Hasta La Gadget!

Every night while I’m brushing my teeth, my mom lays out my clothes for the next day. She says I’m her special boy. Then she goes home to her house, leaving me, my wife and our two kids to put ourselves to bed. This system ensure I’m always looking my best. Not everyone has it so lucky. But startup J.Hilburn is attempting to bring a little motherly love to its clothing clients and just launched a great looking iPad app to assist.

J.Hilburn, a Dallas-based startup, is known for its direct-to-sales business model. Much like Avon, the company sends Style Advisors to client’s homes, who then measures the client. J.Hilburn started selling directly to clients through its website last year, but still supports its initial model as evident by its new iPad app, Style Kit.
Click to view slideshow.
As shown by the video below, this app is aimed at the Style Advisors, allowing them to keep a visual inventory of a client’s ordering history. The company rolled out the app to its sales force in July and saw a 67% increase in sales. It should also serve nicely as a virtual dressing assistant for dedicated J.Hilburn customers.

“Our business is driven by our network of skilled Style Advisors, and we created Style Kit to help deliver a more effective, customized shopping experience at the point of sale,” said Veeral Rathod, J.Hilburn Co-Founder and President. “The impact on transaction metrics affirms that the App is an effective way to further enhance the J.Hilburn experience through digital commerce.”

The Style Kit app features J.Hilburn’s full catalog, individual customer profiles, and a so-called My Picks function that allows customers to create Pinterest-type style boards. And as a male blogger a bit embarrassed about his expanding belt line, I’ll be the first to admit that I like shopping for clothes a lot better in the privacy of my dark basement office than in a brightly-lit Macys — plus, these are a lot nicer clothes for the same price.

Some consolidation in the area of companies that offer tools to mobile developers, specifically in the area of quality testing — a must-have for developers working in the highly fragmented world of smartphones and tablets. Boston-based uTest has made its first strategic acquisition: Poland-based Apphance, which it is buying from its parent company Polidea in a seven-figure deal, consisting of cash and uTest equity for Polidea.

As part of the deal, uTest is picking up all of Apphance’s intellectual property, as well as 10 engineers who work on it, to add to uTest’s existing team of 100 employees. And it will continue to sell and develop the product — which helps developers test apps for bugs and distribute new versions of those apps. It will from now be marketed as uTest Apphance and will be offered to developers free of charge for the rest of 2012 to help promote it.

uTest will also be using Apphance itself for its own 60,000-strong army of app testers, as well as adding functionality for it to support HTML5, on top of existing support for iOS, Android, Windows Phone 7, Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s Nook.

The deal is both a sign of how mobile app testing services are growing in use and maturity, and how consolidation will inevitably follow as bigger players continue to scale.

“This acquisition is a giant step forward in the growth of uTest,” Doron Reuveni, CEO of uTest, said in a statement. “By adding Apphance to our in-the-wild testing services, we’ve dramatically increased our value to customers and extended our position as an all-in-one testing solution for mobile developers around the world.”

Among the features of Apphance’s platform are the ability for developers to distribute new versions of their app, gather crash reports, obtain bug reports and solicit user feedback. This is done by way of adding Apphance code into a mobile app, which then lets any device running that app in pre-production or production to then get tracked by Apphance’s system.

The two companies have been in communication since 2011, uTest says.

Since then, uTest’s business has grown five-fold, raising $17 million in the process, and “discussions between the two parties evolved, ultimately leading to today’s announcement.” uTest is on track for a run-rate of $40 million this year, the company says.

Customers for uTest include Google, USA Today, Amazon, Virgin, Sony, Box and Trulia, and the company employs 60,000 testers across 190 countries and all mobile platforms, devices, and carriers, as part of uTest’s “real world” approach to making sure that apps work as they should.

There are literally twelve-zillion apps out there, and with so many of them available for free, it’s easy to accumulate a hearty inventory. But how many of the apps on your tablet do you actually use? Like, more than just once. Regularly. More »

Are you readyyyy to retina!? Sure you are, so if you’ve got your retina MacBook at hand, hop over to RetinaMacApps.com and see all of the apps that are currently retina ready.

It’s just that simple.

The site, made by Wells Riley, Ian Hirschfeld, and Alex Baldwin, this thing probably won’t be interesting once enough folks have retina laptops but it’s a nice little endeavor by a few clever folks. They’ve clearly got a little affiliate cash coming in from this but if you’re curious as to whether your favorite text editor or media player are retina-ready, this is your site.

If your eyes are blessed with looking at the pixel dense Retina Display MacBook Pro, you’d know the scorching ugly hell of non-Retina optimized Mac apps. It’s so awful—way more scarring than non-retina iOS apps—that you wouldn’t want to use those non-Retina apps anymore. So here’s how to find all the apps optimized for your MacBook Pro with Retina Display. More »