We knew that the DailyBooth team, creators of photo sharing app Batch, moved on to greener pastures at Airbnb. The acquisition was to bolster the mobile apps and presence for Airbnb. What we didn’t know is what the fate of its products would be, but now we do.

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Today, the “Batch team” sent out an email to its users informing them that they should download their photos, because the service will be shutting down today:

The email comes off as a bit short, signing off with “it’s been real.” It’s always a shame when a service shuts down, no matter how big or small the userbase is. Someone will be affected and have to find an alternative.

Its website also carries the same message. Batch.com is a heck of a domain name. I wonder if Airbnb has ownership of that, too.

At the time of its launch, Batch drew high praise from the likes of our very own Michael Arrington, who called it “maybe the perfect photo sharing app.” Since I’m a photo freak, I enjoyed using it as well, although it didn’t quite grip for me after a while. I’m guessing I’m not the only one.

The app allowed you to create “Batches” of photos from an event and free the photos from your Camera Roll on iOS. If you’ve shared photos, you can use its website to connect to Facebook and grab them quickly. Do so, because everything will be deleted on November 8th. Hmph.

We’ve reached out to Airbnb and DailyBooth founder Brian Pokorny for further comment or if any of the technology from the service will be integrated into Airbnb’s own mobile service.

Vineloop, a social recommendations platform which first launched into beta late last year, is today relaunching its mobile app for iPhone offering a completely redesigned user interface, additional categories, a favoriting function and more. And while, yes, there are quite a lot of mobile apps on the market promising to provide the best line-up of recommendations from your friends, Vineloop at least has an original idea of how these recommendations should work.

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I’ll admit that when I looked at Vineloop last year, I came away unimpressed. I didn’t care for the user interface at the time, and didn’t feel that it had the potential to make an impact. (Springwise has a review, posted back in December, if you’re curious). Today’s relaunch, however, has me reconsidering. Vineloop looks better and has more to offer now. I’m not fully sold, to be clear, but I’m coming around. The user interface still feels somewhat overwrought, and in its efforts to be original, the startup is crams a lot of new terminology down our throats: “trustlines,” “True10,” and “Pocket,” are terms which everyday users aren’t going to immediately grasp. (Your mileage my vary, as they say.)

According to CEO, sorry “co-CEO” (ha), and founder Lou Vastardis, the company felt like they had to introduce new words for these features because they’re entirely new concepts.

Well, that’s not true with “Pocket” – it means favoriting/saving for later. But Trustlines is Vineloop’s big draw. Essentially, it solves the “cold start” problem in social apps. That’s when you, early adopter that you are, sign up for a social app and find that only a handful of your friends are using it. Bored, you move on. With Trustlines, though, you gain access to a “trust graph” (as opposed to a “social graph”) of users whose recommendations you can follow. So, let’s say you trust one friend of yours for his excellent wine reviews, then it’s probable that the friends he trusts for their wine reviews also have content you would be interested in. And whomever those friends trust for wine, are likely to be similarly savvy.

In Vineloop, the way this works is that you “activate” people in each category (books, movies, music, etc.) to start serving up their recommendations, as well as those coming from the friends they trust for that same category. In this way, even if you have very few friends on the app itself, you have access to many relevant recommendations.

As for “True10,” this is Vineloop’s concept for ratings. In a nutshell, it aims to fix the issue of today’s rating systems. “The problem that’s out there in the marketplace today that everyone’s just continuing to ignore is that whether it’s five stars, likes, emoticons, stamps – it doesn’t matter, they all face the same issue,” explains Vastardis. “The more you use them the more irrelevant they become,” he says.

For example, the first time you rate a wine, you might think “wow, this is the best wine ever!” and give it a “10.” But the more you learn about wine, and the more wines you rate, the more likely it is that the first wine you rated a “10″ would now be rated lower. In most rating systems, you would have to go back and manually adjust those earlier ratings. But with the “True10″ scale, when you rate another wine a 10, it bumps down the older 10 to something lower. Actually, it asks you to confirm whether or not you want to adjust your previous ratings, because it’s entirely plausible that there are many “10″-level wines out there. However, if you say yes (i.e., “adjust my older ratings”), then your newest 10 becomes a “True10.”

Get it? Whew.

Unfortunately, while it’s certainly an interesting concept, and one that makes a lot of sense, the fact that Vineloop requires so much explanation could be a sticking point for the app. Complexity doesn’t sell on mobile. The best apps are those that don’t “walk you through” how to use them upon first launch because they don’t have to. You can just launch the app and everything makes sense. Vineloop doesn’t offer that experience. There’s a learning curve. That said, if you can overcome that aspect, then you’ll be rewarded with a lot of recommendations even if your entire social network doesn’t sign up.

Vineloop currently offers recommendations for beer, wine, spirits, restaurants, books, movies, music (albums and songs), TV, and beauty. More are on the way, and like other apps in the space, if you like something, you can buy it or book it through affiliate partnerships with Amazon, iTunes, Sephora, OpenTable and others. The app is available now as free download in iTunes.

A Philly-based team of seven, Vineloop has an undisclosed amount of angel funding from local investors.

Glympse, the location-sharing app which first debuted back in 2009, is still hanging in there. The app arrived at a time when its competitors were the original, location-based social networks such as Loopt and Brightkite, now long gone. But Glympse survived – and today, it’s getting a revamp. The company, which has slowly grown its install base to 3 million users, is updating its mobile apps on Android, iPhone and iPad with several new features, including support for groups, calendar integration, and more.

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Although the app looks a lot different now than it did back in May 2009, the core functionality has evolved very little over the years. Instead of offering a social network for check-ins, Glympse always believed there was value in the more utilitarian functionality of sharing your location with friends on a more individualized basis. That is, instead of making your location continually public to your social network, you would send a Glympse which would automatically share your current location for a set amount of time, allowing friends or colleagues to track your approach as you head their way for a meetup or a meeting. Put simply, it’s ephemeral, disposable location-sharing.

Today Glympse is hoping to expand adoption with the introduction of new use cases. With Glympse Groups, for example, the idea is to allow a group of users to share their location during common activities, like sporting events, conferences, meetings, or social gatherings. It’s an idea somewhat reminiscent of the location-sharing apps that made the scene at SXSW 2011 – for example, Beluga, GroupMe, and the like. (Beluga and GroupMe have since been acquired, the former by Facebook, the latter by Skype. Other competitors weren’t as fortunate).

Meanwhile, with Glympse’s newly added Calendar integration, the app allows users to automatically send out location updates associated with a particular event, so participants can avoid the “on my way” and “running late” emails, calls and texts.

Also arriving today is a “request a Glympse” feature, which lets current users request that their friends or family send them a response with their location via Glympse. The feature, of course, requires the recipient to download the app to do so, if they have not done so already.

According to CEO Bryan Trussel, the changes were brought on by a combination of user feedback, analytics, and a bit of intuition. “The main thrust in the new version of Glympse was moving from solely one-way sharing – me letting you know where I am – to mutual sharing, which makes it easier to share location two ways or with a specified group,” he explains. “Both of these were possible with the old app, but too cumbersome. For example, now with Request-A-Glympse, it’s two clicks for me to ask where you are, and a single click to respond.”

Trussel says Glympse is primarily used by consumers, but the Calendar integration is aimed at attracting business users to the service, as it streamlines the process of sending a Glympse to meeting participants. “The new feature imports the attendees, the location, and the meeting name and time automatically,” he says. “It went from a 30-second to 3-second effort.”

Glympse raised $7.5 million in June 2011, and more recently announced a partnership which sees its service integrated into the dash of 2013 Mercedes-Benz Series A Class vehicles. Trussel also hints that other partnerships with third-parties are on the way. That’s good news, then, because 3 million users pales in a time when some industry folks are proclaiming 10 million is the new 1 million.

You may have lumped Glympse in the location-based social app bucket, the truth is that the startup’s main competitor is still SMS. “We’re comfortable that in many ways we’re superior now,” says Trussel. But that’s a statement that’s been true of a number of companies which took on SMS with an advanced feature set, but were never able to gain critical mass.

The updated Glympse apps will be rolling out their respective app stores today, or you can download them from here instead.

Glassmap, the YC-backed location startup launched at the beginning of the year as something of a “Find My Friends” app for Facebook users, is today introducing a new vertical for business customers. With the debut of “Glassmap Business Solutions,” as the system is being called, both brands and local brick-and-mortar retailers can take advantage of the technology Glassmap built in order to better target customers on an individualized basis.

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The solution allows the businesses to build their own self-branded, consumer-facing application on top of Glassmap’s mobile technology platform. It’s essentially a white-labeling of everything that Glassmap has to offer. That includes “Relay,” the company’s proprietary, patent-pending framework that locates users in real-time without the battery drain associated with other location-based mobile apps. And it includes “Cerberus,” Glassmap’s relevancy engine launched this summer, which determines what nearby information a user may be interested in (photos, events, etc.), and then uses that info to personalize its map-based interface.

This relevancy-based targeting is different from Facebook’s targeting capabilities, the company believes, because it’s not about narrowing a large data set down to smaller demographic groups. Instead, it starts with the individual, and targets them in real-time with personalized, relevant information based on their activities, those of their friends, and their current location.

One example of how this could be used for retailers, comes from Glassmap’s business solution alpha testers. Some have been experimenting with a feature that could target consumers as they enter rival businesses by pushing a special offer from their own shop.

Glassmap co-founder Geoffrey Woo says that a business-focused solution has been in demand from top 50 multinational brands and local business alike, and it made sense as an additional source of revenue for the young company. The consumer-facing mobile app is not going away, however. “We see our business vertical as complimentary to our main consumer application,” says Woo. “Selling ads misaligns our incentives against our users and keeping a best-in-class user experience is our primary goal. But we also need to generate revenue. With latent small business demand, the business vertical seems like a perfect opportunity to fill a niche and to develop the small business relationships for future initiatives,” he adds.

The company, which relaunched its iOS and Android mobile apps just two months ago, doesn’t talk in terms of active users, but Woo notes that you can now browse over 2.5 million user profiles and over 200,000 photos and status updates within Glassmap. There are now over 500 million location data points which have been generated by Glassmap users, up from 300 million in August.

The company is offering a 50% discount to the first 10 TechCrunch readers who want to try out the new business platform. Just use the code “TC50” at sign-up.

San Francisco-based Glassmap was co-founded by Woo, Jon Zhang, and Jonathan Chang. The startup came under a little fire (mainly from tech pundit Robert Scoble) shortly after launch for auto-sharing to Facebook. It’s hardly the first company to do so, but even a minor controversy could have put some early adopters off. (See the founders’ response here). Focusing on businesses as a new revenue source, then, makes sense – especially since the new wave of geo-based ambient social apps has turned out to be mostly a dud in terms of real-world adoption.

Google just launched the latest version of its Google+ apps for Android and iOS. The most important new feature in this update is support for Google+ pages. Page owners can now view, post and comment from their mobile devices, something quite a few Google+ users have been asking for ever since Google first launched pages last November.

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Google says the ability to manage pages was one of its “most highly-requested features” for the Google+ mobile apps.

The Android and iOS apps are getting a number of other new features as well. For the iOS version, this mostly means catching up with the Android app. The iOS app, for example, now finally lets you edit your posts after you have published them. In addition, you can now save photos to your camera roll and the updated app now supports the iPhone5′s larger screen.

One new feature that’s specifically for iPad users is the ability to search for people and posts from inside the app (the iPhone app already offered this capability before).

The Android version didn’t get quite as many updates. It now offers a redesigned “Find People’ experience and homescreen widget. Google also says that the app now allows you to access photos from posts with just one click.

Here is the full announcement:

New in the mobile app: support for Google+ pages

Today we’re rolling out v3.2 of the Google+ app to Android and iOS; both versions include one of our most highly-requested features: support for Google+ pages. This gives page owners the ability to post, comment, and interact with their followers directly from their mobile device.

Additionally:
- The Android version includes an updated widget, and a new ‘Find People’ experience.
- The iOS version adds iPhone 5 and iOS 6 support, and the ability to edit your posts.

The new app is available now from Google Play (http://goo.gl/xaxMx) and the App Store (http://goo.gl/RVv2S), so give it a spin and let us know what you think!

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Angry Birds has become such a mobile institution, and its maker, Rovio, has gone so far in its extension of that brand — toys, books, t-shirts, cereal, theme parks, films and more games – that this morning’s invitation to a launch of Rovio’s first ever book app came as something of a surprise. But it’s true: despite all the work Rovio (and others that Rovio seems to tolerate happily) has put into spinning out its wildly successful mobile game about catapulting birds onto structures made by pigs, the company has never produced an official book app.

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That’s all changing come next week, when Rovio will unveil its first effort into the e-book app market. And it’s choosing one of the biggest events on the publishing world calendar — the Frankfurt Book Fair — to unveil it.

The invitation, as you can see below, doesn’t give a huge amount away. What we can see is that it’s not clearly branded Angry Birds, but we do have a lot of pig heads piled up. But that could also be just a bit of opportunistic cross marketing: right now Rovio is hard at work promoting another product, the new game Bad Piggies, even giving over the home page of the Angry Birds URL to the purpose.

What will be interesting to see is how Rovio flies the “book app” format: there have been e-books that are effectively facsimiles of printed books; and mobile apps that are games and clearly not books. Where book apps really stand out is when they combine a reading (often word-based) narrative with lots of interactivity, something that Rovio very much does well. It’s been something used a lot in non-fiction book apps but you can see how a ‘choose your own adventure’ format, for example, could work really well here.

There have been some who have argued that Angry Birds poses the biggest threat to the publishing industry. Let’s see what kind of reception the Mighty Eagle and his crew get next week.

Secure enterprise mobility company Good Technology, which makes products for securing and managing the mix of mobile devices finding their way into businesses thanks to the BYOD (bring your own device) trend, has announced it is acquiring mobile application management and enterprise app store firm AppCentral – another company riding the BYOD device wave, by offering businesses a cloud-based repository to simplify distribution and management of enterprise apps. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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The pair said the acquisition will “extend the capabilities” of Good Technology’s Good Dynamics platform — which allows enterprises to secure, control and distribute apps — by adding AppCentral’s AppGuardian application wrapper and also by incorporating its mobile application management technologies. Adding an app wrapper adds an extra later of security and threat mitigation to enterprise apps. “The combination of AppCentral’s enterprise app storefront and ‘app wrapping’ capabilities with the Good Dynamics platform will deliver the scalability and control needed to manage mobile apps across iOS, Android, and Windows devices,” the press release notes.

Here’s more on exactly what Good Technology sees AppCentral bringing to its platform

AppCentral’s ‘app wrapping’ capability builds upon the application security framework, libraries and services available in the Good Dynamics platform. With the addition of AppCentral, Good Dynamics provides enterprise developers and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) with the option to either add an application security ‘wrapper’ without code integration, or integrate Good Dynamics security libraries directly into their application code. While both approaches provide enterprise-grade application security, code integration delivers additional benefits, such as enabling developers to define app-specific policies (e.g. controlling file access in collaboration apps based on size, type, or other attributes) and to publish app services that multiple apps can utilize without having to duplicate code across every app (e.g. “directory lookup”, “search”, etc.).

The transaction closed yesterday. All app AppCentral staff will become full-time employees of Good Technology. The AppCentral headquarters in San Francisco, California will become a Good Technology office.

“Our goal is to help make it easy for our customers to securely mobilize and empower their workforces with a wide range of devices and productivity applications,” said King Lee, president and CEO, of Good Technology in a statement. “Our acquisition of AppCentral will accelerate and enhance our ability to provide enterprises, ISVs and systems integrators with the ability to secure and manage mobile apps, helping them maximize the power of mobility.”

In August, the founders of TechCrunch Disrupt finalist Hmmm announced their plans to shift their attention (dare you to say pivot!) to a new app discovery service called Hubbl. Today, Hubbl is available for download on both the iOS and Android app stores. Although the new app is participating in a crowded space, Hubbl has a unique and engaging design, and makes clever use of the now-familiar hashtag for organizing and sharing your opinion around mobile apps.

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Hubbl, as you might have guessed, is named for the famous telescope, and it uses the idea of “star-gazing” to inspire its theme and design. A feature in the app called “SkyView,” for example, lets you gaze at the universe of mobile apps with different lenses. App icons are laid out across the night sky, and you can move a slider to showcase apps which are now popular in the news, apps popular among your friends and others in the Hubbl community, and apps seeing activity among your friends specifically.

While the SkyView section allows for a more serendipitous form of app discovery, the key feature in this app is its use of hashtags. You can search for apps based on how users have hashtagged (labelled) them and you can use a “Suggest” option to recommend apps to others by tagging the app with what you use it for the most. Unlike in the iOS App Store, where developers create the keywords which enable their app to be discovered through search, Hubbl turns over the keyword creation process to its community of users, via crowdsourcing techniques.

This could end up being a better tool for discovery than the official App Store because sometimes, developers fail to understand how users perceive their application. So they might categorize their app for “note-taking” and “reminders,” perhaps, while a good number of users have decided it makes for an excellent “grocery list” application. With Hubbl’s hashtags, a search on its platform could retrieve the app based on hashtags related to the latter term, while the same search on the iOS App Store, for example, may have never retrieved the application at all. (That’s also why this news from earlier this morning related to Apple’s possible termination of app discovery apps is concerning. These have the potential to do offer better ways to find new apps than the official App Store).

During Hubbl’s private beta, the app saw some notable traction among testers: 40,000 apps were discovered via Hubbl, 20,000 apps were hashtagged, and 55,000 social interactions took place, which includes adding apps to favorites, among other things. The average session time was at a remarkably high 9.5 minutes as well.

In the version of Hubbl launching today, there’s also a gaming layer that features a leader board with “Appstronaut” (get it?) positionings. Further down the road, Hubbl will begin to award Top Discoverer and Top Contributors with real-world rewards, through in-app contests and other activities meant to encourage continual participation. Today’s launch also includes a developer program, which will allow app publishers to come in and claim their apps in order to gain access to a custom dashboard where they can learn more about user engagement around their app on Hubbl’s platform.

Be Warned: Still Beta, Still Buggy

Hubbl’s design has changed somewhat since its beta, but it seems a bit less cluttered now and therefore, easier to use. As a beta tester myself, the app was fun, and I enjoyed the concept of app discovery via hashtag. I’ve been looking forward to the public launch, but was really disappointed this morning to find that Hubbl is now plagued by a bug on iOS which leads the app to crash quite a bit. Hubbl’s founders, Archana Patchirajan and Kusha Choksi, assure me there’s an update submitted to Apple to address this, and it should be fixed ASAP, but you should definitely be aware of this in the meantime. Honestly, you may even want to hold off on launching this thing until they get it stable.

To be fair to readers, I would normally refrain from covering a buggy app, but because the app is live now, because it’s cross-platform (Android and iOS), because the bug is limited to iOS 6, and because the founders previously had what it took to make it to the Disrupt stage in the past, I’ve decided to go ahead and put this news out there, and let you decide whether or not it’s worth bookmarking Hubbl for later use.

I think there’s potential with Hubbl to be an interesting tool in the emerging and busy app discovery market (see also AppFlow, Kinetik, Crosswalk, Discovr Apps, AppsFire, Xyologic, etc.), but all will hinge on whether or not Hubbl’s crew can work out the kinks and grow its user base significantly after doing so. And that’s still a big unknown.

You can grab the Android version here, and iTunes version here, if you’re interested in testing Hubbl further.

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The cost of bringing in new users to mobile apps declined last month as developers and consumers waited for the new iPhone 5.

The average daily download volume for the top 200 free iPhone apps dropped by 7.3 percent to 4.05 million. The cost to acquire a loyal user, or one that opens an app three times, fell by 20 cents to $1.34.

Many of the very biggest mobile developers like Groupon and gaming companies like GREE and Zynga have to spend multiple millions of dollars a month in user acquisition to make sure they have a constant flow of new and returning customers. Fiksu, which helps developers optimize how they spend on different app marketing channels, tracks billions of app actions every month to figure out which ones are most cost effective.

The August dip is seasonal, and Fiksu generally sees it every year before a big phone launch. Marketing costs are likely spiking again right now as developers bump up spending to be in front of new or upgrading iPhone owners, who might use a new phone as a chance to try out many more apps.

“August was like the calm before the storm for app marketers,” said Micah Adler, Fiksu’s CEO. “App marketers also took the gas off their advertising spending during August, awaiting the availability of iOS 6 in September and the chance to promote updated apps. The combined effect made for a slow month overall ahead of what we expect to be a busy Q4.”

App marketing costs have stayed pretty stable all year long, after rising quite a bit last year after Apple cracked down on cheaper and more unscrupulous forms of marketing. We’d expect to see some more substantial changes happen over the next month, especially after Apple overhauled the design of the store. They pushed personalized app recommendation program called Genius closer to the forefront and de-emphasized rankings slightly.

The ranking algorithm also seems to have changed for the free charts over the last few months with more utility-like and social applications hitting the top. YouTube and Apple’s apps like Find My Friends and iTunes U have more prominent rankings while the one-off gaming apps that would sporadically appear at the top every day are now lower. They still command the top-grossing charts however.