ReadWriteWeb

According to a new survey conducted by mobile analytics company Flurry, developers now launch more e-book apps than games in Apple's iTunes App Store. Games now represent 13% of the new releases while 20% of all the new apps in the App Store are e-books. One of the reasons for this is that it's quite easy for developers to release large numbers of e-books. Developers just have to switch out the text, rename the app and send it to Apple for approval.

The next version of popular web dashboard service Netvibes will push "near real-time" updates from feeds to the browser, a dramatic change in how the service works. Those feeds will be served up along with the standard suite of functional widgets the company has always provided.

As the number of real-time feeds available around the web has rapidly grown over recent months with the rise of real-time publishing technologies, the big question has been: when will a major feed reader consume these feeds? Google Reader may be too complex and too slow-moving to be first; that Netvibes is going to steal the show should be no surprise.

Twitter rolled out its new lists feature to all users on Friday. Today, Seesmic will launch the first desktop client with support for lists. For now, this early release will only go out to users who sign up for Team Seesmic, the company's semi-private beta-test group. We got a chance to test an early build of Seesmic with the lists feature over the last two days and it already changed the way we use Twitter. Seesmic plans to ship this preview version later today.

Xobni, the Outlook plugin that reveals the hidden social network in your inbox, has today launched a business service called Xobni Enterprise. With this, I.T. administrators are being given new tools to deploy and manage the plugin across corporate desktops. In addition, the company is offering customizable extensions for popular enterprise systems including Salesforce CRM, SharePoint, Microsoft Dynamics, and others. It can even tap into a company's own information store saved in an LDAP database like Microsoft's Active Directory or it can pull from other internal websites.

The latest update to the Firefox web browser has now been made available. Released Friday evening, Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 promises a number of new features, including built-in theme support and drag-and-drop file uploads, but perhaps most importantly, there is a renewed focus on browser speed. Claiming improved JavaScript performance, better overall responsiveness and faster startup times, there's no doubt Firefox's development in these areas has been fueled, at least in part, by the speed increases achieved by its rivals, Google Chrome, Safari, and Opera.

A new report by ChangeWave Research provides yet more evidence of the surge in consumer interest in smartphones; and of Apple's iPhone in particular. Last week we reported statistics from AdMob stating that smartphones are now edging out feature phones as the device of choice for consumers. In the race for the highly lucrative consumer smartphone market, blackberry devices still hold the lead over iPhone - but ChangeWave's data shows that the gap is rapidly closing.

We predict that it won't be long until Apple overtakes RIM as the leader in this hotly contested (and vitally important, in context of the Web's shift from PC to phones) market.

Of all the technologies powering the social Web, few are as under-appreciated as the espresso machine.

We go gaga over great mashups, we drool over high-powered hardware, and we lust for private beta invitations to Google's latest whatever-the-hell-it-is. But none of these would be possible without machines to blast steam through finely ground coffee beans, and baristas with the skill to pull a perfect espresso shot.

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