Bout: Play a Round of Photo One-Upmanship
Who among you can snap the funniest photo? Bout will settle the score. More »
Who among you can snap the funniest photo? Bout will settle the score. More »
For those that want to play music with friends across the country, Google is testing a new interactive web app that lets you rock out with others in real time.
More About: Google, HTML5, apps, chrome
As promised last month, LearnVest, a startup which recently expanded its focus from teaching women to become more financially savvy to teaching entire households to so, is now available on mobile. Today, the company is officially debuting its iOS application in the App Store, which will allow users to sign up, budget, set goals, track their cash flow and more.
It’s good to see that LearnVest’s mobile app has been designed with the idea that this may be some people’s first encounter with the service. There are other apps in the financial space that treat their mobile counterparts as complements to their existing service, offering merely a reflection of data already entered in on the web. But with LearnVest, you can sign up from the app itself, and then use the included search feature to find your bank or banks, and add your accounts. For safety’s sake, users are also prompted to set a PIN code to lock down the app – and the PIN code lock screen even has an easy-access button allowing you to quickly add a cash transaction.
The app’s user interface is straightforward, clean, and very mobile-friendly. Two large buttons appear when you first log in – one which takes you to LearnVest’s “Money Center,” and the other which takes you to LearnVest’s articles, which is its advice and how-to’s resource.
After adding accounts, you can then set up your “Smart Budget.” The service automatically tracks and categorizes your spending, so you have a realistic picture of where your money is going. If you’re really watching the nickels and dimes, that’s where the “add a cash transaction” option comes in. Instead of waiting for bank accounts to sync, you can manually enter an item to keep your cash flow balance on track.
While LearnVest categorizes most transactions for you, the 5%-10% which are left uncategorized can be moved into the appropriate section with a tap. These uncategorized transactions are also cached, so you can organize them when you’re offline, too.
Goal-setting is another app feature which again demonstrates the mobile app’s potential to be used as its own standalone interface for accessing and using this service. Here, the app shows your current progress in dynamic graphs and you can even adjust your goals on the fly.
LearnVest, originally a TechCrunch50 startup, has come a long way since its 2009 debut. Last month, the company reported having “helped” over a million users, but this includes account holders, financial newsletter subscribers, and those attending its online, educational “bootcamp” programs. Following its $19 million Series C from Accel and others last July, the company has now raised $24.5 million in funding.
The service just underwent a major overhaul – its largest ever, bringing a new online dashboard, new paid plans, access to investment advice, and more. To some extent, the company is a competitor with personal financial services like Mint, but LearnVest doesn’t monetize using its customers’ data to recommend products. “It’s all about being unbiased, trusted, just about your money and your best goals and plans of action,” LearnVest CEO Alexa Von Tobel told us in September. But more than that, LearnVest actually pairs its users to work with a financial planner, who are there to help customers reach their goals.
The iOS app is now live in the App Store here.
If it feels like you not only have more apps on your iPhone, but that you’re spending more time in those apps, then you should congratulate yourself on being as savvy as pollster Nielsen. According to a report from the organization, the number of apps on the average smartphone increased from 32 to 41 — a jump of 28 percent — over the past year.
As you can see from the Nielsen infographic at the top of this post, the percentage of time spent by smartphone owners in apps rather than on the web has also climbed. The average smartphone user spends only about 19 percent of his or her time on the web; the rest of the time, native apps are being used.
The one other fascinating tidbit on the chart shows that the number of smartphone owners in the US has climbed from 38 million in 2011 to 84 million in 2012 — that’s a jump of 121 percent in just one calendar year.
[via Engadget]
Report: Americans have 28 percent more mobile apps in 2012 originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 17 May 2012 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments
You’ve probably seen the apps used by The Washington Post and Yahoo! on Facebook that require you to install something before you can read an article shared by one of your friends from their sites. Not only is it annoying, it just means that these publications want access to your personal information so it can learn about your reading habits.
I’d rather not let any publication store a list of articles that I’ve read, and I don’t want to install an app that publishes something as I’m reading it. That alone is a privacy invasion, so in seeking a way to bypass this annoying functionality, I found an add-on for Chrome that lets you skip the app installation phase altogether.
While the Facebook Unsocial Reader for Chrome isn’t the sexiest app in the world, it gets the job done if you’re annoyed by Social Reader apps like I am.
What the app does is copy the title of the article that was shared, skips the app installation screen, and takes you directly to a Google “I’m Feeling Lucky” search using the headline. The first search result is usually dead-on for the article that you wanted to read in the first place.
The app was developed by George Mike and I have to agree with his assessment below:
So there you go, if you want to skip over having to install an app to read an article, this is how to do it when you’re using the Chrome browser.
➤ Facebook Unsocial Reader