Hasta La Gadget!

BBM for iOS and Android was released in October and so far we’ve seen some success from the app, such as it experiencing an impressive 5 million downloads within 8 hours of its launch, and with the app rising to the number 2 spot on the iTunes App Store shortly after its release, however it seems that the success of the app could be limited to certain regions. According to Distimo, they have been keeping an eye on the cross-platform version of BBM for iOS and based on their findings, it seems that over in countries such as India, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, BBM has no problems holding its own against the likes of LINE, WeChat, KakaoTalk, and Viber.

However over in countries such as China, Japan, and Korean, BBM has yet to make a significant impact and are clearly dominated by the competition. In a way this isn’t surprising as BlackBerry devices have been popular in regions such as Indonesia, India, Malaysia, and the Philippines (Thailand as well, but oddly enough they weren’t listed in Distimo’s survey), so it could be that former BlackBerry users who might have made the switch to iOS wanted to remain in touch with BlackBerry friends, or perhaps preferred the more familiar interface that is BBM, could explain the app’s popularity.

BBM Shows Signs Of Popularity In India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines original content from Ubergizmo.

Misfit Wearables, the hardware startup that built a sleek activity tracker called the Shine, just picked up $15.2 million from Li Ka-shing’s Horizons Ventures in a big, new growth round.

Jason Wong, a director at the Hong Kong-based firm, will be joining the board. Misfit added that all of its existing investors, including Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, Paypal co-founder Max Levchin and incTANK all participated and took their full pro-­rata in the round.

Misfit was co-founded by former Apple CEO John Sculley along with Sonny Vu and Sridhar Iyengar, who were behind the medical devices company that had the first Apple blessed add-on for the iPhone, which was a glucose meter.

Misfit launched the Shine earlier this year; it’s a quarter-sized activity tracker that awards users points for walking, running and swimming among other activities. Unlike other wrist-bound activity trackers, the Shine can be worn anywhere — as a clip-on to your shoes or your shirt, or as a necklace. That form factor has made it surprisingly popular among female consumers, we’ve heard from sources close to the company.

Like competing products such as the Jawbone, the Shine pairs itself with a mobile app that shows day-by-day graphs of activity. It has a cool syncing behavior, where you place the Shine on top of your smartphone and little circles radiate outward from the device until your phone downloads the data it contains.

The company hasn’t shared detailed statistics on sales so far except to say that that they’ve shipped “hundreds of thousands” of units to more than 20 countries in the last few months.

They’ve also scored key distribution deals with retailers like Apple, Best Buy and Target, which will help on top of online sales through their website.

The funding is going toward new, yet-to-be-launched products that should come out next year. CEO Sonny Vu says that the Shine was merely a starting product and that they have a number of other wearable concepts in the works.

Google has made its Google Compute Engine generally available, more reliable, and less expensive. This will attract more developers and engineers to use Google’s cloud platform for running computations and apps on behalf of their customers. This in turn will lead to more of the public’s data and activities being processed through Google’s data centers […]

Google is developing Chrome apps support for iOS and Android. Chrome apps are Web apps that operate independently and offline. They use HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS, as well as Chrome-branded APIs. Currently, Chrome apps are only available for the desktop. But by January they may also be available for mobile devices, if The Next Web‘s […]

A growing obsession with digitally archiving everyday life has given rise to countless apps facilitating your diaristic tendencies. Rising above the clutter is Bokeh, a new service that strips lifelogging to its essentials with a pared-down app that stresses less is more.

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