Apple has been awarded a multitouch user interface patent by the US Patent and Trademark Office—a patent that has sparked debate among Apple watchers regarding whether it's broad enough to concern Apple's competitors or not.
The patent itself was filed in 2007 and describes methods for interacting with a webpage or other screen element using one or more fingers, depending on what the user is trying to do. For example, one finger might be used to scroll or move the screen around (a la moving the map around on Google’s mobile Maps page), while two fingers might be used to pinch or zoom on certain details within that page or element. The patent doesn’t go into much detail on the GUIs on the device that hosts the screen elements, nor does it expand its description to explain other forms of multitouch functionality.
While pursuing our passion for making things that bring value to millions of people, we built mobile apps to address the needs of non-profits, open government initiatives, etc. We realized that the apps we were thinking of creating, were in the same class as the millions of next-gen mobile apps. These apps are going to use backends because they will upload/download data, use location and social information, and buy and sell things. To do all this, the mobile app has to connect to a backend stack, but building a backend stack sucks. We decided that we were going to make it ridiculously easy for developers to set up, use and maintain backends for mobile and tablet apps. We call it Backend as a Service.
-Kinvey Founder and CEO Sravish Sridhar
Kinvey is one of the brand new companies about to launch out of TechStars, an incubator program in Boston (MA), Boulder (CO), New York City (NY) and Seattle (WA) that has helped numerous companies attract over $25 million in venture capital and angel investment. Kinvey, a company that has created a cloud backend service for mobile apps, will be graduating from this spring’s Boston class.
Kinvey pronounced like convey is a “Backend as a Service” that makes it incredibly easy for mobile app developers to focus on making beautiful, user-friendly apps. Kinvey is betting that the next generation of wireless devices and apps will empower billions of people across the world in ways that will change the face of learning, communication and commerce and that Kinvey will be the hub of that change.
Sridhar and his co-founders came up with the idea in September 2010 and started building the first version. They spoke to hundreds of mobile app developers for input and found that every mobile developer just wants an API. They don’t want to figure out platforms, stacks and tools and how to put those things together. They want to focus on the application and user interface.
Let’s say you’re a mobile app developer who wants to create a fictional app called Videogram. The developer would tell Kinvey, I want the app to take video, upload it, geotag it and then allow it to be pushed to social networks with commenting features. The developer has a a choice on whether he or she wants to store that video on Amazon, Rackspace, or any other cloud service or leave the decision up to Kinvey. In 10-15 minutes, Kinvey sets up a backend to Videogram. The ability to auto-generate those APIs from models is Kinvey’s secret sauce.
Imagine you want to paint your home. With Kinvey, you’d pick the colors, click on the walls and all of a sudden you’d see your house in various colors. Kinvey lets developers focus on writing beautiful client applications by providing a dynamic backend including data storing, location and social networking tools.
Watch Kinvey’s video for more:
“I completely bought into the fact that mobile applications are going to change the world that we live in and what mobile technology in general can do for the developing world,” says Sridhar. “Myself and my cofounders knew we wanted to take this company to the next level from day one so we decided that an accelerator program would be the best way. We got so excited when we found TechStars. The best thing about TechStars is [Director] Katie Rae. She is absolutely amazing. World-class entrepreneurs and investors in Boston spent a lot of time working with us to help accelerate our business, in large part, due to the respect they have for Katie and the reputation she has in the Boston startup community.”
The Kinvey team was new to the Boston area. In a period of just a few months, they built a network of a few hundred technical, marketing and startup gurus, who have all helped them personally and professionally. In the future, Kinvey wants to be the de facto data hub for all mobile data. Once they accomplish this, Sridhar says there will be plenty of monetization routes.
Previous to Kinvey, Founder and CEO Sravish Sridhar was a part of the founding team at United Devices and wrote software that harnessed computing power on over 3.5 million PCs to conduct cancer research. He is also the founder of We Flap, a non-profit that helps other India-based non-profits tap into the social graph. Sravish, who grew up in India, met his CTO Morgan Bickle and Creative and Marketing Director Ryan Light at the University of Texas.
So far, over 100 developers have signed-up for Kinvey’s private beta. For now, the service is free for private-beta users and they will announce pricing after going live in the fall, which could be anywhere from a few thousand dollars a month down to a dollar a day depending on the complexity of the app. Developers will only start paying when their application goes live. Not wanting developers to ever feel stuck, Kinvey will always have the option for a one click “export all data” in multiple formats, allowing the developer to delete their account (thus losing backend support) and walk away with their app, completely free of cost.
Interested in joining the closed beta? Sign up here.
TechStars’ Demo Day in Boston will take place on June 15th, 2011. As the guys have coined this term “backend as a service,” expect quite a bit of humor during their presentation. TNW’s Brad McCarty will be there to report.
Read more on TechStars, don’t miss:
An interview with: TechStars’ David Cohen on startup rockstars.
TechStars: The next great incubator unleashes 11 startups in NYC.
TechStars Boulder: Inside the magic and mentorship of the top startup accelerator.
Apple’s iOS devices may lack native memory expansion, but PhotoFast has now come up with solution that just about bests the official camera connection kit. What you’re looking at here is the i-FlashDrive, a memory dongle that sports both a USB plug and an Apple 30-pin dock connector, and it comes in three flavors starting from 8GB at $95 up to 32GB at $180. What’s more, the drive also works with a free Cupertino-approved app that provides both external and internal file management (for music, photos, movies, and more), contact backup, and native MP3 playback. Want one? Then head over to Taiwan for a mid or late June launch, or watch out for its US debut shortly afterwards. Demo video after the break.
Ever think you’d see Android applications executing natively within iOS? A project called “in-the-box” is working toward this goal, and it’s hoping to provide developers an easy path for submitting their software to the App Store. This means Apple users could get a crack at exotic titles from Google’s turf, all without jailbreaking their devices. The magic is performed by porting the Dalvik virtual machine and Gingerbread API’s to iOS, which developers must bundle inside their applications — something that’s already resulted in a Java-based “Hello world” app (see it in action after the break). It’s an early demonstration, as the only evidence is the output to a console window, but if you’re an Android dev that’s looking to rock the boat (and willing to risk App Store denial), this could be a fine path to explore.
We figured Apple’s firm response to Lodsys earlier this week regarding its claims against iOS devs would prompt the patent holder to move on to its next target, and sure enough, it looks as if said target has been selected. Unfortunately, a group of Android app devs have now found themselves in the Texas-based company’s crosshairs, which is citing the same patent infringement that Apple recently addressed, relating specifically to in-app upgrade purchases. As was the case with the last round of letters, Lodsys is demanding licensing fees from small, individual developers, who don’t have the resources to fight back. Lodsys appears to be maintaining its trend of ignoring media requests, so we’re keeping an eye on the patent troll’s blog to see if anyone comes up to the surface to defend this latest round of allegations. In the meantime, plugging your ears while humming and ignoring the mailman might not be such a bad idea… you know, if you do this kind of thing for a living.
