If you’re looking to join the app development craze and don’t know where to get started, hosting service Applicasa wants to be your app’s home, for free. It might sound too good to be true, but the service will provide all of the server side hosting and maintenance in an easy to use interface, for free, until your app hits 100k users. That would be a good problem to have, huh?

If you have the vision for the next big thing on Apple’s App Store, but don’t have the technical chops to build databases, then Applicasa is most definitely for you. In fact, the site claims that it provides enough tools to get your app’s server side environment going in 10 minutes or less. Support for the Android Market is coming in April.

Applicasa has a graphical interface for database creation, custom queries, as well as a CMS for management of updates, beta version deployment and push notifications.

Big plans, big opportunity

The CEO of Applicasa, Lior Malenboim, says this about the opportunity his company has:

We plan to become a “Home for Apps” by creating a solution and community for developers in which they can host and publish their apps and help each other by sharing code, solutions and ideas.

Without a doubt, there is a massive opportunity to help onboard small teams into app development, whether they already have a successful product on the web or are starting from scratch. By implementing a series of tools that allow you to drag and drop elements into a database, the company is hoping to spark the imaginations of a new generation of entrepreneurs.

As you can see in the screenshot below, creating new fields in your app’s database is as simple as clicking a few buttons and requires little or no coding know-how:

While Applicasa is free for startups and new apps, brands can manage existing apps on the platforms with prices that go up to $199 a month to support $300k users. For startups, the company hasn’t announced its pricing plan yet, but considering that it will take you a while to get to 100k users, it’s not a bad idea to get started by using its service.

By offering this service for free, the company is placing a huge bet on the potential to capture lightning in a bottle by ending up hosting the back end of a really popular app, say the next Instagram, and hope that the developers rely on the service enough to stay put as its app grows. From what I’ve seen, it might just be able to do that.

➤ Applicasa

We love a third-party mockup at TNW as much as anyone, but when someone does the leg work to doodle something that we have thinking about in the backs of our minds, it’s all the better. Today we have something to share with you that should excite.

It is well-known that Windows 8 is designed in part to run on tablet hardware. Also, Nokia, creators of the rather beautiful Lumia line of smartphones, has been tipped as set to build Windows 8 tablets when the time comes. Taking the idea of Windows 8, and Nokia’s hardware, and putting them together is a mental exercise worth enjoying.

Happily, that’s exactly what our mockup from MyNokiaBlog envisions. We’ll cut the chase and get to the pictures:

To quote Reddit, if these existed, it would be a ‘Shut Up And Take My Money’ moment. The creator of the mockup envisioned the device as having the following specifications [TNW notes in brackets]:

• A 1.4GHz cpu
• 512Mb ram [This could be changed to 1 Gb, we think]
• 16/32/64Gb storage [Tiered pricing is an interesting idea]
• 9.7″ AMOLED “clearblack” display (1280×800)
• 8Mp Rear camera, 2Mp front facing camera
• Windows 8 tablet edition [We assume that he means Windows 8 Home, or whatever it ends up being called]
• Wifi/3G connectivity [Windows 8 tablets may be carrier subsidized, which is a very interesting proposition]

The success of Windows 8 in tablet form is very much a dynamic equation. Even if Windows 8 is a very polished piece of software, bad mobile hardware could snuff its chances of moving any significant number of tablets. In short, Windows 8 needs devices like the above unit, but probably with a dual core processor, to be built.

It’s fun to see what enthusiasts come up with, but this is merely a foretaste. We can’t wait to see what Nokia cooks up itself.

This just in: we have received an invite to an event in Barcelona, Spain, on the 29th of February, which Microsoft is calling its “Windows Consumer Preview event.” We assume that at this event the Consumer Preview will be demoed, and released to the general public.

The date of the event, right before the close of the month, is in line with our expectations that Microsoft will release the Consumer Preview of Windows 8 before the end of the month. We broke that story some time ago.

Microsoft has promised to release more information as the date approaches. Earlier today, news of what applications will be included in the Consumer Preview became known. Prior to that, we learned what gaming titles would ship with the code. While some details remain vague, the beta of Windows 8 is taking shape.

We are working to censor our invite so that we can show it to you. Here’s the censored invitation:

We have reached out to Microsoft, asking if the company intends to release the Consumer Preview at the event. We will update this post when we hear back. Update: Microsoft just provided us with the following comment: “While we are excited to announce the Windows Consumer Preview event is in Barcelona on February 29^th, unfortunately, at this time, we are not announcing additional information on the details of the event. Please continue to check the Microsoft News Center during the week of February 29^th for updates and access to online content.”

Popular iOS developer Tapbots has released an update to its highly regarded Tweetbot for iPhone that includes several much needed improvements like inline image preview and one-tap links. Additionally, the entire client has received some nice boosts in speed.

In the new timeline view, spacing has been adjusted slightly and some nice visual updates have been made, including better contrasting colors which help to define individual tweets and make the text more readable. There is a tracking bar that continuously tells you how many new Tweets are above your current view. It can be dismissed with a tap.

This helps you to keep tabs on exactly where you are in your timeline. But if you’re bothered by it, it can be removed by a settings change.

The links that you see in the main view are now colored blue and are activated with a single tap, rather than the two-tap method required in the last version of Tweetbot. Having to tap a Tweet once to activate it and then again to tap a link was probably my biggest peeve with the last version of Tweetbot.

There is also a nice, subtle Readability integration built into the browser view now. While viewing any website, just tap the toggle at the bottom to reformat the page into simple, more readable text using the web service.

There are now nice image thumbnails in the timeline which show a preview of any linked images and those can be tapped directly as well. Tappable links are now active in user profiles also, allowing you to visit any links that people have entered in their bio text.

Below any retweets, you will also now see a ‘retweeted by’ bar that is also tappable, taking you to the profile of the person that retweeted it.

A very nice visual upgrade has been made to the Direct Messages display method as well, bringing it more in line with an iMessage or IM application view. This makes it easier to carry on threaded conversations, which I do a lot of in DM.

There is also a timed automatic refresh, allowing all of your tweets, mentions and DMs to be pulled in anew every 5 minutes while the app is open. This is nice, and one step closer to the true streaming client that I would like Tweetbot to be. A new font size called ‘Huge’ rounds out the improvements in view customization.

We’ve had some time to try out the improvements to Tweetbot for iPhone and I can tell you that the single-tap links are much, much nicer than the old two-tap arrangement. The inline images right in the timeline are also pretty sweet too.

The whole app is also a lot faster now, with gestures, scrolling and actions all feeling lighter and more zippy due to the increase. It’s basically Tweetbot, but that much better. A must have update if you’re already a Tweetbot user and a good grab if you have yet to make the jump into a third-party client.

Tweetbot for iPhone $2.99

Online movie rental and streaming service LoveFilm has gone from strength to strength since it was launched in London way back in 2002, but its CEO Simon Calver has announced that he’s moving on to pastures new…at Mothercare.

After being acquired by Amazon, LoveFilm grew its staff by 20% last year, announced a number of new content partnership deals and hit the magic 2m members milestone…just in time for Netflix launching in the UK. The future was looking pretty good for LoveFilm, but Calver has decided to change direction and move away from the tech industry and into the expectant-mother/children’s-clothing industry. Makes sense.

“After nearly seven amazing years as head of LoveFilm, I have decided the time is right to hand over the baton to the next leader,” said Calver in a blog post yesterday. “Growing this company has been a fantastic experience and I have had the pleasure of working with a truly talented team, real innovators who introduced a brand new way for millions of movie lovers to enjoy films. They provided our customers a vast selection of over 70,000 DVDs and Video Games, and, more recently, led the way in streaming great titles through PCs, TVs, Blu-ray players and games consoles.”

Calver will be handing the CEO reins to Jim Buckle, who has directed LoveFilm’s commercial and financial operations since 2006. “He knows LoveFilm inside out,” says Calver, “and [he will] now lead the whole business. LoveFilm could not be in better hands and I wish Jim and the whole team tremendous success.”

It’s an interesting career move for sure, and it would probably be unfair to look too far into this departure for meaning – seven years at a company is a long time, and it’s likely he was just looking to start afresh somewhere else. That said, the timing is worth noting, with Netflix recently launching its service in the UK and competition really starting to heat up – could Amazon be lining up some major moves for the company this year?

Either way, 2012 will see many new developments within the movies-on-demand space in the UK, and Amazon’s LoveFilm is sure to play a pivotal role.

While traffic stats can be a tricky thing, one thing they’re good for is to judge growth trends. According to a new report by web traffic analyst Compete, Google+ saw impressive growth towards the end of 2011.

Google’s social network, which has come under fire since its heavy integration in Google’s main product, search, saw nearly half as many unique visitors as Twitter did in December of 2011.

Compete says that Twitter had 40,411,065 unique visitors during that month, and Google+ had an impressive 20M during the same time-frame.

After seeing a slight dip in visitors in October of last year, it looks like Google+ righted the ship and had a strong end of the year, which is good news for Google since it’s clearly putting all of its social eggs into the Google+ basket.

The below chart shows the traffic statistics for Google+ since Compete started tracking them, which was as soon as the site became public:

In addition to Google+ becoming more popular as a social destination, Compete shares that its +1 feature which is embedded on a variety of blogs and other external sites saw a rise in popularity as well. To grab those numbers, Compete tracked the subdomain for the +1 button, which is http://plusone.google.com, and saw over 40M uniques in December 2011 (the feature was only widely released in November):

While we should all take these numbers with a grain of salt, its clear that Google+ grabbed a solid userbase and continues to trend upwards in popularity when it comes to monthly unique visitors. While the site is nowhere near the traffic that Facebook sees on a daily basis, the company will definitely continue to push the product forward and we’ll be watching.

When you think about the online flash sales phenomenon, the first company you think of is Gilt Groupe. It has raised $236M in funding and provides access to deals on anything from luxury cookware to clothing. It’s a private sales site and it looks like Gilt is ready to spread its seed by launching its first publicly available API.

In a blog post on Gilt’s site, the reasoning for launching the API, which will let developers create apps around the deals going on within the site, was explained like this:

I’m really excited to tell you that we’ve launched our Public API today, providing programmatic access to a constantly-updating collection of flash sales full of the usual kind of awesome stuff we offer on Gilt’s stores.

We held an internal hackathon two weeks ago and saw some really interesting projects come out of just a day’s work and the brainpower of one room of (admittedly super-smart and obviously very handsome) Gilt engineers, but I can only imagine where things can go now that we’ve got the whole developer community armed and ready.

Just the other day we told you about ProgrammableWeb’s prediction that in the future, every company will have an API. Gilt appears to be kicking off that trend for 2012 with today’s release.

In an effort to build an ecosystem of developers around the new public data, Gilt has launched a developer portal which provides access to its APIs along with suggestions on how to get started and a forum for developers to ask the company questions and help each other out:

Currently, the Gilt API gives developers access to build apps using the sales and products of its four stores: Women, Men, Baby & Kids, and Home. The company promises that there will be more data available in the future, and this first release is more than enough to get ideas going.

Having an API is obviously a smart move for Gilt, and now that it’s available we’ll probably see a slew of new web and mobile apps bringing you deals from the site. Keep an eye on this space and if you’re developing something on top of Gilt, feel free to send it to us for review!

The Windows 8 beta, to be called a ‘consumer preview,’ is right around the corner. Today, a leak to The Verge revealed what applications Microsoft plans to include pre-installed in the Windows 8 beta.

We’ll paste the apps’ names below. Before we do, it’s important to remember that Microsoft has a history of ensuring that beta software components are of a certain quality. By that we mean that it can be expected that each of the following apps has been vetted. What ‘made the cut’ is therefore, in our synthesis, what the beta will contain, and not anything that is insufficiently baked.

Here’s the list:

• Camera
• Messaging
• Mail
• Calendar
• SkyDrive
• People
• Photos
• Video
• Music

That Mail is coming at last will mean that Windows 8 will, finally, be an operating system that has some real use to it, other than testing out the build itself. Microsoft will also include several games in the consumer preview, the full list of which you can find here. Other applications may make it into the beta. Apps included in the beta will not necessarily be present in all final versions of Windows 8.

Microsoft has promised that the Windows Store will also be a part of the consumer preview, showing off its plans to move past boxed software, and likely into a fully digital software distribution model. The beta of Windows 8 is set to land in the second half of this month (February), meaning that it could be in our hands in less than a week. Yes, we are excited.

You can find all our Windows 8 coverage here.

แต่วันนี้ความชัดเจนก็เพิ่มมากขึ้นเมื่อนาย Kapil Sibal รัฐมนตรีกระทรวงพัฒนาทรัพยากรมนุษย์ ออกมาให้ข่าวว่าแผนการของรัฐบาลคือการแจกให้กับนักเรียน โดยโรงเรียนที่จะแจกแท็บเล็ตเหล่านี้จะได้รับการสนับสนุนจากรัฐบาลครึ่งหนึ่ง และโรงเรียนเองต้องออกเงินอีกครึ่งหนึ่ง โดยในตอนนี้ที่ตัวแท็บเล็ตเริ่มส่งมอบแล้วแต่ราคาที่นักเรียนต้องจ่ายนั้นขึ้นกับว่าสถานศึกษาจะช่วยออกได้มากน้อยแค่ไหน

นอกจากการกระจายแท็บเล็ตให้มากขึ้นแล้ว ตัวรัฐมนตรีระบุว่ากำลังเจรจากับทางโรงงาน Aakash ให้ใช้ชิ้นส่วนที่ผลิตในประเทศให้มากขึ้น

ที่มา – India Today

Go to Source