Apple

Tapjoy and PapayaMobile today announced that they are partnering to launch Social Marketplace that provides users with recommendations on which apps to download. Both companies have released a flurry of announcements recently and this particular news could be great for developers and users alike. More after the jump.

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Distimo, the app store market tracking service, continues to reveal the importance of the freemium model. Free app downloads have grown 34 percent since 2010 in contrast to paid app downloads which grew by 7 percent. In the past the firm also reported a 10x growth in freemium revenue from top releases on the App Stor. More after the jump.

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As the lines between console and mobile continue to blur, Apple’s eyes remain fixated on conquering the living room experience. Its introduction of AirPlay Mirroring could be a key blow to console makers like Sony and Microsoft who are still trying to gain traction on the mobile frontier. The plethora of content on Apple’s App Store combined with portable devices could be the reason why Apple will be the first to deliver a seamless gaming experience. More after the jump.

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It may be easy to pass Siri off as another voice recognition application but its domain stretches beyond AI algorithms, continual learning and contextually aware systems. The new Siri stands tall as Apple’s flagship feature to its iPhone 4S and for good reasons. More after the jump.

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Android has outnumbered the sales of iPhone for the first time in Australia. During the last 12 weeks Android accounted for 42.9% of the total smartphones sold in Australia compared to 37.2% of Apple’s iPhone, according to new figures revealed by Kantar’s ComTech WorldPanel.

If we consider only the last four weeks, Android stands on 54% of the smartphones sale (compared to 29 per cent for Apple). This gives a clear indication of Android’s increasing dominance in Australian market synonymous to the US and Western Europe. The recent rise of Android in Australia can also be attributed to the impressive new devices launched by Samsung and HTC in recent months, namely the Samsung Galaxy S II and HTC’s Desire S, Desire Z and Incredible S.

Kantar’s statistics are based on regular interviews every four weeks with a panel of 10,000 Australians aged 16+ ( representation of all population’s age, gender, region and working status). Kantar doesn’t pay the participants to do the survey but do send out gift vouchers as a token of appreciation. The surveys also measure stats such as the actual ownership, purchases, and usage of mobile devices.

Despite the clear statistics, analyst like Foad Fafaghi (from Tersyte) still believe the glory of Android will be short lived as people may be holding off their iPhone purchases in anticipation of the iPhone 5. He thinks that the sale figures of iPhone will lead once again when the next iPhone comes out.

A group of nearly 27,000 South Koreans have filed a lawsuit against Apple for a whopping $26 million, claiming privacy violations on the collection of iPhone user location information. Apple spokesman Steve Park in Seoul has declined to comment on the situation.

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Continued efforts toward translating community-based music fandom to the digital age are always welcome — even though the process can be made tricky by the fact that this type of work only succeeds when many users are on board with the same software. Frenzapp Music, like so many others, hopes to solve this common problem by becoming the go-to app for everyone’s music sharing needs.

Bitsmedia, developers of Frenzapp Music, are positioning the recent release as a companion version to their original app-sharing software, Frenzapp. Like its predecessor, Music is easy to navigate, aesthetically pleasing and laden with useful features (like seamless Twitter, Facebook and iTunes Music Store integration) and only needs widespread support to become a truly outstanding social music tool.

While it’s impossible to predict whether or not Frenzapp will catch on, its excellent design and developer pedigree make it worth a look. The app’s foundation is definitely strong enough (particularly impressive aspects of the program include streaming song previews, location-based recommendation scanning and full playback controls for all tunes stored on a user’s iOS device) but, like all software of its ilk, it will sink or swim based on its popularity.

If enough people decide to take Frenzapp for a spin we could have a beautiful thing on our hands. One of these days there must be some sort of uniting of the collective unconscious, a wondrous, universal decision to all download the same social music app. And for that hyperbolic utopia to become reality we all have to agree on the best available software. So why not check out Frenzapp Music through its iTunes App Store or official site for a start? It is free after all!

With over 700 million users worldwide it seems like the right time to get into the mobile scene while it is still growing. By 2014 analysts say that over 1 billion people will have smart phones and Facebook’s reach will be greater based on current trends.

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Are you tired of circling around the block and walking a mile back to your destination? Streetline now has the solution for smart parking with its iPhone/Android based app, Parker. Parker shows you the available parking spaces with their exact location, using live information from sensors. Parker also shows you where convenient parking lots and garages are.

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In a recent article on the status of the could music battle between Amazon, Google and Apple, I tendered my opinion that victory wouldn’t be based on chronological order, but on a litany of factors. I also touched on the fact that Apple has a storied history of entering the market later than competitors with a superior product and almost immediately leaving said competitors to fight for a very distant second place. Well I’m not one who revels in saying ‘I told you so’ (that’s an absolute lie, I love it) but a recently unearthed patent application strongly suggests that Apple’s cloud-based music service could be a game changer.

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