app

Mobile-app development company MobUI announced Monday that it has raised an undisclosed amount of funding and acquired Action Engine, a fellow mobile-app firm with customers including TiVo, AOL, and The Wall Street Journal.

Though terms of the acquisition haven't been made public, the motivation for MobUI's move is obvious: the success of Apple's iPhone App Store. Since it was launched on in early July, more than 100 million mobile applications have been downloaded.

Other Action Engine customers include MarketWatch, Barrons, MSNBC, and Sports Illustrated. With the acquisition, MobUI said it plans to rapidly create iPhone, mobile Web, … Read more

Edwin Aoki is a technology fellow at AOL, and an alumnus of Apple and of Netscape, where he worked on enterprise products as well as the Communicator browser.

On Thursday, Aoki spoke at the Future Of Web Apps conference in London, alongside figures such as Digg's Kevin Rose and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. He urged developers to create applications out of passion and for the community, rather than just doing it for money.

ZDNet.co.uk spoke to Aoki just after his speech, to talk about the impact Web applications have had in the enterprise and what trends are … Read more

LONDON-- Britain's normally gray capital was unusually sunny this week. So were the attitudes of Web developers gathered here for a conference while, across the pond, Wall Street was in full panic mode.

A bright-eyed pack of several hundred aspiring Web visionaries descended upon London's Excel conference center for the semi-annual Future of Web Apps (FOWA) conference. Eager developers trawled the show floor's booths for stickers that they promptly stamped onto their (overwhelmingly Apple-manufactured) laptops. One pack of young men strolled around in straw sombreros. Another trio passed some time in between lectures by tossing around a … Read more

LONDON--These are tough times for Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The economy is in the tank, Madison Avenue still doesn't have full faith in the social network's ability to generate ad revenue, and entertainment-industry analysts estimate that in a few years the 24-year-old CEO could be in danger of losing his title of "world's youngest billionaire" to pop singer Miley Cyrus.

But Zuckerberg lucked out on Friday with his keynote "fireside chat" at the Future of Web Apps conference. Interviewed onstage by conference organizer Ryan Carson, Zuckerberg wasn't subject to any particularly difficult … Read more

LONDON--A lot of hands in the audience went up at the Future of Web Apps conference when Facebook senior platform manager Dave Morin kicked off his talk at the conference with the question "How many people have built something on Facebook Platform before?"

Fewer went up when Morin then asked the crowd how many had used Facebook Connect, the company's new data-portability initiative. It's live now, he said.

Facebook unveiled Facebook Connect in May amid a flurry of other companies' data-portability announcements, like Google's Friend Connect and MySpace's Data Availability, which has partners like … Read more

LONDON--In the first part of our interview with Digg founder Kevin Rose at the Future of Web Apps conference, CNET News asked the Web start-up poster boy about everything from the company's Series C funding round to whether he's concerned about when those election stories stop rolling in.

In part 2, Rose got a little more specific: What would happen if Digg got hit with a stock-plunging news hoax? Will he be making acquisitions? And most importantly, does "digg" mean anything dirty in any foreign languages?

CNN had that big debacle with a user-submitted story, about … Read more

LONDON--On Thursday afternoon at the Future of Web Apps conference, I had to make a choice: Was I going to blog about a talk hosted by Six Apart engineer David Recordon, talking about the "open social Web," or a talk by Ben Huh, the "Chief Cheezburger" of goofy "lolcat" meme site ICanHasCheezburger.com?

Recordon's talk would invariably be an insightful look into issues like OpenID and OpenSocial, which have faded from the headlines in recent months but are still a hot topic in the developer community. But the talk could prove to be … Read more

Appssavvy, a start-up that connects advertisers looking for "social media" campaigns with developers and firms that will build widgets for them or get their ads on existing apps, announced on Tuesday that it has raised $3.1 million in Series A venture funding. The round was led by True Ventures, with previous investor Scott Kurnit, founder of About.com, also participating.

Earlier this month, Appssavvy struck a deal with NBC Universal, making it "the exclusive advertising-sales team for the NBC News iCue social-media application."

"Social media has the potential to connect marketers with consumers in … Read more

Senior Editor Wayne Cunningham reported earlier on Audi's A4 iPhone app and found that instead of being an innovative way to interface with your vehicle via iPhone, it was merely a game designed to market the newly updated A4 sedan. Recently, Audi updated the app with two new unlockable vehicles and some tweaks to the controls. Having recently purchased an iPod Touch, I decided to take Audi's app for a spin.

The Audi A4 Driving Challenge 2.0, which is a free download from the iTunes App Store, is played by holding the iPhone in landscape orientation. Thumbs … Read more