Xyologic Releases Hundreds Of Reports Detailing Worldwide Mobile App Trends

App search company Xyologic is today releasing a total of 220 app download reports, featuring detailed data on Android, iOS and Windows Phone trends across 29 countries worldwide. The reports track statistics like the number of downloads per platform/per country, growth rates, country rankings, number of paid vs. free apps published, app revenue and details regarding app publishers’ individual rankings.

Unlike app store rankings, Xyologic’s reports use raw download numbers to rank apps, as opposed to complex algorithms often meant to boost app discoverability. Ranking by downloads per month also means that some of the most popular apps will be lower on the list because the majority of their install base already has the app on their phones. That’s why Facebook clocks in as the #18 free app on iPhone in the U.S., for example, while game maker Zynga comes in at #15.

As an example of some of the trends these reports can help spot, Xyologic doled out some interesting tidbits of information, like how Apple saw 1.45 billion app downloads globally in the month of August versus 0.64 billion app downloads on Android. If Android’s current growth rate continues, it’s on track to catch up with Apple in June 2012, says Xyologic, at which point each platform will reach 3.2 billion downloads. (See chart).

In select countries, Android is already beating iOS in monthly app downloads, including in the Czech Republic, Poland and Portugal. However, the mobile market in these countries is not fully developed.

Xyologic also forecasts that Android will catch up to iOS in terms of total app downloads by May 2013 and number of apps by August 2012, if current trends continue. (See below charts).

Digging into the reports for the U.S., you can find details as to the top 100 app publishers per platform, including number of apps (free and paid), downloads per month (free and paid) and estimated revenue. Reports are broken down into categories, with separate reports for top apps, new apps and an in-app purchase economy report. These are provided for each platform (iPhone, iPad, Android and Windows Phone) where available, for 29 countries.

Frankly, there’s a lot of data to digest here, so much that even Xyologic claims that it expects its partners and community to discover even more than it could on its own. That, in part, is why the company decided to make these app reports available for free and will continue to do so on a monthly basis. Yes, 220 reports, 4 platforms, every month, for free. Not bad.

If you work in the  mobile industry, this treasure trove of reports is definitely worth a look. You can access them all from here.

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eBay VP Steve Yankovich: En Route To $4B In Gross Mobile Sales (TCTV)

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Enterprise Mobile Computing Platform Enterproid Raises $11M From Google Ventures, Comcast And Qualcomm

Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... ? Learn More

Exclusive-Enterproid, the developer of a platform that allows professionals to maintain completely separate professional and personal profiles on a single Android device, has raised $11 million in Series A funding led by Comcast Ventures, with Google Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures participating.

Called Divide, the platform allows users to create a completely separate profile on Android devices that includes enhanced security, access control, remote wipe capability and a set of enterprise-grade versions of applications like email, a web browser, instant messaging, and SMS. Users can switch back and forth between their professional and personal profiles but no data can cross the division, so that no business content is compromised in the personal profile.

And Enterproid comes with a bunch of useful tools, including the ability to segregate voice and data usage for work, or hand a child a phone without the risk of the child accidentally emailing or calling a contact.

Enterproid’s Divide also allows users to manage devices from the cloud. Lost devices can be remotely located and wiped with corporate data being erased on the entire handheld. IT administrators can also reset passwords, and lock corporate profiles. Additionally, Divide has built-in expense management tools to help identify roaming devices and display network operator usage data.

Divide is available exclusively for Android phones and tablets but the startup plans to extend the service to iOS and Windows Phone 7 platforms in the future. The app is currently in private beta and will debut soon for download on the Android market.

Andrew Toy, CEO of Enterproid, tells me the platform is capitalizing on what he calls the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) trend. He explains that more and more employees are frustrated by having to carry around two separate smartphones, one for work and one for personal use. Enterproid solves this pain point, makes mobile computing more efficient and gives companies the ability to still maintain a secure mobile environment.

Google Ventures partner Rich Miner agrees that Enterproid is the future of enterprise mobile computing. “When you have one smartphone, you don’t want another phone,” he tells us. “Enterproid is leveraging the technologies now offered by these new sets of devices and creating a mangeable wall between enterprise and personal.”

Founded by former Morgan Stanley, MTV and Smule execs, Enterproid is working with carriers and manufacturers to develop partnerships, which will be announced soon, says the company. The startup is also releasing an SDK as well. The new round will be used to extend engineering capabilities, expand distribution internationally and launch additional global partnerships.

The Divide platform by Enterproid gives mobile professionals a new way to use their smartphones for both work and personal life. With multiple profile support, great productivity apps out of the box and complete personal and IT cloud management, Divide is the next generation solution for enterprise mobility. There’s no need to compromise your personal freedom just because you want to do work on your handheld. Enterproid allows you to create an independent business profile on your Android phone so...

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CrowdStar And Others Bet On HTML5 Mobile Gaming Platform Spaceport

Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... ? Learn More

Multi-device social gaming platform Sibblingz is announcing that a number of Facebook game developers have selected their platform to go mobile. BitRhymes, IKIGames, LuckyLabs, Fortune Planet, DeezGames and CrowdStar are now using Spaceport to build their games for user across iOS, Android and other platforms.

Sibblingz allows developers to simultaneously create games on Facebook as well as iOS and Android devices, allowing players to continue the same social game as they switch between devices. The platform also offers the developers the ability to monetize free-to-play games with virtual goods.

The company’s cloud-based game creation platform, Spaceport, allows game developers to build a game once, using Javascript, and have it play across all smartphone operating systems, with a native app-like experience and fast performance. The web-based games run as a hybrid HTML5 – native app, and the code for the game is written once, in a simple scripting language, so that they can then run on any device. And developer can also create native iOS apps as well using Spaceport.

The developers are basically turning their Facebook games into HTML5-based mobile web games as well as native games for the iOS App Store and Android.

As my colleague MG Siegler reported earlier this summer, Facebook has a secret plan, called Project Spartan, to bring applications to the mobile web via HTML5. We know this is being launched soon and Sibblingz says that Spaceport allows developers to create HTML5 games that are compatible with Project Spartan through an HTML5 canvas-rendering engine available for iOS and Android.

Sibblingz founder Ben Savage has told us that the startup is working with multiple Facebook game developers who are preparing for Project Spartan. It’s a huge, Zynga-sized opportunity and clearly many developers are throwing their hats in the ring.

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The Kindle Fire Will Have A Whole New “Cloud Accelerated” Mobile Browser Called Amazon Silk

Erick Schonfeld is the Editor of TechCrunch. He oversees the editorial content of the site, helps to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produces TCTV shows, and writes daily for the blog. He is also the father of three adorable children. He joined TechCrunch as Co-Editor in 2007, and helped take it from a popular blog to... ? Learn More

Jeff Bezos announced a new family of Kindle’s today, including the Kindle Fire and Kindle Touch. But he also had one more thing. The Kindle Fire tablet is coming with an entirely new mobile browser called Amazon Silk. The browser is “cloud-accelerated” in that it splits tasks between the cloud and the device.

“It is very challenging for mobile devices to display modern websites rapidly,” says Bezos. “So we wondered is there some way we can use the incredible computational horsepower of Amazon EC2 to accelerate mobile web browsing.”

Amazon is taking advantage of its Web services and EC2 compute cloud. Instead of waiting 100 milliseconds for each part of a web page to load, Amazon Silk can cache most of a webpage in the cloud and deliver all the subparts at since. And since EC2 has more bandwidth than a tablet ever will, it can do the same tasks in 5 milliseconds instead of 100.

In a video explaining the browser (watch below), one Amazon engineer describes it like this: “You can think of Amazon Silk as a small store for files you access. What we have done is create a limitless cache used to render the web pages you view every day. It does not take a single byte of storage on the device itself.”

The so-called split browser essentially has two homes: on the Kindle Fire itself, and in Amazon’s EC2. Basically, when a user pulls up a webpage on their Kindle Fire, EC2 handles all the rendering to optimize it for the Fire’s screen. Images are resized on the fly, and what’s more, it tracks user’s behavior. Users who visit TechCrunch all the time, will notice quicker load times because Silk detects that pattern of activity and pre-caches the site. Or similarly, if a lot of people going to the New York Times’ homepage today then click on a set of particular stories, those subsequent pages can be predictively pre-cached and delivered faster.

Amazon calls it “Dynamic Split Browsing,” and while it’s not a terribly new concept—Opera Mini similarly optimized webpages for mobile devices—it’s one that could make a huge difference in a user’s web experience.

Launch Date: September 28, 1994

Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) is a leading global Internet company and one of the most trafficked Internet retail destinations worldwide. Amazon is one of the first companies to sell products deep into the long tail by housing them all in numerous warehouses and distributing products from many partner companies. Amazon directly sells, or acts as a platform for the sale of a broad range of products. These include books, music, videos, consumer electronics, clothing and household products. The majority of Amazon’s...

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Millennial: Android Mobile Ad Impressions Up 48 Percent, iOS Remains Flat

Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... ? Learn More

Mobile ad network Millennial Media, is releasing its monthly report which gives a view into how each OS, device and manufacturer is performing on one of the largest remaining independent ad networks in the world. In August, Millennial actually combined connected devices and smartphones when breaking out the OS impression share. That’s significant because iOS and Android share can include tablets into factoring presence on the network. And last month, Android was in the top spot with a 54% share, while iOS was in second with a 28% share. Rim followed with 13% share.

In terms of growth, Android impressions (including both phones and tablets) grew 48% month-over-month globally. iOS impressions were relatively flat month-over-month, and interestingly Windows Phone 7 impressions saw major growth and increased 48% month-over-month.

Smartphones grew 6% month-over-month and took 72% of the impressions in August. Connected Devices and Feature Phones were tied with 14% of the impression share. In terms of impressions by type of connection, 32% of impressions came over Wi-Fi. Of these WI-Fi impressions 59% came from Smartphones (as opposed to connected devices or feature phones), and saw an 11% growth month-over-month.

Connected Devices, including Tablets, gaming devices, and eReaders, accounted for 34% of the Wi-Fi impressions on the network. In August 2010, feature phones accounted for 33% of Millennial’s network impressions, and this number has dropped to 14% in August 2011.

Millennial also breaks down ad spend from applications on the network, and in August Android grew 2% month-over-month and represented 49% of the Application Platform Mix. iOS followed with 41% share, with RIM taking a 8% share.

In August, News applications on the Android platform grew 26% month-over-month. Gaming applications have been the number one Application Category on Millennial’s network for over a year and in August, games represented 25% of the applications impressions, a 19% increase month-over-month.

Music & Entertainment application impressions grew 13% month-over-month and within the Music & Entertainment category, radio applications accounted for more than half of the impressions in August.

Similar to July’s findings, Apple continued to be the leading device manufacturer the network in August, representing 23% of the Top 15 Manufacturers impression share. The iPhone maintained the number one position on the Top 20 Mobile Phones ranking with 13% of the impression share.

HTC actually reclaimed the number two position on the Top 15 Manufacturers ranking in August, thanks to the manufacturer’s five devices on the Top 20 Mobile Phones list. Together, these HTC phones accounted for 11% of the Top 20 Mobile Phone impressions. Together, all Android phones
represented 32% of the Top 20 Mobile Phones impression share in August.

The past year has represented major growth for Millennial Media. The company just announced that 2010 revenue was $47.8 million, which is up over 3,000 percent from 2007 revenue of $1.5 million. And we know CEO and founder Paul Palmieri has had ambitions of taking the company public. In May, Bloomberg reported that Millennial was talking to bankers about an IPO, which could come in the Fall or in early 2012 and would value the company at a whopping $700 million to $1 billion (AdMob was sold to Google for $750 million).

Millennial Media is the leading independent mobile advertising and data company. Millennial Media commands an impressive share of the mobile display advertising market. The company’s technology, tools and services also power some of the largest companies in the media business today. Millennial Media is committed to growing the mobile advertising marketplace by becoming the preferred partner to advertisers seeking to reach mobile consumers, application and media developers seeking to maximize ad revenue, and mobile operators seeking to further monetize...

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Softbank Pumps $200 Million Into Mobile Ad Network Company InMobi

Robin Wauters currently works as a staff writer for TechCrunch and lead editor of Virtualization.com. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in Belgium, a tiny country in Europe. He can often be found working from his home or... ? Learn More

InMobi, which bills itself as the world’s largest independent mobile ad network, has raised a whopping $200 million in funding from Softbank. The investment will come in two tranches: half this month, the other half in April 2012.

Softbank joins existing backers Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sherpalo Ventures as investors in the company, which recently acquired HTML5 ad builder Sprout.

Naveen Tewari, founder and CEO of InMobi, commented:

“The size of the investment and quality of investor validate the enormous potential in mobile today and strengthen our role in helping the industry evolve. We have already established ourselves as a leader in mobile advertising on every continent. This is just the beginning.

With a global leader like Softbank behind us, we are now well positioned to fully capitalize on the opportunity before us through substantially increased product innovation, deeper market penetration, and acquisitions across the mobile ad value chain.”

InMobi says its mobile ad network currently reaches 340 million consumers, in over 165 countries, through more than 47 billion monthly mobile ad impressions.

The company has raised $15.6 million before closing the $200m investment round earlier this week.

Launch Date: September 15, 2011

InMobi is the world’s largest independent mobile advertising network. With offices on four continents, it provides advertisers, publishers and developers with a uniquely global solution for advertising. Its network is growing fast and now delivers the unprecedented ability to reach 314 million consumers, in over 165 countries, through more than 36.2 billion mobile ad impressions monthly. InMobi was recently selected as the 2010 AlwaysOn Global 250 Company to Watch in Silicon Valley. InMobi is venture-backed with marquee investors including: Kleiner,...

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SoftBank is a Japanese telecommunications and media corporation, headquartered in Tokyo and founded in 1981 by Masayoshi Son. With a market capitalization of around $20 billion, SoftBank is one of the biggest Internet-related companies in Asia. SoftBank operates in various fields such as broadband infrastructure, e-commerce, Internet services, fixed-line telecommunications, mobile phone and web business, financial services and many more. The company took over mobile phone operations from Vodafone Japan in 2006 and is currently No. 3 among the main...

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Walmart Acquires Mobile And Social Ad Targeting Startup OneRiot

Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... ? Learn More

Walmart has acquired OneRiot, a mobile and social ad targeting startup. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, and OneRiot will be joining Walmart Labs.

As we’ve written in the past, OneRiot recently switched its business model; shutting down its realtime search portal and focusing exclusively on monetizing via its realtime advertising network. The startup then moved into providing a social targeting service for mobile ads within apps.

By way of history, OneRiot first ventured into the advertising world in 2009 with RiotWise, an ad format which places content in an emphasized position in their realtime feed. OneRiot also launched RiotWise Trending Ads, a stream of ads that correspond to trending topics as they emerge across the social web, and rolled out self-refreshing realtime trending ads and a self-service version of RiotWise.

Now, OneRiot allows advertisers to reach targeted audience segments on mobile, from busy moms to tech influencers to sports guys to fashionistas. Segmentation and targeting are based on factors such as audience interest profiles, demographics, social influence and realtime conversations. OneRiot’s audience profiles are created by mining and analyzing public big data social streams from services (i.e. Twitter).

It’s this data mining that attracted Walmart to OneRiot and its technology. From Walmart’s announcement: OneRiot has developed some pretty nifty technology that analyzes social media signals from popular networks like Twitter and Facebook to deliver ads that are relevant to consumers’ interests. As our teams debated the finer points of Big Data, Fast Data, and machine learning technologies, it became clear to us that we could find no better colleagues than the guys at OneRiot.

Walmart has been making some interesting plays in the social, mobile and targeting space. The company acquired social media startup Kosmix earlier this year. Kosmix joined Walmart Labs, and has been working on integrating social technology into Walmart’s online and mobile offerings, including its e-commerce website, Facebook pages and more.

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The Fragmented Mobile Information Race

Mobile devices are shifting many individual computing behaviors, perhaps none more significant than how we search for and receive information. Right now, it’s moving at warp speed. In between the time I finish this draft and its posted, it’s entirely possible another company or service launches in this space. Every time we “swipe open” our mobile devices, we seek out dopamine hits from receiving new emails, texts, notifications, or other bits of digital media. A good chunk of this current mobile activity revolves around the personalized search and Q&A space, which leverages these behavior in new ways.

By now, on traditional computers, we know how to find the information we seek, whether via sites like Google, Wikipedia, or through social networks. On mobile, however, our information needs and habits shift. On the go, we typically want smaller bits of information quicker, usually calibrated to our location. We are less likely to engage in longer discussion, and more likely to add questions in the hopes that machines, crowds, or some combination can produce relevant information. This shift has opened the floodgates of activity in the personalized search and Q&A space, with an impressive number of new applications vying for user attention in a crowded marketplace.

Currently, “normals” with smartphones predominantly search for information on their mobile devices through Google, Wikipedia, or, on occasion, various social networks (either via dedicated applications and/or through the browser). Other apps exist for certain needs, such as Yelp, Foursquare, or AroundMe for location-specific information and reviews, Greplin and Doat for personal search, or services such as Loopt, Quora, and even Ask.com, which allow users to ask questions and (hopefully) receive good answers.

This crowded landscape is about to get even more fragmented. In the last month, Ness Computing unveiled their beautifully designed iPhone app, which applies machine learning techniques to search, filter, and tune results for restaurants, with the added benefit of learning about your tastes from your social graph and more frequent use of the app. They will eventually move into other areas. Alfred’s iPhone app, by Clever Sense, is somewhat similar to Ness without the social inputs. Loqly’s iPhone app lets users browse nearby, scrapes reviews (and menus), and encourages users to ask and answer questions. Gootip encourages users to ask questions linked to a specific location with tie-ins back into various social networks, as does Locql, which I presume Hipster will do, too, which is somewhat tangential to CrowdBeacon’s approach of offering location-specific information. Localmind’s iPhone app takes things a step further, asking users to connect major social networks to aggregate potential questions around locations. (This is a very crowded space, so was really hard to include everyone or even come close.)

In that app I happened to stumble into a Q&A thread where an employee from Quora had offered an answer. Which begs the question: How is Quora handling mobile? As I’ve speculated and as the company has hinted, it seems their iPhone app could be released soon. Mobile is a tricky play for Quora given how dense the site’s information is, though their mobile site has served users well so far. Their first version isn’t likely to include the ability to capture images and pose questions by picture. In the meantime, apps like Pupil offer a service whereby users can receive information about the pictures they upload, which is sort of what Peeqit will eventually do, too. Quora’s transition to mobile will meet similar challenges faced by other established Q&A sites with significant traffic, mainly Stack Overflow and Formspring, which each have a few third-party iPhone apps available but seemed to have paused on native solutions. One of the newest entrants, Jig by Tasty Labs, is set up as a lightweight Quora-style interface where users can post their “needs” and the community can make suggestions to “fill” those needs. They have hinted at a mobile app soon, too, perhaps one tied to SMS integration.

The importance of asking and answering questions on the go isn’t lost on the incumbents. In December 2010, Twitter acquired Fluther with the hope of capturing Twitter’s question-related activity, though results haven’t emerged yet. Facebook has the infrastructure in place for a “Questions” feature, allowing users to distinguish posts between “updates” and “questions,” as well as a slightly hidden feature of asking specific friends to answer, all backed by a topic ontology that is almost as impressive as Quora’s. (It’s fair to wonder, also, if they’ll release a separate mobile app for “Questions” as it has for “Messages” and is poised to for pictures.) LinkedIn “Answers” generates decent traffic. Google purchased Aardvark last year for similar reasons, but recently announced it was killing the project, though it remains uncertain if they’ll bake some type of Q&A feature into future G+ versions.

The competition in this space is incredible, reminiscent of the mobile photo-sharing wars of 2010. It’s safe to say that no one really knows what’s going to happen in Q&A, though it does seem really smart folks have decided that, perhaps one day (or sooner), Google’s traditional search on mobile may need to have more layers of signals in order to continue to provide relevant results for users on the go.

Let’s take it a step further. What about next-generation technologies that can make the experience for the everyday mobile user more magical? Perhaps Apple will integrate technology from its acquisition of Siri and transform the iPhone? Perhaps another handset maker will nail a Nuance-like speak-to-text integration? Perhaps we can simply take a picture of where we are and receive tailored information immediately? Perhaps Google, after its acquisition of Motorola, will reign in Android and potentially even give away free handsets to ensure Android’s growth? Or, maybe it’s something as simple as Instagram or as wild as Color, which captures rich metadata around most of the iPhone’s sensors in order to implicitly paint a digital image of one’s physical and social whereabouts.

The sheer level of competition is amazing. No doubt the folks who built Yahoo! Answers must be shaking their heads, especially since they’ve redesigned their own interface. And, in mobile, users’ search behaviors could change so dramatically if given the right tools, so much so that it could eventually threaten search incumbents’ traffic and brand.

In particular, Google has trained us to search by keyword for over a decade now, but in real life, we aren’t wired to search this way as humans. Rather, we often search by posing questions to others around us, an activity that is inherently social, and are influenced by many social signals. And now that the social layer is permanent, and now that many apps can leverage a device’s location (and other) sensors, it’s possible to combine these variables and use a mix of crowdsourcing, curation, and machine learning to provide users with more robust and more relevant information. This paradigm poses a long-term threat to Google from many angles.

To be clear, we are not there yet. Google search will dominate for some time. Google has a powerful, global brand, and now that they are moving to controlling more of the mobile stack with their purchase of Motorola, it’s not out of the question that they will do whatever they need to do to keep Android relevant, perhaps even giving away free phones in exchange for building and maintaining a G+ account? Whatever the outcomes may be today, mobile search and specifically the mobile Q&A market is wide open, up for grabs, and will continue to be an outpost in the multifront war Google is currently fighting. And while all of us keep asking questions, I wonder who or what will provide the answers: will it be humans, or machines, or a bit of both?

Photo credit: Brian Solis.

Ness Computing’s mission is to make search personal. By applying its expertise in search, recommendations and social networking to human behavior, Ness helps people discover experiences they’ll love. The first category Ness supports is restaurants.

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Loqly is a location based social Q&A service focussed on local businesses. Ask for business recommendations around you. Ask questions about local businesses. Receive answers from other locals in real-time.

Learn more Launch Date: December 12, 2010

Localmind allows you to send a question to any place in the world, and get an answer from someone at that location in real-time. Localmind connects you, temporarily and anonymously, to someone at the location you are interested in, allowing you to ask any question you want, and get an answer in real-time. You can find out how crowded it is at a bar, how long the line is at a club, or how many tables are open at the...

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Songza Mobile Apps Socializes the Digital Mix Tape

Streaming music service Songza launched apps for Android and iOS on Tuesday that are designed to make it easy for music fans to find and share digital playlists for practically any occasion.

Think of Songza as curated, hand-picked Internet radio. Like Pandora, Songza is not a stream-on-demand service (meaning, you can’t request to play a certain track or album). Unlike Pandora, Songza doesn’t impose any limitations on how much music you can listen to and it doesn’t serve any audio advertisements. Additionally, Songza doesn’t focus on creating artist based radio stations — although you can do that — instead, it focuses on connecting users with curated or peer-created mix tapes.

These playlists are organized around activities (like “Cocktail Party” or “Coding”), genres (“’70s NYC Punk” or “Math Rock”), Moods and even Culture. For instance, there is a whole playlist category dedicated to Cover Songs, featuring playlists like “More Popular Than the Original” and “Covering Cash.” The playlists are designed to capture a certain mood, event or activity.

Using the free Songza mobile app for iPhone [iTunes link] and Android [Android Market link], users can search and browse through Songza’s expertly curated playlists, save their favorites to their phone and share what they are listening to with friends on Facebook and Twitter.

The Songza team’s previous venture, Amie Street, was acquired by Amazon.com last fall. Songza just closed a financing round led by the same investors that were previously involved in Amie Street. The company clearly has big plans for enhancing its social offerings by allowing users to share their playlists or favorites via social networks.

As it stands, Songza sees itself as a “music concierge” and a better, smarter way of handling social music discovery.

After using the iPhone app over the last 24 hours, we agree. Without a doubt, Songza has the smartest, most well thought out collection of playlists of any of the subscription music services. What we really appreciate is that it is clear that a lot of vetting has gone into creating the officially sanctioned lists. If your friends are on Songza, you can also use the app to follow the playlists they share or like and vice versa.

The one downside to Songza and its mobile app is that right now, users can only create playlists at the Songza.com website. Moreover, Songza’s licensing restrictions prevent users from listening to the playlists they create themselves.

Your friends can listen to your custom mix of ultimate Fall in New York City tunes, but you, the creator can’t. Songza’s co-founder and CEO Elias Roman told us that the company is looking at either partnering with existing on-demand subscription services such as Spotify or working out its own on-demand licensing agreement so that users can listen to their own selections.

If Songza can nail that last loop and provide users who are willing to pay with on-demand access to their own playlists, we could easily see Songza taking off in a huge way.

Still, even with the self-playlist limitations, Songza for iPhone and Android is one of the most promising mobile music apps we’ve seen all year.

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Google Says Mobile Optimized Sites Will Factor Into Landing Page Quality And Perform Better In AdWords

Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... ? Learn More

Google is announcing today that websites that are optimized for mobile will now factor into ad quality. The company says that last year it began to limit ad serving on smartphone devices if they pointed to landing pages with Flash-heavy content, in order to improve the experience for users. Now the search giant will be considering the mobile optimization of a website as a new factor of mobile ads quality for all AdWords campaigns that are driving mobile traffic.

As a result of this change, ads that have mobile optimized landing pages will perform better in AdWords and drive more traffic. The core guidelines for landing page quality apply across devices (on desktop and on mobile) but this consideration will only affect AdWords on mobile devices.

For background, Google’s landing page quality for mobile sites factors in site navigability, simple layout, content prioritization, mobile features, touch features, minimal flash, landing page load time. Landing page quality is one of several factors that determine an advertiser’s keywords’ Quality Scores.

As Google says, a poor mobile web experience can negatively shape a consumer’s opinion of a brand or company and make it hard for them to engage or make a purchase. In fact, 61% of users are unlikely to return to a website that they had trouble accessing from their phone.

Unsurprisingly, Google is pushing its own mobile site creator, through Google Sites, on publishers and site owners who want to create a simple mobile website. Considering the holiday shopping season is getting closer, retailers may want to be sure their sites fit into Google’s landing page guidelines. Certainly, this year more than ever, holiday shoppers will be using their mobile phones for search and purchasing.

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musiXmatch, The IMDB For Song Lyrics, Comes To iTunes & Spotify; Passes 1M Mobile Downloads

Rip Empson is a writer at TechCrunch. He’s not here to make friends, he’s here to WIN, and don’t you forget it. You can reach him at rip[at]techcrunch[dot]com ? Learn More

I don’t know about you, but I’m awful at remembering the lyrics to songs, and I often find myself turning to Google search to answer my lyrical questions — and frequently, to lose arguments. Apparently, I’m not alone, as “lyrics” is one of the most searched-for terms on Google. While a quick search is often all one needs to flick on the light switch, overall, lyric search remains a pretty disappointing (and frustrating) experience. There are tons of lyrics sites out there, but most of them are unofficial, don’t have rights to broadcasting free lyrics, or they’re hiding malware.

Founded in 2010, musiXmatch is a startup trying to solve this very problem by building a database of legal song lyrics on the web in the hopes of becoming the IMDB for legal song lyrics. So far, the site has collected over 5.5 million songs (in 18 languages) and is not only building a database that meets with international rights management standards, but it is also developing an API to distribute its lyrics to music publishers, services, app developers, and hackers. Phew.

Today, musiXmatch is announcing the official launch of its “musiXmatch Lyrics App” for Mac OSX, which is available for $5 on the App Store. The plug-in enables users to automatically view full screen lyrics for the music they’re currently playing and includes support for iTunes and Spotify.

The widget is still in its early stages, and the team said that it will soon be giving music fans the ability to search for lyrics by artist, song name, or keywords, and browse discography info on albums and artists — and share that info with friends through social networks. (Another cool update coming down the pipeline: Enabling listeners to automatically embed the lyrics into the id3 tag of your songs.)

For iTunes and Spotify users like myself, musiXmatch’s widget is a pretty cool little add-on to the existing listening experience, as it automatically matches your iTunes and Spotify libraries (and automatically opens both), works with both platforms’ “radio” features, allows you to share lyrics to Facebook and Twitter, and receive Growl notifications. (And it works with Lion.)

In addition to today’s launch of its iTunes and Spotify compatible iOS plug-in, musiXmatch also shared with us that their mobile applications, which are available on iOS, Android, Symbian, and Windows Mobile, have been downloaded more than 1 million times. Over 50 percent of those users are active on a daily basis.

musiXmatch’s mobile solution allows users to easily find and match lyrics for their entire mobile music library, and with desktop availability, a sweet API that lets developers easily distribute kosher lyrics, the startup is becoming a very appealing service for everything from radio streaming platforms and video services to tablet apps and OEM manufacturers. With partnerships that include BMG, Kobalt, Universal Music Publishing Group, and Sony ATV Music, among others, musiXmatch is becoming a very interesting business and platform.

But, what about competition, you say? Well my friends, look no further than TuneWiki. While musiXmatch is an up-and-comer, the well-funded TuneWiki has been going mobile with its lyric-centric social music player for quite some time now. MusiXmatch is, now, essentially the European equivalent. It will be interesting to see how the two vie for marketshare going forward.

Which would you choose, or both? Check ‘em out.

musiXmatch is a new challenging start up offering “Lyrics in The Cloud” via a scalable Lyrics API. musiXmatch is the first fully licensed provider of global lyrics solutions, enabling developers and music fans around the world to quickly and easily harness the power of online lyrics. Featuring the largest lyrics database in the world, musiXmatch is the first and only comprehensive solution for international lyric rights management. musiXmatch’s comprehensive lyrics API allows anyone to easily plugin and distribute authorized lyrics....

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PicPlz, Fashism & 29 Others Implement New Aviary Photo Editing Tool for Mobile

Aviary, a four-year-old startup that offers a set of free photo, design and audio tools, is launching a new plugin for developers that easily puts photo editing and effects in any iPhone or Android app.

PicPlz, Fashism and 29 other companies have already agreed to use it.

Developers can choose features from a basket of Aviary tools — basic editing tools like crop, flip, rotate, sharpen, blur and red eye removal, as well as fun features like drawing, text, stickers, and photo filters — and customize the user interface to fit within their design.

This is the second Aviary release this year that powers other startups’ products behind the scenes rather than through an embeddable widget or standalone tool. The first was an Effects API that allows any website or mobile app to easily tweak or add effects to its photos.

While Aviary had a Twilio-style monetization plan in mind for that API, in which it would charge frequent users for its service, Alex Taub, lead partnerships and third party integrations, says the startup will likely add premium features for brands to its new plug-in.

Here are how several startups have already implemented the free tool:

Image courtesy of Flickr, bareform

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Kleiner-Backed Vlix Is An Instagram For Video; Adds Filters, Effects And More To Mobile Video

Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... ? Learn More

Mobile video app Vlix is launching a new version of its Instagram-like mobile video sharing iOS app with text-in-video options to video effects, filters, effects and more. The app is currently available in the App Store for free.

Basically, Vlix allows users to post short video (a max of 1 minute) on the fly, but add cool effects, text, edit the content and more. Via the app, you can capture a video and then add artistic filters, and effects like reverse, slow-mo, brighten, and color boost. You can also add customizable text that appears at the start and end of video, and share videos to a private group or to email, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

New features to the app, which originally debuted in April, is the ability to enter the app and browse through featured videos by other Vlix members without having to register as well as the ability to save videos to the iPhone’s camera roll. Additionally Vlix allows you to create a pre-roll short video to run before all of your posted videos.

When you are ready to post a video from Vlix (after using the company’s dead simple editing tool), you render the video (which takes second using Vlix’s proprietary technology), and post. Fellow users within the apps (you can follow other users) can comment and like your video, and you can see how many views it has received.

In many ways, the ease of adding effects to video as well as editing makes the app similar to an Instagram for video. The Vlix folks also have experience with online video. They operate One True Media, a simple video slideshow creation site that sees over 6 million users posting over 10,000 videos a day and over 5,000 videos a day posted to YouTube and Facebook. The company’s other startup SpotMixer allows businesses to create videos for online, TV and mobile.

Vlix has raised $16 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins, and DAG Ventures.

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Clearwire, China Mobile Partner Up To Expand LTE

Chris Velazco is a mobile enthusiast and writer who studied English and Marketing at Rutgers University. Once upon a time, he was the news intern for MobileCrunch, and in between posts, he worked in wireless sales at Best Buy. After graduating, he returned to the new TechCrunch to as a full-time mobile writer. He counts advertising, running, musical theater,... ? Learn More

It’s no secret that Clearwire is looking at rolling out an LTE network of their own here in the States, but a recently announced partnership could bring them some big support from overseas. The 4G internet provider has inked a deal with state-owned China Mobile to collaborate on the development of new TD-LTE devices.

TD-LTE is a network standard that China Mobile has been working to implement during the past few years. China Mobile’s forthcoming TD-LTE network runs on the 2.5 GHz frequency, which (what a coincidence!) matches up rather nicely with Clearwire’s own LTE licenses. Their partnership hinges on the development of multi-mode devices that could see use in either market.

For a company that’s rumored to be gobbled up soon, this partnership could be exactly what they need to stave off an acquisition. What Clearwire is really after is here is access: by helping to develop and expand the TD-LTE standard, they not only make it easier for OEMs to start working on devices usable by both companies, they also get in on the ground floor for potentially lucrative roaming agreements.

Of course, this all supposes that Clearwire can get the $600 million in funding necessary to start building out their TD-LTE network. Neither company has made mention of it, but if China Mobile were to pitch in a few bucks, it could generate some more state-side influence for China’s biggest wireless carrier.

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Verious Launches First Marketplace For Mobile App Components

Today, TechCrunch Disrupt finalist Verious is launching the world’s first marketplace for mobile application components – that is, the libraries, the SDKs (software development kits), the add-ons, the open source code and other third-party services which specifically cater to mobile app developers. Until now, there hasn’t been a centralized repository of these resources.

But Verious isn’t just organizing mobile app components on its site, it’s also offering a way for developers to sell their components to others through a copy-protected licensing system.

According to analysts, the market for mobile application development services is expected to reach $100 billion by 2015, as many independent developers are now working on a combination of consumer-facing apps alongside mobile app component development. That no one has thought to launch a service like this until now is actually somewhat surprising.

With Verious, the goal is to help developers speed their time to market by offering the components they need, but don’t have either the time or resources to build themselves. For example, there’s a 3D globe which consists of 20,000 lines of code, built over the course of 5 months with $50,000 worth of labor. It’s listed on the site for less than $1,000 to license.

Pre-launch, Verious’ founders talked to thousands of developers and have compiled a list of 1,000 components along with $100,000 worth of component requests. The size of this initial catalog demonstrates the need for such a service’s existence in the first place – there are a lot of mobile app components for developers to keep up with!

In addition to organizing the components on the site for easy discovery, mobile app developers are allowed to test out the components in a 30-day free trial. They can also post and “follow” component feature requests, so sellers know which ones to prioritize in their development to meet market demands. In the future, the ability to rate, review and comment on components will be added, too.

The site’s patent-pending License Manager lets sellers enforce different types of licensing models, including annual fees, perpetual fees, volume-based tiered pricing, source code buyout and more. Verious will charge a 20-40% commission on components (20% for charter developers), a referral fee for premier partners listings SDKs, and revenue share for server-side partners.

At launch, Verious supports iOS and Android, but will expand to other platforms as the market demands.

Verious’ management team is composed of industry veterans with CEO Anil Pereira, VP Marketing Don Pitt and Web Strategy/Ops head Michael Coleman. Their combined work experience includes time spent at VeriSign, American Express, DataSphere, VMWare, Samsung, Openwave and TRUSTe.

The company, founded in 2011, is backed by seed and angel investors including Charles River Ventures, X-G Ventures, Mark Britto, Iggy Fanlo, Gil Penchina, Krishna Vedati and others.

Judges Q&A

Expert Judges: Aileen Lee (Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers), Dustin Moskovitz (Asana), Michael Parekh (MPi Capital), Joshua Schachter (Jig)

AL: Estimation of addressable market?

A: 1) App services market – $100 B by 2015, plus app tools market – $30 B by 2015, according to analysts.

DM: Dev tools companies have failed to make business of it. Who is doing it well?

A: Plenty of companies doing marketplace models out there.

MP: Quality control? Rating system?

A: Developers have to produce a sample app with the code, or have an app on the App Store. Yes, ratings, reviews, community are coming.

JS: How to be first stop for developers?

A: Every day, companies are launching SDKs. Companies are working with Verious now to get their libraries listed. They want to be on site to grow their install base.

Verious is the world’s first marketplace for mobile app components, enabling developers to license pre-built, pre-tested libraries to accelerate time-to-market, access 3rd party content and increase in-app monetization. Verious serves as a lens on the Mobile App Development category so mobile app developers can find all the resources they need to accelerate their development efforts, in one place. Verious lists mobile application components for iOS and Android; mobile SDKs; mobile app development tools and services; and major open...

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GameStop Affirms Popularity Of Mobile Gaming; Plans To Sell iPhone, iPod, And iPad

Jordan Crook studied English Literature at New York University before entering the tech space. Prior to joining TechCrunch, Crook dabbled in mobile marketing and mobile apps as well as doing device reviews for MobileMarketer and MobileBurn. Crook is fascinated with alternative energy production and greentech. She is now a writer for CrunchGear. ? Learn More

Still think mobile gaming isn’t a big deal? GameStop disagrees. Though they may not be as in-depth or graphically stimulating as console or PC-based games, but mobile games are accessible to everyone. My grandma can’t play L.A. Noire, but she’s beat every level of Angry Birds. So it only makes sense that GameStop has decided to put a couple new devices on its shelves: the iPod, iPhone, and iPad.

GameStop has made a push into the tablet and mobile gaming space as of late. It started an iOS device trade-in program (for select stores) that is expected to roll-out nationally sometime during this year, reports 9to5mac. The company also said in April it had plans to get into the tablet space, whether that be with a device already on the market or by building a GameStop-branded gaming slate. Turns out, nabbing the iOS trifecta was the best plan.

With the carriers set on a duopoly, there’s no better time to start opening up other retail locations for Apple products. We vote with our wallets, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have the iPhone or the iPad.

GameStop recently received some bad press over taking promotional materials out of games and then selling them as if nothing had happened. Understandably, people weren’t too happy about this. But the Internet has a short memory and it seems that GameStop needs to cover all the bases in its physical stores to remain competitive.

Gamestop is an American video game retailer with over 6,000 locations worldwide. The company spun off from Barnes & Noble in 2004 and operates as GameStop and EB Games.

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Started by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple has expanded from computers to consumer electronics over the last 30 years, officially changing their name from Apple Computer,...

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Terrahawk’s M.U.S.T. Is A Mobile Guard Tower In A Shady-Looking Van

Devin Coldewey is a Seattle-based writer and photographer. He has written for the TechCrunch network since 2007. Some posts he’d like you to read: The Dangers of Externalizing Knowledge | Generation i | Surveillant Society | Choose Two | Frame Wars | The User’s Manifesto | Our Great Sin His personal website is coldewey.cc. ? Learn More

National Security isn’t always about the flashy solutions. Not everything can be rail guns and one-winged drones. Sometimes you just need a sort of seedy-looking van that slowly, slowly turns into a climate-controlled guard tower.

That, at least, is the goal of defense researcher Terrahawk’s M.U.S.T. platform. That’s Mobile Utility Surveillance Tower if you must know. Check out this video of its deployment.

I have to say, it’s different in the movies and such where these things tend to exist. But I suppose in the interest of stability and durability they can’t have big feet that fire out like jackhammers, and a tower that pops up like a jack in the box.

Although it looks like something you can shoot out of, I don’t think that’s really recommended. It’s a fairly vulnerable target — a speeding car or RPG could easily topple it. Terrahawk recommends it for “emergency response, public event crowd control, [and] general surveillance.” It’s got lights, thermal cameras, and ground radar for monitoring borders, so drug runners beware.

They’re doing a big demonstration of the MUST for the House and Senate next Thursday, at which many Representatives will be overheard to say “couldn’t it go a little faster?” And Terrahawk will respond “well, right now your options are taking two days to build a guard tower, or two minutes to put one of our things up.” The Representative will nod and check his phone.

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294 Patent Lawsuits Were Filed In August 2011; Mobile Handset Complaints Up 25 Percent Yearly

Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... ? Learn More

There’s no question that the cost of patents is rising. Google is paying $12.5 billion for Motorola mainly for its huge mobile patent portfolio. In July, an anti-Google consortium raised $4.5 billion for Nortel’s patents (and they overpayed). Interdigital, Kodak, and others are looking to sell their patent portfolios. As my colleague Erick Schonfeld wrote recently, we are in the midst of a patent bubble. One startup, Lex Machina, is aiming to help companies gain insight into data and analytics on patent litigation. And unsurprisingly, the company’s online patent litigation database is being used by most of the top tech companies in Silicon Valley.

The company is just did a study on mobile handset litigation. According to Lex Machina’s data, mobile handset lawsuits are up roughly 25 percent a year since 2006.  In fact, in August of 2011 alone, there were 294 patent lawsuits, 8 percent of which were mobile-related. Currently, Apple is involved in 97 open patent cases (here’s an example of one). Motorola Mobility is involved with 38 open patent cases.

We’ve known that there is a rise of patent trolls, taxing innovation and causing companies billions. Google Chairman Eric Schmidt recently pointed out some major flaws in the patent system, and believes that crowdsourcing is the future to reforming patents.  But until any reform happens, the flawed system is here to stay.

For background, Lex Machina was spun off of a partnership between Stanford Law School and the Stanford Computer Science Department. Initially, the research behind the company was funded by the Kauffman Foundation for Entrepreneurship and companies like Apple and
Genentech. It was then spun off and funded by The Stanford Angels and Entrepreneurs and ULu Ventures.

Lex Machina is announcing free access to its service for small mobile app makers who have been sued (not a bad deal considering access is usually $10,000 per year, per seat on the SaaS model). Companies who want to request access should email access@lexmachina.com.

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Evri Launches SportStream Apps To Bring Realtime, Social Sports News To Your Mobile Devices

Rip Empson is a writer at TechCrunch. He’s not here to make friends, he’s here to WIN, and don’t you forget it. You can reach him at rip[at]techcrunch[dot]com ? Learn More

Evri, the realtime content discovery engine, acquired Radar Networks early last year, incorporating the startup’s semantic indexing technology into its products. The move laid the groundwork for Evri’s shift into the mobile space, as it has since used its realtime semantic matching algorithms to begin delivering news in targeted categories and the Twine team to expand into mobile. Last year, the startup launched EvriThing Tech to allow readers to create and add their own channels on any tech topics, as well as those from predefined topics. (Similar to what FLUD, and others are doing in the mobile content space.)

Today, Evri is expanding its mobile functionality, launching a suite of sports applications for iOS and Android devices, called SportStream, that will be powered by its eponymous platform. With the NFL season looming, Evri is kicking off its suite of sports apps with SportStream Football, an app that looks to provide readers with realtime push notifications and in-game commentary through social channels — to make your Sunday viewing experience more interactive and a little more Web 2.0.

With SportStream Football, Evri is looking to provide an immersive experience for fans that allows them access to realtime news content from thousands of sources, integrating personalized and up-to-date information from fans’ social feeds, enabling readers to live tweet highlights from games as they happen. Viewers can see in-game score updates and play-by-play summaries, with personalization options for specific teams, like key injury and trade news, for example.

Just as Taptu has created a fantasy football stream for iPad users, Evri is looking to have its targeted and personalized content stream become a great resource not only for fans but for fantasy football players as well.

The objective here, says Evri CEO Will Hunsinger, is not to “out-ESPN ESPN”, but to take advantage of where ESPN’s realtime sports coverage lacks. Not only by scouring the web for information from bloggers and other sports content outside of ESPN’s realm, but by allowing fans of, say, Georgetown sports, to create targeted news feeds for their alma mater’s teams. While ESPN is obviously a robust content source (really, the death star of sports content), there’s plenty of room here for startups to improve on the sports content reading and viewing experience.

With Evri’s well-honed semantic indexing data, the SportStream apps are a great resource for personalized sports info. Evri is smart to go after these enthusiastic, underserved niches. Or, even if sports content isn’t exactly sparse, to give sports fans an easier and less “noisy” reading experience, with realtime functionality, adds weight to the startup’s value proposition. Yes, Pulse recently struck a deal with ESPN, and Taptu is offering a great tablet app, but there’s plenty of room in the market, and Evri’s approach to fan engagement via the social graph and realtime tweeting, is a good start.

We’ll be looking forward to the startup’s next moves.

Evri is a personalized news reader for tablets that makes it easier than ever to keep up with topics that interest you. With Evri, you can: Discover breaking...

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