Second screen app Boxfish takes its TV-guide-killing self to the iPhone

TV search and discovery — as well as remote control — app Boxfish can now add the iPhone to its list of compatible devices. The team has also taken a cue from early user behavior and made some adjustments to transform into more of a lean-back experience.

Today, second screen TV app Boxfish is launching its iPhone app. In August, Boxfish debuted its iPad app, which is essentially a means for helping users break out of the dysfunctional excel spreadsheet called TV guide we currently deal with.

The idea around Boxfish is to capture every word spoken on television along with Twitter trends to create an interactive, customizable platform for browsing and controlling what’s on television. The control function is literal: The app connects with your cable box to change the channel to your selected content (provided you’re using one of Boxfish’s partners – whose ranks are growing).

Boxfish CEO Eoin Dowling tells me the iPhone app essentially functions like the iPad app, with some aesthetic exceptions (screen size related, generally). “It’s a much more focused experience,” he says, adding you get the same set top box control as you do with the iPad app.

The team quietly rolled out the iPhone app last week, and already received plenty of user feedback and reactions. “Session usage is already spiking,” says Dowling. “People just use it more than the iPad – our findings show that people are in a ‘learn forward’ experience with the iPad, and the iPhone works better in ‘lean back’ mode.”

Insights to user behavior aren’t limited to the iPhone, however. Since the launch of Boxfish’s iPad app, the team has made plenty of changes to the tablet version as well. “We’ve moved to a tile UI that constantly updates your topics and channels,” says Dowling. “It’s a much more visual and simple navigation and discovery UI.”

“We found that even though there was a huge, highly active segment that were searching, the majority were making much more use of the ‘favorites’ [category],” he tells me. “We found that people just want to know what’s on. The majority just want a lean back experience.” He says Boxfish is moving more in this direction, while continuing to offer up the option of interactivity, but also becoming a passive app that serves as a background tool.

Change in Boxfish’s dynamic isn’t limited to its product: The team picked up Instagram designer Tim Van Damme for its board, and if there’s anything to be said about Instagram, it’s a heightened attention to aesthetics. “Tim’s all about the simple details. If there’s one thing he’s brought to the experience it’s the focus on simplicity. We’ve spent the last year building a monster technical and data-heavy platform; it’s been immense to have someone with such vast product experience to come in with fresh eyes and a laser focus on the user.”

Today’s iPhone app launch also brings with it Boxfish’s new AT&T integration, and the startup has a handful of other partnerships in the works. Also in the works? The Android app. Dowling says the platform’s fragmentation would have made for a poor user experience at launch and the team is choosing to wait on a release. For now, you can check out Boxfish for iOS, available in the App Store today. 

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

StumbleUpon refreshes desktop app with new design and content discovery features

StumbleUpon has updated the relaunched site from 2011 with a refreshed design and new content discovery features.

StumbleUpon has been stumbling as of late to reclaim its former glory. In the wake of curation services and their Web dominance, there’s been some new competition in the content discovery market, though it’s managed to retain a community of 25 million users. But now StumbleUpon is updating things with a revamped, Pinterest-inspired look.

There have been a few changes over at StumbleUpon in the wake of CEO, Garrett Camp, resigning from his executive position to take his place as the new StumbleUpon chairman. Despite the empty CEO role, StumbleUpon’s mobile iOS apps were redesigned to offer a sleeker, easier  to use interface — while at the same time, its last desktop redesign in December 2011 didn’t sit well with users and instigated something of a mass exodus. The company at the time implemented a new channels feature that would enable users to follow brands, celebrities, and media on StumbleUpon, but just six months after the announcement the feature was scrapped.

With this latest redesign, StumbleUpon takes inspiration from its iOS app and some of the features from the mobile version. From first glance, you’ll recognize the Pinterest-like layout on the homepage that showcases content tailored to your interest in tiles, something implemented in the previous iteration.

StumbleUpon has also added color coordination tiles for interest categories like music, arts, and writing. But among its more significant feature updates is an “Activity” tab where you can view content shared to Facebook or Twitter, including content that you’ve liked and content that the top tier of StumbleUpon users recommend.

Other curated tabs include trending content, where you can view buzzed about pages, and “Lists,” where in a manner similar to Bitly’s bitmark list you can cherry pick content into collections or lists. Making lists are not necessarily specific for bookmarking your favorite content. In fact in its blog post, StumbleUpon encourages its users to create “pages to save for later, gifts you’d like to receive, or photos of places to visit.” Yes — it’s a very Pinterest-like scheme. 

Perhaps what’s most interesting about the new StumbleUpon is that the app will include a breakdown of how much each interest category plays into a list that you’ve create — which the site called the “StumbleUpon DNA.” StumbleUpon wants to increase the time that its users spend engaging with (not just skimming) content via the site, and this new emphasis on social discovery is a natural progression.

“With the enhancement to our site we have really created a jumping off point for Stumbling. The layout, design and navigation of the site in this iteration is built to optimize for quick scanning and quick access to content. We want the content to pop off the page. We have also introduced new ways to Stumble with Activity and Trending, and new ways to express yourself with StumbleDNA and Lists. We are excited about introducing this to our community and to all new Stumblers who will give it a try for the first time,” Cody Simms, VP Product at StumbleUpon, told Digital Trends.

The update hasn’t been pushed to StumbleUpon.com, but you can access the beta by selecting the gear tab on the navigation bar. There you should see the tab for “Settings,” and then you can navigate to “Labs” to join the new StumbleUpon Beta.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

This new startup wants to inject some Ooomf into the App Store

Ooomf launches its app discovery and creation platform, a place to participate and curate app products and collections. Take that, App Store.

The app market has become a very important one, and it comes down to numbers: As of May, 50.4 percent of Americans used smartphones, according to a Nielson report; we’re seeing new statistics on how they invade our personal lives; both the Google Play Marketplace and iOS App Store are well beyond the 20 billion download mark at this point; and, perhaps most telling, using a smartphone to make a call comes in as the fifth most popular function — most of it is spent using apps.

Suffice it to say that apps are big business.

Singular app developers aren’t the only ones who’ve noticed the trend, and a new wave of app creation and management platforms are hitting the scene to help with monetization as well. And that includes newly launched Canadian import, Ooomf.

The Montreal-based Ooomf began as a Startup Weekend pitch that pivoted during the team’s time in an accelerator program. “We had two major evolutions,” founder Mikael Cho tells me. “The first idea was to help people market their products online with influencers, and we saw that what we were doing with that was incremental, and not a big change. We had feedback from our users and we started thinking about our backgrounds in user experience and design and marketing, and thinking about the problems we could really solve there. So we started thinking about mobile and we saw that our expertise really aligned with mobile.”

The other piece of Ooomf’s evolution was nailing down the specifics of how it would help app developers. So for starters, the service creates a Website for its users. “One of the things they had to do in getting their app out there was make a site, because Apple requires it,” says Cho. “And we were like “oh, okay, right away, we’ll do that for you.’” He describes the process as incredibly simple — we’re talking Tumblr simple, people — and says it takes less than a minute to have your app’s Web landing page up and running. Sure, it’s a little thing, but it’s an effective one; the caliber of an app’s proprietary page is sort of like a book cover — we’re not supposed to judge it, but lots of us most certainly do.

As the team has refined the product, it’s added a community element to Ooomf. “We allow people to participate in the creation of an app,” says Cho. “So if you have an idea or a prototype or a design, you can put it on Ooomf and let the community vote on features and participate in it.” Crowdsourcing leaves no stone untouched, and that’s quickly including app creation. There are a handful of companies pre and post-launch who are doing this exact thing, though using a variety of mechanisms to encourage audience participation. But the idea remains the same: Everyone has an app idea, and this is a place to put them.

The other beast of a problem Ooomf is tackling is app discovery. If you haven’t noticed, the consumer and developer world largely hates the App Store’s feeble attempts at showcasing apps and helping us find new ones. In addition to supporting and participating in app creation, users can also make their own curated app catalogs. “You identify as a creative, or a traveling nomad, or a hustling innovator, and we have different apps in each category,” Cho tells me. “But the entire idea is to be a part of the whole life cycle of an app, from idea to creation.” Ooomf also offers a “Coming Soon” category to help with discovery of upcoming apps — something that developers fear in the App Store: If you don’t crack the top on your debut day, you can sink fast and furiously.

Apple’s lack of App Store discovery upgrades has been a boon to teams like Ooomf: It’s basically ceded an entire platform to outsiders. Of course, we now have word that Apple is about to flip a switch and turn Genius on for the App Store, and that some of that Chomp acquisition will finally be making its debut. I asked Cho if there’s any fear on Ooomf’s part about this, and he seems to feel the way that I do about it: Too little, too late. He also mentions that Apple’s App Store algorithms still allow the Ooomf team to offer something useful.

At the moment, everything on Ooomf is free, and will remain so for pure users. Cho says that within the year, paid-for features will be introduced on the developer-side and it will either be based on the number of apps someone is making or the numbers of things they use Ooomf to help them do. He also talks about working with developers on incentivizing user participation — offer people early beta testing or future discounts on in-app purchases if they were there from day one.

Clearly, Ooomf’s strategy is to give developers a stage — which is surprisingly becoming tricky territory these days. “I definitely think it’s important to really cater to developers. You’ve seen with Twitter the massive growth that occurred because, yes, there were users, but because every developer was building a Twitter client or something for the application,” Cho says. “There was so much open data and Twitter was able to grow massively because of that.”
“Eventually, we’ll have our own data and open our own API, and we’ll use the App.net approach.”

Today, Ooomf is available via Web and also has optimized its site for mobile. The iOS app will launch this November. 

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com