Dots, The Most Beautiful Mobile Game I've Ever Seen
You remember the first time you played Angry Birds, right? What about the first time you picked up the iPhone 4 and realized just how beautiful a phone can be, both in hardware and software? Well, the latest company to launch out of betaworks mixes the addictive nature of Angry Birds with the minimalist beauty of Apple’s hardware and software. Meet Dots. The idea is simple: Everyone has played connect the dots with their friends during science class or with a sibling on a long plane ride. Dots is the digital version of the classic pencil-and-paper game. The rules are slightly different. Instead of drawing against another player, or being allowed a single line at a time, you simply connect all the dots of the same color that are in a straight line. The more dots you can connect, the more points you get. If you happen to be able to connect the dots into a square, you get even more points. Each game lasts 60 seconds, but it never feels like long enough. The choice to build a game surprised ...
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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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Polar's Sticky Polling App Gets Stickier With Its Latest Update, Closes In On 8M Total Votes
The overall landscape of mobile apps is an interesting one, with most of the top free titles on Apple’s App Store being games or services pushed by massive companies like Twitter (Vine) or Google (Maps). Is there a place for yet another service to pick up steam before a larger network like Facebook re-creates copies its functionality? That’s the interesting future that lies ahead for Polar, the up-and-coming polling app for iOS, that is built for speedy interactions with either complete strangers or people you know. You can set up a poll in seconds, and you’ll start getting responses quickly, almost within seconds of submitting it. The company raised $1.2 million in February to build out its team and expand its functionality as quickly as possible. Two months later, it has released a new version that hopes to increase discoverability of polls, thus increasing interaction. Polar founder Luke Wroblewski is obsessed with data and is willing to discuss most of what he’s learned since ...
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Apple Pulls iOS App Discovery Service AppGratis From App Store
Apple pulled discovery service and daily deal app AppGratis from the App Store. So far, AppGratis is not communicating on the issue and users can only speculate about what the issue is. Sometimes, Apple pulls an app because its latest update crashes or because the app uses a private API. Then, the developer has to submit a new release to return to the App Store. But there could be a bigger issue. Back in October, Apple added a new rule in its iOS developer guidelines. It reads: “Apps that display Apps other than your own for purchase or promotion in a manner similar to or confusing with the App Store will be rejected.” As a reminder, AppGratis curates apps from the App Store, provides a short description and make paid apps free for a day. At the time, AppGratis CEO Simon Dawlat answered that Apple was probably going after low-quality copycats, not AppGratis. AppGratis is all about discovery and helping independent developers thanks to its revenue-sharing deals. Yet, other popular discovery ...
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Why Every Analyst Is In Love With The Siren Song Of The Low-Cost iPhone
For almost as long as Apple's iPhone has been in existence, analysts have claimed to see visions of a low-cost version of the device aimed at developing and prepaid markets. It's easy to see why these visions have grown in magnitude and gained a more vocal following over the years: entering that market would, in theory, broaden Apple's potential appeal by hundreds of millions of new customers. But I refer to the low-cost iPhone as a "siren song" for a reason – there's a significant potential downside if Apple tries such a device and fails to impress.
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