ReadWriteMobile

Last week, hardware manufacturer Acer announced its Alive store, a single place to buy apps for all Acer platforms, including its newly announced Android and Windows tablets, plus its PCs and smartphones. The store, which launches in December in the UK and Italy, will begin rolling out to other markets ?worldwide in Q1 2011. With Alive, users store their app downloads "in the cloud" within Alive's "MyLibrary" section, and then can share those apps across devices.

In Alive, apps are categorized in five sections: Listen, Watch, Read, Play and Application (general purpose apps). But where is the content coming from? And will third-party developers have a chance to submit their own apps for inclusion?

Today Microsoft announced that its Visual Basic add-on for Windows Phone Developer Tools is now available in its final RTW version ("Release to Web"). With this add-on, Visual Basic developers who have built Silverlight applications and games for the Windows Phone 7 platform can finally ship their apps after months of testing and then have those apps published in the official Windows Phone Marketplace.

Finding a good theme for a jailbroken iPhone has always been a challenge. Themes are either posted online in designers' and developers' forums, outside the reach of the "mainstream" jailbreaking audience, or they're arranged haphazardly in Cydia, the jailbreak app store. Neither is an ideal solution for users interested in customizing their device.

Now, things are about to change. A new jailbreak app store called "Theme It" is preparing to launch, billing itself as "the Theme Store you've been waiting for." When it launches in January (tentatively), it will be available as both a standalone mobile app like Cydia as well as a mobile-friendly website.

This week, Nokia provided an update on its Ovi Store's momentum, in terms of downloads. The company said it's now seeing 3 million application downloads per day, up from 2 million back in September. Over the past 12 months, 400,000 new developers have joined its Forum Nokia developer network and its Qt Software Development Kit (SDK) has been downloaded 1.5 million times. What's more, 92 developers have even seen their apps downloaded over a million times.

All these statistics point to one thing, says Nokia: turnaround is happening.

According to analytics firm Distimo's latest report, prices for Windows Phone 7 applications are much lower than those for Microsoft's previous mobile operating system, Windows Mobile - in fact, WP7 apps are the cheapest of all the major application stores, with an average price of $1.95. T?hat's more in line with the other app stores' prices, says Distimo.

And when it comes to the most popular paid applications, WP7 is right on track here, too. 57% of the 100 most popular applications are below $2.00. In other stores, this is between 51% and 67%, except for Windows Mobile, where just 37% of the top 100 were priced under $2.00.

Tango, a cross-platform mobile video chat application, had a notable launch at the end of September 2010. Thanks to a high-profile review in the Wall St. Journal, the application was downloaded a million times within the first 10 days of its release. But did the downloads trail off as the hype died down?

No, they did not. Now, approximately 6 weeks later, Tango is reporting it has crossed the 3 million download mark and is available in 127 countries around the world. People want mobile video chat, it seems. But Tango isn't going to stop at mobile - the company is planning to bring Tango to all your screens - desktop, tablet, mobile and TV.

Have you heard of CCN? CCN is an open-source implementation of "content-centric networking" or more commonly "named data networking." It's a technology being actively developed by the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), formerly Xerox PARC, the birthplace of computing mainstays like the PC, Ethernet, laser printing and the graphical user interface.

So what's CCN? It's an alternative idea about how computer networking should work - and it could very well one day be the future of Internet communications, most importantly, mobile networks.

For years now, we've seen carriers pushing customers to adopt smartphones and pay for unlimited, monthly data plans. We've seen commercials of families bonding over streaming video and students exploring the world in new and innovative ways. There's just one problem - if we keep buying into these spiels, adopting smartphones and taking to watching Netflix on the subway ride home each night, the carriers are going to go out of business.

With the release of the iOS 4.2 update yesterday, the major focus was on all the new features iPad users would receive - folders, multitasking and a unified inbox, to name a few. It also offered two major new features for all iOS users (iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch) - AirPlay and AirPrint, the former for streaming content between Apple devices and the latter for printing from mobile devices to networked printers.

However, flying under the radar a bit, was an update to Apple's mobile Safari browser. And for Web developers, this update may be the most important of all.

MobiCart, one of the more promising startups to emerge from September's DEMO conference, is a service that lets anyone create their own mobile storefront...for free! Currently, the service supports iOS devices, but the company has plans to include support for Android and Blackberry, according to its website.

Today, MobiCart has emerged from private beta, allowing all interested developers to sign up. And good news - it plans to remain free, even after the beta period ends.