Startups have become progressively popular in the last decade with the recent the rise of mobile development, and the availability of resources at our fingertips. With the right amount of support and innovation, certain startups can rise above the rest. Below are the top 3 mobile startups for the first quarter of 2012.

1. Pinterest

There’s no denying that Pinterest has almost become a household name, especially among females in their 20′s-30′s. Pinterest is a rising social network that allows its users to share interesting photos with the world via a virtual pinboard. The startup launched in 2010 with a very small team, and since then has acquired more than 140 million users per day with an increase of 180% annual company growth. Its integration with mobile and desktop has been a key to its success. Pinterest has recently become the target of criticism revolving around artist’s copyrights, but their team has been swift to make changes and provide support for the concerned public. You can see our in-depth post on the social network here.

2. Square

Square is an e-commerce startup allowing its users to accept credit card payment from their customers via smartphone or mobile device. Users only pay a small 2.75% fee on purchases and the service is very intuitive. The company has grown to over $1 billion net worth and is a pioneer in mobile e-commerce – you can get the app and device for free by visiting their site.

3. Instagram

Mobile startups are the one of the leading trends for today’s business world, and Instagram is no exception. The startup is a mobile-only photo sharing service and social network that was first developed for iOS and now available for Android. Instagram lets users upload and share their mobile photos with a “hipster” style while integrating a friends and comments system for an additional social network touch. The startup began in 2010 with a small team of just two people, and since then has vastly grew to over 30 million active users to this day. Instagram has become so popular that it was acquired by Facebook in April 2012 for over $1 billion in cash and stock. It will be interesting to see what Facebook does with its new purchase – you can download the free app now via the App Store or Google Play Store.

Bookmark to:
         

Many people were introduced to social gaming thanks to the barrage of repetitive invite requests through Facebook to join programs such as Farmville, Mafia Wars, and Social City. However, those days of mass invitations has peaked. Social gaming has started to see its own fate – obsolescence. Although there are many who will attempt to refute this idea in the hopes of maintaining a quick way to earn a large sum of money, the reality is that the fad is over and the bubble has burst.

Initially an unprecedented amount of people did take an interest in building farms, cities, and mafias with their friends. Farmville was and still is one of the premier social gaming programs introduced through Facebook and over the course of its existence has been very popular – spawning a variety of parodies. Currently that poppularity is dropping at a rate much faster than it can attain new users, creating a famine of new users and people to help farm your land. But it’s not just Farmville that is suffering.

As of August 2010, according to AppData Mafia Wars had approximately 45.5 million monthly accounts created. Of course, Mafia Wars did not maintain this level of activity for very long. In fact, just a few months later their number of monthly accounts created dropped exponentially to 10.7 million and only continued to drop quickly as the months passed. By February of 2012, the number of daily active users dropped from its peak of 1.2 million to 540,000. People are burned out by these games. CityVille also had a massive drop off of daily users returning.

When looking at data comprising all social gaming, it becomes clear that there is always an extremely high amount of users taking interest initially.  This boom in initial interests deceives some start-ups in thinking that this is a viable space to play in. However, the data is clear in proving that after the initial boom, the road to disinterest and users leaving is inevitable.

Bookmark to:
         

Cathay Pacific airlines and Klout announced today a Klout lounge in the SFO (San Francisco) airport.  Per the announcement on the Klout website:

Starting today, San Francisco International Airport (SFO) visitors using the Klout for iPhone app need only show a Score of 40 or higher to enter the Cathay Pacific First and Business Class Lounge. Previously, the only way to see the inside of a Cathay Pacific Lounge was by holding a First or Business Class plane ticket. Now, Klout unlocks access to this amazing experience. This applies to any visitor traveling through the “A” boarding area at SFO’s international terminal, even if they aren’t a Cathay Pacific passenger.

In order to access the lounge, you must have the Klout app downloaded on your phone. This type of integration of Klout into real life benefits has been on the rise since the announcement of Klout perks earlier this year.

Bookmark to:
         

On the heels of the Instagram purchase, Facebook bought Glancee this week. Glancee is a mobile, start-up app and is based on the idea of meeting new people instead of connecting with people you already know.

The app allows you to find people who are in your general vicinity with common interests and view their profile. Minimal details have been given about this new acquisition according to an article from The Wall Street Journal.

Bookmark to:
         

According to Foursquare’s Blog , over 20,000,000 people have used its service “to discover and share new experiences.” Foursquare has emerged as an incredibly powerful tool for businesses who want to connect with their customers, and, according to Foursquare, over 750,000 of them have already signed up for its free merchant tools that they are hoping will help them attract new visitors and keep their most loyal ones coming back.

In response to the demand from businesses, Foursquare now offers the option to instantly verify a business on foursquare for a one-time fee of $10. Businesses are still able verify by mail at no cost with an expected wait for verification of three to four weeks. Once verified, businesses can start using foursquare’s free tools instantly, offering Specials, updating listings, and obtaining stats about visitors. There is no charge for venues that have already been verified.

Will Foursquare’s proactive approach with businesses help it maintain its status as preeminent leader of location-based apps? Let us know know in the comments.

Bookmark to:
         

By Diana Ajih

Klout, the startup that rates users online influence and social reach, plans on expanding the +K button outside of Klout.com this coming June. The +K rollout will allow brands and publishers to embed the button on their site thus enabling visitors to rate them as influential on a given topic with a simple click of a mouse.

“Reading a great music blog on Tumblr? Give them a +K in Music. Did a particular tweet from Steve Carell get you in stitches? +K him in Comedy.” -Klout Blog

This feature may particularly appeal to the wave of brands looking to become more conversational (and less promotional)—or even publishers themselves.

As for brand pages, the +K button would allow closer ties between a brand’s website and Klout page. Klout CEO and co-founder Joe Fernandez is also looking at how to better integrate brand pages with Klout Perks platform, which lets brands target offers to users based on their Klout scores.

Klout wants to reward us for what we’re already doing online — connecting with other people over things that we care about. With continued improvements, Klout is going to be an incredible tool to help people.

Bookmark to:
         

Facebook is allowing developers to create Action Links to posts that come from apps increase interaction. Essentially, by implementing a development code you can create a custom action that appears next to the “Like” and “Comment” buttons on posts. This new development feature may become very popular with business pages that contain app ties-ins to increase engagement and new ways to save or share information.

Instead of just seeing your friend’s post from Tumblr in the Facebook feed, it now would be possible to have an option to “Follow” or “ReBlog” on the post itself that could redirect you to the Tumblr app. With so many possibilities, these Action Links are sure to start spreading quickly.

Bookmark to:
         

Twitter is an often overlooked platform, and is a very powerful tool for social media  marketing campaigns. With Micro-blogging as its main feature, Twitter is a great way to share interesting news and content in 140 characters or less – keeping everything short and simple without the clutter of Facebook. It’s great for businesses to network with one another and promote themselves to over 140 million diverse and active users. Twitter has one drawback – an over-simplified interface that  doesn’t provide a great workflow for business. The good news is that several Twitter management systems have come to save the day and make Twitter campaigns much more efficient and easy. In this post we’ll focus on two tools for content and growth, respectively.

The first must-have Twitter management utility is Hootsuite, which was created in 2008 and has since risen to great popularity among the Social Media Marketing world. The Twitter scheduling system is free to use and packed with features like a built in URL shortener, multi-column feed management system, and the ability to manage many Twitter accounts under one Hootsuite login. It saves a huge amount of time, as you no longer need to manually post your tweets or login separately to the many accounts that you manage. Hootsuite also supports other social networks such as Facebook, Linkedin, and Foursquare, and offers built in analytics and reporting (although you need to pay for most custom reports). Hootsuite Pro is its premium service with several added features such as unlimited social accounts and no ads.

Tweepi is the essential Twitter tool for growth – a free service that allows bulk following/unfollowing with one click, eliminating the time-consuming method of doing it manually for each user. You can follow any specific Twitter account’s followers, Twitter Lists, or even copy/past a list of Tweeps to follow. There are also options to follow back and cleanup. The free version shows up to 40 users per page, sorted by several filters such as when they last tweeted, follower count, Klout score, and tweet count. The ability to only manage one account per login is the only drawback with Tweepi.

Using both Hootsuite and Tweepi will save a huge amount of time and labor on your personal or business marketing efforts, and ultimately create a much easier workflow. With several top-tier companies like McDonald’s, Pepsi, and Sony using  these tools, it’s an obvious choice for professionals. Take a look at both tools if you haven’t yet, and let us know what you think about them in the comments below.

Bookmark to:
         

Yesterday, Flickr announced a new feature that allows you to share an image from Flickr directly onto Pinterest while automatically attributing credit to the correct person.  This attribution cannot be edited and is permanently tied to the URL of the image. This feature also allows content publishers to decide whether or not they want their images pinned or shared across social networks. Additionally if an image is pinned from a website which has embedded a Flickr image, Pinterest will be able to “automagically” pull the correct copyright information from Flickr.

According to the blog post, this feature is also retro active, “Pinterest went back and added the proper attribution to all photos that have been pinned from Flickr so far. With this new feature, having your photos on Flickr gives you much more certainty that you will be attributed when your photos are being shared on Pinterest.” For businesses concerned with copyright issues, this relationship between Flickr and Pinterest might provide a solution to some of their concerns.

Read the full post over on the Flickr blog.

Bookmark to:
         

Google announced the release of Google Drive today on the official Google Blog.  Google Drive offers 5GB of storage free, with options to increase your storage for a small fee. Google Drive works similarly to Google Docs in that you can update files on the cloud from anywhere and it works with other google products. Even more exciting, Google suggested that you may be able to add Google Drive attachments directly into a GMail email you’re sending.

For more information about Google Drive, check out the video Google put out this morning:

Bookmark to: