Sparrow Flies Away, As Google Finally Pulls iOS And Mac Email Apps From Apple’s Stores

(GNN) - As Google sharpens the focus on its new Inbox email app, the company has quietly made another move on the email front: it appears to have pulled the Sparrow iOS and Mac apps from their respective Apple App Stores.

Google, as you may remember, acquired the French startup Sparrow, including its staff, its email management apps and its technology, back in 2012.

Google’s last cache of an active page for the $2.99 iOS app was made on February 12, while the $9.99 Mac app was last seen on February 13, and the free Mac app Sparrow Lite was also last seen February 12. Right now, if you really want it, you can still download Sparrow for Mac directly from Sparrow’s own web site.

Inbox — the “smart” email app that helps you manage your inbox — got a mainly positive review from us when it launched in October 2014. It has been in a closed, invite-only service since then, with occasional, strategic openings of the floodgates to let in more users quickly. In January, Google released some early stats about usage that noted 70% of early adopters were Android users, and how many people were using its other features like “Snooze” to read later, Highlights and Bundles.

Sparrow flying away for good shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, but it has been a long time coming. At the time of Google’s acquisition in 2012, reportedly for under $25 million, Sparrow/Google more or less stopped big developments but kept the apps operational and pledged support for existing users.

“While we’ll be working on new things at Google, we will continue to make Sparrow available and provide support for our users,” co-founder and CEO Dom Leca wrote on the site’s homepage at the time of the acquisition. The sale to Google saw a lot of backlash and lament about the eventual fate of the apps.

At the time of the sale, Sparrow was one of the most popular iPhone utility apps. When it first launched on iOS, people praised it for offering a simple, easy-to-use, gesture-based email management service, managing to create what Apple itself, and Google, had completely failed to do for email on the iPhone. It managed to hold on to is high ranking for months after the sale to Google without any apparent effort, before eventually tumbling into neglected obscurity, ending as the 842nd most downloaded app, according to AppAnnie.

The last update to the iOS app was made in October 2013, to add iOS 7 compatibility; it never added iOS 8 support. Sparrow/Google also played around a bit with the price, changing it from $2.99 to $4.99 at one point. The Mac apps never got updated.)

Meanwhile, former Sparrow team members joined Google. Some, such as product designer Jean-Marc Denis, went specifically to work on Inbox. And many other competing email apps have been launched and updated in the meantime. Currently, Gmail and Yahoo Mail are in Apple’s overall ranking of most-popular free apps.

Now it appears that with Google’s bigger push to make Inbox is clear Gmail alternative, Google has done some of its infamous and regular spring cleaning. (Could it be that Google’s on a mini-spree: just last week, Google shut down Helpouts, a Hangouts-based service where you could pay to get people to help you with tasks over its video conferencing service.)

We have reached out to Google, and the Sparrow support email, to ask for further details and will update this post as we learn more.

Car Lister Lets You List A #Car To #Sell With Your #Smartphone In Under A Minute

#GNN - #Listing, #selling or #buying a used car online can be a drawn-out process. Car Lister wants to make the process dead simple by allowing you to list a car using only the vehicle identification number (VIN) and smartphone in under a minute.

DreamWare, a company that is attempting to automate the listing process for a wide variety of industries, is launching Car Lister tomorrow, but you can sign up and begin listing cars with this access code: techcrunch.

To list a vehicle you need an account and once created, all you need to do is input the VIN and answer a few questions about the car pertaining to its make and model. The service will generate titles and descriptions for you, making sure that you don’t have to type anything.

If you don’t like a paragraph it generates, you can hit a button to have it generate a new one. You can add up to eight images and a video by hitting a button and every vehicle on Car Lister will have an accident report.

Buyers who access the website through a Mac or iOS device will see a Facetime icon will appear on a listing so that they can Facetime with the lister before driving to inspect the vehicle. Users can email sellers if they would like more information.

Car Lister does indeed make it easy to list and search for cars, but it doesn’t offer much except for a payment calculator for the actual process of selling or paying for a vehicle. Like Autotrader and Cars.com, it connects potential buyers and sellers, and lets them deal with the financial aspect of the transaction. Buyers will need to have cash upfront or find financing to complete the purchase.

In a move to get people to try out its service, Car Lister is allowing the first 8888 cars to be listed for free with an accident report. After that, the company is offering one plan: $14.44 will get you 30 images, the option to add a video and support on the site until the car is sold. The free version lists the vehicle for 14 days.

The service also lets you list your car for a trade-in with five dealerships, and these dealerships will bid on the vehicle.

IMAGE BY Car Lister (IMAGE HAS BEEN MODIFIED)

Apple Updates Retina MacBook Pros With Better Specs

#GNN - #Apple has updated its Retina #MacBook #Pro line, with new Haswell processors that edge their predecessors (also Haswell) by small amounts (200MHz), and with new base RAM for the low-end 15-inch model that doubles the amount of memory it carries within from 8GB to 16GB.

The Retina MacBook Pro update is similar to the MacBook Air update Apple issued earlier this year, in that it improves what’s under the hood but doesn’t introduce any sweeping changes to the Retina MacBook Pro line. Apple last updated the Retina MacBook Pro in October of last year, when it introduced new Haswell and Crystal Well processors from Intel to the line, and improved battery life to 9 hours for the 13-inch version and 8 hours for the 15-inch model.

Price points for the new 13-inch Retina MacBook Pros remain the same, the larger models are now $100 cheaper. Apple still ships the 15-inch laptops with NVIDIA’s GeForce GT-750M, which is now nearly two years old. But you’ll get better value on that base 15-inch thanks to the improvement in the stock RAM configuration (which also isn’t upgradeable after the fact, so that’s a considerable advantage).

Apple shipped 4.4 million Macs in the latest quarter, which was up 18 percent from a year ago and a new record for the company for Macs sold during the quarter ending in June. Apple’s Mac line has gained market share across the PC category (which shrank by 2 percent last year according to IDC) in 32 of the last 33 quarters, so people are clearly happy with what they’re doing with machines like the Retina MacBook Pro, which got a price drop for entry-level models in October, too.