Pokemon Go Underscores Public Desire for Augmented Reality
When Matthew Blake, a 14-year old suffering from autism, finally began reaching out to his peers and socializing, his mother never expected that the source of his “cure” would be so simple. The cure, needless to say, is Pokemon Go — the latest craze sweeping the tech industry and sending iPhone app developers scrambling for […]
Startups Increasingly Tackling Policy and Social Issues
Sidewalk labs (an Alphabet subsidiary) is proposing to build Columbus, Ohio’s public transportation from scratch. Y Combinator is researching what it’ll take to build a city from a blank slate. Artificial islands, far from futurist fantasies, are very real undertakings being pursued by billionaires of the tech industry to create “havens” for innovation. What3Words is […]
Augmented Reality vs Virtual Reality: Which Trend Will Dominate?
Virtual reality has been dominating media coverage of tech, and when mobile app users imagine the coming VR revolution they usually imagine the sort of VR devices we saw at SXSW — big headsets, cords on the ground, complete visual immersion in a digital world. So Pokemon Go, the record-setting high-growth mobile gaming startup from […]
Tech Company IPOs Are Rising to the Top Again
The recent Twilio IPO, on the eve of Brexit, has seemingly defined a bright new future for the tech IPO. While analysts continue to discuss whether it’ll steadily rise like Facebook or steadily descend like GoPro, the message to the mobile app development community is loud and clear: tech IPOs are hot again. Twilio doubled […]
Can Mobile App Startups Disrupt the Insurance Industry?
Insurance, along with medical care, is one of our country’s biggest industries — yet also one of the slowest to adapt to updates in mobile technology. The accelerated pace of FinTech adoption by the mainstream public, however, could signal a sea change for insurance. Clearly, consumer confidence in mobile tech has grown to the point […]
The Best Apps to Accelerate Your Startup
The startup life has never been easy. More than 90% of mobile apps fold within a year of launch. Even fewer move on to become commercially viable. At the same time, startup profits are higher now than they’ve ever been before, with mobile app developer revenues from the Apple App Store and Google Play rising […]
Startup Founders Looking to AgTech as next Frontier
KisanHub is a startup with a simple mission: using tech to help farmers grow more crops more efficiently, while using less land. While iPad app developers might not immediately think of agriculture and farming when they think of unicorn-level startup opportunities, venture capitalists beg to differ — KisanHub just closed a $1 million seed funding […]
Can Mobile Apps Make a Real Contribution to Social Justice?
While Facebook’s stance on censorship remains murky, the unicorn tech giant has issued multiple statements insinuating that the platform — and Facebook live in particular — can have a positive impact by bringing transparency to everyday life. Last week’s controversial police shooting video, which was quickly removed from the platform before being reinstated after public […]
Uber Rushes to Claim the “Uber for X” Startup Market
Uber just made UberRush available publicly to mobile app developers, allowing anyone to build on-demand services on top of Uber’s existing driver and delivery network. The result? A much shorter runway for small startups looking to become “Uber for X.” Rather than sourcing and maintaining their own fleet of drivers or delivery people, developers can pay […]
Google Launches Hardware Initiative to Teach Kids Code
Google just launched a new hardware initiative, Project Bloks, with the aim of expanding youth exposure to coding principles through “tangible coding.” Unlike the software-based coding systems mobile app developers who work with kids might be familiar with, tangible coding systems represent coding concepts — objects, binaries, if/then statements — as physical objects that can […]