Path may finally be taking off in the United States, according to a Wall Street Journal interview with CEO Dave Morin.
Path Gains Ground Among U.S. Users
app store
Mediabistro Event
Find out how to use Google Tools to manage social media content and campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp, an interactive online event starting June 6. Monica Morse (left), head of social & SMB solutions at Google, will familiarize you with a wide range of Google tools such as trends, Google+ and Hangouts. Learn more about our our twelve event speakers and register here.
Organize Your Social Media Strategy with Google
Find out how to use Google Tools to manage social media content and campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp, an interactive online event starting June 6. Monica Morse (left), head of social & SMB solutions at Google, will familiarize you with a wide range of Google tools such as trends, Google+ and Hangouts. Learn more about our our twelve event speakers and register here. Social Travel Apps Thrive as App Store Hits 40 Billion Downloads
Apple announced today that its App Store customers have downloaded more than 40 billion apps. It was a record-breaking year, the company said, with nearly 20 billion apps downloaded in 2012 and two billion downloads in December alone. Aside from popular social networks like Facebook and Twitter, social applications for travelers are doing especially well.
Facebook Smartphone in the Works? | Apple Rejects Flattr Apps | Wayne Coyne Talks Twitter
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A Facebook Smartphone in 2013? (Los Angeles Times)
Can a Facebook smartphone solve the social media company’s mobile problem? Just one week after Facebook’s less-than-stellar IPO comes news that the social network is beefing up its engineering staff in the hopes of releasing a Facebook smartphone by 2013. GigaOM Does it make any sense for Facebook to build its own smartphone? Some argue that this would be a natural extension of the social network’s strategy. The Next Web But the tech world consensus is that it would be a nightmare for Facebook if it got into the mobile hardware game. A Facebook phone, which has been rumored for quite some time, could be one of the only ways for the company to not only control the experience of its mobile users, but properly iterate and hack out a better mobile experience overall. The New York Times This would be Facebook’s third effort at building a smartphone, said one person briefed on the plans and one who was recruited. In 2010, TechCrunch reported that Facebook was working on a smartphone. The project crumbled after the company realized the difficulties involved, according to people who had worked on it. AP Social media sites and blogs have lit up after eagle-eyed viewers spotted a surprise cameo by Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, in a Chinese TV documentary about the country’s police force. The documentary by CCTV was part of a series on Chinese police and high-tech crime-solving methods. Read more
72 Percent of iPhone App Revenue Comes from Apps Featuring In-App Purchases
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.
DJ’s Can Now Spin On the Go with Turntable.fm
Have you ever seen a DJ playing a set while walking down the street? I haven’t. But the wonders of modern technology continue to astound us by taking impossible (and maybe even unnecessary) scenarios and translating them to reality. Hence the adaptation of Turntable.fm, the social music service that digitizes DJing, to an iPhone app — the exact scientific breakthrough we need to move forward in the field of mobile party-starting.
FT Web App Bypasses App Store: How Ya Like Dem Apples?
Financial Times called an end-around play to dodge the Apple App Store, releasing a Web app that brings its content to several smartphones and tablets, including the iPad, with one login and one subscription payment for users.
Lock and Download! It’s a Reloaded Fruit Blasting Blitz
The result is Fruit Blast 2.0 – with all-new graphics, new controls, new animations, a connection to Apple’s Game Center, and a host of new features and fun. “This whole process has been an amazing experience for my son Parker and I,” said Mark Lewis. “It’s a real-world opportunity to teach him about following your dreams, learning from your mistakes, and not giving up on success.”
Google About To Launch Google TV App Market
Google will soon be launching Google TV Market, a market place for apps targeting Google TV, according to Ashish Arora, Vice President and General Manager at Logitech. In this present role at Logitech, Arora’s job is to oversee Google’s TV products for Logitech and ensure that Logitech products are compatible with Google’s offerings.
Subscriptions Now Available via Apple App Store
Apple announced Tuesday that it extended the subscription option it launched with The Daily, News Corp.’s recently launched iPad-only newspaper, to all publishers of content-based apps available via its App Store.
Publishers can set the price and the length of subscription, and Apple will keep a 30 percent share of fees from new subscribers it directs to the app, while 100 percent of fees from customers who access the app via other sources — Web sites, existing print subscriptions, etc. — will be kept by them.
App Store users can review and manage all subscriptions via their personal account pages, including canceling automatic renewal of subscriptions. Use of subscriber information will be dictated by each publisher’s privacy policy.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs said:
Our philosophy is simple — when Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30 percent share; when the publisher brings an existing or new subscriber to the app, the publisher keeps 100 percent and Apple earns nothing. All we require is that if a publisher is making a subscription offer outside of the app, the same (or better) offer be made inside the app, so that customers can easily subscribe with one click right in the app. We believe this innovative subscription service will provide publishers with a brand-new opportunity to expand digital access to their content onto the iPad, iPod Touch, and iPhone, delighting both new and existing subscribers.
Report: 185 Billion Mobile Apps To Be Downloaded By 2014
According to Gartner, the global mobile app store downloads are estimated to reach 17.7 billion downloads in 2011, representing a 117 percent increase from 8.2 billion downloads in 2010. Gartner further predicts that by the end of 2014, as many as 185 billion apps would have been downloaded from mobile app stores – ever since the first mobile app store was launched in July 2008.
