apps

Looks like they're battening down the hatches: Social-network apphaus Gigya has raised $11 million in a Series C funding round led by DAG Ventures.

President and co-founder Rooly Eliezerov called it a "pre-emptive round" in a release Wednesday; the company's Series B round was only seven months ago. But Gigya insists that this new funding is to keep up demand, not to have some disaster insurance in the face of the current financial situation.

Still, economic crisis notwithstanding, Gigya and its brethren may still have a tough road ahead: Blogger Nick O'Neill recently found that … Read more

Tom and Rafe talk about top Web applications, routers, home servers, vacation tech and more.

Hot on the heels of the crucial iPhone 2.1 release, Apple appears to be getting ready to release another software update.

We've known that iPhone 2.2 has been coming for a while, with the primary change expected to involve making Safari on the iPhone look more like Safari on the Mac. But AppleInsider has some details on how the interface for the App Store--perhaps the best thing and worst thing about iPhone 2.0--is expected to change.

One notable tweak is that the selection of an application by category on the iPhone will become easier, with wider … Read more

Productivity application start-up Zoho is in a tough position: it has to compete with Google Apps. That hasn't stopped the company from pushing forward and trying new stuff.

Case in point: Zoho's Marketplace, which launched Tuesday. Through the Marketplace, Zoho users can make a buck or two off of applications that they built with Zoho Creator, the company's drag-and-drop application development tool.

If you've made an application in Creator, you can list it for sale in the Marketplace and charge a fee, if you want. Zoho doesn't take a commission from the sale of applications, … Read more

Facebook on Tuesday released version 2.0 of its popular iPhone app (iTunes Store link). This release contains a lot of the functionality that is in the full version of Facebook, making the iPhone version much more attractive. Some key features added include friend requests, notifications, people search, photo tagging/captioning, full News/Mini Feeds, message attachments, and inbox search.

The application, overall, seems to be more snappy and definitely has a better look to it. The inclusion of friend requests and notifications is big here, adding a whole new level of usefulness to the app. People search is also … Read more

Apple made a few changes to the App Store over the weekend that should cheer up developers, even if the underlying issues remain unaddressed.

Reviews for App Store applications must now be filled out by someone who has actually purchased the application in question, making it more difficult for developers to pump up their own application with favorable reviews as well as for rival developers to "Astroturf" a competitor's application with fake reviews. Applications will also now be listed according to their original release date; before this weekend, an update to an application reset the release date … Read more

I was on the bus yesterday during my commute home and I decided to check out one of my latest iPhone apps to see if it worked as advertised. There was a loud-talking person yammering away on his cell phone (why must people do this?) and to get away from the racket, I stuck in my ear buds and launched WhiteNoise.

WhiteNoise offers several neutral sounds that are perfect for blocking out annoying sounds and also can be quite relaxing. The interface offers eight buttons of soothing sounds you can start up immediately with a timer if you'd like … Read more

When I was at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York last week, many of the panelists and speakers invited the audience to ask them questions by submitting Twitter messages. A Google engineer named Taliver Heath has gone one step further by creating Google Moderator, an application that lets the audiences at lectures and discussions submit questions and vote on the ones they'd like to hear answered.

Google Moderator, earlier named "Dory" after the inquisitive fish from Finding Nemo, started out as an internal tool. It was originally intended for the audiences at Google's "… Read more

Developing an application for the iPhone continues to be a popular yet very frustrating exercise.

Almost since the first day Apple formally announced plans to bring third-party applications to the iPhone, developers have chafed at what they feel are excessive restrictions on what they are allowed to do and say within the program. At the same time, however, they are flooding Apple with their applications: blogger Russell Beattie counted 450 new applications appearing on the App Store in a week.

Feeling that those applications are just the start of a huge iPhone land grab, Beattie thinks that Apple is going … Read more