Category: Tech news

A few short days after rumors began swirling that Apple would hold this year’s fall event on Sept. 12, a reliable source just sent a screen grab of a next-gen iPhone popping up in his/her/its server logs.

We weren’t able to glean any other info from the one session the prototype iPhone was engaged in, but the naming convention falls in line with what others have previously reported. It remains unclear if the iPhone 5,2 will go into production – as opposed to the iPhone 5,1 – or whether it will remain an internal-only test unit.

Rumors are still rampant that Apple will increase the size of the screen from 3.5 inches (diagonal) to ~4 inches and that the 30-pin connector is being put out to pasture in favor of a smaller 19-pin version. Regardless, it appears Apple is close to finalizing the next-gen iPhone ahead of its purported product reveal next month.

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner today addressed the company’s earlier incident of password theft, saying that it doesn’t seem to have an effect on growth.

The theft, as well as the flurry of negative publicity, may have caused some members to question the professional social network’s ability to keep their data safe. However, during today’s conference call on the company’s second quarter earnings, Weiner said “the health of our network” remains “as strong as it was prior to the incident.”

The company’s growth numbers seem to back that up. LinkedIn added 13 million new members in the past quarter, bringing the total to 174 million members. It’s also seeing an average of 106 million unique visitors each month.

Back in June, it was revealed that 6.5 million million account passwords had been stolen and published online. LinkedIn hashed and salted its database, and it disabled accounts of members who were at “greatest risk”.

The company said that none of the email addresses associated with the passwords had been published, and that it hadn’t detected any unauthorized attempts to access members’ accounts.

Weiner said the company is still working to improve its security. The company is taking a $2 to $3 million charge for the next quarter to further invest in this area.

Activision Blizzard announced its second quarter results today, beating estimates with net revenues at $1.08 billion, compared to $1.15 billion for the second quarter last year. Meanwhile, net revenue from digital channels came in at $343 million and represented 32 percent of the company’s total revenues, up from a 27 percent-share last quarter. Earnings per share came in at $0.16, compared to $0.29 for Q2 2011.

The consensus on Wall Street was that Activision would see 18.7 percent revenue growth and 20 percent earnings-per-share growth to $829.7 million and $0.12, respectively. For the first quarter (the period ending March 31st), the company’s net revenues were $1.17 billion, with net revenues at $587 million and EPS at $0.33. So, all in all, Activision beat estimates, the fifth quarter in a row they’ve done so. And based on those better-than-expected results, the company is raising its calendar year net revenue and earnings per share outlook.

Of course, as you can see from the chart above, put in context, it’s not all roses for Activision Blizzard. The company, like EA and others of its ilk, has found a rocky road during its transition to the social, mobile, ahem, digital era. In fact, rumors have persisted (via Bloomberg) that the company’s majority owner, Vivendi SA, is eager to sell its $8.1B stake in the company.

What’s more, net income for the quarter came in at $185 million, down from $335 million in Q2 2011 and down from $384 million in Q1 2012. As a result, Activision ended the day down 5 percent and dropped an additional 3 percent in after-hours trading.

Naturally, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick was optimistic in the company’s earnings statement thanks to its renewed international efforts and its gains online mitigating shrinking retail sales:

On a non-GAAP basis, we delivered record Q2 and first half net revenues, operating income and earnings. Our performance was driven by strong audience demand for our great games. We are very excited to have announced our expanded investment in China through Activision Publishing’s agreement with Tencent to bring the Call of Duty franchise to the Chinese market.

Somewhat surprisingly, Activision has become a bright spot among the videogame giants, weathering lethargic industry sales (especially for console games) by pushing out more content for Call of Duty and developing a new title in a partnership with Hasbro (Skylanders Spyro’s Adventure) that features console games and action figures, among other things.

Zynga also recently inked a deal with Hasbro, as it the gaming giants look to stem slowing console sales with action figures and merchandising. And to that point, Activision performed markedly better than Zynga, which missed expectations in its own earnings announcement as well as Take-Two. EA hit expectations, but didn’t exactly look like the Hulk.

As for other highlights, the company said that, unsurprisingly, World of Warcraft remains the top subscription-based MMORPG, with approximately 9.1 million subscribers, and announced that it expects to release its newest WoW title on September 25th — “World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria.”

The company also claims that Diablo III, released May 15th, “set a new industry launch record for PC games” and was the best-selling PC game for the first six-months of 2012. As of July, more than 10 million players have joined in.

Together, the company said, Diablo III, Spyro’s Adventures and Call of Duty represented three of the best-selling games in North American and Europe.

“For the remainder of the year, we are excited about our product slate which includes Activision Publishing’s Skylanders Giants and Call of Duty: Black Ops II, and Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria,” said the Activision CEO. “While we are increasing our financial outlook for full year 2012, we remain cautious given economic uncertainty, risks to consumer spending especially during the holiday season and the recognition that the majority of our key franchise launches are still ahead of us.”

For more, find Activision’s Q2 earnings release here.

Zipcar is seeing increased competition in the car-sharing market, which is one reason that it might not be growing as quickly as it, or analysts, like. Zipcar reported second-quarter loss of $422,000 today, or $0.01 a share, compared to a net loss of $5.6 million, or $0.17 a share, in the prior year’s second quarter. The earnings came on revenues of $70.8 million, which is up 15 percent from $61.6 million in the second quarter 2011.

But Wall Street analysts expected the company to break even this quarter, with revenue rising 18.7 percent to $73.1 million. And Zipcar missed its own revenue forecast of between between $71 million and $74 million. Zipcar shares popped during the IPO, rising to nearly $30 a share. But ever since, they’ve been on a gradual decline, and closed out the day pre-earnings at 10:50. Zipcar saw its shares drop 6 percent in after-hours trading.

In addition to its GAAP earnings, Zipcar reported it now has 731,000 subscribers, which is up 21 percent from the 2011 second quarter. It recently launched Zipvan service in Chicago and Toronto, and also expanded into Austin, Texas, with 40 vehicles there. Zipcar reported that in its established markets — which include Boston, New York, San Francisco, and Washington, DC — revenues grew 16 percent to $39.8 million. But less mature markets didn’t fare as well, particularly Europe. Scott Griffith, Chairman and CEO, wrote in the press release:

“Despite these gains, we brought in fewer members than we had anticipated, and we faced economic challenges in our UK business. Moving forward, we are taking actions to maximize returns on our marketing spend, and we will be rolling out initiatives to accelerate adoption and expand our service offerings.”

The report comes as Zipcar faces increasing competition in the car-sharing segment. It’s coming under attack from local services like City Car Share, and is seeing startups like peer-to-peer car rental services Getaround and RelayRides pop up. Earlier today, Getaround announced that it was launching Getaway, a service that will let its member rent out their cars full-time, which could instantly give it a fleet of cars to compete with Zipcar in launch markets like San Francisco and Chicago. And RelayRides recently partnered with GM and OnStar to get more car owners sharing on its peer-to-peer marketplace.

Ready to enter a cardless future but not quite sure about NFC? The Protean Echo might be for you. This clever project essentially captures your credit cards onto one multi-purpose card that can hold up to three cards at a time.

It works like this: you scan your magnetic stripe cards into a smartphone app using a supplied dongle. You can then “upload” three cards to the Protean Echo and select them by tapping one of three touch-sensitive spots. The Echo’s batteries last for 2 years and you can store as many cards as you want on your phone.

The Protean Echo uses a dynamic stipe system to mimic the way credit cards store data on the fly, thereby reducing clutter in your wallet.

Now obviously what we’re dealing with here is a card skimmer with some very cool, Terminator 2 Edward Furlong-type technology. Presumably you wouldn’t skim other people’s cards and only yours and you’re obviously going to meet some uptight merchants who want to see the original card so I suspect the use case will be limited to swiping at unattended kiosks or ATMs. Plus, it’s just some credit cards. It’s not that big a deal to slip them into a wallet.

Regardless, these guys are going to give it a try and for $80 you can reduce the size of your wallet by at least three credit cards. They’re planning a Kickstarter launch shortly and you can check out the website here.

Mobber, a platform that rewards users for distributing promoted content through their social media accounts, has been suspended from using Twitter’s API.

Mobber, which launched in June, is intended for companies and musicians who “want to BLAST something into the social media world.” A brand can start a “mob,” set a capacity and recruit fans to join all through Mobber; by joining, a user commits a tweet or status about the brand. When the mob reaches its capacity, all of the tweets and status updates are released at once, causing a social “bomb.”

“I imagine we were kicked off twitter because we may pose some threat to their promoted tweets and stream ads,” founder Billy Draper tells me. “Most of our mobs to date have been under 200, but if a heavy hitting Tweeter started a mob of 1000+, it would likely trend on a national scale.”

While it still has under 10,000 users, Mobber has done 30 mobs, the biggest of which was a 150-person mob that drove 1,050 clicks to rapper DeStorm’s iTunes album.

Draper says the last mob that got them kicked off was for a clothing company, Salute the Brave, that donates a package to an overseas soldier for every item sold.

“Hopefully we can resolve the issue with Twitter, but in the interim we will focus on Facebook and do our best to make it rain,” Draper says.

The service is really not very different from Twitter’s “Sponsored Trends,” except for the fact that Twitter doesn’t make any money off of it. While it’s definitely a double standard, you play by Twitter’s rules if you’re on its platform and there’s no way it will allow a direct competitor to their advertising dollars.

Twitter has not responded to a request for comment. I will keep you posted if they do.

LinkedIn has just released Q2 earnings, and the enterprise-focused social network continues to rise. It’s posted revenues of $228.2 million and earnings per share of $0.03 (non-GAAP EPS: $0.16). This puts the company past earnings estimates from First Call of $216.3 million, and Yahoo Finance, which had estimated revenues of $216 million. It also beat First Call’s EPS of $0.01, as well as LinkedIn’s own guidance of revenues of $210-$215 million. However, GAAP net income was nearly halved to $2.8 million, versus net income of $4.5 million Q2 2011. (Non-GAAP net income for the second quarter was $18.1 million, compared to $10.8 million in the second quarter of 2011.)

Q2 saw LinkedIn get hit with what might have been its worst publicity disaster in recent times, when some 6.5 million passwords were stolen. Although the company moved quick to create password changes, the breach would have put off users from relying too much on putting data into that social network, or using it for and paid services, but these results show that clearly it was not hit as hard as people might have thought.

LinkedIn says that it now has 174 million members, up from 116 million a year ago and 161 million in Q2012. ComScore puts the unique visitors for the quarter at 106 million, meaning it has a pretty strong rate for active users. Pageviews were down slightly to 9.3 billion from 9.4 billion the quarter before.

Here’s how some of its divisions performed:

Hiring Solutions: Revenue totaled $121.6 million, up 107% compared to the second quarter of 2011. Hiring Solutions revenue proportion is going up. It’s now 53% of total revenue versus 48% in Q2 2011.

Marketing Solutions: Revenue totaled $63.1 million, up 64% versus Q2 2011. Marketing Solutions revenue represented 28% of total revenue in the second quarter of 2012, compared to 32% in the second quarter of 2011.

Premium Subscriptions: Revenue was $43.5 million, up 82% versus Q2 2011. Premium Subscriptions represented 19% of total revenue in the second quarter of 2012, compared to 20% of revenue in the second quarter of 2011, LinkedIn said.

We’ll be listening in to the call at 2pm PT. Some things we’ll be looking for:

Mobile in Q1 accounted for 22% of LinkedIn’s visitors, and with the introduction of LinkedIn’s iPad app, investors will be looking to see whether the company has been able to capitalize on that further. In the release, LinkedIn notes no numbers but does say the iPad app has been “received positively, and engagement trends are encouraging.” More than half of page views on the app are being generated by content-focused products such as updates, news and groups — meaning potentially more routes for monetizing on those down the line.

User engagement, as some have noted, is another focus. The company in May bought enterprise content sharing platform  SlideShare for $119 million, and just weeks ago it launched a redesign that is also geared to making the site a place where users would like to spend more time, with an enhanced LinkedIn Today story stream and more options for communicating with other LinkedIn members.

LinkedIn’s revenue guidance for Q3 had been $235 million, and now it’s bumped that up to $235 million-$240 million. It’s also raised its full-year forecasts to $915 million-$925 million; in its Q1 call, LinkedIn had given the range $880 million$900 million.

In Q1, LinkedIn had impressed analysts with a set of very strong results, producing earnings per share of $0.15 against estimates of $0.09, and revenues of $188.5 million against an estimate of $179 million.

ImageShack founder Jack Levin has certainly experienced the short end of the stick when it comes to building a company that works with the API of a larger social network.

In February 2009, ImageShack launched the Yfrog photo-sharing service, which quickly became one of the most popular ways to share photos on Twitter — back in the day, you may remember, the only way you could share photos on Twitter was through third-party applications such as Yfrog and TwitPic. But in mid-2011, Twitter decided to get into the photo-sharing game after all and in August it rolled out its own internal photo-sharing service through a partnership with Photobucket — which, of course, immediately caused significant damage to the Yfrogs and TwitPics of the world.

You’d think that being burned by a giant like Twitter in such a way might make Levin back away from the social networking space altogether. But it turns out, it really had the opposite effect: Now, he’s going after the space in an even more directly-competitive way.

Today ImageShack is rolling out Yfrog Social, a full-service social networking platform for the web and the iPhone. You can watch Levin talk about the launch and give a demo of the product in the video embedded above.

In short, Yfrog Social looks like a mix of Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn, with the high-resolution photo-sharing qualities of an ImageShack or a Flickr. The core differentiators of the product, however, are its ad-free freemium paid business model and completely open API. These two things together, Levin says, mean that developers will be able to make apps that depend on Yfrog social, with no fear of being quashed.

It’s a hugely ambitious launch — crazy, almost. But hey, it could attract a following: In my experience using it, it’s a really beautiful and snappy site, with very thoughtful features for sharing and sorting your contacts. Also, you’ve got to hand it to Levin for not being cowed by the big players who are currently dominating the space. It’s very similar to what Dalton Caldwell is aiming to do with his new direction for App.net. Whether these efforts will be successful remains to be seen, but it’s pretty cool to see people try.

If you want to test out Yfrog Social, you can bypass the waitlist by following this link: http://yfrog.com/invite/techcrunch

Here are some screenshots of Yfrog Social for the web (click to enlarge):

The marketing automation sector is one of the fastest growing in the burgeoning enterprise space. We see proof of this today with Eloqua’s initial public offering (HPO).

The stock opened at $12.02 per share on the NASDAQ for the SaaS provider of performance management technology. It was up 12.92% in trading  from its $11.50 original stock price. The company sold eight million shares. It had a price range of $10-to-$12 per share.

Eloqua is halfway through its fiscal year. In 2011 the company had revenues of $71.3 million, up 40%. In 2011, the company has 327 employees. That’s up 15% compared to 2010.ffer as a software as a service (SaaS).

According to WSJ, Eloqua’s revenue increased 42% to $45 million this year, although the company reported a net loss of $5.5 million, compared with a loss of $3.5 million in the first half of the prior year.

The marketing automation space is highly competitive. Eloqua faces competing from giants like IBM and Oracle. Newer players such as Marketo and Pardot are also considered as competitors.

Samsung and Apple’s big patent trial took an intriguing turn earlier this week when members of Samsung’s legal team decided to send information that was unusable in court to a handful of eager reporters.

Of course, Apple wasn’t about to take that lying down. Apple attorney William F. Lee recently filed a motion that asked for the Korean electronics giant to be sanctioned (again). This time though, instead of monetary damages or a procedural edge in court, Lee’s newly requested sanction calls for the case to be dismissed and for Judge Lucy Koh to find in Apple’s favor.

In Lee’s own words:

“…Apple respectfully requests that the Count sanction Samsung by granting judgment in favor of Apple on its claim that Samsung infringes Apple’s phone design patents, and granted judgment that those patents are not invalid.”

Suffice it to say that’s probably not going to happen, so Lee offered up some alternative (more reasonable) penalties to be inflicted upon Samsung just in case he didn’t get lucky the first time. At the very least, Lee contends, the jury should be told the court has found that Samsung indeed copied the Apple designs in question because the company’s actions were out of line. What’s more, Lee asks that Samsung be disallowed from pointing to designer Shin Nishibori’s Sony phone designs from here on out.

In case you haven’t been keeping up with the case, here’s what Samsung did to prompt this kerfuffle. On the afternoon of the 31st, the Korean company’s legal counsel sent to members of the press a PowerPoint presentation that Judge Lucy Koh had previously deemed inadmissible. Exactly how damning that evidence is remains open to interpretation — the PowerPoint slides in question include some dialogue from Apple designer Shin Nishibori (who created the now well-known Sony iPhone designs) and phone designs the company was working on prior to the iPhone’s launch in 2007 — but Judge Koh was none-too-pleased with that turn of events.

John Quinn, Samsung’s lead counsel for this case, eventually admitted in writing that he had authorized the release of the materials. It was a gutsy move on his part but not an impulsive or poorly-conceived one, as Groklaw artfully points out.

Naturally, Apple didn’t take too kindly to Samsung’s maneuver, and here we are. The jury has been instructed to avoid related media coverage for the duration of the trial so their verdict ideally shouldn’t be influenced by the released information anyway, but that clearly wasn’t enough for Apple’s legal team. Whether or not this (damned ambitious) request goes anywhere is still unclear, but the trial is set to resume tomorrow so it shouldn’t be long at all before we find out if this whole thing ends before it really gets started.

All photos by Greg Broom/Wired

Photo courtesy of Road Warrior Luggage

Road Warrior’s latest duffel is a capacious, no-frills roller bag made of ballistic nylon. But it also shrinks down to less than six inches tall, so it can be slipped under your bed or hung in a closet. It’s an apartment-dweller’s dream.

To collapse the case, you open the bag and pull on the two interior cords. This reduces the bag down to about one third of its bulk. To expand it again, take hold of the exterior grips, give them a gentle tug, and the bag pops back to full size.

You can carry it like a traditional duffel, or just roll it; at the base is a lightweight aluminum frame with wheels and a telescoping handle.

It’s a big bag, measuring 30 inches tall, 15 inches across and 16 inches deep. When empty, it weighs a hefty (for luggage) 11-plus pounds. Fully stuffed to its 6,750-cubic-inch maximum, my bag weighed over 40 pounds — it’s a bit of a trade-off when the bag itself contributes 25 percent to the total weight of your luggage. Given the weight, it was actually fairly easy to peel it off a luggage carousel (it’s too large to serve as a carry-on, so it must be checked) thanks to the big, robust duffel straps. One other quibble, though: the duffel has garment sleeves and spacious pockets aplenty, but I did miss smaller pockets for incidentals.

The case I tested is the largest one Road Warrior Luggage makes, but the company offers six other wheelie bags — all of which feature its zipperless Micro-Pop collapsing system — ranging from 20 inches to 27 inches tall, as well as a 17-inch tote-style overnighter.

WIRED Tough, well-constructed nylon roller bag. Zipperless rip-cord system collapses the bag down for storage. Simply pull on the outside handles and it pops back up to full size. A welcome innovation for those in space-challenged homes.

TIRED Heavy. Plenty of storage inside and out, but no smaller pockets for phones, tickets, incidentals and accessories. Expensive: over $350 at most outlets.

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Sony already has one ultrabook on the market — and at prices ranging up to $3,000, the Vaio Z Series is the most expensive laptop in the category that you can buy.

To counterbalance the excess of its sky-high Vaio Z, Sony has another option for you. The scaled-back Vaio T Series is a little more restrained, offering a slimmed-down computing experience complete with third-generation Core i5 CPU for just 800 bones.

The specs aren’t exactly earth-shaking. A surprisingly dim 13.3-inch screen at 1366×768 pixels, the usual 1.7GHz Core i5, 4GB of RAM, and integrated graphics. One curiosity here is the hard drive, a hybrid model that adds 32GB of SSD storage to the 500GB traditional hard disk system. This helps to earn the system slightly better benchmark scores than you’d expect, but the numbers are generally in line with the competition.

That said, the T Series can be sluggish at times and occasionally pokey to boot up. Without getting too wonky about it, one of the reasons for this is that the SSD portion of the drive used in the T Series incorporates MLC (multi-level cell) technology, which is slower — and cheaper — than the SLC (single-level cell) technology used in higher-end drives.

Connectors include two USB ports (one 2.0, one 3.0), HDMI, SD card, Ethernet (full size), and VGA. One thing you’ll particularly miss if you’re a frequent flier is the lack of a dedicated wireless on/off switch. In fact, you can’t even turn Wi-Fi off via an Fn key combo; Sony has instead relegated the wireless system to a homegrown Control Panel, a truly awful decision. Of course, Sony has plenty more Sony-branded software preinstalled on this laptop, including the intrusive Vaio Gate toolbar that lives at the top of the screen. If for some reason you prefer to get to Skype via this system instead of the Windows taskbar, you’ll be in hog heaven. I expect most users will quickly turn it off.

The Vaio’s speakers are loud but noticeably tinny, but the volume is necessary to drown out the occasionally loud fan. The five hours of battery life is impressive, however, and the keyboard is spacious and easy to work with, though the key travel could be better.

At 19mm thick and 3.4 pounds, the T Series is a bit on the bloated side versus most 13.3-inch ultrabooks, and the brushed aluminum body with shiny chrome trim comes off as a bit garish in a world of more restrained designs.

But ultimately there’s nothing that really urges me to dissuade you from the T Series, though there’s nothing special to really recommend it, either. Want an ultrabook for 800 bucks? This slab of silver gets the job done about as well as anything else.

WIRED Generally good keyboard and clickpad. Slightly above-average performance. Good battery life. Upgrade to Windows 8 (when it comes out in October) for $15.

TIRED Needs more USB ports. As usual, bundled Sony software overwhelms even simple tasks. Washed out color on dim LCD.

When Spotify launched its new (and free) mobile radio functionality for iOS back in June, the company hinted that its Android counterpart would get it shortly but didn’t offer up any more detail than that. Well fandroids, that wait is over — Spotify just announced on their official blog that a newly-released update has finally brought that wallet-friendly feature to the service’s Android app.

The streaming radio feature — which lets users create stations based on a selected song, artist, or album — first made its debut in the desktop client back in December. It’s all very Pandora-esque, save for a few nifty enhancements. When users stumble upon a song they like for instance, they have the option of saving the track to a separate “Liked From Radio” playlist instead of scrambling to write down its name before it’s too late. What’s more, users can create an unlimited number of stations, as well as give tracks the ol’ thumbs up to influence future music choices.

Perhaps more important is the fact that its iOS launch was the first time non-paying users could access Spotify’s music catalog for any considerable amount of time; those users were previously stuck with a 48-hour free trial. Sure, those users have to put up with ads from the likes of Verizon Wireless, McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Red Bull, and more, but that’s arguably a small price to pay in exchange for access to Spotify’s sizable catalog.

As for why the long-awaited feature is only now making its way to Android, product manager Donovan Sung noted that it was an issue of balancing priorities. According to him, one of the reasons Radio for Android spent an extra month in the oven was because the team was “focused on making the Android app a lot better” first.

Just a week before the mobile radio feature made its debut on iOS, the company had pushed out a major update to its Android app that finally brought many of service’s most notable features to Google’s mobile platform — think social functionality, 320kbps audio streaming, playlist folders, and the like. With that update, the app finally shed its beta trappings, so it’s clear that implementing the mobile radio feature was a secondary priority at the time.

The shopping spree for InMobi continues apace: today the mobile advertising network has announced the acquisition of UK-based Metaflow Solutions, a mobile app management and distribution company. Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed; we’re looking and will update as we learn more.

The news comes in the same month that InMobi announced the acquisition of MMTG Labs, another company focused on the distribution of apps — and points to how InMobi is broadening the reach and targeting it can offer to its mobile advertising developers and publishers. (It also shows how the company is putting its most recent $200 million round of funding to good use.)

“As a global leader in the mobile advertising space, InMobi is committed to growing the mobile ecosystem. Our acquisition of Metaflow Solutions will help us to continue to rapidly expand the distribution and monetisation of content for our developers and publisher partners,” Naveen Tewari, Founder and CEO at InMobi, said in a statement.

Consolidation in the mobile advertising and app distribution spaces seems inevitable. InMobi is one of the larger of the independent mobile advertising companies — its ads, it says, reach 578 million mobile consumers, in over 165 countries, through billions of ad impressions every single day — but there are at least 4 other ad networks working at that same scale or greater. Having a better route through to where those ads might go — that is, better targeting and placement, as well as wider placement — is essential for a company like InMobi to compete effectively against AdMob/Google, iAd, Jumptap, Millennial Media and all the rest.

And this is what the Metaflow acquisition can potentially bring. Metaflow says that it works with “thousands” of active mobile developers and helps distribute apps and other content to some 350 app stores and operators worldwide — another fragmentation issue that puts off advertisers — with some of the bigger names including EA, Orange, Glu, O2′s Bluevia and Eric Schmidt-backed white-label app storefront Appia.

Metaflow has been around since 2006 B.I. (that’s before iPhone btw), and as such has a continuing strong business in distributing content to feature phones. More recently, Metaflow has been growing distribution in the area of smartphones, with “a very strong Android app proposition,” says Rob Jonas, MD and VP EMEA and global business operations at InMobi (he was poached from Google back in 2007), who points out that smartphones “is what InMobi is focused on as well.” But even the feature phone part of Metaflow’s business is a good fit for InMobi. Despite the growth of smartphones in developed markets like the U.S. and UK, InMobi still has a very strong business in advertising on feature devices, courtesy of its strong presence in Asia and Africa.

Jonas says that the Metaflow purchase helps fill out a strategy InMobi has been pursuing to offer more services to the developer community. “The core of the business is the mobile ad network and that is not going to change, but for any company that is mob advertising-focused a huge part of our business comes form the developer community so we have been expanding our efforts with developers.”

If the four areas of focus for developers are build, distribute, understand and monetize their content, Metaflow helps bolster InMobi’s ability to distribute, he says. As for future acquisitions, they may be in the “understand” category: “We are lookign at analytics very closely,” he says. Less so app building: “That is the least interesting to us in terms of the four main areas, but we have to be responsive to what is going on in the market.” So right acquiring app building technology is is not a priority, but that could change.

While Jumptap is preparing to follow Millennial Media and IPO by next year, inMobi might not be following them very soon. “For now, we’re continuing to build the business,” he says. “We still have a lot left to do before we start thinking about that.”

The Metaflow team will report to Piyush Shah, VP and GM of developer platforms and performance advertising at InMobi, which is also where MMTG Labs’ team now also sits. Metaflow’s team, already based in the UK, will continue to stay in the country and work out of InMobi’s London office.

More to come. Full release below.

LONDON, UK, 31 July 2012 — InMobi, the largest independent mobile advertising network, today announced the acquisition of Metaflow Solutions, leaders in mobile app management and distribution solutions.

Metaflow technology simplifies the global deployment and content management process for developers through its intelligent submission tools optimised through six years of operations, servicing the biggest publishers in the market. Metaflow’s Management and Distribution of content to consumer portals has consistently provided the fastest, lowest cost way to publish apps to hundreds of independent, OEM & operator appstores across the globe.

“As a global leader in the mobile advertising space, InMobi is committed to growing the mobile ecosystem. Our acquisition of Metaflow Solutions will help us to continue to rapidly expand the distribution and monetisation of content for our developers and publisher partners,” said Naveen Tewari, Founder and CEO at InMobi.

The Metaflow team will become an integral part of InMobi’s developer oriented efforts, led by Piyush Shah, VP and GM of Developer Platforms and Performance Advertising at InMobi. Piyush adds, “With the recent acquisition of MMTG Labs, along with today’s acquisition of Metaflow, we will augment our value proposition by offering highly compelling distribution, monetisation, and engagement solutions to app developers globally.”

“At Metaflow, our mission has been to simplify and unify the complex process surrounding content management and deployment of apps to a distributed and highly fragmented marketplace. The global reach and technology backbone provided by InMobi is hugely exciting for us. InMobi provides app developers with even greater opportunities to acquire millions of users and monetise their exciting apps,” said Charles McLeod, CEO at Metaflow Solutions.

The Metaflow Solutions team will relocate to the new InMobi London office.

About InMobi

InMobi is the largest independent mobile advertising network. With offices on five continents InMobi provides advertisers, publishers and developers with a uniquely global solution for advertising. The network is growing and now delivers the unprecedented ability to reach 578 million consumers, in over 165 countries, through billions of ad impressions every single day.

InMobi is venture-backed by investors including: SoftBank, KleinerPerkins Caufield & Byers and Sherpalo Ventures. The company has offices in Bangalore, Johannesburg, London, Nairobi, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Seoul, Singapore and Tokyo.

To learn more, please visit www.inmobi.com, follow us on Twitter @InMobi, or read our blog at www.inmobi.com/inmobiblog/.

About Metaflow Solutions

Metaflow provides the industry’s standard distribution solution for stocking mobile content into more than 240 mobile sales channels and portals, encapsulating all of the submissions requirements, devices and ingestion mechanisms for all major revenue generating channels in every corner of the world. For more information, please visit: www.metaflow.com