Freemium wireless data startup FreedomPop has been out to undercut traditional wireless carriers on data plan costs for over a year now, but now the company wants to up ante once more. In exchange for a recurring monthly fee of $0, users of the company’s forthcoming phone service will be able to get 500MB of wireless data access, 200 voice minutes, and unlimited messaging starting later this summer.

Oh, that’s not enough for you? For an additional $10, you get unlimited voice too.

FreedomPop COO Steven Sesar says that everything the company has done so far — from attempting to wrangle a deal with LightSquared to fine-tuning the value-add features of its currently data-only service — has all been so the company could eventually offer this sort of freemium mobile service.

After unboxing last week’s Galaxy S4 Mini, Samsung is keeping the pedal pressed to the metal by announcing another new launch variant of its current flagship smartphone — this time aimed at users who want their device to be made of slightly tougher stuff. Iterating its portfolio in this way is how Samsung squeezes the competition by making it harder for them to differentiate on price, size or special features like water-resistance. Sorry Sony.

The Galaxy S4 Active is being badged as a phone for outdoorsy types — hence it’s dust and water resistent to IP67 (one below the highest possible rating) and has a fully sealed design. This means it can be submerged in water one meter deep for up to 30 minutes, so great for dropping in puddles and streams, not so great for dropping when you’re scuba diving.

Although Samsung’s marketing material makes it sounds like a rugged phone, there’s no specific mention of impact resistance or especially toughened glass in the specs — so if you’re after a phone to take to work on a construction site you’re probably better off with one of these bad boys (having seen my TC colleague Chris Velazco do his best but fail to crack the CAT B15′s will by throwing it at some fake rocks). The thing is, truly rugged phones are necessarily chunky so there is always a trade off.

Talk to most developers and they will invariably say that the status quo of app discovery through rankings can’t really last.

People have, of course, been saying this for a couple years. While Apple did make a few strides in acquiring app search startup Chomp, rankings still have an overwhelming influence over how consumers find and discover new apps. This leads to a winner-take-all effect where the long tail of apps have little hope of acquiring a meaningful number of downloads except through aggressive app store SEO or through paid marketing.

DC Entertainment is announcing two new technologies today that should give readers more opportunity to interact with their digital comics. The company is also sharing some numbers about the growth that it’s seeing on the digital side.

Co-Publisher Jim Lee told me that the new features are “the next evolutionary step in our digital publishing program.” There’s DC², which adds dynamic layers to a panel. Readers can swipe through multiple elements (like word balloons) and images within a single panel, giving the writer and artist an opportunity to pack more story and content into a given space and, in Lee’s words, “explore and bend the rules of traditional storytelling.”

Then there’s DC² Multiverse, which allows readers to shape the story of the comic. When the concept was first described to me, my mind immediately went to the Choose Your Own Adventure books that I read as a kid, but that’s not quite right — it sounds like it’s more about exploring the characters and subplots that you’re interested in. For example, Lee said that at one point in the Batman: Arkham Origins comic, Batman and Catwoman are standing back-to-back in a fight, and the reader can choose which character that they want to follow for the next section of the story. At another point, you can choose which weapons you want the heroes to equip themselves with. (You can see what it looks like when a reader chooses between two different plotlines in the screenshots below.)

Summary: Ultimate Ears knows audio and their latest UE Boom product rocks the portable market with fantastic features, long battery life, and advanced pairing functionality.

I have had the opportunity to test out many new portable speakers, headphones, and earphones and the audio experts at Ultimate Ears continue to impress. They have large and small speaker solutions in the Logitech UE Boombox and Mobile Boombox, but this latest speaker I have been testing is the best I have heard from them so far.

The Ultimate Ears Boom speaker comes in a number of color schemes and can be used alone or paired with another. I compared it to the Beats Pill, Jawbone Jambox, and Braven 650 and found it to be the best of all. It has all the latest and greatest technology, including Bluetooth with a range of 50 feet, ability to pair with up to eight devices, NFC for ease of connectivity, a battery life of up to 15 hours, and mic for speakerphone functionality.

Personal styling and retail platform Trunk Club is going mobile. After finding that around 40 percent of its website traffic is now coming from mobile devices, and around 75 to 80 percent of that comes from iOS devices in particular, the company is today introducing its first consumer-facing native application for iPhone. The app will allow users to access its personalized clothing service while on the go, and it also introduces a number of new features exclusive to mobile customers.

Though customer demand for mobile has been there for some time, Trunk Club’s Director of Products Neil Kamireddy says the startup didn’t want to launch on mobile solely for the purpose of being on mobile — it wanted to establish several use cases for its app first.

That makes sense, because the mobile homescreen is a competitive landscape, and apps without a regular draw may be easily forgotten among the clutter.

Launched just last year, Hukkster is a platform that lets you tag items online, and then alerts you when those items go on sale or get attached to a coupon code.

Hukkster makes money on a commission basis from retailers each time a transaction is facilitated by the platform and has received a total of $5.5 million in funding.

The company, founded by two ladies named Erica Bell and Katie Finnegan, was recently recognized as one of Time Inc.’s 10 NYC Startups to Watch, but the company has no intention of resting on its laurels.

Zynga wasn’t the only company that had major layoffs this week.

Tapjoy, which has been an advertising and monetization backbone for many mobile gaming companies across the entire industry, also is going through a round of restructuring, according to multiple sources connected to the company. While Tapjoy wouldn’t disclose the number of layoffs, we hear that it’s more than 20 people, which could be close to 10 percent of the company’s headcount.

Tapjoy has weathered many changes on both the Facebook platform and Android and iOS throughout the years. It used to be known as Offerpal and was a leading offers provider for social games until Facebook put in tougher restrictions around the practice. Through the acquisition of a small mobile app install company called Tapjoy, they shifted to iOS until Apple banned the practice of incentivizing gamers to download apps in exchange for virtual currency. Eventually, they turned into a pay-per-install ad network where developers could spend to get new users through rich ad units.

Segment.io, a Y Combinator-backed startup making it easier for developers to integrate APIs from multiple analytics providers into their applications, is today expanding its service to include support for mobile. The company is introducing mobile software development kits for both iOS and Android, which will allow developers to toggle on or off 25 different analytics services without resubmitting their apps to the various app stores.

At launch, Segment.io’s iOS and Android libraries will support sending data to a number of mobile analytics services, including Countly, Mixpanel, Localytics, Flurry, Google Analytics and others. Co-founder Peter Reinhardt explains that the new libraries will give mobile developers flexibility, because they’ll now be able to deploy the Segment.io analytics library just once, then switch on or off the services inside Segment.io that they want to work with.