Banjo Releases iPad And Android Tablet App, Focuses On Content Consumption And The Second Screen

banjo1Banjo, the location-based social network for sharing images and content tied to specific real-world locales, today unveiled its new native iPad and Android apps. This marks the first time Banjo has made the leap to tablets, and I spoke with Banjo CEO Damien Patton about why the time was right to bring Banjo to the bigger screen: It’s mostly about riding the second screen wave, Patton says, and tapping into the idea of a lean-back consumption model of material gathered via the smartphone app.

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Customer Loyalty Startup Front Flip Raises $3.75 Million For Its Digital Scratch Cards Platform

FF_Winning_ScratcherBy default, the in-store scans are time sensitive, offering customers 30 minutes to redeem their prize, like a free or discounted appetizer, drink, dessert, etc. The drive-thru codes, meanwhile, give users around four days to redeem their code. Sean tells us that the company is now working to bring its QR codes to Facebook as well, where they can be used directly on businesses’ Facebook timelines or pages. And yes, that means users would have to scan their computer screen with their phone in these cases. (You can see this in action here.)

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Can A Messaging App Beat Standalone Social Networking? Khosla-Backed Stealth Startup Just.me Gears Up For Launch With iOS Beta

Just.me logoJust.me, the new project from Keith Teare, co-founder of TechCrunch and partner at Archimedes Labs, has launched in beta as an app for iOS — ahead of a public release on the App Store, likely in a month. An Android app is coming soon — due this quarter. Just.me is a unified messaging platform that offers private, shared and public messaging functionality within a single app interface.

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Instafocus Tries To Answer The Question ‘What Happens After The Platform Rug Gets Pulled Out From Under You?’

instafocusInstafocus did what many new app startups did: tried to build a business on the back of another, only slightly older and more stable, one. In this app’s case, that bedrock business was Instagram, which was just testing out its wings as a broad-reaching platform with real-time developer API access. But Instagram changed the rules of the game over Christmas, disabling its real-time API, and that meant rough waters ahead for Instafocus.

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Backed By Skype Co-founder Janus Friis, Futureful Launches On The iPad For Smarter Web Surfing

Screen shot 2013-01-23 at 7.47.40 AMIf you’re a fan of content discovery veteran, StumbleUpon, or haven’t quite been sold by its new look, then you just might have some love for a new startup out of Helsinki, Finland, called Futureful. A product of Finland’s largest, seed-stage startup accelerator, Startup Sauna, Futureful has spent the last three years quietly building a predictive discovery engine that co-founder Marko Anderson says describes as “part toy, part tool” and seeks to provide users with a personal filter for the Web’s multifarious content.

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Swipp Launches Social Interest Graph Platform To Go Beyond The Facebook Like

swippSwipp, a Mountain View-based startup taking the wraps off of its products and platform today after two years of development and with $3.5 million in funding from Old Willow Partners. The startup has been cagey about what exactly it was building until now, but co-founders Don Thorson and Charlie Costantini provided me with a demo of the Swipp’s “global social intelligence platform, commercial and consumer apps” ahead of today’s official launch.

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With 40% Of Its 2.5M Users Now Logging In Via Mobile, Gogobot Finally Brings Its Social Travel Experience To Android

framed_topicSince launching in 2010, social travel startup Gogobot has been trying to play a role in legitimizing online travel discovery, fighting the shoddy design and link farm leanings that reined in the space. Focusing on collecting and curating quality, user-generated photos and reviews for travel destinations all over the world, Gogobot set out to create the new, digital Lonely Planet — a trusted mobile and web resource for trusted travel advice from experts and friends.

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Yandex Search App Wonder Uses Nuance Voice, Calls Up APIs From Foursquare And More, Screenshots Reveal

wonder 5 erasedEarlier this month we broke the news that Russia’s search giant Yandex was eyeing up a move into the mobile, social search space with the development of an app called Wonder, which drew on Facebook data to let people search for local places and content, incorporating what their friends have also visited and consumed. Now a source has passed us some screenshots and more details about how it looks right now, how it works, and who is behind the project.

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Spraffl Launches As An Anonymous, Location-Based ‘Social Experiment’

mzl.xtarktil.320x480-75Spraffl is a new iOS app that’s attempting to buck the trend of real name policy, or even semi-identifiable pseudonyms, in favour of an entirely anonymous social network, tied to a user’s location. I say social network, when in actual fact the UK startup is dubbing the app a ‘social experiment’, and in some ways the concept is reminiscent of the anarchic and experimental element of the Internet of yesteryear. And that may be both its appeal and its ultimate downfall.

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Peter Thiel & Reid Hoffman-Backed 100Plus Unveils Its First iPhone App, “A Life Coach In Your Pocket”

photo 2-30Founded in late 2011, 100Plus set out to tap into the growing popularity of the Quantified Self movement to create a personalized, mobile health prediction platform to help Average Joes like you and me stay active and get healthy. Like some of today’s better known activity and health trackers, like Fitbit, Jawbone’s Up and RunKeeper, 100Plus wants to leverage our ever-present mobile devices to create a more accessible way to analyze, understand and digest our health data — in turn, encouraging us to complete small, healthy actions, while receiving realtime feedback on how those actions affect their daily routines and long-term health.

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