Facebook Application Development

With around of 650,000 users, installs up 400% this year, a podcast recommendation engine, and today adding Facebook auto-sharing to its Android app, Stitcher has made a lot of progress towards owning talk radio after the fall of AM/FM. Today it revealed a number of stats through a Facebook Developer Spotlight, but when I deduced that it now has 650,000 active users based on AppData and the fact that 30% of new signups are from Facebook, Stitcher’s CEO Noah Shanok confirmed “that’s a rough ballpark”.

In an interview he told me how his app will rule the digital airwaves by getting to commuters through new automobile integrations, and filling a giant hole in what Spotify and Pandora offer.

Figures out today from eMarketer estimate that in the U.S., just under 82 million consumers, or 26% of the population, will access social networks from their phones this year, rising to nearly 117 million by 2014. But if you are a social networking startup that sees that low-penetration figure as an opportunity, be aware that at the moment Facebook has all but cornered the market, and that the market is slowing down. Facebook today accounts for 85% of all mobile social networking activity, and that proportion is only growing: eMarketer projects that Facebook will account 87.4% by 2014 — or four out of every 10 mobile users and nearly two-thirds of smartphone users.

Meanwhile, growth in social network on mobile is slowing right down, from 50% in 2011 to 18% by 2014.

Kiip — the San Francisco-based mobile marketing startup that has created a “rewards network” in which users see offers for free goods and services instead of mobile ads — is going international. The company has signed on with the UK-based sushi chain, Yo! Sushi, to deliver offers for free food across apps used in the UK that have integrated Kiip’s service.

Although Kiip has had some of its U.S. customers serve ads outside of the U.S., this is the first time a non-U.S. company has signed on for the service, and the first time Kiip is sending out offers in the UK on a localized, London-only basis, to coincide with the fact that there are so many more people (and specifically Americans) in town for the Olympics. In a meeting this past weekend in London, CEO and co-founder Brian Wong told me this is just the beginning of many deals like this as Kiip ramps up its growth, on the back of a recent $11 million Series B round of funding. The expansion comes at a time when Kiip is competing against a number of other companies that also deliver rewards instead of straight advertisements, like Foursquare and Groupon. The space remains wide open, says Wong, and “we have realized that we could become the trusted rewards provider out there.”

Mobile app monetization exchange inneractive has closed on $3.5 million in new financing, the company is announcing today. The round was led by Evergreen Ventures Partners, and saw participation from both existing private investors and new investors from the U.S. and Europe. The company, which integrates over 120 ad providers from 200-plus countries into a one-line SDK, now has thousands of developers using its monetization platform on iOS, Android, RIM and Windows Phone. It also offers SDKs for non-smartphone platforms like J2ME, Bada, Symbian and others, but without the one-line implementation.

Founded in 2009, Kno began its career with ambitious plans to disrupt education with a little mobile hardware — by developing a tablet that was tailor-made for students. Unfortunately, thanks to the meteoric rise of the iPad and, later, Apple’s big re-entry into the textbook arena with iBooks 2, Kno’s hardware efforts didn’t pan out. Beginning early last year, the startup pivoted towards a more agnostic solution, creating an educational software platform and app to bring interactive textbooks to the college crowd.

But, with nearly $80 million raised from investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Mike Maples and Ron Conway, there’s more pressure on Kno to keep moving forward than there is on your average edtech startup. Today, the Santa Clara-based company took a significant step in that regard, expanding its scope beyond the college campus to bring digital textbooks into K-12 classrooms. To take on grade-agnostic solutions like iBooks 2, Kno has struck a partnership with educational publishing giant Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.