to personalize your phone was by having your own ringtone, but just hearing your phone ring was very last century. We identified this vacuum and decided to fill the screen with color, motion and light. At first we did this through our Video Ringtone App (aka Vringo) which allows you to set videos that you create or download from our library as your ringtone. It meant you could watch your favorite band play your favorite song, not just hear it. Then we added an extra layer of personalization and further integrated the social element by enabling your video ringtone to play on your friend’s device when you call them. It’s called VringForwardT and is a patented technology and industry first.

Our journey began by enhancing the social experience for our users within their primary social network, their phone contact list. Shortly after, we decided to integrate their extended social networks. We predicted that visual content such as photos and videos would play a major part in the social platform evolution. This is how Facetones, an animated social video tone, was born.

MM:. What is Facetones and how does it work?

Facetones is a mobile app that generates a video slideshow of your friends’ Facebook photos whenever they call you or you call them. It automatically matches your phone’s contact list with your Facebook friends so that when you ring each other, you see a visually exciting video slideshow of their pictures on your phone.

Facetones is available to download for Android, Symbian (and coming soon to iPhone) from all major app stores such as Android Market, Ovi store, Mobango, Getjar, AppBrain. We have already exceeded 200,000 downloads of Facetones and have launched Facetones with leading carriers including Verizon, Telefonica and NTT Docomo which means subscribers can download the app direct from their mobile providers’ app stores. We’re currently in discussions with several other carriers to launch Facetones.

MM: Are the photos pulled in real time? Periodic synchronizations?

Facetones refreshes itself every week but also lets you do a manual refresh. Either way, your friends pictures will never be old and boring.

MM: How does Facetones address the issue of multiple contacts with the same name?

Facetones knows you might have multiple contacts with the same name or contacts who you save as one name on your phone (eg Mom) but whose real name will appear on Facebook. That’s why we ensured that the manual matching process is as quick and simple as possible; you can manually match any contact in only 2 clicks.

MM: What’s the difference between Facetones and Facetones Pro?

Facetones is ad supported but free to download. Facetones Pro does not have advertisements and costs a few dollars to download.

We also offer a subscription version without ads together with major carriers such as Verizon. With Verizon the subscription fee is $0.99 a month.

6. What trends in the mobile industry do you see really taking off in the next year or two?

Demand for mobile social interaction. As more and more people are becoming connected to the internet and social networking sites, the desire to receive instant updates and social media driven content is growing exponentially. There is an extreme demand for this social interaction to become integrated into more traditional areas of our entertainment and our lives. The Facetones concept is a prime example of the latest trend – integration between the mobile and social experiences. Estimates suggests that there are 5 billion global mobile subscribers in 2011 and 91% of mobile internet access is to socialize. We can see this trend in action with the recent partnership of Skype and Facebook. This partnership represents the future of communications: Socially connected, context rich, immediate sharing of content, free, and utilizing rich media and it has been reported that more than 50% of Skype calls today involve video. Facetones demonstrates how Vringo connects to this huge secular trend.

The Personalization imperative. More and more people around the globe are using mobile devices, and yet they want a very personal way to stamp and brand their own mobile voice and data connection to the world. Initially this was done with a ringtone-a great way of telling your surrounding what kind of person you are. Obviously the Rolling Stones, Bach or Justin Bieber each tell a different story. However today with the advent of blazing fast data networks through mobile carriers, many consumers will want to do much better with broadcasting their own personal brand across the network. This can be with a video ringtone -which is Vring forwarded or with social network pictures and updates that are shared with friends.

Video is the future. The latest smartphones, regardless of operating system, are pushing high quality video and visually stimulating content and applications at an increasing rate. The latest app designers and many mobile operators and cell phone manufacturers are coming up with innovative new ways to display video content on older models and more simple mobile devices due to their prevalence in major emerging markets with millions of consumers such as India and the developing world.

MM: What current trends do you see leveling off and fading away over the next while?

The old audio ringtone craze is over. People want more than just ri-ring from their smartphones.
They want some visual content and excitement. Thus video ringtones and social pictures and videos received while making and receiving phone calls are clearly the wave of the future.

Siloed communications is last century. The notion of separate applications and functions for messaging, chat, video, and voice will soon seem very quaint. It’s all about bringing the richest and most interesting form of communication to your phone with the best user experience. Soon all communication will seem like one big mash up.

Communications without social context will soon be over. Each time you reach out to your friends via phone you will want to share the social context we all create with our social networks. Bringing this social context seamlessly into the conversation will be where the money is made.

MM: Can Google+ and Facebook co-exist? Do people want to participate in more and more social networks?

The key to being a successful social networking platform is offering users a unique experience, or in other words, not being the same as the other guy. Over the last few weeks we’ve been watching a game of catch up by both Google+ and Facebook. Many new features were announced by both parties; however each one appeared to be already in play on the other’s site.

I think ultimately both platforms will reign for their own distinct features and will be mutually exclusive, appealing to different audiences and satisfying different needs. People will join networks that help them satisfy their particular need. For example, the reason a person signs up to LinkedIn will not be the same reason for signing up to Facebook. Facebook and G+ will need to create and develop their unique spaces. Right now Facebook has an obvious lead in social networking, and Google has an obvious lead in search. Both will continue to grow. Competition is a good thing as it will keep both platforms on their toes which should ultimately benefit the user.

MM: What other projects are on the horizon for Vringo?

Right now our goal is reaching 1 million downloads for Facetones by January 2012, but our overall goal is to use our experience and our strong patent portfolio to keep creating apps which engage and visually-excite mobile users whilst keeping them connected to their social networks. Our continual aim is to improve the mobile social and video experiences for all users. We’ll also be looking into other kinds of networks, e.g. enterprise networks, and seeing how we can take our experiences and technology to develop products for businesses.

MM: Anything else you’d like to add?

There are huge opportunities in building video rich social apps for other needs and situations. We created a Video ReMix application in partnership with music artists and brands that allows users to create their own music video by tapping on a Smartphone or tablet. We also developed ‘Fan Loyalty’ which is a platform that lets users interact, vote and communicate with contestants in certain reality TV series and even set their performances as video ringtones. It was first launched in June 2011 for the reality TV show “Star Academy” seen by over 300 million viewers in the Middle East. At the end of the day, life is made up of social interactions and Vringo is here to enhance them.

[Vringo]

The post Interview with Jon Medved, CEO of Vringo (Facetones) appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

“Where are you?” That’s one of the most common text messages sent, because you want to meet up with a friend or you got separated while shopping at the mall. In fact, over 600 billion text messages are sent in the United States each year posing that exact question. The echoecho app is supposed to streamline that so the core text message is no longer necessary.

It’s a “simple location-based mobile application for finding friends in the real world.” In some ways, you could say that it fits somewhere between Foursquare and Google Latitude, but it’ll work with anyone in your address book without having to reconnect through another social network. It’s available for Android, iOS, BlackBerry and Nokia Symbian, and the announcement this week is that Echoecho has received some serious financial backing in the form of $750,000. That seed funding comes by way of Google Ventures, as well as PROfounders Capital, a venture firm based out of the UK.

You send the “where are you” request and when your friend accepts, both your locations are shown on a graphical map. You can use it to set up meeting places, chat with friends via EchoChat, and share your location via the web with WebEcho. They’ve also worked so that the app “doesn’t destroy the battery life of your phone, broadcast your location to everyone in the world or force you to join yet another social network.”

“Checking in” is the hip thing to do these days, but maybe you don’t want it to be all that public. In any case, you can check out the echoecho app (and download it) through the official website.

The post Google backs echoecho app to answer “Where are you?” appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

eShadow works by recognizing nearby wireless networks, as well as the wireless communications technologies found within your smartphone. I don’t think that eShadow is particularly novel, though, since you could have had a similar experience with Google Latitude. I guess the idea here is that you can connect with new friends too, based on the personal and professional interests that you share.

They say that eShadow complements current social networks, because it emphasizes and facilitates face-to-face meetings. I imagine this could get really messy at trade shows where you have a lot of people in a small space, all of whom likely share some really similar interests. Thankfully, there are both whitelists and blacklists built into the software that you can define and adjust.

“Today, online social networking has advanced dramatically, but our ability to meet people face-to-face hasn’t gotten any easier,” said Dong Xuan, associate professor of computer science and engineering at Ohio State University. “We want eShadow to close social gaps and connect people in meaningful ways, while keeping the technology non-intrusive and protecting privacy.”

I’m pretty public with what I do — via my blog, Twitter, and other places online — but these kinds of programs are a little too stalker-ish for me. What do you think?

The post eShadow smartphone app will direct you towards nearby friends appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Anyone who has ever played with a remote-control car has dreamed of this moment. Forget about those tiny 1/18 scale models. What if you could drive a real deal BMW down the road using nothing but your smartphone? That’s the dream that has been realized by a couple of keeners.

An Jiaxuan teamed up with one of his buddies to outfit a brand new BMW (yes, the real car) with the ability to be remotely controlled using a specially designed app for the Nokia C7 smartphone. Remember that the C7 uses the same Symbian^3 platform as the Nokia N8, so you could likely do the same thing with that device too. You know, if you had the same kind of hackery skills as An Jiaxuan.

What’s crazy is that they were able to achieve this feat in just 20 days of programming and testing. They started out with trying to remotely control a little toy, then an air conditioner, then the room lights, then a DSLR camera, and ultimately the full-sized BMW.

Better still, they were able to confuse the heck out of a traffic cop trying to write the “driver” of the red BMW a ticket… only to see that there was no one in the driver’s seat at all.

[My Nokia Blog via Symbian World]

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