ReadWriteMobile

Webscorer is an integrated system for organizing timing-sport races. It includes three components: two different iOS timing apps called Webscorer PRO and FAN and an associated website that provides results posting, online race registration and racer interaction services. You'll need iOS v3.1.3 or later. The iPad versions are optimized for the larger screens, and they are planning on Android versions in the future. It can be used by both fans and by the race organizers in any race where timing determines the winner, such as in cycling, skating, motor sports, or running races.

It is dirt simple to use: you start the clock and then tap the screen as you wish to record a time, and then enter the racer's name. When you want to upload the results, you tap a few other buttons and enter the sport information.

Mobile ad optimizing network Smaato has released its third quarter metrics and the good news for developers is that U.S. fill rates have stabilized. The problem for developers is that fill rates have stabilized at 18%, a one-point drop from the second quarter. The question that developers have to ask themselves is whether or not mobile advertising can be relied upon to create a viable business for their products.

The barrier for entry for creating software for computing devices has never been lower. This has a lot to do with the mobile revolution. According to a report from VisionMobile, the time to market for applications has decreased from 82 days through traditional channels to 36 days with the advent of the app store. Developers have more reasons to publish to apps stores now than ever before, with curation, distribution, billing and monetization, discovery and feedback opportunities from users higher than ever.

There are several kinds of mobile developers. There are independent software vendors, contractors, hobbyists, moonlighting engineers, entrepreneurs, in-house and B2B/B2C focused developers. The strength a given mobile platform has much to do with how many quality developers it can attract to it.

Mobile Web apps are starting to make a dent in the developer sphere and are beginning to find space on consumers' smartphones and tablets. Two British companies believe that Web apps need an icon unto itself to differentiate from native apps and have created differentiator for consumers to know when they are using an app designed for the mobile Web.

So, there is going to be a Facebook Phone, if a week long series from AllThingsD can be trusted. It will come from HTC, the same original equipment manufacturer that brought us the ChaCha and the Salsa, some of the first smartphones with the "F" button concept that brought users straight to a Facebook interface for a social layer baked right into the device. Facebook needs to continue its hard push into mobile, but does a dedicated device, based on Android, make any sense?

Foremost, Facebook might want to consider changing the name of the mobile platform. Facebook Phone does not inspire confidence in consumers. It was code-named Buffy when it was being developed by a team of top-notch engineers more than a year ago. That was a derivative of the "social layer" that was nicknamed "slayer" by the group. One of the reasons that Google has done so well is because Android sounds cool and Google did not change the name when it bought the company from Andy Rubin in 2005. There is a lot of potential things to like, or hate, from a Facebook Phone. We examine those and it is also the topic of this week's ReadWriteMobile poll. Vote below.

Last month, Android's user experience lead, Matias Duarte, spoke to The Verge's Joshua Topolsky about the emerging design ethic for the mobile operating system, which Google hired him to help create. At that time, Duarte told Topolsky that there's a special difficulty in maintaining a single design ethic that must be applied to multiple variations of an operating system simultaneously. "You want to be sure that your design ideas will survive, and also allow for customization," he said.

Topolsky's story inspired Slate's Farhad Manjoo on Monday to write that even Android 4.0, whose design was influenced by Duarte's contributions, does not have a consistency of overall experience that evokes an experience, as Duarte described it, of "love." "Of the three major smartphone operating systems," Manjoo wrote, "Android is still by far the most confusing. It's also the least likely to inspire joy." (For those of you keeping score at home, the #3 system on Manjoo's list is Windows Phone, not BB OS.)

The first GSMA Mobile Observatory report to focus on Africa has come back with some fascinating conclusions. First among them, Africa has passed Latin America to become the world's second largest mobile market.

The global mobile association examined the 25 African countries that account for 91% of mobile use (calling them the "A25"). Here are some of the most interesting of the report's conclusions.

A little more than a year after Windows Phone 7 was launched to the world, the ecosystem is seeing some strong growth from Windows Phone Marketplace. According to a new report by Distimo shows that the Windows Phone Marketplace has downloads of 101,000 free applications per day and 20,000 paid applications. The Windows 7 Marketplace is 39 times smaller than the Apple App Store volume.

The App Store is about 12.5 times larger than the Windows Phone Marketplace (500,000 apps to 40,000). The iOS user base is mammoth in in comparison to WP7, with northwards of 200 million devices sold against the abysmal numbers for Windows Phone (2 million devices shipped into the channel in Q3 2011). The Nokia Lumia might help WP7 along globally but the Marketplace has almost reached a point where it can support a vibrant user base in the same way as iOS and Android.

The team at Socialize has released a new action bar that centralizes the user interface of its mobile engagement platform. Developers can now drop the Socialize SDK into their app and create an bar where users can interact within the app through Facebook, email, text and Twitter and also use in-app commenting.

The new action bar can either be a stand-alone feature within an app or developers can strip the UI from the bar itself and just place the functionality of the action bar within an app. As the Socialize SDK is open source, developers can add the social engagement layer that the startup provides in whatever way they want. This is a significant step for the startup but the team has more up its sleeves coming soon.

HTML5 development firm appMobi has a gift for developers to kick off the holiday season. The company is making much of its HTML5 device-side APIs available as open source projects starting on November 25, otherwise known as Black Friday. AppMobi is releasing its DirectCanvas, device-APIs for iOS and Android and its MobiUs browser among hundreds of other HTML5 development APIs as open-source projects free for developers to build upon.