SAP Ties Up With AT&T to Help Ease Business App Creation

SAP and AT&T announced plans to broadly offer the German software company's suite of mobile app creation, security and mobile management software. AT&T said that SAP's software will be made available to its business customers starting in the fourth quarter.

Startup Looks to Bring Kinect-Like Camera to the iPad (Video)

Occipital, a company best known for an app that lets users take panoramic photos from their phone, is looking to get into hardware.

On Tuesday, Occipital is announcing plans for Structure Sensor, a 3-D camera that brings Kinect-style depth sensing abilities to the iPad and other mobile devices. Attaching such a camera to a phone or tablet paves the way for use in other contexts, including object scanning and augmented reality.

Although Occipital is showing off the sensor on Tuesday, it won't be ready for mainstream consumers until sometime in the middle of next year. The company is launching the product first for developers who order the device on Kickstarter. Doing so, said Occipital CEO Jeff Powers, will get the device into production quicker.

"We really wanted to get feedback from the world," Powers told AllThingsD. "We wanted to also be the first to do this. There's something about being the first to bring the sensor."

Getting a consumer-ready product with three or four fully functioning apps would have meant waiting another year or more. Kickstarter backers willing to pay $500 for a developer kit will get a hand-assembled beta version by this December, while those who pay $349 can get a developer unit around February.

The Structure Sensor is designed to fit directly onto an iPad to link up with its camera, but uses Bluetooth so it could be connected with other phones and tablets. Backers who pay $349 get to choose either an iPad or non-iPad version, while those paying $379 or more will get both attachment options.

The hope is that the developers will not only serve as early enthusiast customers, but also help create the killer apps that will make the Structure Sensor worth it for consumers.

Occipital, which managed to cram PrimeSense's full-size sensor into a mobile device, is likely to face significant competition in the market for mobile-compatible 3-D cameras. Intel talked at last week's developer conference about including 3-D cameras into future Ultrabooks, while imaging-sensor maker PrimeSense has its own Capri sensor that is designed to go into smaller devices.

Powers said that Occipital knows it is a small company likely to bump up against bigger competitors. But he said being small offers some advantages, too.

"We don't have to sell five million of these devices to succeed," Powers said.

Here's a video of the Structure Sensor in action:

Apple Offers Legacy Apps for Old iPhones and iPads

9to5Mac

When it debuts tomorrow, iOS 7 - the next generation of Apple's mobile operating system - will support only the iPhone 4 and later, iPad 2 and later, iPad mini and the fifth-generation iPod touch. But it's not abandoning the older devices that can't run the new platform.

Apple this week updated its App Store to allow users running older versions of iOS to install legacy versions of apps that are compatible with them. Now, when you attempt to download an app that's no longer supported by your current firmware, instead of getting a "this requires iOS 7 prompt, the device offers to download the "last compatible version" of that app.

Great news for owners of older iPhones and iPads, which will now see the lifespan of those devices extended. Good news for developers, too; now they don't have to worry much about excluding older devices. And a savvy marketing move for Apple, which by rolling out this "last compatible version" feature is offering its customers the assurance that their devices can continue to run their favorite apps even after they've aged out of the latest iOS update.

Update: Okay. Maybe not as great news for developers as I'd thought.

More Tech IPOs: Criteo Files, and Rocket Fuel Is Ready to Start Trading Friday

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly reported that video ad startup YuMe was trading below its $9 IPO price; YUME shares climbed back above $9 last week and closed today at $11.

Here's another tech company headed for the public markets: French advertising startup Criteo has filed its public IPO documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which means the company could be trading in less than a month.

Criteo's latest funding round, completed a year ago, valued the company at $800 million.

Like Twitter - and just about every other company that has gone public this year - Criteo filed its initial documents with the SEC in private earlier this year, using cover provided by the 2012 Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act.

But, unlike Twitter, the timing of Criteo's filing isn't surprising at all, since the ad-tech world has been gabbing about it for months.

Criteo is a retargeting company, which means it helps e-commerce companies track prospects online and show them display ads. Last year, it made a profit of $1 million on sales of $354 million; in the first six months of this year, it lost $6.4 million on sales of $252.7 million.

More than half of Criteo's top-line dollars go back out the door via traffic-acquisition costs. It spent $205 million on TAC last year, and another $152 million in the first half of 2013.

Criteo, which is based in Paris, wants to list its American Depositary Shares on the Nasdaq under the "CRTO" ticker.

Criteo's filing follows disappointing public debuts for ad-tech startups this year. Marin Software and Tremor Media are trading below their IPO prices, and the general climate for ad-tech stocks has been lousy enough that Adap.TV chose to sell to AOL instead of following through on its IPO plans.

But now the conventional wisdom is that investors are once again willing to look at companies that combine technology and advertising, at least in some cases - see Facebook's triumphant return.

We should get a better sense of investors' appetite for ad tech at the end of this week, when Rocket Fuel, which helps advertisers buy "programmatic" inventory, is supposed to go public. People familiar with the company's plans said it expects to price its shares on Thursday, and head to the Nasdaq Friday morning.

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Everett Collection)

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly reported that video ad startup YuMe was trading below its $9 IPO price; YUME shares climbed back above $9 last week and closed today at $11.

No Internet? No Problem: YouTube Getting Ready to Let You Watch Videos Offline, on Your Phone.

YouTube streams more than six billion hours of video a month. Soon it will let people watch some of those videos even if they're not connected to the Web.

Next month, Google's video site will let viewers save clips on their phones and other mobile devices for up to 48 hours, so they can watch them when they're not online.

The videos will still be free, and Google will run ads on the clips, which will be available via its mobile apps.

That's a big change for the eight-year-old company, which has previously required a live Web connection to watch its videos (though there are plenty of workarounds).

YouTube announced the move in a blog post published late last night, and started telling its partners about its plans via email, as well; YouTube said it will allow uploaders to opt out of the offline option.

The practical benefit for YouTube viewers is that they'll be able to watch videos in places where they've previously been unable to do so, like planes or cars.* This should presumably boost overall viewing for the site, which already generates more than a quarter of its views - that's more than a billion views a day - via mobile.

If so, that may put more pressure on YouTube's ad rates by opening up more inventory.

Here's the text of YouTube's post announcing the move:

We're always exploring ways to bring more viewers to your content. As part of this effort, later this year we'll launch a new feature on YouTube's mobile apps that will help you reach fans - even when they're not connected to the Internet.

This upcoming feature will allow people to add videos to their device to watch for a short period when an Internet connection is unavailable. So your fans' ability to enjoy your videos no longer has to be interrupted by something as commonplace as a morning commute.

This is part of our ongoing updates to give people more opportunities to enjoy videos and channels on YouTube mobile. Check out the YouTube blog when this launches in November for more details on how this will work for viewers.

* I'll check, but I don't believe the move is relevant to Google's Chromecast gadget, which is designed to work in conjunction with mobile devices, but which relies on an Internet connection to play content on your TV. UPDATE: That's correct.

Early Groupon Backer NEA Dishes Out $226 Million in Deal Site's Stock

New Enterprise Associates, a venture firm that was one of Groupon's earliest investors, distributed 20 million shares of Groupon common stock to its general partners and its own investors on Friday, according to a document filed with the SEC on Tuesday.

The 20 million shares are worth about $226 million in total at the current trading price of $11.32. NEA was Groupon's first outside backer, investing $4.8 million into the company in 2008, when it was still called The Point.

NEA investors, or limited partners, who received shares in this distribution had contributed to the firm's 12th fund. Last summer, NEA raised its 14th fund, which totaled $2.6 billion.

How to Launch a New Photo App: Wait for iOS 7 Launch, Try to Get Featured. Then Hope.

Another new photo-sharing app? In 2013? Really?

Yup, really. But say this for the team behind Memoir, which is launching today: While sharing photos is a component of what their app does, it's not solely a photo-sharing app. It's more of a photo-storage and filing service, with ambitions to move someday beyond photos into other personal data.

Which is good, because it sure seems like the photo-sharing app space is full up, though people are still trying to prove otherwise.

Memoir was co-founded by Lee Hoffman and Angela Kim, and is a pivot out of Veri, a TechStars education startup they launched in 2011. They raised $1.2 million for that project from backers including BetaWorks and SV Angel, and used much of that to move into Memoir; they're also finishing a new funding round.

You can get a sense of what they're trying to do with Memoir in the video below, but if you want a very short sentence, it would be: TimeHop mashed up with Photo Stream.

More sentences: Memoir checks the metadata for pictures you have on your phone, plus those you upload to Facebook and other services (if you let it), and organizes them by date and location; it will also try to figure out who you were with when you took the photo. Then it stores all the images on its servers, and lets you access them whenever you want; it assumes your photos are private, and will only share them with friends if you ask.

The service is free now, and the company hopes to introduce a freemium model that will give you access to goodies like higher-resolution images, etc. One day, Hoffman and Kim can see Memoir storing and filing things that aren't photos.

For now, they're just hoping to pick up some momentum from today's Apple's iOS 7 launch.

They've held the launch of their app until this afternoon, with Apple's encouragement, in the hope that they get featured in Apple's App Store. There's no guarantee that they'll get that attention, and even if they do, a feature slot at the App Store is no guarantee of success.

But it sure would be nice to show up today, when lots of you are going to be spending lots of time there.

Introducing Memoir from Memoir on Vimeo.