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The point of any image is to draw the attention of the viewer. Now there are many ways to do this. In this article, we have collection of Pencil Vs Camera Photography.
31-year-old Alejandro Maestre Gasteazi has created an incredibly interesting photographic series about the struggle of an artist.
See more at My Modern Metropolis.
Michael Yuan of the medical-focused mobile company Ringful Health has submitted over 30 applications to multiple mobile application stores. It’s what made him qualified to give a speech at this week’s SXSW conference in Austin, Texas on the topic. His panel, “Tips on Getting Your Approved on App Stores,” wasn’t so much of a step-by-step guide for navigating the submission process, but more like a collection of things developers would want to know about the major application marketplaces. It probably wasn’t the best title, considering the content presented, but the information itself was helpful to developers looking to learn a few more details about the different app stores out there.
Due to time constraints, Yuan’s talk only focused on three mobile app store ecosystems: iTunes, Android (both the official Market and third-party efforts) and BlackBerry App World.
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Yuan began by explaining why it’s important for mobile app developers to submit apps to an app store in the first place. App stores provide a wide reach, he explained, and offer easy one-click purchasing for customers, which can potentially lead to recurring billing scenarios. He then went through several of the top mobile app stores and the tips he picked up along the way:
Yuan wasn’t too pleased with his previous BlackBerry App World experiences because the registration fee only covers 10 submissions. Afterwards, you pay per update once that limit is exceeded. This seems to discourage updating apps, Yuan noted. Your best bet is not to count on releasing several incremental updates in this store. 
The wait time for getting your app approved at iTunes is 1-4 weeks, and the initial submission process goes much slower than future updates.
Yuan recommends that you talk with the business development people at the store if you can as they can often help you implement alternate revenue models or offer you promotional opportunities. The tips here may be useful for developers now considering developing a second or third app for another store, but SXSW sessions are often just too short for there to be much detail. It would have been nice to hear more about real-world examples involving rejections, issues and fixes from Yuan. But SXSW is not really the venue for those sorts of in-depth discussions…except for those that occur in the hallways, that is.
Google-owned mobile ad network AdMob is announcing a number of new products and features today for developers and advertisers. This includes the launch of the beta SDK for Windows Phone 7, which will allows these platform developers to advertise via AdMob.
Google director of engineering Mark Schaaf (who is a former AdMob Engineering Director and the network’s third employee) says that the addition of Windows Phone 7 SDK aligns with Google’s openness strategy, which in AdMob’s case, allows developers and advertisers to users across multiple mobile platforms. He says that the AdMob network currently includes more than 50,000 mobile applications across iOS, Android, and webOS platforms.
Similar to the iOS and Android experience, developers using Windows Phone 7 SDK can use the format to integrate AdMob advertising into apps, control where ads appear, and what types of ads are served. The ad unit supports a variety of post click actions including opening a webpage and linking directly to the App Marketplace. And the Windows Phone 7 beta SDK currently supports text and banner ads and can be downloaded by creating a new site on AdMob.
AdMob has also updated iOS and Android SDKs with HTML5 support for its ad units, allowing advertisers to create more rich media advertisements that can be viewed across platforms. Previously, the formats were written in Google/AdMob’s own markup language, but with the addition of HTML5, Schaaf says that the format gives advertisers and developers more openness across many platforms. He says that HTML5 allows advertisers to do more with less coding and also allows for more seamless transitions and formats on devices. Additionally, AdMob is also supporting full screen interstitial formats for tablets on iOS and Android.
The move to HTML5 isn’t surprising for AdMob, considering that Google is a huge proponent of HTML5.
From the ad requests standpoint, AdMob appears to be growing under the Google umbrella. We heard earlier this year that AdMob is currently receiving 2 billion ad requests per day, a data point which has quadrupled over the past year. But there have been rumors that the transition isn’t going so great over at the Googleplex, which is of course contradictory to Google’s growth stats.
Regardless, mobile advertising is a multi-billion industry, and there’s no doubt that Google will continue to innovate so that it can take a piece of this enormously large pie.
The Startup Visa Act is proposed United States legislation that would allow foreign entrepreneurs to get a visa and move to the US.
Making it easier for immigrants to start businesses in the US would be a boon for America, as it competes in a networked global economy which is increasingly driven by talent and entrepreneurship. Many of the greatest entrepreneurial successes in America (and by extension, the world) were started by immigrants.
As a French entrepreneur who would like to move to the US some day, I opposed the original Startup Visa Act.
Why? Because the original version of the bill premised the visa on on obtaining funding from venture capitalists or business angels. It’s not just a bad idea because VC-funded companies are a small subset of the fastest growing companies, but also because it makes what is an already unequal relationship (entrepreneur and investor) even more unequal by letting the investor decide not just the fate of your business but of your very life.
Now a new version of the bill has appeared and it’s a marked improvement, as entrepreneurship researcher Vivek Wadhwa points out. The new bill would grant a visa to the following people:
The last item is the key one. It should be possible for entrepreneurs to move to the US if they can raise money from US investors, but also if they build a business that can be evaluated on the basis of revenues and profits. This frees the entrepreneur from being at the mercy of a VC, and broadens the universe of entrepreneurs who can apply.
No bill is perfect, but this is a great improvement and its passage would be a boon for America, and thousands of men and women.
Previously: The Startup Visa Act Must Be Stopped
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