Google today launched Chrome apps for Android and iOS. The company is offering an early developer preview of a toolchain based on Apache Cordova, an open-source mobile development framework for building native mobile apps using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Developers can use the tool to wrap their Chrome app with a native application shell that enables them to distribute it via Google Play and Apple’s App Store.

Today’s announcement builds on the company’s launch of Chrome apps in September that work offline by default and act like native applications on the host operating system. Those Chrome apps work on Windows, Mac, and Chrome OS, but now the company wants to bring them to the mobile world.

Read the full article at TheNextWeb.

Mozilla has announced several new features today designed to continue the Firefox browsing experience to any device you use. The company has announced that Accounts will be coming to the browser, along with an improved Sync feature and the ability to customize the user interface. All of these things are available to test now in Firefox Aurora.

With Firefox Accounts, users will be able to capture their login credentials for various services, their bookmarks, history, and any open tabs and bring it with them to any device. This new feature is a part of Firefox OS and is said to match Mozilla’s mission of helping the Web become a more mobile platform. The work on Accounts stems from programs that the company set up last year as a means of making things more accessible in the cloud.

Read the full article over at TheNextWeb.

Yahoo, the Web portal that rose prominence in part by selling banner ads, is looking to move away from the very format it inflicted on the world as it continues to adapt to the mobile age.

Instead, Yahoo’s focus is on Stream ads — Yahoo’s name for its native ad placements — for its mobile properties, a response to how media is being presented and consumed on the Internet in general and on mobile specifically. Whether on Instagram, Twitter or Yahoo, Internet users are increasingly consuming media in endless vertical streams. For platforms and publishers, it affords them a chance to move away from selling the beleaguered banner ad and toward ads that are supposed to be more engaging, and, with luck, more valuable.

Read the full article over at DigiDay.

When Oracle acquired Eloqua in December 2012, Jill Rowley was ready to head for the door. Not only was Ms. Rowley, an Eloqua sales rep, assigned to Salesforce, one of Oracle’s top competitors, but she questioned the company’s commitment to the cloud, where Eloqua’s software lived.

“No way is this happening to me. No way,” she recalled thinking at the time. “I had spent over a decade building this company, building this space, and Oracle, to me, did not know cloud, didn’t understand cloud, hadn’t taken it seriously, hadn’t developed any great cloud products in my knowledge — this was a nightmare.”

Read the full article over at AdAge Digital

Mobile advertising is booming, with a $5 billion dollar increase in spend expected this year, after a similar jump last.

And as the spending increases, the mobile ad-tech ecosystem is growing along with it, flush with entrepreneurs trying to turn a profit while helping the growing market reach its potential.

Seeing that opportunity, Google, AOL Ventures, and others are investing $17 million dollars in Vungle, an in-app focused mobile ad-tech company based in San Francisco.

“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Vungle CEO Zain Jaffer. “One day, apps will be everywhere — in your car, in your contact lenses, on your TV and refrigerator — and mobile ad tech will have to evolve and adapt.”

Read the full article over at AdAge Digital.

Welcome to the weblog of Nextrithm, the Digital Agency.  This is where we, the people at Nextrithm, will post regular updates on our work, information on upcoming events, occassional posts on what is happening in the digital world and an occassional hilarious post which, we hope, you’ll find funny.