Website Editor Jimdo Launches An iOS App So Users Can Build And Edit Sites From Their Phone

Jimdo, a Hamburg-headquartered company offering easy-to-use tools for building websites, already seems pretty mobile friendly. Jimdo-powered sites can also be viewed in mobile-optimized layouts, and earlier this year the company announced a “mobile express” format, where businesses create a landing page that highlights their most important information.
What’s left? Well, actually creating and editing sites from a mobile device.
So today, Jimdo is launching an iOS app enabling those very tasks. This is one of those mobile launches where (unfortunately) I wasn’t able to try the app out ahead of time, but co-founder Christian Springub said the app will allow users to start a website from scratch, add new content, update the content of existing sites, add or delete pages, view how the site will appear in desktop and mobile, and check statistics.
I’m guessing it would be pretty easy to overload a smartphone screen with different menus and controls, but Springub said team members put a lot of effort into simplifying the interface. He added that they basically scrapped the initial version of the app, because it was guilty of “web thinking,” whereas the version launching today comes from a “better understanding of mobile” and how to use the touch interface.
But is this something people actually need? I mean, I can see making minor tweaks from a phone, but why would you need to create a website while you’re on-the-go? Springub said even without the app, Jimdo is seeing users log in from their tablets, and he noted that they might create the broad strokes of a website from a phone or tablet and then refine it once they’re back at their desk.
Jimdo isn’t the only company in this market that thinks mobile editing is important. Weebly, for example, launched a mobile editor earlier this year. (At the time, Weebly also said it has been used to create 15 million websites, while Jimdo says 8 million sites have been built on its platform.)
You can download the app here. Oh, and if you’re an Android user, Springub said Jimdo will start working on an equivalent app soon.

Alibaba Founder Jack Ma Joins Board Of UCWeb As It Builds A Mobile Ecosystem In India

Alibaba founder and former CEO Jack Ma has joined UCWeb‘s board of directors as the company focuses on building mobile ecosystems in India and other emerging markets. UC Browser recently surpassed Opera as the top mobile browser in India, but only by a thin margin, and UCWeb has said it plans to build relationships in different verticals in order to increase its foothold.
Guangzhou-based UCWeb, which claims 400 million users worldwide, grabbed the top spot among mobile browsers in India in July, according to StatCounter. UC Browser now holds a 29.9% market share, compared to Opera’s 28.6%.
UC Browser’s worldwide growth has been driven by partnerships with phone makers including HTC, Samsung, Nokia, LG, Lenovo and carriers such as Vodafone, China Mobile and China Telecom. But its lead in India is still far from secure as Opera looks to take back market share by striking agreements with Indian manufacturers. In May, for example, Opera signed partnerships with seven mobile device makers to pre-load Android devices with Opera Mini mobile browser, which is popular in India because it compresses Web sites, allowing them to load faster on low-speed networks and use less data.
UCWeb named India as its second headquarter in April. At that time, co-founder and president Xiaopeng He said the company will seek partnerships across domains and verticals in order to build a thriving ecosystem in the Indian market, where UC Browser first launched in 2011. Having Ma on its board will be helpful as UCWeb works on entering different sectors. Ma resigned as CEO of Alibaba in May, but still serves as executive chairman of Alibaba Group, as well as chairman of the massive China Smart Logistics Network (CSN).
In turn, Ma’s presence on UCWeb’s board reinforces its close relationship with the company and makes it less likely that UCWeb will strike strategic partnerships with Alibaba rivals like Baidu, which reportedly try to purchase UCWeb in June 2012. UC Browser is China’s largest mobile browser with 33.3% of the market, compared to Opera’s 10% share.
In 2009, Alibaba made a strategic investment in UCWeb, which is planning a U.S. IPO later this year.
In a statement, UCWeb chairman and CEO Yu Yongfu said, “We hope that Jack will bring the tremendous experience he has in building Alibaba to our company, and Alibaba’s strength as the dominant e-commerce platform in China will help accelerate UCWeb’s transformation into a one-stop shop of Internet services.”

Google Now Update Adds More Entertainment And Travel Features To The Android Personal Assistant App

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Google has added a half-dozen new travel and entertainment features to its personalised search app Google Now. With the additions, the company is aiming to capture the attention of the real-world consumer, such as a sports fan watching an NCAA football game, or the recently landed tourist trying to find their rental car.

Like Twitter, Google is drawing on a lot of evidence that indicates people are increasingly consuming entertainment — TV or otherwise — while tapping away on mobile devices to get more information and connect with other viewers. The new features include:
- New cards for car rentals, concert tickets, and commute sharing.
- Improved cards for public transit and TV, which now aurally identifies music and program information.
- The ability to set search reminders for new media releases, as well as receive real-time NCAA football scores.
Google Now pulls information from all of your Google services in a bid to provide relevant information depending on your time and location. So for travelers, the car rentals card, which complements the boarding pass and hotel reservation cards, directs them to the rental centre; the concert ticket card will bring up the ticket once the user arrives at the venue; and the commute-sharing card informs users’ loved ones that they have just left work and are heading home.
However, Google’s America-specific focus has irked users around the world.
On the company’s blog post announcing the features, international users have complained about the lack of local support from Google. ”Google now is very US centric. I wish Google concentrated more on providing local content on a global basis,” wrote Google+ user Kumarjit Sen.
The Google Now update is for Android 4.1+. There is no word on whether the iOS version, which has been largely neglected, will get the new features anytime soon.

Wayra-Backed Tank Top Movies Launches To Help UK Users Navigate Myriad Of VOD Services

There are myriad video on-demand and movie-streaming services in the U.K., from big hitters such as Amazon-owned Lovefilm, to lesser-known brands such as DSG’s KnowHow. In fact, so crowded is the space, you’d be forgiven for thinking that VOD is a commodity business. Except that the movie catalogs — and in some cases prices – that these services are able to offer vary greatly, with those companies with the deepest pockets sometimes picking up content on an exclusive basis. Plus each service operates within the context of arcane distribution models based on predefined ‘release’ windows that see movie studios dictate when new releases eventually make their way to on-demand and movie subscription-based streaming or free-to-view.
Movie fans don’t care about that stuff, of course. They just want an easy way to discover, find and watch movies they’ll enjoy, no matter on what online service they are made available. Enter Tank Top Movies, which launches today to help U.K. movie watchers do just that. Part search engine, part movie recommendation engine, the company, backed by Telefonica’s Wayra startup accelerator, lets users search across 18 movie services in the U.K., add movies to a unified ‘watch list,’ be alerted when movies become available, and click through to begin watching.
“If you want to watch a movie at home tonight in the U.K., there are around 13,000 different films to choose from, and at least 20 different legal services,” says Tank Top Movies co-founder Liz Rice, who noted that each service licenses different content, and have different commercial models — free to view, subscription, and pay-as-you-go. “As users, we thought it was crazy that a relaxing evening watching a movie would be preceded by 20 minutes of tedious searching around to see what’s playing on the different services we use, cross-checking with sites like Rotten Tomatoes to see whether the films are any good. In most cases, the on-demand film services really don’t offer a great user experience for browsing what’s on.”
It was faced with this problem that the founding team — members of which have previously worked at Skype, Last.fm, Just-Eat and Metaswitch Networks — decided to build a service that consolidated the experience. “With Tank Top Movies we’re aiming for ‘serendipitous discovery,’” says Rice. “We use various factors, including critic and user ratings, recency and your previous choices to create a personalized list that’s fun to browse, where we hope you’ll quickly find something you’d like to watch, from across the services you use. You can build a watchlist for keeping track of the films you want to see, and if you missed a film at the cinema, we can notify you as soon as it’s out on one of the on-demand services you use.”
Rice says the company is also trialling widgets for film websites, “so that any film blogger or publisher can connect their readers directly with the film they’re writing about.”
Tank Top Movies makes money from any available affiliate revenue generated from the leads it produces, though the primary business model is a more ambitious data play: It wants to help the film industry better understand their audience by selling aggregated viewer behaviour and preferences back to them — but only when, and if, it’s able to reach enough scale to be in a position to do so.
All of which hasn’t gone unnoticed by other players in the industry, not least Netflix which pulled the plug on Tank Top Movies earlier this month, meaning that the startup is unable to list Netflix’s content in its index. It’s easy to presume that the movie streaming giant wasn’t too keen on a service that enabled users to compare competing offerings so transparently, though I suspect it was Tank Top’s universal watch list feature that likely caused the fall out.
“It’s disappointing that Netflix asked to be removed, and it’s strange because you’d think that any on-demand movie service would be happy to receive visitors looking for a film that they can watch on that service,” says Rice, adding that Netflix appears to tolerate similar functionality offered by Fan TV in the U.S.
“Fortunately there are plenty of other streaming services in this country, and in fact Netflix were only the fifth most popular on our site in terms of clicking out to movies, so it hasn’t caused too much disruption to the majority of our users.”