In 2004, Andy Puddicombe returned to London from a ten year expedition training as a Buddhist monk. Returning home, he established his own private meditation practice and in 2010 one of his clients, Richard Pierson (CEO), helped him establish Headspace. Headspace was originally an events company, offering prospective clients a way to book Puddicombe. After several clients asked him for material to take come, the team (a few friends of Puddicombe and Pierson) built an app to fill that need. Th...| Business of Apps
The initial spark that showed Calm co-founders Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith there was a market for meditation was rather simple. Tew, who had become a minor internet celebrity for the Million Dollar Homepage, built a website in 2011 called ‘do nothing for two minutes’, in which a user would stare at a screen and listen to waves on a beach for two minutes without touching their mouse. At the end of two minutes, an email prompt would appear asking people to sign up. In two weeks, over 1...| Business of Apps
Copilot is the brand name for all of Microsoft’s generative chatbot services, which include its search engine, coding assistant and chatbot. It uses OpenAI’s GPT model, which Microsoft integrated shortly after investing $10 billion into the startup. Copilot started out in the Bing browser, providing generative AI answers to search queries. This led to increased downloads and usage of Bing’s browser, causing Google to work on its own form of AI search integration in the form of Gemini ov...| Business of Apps
Lensa AI is a photo editing app which has shot up in popularity due to the launch of its Magic Avatars, which use a generative image system to create unique digital avatars based on selfies uploaded to the app. Users upload 10 to 20 selfies to the app and for $7.99 Lensa will create a pack of 50 images, with various art styles and backgrounds. The app also offers retouching and other editing services, with subscription fees starting at $35.99 for a year of access. Magic Avatars have drawn in ...| Business of Apps
Google Gemini is a chatbot developed by Google as a director competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Using all of the power and capabilities of Google in artificial intelligence and search, it has been quickly embedded into almost all Google products. Launched in March 2023 as Bard, the chatbot did not have the best start to public life. Within hours, users had found lots of embarrassing holes in the technology, from the typical hallucinations to racist image results. Google has ridden the criticis...| Business of Apps
A chatbot from Chinese AI lab DeepSeek sent shockwaves through the market in January, due to its ability to perform mathematics, coding and reasoning at a similar level to ChatGPT and other top-tier chatbots while costing far less and using fewer resources. The chatbot launched globally on the 20th of January and quickly brought in a lot of users, with claims of it matching ChatGPT in performance luring in AI testers. The underlying model, which is in its third iteration, has been worked on b...| Business of Apps
Character.ai is one of the many AI chatbots to explode in popularity, as the success of ChatGPT has led millions of people to find alternative chatbots offering different experiences. In character.ai’s case, it has built a library of personalities, each with their own distinct way of interacting with users. This can come in the form of a purpose, such as a trip planner or language teacher, a famous dead person such as Albert Einstein or Elvis Presley, or as an interactive story, like a dete...| Business of Apps
A bit of an unconventional name for a social app but one that fits with the main function of Gas, the act of “gassing” friends or crushes through polls and giving them compliments. Targeted at high school teenagers and only available in a select few states in America and Canada, the app creates polls such as “Who should DJ at every party?” or “Who do you secretly admire?” with the name of four people at the school. The names can be shuffled or skipped, which provides the user with...| Business of Apps
When the deal to acquire Twitter was finalized, several Twitter alternatives were floated for those that did not like Musk’s politics, his ideas for Twitter, or just wanted a new microblogging platform. Bluesky has been one of the few to maintain steady growth since the acquisition, with a new surge post US election. Bluesky was formed inside of Twitter by the then-CEO Jack Dorsey, as a potential way to decentralize Twitter. After two years in development and consultation, the ‘Authentica...| Business of Apps
ChatGPT has taken the world by storm, setting a record for the fastest app to reach a 100 million users, which it hit in two months. The implications of this tool are far-reaching, universities around the world scrambled for a way to detect ChatGPT in submitted essays, entire divisions of companies shifted priority to learning how to interact with the chatbot, and all of the tech giants refocused efforts around AI. For those unaware, ChatGPT is a chatbot launched by OpenAI, a research laborat...| Business of Apps
The pendulum swung in 2022 with app downloads stagnating, after two years of solid growth under the pandemic. In 2023, some categories saw growth while others continued to stagnate, as users shifted their interests and preferences to a “post-Covid” world. The five most downloaded apps mirrored the previous year, although Instagram surpassed TikTok in total downloads for 2023. Meta’s Facebook and WhatsApp came in third and fourth, with TikTok’s video editing app CapCut rounding out the...| Business of Apps
Expedia was one of the many .com travel websites launched in the mid-1990s, the brainchild of internet entrepreneur Rich Barton, who would go on to found Zillow and Glassdoor. Barton was working for Microsoft at the time and incubated the project inside the tech giant, launching in 1996. Three years later, Expedia was spun off by Microsoft into a public company, with Barton as the CEO. With the dotcom crash of 2000, many recent IPOs fell victim to huge drops in stock market value. American ho...| Business of Apps
The hunt for the next evolution of the search engine has been ongoing for over a decade, but nothing has been able to even nudge Google’s dominance. The latest attempt and by far the most conceivable alternative is generative AI chatbots, which take all of the relevant links and data from the web and simplify it to a single answer. Perplexity is one of these chatbots aiming to be the next Google. Launched in August 2022, Perplexity was one of the first to use up-to-date data from the web, a...| Business of Apps
Ecommerce marketplace app Shopee started life out as a customer-to-customer marketplace, in the same vein as eBay, but over the past few years has remodelled itself as a b2c marketplace. That switch to a b2c hybrid model has netted Shopee a lot of customers, especially in the Southeast Asia region where it is the most popular ecommerce platform by some margin. It also offers services in East Asia and Latin America. Shopee has managed to surpass Amazon and other ecommerce marketplaces in this ...| Business of Apps
Vrbo in its current form is a combination of dozens of websites and apps that were under the HomeAway brand until 2020, when Expedia decided to consolidate all short-term rental brands under a single Vrbo website and app. Originally created by David Clouse as a website to book his Breckenridge Ski Resort condo, the website took off for its simplistic (at the time) booking system, which attracted other homeowners who wanted to list their properties for short-term rental. The agreement with hom...| Business of Apps
Like a lot of websites launched in the 2000s, the inspiration for TripAdvisor came to co-founder Stephen Kaufer after a frustrating experience. In his case, it was attempting to plan a family vacation using the tools available at the time. Designed as a comparison website for the entire travel experience – from accommodation to flights to experiences – TripAdvisor quickly became a favourite in North America and Europe. It wasn’t long before American holding company IAC acquired the bran...| Business of Apps
Travel recommendation app Hopper might be considered the new kid on the block, with downloads and usage growing rapidly in 2021 with the introduction of fintech products aimed at providing more flexibility and security to customers. While it has gained traction in the past year, Hopper has actually been around for close to a decade. It started as travel tool similar to TripAdvisor, in which users could search for a place or activity and check out reviews from the web. The team working on Hopp...| Business of Apps
With the apparent self-implosion at Twitter, Instagram-parent Meta launched into the microblogging scene with Threads. Aimed at users and advertisers fed up with Twitter’s handling following the Musk takeover, it made a large splash in the first week with over 100 million sign-ups. This was helped along by Twitter announcing it had temporarily limited the amount of tweets users could view in one day. Threads works in a similar way to Twitter, where a mix of short posts from accounts followe...| Business of Apps
Chinese discount ecommerce app Temu has taken the United States and United Kingdom by storm, as the newest Chinese-based challenger aiming to saturate the market with products at under half the price of similar items on Amazon and other ecommerce stores. Temu, which is owned by Chinese ecommerce giant Pinduoduo, launched in the US in 2022 and in select European countries in 2023, offering a megastore of almost every conceivable item at a fraction of the cost. Like Wish and other discount stor...| Business of Apps
Facebook probably needs no introduction; nonetheless, here is a quick history of the company. The world’s biggest and most-famous social network was launched by Mark Zuckerberg while he was a student at Harvard University, in early 2004. TheFacebook, as it was then known, was originally intended to serve a digitised version of the ‘face books’ held by Harvard’s various colleges, which were paper directories containing images and personal information about students. Initially limited t...| Business of Apps
BeReal is the newest social app to make its mark, coming at a time when many were disillusioned with Instagram and its focus on algorithmic content. In 2022, it broke out in the US and UK with millions switching to the app, but has struggled to retain those users long term. Built by ex-GoPro employee Alexis Barreyat and Kévin Perreau and launched in late 2019, the basic premise of the app is to take a photo with the back and front camera at a random time each day. The impromptu nature of the...| Business of Apps