AppAnnie Intelligence platform Once a Beijing startup is now a global brand  App Annie is a business intelligence company and analyst firm, co-headquartered in Beijing, China and San Francisco, USA. It produces a range of business intelligence tools and market reports for the apps and digital goods industry. App Annie was launched as a free service in 2010, and the company was founded in 2011 by Bertrand Schmitt. It provides three main services, including analytics, store stats, and business intelligence. These products provide publishers with data on downloads, rankings, revenue, reviews, and more to help them learn about the performance of their own and competitors’ apps. App Annie' s VP of marketing, Oliver Lo, who is part of the founding team at the mobile app data company explains AppsAnnie' s timeline as March 2010: Officially launched AppAnnie.com with Analytics and Store Stats products for the App Store and Mac Store. 30,000 apps were using Analytics within a year of launch. May 2011: We raised our first round of funding, with $1 million series A investment from IDG Capital Partners. We grew the team to a whopping 6 people! January 2012: We launched our premium Intelligence product, offering the most accurate app store market data available. We also gave Annie a facelift, ditching the spandex for geeky glasses. February 2012: We launched Google Play public beta support across our three products. By now we had 100,000 apps using Analytics. We also partnered with IDC to deliver a quarterly portable gaming report that showed how mobile games are reshaping the industry. August 2012: We raised a second round of funding, with a $6 million series B investment led by Greycroft Partners and participation from e.ventures, Infinity Venture Partners, Kii Capital, Jarl Mohn, and IDG Capital Partners. We also opened a new office in San Francisco, which became our global sales and marketing headquarters. Dec 2012: We launched the App Annie Index, which quickly became the point of reference for commercial success on the app stores. Every month, the Index is quoted in every business media outlet from WSJ and Bloomberg, to Techcrunch and AdAge. There were 175,000 apps using Analyticsand we opened offices in London and Tokyo to keep up with demand in Europe and Japan. Spring 2013: We launched support for the Amazon Appstore, Windows 8 Store. We also launched AppAnnie.com in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Russian. Summer 2013: We took App Annie’s product suite to the next level with the launch of Intelligence Web and Visualization, as well as a mobile app for App Annie Analytics. There were 275,000 apps worldwide using App Annie Analytics. August 2013 (Present): Today, we have over 100 App Anniers and counting across Beijing, San Francisco, Hong Kong, London, Tokyo, and Seoul. More than 90 percent of the top 100 publishers by revenue are using an App Annie product.  When everyone is rushing to get their work sorted out before the new year, App Annie released some useful updates to the App Annie platform one of which is Share eBooks Data, Without Sharing Login Details If you work in the eBooks industry, this update will make sharing sales and download figures a whole lot safer. If you’re a publisher, agent or distributor, there’s a good chance you manage 100’s of books for dozens of authors, all of whom want to know how their books are selling. But you only get one consolidated report from Amazon and you have to split out each author’s data, row by row. Well now you can simply share the relevant titles on App Annie without exposing anyone else’s numbers.  READ MORE ON >>

Huddle sees 132% increase in UK public sector contracts Adoption of cloud services in the public sector is continuing to increase, according to Huddle’s financial results. The company’s revenues from the public sector have more than doubled in the first seven months of its financial year, running May to April, seeing an increase of 132% on the same period last year. The cloud collaboration company has announced its financial year is set to be the biggest in terms of public sector contracts. Huddle is pan-government accredited at IL2 and sits on the UK government’s G-Cloud framework, the fourth version of which (G4) went live in October. The framework aims to provide more small and medium-sized enterprises the opportunity to win government IT contracts. Huddle claims 80% of central UK government departments now use its cloud service to securely share and work on content. Additionally, local public sector organisations, including Surrey County Council, Knowsley Metropolitan Borough Council, Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust and Northamptonshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, are now using the service. “While the government is making headway in terms of its cloud ambitions and our latest figures show increasing demand for cloud services, there’s still a mountain to climb," said Huddle CEO Alastair Mitchell. "A lot more pressure needs to come from the top-down as the £63.4m that has been spent through the G-Cloud is a tiny proportion of the government’s overall IT spend,” he said. Mitchell also pointed out that a number of suppliers on the G-Cloud framework do not have EU datacentres or pan-government accreditation at IL2, so they would be unlikely to meet security requirements.   Read Source

John Hunter on the World Peace Game

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China unveils first domestic cloud computer A leading information technology company on Wednesday unveiled China's first cloud computer, a major breakthrough for Chinese cloud computing. The computer developed by the Unisplendour Corporation Limited of Tsinghua University, has a dynamically scalable function in computing power and storage capacity in accordance with customer requirements, according to a statement from the company. The number of the computer's CPU can be expanded to 65,535 and its storage space can reach up to 85 PB bytes, with a throughput of 1.2 GB bytes per second, according to the statement. It differs from personal computers and supercomputers in terms of distributed architecture and combines virtualization technology of cloud computing and computing resources with lower cost. The computer's software consist of virtualization, big data and automatically-deployed modules, all with independent intellectual property rights, the statement said. The computer's completely open nature allows high compatibility with various general hardware and industry application software, it added. Cloud computing generally refers to services, including software and storage, accessed by users through the Internet. Read More

If she was not there we would not be here.

A NEW TREND: GAMIFICATION Californian based Company Badgeville which was founded in 2011, has now announced its Next –Generation Gamification Technology,  the Behavior Platform 5.0. This new technology will enable large companies themselves to deliver sophisticated, scalable and secure gamification programs. These programs will empower the companies to gamify their customer facing applications thus engaging their customers and employees more with themselves and their product lines. The behavior platform of Badgeville has already been recognised by the Software & Information Association as the 2013 Cloud Platform of the year and is regarded as the leading gamification platform in the industry. It is currently used by hundreds of the world’s leading brands amongst those are: American Express, Samsung, Oracle and many others. This new technology trend was earlier seen by Gartner (An American information technology research and advisory firm)  in 2011. In one of its summits in 2011, Gartner has declared that “By 2014, more than 70 percent of Global 2000 organizations will have at least one ‘gamified’ application” . Gartner analysts examined the future of gamification and said at the time that “gamification is positioned to become a highly significant trend over the next five years”. This has now become a reality. Brian Burke, research vice president at Gartner has once said "Gamification could become as important as Facebook, eBay or Amazon..During 2012, 20 percent of Global 2000 organizations will deploy a gamified application. IT leaders must start exploring opportunities to use gamification to increase engagement with customers and employees, with the aim of deploying a gamified application next year. Understanding how to apply game mechanics to motivate positive behavioral change is critical to success." Gamification typically involves applying game design thinking to non-game applications to make them more fun and engaging. Gamification has been called one of the most important  trends  in technology by several industry experts. Gamification can potentially be applied to any industry and almost anything to create fun and engaging experiences, converting users into players. Read More