The Best Apps to Accelerate Your Startup
The startup life has never been easy. More than 90% of mobile apps fold within a year of launch. Even fewer move on to become commercially viable. At the same time, startup profits are higher now than they’ve ever been before, with mobile app developer revenues from the Apple App Store and Google Play rising […]
Startup Founders Looking to AgTech as next Frontier
KisanHub is a startup with a simple mission: using tech to help farmers grow more crops more efficiently, while using less land. While iPad app developers might not immediately think of agriculture and farming when they think of unicorn-level startup opportunities, venture capitalists beg to differ — KisanHub just closed a $1 million seed funding […]
Can Mobile Apps Make a Real Contribution to Social Justice?
While Facebook’s stance on censorship remains murky, the unicorn tech giant has issued multiple statements insinuating that the platform — and Facebook live in particular — can have a positive impact by bringing transparency to everyday life. Last week’s controversial police shooting video, which was quickly removed from the platform before being reinstated after public […]
Y Combinator to Build “ultimate Full-Stack Startup”: A City
Y Combinator made a controversial announcement last week that their nonprofit arm would begin research towards building an entire city from scratch. The accelerator’s mobile app development projects have raised record-setting returns for the group, fueling a multi-million dollar nonprofit fund which Y combinator president Sam Altman hopes to grow to 100 million in coming […]
On-demand Service Startups Start Targeting the Suburbs
Food delivery startup Farm Hill announced their intention to expand into San Francisco last week, which doesn’t sound like hot news until you look at the context — specifically, the expansion “into” rather than “out of” a city. Farm Hill is backed by high-profile VCs like SOMA Capital and associated with Standford’s accelerator StartX. Regardless, rather […]
Uber Rushes to Claim the “Uber for X” Startup Market
Uber just made UberRush available publicly to mobile app developers, allowing anyone to build on-demand services on top of Uber’s existing driver and delivery network. The result? A much shorter runway for small startups looking to become “Uber for X.” Rather than sourcing and maintaining their own fleet of drivers or delivery people, developers can pay […]
Google Launches Hardware Initiative to Teach Kids Code
Google just launched a new hardware initiative, Project Bloks, with the aim of expanding youth exposure to coding principles through “tangible coding.” Unlike the software-based coding systems mobile app developers who work with kids might be familiar with, tangible coding systems represent coding concepts — objects, binaries, if/then statements — as physical objects that can […]
How Much Does it Cost to Develop an App?
Short answer: anywhere from $25,000–500,000. Long answer: building an app is like building a house. Who is it for? Bricks or beams? What’s the neighborhood like? Tree houses and penthouses are both “houses,” but serve radically different purposes at radically different price points. The team here at Dogtown has launched over 100 mobile app […]
Uber Trying to Win Back Their Most Valued Resource: Drivers
Uber, like any sharing-economy mobile app developer, has two main resources: workers and customers. This may sound simplistic, but it’s actually a tricky and unique balance in the on-demand startup industry, compared with worker and consumer relations in more traditional companies. When a mobile app becomes the interface between employer and employee, efficiency increases — […]
Apple Says App Store Ad Changes Won’t Hurt Small Developers
iPhone app developers have been voicing concerns about Apple’s new App Store app-install advertising proposal, after an email to developers announcing the beta program went out to the development community. According to Apple, Search Ads will be similar to Google Adwords in that users will place bids on relevant keywords in order to appear at […]