Category: Tech news

Nokia’s Bryan Biniak has a tough job — he’s the guy who forges partnerships with all the hottest apps to bring them aboard Nokia devices, which now means Windows Phone 8. However, even with its steady growth, the Windows Phone platform only accounts for around 5 percent of the global market, behind second-place iOS and ever-growing Android.

For small, lean startups (like Instagram once was, for example), developing for an entirely new platform with comparatively limited reach, it’s a reasonably tough sell. But it’s Bryan’s job, and today he absolutely nailed it (with one very obvious shortcoming). Path has joined Windows Phone 8 with an app specially tailored to the Lumia 1020‘s 41-megapixel capabilities, alongside a new CNN iReporter app, Hipstamatic app, Oggl Pro, Yelp, foursquare,Path app and promise of a Vine app later on.

But where’s Instagram? Facebook has a strong relationship with Microsoft, as proven with the Bing situation, and Instagram is now Facebook’s property. What’s the hold-up? Especially when Instagram had the opportunity to do something exclusive and cool (Instagram is a fan of exclusivity, as proven by the 18 months it spent on iOS before hitting up Android) with the Lumia 1020′s highly capable PureView camera.

We spoke to the man in charge of making this happen. This is an edited transcript of the interview.

TechCrunch: Describe what it means to be Vice President and General Manager of App development at Nokia.

Bryan Biniak: For one, I focus on apps with global appeal and reach as opposed to regionally specific applications. We have teams that focus on various regions, but I oversee the applications that ship on a global scale.

I’m also responsible for integrated marketing with those applications. At Nokia, we really try hard to connect these applications to the Nokia story, and the Lumia story, bringing that into the marketing message. We want it to connect with operators and retailers so that we can offer a richer experience through and for the applications.

I came from a world of startups.

TC: What startups?

BB: I started as VP of Business Development at Harmonics Music Systems, then became the COO at YourMobile, before it was acquired by Vivendi. I stayed there a while before moving on to start up the mobile division at American Greetings, and then became the CEO and Founder of Jacked, which was a second screen experience we sold to RoundBox. Now I’m at Nokia.

It’s interesting to switch from one side of the desk to the other. I used to be the guy who went around knocking on office doors at big corporations, and now I’m the guy who’s working with the smaller companies to get them big-time distribution.

TC: Windows Phone has clearly shown growth, but for developers at small startups, the distribution there is pretty limited. You guys are a distant third behind Android and iOS, so I imagine it must be difficult to bring some startups on board the platform, especially those that you’re really desperate for on Windows Phone who are having perfectly good success on the other two platforms. What are some of the biggest challenges you face at your job, and how do you make your argument to these hold-outs?

BB: I don’t think everybody sees the opportunity right away. But when we talk with developers, we explain that we offer an expansive offering. We offer distribution, integrated marketing, technological resources. It’s a symbiotic relationship that we have with our developers and we’re interested in everybody. It’s not about who is stronger and bigger — that doesn’t determine how we treat companies or what kind of investment we’ll make in them. And since it’s a non-equity investment, those entrepreneurs can always act in their own best interest, too.

We’ve taken more of a consultative approach. We want to understand their business goals, their product, consumers, how they use it, and what the team’s roadmap looks like. What I like to do is figure out how we can accelerate all that. Nokia can bring creative technology to the table and package in distribution to drive phenomenal results. These startups don’t have a lot of marketing resources, but we bring them into campaigns for OOH, over the line, under the line, and team them up with the operators. For them, that’s a huge amount of value.

As a young company, certain things drive the next level of valuation. The types of deals we make with apps preserve their cash flow, and give them access to the talent in our company.

TC: But with the Lumia 1020 specifically, which was unveiled yesterday, there’s an entirely separate SDK to take advantage of that 41-megapixel sensor. So with this particular phone, you’re asking developers to take it a step beyond building for a third platform and actually build specifically for a certain phone. That must make things even more complex from a development standpoint.

BB: We have spoken to a number of companies who don’t even have the bandwidth to operate the way they’d like. They explain that they have to keep advancing, but that it’s hard when you’re on a team of 10 to 12 people. They think adding in another platform is daunting.

But when I’m able to bring a device like the 1020 on to the table, it changes the conversation.

I can do stuff on this phone that I can’t do on any other device.

This happened with a number of different companies we spoke to, who saw an opportunity with the Lumia 1020 to fulfill certain pieces of their own dream for their app. We try to explore concepts around development that will help the apps we work with achieve their long-term vision. We have started experimenting to solve real-world problems with our APIs and then open up those solutions to other people.

TC: Let’s move on to a tougher question. The Lumia 1020 is clearly built with imaging in mind, and when I think of mobile photography there’s one app that dominates the thought. You know where I’m headed: What’s the deal with Instagram? When can we expect them on the platform and what are you doing to get them there? Have talks begun?

BB: We are working… very hard on Instagram. We’re working closely with Facebook — as you know, we work with them across all kinds of devices. Microsoft has a close relationship with Facebook, which you can see from the Bing decision, and… for Instagram. We’re working on that.

We’ve also extended our relationship with Twitter so Vine will also come to the platform later this year.

TC: You mentioned earlier that you make investments in applications, and that you offer marketing integration to get them on the platform. What do these deals look like? Have you ever paid any app to get on the platform?

BB: We work very closely with all developers. (Super, super long pause)

Let me answer this in a different way. We have commercial agreements with every company out there. Contractually, we’ve signed NDAs and we don’t talk about the deals in specifics.

What you’ll see is relationships driven by technology, time, and leverage what Microsoft has to offer. With our team at Nokia, we have more people on the ground than anyone else, going to individual markets working on an account-by-account basis. We talk to companies from a business standpoint as well as on the basis of technology. There’s a lot of different things that go into those agreements, but I can’t go into further details.

Job Change Notifier, a cool little utility that allowed LinkedIn users to track and be notified via email when one of their connections changed jobs, is shutting down due to new restrictions LinkedIn is placing on its API. According to Job Change Notifier creator Roger Lee, the changes impact the ability of “set it and forget it” services like his to function, because now third-party apps can only access user data for 60 days, unless the user re-authenticates with the application.

“We’d have to remind users to log in to the app at least once every 60 days, or else the app would lose access,” Lee explains. “This, of course, makes the service a lot less useful.”

In the two years the service has been up and running, Lee says it had tracked nearly 10 percent of LinkedIn’s user base (22 million connections), had recorded 14 million job changes and sent out 7 million notification emails. Though arguably a small drop in the water that is LinkedIn’s ocean, the service was popular among startups, sales and biz-dev executives and, of course, recruiters.

Fortunately for Lee, a co-founder at ad tech company PaperG, Job Change Notifier was only a side project. (He was once even offered to join LinkedIn, but had declined.)

Though Job Change Notifier is no more, competing services, such as Bullhorn Reach and SalesLoft, are still up-and-running, but only because they offer a web application while Lee’s utility was an email-only service. To keep it functional, Lee would have had to send out emails to users asking them to re-authenticate. It would have been more hassle than it’s worth.

Web Companies’ “Open” APIs Never Seem To Last 

The API changes LinkedIn is implementing speak to a larger trend among today’s Internet players – services offer open APIs to third-party developers as they grow, and later start clamping down after achieving significant scale.

We’ve seen this same story play out time and time again, with companies like Facebook and Twitter, and now LinkedIn. Even today, Facebook reacts to threats to its business from competitive services by pulling apps’ ability to access users’ social graph data. For instance, it recently shut off messaging apps’ Path and MessageMe’s “Find Friends” feature, though it still offered the Facebook login and share options.

Meanwhile, Twitter has, for years, readjusted its API as it worked to standardize the Twitter experience for end users. In spring 2011, Twitter informed third-party developers that they should no longer be creating Twitter clients, bringing a busy ecosystem of alternative – and often more feature rich – desktop, web and mobile applications to a stop. That noose was further tightened in 2012. It also shut down access to GeoAPI, which offered a platform for building geo-based apps, and has dabbled with “Find Friends” bans of its own, including most notably, Instagram.

This week, rapidly growing cloud storage startup Dropbox began the same familiar song and dance we’ve seen from web companies over the years – an appeal to the third-party developer community. CEO Drew Houston told reporters the company has no plans to charge developers, after announcing the launch of two new APIs to enable pulling files down from the cloud and syncing. The company already has 100,000 apps on its platform, but wants to grow even further – and it needs developers’ help.

But if history is any indication, developers should be cautious – even if Dropbox plans today to generate revenue through paid subscriptions, there’s no reason why those plans can’t change. Even Houston gave himself an out, saying “it’s conceivable that there would be services in the future where there would be some cost associated with the developer,” then couching that by saying the company doesn’t believe that will ever be a large part of its business model.

But Dropbox’s business itself is still being formed – the company has been acquiring startups that involved themselves with photo sharing and music and email management. What tomorrow’s Dropbox looks like, is still an unknown.

Job Change Notifier’s disappearance from the LinkedIn app ecosystem won’t impact the majority of users; it’s only another example of how the company is further limiting access to its data. And besides, if you really want to know which connections of yours changed jobs, can’t you just read that email LinkedIn is now sending every freaking day?

Some Google fans were mighty miffed when Google removed the ability to make voice calls from inside Gmail, but now the feature is back, flying under Google’s Hangouts banner. Instead of just being able to place calls from within Gmail though, users can dial up friends and family while poking around on Google Plus or by using the Hangouts Chrome extension.

This won’t come as much of a shock if you’ve been paying attention to Hangouts history: Google brought the ability to receive VoIP calls to Hangouts by way of Google Voice integration back in May, so it’s only natural that the company would eventually complete the circle and let users make calls, too. Don’t fret if you don’t see the option to place a voice call just yet, as Google says the feature will be rolling out over the next few days.

That initial group of scorned Googlophiles will probably just be happy to have their feature back, but it’s hard not to look at calling within Google+ as a shot across Facebook’s considerable bow. The social giant rolled out its own free VoIP calling service to users in the United States, Canada, and the U.K. earlier this year, but Facebook’s approach was to bake the feature into its Messenger mobile apps. This makes sense considering the nature of the device the apps were running on. However, Google’s most recent Hangout maneuver stands in stark contrast; while there’s apparently been plenty of attention paid to improving the desktop calling experience (users can rope VoIP callers into conversations with video chatters, for instance), none of those improvements appear to have spilled over into Google’s iOS/Android Hangout apps.

Frankly, that’s a shame. Google has already said that Hangouts is “the future of Google Voice,” which is a great sound bite, but the Google Voice experience is in dire need of repair and we’re still waiting for some fixes. I’ve been using Google Voice for years. I still give my Google Voice number to just about everyone I meet. But the sheer convenience of a single number routing calls and messages to all of the phones I’ve got buzzing around my office is offset a bit by the generally lackluster apps (especially the iOS version) and the slow rate of improvement that the service has seen. Hangouts really might be just what the doctor ordered for Google Voice, but the wait is becoming unbearable.

These days it seems like just about every smartphone player worth its salt is devoting time and resources to upping their camera game, and Apple is no exception. A new report from 9to5Mac’s Mark Gurman points to snippets nestled within iOS 7 beta builds that seem to indicate the company is working on a camera feature called “Mogul” that will let users record video at 120 frames per second.

That’s a considerable leap over what the iDevices are currently able to capture. Apple says the iPhone 5 can record video at “up to 30 frames per second,” and a wrap-up slide from Apple’s 2013 WWDC presentation confirmed that iOS 7 would effectively push that limit to 60 frames per second. The end result? Crisper, smoother video. A quick look at all the 120fps videos on YouTube (not perfect comparison, I know) should give you a hint of what iPhones may eventually be capable of.

Don’t expect to see the feature go live any time soon, though. Despite their coaxing, the 9to5 team wasn’t able to get the feature running on current generation Apple hardware, which they’re taking as a sign that Mogul is actually meant for a forthcoming version of the iPhone.

By the time Mogul sees the light of day, Apple’s rivals may be well ahead of it in terms of camera prowess. Samsung’s Galaxy S4, Nokia’s Lumia 920, and HTC’s One are the latest in a growing pool of smartphones that let users shooting slow-motion video (the two former records at 120fps, but HTC doesn’t specify). And then there are devices like Nokia’s Lumia 1020, which sports a tremendous 41-megapixel camera sensor and, if it’s anything like the 808 PureView that came before it, can capture some really stunning video.

So sure, if the report pans out and Apple really does push the so-called Mogul feature out the door someday, they’ll be walking down a path already traveled by its rivals. I suspect that won’t present too many issues for Apple, though; iOS aficionados will latch onto it just as they did with the similarly late Panorama feature in iOS, and Mogul may wind up making slow-motion video a must-have for smartphones going forward. (Seriously, I’m just waiting for someone to whip up a Vine or Instagram knock-off devoted to slow-mo clips of people tripping over things.)

The sheer amount of mobile camera options means that consumers will ultimately be able to capture moments more effectively with their iPhones or Lumias. However, the smartphone camera war is already weighing heavily on some camera manufacturers, which are struggling to keep their businesses in order while high-powered camera phones devalue the venerable point-and shoot.

Nikon is a great example, according to Bloomberg. Company president Makoto Kimura hinted at the possibility of a “non-camera consumer product” to help offset flagging point-and-shoot camera sales. Some have already taken that to mean that Nikon is mulling a smartphone. It used to be that imaging innovation trickled down from devoted camera companies to the rest of the consumer gadget market. How long until things start flowing in reverse?

Twitter wants to prove it’s not just for broadcasting the mundane details of your life so it just launched the Twitter Media blog. The site plans to feature great uses of Twitter for “TV, sports, journalism, government, music, movies, social good and beyond.” It joins Google Inside Search and Facebook Stories as another media endeavor designed to help inspire our use of today’s top technologies.

Technically the site launched on July 2, but Twitter kept it quiet until now so it could build up some content. Along with end users, the blog is trying to educate the media about how to tap Twitter for interesting content. Posts so far include a deep data analysis of tweets from Wimbledon (Andy Murray’s celebration tweet now has over 92,000 RTs), a visualization of NBA Finals tweets, and the story of a tweeting tightrope walker.

Confusion about what the whole point of Twitter is might be contributing to its drop-off rate. While hundreds of millions have registered for Twitter, many don’t make it past their first few tweets or follows before they give up. The TwitterMedia blog could give them something to talk about.

One of the questions that came up a couple of times during the press Q&A at Dropbox’s DBX developer conference: What does today’s news mean for the company’s business model? Given the impressive user numbers and platform expansion announced today (including a new API to sync data between apps), could Dropbox try to make money from advertising? Or by charging developers?

Co-founder and CEO Drew Houston told reporters that’s not the plan. Instead, he wants to stick with the company’s existing business model, which involves charging subscription fees for pro and business users. In fact, he said that the simplicity of how Dropbox makes money is part of its appeal, because it means there should be fewer surprises down the road.

“You don’t have to look around and wonder where our money is coming from,” Houston said.

I’m not sure if the “you” in question was referring to consumers or developers. But I think it kind of applies either way, whether it’s a consumer worried about Dropbox selling their user data or covering the site in ads, or a developer worried that they’re going to end up competing with Dropbox down the line. Houston’s other answers addressed these possible developer concerns explicitly, saying that the company will stay focused on creating its “core experiences” as good and as simple as possible. And on user data, he also said that Dropbox has specific terms covering how it responds to government requests for data, and that it has been expanding its security team.

Monetization came up again a few minutes later, when Houston was asked specifically whether he’d consider charging developers, particularly if the platform expansion increases Dropbox’s costs significantly. Once again, the answer was no.

“We’ve never taken money from developers and we don’t have any plans to,” Houston said. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Dropbox will never, ever do it (“it’s conceivable that there would be services in the future where there would be some cost associated with the developer”). But, he added, “because we have a strong core business model, I don’t think that monetizing developers will be an important thing for us for the foreseeable future.”

Foursquare has made a name for itself out of the growth in smartphones, but as it tries to build up business in newer markets, it’s covering all of its bases. Today the company announced an update to its app for feature phones, specifically for Nokia’s range of S40 devices — which include its Asha handsets, sold and marketed as low-end smartphones. It looks like this may have been the first time in years that this app has gotten attention. Along with the new app, Foursquare also inked a deal with Nokia to come preloaded on new Asha devices when they hit the market in coming months.

While Nokia’s Symbian smartphone platform has died, and while Windows Phone (Nokia’s new smartphone platform of choice) has yet to gain much critical mass, S40 is actually putting up a respectable performance. According to these figures from StatCounter, it’s third after Android and iOS for worldwide mobile platform market share, with 13.9 percent of the market at the moment.

Looking at how that breaks down in different countries, the picture is more interesting and points to how a strong presence on these devices could be a good way specifically for targeting users in emerging markets. Again, from StatCounter:

“Hundreds of millions of people around the world use Nokia S40 phones, and now they’ll all have access to Foursquare,” the company writes in the blog post. “Now, all those people can use Foursquare to make the most of where they are and where they’re going.”

For a company like Foursquare, fighting for mindshare among smartphone users and their millions of apps, going into slightly less-crowded territory like this is a smart move, all the while helping it continue to achieve critical mass for its location services, advertising and more. It also refocuses a little more attention on Nokia’s other line of business in a week when all eyes are on what it might reveal on the 11th — quite possibly Nokia’s most high-end smartphone yet.

Still, it’s a move that appears to be a more recent decision. When I met CEO Dennis Crowley back in 2012 during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, he was squarely focused on building out new products, making use of all the fancy gadgetry of smartphones and not focusing on lower-end devices.

Fast forward a year to February 2013, he admitted that the company hadn’t done any proper work on low-end devices in years. “We have a bare bones one that is not very pretty, which supports feature phones. We’ve had that since 2009,” he told me. “It’s not super sexy. We think our stuff is so niche that for now we don’t have HTML5 in our strategy. We’re a small team so we have to focus on where our users are.”

Looks like that focus has expanded to pick up new users, some on feature phones.

Path added stickers to comments, released a new iPad design, and introduced a new way to add friends in person today.

Any sticker, old or new, can now be used in comments to respond to friends’ moments. Path introduced stickers in version 3.0 in March to extremely positive feedback. In the first 24 hours after the launch, Path saw a million messages sent and made more money than it had in its entire lifetime as a company. Facebook followed suit, adding stickers and then branded stickers, which could develop into a sponsored content business for the social network.

“With our Messaging release a couple of months ago, we introduced a new way to communicate with the people you care about on Path,” the company wrote in a post today. “Since then, it’s been our goal to give characters, faces, and icons to those day-to-day triumphs, annoyances, and logistics. Stuck in traffic? A promotion at work? In desperate need of caffeine? Feeling silly, lovestruck, or frazzled? There’s a sticker for that.”

The company’s blog has been dominated by posts about stickers, which seem to be a major focus for the company, both for user experience and revenue.

In addition to doubling down on stickers, Path improved navigation for its iPad app, making it easier to compose and share moments.

Finally, Path made it easier to send friend requests in person. The app will generate a QR code, which your friend can scan in person and instantly become Path friends.

The update is available now for iPhone, iPad and Android.

Exitround, the website that launched earlier this year that lets startups anonymously seek acquirers, is announcing that it has facilitated its very first acquisition.

Pretty exciting, right? But what’s the startup? Who did the acquiring? Well, co-founder and CEO Jacob Mullins isn’t saying. He claimed that he’d like to share details, but the acquiring company wants to keep the deal confidential. (And in this case, the acquirer isn’t just trying to keep Exitround’s involvement secret. Apparently the acquisition hasn’t been announced publicly at all.)

That’s a little disappointing but not too surprising, as one of Exitround’s main selling points is confidentiality. Startups are matched with potential acquirers based on some of their basic characteristics, but they’re not actually identified or put in contact unless the team expresses interest in a specific company.

Still, if you believe Mullins (I do, but maybe that’s because we used to work together at VentureBeat), the news is a sign that there’s really something to the idea. It’s only one acquisition, but since it’s only been four months since the service was announced, and three months since it went live, he said “thrilled” that it has gotten this far this quickly. There are several other deals in progress, he added.

Another sign of interest: Mullins said there are now more than 200 potential buyers on the service, including 16 public companies and nine companies in the Fortune 500. Those buyers go beyond the big tech companies that you’d expect and include fast-growing startups and companies outside the tech industry entirely.

On the other side of the marketplace, namely startups seeking (or at least considering) an acquisition, Mullins said there’s been broader interest than he expected — it’s not just small teams that are looking to exit gracefully through an acqui-hire, but also larger startups with funding and real technology. The average startup on the site has a team of seven people, with five of them holding technical positions, and has raised $634,771, Exitround says.

When we last covered the company, Mullins told me he was treating Exitround as a side project from his job as a senior associate at Shasta Ventures. Since then, he’s left Shasta and is now working full-time on the service, as has CTO and co-founder Greg Dean (formerly of Avira and SocialShield). He also said he’s working on raising an angel round of funding.

As companies have started using the site, Mullins realized how tough it can be to actually figure out which companies might be interested in buying which startups, he said. Over time, the goal is to build recommendation technology that can make those matches “in a more highly software-based and scalable way.”

Another goal is to do more to guide startups about when they should be looking at an acquisition and how they should go about the process — for example, Mullins said he wants to produce more content around that topic. To that end, Exitround is also announcing an “industry council” with experts on the corporate development and acquisition process. Their job won’t be producing the content themselves or working directly with startups (though that may happen on a case-by-case basis), but rather to guide Exitround’s strategy. The council consists of:

• Pat Matthews, Senior Vice President Corporate Development, Rackspace
• Adeo Ressi, CEO & Founding Member, The Founder Institute
• Ted Rheingold, Founder of Dogster/Catster; Entrepreneur
• Mark Seneca, Partner, Orrick
• MG Siegler, TechCrunch Columnist and Investor
• Ryan Spoon, Senior Vice President Product Development, ESPN
• David Tisch, Managing Partner, Box Group

Total new capital invested in the United States tech industry rose from $1.9 billion in April to $3.8 billion in June, a 100 percent increase in two months, according to quarterly data from CrunchBase. The data, which is specific to the United States, breaks down new venture capital raised by round type, investor, company, geography and more.

In the second quarter of 2013, $9.2 billion was invested in over 1,347 rounds. The rounds break down to 500 angel rounds, 306 Series A, 109 Series B, 102 Series C and later, and 330 unattributed rounds. This data set doesn’t include some investments, such as private equity and post-IPO investments, and thus is lower than the total funding for the quarter.

The San Francisco Bay Area still dominates other regions, as companies in the Bay Area raised more capital in Q2 than Boston, New York, and Los Angeles, the next three regions in total capital raised, combined.

Bay Area companies raised $3.2 billion in 316 rounds, while Boston companies raised $1 billion in 84 rounds and New York startups raised $800 million in 142 rounds. Los Angeles companies raised a bit under $500 million in 81 rounds.

Biotech companies led the way in amount of money raised, followed by software startups. On average, Biotech companies captured 30 percent of total funding per month, followed by software at 19 percent.

The most active investors, in terms of number of rounds they participated in, were TechStars, Andreessen Horowitz, 500 Startups, SV Angel, AngelPad, and Google Ventures.

All data for this story comes from CrunchBase, TechCrunch’s free database of companies. You can check out CrunchBase’s monthly reports and download the full data set for Q2 here.

Note: not all funded companies have a category and/or region set. Almost all do, but not 100 percent, so there is a bit of a discrepancy across the data depending on how it is sorted.

Graphs and data analysis for this story were done by CrunchBase’s Eddy Kim.

Do you have spark? Are you a hero? If so, Tim Draper may want to get inside your head. Draper, best known, of course, as the founder and a managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, has founded a “new kind of university” in an old hotel in San Mateo designed to attract the “best and brightest”. Named Draper University Of Heroes, Tim Draper’s vision is to train young entrepreneurs by, as he told me, “getting inside people’s heads” and “changing the rules”. Draper University of Heroes is a college of disruption, offering both urban and rural survival training and literally changing the rules on everything – from baseball to Monopoly to adding the nuclear option to Risk.

It’s a radical idea – both in an educational and business sense. Instead of full time faculty, classes at Draper University are taught by friends-of-Tim like former Apple Store supremo Ron Johnson and Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh as well as by Draper himself. It’s a “R&D center” for entrepreneurs, he explained,  with student entrepreneurs getting access to Boost.vc, the Silicon Valley accelerator run by Draper’s son, Adam.

Annual fees are $9,500 and the application deadline for the upcoming September term is August 5.

Only heroes need apply. So what are you waiting for?

Today Dropbox launched two powerful new APIs for syncing and viewing data within apps that will help the company expand beyond the traditional “file” storage system it has built its service on.

The Datastore API can save any structured data or metadata for an app. It lets developers protect their users’ data even when they make changes offline. It is essentially a syncing API, which lets developers store a user’s contacts, to-do items and other data across different devices and platforms, both online and offline.

The Drop-Ins API, and the new native Chooser, let developers pull down files from their users’ Dropboxes for display within the app. They could make sure you never lose the latest items you add to a to-do app and can access your cloud-stored photos from any app.

The goal is to give developers cross-platform support (iOS, Android and JavaScript) so users don’t have to use multiple APIs for different integrations. The new API also handles conflict-handling to avoid overwriting other developers’ work and what they call a “Datastore Explorer,” for developers to view data as it is updated.

Combined, the two new APIs illustrate the company’s efforts to give developers a way to use its back-end environment for moving and syncing data across platforms and devices. With its file system firmly in place, the move gives Dropbox a way for developers to give users deeper access to their accounts.

Firefighters are trained to go into burning buildings, but even with all of this training, they can get disoriented in the pandemonium around them. Hateya, Belgium’s finalist for Microsoft’s Imagine Cup 2013, says this is a leading cause of deaths among firefighters and a problem that technology can prevent. The team developed a system that uses a helmet with augmented reality glasses, as well as a small computer and sensors inside the firefighters’ clothing to keep track of his location. To find his way out, the firefighter would just have to follow the arrows that will appear on the glasses.

The system works autonomously and just a click of a button built into the clothing enables what Hateya calls the “ComeBack” system. Because it’s being used indoors, GPS would obviously not work to get precise location data, so in the current prototype, the system measures the steps a firefighter takes inside the building and a compass to determine the route somebody took inside a building. This approach, the team argues, is very accurate, though they are also looking into alternatives to make the positioning even more precise.

The four Haute Ecole De La Ville De Liège students behind this project are already testing this project with a number of fire companies in Belgium.

Even though the ComeBack unit can easily work on its own, Hateya also added another component to the system that makes it far more capable by creating both a mesh network between the different ComeBack devices when there are multiple firefighters in a building. In addition, there is a “back office” application that a supervisor outside of the burning building can use to get a full picture of the situation, including information about the location of every crew member. In its current iteration, the system uses Wi-Fi, but the idea is to use more conventional radio technology with a wider range in the next iteration.

In the next version of their system, the students want to enable more two-way communications systems that would, for example, allow a supervisor to plot a route of a building when the original way was blocked, as well as a video feed that will give those outside the building an even better idea of the situation inside.

Dropbox CEO Drew Houston just announced that the company will be launching a new version of Mailbox, the iOS email app that it acquired earlier this year.

This will be the first real integration between Dropbox and Mailbox, he said. The demo was pretty brief, in part because the integration looks pretty straightforward. If you include a link to a Dropbox file in your email, it will actually be viewable from Mailbox as if it were a normal file attachment.

It sounds like this eliminates one of the few reasons that you’d still want to include a regular email attachment rather than just using Dropbox to share files. In other words, you don’t have to worry as much that mobile users who receive a Dropbox link will be annoyed because they have to jump to Dropbox in order to read whatever you sent them (though of course this will only benefit Mailbox users).

Houston didn’t announce a specific release date for the new app, but it sounds like it’s coming up soon. He mentioned the app while onstage during the keynote for Dropbox’s first DBX developer conference, where he also announced that the company now has 175 million users and shared some significant platform improvements.