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Plancast , the plan-sharing startup with big-name angel investors and " future as platform " aspirations, has just had its iPhone app accepted into the iTunes store. The app was built by contracted star developer Leah Culver. It's simple, functional, attractive and useful. It's going to be very good for SXSW and probably beyond, if the service continues to stick with users as it has so far. Here's the iTunes link and below you can see some screenshots. Sponsor I'm posting my plans at Plancast.com/marshallk . You can see who's coming to our SXSW party Sunday night with NPR, PBS and more here on Plancast . See also: Hot Potato also has a new iPhone app just released today ( iTunes link ) which may come in handy for discussing the events that you attend via Plancast and otherwise. Discuss
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Plancast iPhone App is Live & It is Good
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Firefox Personas , the designer skins that let web surfers dress up their browser, are now being rebranded "Personas Plus" and are being moved over to Mozilla's add-on gallery to join the other plugins. With the move, Mozilla has also announced that development work on this popular personalization program is continuing with the addition of new features that will transform Personas from static background images to dynamically updating themes that could even include ambient information. Sponsor Personas , if you're unaware, are special web browser skins designed for Firefox that let you style your browser with colorful backgrounds and imagery. Slightly different than Firefox themes, which typically change browser buttons and toolbars too, Personas just let you update the browser's background without making dramatic changes to other Firefox features. Also, unlike themes, Personas don't require a browser restart to apply. Until now, Firefox Personas have been a sort of cute, but somewhat unnecessary feature, and one that seems to appeal more to the "junior" set of web surfers. With Personas for things like Lady Gaga, Twilight, Avatar, musicians, popular TV shows and celebs, older web surfers may have felt a little out-of-place when visiting the Gallery's homepage . However, the future of Personas may have have all Firefox users taking a second look. Future Plans for Personas On the development roadmap, Mozilla is considering a number of new ideas for these add-on skins, including dynamic Personas, window and/or tab-specific Personas, page specific Personas and self hosted Personas, among other things. There are definitely some intriguing ideas here, although, on the other hand, Personas that changed too often during web surfing could end up being more distracting than useful. One of the more interesting ideas under consideration is the addition of ambient information into a Persona. Years ago, we looked at an ambient news reader plugin for Firefox which displayed headlines from articles you would be interested in reading. These headlines, determined by an analysis of your web surfing habits, appeared in a beautifully fading list every time you opened a new tab in Firefox. That sort of low-impact information delivery mechanism is a perfect example of what it means to provide "ambient information." So what sort of ambient information could be embedded into a Persona, we wonder? Could Personas provide statistics on tweets, Diggs and other social actions the way Feedly's toolbar does ? Or could they, too, offer up links to related web pages or news stories? What would you want to see? With Personas, the Focus is on the Browser, not the Web Another thing to consider is whether or not this planned development means Mozilla is charting a different course for Firefox than rival Google is with their new Chrome browser. Where Chrome makes the browser "go away" with an emphasis on the web and not the tabs, buttons or toolbars, Personas do just the opposite: they return the focus to the browser itself. This would contradict other plans Mozilla was supposedly considering for Firefox's future not too long ago, most notably a design that would put tabs at the top of the browser just like in Chrome. Last summer, Mozilla requested user feedback about this potential revamp, but feedback was mixed. What do you think about the plans for Personas? Are they interesting enough that you would give them a try? Or do you like a more minimal look for your browser? Discuss
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The Future of Firefox Personas: Dynamically Changing and Filled with Ambient Info
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To all those companies and developers focused exclusively on iPhone apps: Watch your back. The Android platform is catching up, and none too slowly. As Android's growth continues to explode since the release of the Droid, only the most foolish of app shops are not planning to expand beyond Apple's walled garden. One developer, in fact, wrote that his app, which was showing modest, double-digit daily sales late last year, now reports that his app is making $13,000 a month. When that kind of opportunity exists for a single app, why would developers put all their eggs in one basket, a.k.a. the "Jesus phone"? Sponsor A few weeks ago, we told you, "As of December 2009 4 percent of all smartphone owners now use a phone running some version of the Android OS. That's an increase of 200 percent since the previous survey released in September. "Respondents were also asked about their plans to purchase a smartphone in the future. Among those who planned to purchase within the next 90 days, 21 percent said they would now choose Android." It's this growth that helped fuel the success of Eddie Kim's app, Car Locator. In a blog post today, the developer revealed that his Android app "started as a little side-project while I was vacationing with my family, turned into a few extra bucks for lunch money every day has continued its upward trend and is now beyond my wildest fantasy of what could have been possible. " Car Locator is a pretty simple application: Users save their location when they park their cars, and the app navigates them back to their cars later. The app was available in free and paid versions with varying feature sets. The paid version originally sold for $1.99, and the price was later increased to $3.99. Kim has done no marketing for the app, but it did win third place in Google's Android Developer Challenge 2 . When Motorola's Droid was released, Kim saw his first major spike in sales: "In the first 2 months, the app saw sales of about $5-6/day. Nothing too fancy," he wrote . "But starting November 7, there's been a significant uptick in sales, peaking on November 9, where the app saw $44 in sales. Sales have since settled to about $20/day, but it's probably too early to tell if this will hold." Little did Kim realize that his sales had just begun. To date, the free app has been downloaded 70,000 times, with paid app sales at about 10 percent of that figure. "The application was netting an average of about $80-$100/day, until it became a featured app on the Marketplace. Since then, sales have been phenomenal, netting an average of $435/day, with a one day record of $772 on Valentine's Day. Too bad I didn't have a Valentine's date this year - we would've gone somewhere real special!" (Catch that, ladies?) Kim also stands by the Android platform, saying, "Some may be quick to point out that a featured Android application is only able to net $400/day, while top iPhone apps make thousands However, I still think that Android is only a fraction of what it will eventually become . Each release of a new Android handset gets me excited, as it means a wider reach for the Marketplace." Folks, if you've been longing for a much-hyped app to make its way to the Android Market, forward this article to the developers and marketers in charge. There's money to be made there, and the userbase is only getting bigger. Discuss
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Watch Out, iPhone Devs: One-Man Android App Nets $13K Monthly
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Peter Kafka of All Things Digital has come out with some more details , which he says come from "people who have been briefed by the company", about Twitter's expected advertising platform . According to Kafka, the platform will be primarily search based, distributed via third-party applications and will appear in the familiar 140 character tweet format. He makes sure to include a caveat, because there's been a bit of confusion since reports of an "imminent" launch the other day, but the details mesh with what we've heard so far. Sponsor "Everyone I've talked to cautions that the plans are evolving and that there are plenty of details to work out," Kafka writes. "Including a launch date, though it seems as if the first half of this year is a very safe bet." When we first wrote about the ad platform this week, it was based on an article in MediaPost , which reported that a Twitter ad platform was "imminent". Since then, Seth Goldstein , who led the talk on which the reports were based, has back pedaled, saying he was only referring to a November statement by Twitter regarding its advertising future. Goldstein since called MediaPost's article " speculation ", but this seems to only apply in relation to the time frame. Anamitra Banerji, head of product management and monetization at Twitter, is still on record with MediaPost as saying that the company is working on an ad platform, which is currently in the test phase. According to Kafka, this is what we currently know about the developing ad platform: Ads will be tied to Twitter searches, in the same way that Google's (GOOG) original ads did. So a search for, say, "laptop", may generate an ad for Dell. The ads will only show up in search results, which means users who don't search for something won't see them in their regular Twitterstream. The ads will use the Twitter format -- 140 characters or less -- and will be distributed via the third party software and services that use Twitter's API. The services will have the option to display the ads, and Twitter will share revenue with those that do. Twitter will work with ad agencies and buyers to seed the program, but plans on moving to a self-serve model, like Google offers, down the road. The details jive with what Banerji told the MediaPost at the meeting in question. "We don't think of ourselves as a Web site -- essentially it's a platform," Banerji said. "We don't really control the ads or the way the tweets are viewed and then consumed. We are completely open around other people innovating around us. Ultimately, publishers should have choice. But the one area of concern for us -- and that's if bad ads get identified in Twitter -- it's a problem for us in the long term. So, we should do whatever we can to encourage positive behavior." An ad platform that leaves the appearance of advertising up to the program just calls out for a freemium model within third-party Twitter apps, where paying users could avoid seeing Twitter advertising. Or perhaps we'll see the emergence of more open source Twitter applications as advertising begins to appear in our previously ad-free apps. So while reports of Twitter unveiling the ad platform at SXSW may be a bit premature, it seems that there is no question that it is in the works and will take on many attributes of Google's AdWords program. Discuss
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Details of Twitter Ad Platform Emerge
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ReadItLater , the company behind the web browser add-ons and mobile applications that let busy web surfers mark articles for later reading, has just released a new service that will make it easier for you to finally catch up on your saved items. Before, as you browsed the web (either via desktop or mobile), you could use ReadItLater to accumulate a list of items you didn't have the time for at the moment. This was especially helpful for when you came across longer, thought-provoking articles - the kind you really wanted to sink your teeth into by devouring them word-for-word. Unfortunately, the ability to quickly tap a button to add something to your reading list was so easy - perhaps too easy - that users ended up with long, unwieldy lists of saved content. Now ReadItLater is introducing a new Digest feature which helps you get caught up by automatically sorting and organizing articles for you. Sponsor Digest: Imposing Order on the Chaos of Unread Items ReadItLater's creator Nate Weiner calls the new Digest "Read It Later with a brain." Instead of being presented with a simple list of headlines as you were before, the Digest organizes all your articles and groups them into topics. Its layout is somewhat reminiscent of Feedly , the popular start page made up of your Google Reader RSS feeds and Twitter posts. Like Feedly, which organizes topics by Google Reader folder names and tags, the Digest also employs a categorization system of sorts. The difference is, in ReadItLater's case, that filtering and organization is performed automatically with no extra effort required on your part.
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