The Review Blog

Customers of Time Warner Cable have some reason to rejoice today, as the cable company has gotten the go-ahead to add channels like MTV, VH1, and Comedy Central to its live streaming iPad app. The addition comes after the channels’ owner Viacom has settled its differences and resolved litigation with Time Warner Cable.

The legal fight erupted last year, after Time Warner Cable released its iPad app, which lets subscribers stream live shows to tablets inside their homes. While many networks grumbled about the app, Viacom was most vocal in rejecting the app, taking its distribution partner to court over whether or not it had the right to stream to other devices.

Time Warner Cable’s argument was that the iPad was just another TV in the home, while Viacom argued that the tablet was a new device and required additional rights for distribution. Not to mention, the networks were probably annoyed because Nielsen wasn’t able to measure consumption of video delivered to the iPad — which meant there were eyeballs not being counted, and subsequently not being sold to advertisers.

But that’s all over now. Hooray! Although, even with the legal case settled, both are sticking to their original legal positions.

One aspect of the settlement that sticks out is Time Warner Cable’s agreement to carry Viacom’s Country Music Channel (CMT). As is usual with these types of deals, the content provider (in this case, Viacom) tries to get the distributor (Time Warner Cable) to pay for a whole bunch of channels, and often lumps in those that aren’t that highly rated and, in the cable company’s view, doesn’t provide a whole lot of value. CMT was one of those channels, and its carriage was apparently a sticking point in the negotiations.

Official comment below:

Viacom and Time Warner Cable have agreed to resolve their pending litigations. All of Viacom’s programming will now be available to Time Warner Cable subscribers for in-home viewing via internet protocol-enabled devices such as iPads and Time Warner Cable will continue to carry Viacom’s Country Music Television (CMT) programming. In reaching the settlement agreement, Time Warner Cable and Viacom were also able to resolve other unrelated business matters to their mutual satisfaction. Neither side is conceding its original legal position or will have further comment.

It’s hard to underestimate how important ranking in Apple’s top 25 in the iTunes store is for mobile app developers. After all, the top 25 is probably the single most important app discovery mechanism for most iOS users. But how many downloads does it take to rank in the top 25? Mobile app store analytics firm Distimo today published some interesting data that answers just this question. Turns out, in the U.S. store, the answer currently is about 38,400 daily downloads for free iPhone apps and 3,530 for paid iPhone apps. To rank in the top 25 per category, of course, takes significantly fewer downloads, with games unsurprisingly being the most competitive category. It takes 25,300 daily downloads to rank in the gaming top 25 for free apps and 2,280 downloads for paid apps.

For free apps, other competitive categories include ‘entertainment’ (6,700 daily downloads), ‘social networking’ (5,800), ‘lifestyle’ (3,900) and ‘music’ (3,900). Interestingly, in the paid app charts photography apps rank just behind games and entertainment apps. Still, it currently only takes about 270 daily downloads to rank in the photography top 25 for paid apps.

These numbers, of course, are always changing and this just represent a snapshot of what Distimo found when it compiled this data last month.

Update: We just talked to one source with a lot of experience in building mobile apps and who also currently runs a top App Store app. According to this source, Distimo’s numbers are too low and may just represent data from a relatively small number of apps. Keep that in mind as you read Distimo’s data.

Given the popularity of games on iOS, Distimo also took a closer look at the various gaming subcategories. Here, arcade and action games lead the pack:

This is the first time Distimo is releasing a detailed set of these numbers. It’s worth noting, though, that at the end of 2011, the company reported that it still took about 45,000 daily downloads to rank in the top 25 of most popular free apps. Since then, though, Apple has been working hard to shut down various scams and bots that automatically downloaded apps and allowed developers to rank in Apple’s charts without having a real user base (then, once you are in the top 25, of course, real users will automatically find you, of course). Judging from Distimo’s latest data, these efforts are starting to pay off and will hopefully make life a little bit easier for legit developers.

No one ever called a limit on the number pivots a company can do, right? So here’s the latest at a company we’ve been watching for a while now. RAVN, an event planning and sharing app that itself was the product of a pivot from the developers behind “experiences marketplace” Skyara, has sent a letter out to its users telling them that the app is getting shut down at the end of this month. In RAVN’s place, the founders are starting up yet another business — their third — also loosely based around events but with a decidedly more commercial bent: a design flash sales site called Touch of Modern.

“After two years of building a new marketplace for experiences, we have decided that it is time to close down RAVN. The website and mobile app will completely stop working by the end of the month,” the RAVN team wrote in the note to users.

“We’ve had a great time helping people discover unique events and experiences they wouldn’t have found anywhere else. And we thank you for being a part of that experience.”

There is no word on how many users RAVN has picked up since its launch in November 2011, but the three founders behind the projects – Jonathan Wu, Dennis Liu and Steven Ou — clearly have the ear and eye of the investment community behind them. Skyara received seed funding from i/o Ventures of an undisclosed amount; and then when the RAVN pivot happened, that picked up some seed money, too, this time from HillsVen Capital — again, for an undisclosed amount.

When RAVN launched, it had amassed a database of 13,000 events, with the idea that users of the app could find and book events near a specific location, share that event with friends, get access to exclusive events, and keep all of that together in a planner — a little like Time Out meeting Gogobot or Tripbirds or one of the many other social travel/event apps out there.

What RAVN might have lacked was a commercial enough element to transform the app into a viable business. That seems to effectively be what they are getting in spades with their newest effort. Touch Of Modern, they say, will be starting its first flash sale at the end of this month. Users of the RAVN app are being offered a $5 credit towards those sales — although there is no indication of whether that represents a typical price for an item or a small discount.

We have contacted RAVN and Touch of Modern to try to get more information about both — what hapened with RAVN, and why the move to flash design sales, and what happens to the team and past funding. We’ll update this post as we learn more.

Update: One of the founders, Jonathan Wu, has gotten in touch with some more detail. He notes that RAVN was active for eight months and the founders decided to close up shop for both the website and iPhone app for several reasons, and they are likely to be familiar ones to others in startup-land: “The website and app were hard to scale, local discovery isn’t social or viral enough to perpetuate organic growth, and we weren’t making enough money to pay for advertising costs,” he wrote to me in an email. “We executed several iterations, but in the end, getting the traction required to grow RAVN into a big business proved to be more difficult than we had originally anticipated.”

He also notes that RAVN faced the same challenges that others such as Plancast have seen in the event discovery space; and his words confirm some of what I wrote above: “Without sustained organic or viral growth and without a solid monetization strategy, scaling is very hard in this space. We’ve toyed with the idea of offering local deals, but this still would not cure the challenges inherent with local discovery.”

He continues: “The problem with local is that it’s very hard to reach critical mass.” He notes that Yelp solved it by focusing on one city at a time and leap-frogging across multiple cities once they had traction. But he also notes that with the area significantly ore crowded with similar offerings, this is significantly harder to do.

“Many of us here believe there is still room for RAVN or another events discovery app to win the market. But they would have to solve the scaling and growth problems that we couldn’t,” he concluded. He also added that they will be raising another round of funding shortly for Touch Of Modern.

For some inexplicable reason, Nintendo and Toyota have teamed up to turn the Nintendo DS into a navigational remote control, thereby allowing drivers (although I hope passengers do most of the fiddling) to set their routes using their game consoles.

The service, called Kuruma de DS lets you see map and destination info as well as tour information as you drive through town. The service slightly gamifies the experience by adding a POI saving option.

The compatible Toyota Smart Navi system costs about $3,000 while the game itself costs $92 – quite a bit of cash to simulate the map screens in Super Mario World. The DS connects to the car via Bluetooth and includes quiz games and delightful Mii characters who show you around town.

via 4gamer via Kotaku

For some inexplicable reason, Nintendo and Toyota have teamed up to turn the Nintendo DS into a navigational remote control, thereby allowing drivers (although I hope passengers do most of the fiddling) to set their routes using their game consoles.

The service, called Kuruma de DS lets you see map and destination info as well as tour information as you drive through town. The service slightly gamifies the experience by adding a POI saving option.

The compatible Toyota Smart Navi system costs about $3,000 while the game itself costs $92 – quite a bit of cash to simulate the map screens in Super Mario World. The DS connects to the car via Bluetooth and includes quiz games and delightful Mii characters who show you around town.

via 4gamer via Kotaku