Tag Archives: android apps

Guardian iPad app downloaded nearly 150,000 times in first week

The Guardian’s new iPad app has been downloaded 145,880 times since it was launched last Thursday (13 October), with more than a third of those from outside the UK.

The app is free for the first three months due to a sponsorship deal with Channel 4, after which it will cost £9.99 per month.

The Guardian also today revealed that just over a million Facebook users have installed the Guardian’s Facebook app, which was released exactly a month ago.

Since its launch at the beginning of the year, the Guardian’s iPhone app has been downloaded over half a million times; its Android app, which was launched last month, has been downloaded over a quarter of a million times.

Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of Guardian News & Media, said in a statement:

Since launching last week, the new Guardian iPad edition has already been downloaded over 145,000 times. This number of downloads in a week is a fantastic achievement, and shows the appetite among our readers to access our content in new, digital ways. This is our most successful app launch to date, and an important milestone as we continue to evolve into a digital-first news organisation.

Statistics breakdown

iPad app downloads
Total: 145,880
UK: 85,018
US: 29,082
Res of the wold: 31,780

Guardian iPhone app
Since launching in January this year, the app has been downloaded over 570,000 times, with nearly 100,000 users going on to take out subscriptions.

Guardian Android app
This launched last month, on 7 September, and since then the app – which is free and ad-funded – has been downloaded over 250,000 times.

Paperboy app: Take a photo of newspaper article to find the digital edition

An app which uses image recognition technology to allow a reader to take a photo of a newspaper or magazine story on an iPhone or Android phone and use it to search for the digital article will be launched for UK titles next month.

Kooaba, the company behind the Paperboy app, has partnered with NewspaperDirect to enable print to digital linking for 2,000 titles worldwide. Around 50 UK titles are available digitally via NewspaperDirect and are therefore likely to be the publications available via the app. The full list includes the Daily Telegraph, Financial Times and Daily Mail, plus regional newspapers such as the Kentish Gazette, Birmingham Mail and Evening Standard.

In addition to taking a photo on a phone and using image recognition on the text to find the digital article, newspapers can also print a link which app users can snap to lead them to additional multimedia content, such as video.

The roll-out of the ability to find digital from print using the Paperboy app has started with this list of newspapers based in Germany, Austria and Switzerland and is planning add UK titles in November.

The Kooaba blog explains how the technology works.

Paperboy connects printed media to the digital world with one click: All the application’s powerful image recognition technology needs is a photo taken by a smartphone camera of an article or page in a newspaper or magazine. Paperboy then matches the photo to the images in Kooaba’s sizeable library of printed media or identifies that page or article from NewspaperDirect’s inventory of over 2,000 same-day, digital newspapers replicas. Users can then share, email or archive the electronic version on the go, anywhere, anytime or explore related information like videos, images or links to selected topics. Paperboy automatically finds URLs on pages of print publications. In some publications, exclusive Paperboy content is for pages with the Shutter icon.

This video gives examples of how readers could find it useful, such as taking a photo of a recipe to locate the digital version, which could then be saved to Evernote or shared via Twitter.

BBC News Android app now lets users submit stories, videos and photos

The BBC News Android app has been updated to accept user-generated content and encourage people to send in their photographs and videos of a news event, something user of the BBC News iPhone app had already been able to do.

The Android app, which has been downloaded more than two million times globally since its launch in May, has also been updated to include the addition of homescreen widgets, improved personalisation and the ability to store the app on the SD card.

A BBC Internet Blog post details the changes.

Citizen journalism platform Blottr launches iPhone app

User generated news service Blottr has launched an iPhone app called Paparappzi. It is to follow with the release of an app for Android devices next week.

The app is designed to encourage people to submit news stories covering their local communities. Its challenge now is to encourage people to upload and share news.

Blottr, which launched in August, focuses on seven cities – Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Leeds, London and Manchester.

Paparappzi has an intuitive design, allowing users to write a short news item, add a photo and a geolocation and submit it to Blottr.

Similar to recently-launched app Meporter, Blottr’s offering differs in that it comes out of the UK rather than the US. The UK company raised £1m investment in May.

Founder Adam Baker said in a release:

The Blottr app has the potential to fundamentally change the way news is gathered and reported. The UK has the highest number of smartphone users in Europe at 11m, and growing.

Over time, we hope a high preponderance of smartphone users will be using the Blottr app to report news they are witnessing from the scene.

Baker added: “We hope this will be the catalyst for millions of ordinary people to become citizen journalists and through our app, we expect to create a powerful network of people and content that will transform the ability to break news as it happens.”

Jon Anthony, leading the build, said: “One of the biggest challenges we faced when architecting the app was enabling real-time integration with our CMS. The app integrates fully with the user layer of our CMS, allowing stories to be posted directly to the site and viewed straight away on both mobile and web.”

Live video streaming will be introduced in the coming months.

Twitter starts to roll out new site for mobile browsers

Twitter has started to roll out a new version of Twitter.com for mobile devices. Most people who use Twitter on a smartphone opt for one of the official apps or a third-party app such as TweetDeck rather than the browser, but the the new mobile site promises to improve the experience for those without an app.

The new mobile browser is currently only available to a limited number of iPhone, iPod Touch, and Android smartphones, Twitter announced on its blog, but there will be a full roll out “in the coming weeks”.

Judging from the pictures released by Twitter, changes include the black navigation icon bar along the top.

TweetDeck rebuilds its iPhone app

TweetDeck has redesigned rebuilt its iPhone app from scratch. Version 2 is available now and allows users to access feeds from Twitter and Facebook.

The new app has been designed by the team that developed the Android app, which has been nominated for a Webby Award.

YouTube is currently down, so the embedded video supposed to appear here is not displaying. We will put it back as soon as YouTube is back on its feet. 4k torrent http://4k-hd.club over 1000 4k movies for download.