If you thought that the app store helps rake in millions for a developer, it is probably your misconception and not all (actually not sure if any) developers sitting out there are driving Ferraris because their application was a popular arrival at the app store.
As per a recent AdMob survey (with 1,117 relevant respondents) users purchasing applications at the App Store spent on average $9 per five downloads.
Apparently there’s $200 million worth of applications sold in Apple’s iPhone store every month, which makes for some $2.4 billion a year. But people love freebies and believe it or not the main thing that convinces them to spend money is actually playing with the free one at first.
The iPhone and the Android users download ten new applications a month and the iPod touch users get 18 new apps downloaded a month on average. Combining the stats for both iPhone and Android, almost half the number of people downloads the freebies. The fact of the matter is that ‘cheap is here to stay’ and a free version is how you can entice a user to download your application.
So how many of you have made money with apps … and can you tell us how much?
[via ArsTechnica]
Nokia dominates the world cell phone market share and with such a huge customer base it’s no surprise why they’d like to delve deep into this an use it for further profits with a real time monetary service.
It looks like the Finish folks will be presenting the Nokia Money module — an elementary banking and money transfer service, at the Nokia World conference which is to be held next week. The service that will be rolled out next year in a selective number of markets will be an effective electronic money transfer tool, a money management system where the customer will only be required to know the phone number of the receipt of money. Smells like mobile Paypal?
The credentials of the service quality cannot be doubted for it will involve Nokia’s money and mobile money transfer specialist Obopay’s brain.
Rumors about the Apple Pay Pal Killer have also surfaced from time to time, but Nokia seems to have one-upped the competition with a mobile version of the money transfer system … something which could have a more far reaching effect.
Source
Just before Twitter went down again yesterday, many Twitter users noticed a fleeting click tracker in the address bar of the browser before it redirected them to the final site — which might be the cause of downtime as too many people clicked on the redirects. Redirects that look like that http://twitter.com/link_click_count…
When it came back again, the fleeting click tracker was gone so maybe this was just a preview test of what Twitter intends to do in the future.
Apparently Twitter looks determined to track all the links a user clicks on the site, but this is not something utterly new as they already do it in an unorganized way. Currently a user gets redirected twice, first by the shortened URL and then by Twitter itself. Maybe Twitter wants to know where it is sending the most amount of traffic, who is sending the most traffic and which are the most popular tweets.
The entire data can be useful for Twitter’s planned analytics service intended for business customers.
[via TechCrunch] Original image by theelusivefish
The Wikimedia Foundation may be a non-profit organization but that doesn’t stop them from getting competitive — which is great.
A few days ago, Wikipedia rolled out its first official iPhone application dubbed Wikipedia mobile which is available for free in the App Store (note: iTunes link). The new Wikipedia iPhone app has been designed to provide users with Wikipedia-formatted articles, but we’re being left in the dark as it doesn’t look anything different from a regular mobile Wikipedia website. Actually, it simply serve as a wrapper.
There are already interesting applications like the Taptu’s Wapedia, Wikiamo and Wikipanion, which are visibly better than this official Wikipedia App, that doesn’t even bring a single new element to the whole deal except for the fact that it can track your browsing history.
Our take on it? The official Wikipedia App will have to do lots of polishing to compete with the unofficial ones.
There is a Facebook 3.0 app for the iPhone thas arrived and is awaiting the App store approval. The latest version looks like the full Facebook but with a cleaner, snappier and bug-free interface.
Some great features have been added to the application and that includes the all new News Feed that imitates the web based version, very well. There’s also the Like feature in full swing, but for it, Facebook is expected to fix the notification system so that a user doesn’t get bombarded with notifications after ‘liking’ something. Other than these there’s access to events, too. They include the ability to RSVP but there is still no access to the event’s wall.
The iPhone users can edit notes but cannot tag people in notes. They can now create new albums and upload photos to them, zoom in photos and can even have an album of profile pictures. You can quickly text friends directly from the friends page and all the messages you type will be restored in case there is an interruption to your connection.
To top it all there is a new homescreen that ensures easy access to all your stuff, search and notifications.
We think we’ll give it a try in here and let you know!
For more info check out AppAdvice
With curtains on the Pirate Bay drawing closer and closer, there are some who’d like to know what are some alternatives — and we got them for you.
To begin with, there’s Demonoid which has a solid community and most importantly it’s said that the quality of the torrents is much higher. Mininova is another option with tons of torrents from multiple trackers, a simple interface and a pretty decent search — with some even appreciating the similarities with TPB.
ISOHunt is another Bit Torrent which also facilitates P2P search and thereby earns the laurel of being the most sophisticated search engine. BTJunkie is the self acclaimed largest torrent search engine with 5,000-25,000 new torrents added to the index on a daily basis. However, all these credentials are marred with a sad interface so the choice is purely yours. Last, but not least, it’s EZTV — the most prolific TV rippers with high quality videos.
Although all these are supposed to be legitimate torrents, we’re pretty sure that shutting down Pirate Bay will be a loss that will never be made up.
[via Gizmodo]
There’s a new Twitter application out there. We’re talking about the South African folks behind Twitsume — a free online résumé/CV product for the Twitter community.
Twitsume allows all the Twitter account holders to connect and create an online resume. The users have all the discretion to make their Twitsume public or leave it private courtesy of the user enabled settings. There’s also the option to hide a few aspects if you want to keep parts of your resume, private. Other than creating a resume, you can also see which of your friends or followers don’t have a Twitsume account yet, and you get to invite them.
Key features of Twitsume
- Build your online profile by sharing your resumé with your Twitter network
- View other people’s résumés within your Twitter network
- Capture your résumé in a professional format and export email-able and printable versions
The Twitsume.com interface has been built on PersonL — the company’s recruitment management software suite. Though the Twitsume just took two months to take form, the PersonL has been 2 years in the making.
Looks promising. We have our eyes on you guys!
MSNBC, the joint venture between Microsoft and NBC, has acquired the Chicago based hyper-local information site EveryBlock in a several million dollar deal.
The two year-old experiment in hyper-local news is available in 15 cities (New York, San Francisco, and Seattle to name a few) deeply covers local communities with a range of topics which span from announcements to news coverage, blog entries, civic data, photos and dozens of other types of information — just by typing your address, neighborhood name or ZIP code.
The evident aim of the acquisition is to compete with local newspapers and other forms of media. EveryBlock is capable of providing stunning stats for specified local areas which strengthens the base of MSNBC.com making it a more vivid news source. It is all about weaving more local results into the site and this could even assist the new search engine Bing.
Founded in 2007, with a $1.1 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, we have to agree that this is a wonderful achievement for a start-up company with just six employees. What’s even more interesting is that MSNBC plans to keep EveryBlock independent and will help it continue grow to other cities, too.
[via NYTimes]
All the Apple gadgetry fanatics realize the importance of the Keynote event which the company holds since 2005. The event discloses all about the updates related to Apple products such as new iPods, iPhones or iTunes new features.
Hence why we think that you should know that this year the “grand ceremony” will be held on Wednesday on September 9th. Most likely the will be Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, for the keynote event has has been held there on all previous occasions.
Sadly all the hype regarding the event revolves around Steve Jobs making his first public appearance after coming back from his medical leave.
More to it, the buffs expecting to see the Apple Tablet will have to return home disappointed since it’s now pretty obvious that the project has been postponed and we’ll get our eyes on one, no earlier than next year. Of course that doesn’t mean that Steve won’t have one to play with in front of everyone.
Smells like, it’s going to be an exciting fall!
[via allthingsd] Image courtesy of dekuwa
Not many know what retweeting (RT) on Twitter is — but you probably do. However, for those who don’t, retweeting is getting more attention towards a particular tweet by copy pasting it as your own and crediting the original author with an @ mention and finally indicating that it is a retweet. And this is how Twitter wants to facilitate the open exchange of information to have a global impact whilst also having an efficient dissemination of information across the entire Twitter ecosystem. That very inspiration will see this feature being officially added to Twitter.com.
Phase one of project retweet is to show the developer community how it will work from an API perspective as well as a user perspective.
The final details for project retweet are still getting ready and as of now, Twitter has managed to reach the first phase which caters to the developers. Hence why applications related to the same are being sought.
Consequently, the first official launch of retweeting will be for a selective set of users and once the assessments are made here, a full retweeting tool will become public for all.
So that leaves me to only two questions. Will Twitter beat Google in popularity, and … will you retweet this? 
