In recent months, GoodBarber has been working closely with Xtone, a company from Tokyo that specializes in the design, development, content operation, and content managing systems for the web and mobiles. Xtone and its sister company Gaps Mobile use GoodBarber to launch many Japanese companies’ mobile apps.

On Thursday, July 5th, we look forward to seeing you in Paris for GoodBarber Café. This is an opportunity to meet face-to-face and to discuss mobiles while having breakfast.

We are very pleased and rather proud to announce that last week, the ITespresso.fr app climbed to the top of the free application rankings for iPhones in the App Store. The ITexpresso.fr app is of course a GoodBarber application, hence our pride. For those who don’t know, ITespresso is a reference site for the latest information technology developments. We take this opportunity to congratulate to the team at NetMediaEurope . Wait no longer, download ITespresso in the App Store .

This summer, we are launching a road show to meet with our current and potential users. Follow the hashtag #GoodBarberSummerTour2012 on Instagram and Twitter throughout the summer. Yesterday, Mathieu , Dumè and I have boarded at the port of Bastia, towards Rome. This is the first step of the #GoodBarberSummerTour2012. We're coming to meet with our users and with web and mobile professionals. Operation evangelization. At the moment, the summer program is as follows:      - Rome, June 21st and 22d      - Paris, July 4th and 5th      - London, July 31st and August 1st If other dates and venues are fixed, we will definitely let you know. Meanwhile, if you're around, book your agenda, we'd love to meet with you. You can reach us on Twitter @GoodBarber. #GoodBarberSummerTour2012

The GoodBarber application for iPhone is available in the App Store since few hours.

About a month ago, we sent more than 500 GoodBarber magnets with thank you postcards signed by the entire team to 12 different countries, on 4 continents, in the Atlantic (Caribbean) and Pacific (Polynesia). The target: our user community. Here’s a summary of the operation stages with no less than a month and a half for preparation: card design and production, sign each card by every team member (it’s not an easy task), purchase stamps for 3 different destinations (France, Europe, rest of the world), manual preparation of envelopes, and shipping.

With the various 2012 elections, GoodBarber has strengthened its status as the mobile solution for public figures. Several politicians are now using our service to ensure their presence in the App Store, Google Play, or Windows Marketplace. To ensure their mobile presence, Jean-Pierre Chèvenement (Senator, former Minister) and Paul Giacobbi (MP, Chairman of the Executive Council of Corsica) have been using our service for a long time. They also use WMaker, Goodbarber’s sister service for the web.

Enhance your application with your tweets, and allow your readers to reply or retweet you directly from your application. Our goal is to enable you to combine all of your content sources in one single application, and to offer an exciting and unique experience for your readers. Integrating Twitter with GoodBarber was planned on our roadmap . For several days, your back office Sources page has included a space for Twitter. It’s extremely simple: you have to click twice. Your live thread is displayed on the application, and the “Reply” and “Retweet” options are available.

As promised, GoodBarber is enhanced with new content sources. In terms of video, your Dailymotion channels and playlists can now be connected to your application. It functions the same as YouTube in the GoodBarber back office. Enter the name of your Dailymotion channel on the Sources page. GoodBarber will recognize it and ask you either to import all videos, or import one or more of your playlists. If you select the playlists, you can connect as many as you like by pairing each playlist with a navigation tab located on your tab bar. Your application can keep your videos on a single tab with your other content sources and even become a real “video app.”

Since the end of last week, the iPad apps that you configure with GoodBarber are up to Retina Display standard. We had announced it last Thursday in our blog. Since Friday, your GoodBarber apps have an optimized display for every version of the iPad, even the new iPad with Retina display.

Conscious to closely follow market developments and benefit you to the greatest degree, an iOS update is coming soon so that your apps are up-to-date with the new iPad. We’ve been on the starting blocks since March 7th, and even before. If you follow us on Twitter, you’ve probably seen photos of the new model that we received last Friday. We were eager to test GoodBarber apps on the new iPad, but not without some anxiety. Display problems can always be a possibility, especially in the case of a version with a doubled screen resolution. Pleasant surprise, GoodBarber apps remain stable on the new iPad, but we will make quick adjustments to our system so that you are able to take full advantage of the Retina Display. We will allow GoodBarber users to load images that are twice as big. And you will all benefit from a free update for your iOS app, so that you can bring your apps to new iPad’s level. We will talk to you about it again soon.

Google has announced the launch of Google Play, a platform that unifies apps, books, music and movies. A few hours before the announcement of Apple’s iPad 3 Keynote, Google launches its iTunes killer. Google Play is an “integrated destination” for mobile applications, books, music and movies, accessible from all Android devices or the Internet. The Android Market, familiar to Android device users, disappears, giving way to Play Store - one of the four components of the Google Play platform. Google Music becomes Play Music, Google Books becomes Play Books, and Google Movies becomes Play Movies.

As promised, this morning I spent some time touring the booths in search of innovations. I also had the opportunity to play with the new devices and test the quality of the products. Note: it’s impossible to test all the devices at the show, so I made a selection. The vast majority of phones and tablets presented at the Mobile World Congress are Android devices. As usual with this system, there are high and low quality devices.

On the second day at MWC I had a little more time to converse with some exhibitors. It’s not possible to meet them all, or to describe them all (the exhibition catalog is 300 pages long!), so my visits were focused on application monetization services. I briefly describe three of the most interesting below.

If we were car manufacturers or a car dealership, our annual event would be the auto show. But at GoodBarber, we make mobile apps, and the big annual event happens in Barcelona. Barcelona is the Mobile World Capital (until 2017), so it's the city that hosts the annual Mobile World Congress, a huge event for mobile professionals. When we take a look, nearly all sectors are represented: from the antenna manufacturer or foundries, from the application developer, to the operators or device manufacturers.

Meet Dominique, our CEO, at the Mobile World Congress until Wednesday. GoodBarber participates in key events of the mobile and IT industry. After the 2011 “Mobile World Congress” a year ago in Barcelona, “Le Mobile 2.0” in Paris in March 2011, “LeWeb'11 ” last December in Paris, we are present at the “Mobile World Congress ” this year again. Finding an accommodation in Barcelona for this major event is not a easy. Dominique Siacci , our young and intrepid CEO, does not cease by so few. You will find him in the aisles of the MWC until Wednesday. Don’t hesitate to tweet @dsiacci or @good_barber , to track Dume Siacci on Foursquare. As for groupies, just write me, I would give you his personal phone number...

An article published on www.igeneration.fr on February 14th, echos a study published by Cisco on the same day: Cisco expects an explosive growth of mobile Internet traffic via moblie devices. In 2016, 10 billion mobile devices are expected to be connected to the net for 7.3 billion people. In a study on trends in mobile data traffic , Cisco identified 10 main trends. Cisco anticipates a monthly traffic volume of 10.8 exabytes in 2016. There have been 0.6 billion exabytes in 2011, and should be 1.3 billion in 2012. Traffic will be multiplied by 18 between 2011 and 2016; and by 2 between 2011 and 2012. The growth rate of traffic data was higher than expected in 2011. At the end of 2012, the number of mobile devices connected to the Internet exceeded the number of people in the world. In 2016, the ratio between the number of connected mobile devices and world population will be 1.4. Of the 10 trends described by Cisco, three of them particularly characterize the mobile market in our view.

As promised a few weeks ago, here is the development plan that we’re bringing to GoodBarber. What you can expect: new content and design features, an interface with advanced customization for agencies, and the integration of new social features. There will be two major phases in 2012. Starting now, and until May, there will be a monthly growth: GoodBarber will evolve from the current V1.0 to V1.4. During the second half of 2012, we’ll start moving toward an ambitious V2.0, which we will discuss in due time. The evolution toward V1.4 will keep us busy during the next few months. The changes will focus on content (V1.1) and design (V1.2) features, advanced customization for agencies (V1.3), and social features (V1.4).

Some of you have noticed that something was wrong yesterday, Sunday, January 29th. We experienced a temporary system failure. Last week, we conducted changes to our server architecture in order to replace some of the material. Some of the hard drives that we installed were unfortunately defective and caused a system breakdown. Four new Intel 600 Go SSD (5 year guarantee) were simultaneously lost Sunday at 4:00 p.m. The system can support a loss of two disks at a time. This failure has had little or no effect on existing customers, but it has led to the loss of all subscriptions since our last system backup. As a result, the accounts for subscriptions placed after Friday at 1:55 p.m. have been lost. The same goes for certain changes to existing accounts. In addition to GoodBarber, we host two other products: a CMS and a videosite platform . We guarantee 99.9% availability for both. These two products account for nearly 200 million monthly page views for just over 2,500 clients. These numbers imply a strong and secure system architecture. We run routine security audits, and data loss is not a customary occurrence… We’re aware of the potential impact that an event of this magnitude could have on you. We would greatly appreciate it if you went through the registration process again. We are here to help anytime via customer support.

GoodBarber’s back office is now available in German! Since the release of GoodBarber on November 14th, the Website was already available in English, French, Italian, Spanish and German. At that time, the back office was available in English, French and Italian.

This was a recurring request from you. It seems quite obvious, and so we have sped up its implementation. You would like to be able to put your YouTube playlists on GoodBarber.

We’ve recently made GoodBarber compatible with a new ad server called Swelen. For those who are less familiar with the terminology, an ad server isn’t an ad network. Ad serving is a technology that stores and distributes advertisements. Different mobile ad networks use ad servers. Swelen allows the distribution of interactive media ads such as video interstitials, or interactive advertisements (holograms, etc.). Swelen also differentiates itself from other ad servers by offering a decentralized, social approach in order to link advertisers, publishers and advertising networks. In terms of innovative solutions, Swelen offers an “in-banner” format for video streaming. The application user does not have to quit the application to view the advertising content. For more information about Swelen, you can visit their website, and read the article that TechCrunch France wrote in 2011 or see them in the CrunchBase.

For 2012, the entire GoodBarber team would like to wish you peace and good health (pace è salute), as we say here in Corsica. We hope our user community continues to grow and that we can provide everyone 100% customer satisfaction. That’s the reason why we haven’t taken any time off throughout the holiday season. We aren’t rushing, but are working quickly to have a second version of GoodBarber available to you soon that will remove many kinks from the current mobile Internet. In the meantime, Happy New Year to everyone!

GoodBarber just celebrated its one-month anniversary since opening to the public! Since Monday, November 14th at 5:00 p.m., many of you have tested GoodBarber from all around the world. We’ve received your feedback and are pleased to hear that you love our product. Your initial remarks have guided us in making improvements to the back office, and we’re aiming for 100% customer satisfaction. Here are a few improvements we’ve already made, which will make life a little bit easier for you.