Investors Starting to Support iPhone Development

Word on the street is that New York's Pinch Media has attracted initial funding from Union Square Ventures, First Round Capital and a few other investors, in what appears to be one of the first signs that investors are eyeing the iPhone.

Pinch Media builds free tools for iPhone SDK developers, the company says, allowing them to focus on what's important about the apps. Pinch Media's seed funding comes from Union Square Ventures, First Round Capital, Dave Morgan, Jerry Neumann, Mike Yavonditte, and Sharkey Goldstein Capital.

Pinch Media was founded by Greg Yardley and Jesse Rohland in April 2008, and is based in the NYC area. The company's first product, Pinch Analytics, is aimed at iPhone application developers as a free-hosted analytics service. Basically, it lets you, as a developer, track how your applications are used: it will track the number of unique, active users, the length of time your application is being used and, if enabled, the geographic location of your users, and so on. The software must be integrated with the iPhone SDK application. Pinch Media's software is specifically crafted to help devs see how many people actually use their applications.

"We're ridiculously pleased to get this out to developers, so we can see how it performs on a wide variety of applications," Pinch Media said, according to 9to5mac. "If you're building something with the SDK, check us out - we'd love your feedback. We're already working on our next iteration of Pinch Analytics and our additional products for iPhone apps, and getting ready for WWDC in early June."

The company is also hiring and is "especially interested if you're in the NYC area and you possess some of the following skills and experiences: Objective C / Cocoa development, iPhone SDK development, PHP/MySQL development, experience with advanced JavaScript frameworks, scaling web applications, familiarity with phpAdsNew / OpenAds / OpenX and experience developing for other mobile platforms."