App Smart: Create and Track Your Gift List, or Send a Silly Holiday Card

But while I’m out strolling the beach, snapping snowless photos, I’ll have my smartphones and tablets with me, loaded with seasonal apps. And there are some great ones.

One that comes with a helping of nostalgia and could be suitable for older children, is “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” $5 on iOS or Android. It’s an e-book with interactive elements on each page, narrated by none other than Peter Robbins — the original animated voice of Charlie Brown. He’s grown up now, but where Charlie speaks in the story, you hear classic recordings of Peter being Charlie. Children will love the graphics that react to touch, like the playable piano. It is adorable, but so steeped in Charlie Brown history that you may, like me, find the mood of the cartoon a bit depressing.

More silliness can be found in Christmas Booth Festive Photo Fun, free on iOS, in which you apply stickers to a photo to make anyone look like Santa, an elf and other characters. It’s ideal for making images for silly greeting cards. The usual iPhone gestures control the stickers, making the app easy to use. For Android, a similar free app is Santa Camera, but adjusting the stickers’ size and angle is done through a menu and thus is not as intuitive.

More seasonal fun can be found in 3-D Christmas Live Wallpaper, free on Android, which offers a sparkling tree-shaped graphic as your device’s background image. Among the many festive wallpapers in the app store, this is my favorite: it gently animates as you switch screens, and from time to time it changes into a glittery countdown clock.

A different holiday countdown is found in the official Norad Tracks Santa app. On Christmas Eve, it follows Santa as he speeds around the world on his sleigh to deliver gifts. But until then, it has some simple games to divert you and a precise countdown clock. It’s free and available for iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Windows 8.

Those who fancy adding some seasonal ringtones and alerts to an Android device might check out Christmas Ringtones, free from JRJ Unlimited. Its tunes and sound effects can be set as alerts with a simple long press on the icons. Some of them are merry indeed, but here’s a warning: Don’t let your children play with this if you don’t want to hear endless sleigh bells or ho-ho-ho’s before Christmas Day.

Apps can also help you with gift-giving. If you’re at a loss for ideas, you may find the Gift Professor (free on iOS and Android) helpful. I was skeptical as I tapped in details for my wife, like her profession, personality and interests. But the app ultimately came up with some gift ideas that I think she’d genuinely like. You can use it simply to generate ideas, but it also has links to online stores, allowing you easily buy the items it suggests.

The Gifted - Gift List Manager app ($2 on iOS) is similarly handy; it helps you track your gift ideas and your progress in buying them. You can use it to keep notes on a person’s preferences and clothing sizes, and it can help you track how much money you’ve spent. It’s both neatly designed and well organized — so much so that if you thrive on the chaos of holiday gift shopping, you’ll dislike it. Free Christmas List, a similar app on Android, has an interface that is graphically more entertaining, though it doesn’t have quite the sophistication of the iOS offering.

Holiday season is also party season, and for those who are planning a gathering, Simple Soiree ($2 on iOS) is for you. It’s an organizer that can help you manage everything from guest lists to shopping for supplies.

And with that, all that’s left for me to do is to wish you a merry old time.

Quick Calls

A beautiful app to count down to Christmas, the New Year or someone’s birthday is Countdown Star, for $2 on iOS. A nice feature is that it’s easy to switch from counting in days to hours or even seconds. ... Android users may like the new Wakeify-Spotify Alarm. This free app connects to your Spotify account, so you arise to your favorite tunes. It cleverly controls the volume to wake you gently.

Founder Institute’s Requirement: Create a Company

CAN you build a technology entrepreneur from scratch in four months flat?

Yes, contends a global training program called the Founder Institute, which was started in 2009. For tuition of less than $1,000, students attend classes with one goal in mind: to create a fully operational company. In fact, they are required to incorporate before they can graduate.

To be accepted, students don’t need to have a fully baked idea, but they must take a test that the institute says can predict their entrepreneurial success. They can keep their day jobs while attending class, but that does not mean the program is easy. The workload is grueling, and 60 percent of the students fail to graduate.

But this for-profit institute, based in Mountain View, Calif., says it has helped start more than 500 companies. It has done so by going global, with chapters in 14 countries, in a total of 27 cities. It aims to make money partly through its equity stakes in the companies created by its graduates.

Boaz Fletcher, 44, a consultant to new companies in Israel, started the Tel Aviv branch this year. “As a country, Israel is amazing at technology, but not great at building sustainable businesses, and that is one of the things the Founder Institute teaches: how to build an enduring, stable company,” he said. The branch’s first class of nine students will graduate in September.

The institute is the brainchild of Adeo Ressi, 40, who has started eight companies of his own. Back in the mid-1990s, he was a co-founder of Total New York, an online regional city guide that was acquired by AOL.

Mr. Ressi saw a need for nurturing entrepreneurs even before the idea stage. He set out to create a vocational school of sorts to teach the nuts and bolts of entrepreneurship, setting it apart from highly selective programs that often support start-ups before the venture capital stage. One of the best known of these “accelerators,” TechStars, accepts only 1 percent of applicants.

Mr. Ressi says he wants to reduce the failure rate for new companies. For every Dropbox, the popular file storage service, there are hundreds of businesses that never make it, he said, adding: “Why is that the case? And can it be fixed?”

HE came up with the idea for the institute as C.E.O. of TheFunded.com, a Web site where entrepreneurs and chief executives rate venture capital firms and investors. Through the site, he has a community of founders at his fingertips, and he was able to ask them: What would they have done differently at the beginning?

From Tel Aviv to Chicago, the curriculum is partly based on answers to that question from 2,000 executives. Classes often consist of around 30 students, with a much smaller number making it to graduation. In 15 sessions, students learn about topics like revenue, costs and profits; marketing and sales; presentation and publicity; and fund-raising.

There are adjustments in the curriculum to address local markets. In Singapore, for example, there is an additional session on doing business in China. Sessions are taught by chapter leaders and by seasoned entrepreneurs who can also serve as mentors.

Fundamental to the institute is the belief that many aspects of entrepreneurship can be taught.

Jose Luis Senent, 43, had been a car broker in Paris for 20 years, but had no previous experience with technology or start-ups. He graduated from the Paris chapter in April 2011 and now runs Autoreduc, a group-buying site for cars that he says is profitable and will expand into Spain, Belgium and Switzerland this year.

“I cannot imagine starting a company without knowing what I learned at the institute — there is so much to know about marketing, business models and raising money,” Mr. Senent said. The institute connected him with mentors who challenged his ideas and set his company in the right direction, he said.

Mr. Ressi says he wants to help budding founders avoid rookie mistakes — like bad Web design and off-key marketing, or creating the wrong corporate structure.

Katherine Bicknell, 31, a graduate of the New York chapter and co-founder of Kindara, an app that helps women track their fertility, would still be calling her company “Moonlyght” if not for a session on naming and branding.

“The Founder Institute said that you had to be able to say it, spell it, read it easily, and the dot-com had to be available,” said Ms. Bicknell, whose company is based in Boulder, Colo. So far, she and her co-founder have raised $100,000 from friends and family.

The institute aims to democratize the access that up-and-coming entrepreneurs need, partly by opening up networks and opportunities to those on the outside of the tight-knit start-up world. It “helped me build my network — when I came from Turkey to the U.S. in 2008 to start my company, I didn’t know anyone,” said Eren Bali, 28, co-founder of Udemy, an online learning company that has raised $4 million from investors. “I was starting from scratch, ” said Mr. Bali, who graduated from the Silicon Valley chapter in 2009.

Carlos Rozo, 38, a graduate of the chapter in Bogotá, Colombia, said the institute steered him away from a potentially fatal mistake — starting something big and complicated — and toward something more narrow that would fill a niche. He abandoned plans for a content-sharing platform in favor of Thotz.net, a provider of software that companies can use to share information among employees. Mr. Rozo says he has received $50,000 in seed funding from Wayra, which is backed by the Telefónica Group.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 28, 2012

An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of the person who began Founder Institute chapters in Colombia. He is Alan Colmenares, not Colemenares. An earlier version also misidentified the company that Carlos Rozo started and contained an incorrect link for that company’s Web site. It is Thotz.net, not Thotz.com.