Japanese messaging app Line has just reported that new users in Hong Kong have been doubling each day for the past week since January 29.
The app, which is the dominant messenger of choice in Japan, launched its Chinese version on December 12, and looks like it’s riding a huge wave of momentum in Asia, ranking first on the free app category in Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Thailand, to name a few.
Line provides free calls and chatting, and the company noted in its latest announcement that t...
Artkive, an app designed to eliminate the overwhelming guilt you get tossing your children’s brilliant artwork into the garbage, now has another purpose, too: you can order printed out books of their creations. Instead of just hiding the child’s crumpled up drawings and precious finger-paint covered handprints that school sends home – what is now, like every day? – under cereal boxes and empty bags of chips, you can assure yourself that you’ve found a more efficient means of saving these items instead. You snapped a photo of them. The sense of relief is overwhelming, I tell you. OK, I kid…a little. But as any parent will tell you, kids’ art output is overwhelming, forcing you to curate with a heavy hand. That’s why so many moms (and some dads, too) have begun snapping photos of the art before it hits the trash. Explains CEO Jedd Gold, who has extensive experience working in kids’ entertainment, including with the relaunch of nostalgic 80′s brands like Strawberry Shortcake and Trolls, he was inspired to build Artkive after witnessing this very behavior at home. “I was watching my wife take pictures of our kids’ artwork on her camera, that she would upload to her computer, and then she would upload from her computer to one of these photo sites. But by then she wouldn’t remember who created what piece, or when they were created, and they’d be out of order,” he says. “I thought, ‘there’s gotta be an app for that.’ But there really wasn’t.” So he launched one. The Kive Company raised $500,000 late last year for its mobile application that helps you to not just take the photos, but also annotate them with things like the child’s name, date of creation, and other comments. Although the original goal was to make the art archiving process easier – as you can tell by the name – the app’s small but growing customer base of 105,000 (almost all moms) have already found other uses for it. They’re documenting everything that you would save for a kids’ scrapbook, including report cards, photos, other items from events and school activities, and more. One woman even used the app to document the last seven months of her pregnancy. With this expanded focus, the printed book option begins to make more sense. Because as much as I love my own daughter’s art, I’m not sure how often I’d really
Truecaller, the Sweden-based creater of a crowdsourced phone directory app and online white pages service, has opened its API to a select group of “handpicked” developers. Truecaller said its directory now contains some 600 million phone numbers, either contributed by individuals or harvested through partnerships with other directory services.
One interesting element of Google I/O this year were the sensors laid out everywhere around Moscone tracking environmental data throughout the event. Those types of sensors are now all around us, including in our phones and in various smart home devices, and now a new Kickstarter project from ManyLabs wants to help kids get familiar with them very early on.
