Everybody wants searchable apps, except app makers

From pond to plate

Euglena cultivates its namesake algae in vats on Ishigaki Island, producing 59 nutrients for foods and supplements from the single-celled organism Extracting nutrients in the lab An algal health drink washes down a plate of carbonara at the company’s Euglena Garden restaurant on Ishigaki

have competitors, but they were there before them,” says Tomohiko Ikeno, an analyst at Ace Research Institute in Tokyo. “The technology coming out now seems to be following them.”

The global aviation industry has committed to cap carbon dioxide emissions starting in 2020. Biofuels, which are processed from renewable sources, typically produce less than half the emissions of petroleum-derived jet fuel. United Continental Holdings, owner of the world’s second-biggest airline, announced last month that it’s pouring $30 million into a strategic partnership with California’s Fulcrum BioEnergy to develop jet fuel from garbage. Others have experimented with cooking oil, sugar cane, and drought-resistant jatropha and camelina plants.

The future of algae-based biofuel is still murky. ExxonMobil has put more than $100 million into a venture with a California startup called Synthetic Genomics, but so far it has little to show for its efforts. Shell bailed out of its own algae partnership in 2011.

Getting production costs down is the biggest challenge for producers of algaebased fuel, says Taira Enomoto, a professor of molecular biology at Kobe University. Izumo isn’t fazed. “Airlines will have an incentive to use biofuel even if it’s somewhat more expensive,” he says. “We’re now working on increasing the scale of production. We need giant facilities to create the tens of thousands of tons required by airlines.” —Tom Redmond and Yuko Takeo

The bottom line Investors have bid up the stock of Euglena more than 2,400 percent since 2012 as the company finds new uses for its algae.

Internet Coders Balk at Making Apps Searchable

Google and Microsoft push app developers to reveal their content

“We prioritize features that are necessary over nice-to-have” The giants of the Web have been pressing developers of mobile apps to index their content so it can be parsed by search engines or linked to from other sites. That’s already possible with most Web pages, thanks to pieces of embedded code known as deep links. Imagine a future in which a Google search for a “tulle mini” would call up results from Wish, a fashion app, along with links to e-commerce sites. A Facebook user who wanted to share a recipe for vegan chocolate chip cookies from the Yummly app would be able to post a link that would take viewers to the relevant page instead of forcing them to download the 12% app first. So far, the effort has been a bit like herding cats:

Increase in traffic on Etsy’s app since it was indexed using Only a few thousand apps—a tiny fraction of the millions out there—

Google tools have adopted the competing tech protocols that Google, Facebook, Apple, and others are pushing.

Apps accounted for seven of every eight minutes Americans spent interacting with media on a mobile device in 2014, according to a survey by ComScore. But because they’re essentially walled gardens, there’s little visibility into who frequents them and what they do there. That’s frustrating for Google and Facebook, which make money by helping businesses target digital ads to the most receptive audiences.

Google’s pitch to developers is that deep links benefit them by driving more traffic to their apps. The company says traffic on the Yellow Pages and Etsy apps increased by 8 percent and 12 percent, respectively, after they began using Google’s indexing. Rajan Patel, a principal engineer at Google, says more than 1,000 apps—mainly those designed for its Android mobile operating system but also some for Apple’s iOS—use its deep linking. “To us, the main advantage that we see coming from this is removing friction—not having to find the app on your phone and fire it up,” says Atul Kakkar, principal product manager at Eventbrite, a website that helps people publicize and sell tickets to yoga classes, tech conferences, and other happenings. The company plans to start indexing its app to enable Google searches.

Some developers have resisted using deep links because it’s costly and laborious to create separate code for each mobile platform. (Android and iOS are the predominant ones.) Inserting the