Ok, maybe not a bouncy ball, but pretty damn close.

M-Edge came out with a SuperShell for the iPad towards the end of last year, but the idea of a bouncing iPhone seems much more appealing. The case comes in four different colors — black, blue, purple, and pink — and has a finely dimpled finish to it to help with grip.

Clearly, it’s not the slimmest case on the market, so if you’re into that minimalist thing you may want to steer clear.

At the same time, anyone who lives a rough-and-tumble life (or drops their phone more than the average bear) should consider looking into this. The corners of the case are bulkier than usual, which allows for a bounciness that you can view for yourself in the video below.

The cover is made of closed-cell foam that helps absorb shocks, and it wraps around the edges of the phone to fit securely. All ports are accessible.

If only it came in orange with black stripes we could call it the Tigger.

The M-Edge iPhone SuperShell is available now for $29.99 from the M-Edge website.

Apple is continuing its “famous person uses Siri” commercials by bringing in famous person John Malkovich to add a soupçon of Old World weltschmerz and philosophizing to what is, in short, a way to schedule a wake-up call without unlocking your phone. The commercials feature Malkovich in what appears to be the house above the nasty places in Hostel where he muses on fine meats and the meaning of life.

I don’t quite get these celebrity appearances but, in the end, I suppose they’re good for brand awareness. Siri isn’t for the geeks – it’s for the folks who may have once been in love with BlackBerries. Siri suggests a certain ease, a certain subsumed technicality that would draw in the C-level exec and, in parallel, well-known superstars. It is, in short, a little assistant that will never talk back to you, never ask for a raise, and never request that you stop cursing.

That they chose Malkovich for this one is a little odd on the surface but it makes sense: Malkovich’s audience these days is the indie-film-loving, ironic post-gen-X C-level business person who is adult enough to be able to spend a little money on a 4S yet still is wary of being marketed at. A similar demographic targeting is shown in the choice of Samuel L. Jackson (the just-below-Mensa-level adventure/action loving geek who remembers Mace Windu’s sword) and Zooey Deschanel grabs the plugged-in hipster demographic. If you extrapolated this further into an older demographic you could almost foresee commercials featuring Betty White and maybe Leonard Nimoy.

For those who find these a bit out of character, I suggest we go back and look at the Mac vs. PC ads that featured two memorable faces who, arguably, cannot be disassociated from that campaign. You can’t look at John Hodgman – even with his sassy little mustache – and not see that poor, put-upon PC being shown up by Justin Long.

The iPod advertising was genius because it made everyone think they could move like a sinuous dancer to the lilting chords of Jet. These new commercials allow a certain type of consumer to associate him or herself with a certain archetype. As inclusive as Apple seems to its fans, it’s still important to segment those still on the fence and, one by one, speak directly to them.

In what should be a very welcome addition for Android developers, Google is adding subscription billing to its app store.

That should give developers yet another to earn revenue on top of in-app purchases of virtual currency, downloads of paid apps and advertising. It will probably most benefit mid and hardcore game developers, who are more likely to have rabid fans willing to pay for monthly access. It will also help magazine publishers, who are still figuring out how to sell content on tablets.

All of the subscriptions are auto-renewing and can be set with monthly or annual fees. Developers set the price themselves.  There’s also an HTTP-based publisher API that lets enterprise-scale backend servers validate or cancel subscriptions. It’s inter-operable with subscriptions on the web, so users can take their paid access with them across devices and web destinations.

The revenue share is just the same as it is with paid apps and in-app purchases. Google takes a 30 percent cut. When Apple launched subscriptions on iOS, some publishers like The Financial Times balked at Apple’s cut and instead built HTML5 apps to circumvent the fees. Google’s situation is a little more complicated as it relies more on carrier billing, which means most of their 30 percent cut may actually go toward mobile operators.

Google hand-selected a few developers to launch with subscriptions today. One of them is Glu Mobile, which is a publicly traded mobile game developer. They’re best known for “action-adventure” games like Gun Bros and they did just over $17 million in smartphone revenue in the first quarter of this year (which was a pretty impressive 72 percent increase from the quarter before).

Google is playing catch-up with iOS in terms of helping developers make money from their apps. Mobile analytics firm Flurry found that for every dollar a developer earns on iOS, they earn about a quarter of that on Android. Most of this has to do with how Android just has fewer paying customers on file. If you look at revenue on a per-user basis (or how a paying user spends on average), it’s actually almost the same on iOS and Android. So as long as Google can get more payments information on Android users, it looks promising.

Amazon’s Kindle Fire is currently the most popular Android-powered tablet, but it doesn’t feature a GPS chip. Given how important location-based services have become, that’s a bit of a drawback for many developers and quite a few apps that want to access location features on Amazon’s tablet actually crash. To avoid these issues, Kayak teamed up with Skyhook to provide location services for its updated Android app. Kayak, of course, relies heavily on location services to show its users information like nearby hotels and airport information.

Skyhook’s Android SDK allows developers to get location information across virtually all Android versions and forks like the Kindle Fire and Barnes and Noble’s NOOK.

The service, which provided virtually all of the location features for iOS before Apple switched to its own solution in 2010, uses WiFi triangulation when it can’t use a GPS chip or cell tower triangulation to determine a device’s location.

On Android, it is worth noting, Skyhook is also enabled in a number of other popular apps, including Tweetcaster, HopStop, deCarta and OpenTable. WiFi triangulation, of course, is never quite as accurate as GPS (except for when you are indoors), but using a service like Skyhook greatly improves location accuracy in urban areas and speeds up GPS satellite acquisition times.

Autodesk is expanding its growing portfolio of iPad apps today with SketchBook Ink. The pen-and-ink app is built on a new graphical engine that’s independent of resolution, allowing the created artwork to be exported in resolutions exceeding 100 megapixels.

This, Autodesk hopes, will reinvigorate graphic artists and even doodlers about iPad content creation since the vector-based artwork can scale to massive print sizes.

SketchBook Ink joins Autodesk’s relatively large assortment of iPad drawing apps. Although powered by a new engine, the app feels very similar to the other titles including SketchBook Pro. The interface is a bit scaled, almost reorganized to make for a more intuitive user experience. SketchBook Ink launches with seven preset ink styles and two types of erasers.

“I am a frequent doodler. I mostly like to draw pictures of my dog and stuffed animals, but today, during a riveting Disrupt Battlefield session, my mind wandered to a sunny, lightly wooded retreat miles away from the nearest Internet-connected computer. So I drew this using the new SketchBook Ink app.” Said Elin Blesener, TechCrunch Community Manager yesterday after being caught messing around on an iPad instead of working.

Autodesk built the app for sharing. Artwork can be exported to the iPad’s photo library, iTunes, Dropbox, and can be shared quickly via email. The slick interface makes scaling upon exporting rather easy with options to keep it small for web use or export for print with a resolution over 100 megapixels.

“With more than 10 million downloads to date, we’re proud that the SketchBook family is changing how, where, and with what tools people unlock their creativity. People who never considered using a digital app for their artwork before, are now turning to SketchBook to produce incredible illustrations,” said Samir Hanna, vice president, Consumer Products, Autodesk in a statement released to TechCrunch.

Starting today, the Autodesk SketchBook Ink App is available for $4.99 from the App Store. But if you act fast, you can nab it for $1.99 during a special introductory promotion.

Mobile advertising company  Millennial  Media, one of the biggest in the U.S., has released its quarterly ad impression report, and the results show that Apple continues to remain the single-biggest brand, and most popular phone maker, on the Millennial ad network — with the rest of the list largely dominated by Android.

Apple has a clear lead in the field of device makers based on brand: the popularity of Apple’s iPhone handsets, iPad tablets and iPod music players gave the company a share of 28.32 percent of all devices on the network, with its closest competitor, Samsung, picking up a share of 18.25 percent of the overall market impressions. Millennial also notes that non-phone devices are continuing to see a growing impact on the overall mix.

RIM slipped down to number-five in the list of top manufacturers, and  with 10.16 percent of all devices, and Nokia, once the leading vendor of mobile handsets, is now down to 10th position, with a 0.91 percent share of mobile devices.

When considering individual handset models, you can really see the strength of Apple’s strong portfolio essentially built around one device. Apple only had the iPhone (unspecified which precise model; perhaps all three) in the top-20, but usage of iPhones was enough to give it 15.1 percent of the whole market. The next-closest competitor was BlackBerry Curve with a 4.44 percent share of the market.

In contrast to Apple, other handset makers are still relying on several handset models, which all do moderately well, so that in aggregate they are gaining better market share. For example, RIM has five handsets in the top-20, the biggest number. Together that accounted for only 12 percent of impressions. Samsung had four handsets, which together made eight percent of impressions. HTC also had four models in top-20, with Motorola listing three.

Although the usage of tablets is really taking off — Millennial notes that is up by 33 percent over last year, with iPad very much in the lead — smartphones are still accounting for the vast majority of traffic. Collectively, they account for 73 percent of all ad impression traffic, versus 62 percent the year before. Traffic from tablets and other non-smartphone devices went up as well, t0 20 percent from 15 percent, while feature phones are really in decline. Lower end devices not account for only seven percent of ad impression traffic, compared to 23 percent a year ago.

When it comes to platforms, although Apple leads in terms of single brand, the sheer aggregation of Android device makers continues to push Google’s OS into the lead. Android now has 49 percent of all impressions, with iOS at 33 percent. Millennial notes that Android overtook iOS as the dominant platform in 2011. BlackBerry is at 14 percent to round out the top three.

In terms of popular apps, Millennial says that games were the most popular category, and it grew by 10 percent over last year. Music and entertainment took the number-two position. The full rankings for popular app categories are below:

This time last year, Brett Martin took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York to launch Sonar, a mobile app that connects you to friends and other people nearby, based on your existing social networks. Fast forward to today and the Battlefield runner-up is rolling out a major update to its mobile app that will allow Sonar to finally become the “Here-Now” social network.

The app previously focused on providing relevant information to users about others around them based on connections via Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, and Twitter. Extremely useful for conferences like Disrupt, when you’re at a party or maybe even starting a new job.

So what’s new? Aside from the usual under the hood tweaks, Sonar has crammed in Status, Sonar Presence, Notifications and Messaging. The status update serves as a hyperlocal broadcast tool for those within close proximity and even pushes out a notification to your friends when they’re close by.

Sonar Presence runs in the background to let others know what you’re up to or when friends are nearby, pushing a notification to alert you to folks you are already connected to. Sonar says one way they’re set apart from other apps in the space is that they’re most interested in showing you real connections and people you actually care about. Like others in the space, battery issues remain because current devices aren’t optimized to use GPS properly. You can pause Sonar in the background, BTW.

Notifications will only ping you when friends you actually know and are connected to are nearby.

Messaging is pretty straight forward and lets you lob chats back and forth with other Sonar users. So if you’re heading into the office and Sonar notifies you that a co-worker is close by, you can send a message asking them to hold the elevator or ask if they need a coffee. Sonar also offers a replacement to the irritating “Where are you guys” texts that are a staple of meeting up at a concert or park. Brilliant, no?

Oh, you think you’ve heard this before, have you? How useful is Highlight outside of the San Francisco tech circle? Because it’s pretty worthless in New York. There are folks working in every industry imaginable, not just tech. The connections that I’ve personally made with folks in fashion, entertainment and countless other industries are innumerable thanks to Sonar. And what about getting results anywhere outside of a tech hub? Sonar says they had users in 35 countries just within a week of their launch last year, and have seen usage in more than 65 countries total. If you don’t see the value in a service like Sonar, then you’re totally missing the point and drinking the kool-aid.

Oddly enough, I’d heard this pitch before but it came at a time before the App Store was even a thing. Back in 2008, Mike declared that he’d seen the “Future Of Social Networking.” He described it as such:

A few years from now we’ll use our mobile devices to help us remember details of people we know, but not well. And it will help us meet new people for dating, business and friendship. Imagine walking into a meeting, classroom, party, bar, subway station, airplane, etc. and seeing profile information about other people in the area, depending on privacy settings. Picture, name, dating status, resume information, etc. The information that is available would be relevant to the setting – quick LinkedIn-type information for a business meeting v. Facebook dating status for a bar.

Given the intimate connection we have with our mobile devices, who wouldn’t want this type of service at our fingertips? It’s not like we don’t immediately Google someone we’ve just met anyway.

Mike never disclosed the name of the company and we never heard from them again. But it doesn’t matter. Sonar does just that and more.

Sonar [App Store]

Just over a week ago, the jury began deliberations on the ongoing patent infringement case between Google and Oracle. After waiting in the wings, with bated breath, the verdict is finally in, as Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court of Northern California dismissed the jury this afternoon after a unanimous decision that ruled in favor of Google’s mobile OS — declaring that Android did not in fact infringe on the Oracle patents in question.

The decision follows an opposing verdict earlier this month, in which the jury in the long-running infringement case found that certain components of Android APIs had too close of a resemblance to code used in Oracle’s Java programming tools. However, the jury ended up splitting on the notion of whether or not Google could in fact claim fair use in its defense (which could have then led to a mistrial.)

The jury’s decision was obviously a laborious one, following two years of a legal back-and-forth between the two tech giants. Oracle had initially filed the lawsuit back in August 2010, in which the company asserted that Android infringed on Java patents that Oracle acquired as a result of its purchase of Sun Microsystems. Google responded by saying that, at the time of development, it was not aware of Sun’s patents and that Android was in fact free to use.

Of course, that decision was only the first act in the three-part deliberations, in which the copyright infringement issues were to be followed by consideration of Oracle’s patent infringement claims (the focus of today’s hearing) and, finally, the damages Google might be liable for were it found found to infringe.

However, much of that speculation was rendered moot today, as a week of deliberation came to a close today at the U.S. District Court of Northern California, with the jury unanimously declaring that Google did not in fact infringe on the six claims set forth by Oracle in regard to U.S. Patent RE 38,104 as well as the two claims regarding U.S. Patent 6,061,520.

Of course, this does not mean that the whole case has been decided; instead, the decision marks the end of the trial’s second phase, which, again, focused solely on Oracle’s claims of patent infringement.

While the jury had previously found that Google was in violation of Oracle’s copyrights, as stated above, it could not come to a unanimous decision on the issue of fair use. Meaning that, although Oracle ostensibly “won” its copyright case, it effectively has a hold on its ability to collect on any of the $1 billion in copyright damages it is seeking from Google — a conclusion that was supported by the tweets of legal reporter Ginny LaRoe, who attended today’s hearing.

And #Googacle The Trial is over. Judge Alsup dismissing jury. Since Oracle won virtually nothing, no damages phase at this point.

— Ginny LaRoe (@GinnyLaRoe) May 23, 2012

On top of that, there are a number of other legal questions surrounding the copyright case on which Judge Aslup has yet to issue a final ruling, although he is expected to come to a decision next week.

Updating

Mint.com iOS users now have the ability to create and (more importantly) edit budgets directly on their iPad/iPhone. Previously, editing functionality was only available at the main Mint website. Additionally, users can also split transactions, giving them a better more granular look at their financial picture.

The main thrust of this update includes:

• Create and edit a budget while out and about: Set up budgets from your iPad or iPhone and edit them — wherever and whenever you want. Also, the new budget slider lets you set more realistic budgets in increments for more control of your finances.
• Split transactions: Shopping for multiple things from different budgets at one store. Get a more accurate view of your spending by easily separating out purchases from one transaction into different categories, right on your mobile device.

I’m sort of a fan of the later update enabling the splitting and categorization of purchases. I’m somewhat concrete in how I manage my finances, and can really appreciate being able to categorize individual purchases from the same merchant. I would find great utility in that functionality.

More info at Mint.com

Online advertising company Rubicon Project just announced that it’s getting into the mobile market by acquiring a startup called Mobsmith.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed in the announcement, but AllThingsD is hearing that the price was $10 million.

Rubicon does say that it will be combining Mobsmith’s technology with its own to create “a single platform and marketplace for buying and selling of both display and mobile ad inventory.” Rubicon Project founder and CEO Frank Addante describes Mobsmith as “the best product we have seen on the market” with “the strongest product and engineering team.” The 10-person Mobsmith team will remain in San Francisco, becoming Los Angeles-headquartered Rubicon’s SF office.

Formerly known as NearbyAd, Mobsmith launched last April with a platform to create and target rich media ads for mobile websites and apps. It raised $575,000 from Blumberg Capital, XG Ventures, and various angels.

Rubicon, meanwhile, claims to be the advertising platform with the largest installed base among comScore 500 publishers, with a reach of 650 million unique users. It says this is its fourth ad tech acquisition in three years.

shopkick, the location-based shopping app backed by Greylock and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, is having its biggest rollout yet — Target says it’s making the service available in its stores nationwide.

Target was already announced as a shopkick partner, but until now, it was limited to testing integration in seven cities. Now, thanks to what the company says were “rave reviews,” it’s expanding its shopkick integration to all of its 1,764 stores in the United States, making it the largest shopkick retailer.

shopkick uses smartphones to give stores and brands a new way to interact with shoppers. By entering partner stores and scanning specific products, users earn “kicks” which can be redeemed for gift cards, deals, and other rewards.

The company says its other large retail partners include American Eagle Outfitters, Best Buy, Crate and Barrel, Macy’s, Old Navy, Simon Property Group, The Sports Authority, Toys“R”Us, west elm, The Wet Seal, and ExxonMobil. It claims to have driven $110 million in revenue for brands and retailers last year.

Security and anti-spam firm McAfee today reported that it saw a massive uptick in mobile malware last quarter. Mobile malware has “exploded,” the company said (PDF), “with a significant increase on Android devices. In addition, McAfee also found a slight increase in malware targeting the Mac, but the report notes that this trend was not “extreme.” Despite the increase in mobile and Mac malware, as well as password-stealing Trojans, the good news in today’s report is that global spam level dropped quite a bit during the last quarter, though we are still talking about a trillion messages per month.

This quarter’s increase in mobile malware is partly due to the fact that McAfee improved its ability to find these threats, but it still represents a massive increase. The company collected about 8,000 mobile malware samples last month. These threats, as usual, mostly target Android. While Google and other major store have made great strides in keeping malware out of their stores, third-party stores and forums remain a problem. Among the areas of mobile malware that saw major increases in threats was mobile backdoor malware and the always popular premium-rate SMS-sending malware.

The report also noted that the company found one of the first destructive Android Trojans this quarter. This piece of malware doesn’t damage apps or executables, but instead targets a user’s photos and then adds an image of the Ayatollah Khomeini to each picture.

Here are a few additional interesting data points from the report:

• Q1 2012 had the largest number of PC malware detected per quarter (83 million)
• McAfee found about 250 new Mac malware samples last quarter and about 150 fake Mac anti-virus samples
• spam levels dropped to 1 trillion per month
• the United States represents the primary source of cyber attacks

You can find the full report here (PDF).

MapMyFitness is a veteran of the online health and fitness space, with the first iteration of its website appearing back in the summer of 2005. Since then, the startup has developed a suite of fitness-oriented websites (like MapMyRUN.com, MapMyRIDE.com, MapMyWALK.com, et al) to let users track and store their running, cycling, walking and hiking endeavors, along with accessing a database of international routes, fitness calculators, nutrition tracking, events listings and more. MapMyFitness has long had a stable community of committed users, but over the last year, things have been moving steadily north.

CEO Richard Jalichandra (who joined the startup from Technorati last year) tells us that MapMyFitness recently passed 9 million registered users, and that, collectively, its mobile apps have amassed over 30 million downloads, making it one of the biggest players in the fitness tracking space.

The good news for MapMyFitness, however, has been the recent telescoping growth in registrations (not downloads), with the latest 1 million registrations occurring over the last 40 days. That’s an increase from the 54 days it took for the site to go from 6 million to 7 million users, and the 47 days it took to pass 8 million users. All in all, that’s 3 million new users in the last 5 months, and the CEO says the company is today seeing 25K new registrations a day, significant when viewed against its nearly 7-year history.

It’s based on this recent uptick in activity that MapMyFitness is today launching one of the biggest feature updates the platform has seen since rebranding in 2007. The startup has completely rebuilt its portfolio of websites, and is now beta testing three big new features: Updated routes, personal challenges, and courses, with the main attraction, Jalichandra says, being the latter.

The CEO claims that the introduction of its new feature makes MapMyFitness the only online fitness service to have integrated Google Maps API v3.9 (the latest version of its API) and leverage its full functionality.

What does that mean? While MapMyFitness users could already plan, track, and share their routes, Jalichandra says that Courses adds a notable difference in performance and user experience, enabling users to go beyond the actual route. By incorporating realtime info on traffic, weather, safe routes, directions, realtime elevation, and custom markers, now users can go beyond the route, planning the best Segway route home from work, for example..

Really, the feature is intended to bring MapMyFitness into the gamification/Foursquare era, as it provides both hardcore and casual athletes with both leaderboards and check-ins. Courses offers an automatic “check-in activity” for every exercise logged to track the speed, distance, consistency, and intensity of workouts, ranking users by gender, age, and weigh on the platform’s new leaderboard.

There’s also a group segmenting feature that allows users to compare themselves, leaderboard-style, against specific groups, be they local clubs, friends, or fierce cycling rivals, backed by a points system that incorporates personal best times and monthly consistency, awarding badges to the users with the most overall points on climbing courses, those with the most completions of a course, the fastest time, etc., etc.

Courses will span MapMyFitness’ five primary categories, including cycling, running, walking, hiking and winter sports, as well as hundreds of subcategory specialties (like unicycling) and enables users to create new Courses directly from their iPhones, BlackBerrys, Androids, Windows Mobile phones and iPads.

It also helps that Courses leverages the startup’s database of more than 50 million routes, 1 million climbs, and 30K event courses through realtime processing, allowing users to measure fitness and track progress in realtime or over time.

With RunKeeper on a laudable mission to build “the health graph,” alongside an API that’s already attracted 50+ integrations, big funding, and a platform that’s quickly becoming one of the top destinations for tracking and sharing fitness routines, incumbents are feeling a little bit of pressure.

But, as its name implies, MapMyFitness does maps better than most, especially now that it is powering its new features with Google’s latest mapping technology. According to the startup’s CEO, other than Strava, MapMyFitness is the only platform that offers realtime GPS activity leaderboards, and he thinks that components of the service, like route mapping, the ability to send a route to your phone to route with directions, along with the ability to choose from over 40 sports give its service a leg up on the competition.

MapMyFitness also capitalizes on three revenue streams: Media, digital commerce and subscriptions, and enterprise software, with this diversity resulting in the startup’s revenue doubling each of the last four years, the CEO says, and is projected to triple in 2012. This has allowed the startup to avoid raising outside investment beyond its Series A in 2010 and to grow, under its own volition, to a team of 78, giving it an advantage over its competition in terms of good old human capital.

With its deep database of courses, routes and trails, some added stickiness thanks to leaderboards and check-ins, and some big data collection and storage capabilities on the back-end using postGIS, it wouldn’t be surprising to see MapMyFitness continue in its accelerating growth trajectory. And maybe even find a little funding waiting in the wings.

Also, don’t be surprised if MapMyFitness ends up being featured by Google at some point. My guess would be here.

Courses will be available initially through a private beta test for first 100,000 users
who sign up here. iPhone and Android MMF users will only see superficial changes reflected in its new site — now available to one and all — at new.mapmyfitness.com. Widespread access to Courses et al will be offered later this summer.

What do you think?

On one end of the spectrum, networks like Twitter and Facebook have acted as catalysts to organizing events like the Arab Spring or the riots of London. On the other end of that spectrum, networks like Yelp or Foursquare tee up user generated reviews, tips and public-facing profiles. Somewhere in between all that falls hownow, an iPhone app-based social network that lets users publish messages semi-anonymously at a hyperlocal level.

At its core, the app allows all those who have downloaded the app to strike up semi-anonymous conversations with others at a “block” level, “Neighborhood” level, “City” level or “Worldwide” level. There is no sign-up process and though users have the option to post anonymously, they also have the option to create a pseudonym if that tickles their fancy. Betaworks says they may implement a “rules of the road” to help users take full advantage of the network at some point down the road. Messages can be left forever, for 30 days, a day or an hour at any level. (Don’t be surprised if you see local businesses take advantage of this.) Photos can also be shared via hownow and users do have the option of linking their Twitter accounts for cross-posting, too.

Made popular during the peak of the Occupy Wall Street movement, NY-based Betaworks has since acquired hownow to help bolster and fast track the company’s vision for online identity “and the growing significance and opportunities with mobile services.” The app was refreshed and re-released to the App Store last week with tweaks made under the hood and the inclusion of Google Maps. There are no plans to expand to other platforms in the near future.

If you’re like me, you’re probably wondering what sort of user information is stored both locally and afar, right? According to Neil Wehrle, VP of user experience at Betaworks, the only data being stored on Betaworks end includes, “Date, Time, Location, Message Content, and an anonymous ID.” An “anonymous ID key” and a cache of the most recent messages is stored on the user’s device.

hownow [App Store]

They say that all work and no play makes for some dull boys, and I think brothers Darren and Derek Dodge would definitely agree with that sentiment. The two of them have just launched a new iPhone app called About Last Night here on our Disrupt stage that aims to connect fans of the nightlife and help them find the best parties, clubs, concerts, and games every night.

“We like to think of ourselves as a social network completely geared around nightlife,” Darren told me.

About Last Night is a simple service to get started with — after logging in with their Facebook credentials, users can share photos and videos of where they are, tag their Facebook friends, and upvote the events they attend if they’re particularly good. Images of events and venues that are especially well-rated are pushed to the top of the app’s main activity feed and can even garner bronze, silver, and gold medals to highlight just how good a time everyone is having.

Those posts can be set to private if users want to keep some parts of their night hush-hush, but they generally don’t last too long anyway. In a bid to make sure users come back again and again, those posts will disappear after 48 hours.

Users can navigate through the app by swiping left and right from the main landing page — they’ll always be just a swipe or two away from listings of nearby events, friend activity, and locations that they’ve chosen to follow. Tapping an icon on the top left causes the entire panel to slide to the right, revealing a control panel a la the Facebook iOS app from which users can search for their friends on ALN.

With all the location posting, About Last Night sounds a bit reminiscent of Foursquare. Indeed, the brothers Dodge told me that Foursquare got people into the rhythm of checking in, a behavior they’re clearly keen to harness. Still, their unwavering focus on the nightlife also means that their audience of potential users are avowed fans of finding things to do into the wee hours of the morning, an audience that they believe plenty of brands are itching to reach.

While the brothers are all about making sure you get to have a good time — the idea struck them while enjoying the heady party scene in college, after all — they also want brands and venues to be able to connect directly with their users.

“Brands spend billions of dollars yearly on the nightlife,” Darren noted to me. “But they’ve had no other way to reach these people other than advertising.”

Then plan to do this by giving them the ability to create sponsored and contextual posts to be injected into the streams of users who follow specific brands or venues. Those venues will also be able to offer discounts and deals a la Groupon to lure people through their doors. But that will all come in time, and they tell me that they don’t plan to monetize the service yet — they’re planning to flip that switch within the next few months.

Disrupt Q&A

Q: How big a market can this address? What are the demographics?
A: Nightlife is huge, we think that college kids we be heavy users, but anyone who goes out often will benefit.

Q: Do you have a sense of the scale needed to attract national brands
A: We’re already talking to big brands — Sam Adams for one.

Q: How you brands know when to send out deals?
A: Will be able to detect when a user is actually at the location, businesses will create their targeted posts from a web front-end.

Q: How will heavy partiers remember to set their sensitive posts to private?
A: There’s a rocker directly in the Post page that’s pretty hard to miss.

Earlier today, David Lee of SV Angel said that one of the hottest areas to watch in tech right now is the area of mobile commerce and companies that can “close the loop” between online and offline transactions. Today sees the launch of Cardify, a mobile app and merchant dashboard that aim to solve that challenge from the direction of customer loyalty.

The idea behind Cardify, a contestant in the TC Disrupt Startup Battlefield, is this: the need to identify and engage customers is a priority for all businesses, but existing loyalty solutions are not delivering the goods. Traditional punch cards are messy and don’t add much value for either the business or customer. Solutions with more technology to them, such as QR codes, can be tedious.

Moreover, loyalty services that give money back to users, or daily deal services like Groupon that do not help with return business, nor do they help build a consumer relationship.

Cardify (not to be confused with the e-card app Cardify) aims to solve this by way of a mobile app, currently in iOS only (with Android to come), in which consumers get instant points towards perks and rewards at their favorite local merchants when they pay with their credit cards. (For now, these get entered once, manually, although in the future, founder Sean Rad says that users will be able to photograph them and enter the details in other ways, too.)

Unlike other loyalty programs that often take at least a day for the reward to be processed, these points are earned in real time right after their purchase and don’t require consumers to “check in”, punch a card, or do any other work.

On the merchant side, businesses get a simple dashboard that they use to create their loyalty rewards and monitor how they are used, and to track individual consumers. There are some nice touches to this, such as the fact that businesses are able to use the dashboard to identify when consumers come in to the premises: since users sign in with Facebook to the app, their pictures appear on the dashboard and can be used by a business to develop a more personal relationship.

Cardify’s business model is based around charging merchants a monthly fee for every location that uses Cardify, which works on a sliding scale based on the number of businesses in the deal.

Now, we all know there are a million loyalty plays out there right now. Among them are the credit-card-based loyalty program Swipely; Foursquare and Groupon getting involved in this space; Facebook’s recent acquisition Tagtile; Google’s Punchd — and that’s before counting all those retailers that have built their own loyalty apps already. Still, no single player has yet to make significant inroads in a service that aggregates all of this in a critical mass, and that leaves Cardify (and the rest) with a lot of opportunity.

But Cardify has some very significant cards up its sleeve that could give this loyalty play a winning hand.

For starters, Rad was also the founder of Ad.ly, the social media/celebrity endorsement company: that gives him some experience and knowledge of how to take a tech idea and make it go viral with consumers.

Perhaps more significantly, consider Cardify’s backer, media giant IAC’s Hatch Labs, which Rad calls “a home for people who want to swing to the fences, with the backing of IAC.” Through IAC, Cardify has picked up $750,000 in seed funding, but it also has access to a network of 300 million consumers via IAC’s properties and some 1 million local merchants through IAC’s search portals UrbanSpoon and CityGrid — connections it will be using to scale up.

Apart from the fact that no single player has cornered the loyalty market yet, there is an existing business gap in the market that also gives Cardify a strong case for winning business. A study from the Kellogg School at Northwestern found that half of a local merchant’s revenue is generated from only 15 percent of its customer base. That means if you can find ways of further tapping those most loyal users — or creating services that can boost that average 15 percent figure — a retailer can be on its way to growing revenues significantly.

There is some potential for how Cardify might grow as a business: because the app works by way of credit card details, there is potential future transactional element for Cardify. On the other hand, Cardify could also link up with other services, like Square or PayPal’s Here or one of the various other players in this space, that want to add more stickiness to their payment apps.

There will be an API coming soon to integrate into other apps — whether they are payment apps or those created by businesses for other purposes, such as in-app shopping, to add more of a physical-store experience to the app.

“When we look at the market we feel there are so many who have figured out mobile payments. We are looking how we can lower other kinds of commercial friction,” says Rad. He notes that his company is already in advanced talks with one of the big players in mobile payments.

Remember address book-gate? Locationgate? I-don’t-know-what-my-apps-are-doing-on-my-phone-gate? (Oh, that last one might not be a real thing.) Regardless, we’re living in age where companies are pushing us to rethink the boundaries between what we consider private, personal information and what should be public. The resulting backlash is an overreaction(-gate) when we discover that some of the data we presumed to be ours alone was actually being stored, accessed and shared by others…in many cases, “others” being mobile app developers.

Well, leave it to a security firm to capitalize on the privacy scare trend. And by capitalize, I mean launch a $4 app that tells you what the apps on your phone are doing. Introducing Bitdefender’s Clueful.

Today, the security company has pushed Clueful into the iTunes App Store, claiming it can identify the “misdemeanant apps on your iPhone.”  (I believe “misdemeanant” is fancy talk for “naughty.”) Of course, Apple iPhone users don’t have much to fear in terms of malware – Apple curates and tests apps prior to admission. Google has a bigger malware problem, as it only kicks apps out after they’re discovered to be malicious. That being said, even Apple can’t test everything. And some users don’t understand that a social feature on their phone may require an app taking a peek at their address book, for example (the horror!), or tracking their location (ack! I’m being stalked!).

While Bitdefender acknowledges that most apps are not malicious, it’s true that app developers can be careless with the way they handle user’s data. With Clueful, Bitdefender says it can now answer questions about what your apps are doing. It shows which apps are accessing your location, tracking your in-app usage, reading your address book, linking your actions across apps to a single identity, needlessly keep GPS running, thereby draining your battery, accessing your UDID, and a host of other ills. To do so, Clueful examines what applications are running in memory and then retrieves audit information from the “Clueful Cloud.” (That’s the name for the space where Bitdefender maintains all the data on apps, and it’s also the way they ensure communication between the app and Bitdefender’s research labs.)

To create the Clueful Cloud, Bitdefender built proprietary technology similar to what they use for their anti-virus products, but customized for iOS apps. But because it’s a proprietary technology and patent pending, the company won’t go into detail about the specifics of how it works. But the long and short of it is this: Bitdefender tests apps, creates a database, and then shares that info with the Clueful app to give you insight about the apps you use on your phone.

The iTunes App Store has hundreds of thousands of applications, but Bitdefender’s Cloud “only” has tens of thousands at launch. However, the database is still growing, and you can submit apps to be tested using the application.

I’ve got an embarrassing number of apps on my phone, but after installing and running Clueful, it still managed to surprise me. (Solitaire was accessing my address book? What?) But the news wasn’t all bad – most of my apps were behaving. Clueful nicely differentiates between apps that “can” do something (like access your address book) versus those that “could” do something (like track your location). Plus, it highlight the good things apps do for you, too, like encrypt your data, for example. I’m not sure the app is worth $3.99, but if you’re at all curious about your apps, or just privacy-sensitive, this isn’t a bad tool to use.

Geoloqi, the Portland, Ore.-based location platform, today announced that it is partnering with the popular mobile app development platform Appcelerator. Thanks to this partnership, Geoloqi is now available to the 1.6 million iOS and Android developers who have signed up for Appcelerator’s Titanium 2.0 platform. With this, Appcelerator developers can now easily create location-based apps on the company’s JavaScript-based Titanium 2.0 app building platform.

Thanks to the new Geoloqi module, developers can now create geo-triggered events in their applications. This, says Appcelerator, will allow its developers to create apps that make use of geofencing and can, for example, send users a push notification when they cross the border into or out of a geofenced zone. In addition, Geoloqi offers standard location tracking features as well as location analytics. While the company’s partnership with Appcelerator focused on these areas, Titanium developers will also be able to use Geoloqi’s other features, including, for example, its Wikipedia layers.

Appcelerator tells us that it also chose Geoloqi because it can smoothly transition between different location sources like GPS and WiFi triangulation, relatively conservative battery use and also because it features sophisticated privacy controls for users.

Appcelerator, as its head of Head of ISV and ecosystem partnerships Spencer Chen told me at TechCrunch Disrupt earlier today, is looking to partner with forward-looking companies that can offer best-of-breed services to its users. Just last week, Appcelerator also announced a partnership with leading mobile ad network InMobi.

About 70% of the company’s users, said Chen, currently develop consumer-focused applications like Hotel Tonight and the other 30% are working on apps mostly used internally in large enterprises. The company’s new COO Sandeep Johri was, among other things, responsible for implementing the overall strategy for HP’s enterprise business, so chances are that the company will continue to push even deeper into the enterprise market in the near future.

Appcelerator is offering developers who sign up for the Geoloqi module before June 30, 2012 a free two-month trial of Geoloqi. After that, plans will start at $19.99 per month.

There was a time when I would watch shows like Extreme Couponing with a sense of morbid amusement — there was clearly plenty of money to be saved by clipping bits of dead plant matter out of a newspaper, but the process of keeping track of or remembering them when I go to the store has always stymied me.

That may no longer be the case, if Ted Mann and his Philadelphia-based team have anything to say about it. They’ve just released a new iOS app called SnipSnap that’s meant to simplify the process of snipping, saving, and even sharing those money-saving scraps of paper.

In a nutshell, SnipSnap lets you snap pictures of all your coupons and save them on your iPhone so they’re handy when you’re put in the field. Taking the picture is just the beginning though — from there, the images are uploaded to SnipSnap servers where all the pertinent information (barcode, expiration date, cashier code) are pulled from the image and and saved alongside it so your cashier won’t have to try and scan or read something off a photograph.

The idea for SnipSnap came to be after co-founder (and father of two) Ted Mann found himself at the store buying diapers at full price after realizing he left his much-needed coupons at home. After chewing on the idea for a while he rallied local techies Kostas Nasis and Kyle Martin to become the company’s CTO and VP of Product respectively, and got to work building the app towards the end of last year.

There’s a strong social aspect at play here too. Unlike some other competitors in the mobile coupon space, SnipSnap relies mostly on users to clip the coupons they find interesting and share them with others. Though that means there may be fewer coupons to discover during the early days, they’re coupons that other people have found worthy of saving. Oh, and my favorite bit — if you have, say, a Target coupon saved in SnipSnap, the app will issue a push notification whenever you’re near a Target store.

On top of that SnipSnap also lets you know when individual coupons are close to expiring, so you can plan your next shopping trip(s) accordingly. I’m not the sort of person who normally even pays attention to coupons because of the hassle they usually entail, the app managed to make a convert out of me. The moment I managed to get 10% lopped off of a bill at an Indian restaurant thanks to a coupon someone else shared sealed the deal — I’m a couponer now (my girlfriend will be thrilled).

As useful as SnipSnap sounds in theory, it isn’t without its potential headaches. While the service was still in its beta testing phase, some users found that certain stores just wouldn’t accept coupons that weren’t physically in customers’ hands. There’s not much the SnipSnap team could do to change store policy, so they added the ability to report on whether or not the coupon worked a la RetailMeNot.

SnipSnap also doesn’t play well with manufacturer coupons (like the kind you get at the grocery store), though Mann assures me that the team is working on getting that functionality live as soon as they can.

While they’ve been slaving away on the app, they’ve been honing their monetization plans too — SnipSnap aims to generate revenue by offering coupons and affiliate offers to users based on the coupons they’ve already scanned and redeemed in stores. If you’re a big pet lover and have scanned handsful of pet store coupons for instance, don’t be surprised if you get pushed a full-screen offer for PetSmart (just an example). The company is also looking at partnerships with major retailers, and Mann noted onstage that they just recently linked up with Aeropostale.

Disrupt Q&A

Q. What’s stopping retailers from not taking these coupons?
A. We leave that up to the retails, but our coupon success ratings are a good indicator of which coupons to use.

Q. What demographic is most likely to clip coupons?
A. Usually females from between 30 to 50 years old.

Q. What’s the barrier to entry here? It seems straightforward enough to copy this.
A. Pulling in data and interpreting coupons isn’t a simple thing to do, and we’re going to move as fast as we can to stay ahead of the competition.

Q. Is a focus on analog coupons the right move right now, with digital deals becoming more popular?
A. We’re building our user base by taking printed coupons and turning them digital, but we’ll be offering more digital deals over time.

If you’re like me and you live in San Francisco where cabs are few and far between, Uber has been a godsend. But the marketplace for on-demand transportation is about to get a lot more interesting. That’s because there are a few startups that will be doing on-demand, ride-sharing at a much more affordable price point over the next few months.

Zimride, which has been around for a few years, will be one of them. They’re coming out of the gate with a product called Lyft today. It’s still in beta (so just friends and family). But basically you can use the app to request a driver immediately and get a ride anywhere in the city for a price that’s competitive to or even cheaper than a cab.

Like Uber, Lyft faces interesting regulatory hurdles around doing ride-sharing that arguably competes with professional and government-licensed cab companies. It and another company that’s still in beta called Sidecar are getting around this by doing reimbursements or operating on donations.

“It’s reimbursement,” said co-founder and chief operating officer John Zimmer. “Anything above and beyond that is a donation.” Zimride has an algorithm that suggests a recommended donation based on time and distance, but it’s up to the consumer to decide what to pay. Zimride keeps about a 20 percent share.

The company is seeding the market with drivers that are willing to do longer shifts that take several hours. They’re using a thorough interview process that includes driving history, criminal checks and car inspections.

On the consumer side, it will be easy to pick the app up and demand a ride. But on the supply side, there’s a whole vetting process. ”We just want to be very deliberate about how we build this market,” Zimmer said.

Zimmer says Zimride has gained a lot of experience in growing two-sided markets. ”Ride-sharing is often called a chicken-and-egg problem,” he said. “But we’ve learned over time about how to take the right steps at the right time with supply and demand.” (Unfortunately, he didn’t share too many of his tricks as those are proprietary!)

The company has actually been breakeven at many points in its life. Zimride is really three separate businesses under one roof. One is a university-focused program where they charge colleges for providing school-specific, ride-sharing programs. A second business is for long-distance ride-sharing. Los Angeles to San Francisco, for example, is a very popular route.

Every time they’ve gotten one leg of the business to profitability, they’ve used it to fund the next piece. This one will likely be their most challenging endeavor yet.

“There are three variables and each one makes it exponentially more difficult to get critical mass,” Zimmer said. “There’s starting location, ending location and starting time.”

Zimride faces a number of upcoming competitors. Uber has mostly stuck to the higher-end of the market with private drivers and black cars, but there are signs it is moving downmarket. There is also another app that hasn’t publicly launched but is in beta around San Francisco called Sidecar. It has an extremely similar model.

“Uber is this amazing, luxurious transportation experience,” Zimmer said. “Our vision for Zimride is to have everyone participate. We have to make that as frictionless as possible.”

The company has raised more than $7 million from Mayfield Fund, Floodgate, Keith Rabois, K9 Ventures and fbFund.