Using Fusion Elements from Expedia, OpenTable, and TicketsNow, users can complete transactions right within the app. If they are researching restaurants in the area, as recommended by Fodor’s, they can now see table availability and make a reservation all without leaving the City Guide they are browsing.

In the screenshot below, a user in San Francisco is interested in dining at A16, an Italian restaurant recommended as a “Fodor’s Choice.” They tap to reserve a table and are able to do so via the OpenTable Element.

Amanda D’Acierno, Vice President and Publisher of Fodor’s said, “Fodor’s understands its travelers are on the go and need curated, trusted information, whether they’re in the planning stages or during their travels. We are thrilled to be offering our new free Fodor’s City Guide apps to provide travelers with instantaneous access to our expert recommendations, making booking a fantastic hotel, memorable restaurant, or hit show simple and easy.”

We couldn’t agree more, and are pleased that Fodor’s is one of the first publishers to utilize Fusion Elements to make a comprehensive experience within an existing app.

Elements such as the ones introduced in the Fodor’s City Guides also offer the opportunity for publishers to earn revenue from transactions. Revenue sharing is built into the elements, so that when a traveler books a hotel or makes a restaurant reservation, both the service provider and app publisher benefit from the sale. This is a key offering from Fusion, that we think is the future of app monetization.

In the coming weeks we’ll be putting out more information about how other publishers and developers can take advantage of monetization through Fusion.

Related coverage:
Six-City App Giveaways For Travelers by Fodor’s
Fodor’s Free Mobile Apps for Travel

In the midst of all the buzz about Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of Instagram announced on Monday, you may have missed other Insta-news of the week. We are happy to say that some people were definitely talking about it, but just to fill you in: on Saturday, InstaPad Pro debuted in the App Store! Meanwhile, the original free version of InstaPad has its own bit of news this week…it just hit one million downloads and is one the top 10 apps in the store!

Like the original InstaPad, the “Pro” version lets you view Instagram photos on your iPad and is built in our very own Fusion Studio. You can see a full list of InstaPad Pro’s new features in the App Store, but a few highlights include:

• InstaPad Pro is fully optimized with high resolution images for the new iPad’s Retina Display
• Translate comments from 52 different languages
• Present photos in a “Ken Burns style” slideshow
• Discounted Postcards! Send postcards for only $1.99 instead of $2.99 in the standard version.


We’re proud of InstaPad’s success and the new features in InstaPad Pro, but it wouldn’t have been nearly as easy to produce these apps and add new functionality without our development platform. Specifically, both versions of InstaPad make excellent use of Fusion Elements by providing great features to users, while also creating revenue streams. Two of these, the Sincerely Element and the BluTrumpet Element will soon be available in Fusion Studio to use in your own apps!

We wanted to make a more complete photo experience for InstaPad users, and that including sharing photos with friends and family outside of the digital realm. To offer this feature, InstaPad uses the Sincerely Element to let users easily send printed postcards of their favorite photos without leaving the app. With a few taps, users can go from viewing their photo gallery to mailing a high-quality postcard to anyone in the world.

InstaPad also uses an element to integrate with BluTrumpet to recommend other relevant apps to users in an AppExplorer screen. By participating in the BluTrumpet network, InstaPad has the opportunity to earn revenue when users discover and download apps from other publishers.

These are just two examples of how Fusion Elements can be added seamlessly to enhance your app’s customer experience and monetization potential. If you are currently working in Fusion Studio we hope the InstaPad example inspires you to try out Elements in your own apps as we make them available. If you are a solution provider interested in signing up your service as a Fusion Element, get in touch with us!

Fusion Studio
As we hope you’ve heard, earlier this month we announced Fusion.  Fusion Studio, our web-based app building and management suite was upgraded to make it easier to build beautiful apps, while also introducing the ability to build more functionality into your apps with Fusion Elements. Which brings us to the first number we’d like to lay on you, since we might as well start at the very beginning: zero.  That’s the new cost of using Studio, as in $0.00, otherwise known as free.  Anyone with less than 250,000 push notifications per month gets it all for nothing. Our 30,000 registered users are now able to take full advantage of all that Studio has to offer, at no cost for the majority of them. And they are taking full advantage, cranking out new apps at an impressive rate of 200 per month.

Stats at a Glance

• $0.00 – Cost of Studio
• 250k – Push notifications /month included for free
• 30,000 – Red Foundry registered users
• 200 – Average number of new apps started per day
• 1200 – Average number of apps compiled per month

Apps in the Market
Of the thousands of Red Foundry apps in the market today, many are having great success, gaining traction and popularity. More than a dozen Red Foundry apps are ranked in the Top 100. Instapad is the #1 iPad app in the photo category in over 10 countries, and now boasts over 750,000 users. We’re betting that by the next time we post a numbers wrap up, will be reporting they’ve crossed the million user mark!  

Apps Stats at a Glance

• 1000s –  Red Foundry apps on the market
• Top 100 – we have over a dozen apps that are ranked
• 750k – the number of Instapad users

Red Foundry

• 18 and growing – the size of our team
• 5 – Places where members of our team are located
• 1,135,385,505 – transactions logged…not that it matters, but it’s a big number.

Bonus fun fact: it’s estimated that $175 million is lost due to the decline in worker productivity in just the first two days of March Madness. So it’s probably a good thing that we’re ready to say goodbye to the third month of the year, and turn our noses back to our respective grindstones, er, anvils. We’ve got some great things coming out soon, including the much-anticipated Fusion SDK. So back to work!

First, just to confirm a few things for everyone:

• Our service is now free for most users.
• You can now compile Android apps, but please remember this is still in beta.
• Studio has been updated and renamed as Fusion Studio.
• Yes, Fusion is kind of a big deal.

Our Motive

Everyone wants to create beautiful, useful, successful apps, but getting there can be a challenge for many reasons. The Red Foundry mission has always been, and continues to be, helping people overcome those challenges. We’ve delivered on that mission with a proven platform that has already been used to create thousands of apps, many of which are in the App Store Top 100. We’re proudly building on that success with the introduction of Fusion, but it’s not just about making apps easy to build. Fusion is about creating amazing apps…the kinds of apps that are must-have, memorable, feature-rich, and profitable.

Not long ago, a quality app stood a good chance of getting some attention and providing a reasonable return via app sales alone. But with hundreds of thousands of apps available today, app publishers need to find ways to build more value into their apps and open new revenue channels–all while reducing development costs. Until recently, Red Foundry has been focused on minimizing those development costs by providing both the tools that produce native apps quickly and the infrastructure to measure and manage those apps over time. Providing a cross-platform solution that lets app publishers save time without settling for an HTML-based app has also been a priority, and since just reducing development effort was not enough, we really wanted to address the value and revenue side of the equation.

At the same time, we see a large number of providers out there, various brands, services and other solution providers that have really interesting capabilities. Maybe they have an app that isn’t getting a lot of traction, or they would like to get into mobile, but what they offer alone doesn’t make for a highly popular app. Other providers have figured out that they stand to gain a lot by having a presence in various apps, but struggle with the challenge of providing an API or SDK and maintaining it. Still, developers that want to take advantage of these capabilities can get stuck with a variety of integration and management headaches when faced with using multiple SDKs. Not to mention that complex integrations have often precluded developers from taking advantage of easy to use app development tools like Red Foundry…until now.

This is where Fusion comes in. We believe it’s time to make it easier for these kinds of providers to connect with developers and publishers eager to use them to build more features (and value) into their apps. Even better if those apps can earn more when customers use those features. In short, we’ve evolved our platform to forge relationships that make for better apps and more revenue opportunities. We like to think of it as mashups for mobile.

To make Fusion possible, we created the Fusion Network. It’s a hub for offering a variety of pre-built features, functionality, and services to app developers in the form of Fusion Elements that work with any app built with Red Foundry. Elements can be simple user interface components that look cool and save you time, to complex functionality that add entirely new capabilities to your app. Services made available as an element take on better relevance in the context of how someone is using an app, which translate into higher conversion rates. We’re making it easy to combine elements in apps, so multiple services can come together easily to make for very sophisticated apps.

We didn’t stop there…we’re also offering a Fusion SDK! It seemed wasteful to go to the trouble of establishing relationships, integrating services and creating an abundance of elements, only to force everyone to build their entire app on our platform. If you’re working in a native development environment like Xcode, the Fusion SDK lets you use Fusion Elements in your code. This also means that you can add Fusion Elements to any existing app, so apps don’t have to move to our platform to reap the benefits. Use a little Red Foundry or use a lot, just use what you need. It will save you time and give you access to a vast array of service providers all through a single SDK.

To tie this all together, we’ve upgraded our web-based app building and management suite and renamed it Fusion Studio. Fusion Studio makes it easier than ever to build native apps with our markup language and you can start using some Fusion Elements right now. When the Fusion SDK is released later this spring, developers will be able use Fusion Studio to make use of elements and manage aspects of their app. We will also be turning on the ability for anyone to create an element and make it available on the Fusion Network this summer.

One of the major changes to Fusion Studio is that it will now be entirely free for most users. We are still charging for support and for more than 250,000 push notifications per month, but our pricing plans are going away. We’re doing this because we don’t want a price barrier keeping you from building apps with us. Essentially, our success is now tied more to the quality of our customers’ apps, not sheer numbers of apps published, and that’s how we like it.

Since announcing that Fusion Studio is free, we’ve already had some interesting questions that we might as well address here too. To be absolutely clear, becoming a free service does not mean that we are going to slap ads on your app. Apparently, some of our competitors like to do that, but we think that’s a great way to ruin an app unless you actually want the ads…and if you want the ads, you probably want to get paid for them. That’s worth saying again:

We do not impose ads or any other content on your app whatsoever.

Moving to a free model also doesn’t mean that we’re losing business or desperate. In fact, our customer base has been growing rapidly, and considering everything we’ve just announced, we’re pretty excited about our future.

“So how does Red Foundry make money?” is the logical follow up question. Basically, we see value in the relationships that we create and the features that we make available as Fusion Elements. Fusion is going to provide a host of publisher services –many will be free, but many will also provide commission-based opportunities from our partners, which is where Red Foundry will receive a share. It will always be your choice to use them, but we’re confident that you will find enough value in the elements that we have in store that you will want them.

There is also interest, understandably, in seeing Fusion Elements in action. There are already some excellent apps live in the App Store that use elements: Instapad and Fodor’s Travel Guides.

One of our own apps, Instapad, has been a huge success and we recently added two elements to it: the Blutrumpet Element to advertise other apps within Instapad, and the Sincerely Element which enables users to send printed postcards of Instagram photos to anyone.

Many of Fodor’s travel guides for cities like New York, have also been updated with elements that let customers buy event tickets and make restaurant reservations.

These examples just scratch the surface of what is possible with Fusion. While it’s not a means to produce electricity for the masses, we do expect Fusion to generate a lot of new apps and energize many existing ones. If you’re interested in making elements that bring your feature or service to the Fusion Network, or you just want to get early access to the Fusion SDK, contact us or sign up for Fusion updates as things evolve.

Until yesterday, I attributed Android’s UI issues to maturity (ie as the platform matured, they would have more time to tweak it), and hardware (ie they just needed faster processors). But some recent news in the tech world is painting this as an extremely difficult problem to solve, and may even be impossible without a complete rewrite of every Android app ever created! The firestorm started with this post, https://plus.google.com/105051985738280261832/posts/2FXDCz8x93s by Dianne Hackborn who outlined why Android rendering is actually really great, which prompted a response from Andrew Munn at https://plus.google.com/100838276097451809262/posts/VDkV9XaJRGS to counter that claim. Now it’s always hard to choose one side over the other, but I would probably choose to side with Andrew, because what he describes is very visible to me and if it were something that could easily be fixed, why hasn’t Google done it?

One of the more interesting tidbits in Andrew’s posting was this:

Work on Android started before the release of the iPhone, and at the time Android was designed to be a competitor to the Blackberry. The original Android prototype wasn’t a touch screen device. Android’s rendering trade-offs make sense for a keyboard and trackball device. When the iPhone came out, the Android team rushed to release a competitor product, but unfortunately it was too late to rewrite the UI framework.

Now what I find interesting about all of this is that there are some UIs that seem downright snappy and wonderful on Android. One of these is the home screen UI on the Amazon Kindle, where I noticed that the “cover-flow” like scrolling is beautifully executed. After reading all of this controversy, I started wondering how Amazon pulled it off— and came to the conclusion that they probably built their UI in OpenGL ES. Anyone from Amazon care to confirm/deny this?

All of this begs the question (if what Andrew Munn says is true), will OpenGL ES become the new defacto standard for Android UIs in the future? While we have had few issues getting our Android port to run just as fast as any other Android app, we’ve been wracking our brains trying to figure out how to get it to perform just as nicely as it does on iOS. As it turns out, this might be an exercise in futility. Perhaps OpenGL ES is in our future as well?

Let’s start out with a little experiment here. If you have a mobile phone sitting next to you, pick it up and take a look at it. Look at the plastic or glass, the screen, the buttons and everything else. Now I bet you’re thinking the same thing I am— “I wonder if they used injection molding or thermoforming to make that button,” am I right? Okay, maybe I’m wrong— unless you’re a plastics engineer, my guess you are probably like the rest of the 99.99999% of the population who doesn’t care. Now let’s take this a little further and examine your absolute favorite app on your phone. Do you think a lot of people ask the question, “Hmmm, I wonder if they used HTML5 or native code to build this?”

Before we move on, can we just agree on one thing? By and large, people only care about their experience with a product, and not what technology was used to build it.

Now to frame this discussion, let me pose a couple of questions that I wish I had a nickel for every time someone asked:

• Are HTML5 based mobile applications going to eventually take over the market?
• Why in the hell did Red Foundry choose to base their system on yet another proprietary markup language?

By and large, people only care about their experience with a product, and not what technology was used to build it.

When we first started Red Foundry we had to make the same decision that many people and organizations face today when building an app:

• Use open standards like HTML5 to help us touch a large number of devices.
• Use proprietary tools and native code to help us create the absolute best user experience.

There are plenty of people in the HTML world who would argue that using HTML5 gives you so many benefits that it’s not worth looking at anything else. I’m not here to try to convince them otherwise, because the debate has become religious in nature and not worth the energy. What I can do is point out some of the reasons we disagree, in order to help others who are on the fence to make an informed decision.

To win in F1 you have to have a fast car, and to win in mobile apps you have to have an app that people love to use.

Red Foundry chose to build its platform completely 100% native (including UI rendering) in order to take complete advantage of all the power on the hardware.

You simply have to decide what is most important to you and choose the best tool for the job.

Red Foundry chose to build its own markup language called RFML, which is similar in form to HTML, but purposefully built from the ground up to:

• Address and take advantage of the unique features of differing hardware.
• Combine markup, scripting, styling, and data access into one easy-to-learn language (RFML).
• Optimized exclusively for creating stunning mobile UI’s as efficiently as possible.

Learning a proprietary markup language like RFML takes about the same time as becoming proficient in a mobile HTML framework.

Could you imagine if the iPhone, a Ferrari, or the Mona Lisa were created by a committee?

Another problem that we’ve run into with HTML in the past is supporting the myriad of browsers and their own unique rendering and extension idiosyncrasies. This isn’t going to get any easier with mobile. New mobile browsers are released on a seemingly monthly basis and each of them are trying to add their own special sauce by “enhancing” the HTML spec with their own tags and extensions. This is why developers spend so much time today writing code or utilizing libraries to abstract and fix browser inconsistencies.

Because Red Foundry maintains the one and only “browser” (renderer) for RFML, we can essentially ensure the highest level of compatibility on each platform.

Apps that take advantage of unique hardware features will sell more devices, not universally accessible web apps.

• iPhone users are mentally trained to look for an app in the App Store before they look on the web. The App Store has become the “Google” for discovering mobile apps.
• I know who I’m dealing with— I don’t have to spend hours working on SEO for my web app and dealing with the hundreds of web search engines that might help people discover it. Apple makes it extremely transparent and simple to get my app noticed in their store— make it awesome, and choose a great 100 characters worth of keywords. Now I’m not saying that you don’t also need to market your app outside of the App Store, but it’s certainly not a requirement.
• I get a level playing field. Why isn’t the App Store dominated by huge publishers? Because you can’t pay for placement. Apple doesn’t care how popular your app is, they only care if it’s amazing; and if they think it’s amazing they will make it popular. The same cannot be said for web search engines like Google. In order to get noticed on the web, you have to be popular to begin with.
• They make it really easy to charge for my hard work and for people to pay for that hard work. Pretty self-explanatory.

Another important thing to keep in mind: Proprietary does not mean Evil. We didn’t choose to build a proprietary technology so that we could muscle out the competition and charge users exorbitant fees (building apps with RFML is completely free), nor do we care about being dictatorial about the future of our platform (our customers play a vital role in guiding us). Open and organized standards are extremely important in our world, but when it comes to creating something truly unique and innovative, they don’t always fit the bill. Could you imagine if the iPhone, a Ferrari, or the Mona Lisa were created by a committee? Sometimes you just need stick to your principals and forge your own route to innovate and reach success.

No one cares how you get there, only that you arrive in style.

Cheers,

-jim

As many of you know, we’ve been saying Android support is “coming soon” for a while now. Guess what? Android support is coming soon. How soon? Well, soon enough that we can start talking about it in more depth and revealing features so you can start thinking about how you’re going to bring your apps to whole new audiences with Red Foundry.

After Thanksgiving, we plan to provide a preview of VIZ for Android that will allow you to preview Red Foundry app builds (just like you do now on iOS) but we thought we’d go ahead and give you a sneak peek at things a little early.

One of our favorite customers, Cheezburger Network, has graciously allowed us to show their “I Can Has Cheezburger” app as an example. Originally “forged on Red Foundry” for iOS and now running on Android! It’s not perfect yet, as we’re still adding full-support for everything that we have for iOS, but we’re excited by how close we are to offering this to our customers.

Want to try it out for yourself? You might need our instructions for installing non-Market Android apps, along with this link to the I Can Has Cheezburger app for Android.

Meanwhile, we’ve got some of our best team members testing VIZ for Android right now, and we look forward to showing you a preview of this after Turkey Day!

Right off the bat, the new dual-core A5 chip will mean faster processing speeds with your phone, which translates to an immediate benefit in most of your mobile computing tasks. The new 1080p-capable, 8-megapixel camera is also a bonus, as is iOS 5 and iCloud. However, their game-changer would have to be Siri, which specs out to this in plain English:

“Siri on iPhone 4S lets you use your voice to send messages, schedule meetings, place phone calls, and more. Ask Siri to do things just by talking the way you talk. Siri understands what you say, knows what you mean, and even talks back. Siri is so easy to use and does so much, you’ll keep finding more and more ways to use it.”

Looks like Apple’s Siri is planning on leaving the Android assistant in its dust. We shall see.

So far, Apple is definitely the 800 lb. gorilla on the technical cul-de-sac. According to Apple CEO Tim Cook, more than 250 million iOS devices have been sold, and 92% of corporations are testing or deploying iPads. Cook went on to say that “iPads are showing up everywhere. iPads in schools are helping kids learn in amazing new ways. Every state in the U.S. now has an iPad pilot program or deployment. And almost 1000 schools have a one-to-one program. About 1000 universities across the U.S. have iPad programs.”

More fun Apple facts: iPads are also showing up in airplane cockpits and in hospitals. More than 80 percent of the top hospitals in the U.S. are either testing or deploying iPads (a stunning metric considering the device has only been available for 18 months). Three out of four tablets sold in the U.S. are iPads. Customers have downloaded more than 18 billion apps to date. There are 1 billion downloads per month. Apple has now paid out more than $3 billion to developers.

In addition to the new model, Apple will continue to sell the iPhone 4 at a discounted rate of $99. Perhaps most interestingly, the iPhone 3GS will continue to be sold as well – or given away for free with a new wireless contract.

• Hey Wooorld! with Dwight Howard: http://itunes.apple.com/tw/app/hey-wooorld-dwight-howard/id457044927?mt=8
• I Can Has Cheezburger: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/i-can-has-cheezburger-the/id381442338?mt=8
• FailBlog: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/failblog-official-app-fail!/id457637357?mt=8
• Memebase: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/memebase-the-official-app/id457636337?mt=8
• Athlon Sports: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/2011-college-football/id447693719?mt=8
• Name.com: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/name.com/id447653759?mt=8
• Packaging World Real-Time: http://itunes.apple.com/app/packaging-world-real-time/id460148052?mt=8
• School for the Visual Design: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/school-visual-arts-gdad-grad/id433686061?mt=8
• Air Techniques: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/air-techniques/id459219715?mt=8

Also, one of our awesome Value Added Partners, Blue Wave Media out of sunny San Diego, has released five new killer iPhone apps via iTunes this summer, including:

American Health Journal: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/american-health-journal-mobile/id426887150?mt=8

We’d also like to welcome ChaiONE, from Houston, TX, as our newest Value Added Partner. More information on ChaiONE can be found by logging onto: http://www.chaione.com

Thanks for checking out Red Foundry’s blog…hit us up if you’d like to get mobile, get more customers, and sell more of your stuff!

• VIZ IS NO LONGER ON THE APP STORE. Don’t look for it there, cause it ain’t there. When you log into the new version of my.redfoundry.com, you’ll see that you need to upload your Apple Developer cert and a Provisioning Profile to download a signed copy of VIZ that you can Ad Hoc install onto your device.

• Yes, this means you HAVE TO HAVE AN APPLE DEVELOPER ACCOUNT FROM SQUARE ONE. No way around it. If you want to build apps on Red Foundry now, you’re going to have to register with Apple and pay their $99 fee to join their iOS Developer Program.  It’s a good thing – you’ll need an active Developer Account with Apple to publish your app when you’re finished with it anyways.

• This also means that the App Signing Process will (hopefully) be a little easier. You should not have to use RFAppSigner anymore, as the Builder will prompt you to upload any certificates or provisioning files when you go to publish, and will return you a fully-signed app.

• Very soon we’ll be launching the new developer.redfoundry.com with all-new documentation on the awesome new features in VIZ 2.

Let us know if you have questions.  if you do, visit us at the community forums at community.redfoundry.com.