Do you have a great idea for an iPhone app but not the coding skills to actually build it? Well, there's an app for that. The AppIncubator iPhone App from MEDL Mobile lets you submit your ideas which the company's development team will then build into apps for you. Of course, as you probably imagined, they're going to take a cut of the profits. But what better way to build an iPhone app without actually having to do any work!
The latest update to the Skype iPhone application delivered some minor improvements and fixes, but the biggest update involves a new warning message directed at the owners of jailbroken iPhones. After launching the updated version of Skype (v 1.0.2), you'll see a message that reads "this version of Skype is only supported on unmodified iPhone OS." Why is Skype doing this?
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As a website or blog publisher, you've likely often wondered, "Who is visiting my website?" Traffic stats are readily available, so you already know that your unique visitors are up this week, and average time on-site is holding steady, and you're slowly beating down that ugly bounce rate, but what you don't know is who these people are. Are they social media geeks? Are they stay-at-home moms? Are they 20-something males with an interest in extreme sports?
How-to video site Howcast collaborated with the US Department of State to develop a media-rich web site for the Fifth Summit of the Americas, a strategic meeting between diplomats and world leaders from the western hemisphere, including President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The pressing issues headlining this summit will be human prosperity, energy security, and environmental sustainability. The summit, located in Port of Spain, Trinidad & Tobago, runs from April 17 (tomorrow!) through April 19, and there is an opportunity for the public to submit questions to be addressed on the final day.
Google announced a new, smaller version of their sitelinks search feature on their official Webmaster Blog today. The new mini-sitelinks will appear on more than just the top search result, and will occupy a maximum of one line and four links per result. Sitelinks were originally added by Google to help people jump to more specific portions of large web domains like Amazon or About.com. Additionally, the original version of sitelinks ws only generated for the top-most result of a search query; the new one-liners can appear on other results on the first page.
Just last October, we reported that Ning hosted half a million social networks, and today, the social network provider announced that it has hit 1 million networks. Ning, which hosts custom social networks, was co-founded by Marc Andreesen and launched in 2005. Of course, as is so often the case, while Ning now has about 22 million registered users, only 6.1 million of these are active users. And while 1 million networks definitely sounds impressive, only about a fifth of these are currently active.
In terms of its social media presence, Domino's Pizza gets a lot of things right. It has a YouTube Channel, a Twitter account, and both a Facebook and MySpace profile. What Domino's could not plan for, however, was that two of its employees at a North Carolina franchise would use YouTube to broadcast a rather disgusting video that would severely damage the company's brand. Since the video first appeared, Domino's has quickly stepped up its social media presence in order to regain some positive momentum.
The State of Utah has released the first iPhone app by a state government and it is pretty impressive. In addition to the directory of departments and services available through the Utah.gov app (iTunes link) there's also a second app available called the Utah Professional License Lookup.
Would you like your local and state governments to offer iPhone apps? We can see some reasons for it and some reasons why it might not be such a good idea.
While Ashton Kutcher and CNN are trying to be the first to hit 1 million followers on Twitter, Joseph Frieschel, an inconspicuous Australian MD, is quickly catching up. Frieschel only opened his Twitter account last night, but he already has over 200,000 followers. How can this be? Well, it looks like the anonymous members of the infamous 4chan imageboard didn't like the idea of either Kutcher or CNN breaking the 1 million follower barrier before they got a chance to make their presence felt.
Former Gmail engineer Gabor Cselle has been working on improving email for years. This week he built a new system for prioritizing all the emails in your inbox. It's called ReBoxed, and it relies on crowdsourced A/B preference voting on email senders, and Cselle built it in just 3 days.
I'm not sure it's going to work as it's implemented so far - but it sure is interesting.
