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]

If you’re one of the millions of players who have jumped on the online poker bandwagon, you may have searched for a way of playing real-money online Texas holdem on your iPhone. Probably without finding any.
Because of Apple’s resistance towards opening the iPhone platform for gambling, there are no real-money poker games available for the iPhone today.

Meanwhile, Apple is very well aware of the value of having a good poker app for the iPhone. Their own “Texas Hold’em” poker game is proof of this.

Even if “Texas Hold’em” is a neat game which makes impressive use of the unique iPhone interface, it’s also rather limited. It doesn’t look much like real poker, although you can actually play against a few friends over a WiFi network.

Instead, if you’re looking to play poker online against thousands of players around the world, you should take a look at Zynga’s “Live Poker”.

And Zynga has done a great job in adapting the experience from real poker to the iPhone format. The interface looks a lot like real online poker. If you have played online poker before, you won’t have any problems with the Live Poker interface.

A clock tells you when it’s your time to act. You can chat with the other players at the table and even buy them a drink to celebrate your big wins.

This iPhone game integrates with Zynga’s enormously popular poker game on Facebook. On Facebook, Zynga Live Poker often has more than two million simultaneous players, an astounding figure that beats the crap out of even the biggest online poker sites.

As stated above, you cannot play for real money. At least it’s not supported by the application. But at least with Live Poker you play with great entertainment value in an environment that feels a lot like genuine online poker.

As usual when you play poker without real money, or some other kind of real value, there’s no real challenge in Zynga’s Live Poker. You receive a decent amount of chips and it will be refilled along the way.
Nevertheless it’s in the nature of the play money game – if you have nothing to lose, you won’t play good poker.

This is fine if you’re just looking for some entertainment, as long as you don’t start believing you’ll do well in real poker just because you make millions in Live Poker.

There are really no new or revolutionizing features in Zynga’s game, but the game we’re playing is the popular Texas holdem that so many players around the world fancy so much.

All in all, Zynga Live Poker is definitely one of the best ways of enjoying poker on the iPhone, while waiting for a poker game with real money to pop up. Which might very well never happen.

To play Zynga Live Poker your iPhone must be upgraded to iPhone 2.0. The game is compatible with iPhone and iPod Touch.

Pricing for the new iPhone range from a once-off cash payment of R 5 199 for a 32 GB iPhone 3GS on a iPhone Weekender S package to a fully subsidized handset on the financed iPhone options starting at R 458.00 per month