Shenzhen's Huaqiangbei Sellers Are Struggling As Phones Get Cheaper
This is the ground floor of one of the electronics malls in Shenzhen’s famed Huaqiangbei district. Huaqiangbei is a stretch of large malls and shops in the Southern Chinese province, and due to its proximity to some of the manufacturing superfactories in the city, it has a cluster of malls that specializes in carrying tech goods. These electronics malls generally start out with booths on the ground floor and individual store units as you go up the floors. They’re typically buzzing with activity from consumers to wholesalers keen to check out the quality of new devices coming out of the factories. But when I visited some of the malls last month, only a handful of the open booths downstairs were tenanted, and the shutters were down on almost every floor of one of the seven-storey malls. when I asked one of the shopowners what was going on, he said his former neighbors packed up progressively over the past months, forced out by the tight competition of hawking nearly identical products ...
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Visual Mobile App Builder Tiggzi Relaunches As Appery.io, Adds New Enterprise Features
Exadel’s Tiggzi online mobile app development service for iOS, Android and Windows Phone launched almost exactly a year ago and today, the company is officially rebranding it as Appery.io. The reason for this change, the company told me, is to “reflect the evolution of Appery.io as well as to support where [the] platform is headed. ” The service always stood out from its competition because it focused strongly on connecting apps to existing RESTful APIs, making it more flexible than most similar visual drag-and-drop app building tools on the market. In addition, Appery.io also offers its own set of backend tools for app developers. Existing Tiggzi users and their apps will be automatically migrated to the new system and all existing apps will continue to function. Appery.io will use the same visual editor as Tiggzi.com and most of the major changes have happened on the backend, where the team added a number of new tools and features. In this new incarnation, Appery.io continues to ...
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Chinese Gaming Publisher Yodo1 Raises $5M In Round Led By Singapore's SingTel Innov8
Yodo1, a Beijing-based company that works intensively with Western game developers to bring their titles to the Chinese market, raised $5 million from SingTel Innov8, the corporate venture arm of a mobile carrier. An earlier investor, Chinese online game maker Chang You, also participated in the round. Yodo1 has a co-production model where they actually get access to the code base of a Western developers’ game. They modify the graphics, virtual goods and music for local Chinese tastes. An example CEO Henry Fong points to is Ski Safari, a game from Brisbane, Australia’s Defiant Development. In the platformer title, a character races up and down ski slopes (kind of like last year’s indie hit Tiny Wings out of Germany). For the Chinese version, they made the architecture of the houses in the background more Chinese, added a zither to the music and put in terra cotta warrior outfits. “We’re a full blown co-production team,” Fong said in an interview a few weeks ago at San Francisco’s ...
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Ask Slashdot: Preparing For the 'App Bubble' To Pop?
Niris writes "I am currently a senior in computer science, and am expecting to graduate in December. I have an internship lined up in Android development with medium sized company that builds apps for much larger corporations, and I have recently begun a foray into iOS development. So far my experience with Android ranges from a small mobile game (basically Asteroids), a Japanese language study aid, and a fairly large mobile app for a local non-profit that uses RSS feeds, Google Cloud Messaging and various APIs. I have also recently started working with some machine learning algorithms and sensors/the ADK to start putting together a prototype for a mobile business application for mobile inspectors. My question: is my background diverse enough that I don't have to worry about finding a job if all the predictions that the 'app bubble' will pop soon come true? Is there another, similar area of programming that I should look into in order to have some contingencies in place if things go south? ...
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With 26.5M Daily Users, Denmark’s Kiloo Pioneers New Ways of Producing Mobile Games
One of the sleeper hits on the charts over the last year has been a tiny game out of Denmark called Subway Surfers. It’s a runner game like Imangi’s Temple Run that has a character named Jake riding train tracks and dodging trains. That single title has helped Kiloo and Sybo, the studio it co-produced the game with, reach 26.5 million daily active users. For comparison, that’s more daily users than Zynga had on mobile platforms last quarter. Subway Surfers was also the sixth most actively used game on U.S. iPhones in December, according to app tracking company Onavo. It has some off-the-charts retention numbers with 91 percent of players returning after day 1 and 60 percent returning after 30 days. How did they do it? Kiloo’s chief creative officer Simon Moller credits a co-production model where they split development of the game with outside studios. Kiloo handles the free-to-play part with the user interface, monetization, marketing, user retention and community. Their developer ...
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