Generation Now and Mobile Velocity Acceptance

Alan Knitowski

news_bizinsider_generationnow

We have all lived through some really interesting historic business and market cycles. Unfortunately each one has not necessarily taught us the lessons needed to succeed in the existing or imminent cycles that are either ongoing or ahead of us currently. I was fortunate to have lived in Silicon Valley from 1996-2001 and was able to witness first-hand both the boom and subsequent bust of the technology and Internet bubble.

What struck me fifteen years ago during my time in Silicon Valley was the speed with which technology cycles changed. First it was Moore’s Law and the imminent changes I witnessed year over year in terms of processing / computing power and the associated cost / price that accompanied it. The velocity of this technology change and the product cycles that resulted from it were truly breathtaking. (more…)

Phunware Buys GoTV Networks

Eric Moujaes

news_gotv

Acquisition Positions Profitable and Debt Free Company as the Premier Global Provider of Branded Mobile Application Infrastructure and Experiences.

Acquisition Positions Profitable and Debt Free Company as the Premier Global Provider of Branded Mobile Application Infrastructure and Experiences

AUSTIN, TEXAS, JULY 12, 2011 – Phunware, the leader in enterprise branded mobile application infrastructure and experiences, announces today that it has acquired GoTV Networks, the industry’s largest mobile media network. The acquisition was unanimously approved by the Board of Directors for both companies and officially closed today. Through the acquisition, Phunware adds new offices in both Northern and Southern California, including San Francisco, Sherman Oaks (Los Angeles) and San Diego.

“We are extremely excited to add GoTV Networks to the Phunware Phamily,” said Alan Knitowski, Chairman and CEO of Phunware. “Through this acquisition, we have accelerated our operational growth, strengthened our financial position and achieved critical mass on a global scale, including an array of customers and brands unparalleled in the industry.”

Phunware’s representative customer list now includes the following key verticals and brands:

  • Education – allCanes (University of Miami), Cambridge, Discovery Education, William & Mary and US Education TV
  • Entertainment – Astrology Zone, Crackle (Sony), Discovery Communications (Discovery Channel Latina, DMAX, MythBusters and Tudiscovery), G4 (NBC Universal), Hitfix, MobiTV, National Geographic, Oprah, The Karaoke Channel, Univision and Young Hollywood
  • Internet – AllClearID.com, Bikini.com, HomeAway.com, Petfinder.com, PetsMD.com and YouSendIt.com
  • Music – Amplified Pop, ES Música, Hip Hop Official, LAMC, Lollapalooza, Revolver TV, Rock the Bells, SXSW and True Country
  • News – Daily News, Fox 7 WHDH Boston and Fox 7 WSVN Miami
  • Original Branded Programming – AEG, ASICS, Gibson, Johnson & Johnson, Lexus, Proctor & Gamble, Rolling Stone, Secret, Sesame Street, Tide and US Weekly
  • Retail – Cricket Communications, McDonald’s and User Friendly Media
  • Sports – Callaway Golf, ESPN, NASCAR, NFL, NHRA and Peter Jacobsen Sports
  • Travel – Animal Kingdom, Disney World, Epcot, Hollywood Studios and Universal Studios
  • Technology – AMD, AT&T, Freescale Semiconductor, HP, Nokia, Samsung, Sprint and Verizon Wireless

Platform support includes Apple iOS, BREW, Google Android, HP / Palm webOS, Java, Microsoft Windows Mobile, Nokia Symbian, RIM Blackberry, Samsung Bada and WAP. Mobile and broadband video distribution includes Amazon, AOL, Apple iTunes, Babelgum, Bebo, Blackberry Application World, Boost Mobile, Cricket, Daily Motion, Google Android Marketplace, Handmark, Joost, Meta Café, MSN, MySpace, Pocket Gear (Handango), V CAST and YouTube. Carrier distribution includes AT&T, LEAP Wireless, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless and Virgin Mobile.

Phunware’s mobile experience portfolio now exceeds 150 applications in more than 100 countries and 4 languages. Application users within this portfolio have downloaded tens of millions of applications, consuming billions of minutes (or thousands of years) of App engagement, on its mobile experience platform.

Siemer & Associates was advisor to GoTV Networks on the transaction, while Phunware was self represented.

About Phunware, Inc.
Phunware creates brandME™, the best and most powerful branded mobile experiences in the world, along with PRAISE™, the global industry standard for bulletproof mobile application infrastructure. Phunware leads the mobile application revolution globally and is reinventing the mobile application experience for the benefit of consumers everywhere. Phunware has introduced category defining applications that challenge the outer limits of the best mobile devices on Earth and is defining the future standard for mobile application experiences. Visit us at www.Phunware.com.

About GoTV Networks, Inc.
GoTV Networks enables media owners and brands to deliver compelling, personalized, highly engaging content experiences through feature-rich smart applications distributed to the widest audience possible. Visit us at www.goTVnetworks.com.

Contact:
Melissa Anthony
anthonyBarnum Public Relations
Ph: (512) 619-9454
Melissa@anthonybarnum.com

“Push the edge or die.”

Gabriela Cocco-Sanchez

HTC EVO 3D

“Push the edge or die.” The saying ought to be on a flag flying high above every company that comes to play in this industry. We are in a technological “X Games” where wheelies don’t cut it. You’d better have enough air to land a triple back flip and tag a flip wheel double on to the end for good measure. Then you better get back to the pit and start working on a quadruple.

Yeah, we do live streams on mobile. A lot of them. We’ve even rattled our teeth a couple of times early on. But eventually we got good enough to get bored with it.

Just a few months ago, putting 3D content on a cell phone carried the highest degree of difficulty. And we nailed it, creating video and developing the key encoding solution for the debut of Sprint’s HTC Evo 3D phone at this year’s CTIA conference.

If degree of difficulty wasn’t enough, we also tacked on a few style points, letting viewers leave the geeky cardboard glasses at home. 3D. On a phone. Without glasses. Sweet.

In March, we moved on to high fives and chest bumps. Corona and Jack all around. Today, it’s a wheelie. And please don’t poke your eye out with that umbrella in your drink.

A live 3D stream is the new holy grail … and the Travis Pastranas of tech are biffing … trying to squeeze all that data through a larger, but still not-yet-big-enough, pipe. They’re close, but not yet. So far nobody’s been able to quite stick the landing. But they will. Hell, we will.

It will make us some money as people hire us for projects both epic and inane. Having Lady Gaga or the Super Bowl “pop out” of your mobile device or tablet will be a burly visual experience. In time, in very short time, however, the thrill will be gone and it will become just another wheelie. Something any six-year-old with brittle bone syndrome can feel safe in attempting and secure in pulling off.

So why does it matter? Why all the noise about something that will flare like a supernova and fade faster than Lou Diamond Phillips’ career?

It isn’t about entertainment. It never has been. Entertainment is part of the toolkit; a commodity created to keep people busy while we go back and take our lumps working on gnarlier moves.

It matters because it’s proof that it can be done. It matters because it’s the next step … in TV (whatever that means these days), in communication and in the way that we share information, anytime and anywhere. Most importantly, it matters because it enhances the way we experience life. And it’s all about the experience – whether you’re getting big air or landing a crazy face-plant.

First came the printing press, then the telegraph, then the telephone, then the radio, then the television, then the satellite, then the Internet and now the mobile devices. Each new development was better, faster and more impactful than the one before it. Every “point-whatever” upgrade makes it possible to more deeply engage both our world and each other, bringing us a more complete life experience than the legacy version we try to dump on eBay.

Pushing the edge makes it possible for us, the grand “US”, to walk through time and space, providing an almost infinite number of people, places and ideas that we can visit or summon. In doing so, we are bigger, better, smarter and stronger. And we are incrementally closer to fully realizing the limitless potential that we are confronted with every day.

It’s why we do what we do here at Phunware. It’s why we focus on the experience, not the feature sets, when developing our apps and stretching the limits of both our tech and creative teams alike.

It’s why we’ll stick the landing of live 3D streams. It’s why we’re alive. And looking damn good on the highlight reel we might add.

Phunware Launches PhunDeals™ Daily Deals in 107 U.S. Cities

Eric Moujaes

news_phundeals

Newest PRAISE™ Mobile Experience Platform Offering Brings 50-90 Percent Local Savings to Consumers and Creates New Monetization Options for Internet and Mobile Application Developers

AUSTIN, TEXAS, JULY 7 – Phunware, the leader in enterprise branded mobile application infrastructure and experiences, announces PhunDeals™, its nationwide daily deal service. PhunDeals™ is the newest PRAISE™ mobile experience platform offering and is now available for U.S. consumers and application developers on the web, mobile web and within mobile applications and experiences.

“The PhunDeals™ daily deal service affords consumers immense local savings where they live and work and where they travel for business and pleasure,” said Alan Knitowski, Chairman and CEO of Phunware. “Not only does the new offering provide utility and value anywhere and anytime desired by consumers, but it also provides businesses with new opportunities to monetize their communities, content and traffic through Internet, mobile Internet and mobile devices alike.”

PRAISE™ modules, such as PhunDeals™, represent key components of an enterprise class, carrier grade, geographically redundant, hyper-scalable mobile application infrastructure and experience platform that is ideally suited for millions of simultaneous interactions and transactions, as well as massive worldwide deployments dependent upon multicultural, multilingual and multichannel demands and requirements.

“By launching in more than 100 cities across the nation, and partnering with more than a dozen of the industry’s leading daily deal aggregators, PhunDeals™ allows us to add significant breadth and depth to our product portfolio while delivering incredible value to both consumers and application developers,” added Alan Michael Kane, CFO of Phunware and General Manager of PhunDeals™. “If you have an online or mobile audience and you are looking to monetize that audience or application via daily deal offerings, then we have your solution.”

For more information, or to sign up for PhunDeals™, please visit www.PhunDeals.com. Additionally, if you would like to receive information about becoming a PhunDeals™ partner and learn how to add PhunDeals™ to your websites, mobile websites and mobile applications, please contact us at info@phunware.com.

About Phunware, Inc.
Phunware creates brandME™, the best and most powerful branded mobile experiences in the world, along with PRAISE™, the global industry standard for bulletproof mobile application infrastructure. Phunware leads the mobile application revolution globally and is reinventing the mobile application experience for the benefit of consumers everywhere. Phunware has introduced category defining applications that challenge the outer limits of the best mobile devices on Earth and is defining the future standard for mobile application experiences. Visit us at www.Phunware.com.

Contact:
Melissa Anthony
anthonyBarnum Public Relations
Ph: (512) 619-9454
Melissa@anthonybarnum.com

The Delusion of WORA Apps

Alan Knitowski

Multi-Platform

In a recent blog called The Lies, Damn Lies & “Statistics” of Mobile Commerce, I focused on exposing one of the industry’s dirty secrets about the current state of mobile commerce and the types of conclusions that could reasonably be made so early in the transition from feature phones to smart phones and tablets worldwide. Now I turn my attention to another popular myth about the development and publication of mobile applications: the delusion of “write once, run everywhere” mobile applications and the fallacy of their existence.

The old adage that “there ain’t no free lunch” has never been more applicable than it is to mobile applications. There are a lot of other analogies that likely apply as well from “you get what you pay for” to “if it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is.” I could likely go on for days with such analogies, but I raise them all today to focus on the importance of understanding that “write once, run everywhere” approaches to mobile simply don’t work. At all. They are marketing “FUD” and will fail you miserably if you’re attempting to build any mobile application of substance to run a real business through this new form of digital distribution on the highest value touch point between your brand and your consumers. (more…)

A Cautionary Tale: Advice for Choosing a Mobile Partner

Andy Greff

Developer

Recently, Sanjay Jha, CEO of Motorola Mobility remarked that of the Motorola Android devices that are returned, 70% are returned because applications affect performance. He basically lays blame on the open Android store for performance issues on Motorola phones. Unfortunately, this problem is not exclusive to Motorola or even Android devices. This is the unfortunate side effect of the hyper growth seen in the Mobile App space. New and / or inexperienced developers rush untested applications to market searching for the Pot Of “App” Gold. Applications that are poorly designed, written and tested create a negative ripple affect across the entire Mobile ecosystem as Motorola has clearly discovered.

Poorly written applications not only impact wireless devices, but also wireless networks. These poorly written Apps chew up precious network resources including signaling, bandwidth and airtime usage. It is common to have data issues at a large sporting event because 100,000 people are trying to use the same precious network assets. It seems logical. However, a few poorly written applications running in the same general vicinity can have a similar effect on a wireless network. Throughput decreases for everyone connected to that tower or in the area because the wireless resources just aren’t available. This has become an enormous expense to wireless operators as they not only have to deal with the exploding number of data hungry devices, but also the exponential availability and usage of poorly written applications. It is almost (almost) unfair to blame the network operator for issues that are not caused by them and that cannot be fixed without heavy-handed measures! (more…)

What iCloud Means for Mobile

Eric Moujaes

Apple CEO Steve Jobs talks about the iCloud service at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco

iCloud is Apple’s next step to change the way that consumers interact with mobile. And it’s going to work.

It’s amazing to see Steve Jobs vision come to life more than a decade after he speaks about it in the 1997 WWDC closing Keynote:

With the iCloud Storage APIs developers can now enable applications to store files and key value data (e.g. application state, settings) remotely. iCloud can then push this state and any user designated content wirelessly to any device. A truly persistent mobile experience.

More importantly, and what will be the key for user experience, is iCloud’s ability to seamlessly address the issues of version control, conflicts and syncing for users that are constantly jumping in and out of internet connectivity and application switching. All of these issues which if not addressed would spell a disaster for the service. Naturally,

Much overdue, and a sigh of relief for many is the iPhone and iPad’s ability to exist independent from Macs and PCs. Apple has taken the central hub of our digital lives, the computer, and demoted it to just a regular device. The Cloud is now the hub that will seamlessly centralize our content and experiences across all platforms.

(more…)

Analytics vs. Sales Reporting

Alan Kane

Mobile Analytics

Engaging customers through mobile experiences offers incredible opportunities for brands to build brand loyalty, announce new products, deliver services and drive sales both online and offline. How businesses measure this “always-on always-connected” sales channel is mission critical to both new and established enterprises alike.

Despite this importance and the fact that unmeasured sales channels can become liabilities, many businesses today are rushing to market without a mobile analytics system in place or a clear understanding of what they can or should be measuring on mobile. Furthermore, a fragmented landscape consisting of multiple mobile platforms, multiple app stores, dozens of advertising networks, evolving privacy laws and numerous ways in which to engage users, causes even the most sophisticated or best-intentioned businesses a real headache when designing and implementing a mobile analytics system. (more…)