Apple iPad 2, iPhone 4S Jailbreak Released: Not Public

I’ve got some good news and some bad news for all the Cydia fans in the audience. The good news is that they’ve figured out how to jailbreak the iPhone 4S and the iPad 2. The bad news is that the jailbreak isn’t quite ready for public consumption just yet.

Not surprisingly, the jailbreak solution comes to us from the iPhone Dev Team, the same people that did Yellowsn0w, Redsn0w, and all the other sn0w jailbreaks for previous iDevices. While the jailbreak appears to be playing friendly with the A5 processor and iOS 5, there are “huge missing pieces” that prevent the jailbreak from hitting public release.

Considering that the original jailbreak of the iPhone 4 was demonstrated on July 2, but wasn’t released to the public until August 2, we might have to assume that the work being put in by the iPhone Dev Team will be much the same for the iPhone 4S. So, even though the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S have been jailbroken, you likely won’t be doing the Cydia thing on there until the end of November. Is this a bit premature to announce? We think so, reminds us of those 1TB SSD drives announced 2 years ago but never actually made it to market unti

Read more »

MoPub Launches New Marketplace For Real-Time Mobile Ad Bidding

MoPub, the mobile advertising startup founded by former AdMob and Google employees, has been known as kind of a ”Doubleclick for mobile” until now. Today, the company is expanding its offerings with the launch of theMoPub Marketplace, which will serve as a virtual trading floor for mobile ads, allowing app publishers to connect with ad buyers in real-time.

The Marketplace will operate as a self-serve platform, allowing publishers to access new sources of revenue, while still remaining in control of their mobile ad inventory. Explains Co-founder and CEO Jim Payne, the new real-time marketplace can do what ad networks cannot, equating those to a sort of “black box” where publishers can’t control what they’re buying or target their ads with any real sophistication.

To use the new service, iOS and Android developers can download the updated SDK, already in use by over 650 publishers on the MoPub platform. Once installed, publishers get detailed insights right down to which individual ad creatives are working and how well they’re working, for example. In the future, MoPub will begin offering even more fine-grained details, including hourly analysis of ad inventory.

Publishers in the Marketplace can also choose to expose or hide their app’s name to bidders and can preemptively block ads from a particular advertiser or brand, like ads by a competitor. They can even block a specific ad itself.

Although there are other real-time marketplaces out there – Nexage’s solution is fairly complete, says Payne - MoPub hopes to differentiate itself by becoming the one-stop shop for publishers. Its full lineup now includes direct-sold ads, cross-promotional campaigns, ad networks, and, thanks to the Marketplace launch, real-time bidding, all in one place.

The pilot program for the Marketplace was previously in testing with around 10% of its user base (65 publishers) on an invite-only basis. Now, any interested publisher can sign up here for free.

MoPub has raised over $6.5 million in venture capital from Accel Partners and Harrison Metal Capital. The funding was used towards the Marketplace development and to increase its staff, which is now 30 people, mostly engineers, in San Francisco and New York (and still growing).

Read more »