One great feature of this release is the fact that users can track their travels via a GPS device and save the results as a KML file to be viewed in the application at a later time. The example given is a look at the route taken to climb a mountain; however, the same tool can be used to track marathons, sailing regatas, road trips and basic travel. For information on how to convert GPS data into Google Earth, users can visit Google's KML Support Section. If you haven't already downloaded the application, you can do so here.

Said Nohe, "With the massive number of applications downloaded to date, the iPhone has taken an early lead in getting owners to adopt app functionality and make popular applications a part of their daily lives...Once users are hooked, they're very unlikely to give up their device - that makes mobile the next can't miss opportunity for marketers."

Compete affirms ReadWriteWeb's statement that iPhone owners are embracing paid apps. The research company suggests that users prefer to pay less than $5 dollars per app with the most popular downloads being entertainment, gaming, music, social networking and weather applications. With the iPhone's culture of app downloading, it's obvious why developers covet the featured paid app spot in any one of these categories.

The top free application in the App Store's social networking category is Facebook and 71% of those surveyed reported accessing the site from their mobile device. Nevertheless, Twitter usage appeared remarkably lower than expected. Compete reports that 85% of smartphone owners still prefer to access Twitter from their computer rather than their mobile device. "Of the smartphone owners who do access Twitter via their phones, 41 percent use the application to keep track of what their friends are doing, 32 percent use the service to keep up with current events and 19 percent tweet from their handset to build a fan base or promote their company." Given Facebook's recent slew of Twitter-like features, and the fact that Twitter has no official mobile application, perhaps the microblogging site is seen as a redundancy amongst this group.

Another interesting fact is that nearly half of the group was open to receiving location-based discounts and advertisements. Communities like Foursquare and Brightkite have already been exploring such ads as a revenue model. However, it will be interesting to see if they try to place their own ads or outsource the sponsorships to a location-based ad serving network.

WhitePages Director of Monetization & Mobile, Bret Moore, said, "While we have seen tremendous success and uptake from our iPhone and Android apps as well as the newly relaunched m.WhitePages.com, we wanted to design something new with the power BlackBerry user in mind."

WhitePages rep, Tyler Roehmholdt, said, "The app has everything you'd expect in a WhitePages mobile app - the ability to search hundreds of millions of listings to find people and businesses on the go - as well as a number of great new features to help Blackberry users be even more efficient."

Check out this demo:

This rash of mobile apps from WhitePages is part of a major rebranding effort that targets not only the company's visual identity (very humanly chronicled in the WhitePages blog entries) but also the range of services and products they offer. We look forward to seeing what's next.

The Blackberry app is initially available on the BlackBerry Bold, with versions for Storm, Curve and Pearl to follow shortly. The price is $6.99 for six months of service.

Enter new media marketing for new media products! A rash of online promo videos for social products show how Internet and mobile entrepreneurs have taken lessons from traditional broadcast advertising as much as they have from YouTube.

Best of all, the videos have given great ROI (that's "return on investment" for you non-advertising types).

Regarding this promo video for MyNameIsE.com, founder and designer Renato Valdés Olmos said, "That video actually cost us rental money for the camera, some drinks, and pizzas!"

In 3 days, the video got "4,000 views and great responses" before Vimeo took it down; apparently, the site doesn't allow commercials. However, the E team got the video up on YouTube.

"Sign-ups spiked as soon as the video started being posted around," said Olmos, "and it also works great in pitches and presentations."

All this was acheived with no marketing budget and little support from major bloggers and Twitter influencers.

Another promo video making the rounds comes from iPhone app Birdhouse.

"There's no question that the adoption of Birdhouse benefitted hugely from the exposure that came from the promotional video we put together," said cofounder Adam Lisagor. "We knew from the beginning we'd be making a video people would enjoy despite any interest in the actual app. We heard over and over, 'I don't even know if I'll use Birdhouse, but the video made me buy it.'

"This is something that almost all software developers overlook: the power of entertainment to communicate why you built it and why you want others to enjoy it as much as you."

A third video we've seen is almost a straight-up live demo for LoveToGoOut.com, a new site that aims to organize pub crawls, club nights, and other nocturnal, boozy get-togethers.

"Originally, the video was created to promote the site at a local university event here in the UK," said advisor Barry Pace.

"[We] haven't promoted this too much online (if at all). Measurement of success is more about local awareness rather than attempting to monitor any buzz online."

Nevertheless, if current trends are any indication, site traffic will spike with proliferation of the video.

Recession? What recession? According to a survey from ABI Research, many U.S. consumers are spending hundreds of dollars per year on mobile applications. Over 15 percent of those surveyed had spent nearly $100 over the past twelve months and a surprising 16.5 percent had spent between $100 and $500 during that same time frame.

With the high level of spending being reported, those unfamiliar with the mobile industry could easily be led to believe that mobile applications must cost a pretty penny. However, just the opposite is true - mobile applications are relatively inexpensive - often only a dollar or two on iTunes for example. That makes the amount of money being spent all the more telling - people aren't just buying apps, they're buying a lot of apps.

Yet it's those App Store prices that ABI analyst Jeff Orr claims are hurting the overall mobile industry. "If you exclude Apple from the mix, applications for other platforms cost about $7-25 each," he says. "Many developers, lacking the resources to author applications for all available smartphone platforms, have to focus on one. That means they have a 'margin vs. volume' quandary: sell many copies for the iPhone at a very low price of which the developer receives 70%, or sell fewer via one of the other application storefronts, but charge a higher price and earn more per transaction."

On the other hand, however, Orr notes that Apple did a lot for the industry with their marketing campaigns for mobile applications. Their efforts led to sort of a 'halo' effect that has positively impacted the sales of apps on non-Apple platforms.

Some Big Caveats About These Numbers

Before everyone takes these survey numbers to the bank, though, it's important to look at them a bit more closely.

First of all, the sample size of this survey was far too small - only 235 smartphones owners were involved. That may be enough to hint towards a trend that requires further research, but it's not large enough to drawn any concrete conclusions from.

Secondly, smartphone users who didn't install an application weren't included in the survey so, obviously, the data is skewed here as well. The survey results seem to imply that application purchases are something all smartphone owners do, but that is not the case. We imagine there are probably tons of executives out there whose Blackberry devices are used for two things only: phone calls and emails. That said, it seems once you cross over to being an application buyer, the sky's the limit when it comes to spending.

One final note about the survey is that the findings are self-reported and most people don't do very well at estimating how much they've spent over a period of time. We could probably ask our readers a similar question and report our findings as "research" too.

Hmm, let's do that:

The newspaper industry is in a downward death spiral, having been severely impacted by new technologies, the ubiquity of internet access, and a rise in citizen journalism. Here in the U.S., some papers are filing for bankruptcy, others are close to doing the same, and there's even a proposal to give the newspaper industry a bailout plan of its own. Elsewhere in the world, it's more of the same. In Japan though, the country's high population of elderly citizens is keeping the papers afloat...for now, at least. But like everywhere else, they will soon have to face the future: young people don't do newsprint.

"I am in a dying industry," said Kenichi Miyata, a senior editor and writer at the Asahi newspaper, a daily with a circulation of 8 million. "Young people do not read newspapers, and our population is getting very old very rapidly."

Japanese Papers Collaborate on Mobile App

In many parts of the world, individual newspaper companies are trying different things to revitalize their industry. For example, we've seen a lot of innovation from the New York Times lately, as they embrace open data and APIs. (Disclosure: The NYTimes is a syndication partner of ReadWriteWeb.) 

However, there's still a feeling of "it's everyone for themselves" when it comes to developing new business models. In Japan, however, three of the major newspapers have decided instead to band together. The papers are all members of the Nikkei-Asahi-Yomiuri Internet Business Partnership, a group formed nearly a year ago to launch a web site that featured all their articles together in one place.

Now, those papers have once again collaborated on a new effort to bring their content to the tech-obsessed youth. Last week, the three collectively introduced an iPhone/iPod Touch application which delivers the cover stories, city news items, editorials, and pictures to the owners of Apple's smartphone.

The application is unique as it lets consumers browse and compare the coverage of news stories by the different papers all within one single interface.

Some Problems

The application is not without its faults, though. Although it sits at the top of the free apps section in the Japanese App Store, it's not very highly rated. This is because the app doesn't provide the full text of the papers, only abstracts. In order to read the complete article, users must click a link to go to the paper's main web site. That extra effort probably frustrates users, leading to its low rating of only 2 stars. In comparison, another news organization, Sankei Shimbun, has an app which does provide the full text. In time, through download counts and popularity ratings, it should become apparent how important full text is to a newspaper app's success.

At the moment, the new collective iPhone/iPod application isn't monetized, but the companies involved hope it will motivate customers to actually read the physical newspapers. We doubt that will happen, but it will certainly be interesting to follow the success or failure of this newspaper triad. Will there be safely in numbers? We don't know yet, but it's a possibility worth looking into.

With Queued, you can quickly access and modify your Netflix queue from your desktop, search for movies to add to your queue, rate movies, and you can even use the app to launch and view Instant Watch movies.

Since Adobe AIR lets the app run in the background, you can leave it running until you need it and when you return, there's no need to launch a browser and sign into Netflix - it's all right there for you. The app also alerts you when Netflix ships one of your movies so you know what's coming. And with AIR's offline capabilities, Queued lets you interact with it even when you have no internet connection. When the connection returns, your data will be automatically synced back to Netflix.

The Technical Details

On the Dojo side, the app uses a single HTML file for the main window, dAIR for Dojo/AIR integration, dijit for layout, unobtrusive behavior implementation using dojo.behavior, dojox.dtl for most widget templating, drag and drop for queue re-ordering, various animations for polish, and Dojo's build system.

On the AIR side, the app implements some of Adobe AIR's newest features including a local database, encrypted local storage, view source capability, automatic updates, and offline capability.

Go Get It!

The source code is available on Google code and the app itself is available for download from SitePen's web site, as they were the creators of the software.

What's New

But what MySpace has announced may not be anything dramatic enough to encourage those upset at Facebook to give MySpace another shot. Instead, in addition the Nokia and Pre applications that are now underway, the company said they will launch a new MySpace Mobile web site this week. The site (m.myspace.com / wap.myspace.com) is said to better enhance the look and feel of MySpace on the mobile phone to make it more closely resemble the online web site. User interface elements have been optimized for devices with screen sizes 176 pixels wide (and larger) and it includes the ability to upload photos. 

The company also says the site is more scalable, which is good considering they're reporting 20 million visitors hitting up the mobile site each month - a number that has been growing rapidly. Over the past six months, the company has noted over a 50% increase in mobile usage for the U.S., an 80% increase in mobile usage in Europe, and a 60% increase in the Asian market.

A Look Look...Yawn

While those numbers on their own are impressive, MySpace is now no longer the dominate social network in the world. And while they still reign as the leader in the U.S., we're seeing Facebook steal marketshare on that battleground as well. As of last month, Facebook gained almost 100 million more worldwide users than MySpace and is now nearly two times as large.

For MySpace to reclaim their dominance, they would have needed a much bigger announcement right now than simply some new apps and a new look for their mobile web site. They would have needed something that broke new ground - like a location-aware mobile site that found your nearby friends or a site that integrated MySpace Music for on-the-fly mobile streaming. Something...you know, big.

Instead, what we got was this (see below).

Before:

After:

That's nice, we suppose, but we were hoping for something a bit more. What do you think?

Based on the performance of iPhone apps, it's highly likely that we'll see more applications aiming for the lower end of that pricing spectrum than the upper end. But it will be interesting to see if any developers choose to charge a premium price - which isn't nearly as ridiculous as the App Store's $999.99 threshold - for their development efforts. Thankfully, according to the Market, "Once you've set a price for an application, you may choose to change it at any time."

The option of listing priced applications is currently only available to developers in the US and the UK. However, developers from Germany, Austria, Netherlands, France, and Spain are slated to be allowed access to sell applications before April 2009. The Android Market hints at additional countries being added before the end of Q1, as well.

In related news, Australia developers just gained the opportunity to upload free applications. Singapore developers will soon have similar options.

For more information on uploading priced apps or purchasing them, visit Android Market support.

Like Yotify and Alerts.com, Trackle is your personalized web scout. Instead of having to constantly revisit web sites and services for the news you want to follow, you can use Trackle to be updated automatically when there's a change in whatever it is you're following. Want to track prices of a new Canon camera? Want to know when your favorite band has a new album on iTunes? Want to get the latest sports scores? Trackle does all that and then some.

Trackle Has the Most Alerts

What makes Trackle unique, though, is the sheer quantity of alerts they've made available. It's here that Trackle really outshines their competitors. They've also added some alerts that are unique to their service (at least so far), like the ability track crime in your neighborhood - you can even select and de-select checkboxes for the types of crime you want to track when setting up that particular alert.

There are also plans to give third party developers the ability to create their own alerts in the next version of Trackle. And the company promises their service can scale to support however many new ones are created.  

Alerts We Love

For the Facebook obsessed, a Trackle alert can notify you when someone sends you a message, adds you as a friend, posts to your wall, etc. Of course you can see all these things on Facebook, but with Trackle, you can set up an SMS alert for this. That's especially useful for students and employees who have to deal with Facebook being blocked by their I.T. department or for anyone who doesn't spend their entire day in front of a computer.

Bloggers and other information hounds will appreciate Trackle's scouring agents that let you track anything on the web, including blogs, RSS feeds, news, and more. Although other sites allow this too, what's different about the way Trackle works is that you can set up one alert but associate it with different keywords. So, for example, you could fill in "TweetDeck," "Twhirl," and "AlertThingy" as keywords you wanted to track across blogs, but save the whole alert as "Tracking Twitter Applications" instead of having each keyword as its own alert.

Smart and Well-Organized

Trackle is smart, too. Once the system has shown you something once, it's not going to show it to you again and again, even if that particular link rises to the top of Google's search results. Your alerts will always be new information so as not to waste your time.

However, one of the best things about Trackle is the look and feel of the site. The overall design is visually appealing which makes the service easy to use. Left-side navigation leads you to just the type of alert you need and each alert is clearly marked with an "Add," "Info," and "Share" button. ("Share" because Trackle lets you email or Twitter alerts). That same sense of organization is available in your Trackle inbox - the tab where you can catch up on your alerts. When you have new alerts in a particular category, a number appears next to the category name, designating the number of new alerts available. You can click the category to be taken right to it or you can scroll down through your list.

Only One Problem

The only downside to Trackle - and watch out, it's a big one - is that it appears to have been designed mainly for U.S. usage. So for example, when you're tracking crime, home prices, events, etc., you have to pick from a list of U.S. states. That's too bad, because Trackle's service deserves to be used the world over. We hope they'll expand to include other parts of the globe soon.

Bliin

Bliin is a Dutch service that combines the location sharing of Google Latitude with the journey recording of Nokia's viNe application (our coverage). With Bliin, you can explore the world around you, zooming in and out on the map while viewing geo-tagged photos, the last recorded locations of other Bliin users, and even the live movements of anyone sharing their journeys on the network. So why isn't Bliin catching on? Blogger Martin Bryant theorizes it could be because the network doesn't integrate with your address book the way viNe or Latitude does. It's also a much smaller European company without the financial clout of either Google or Nokia.

Toaí

Toaí (Portuguese for "I'm Around") is actually a new social network which, at first, appears to be just like any other: you sign up, create a profile, etc. However, Toaí also asks you for your mobile phone number which it uses to text you with music, art, and stores that are near where you are. The recommendations it sends are based on you and your friends' favorites. It also lets you know when your Toaí friends are nearby. Toaí is a great example of how a social network can add in location-based features to take networking beyond the virtual world and into the "real" world. Unfortunately, there is no English-based version of Toaí yet.

Parallel Kingdom

Who cares what your friends are doing when there are dragons to slay, enemies to fight, and weapons to upgrade? The new RPG (role-playing game) Parallel Kingdom for Android and iPhone uses location-based networking to let you see other nearby players on a Google map. Also, when finding monsters to battle, you have to physically move to a new location to do so. The end result is a mashup of traditional gaming and geocaching. (U.S. Only)

Radar

Outside.in's new iPhone application Radar (not to be confused with the photo-sharing iPhone app also called Radar) delivers location-based content including news, blog posts, and tweets to your iPhone. Once installed, the app will geo-locate you upon being launched to deliver the news within 1000 feet of where you are standing, from your neighborhood, or from the entire city. You can also load up Radar with profiles for various locales, including your home, office, and more. Shake the app to switch from the news listings to the map view. (U.S. only)

Once the app is installed, PCs on the internet can access the iPhone to upload or download files through a browser or they can use the webDAV protocol. If the PC and the iPhone are on the same network, the PC can connect directly. If they are on separate networks, then FreeBit's VPN software will engage the connection.

The name "ServersMan" is said to be inspired by Sony's "WalkMan," and its no coincidence that FreeBit has invited Sony's former CEO Nobuyuki Idei to be a business advisor for the company.

At the moment, the ServersMan@iPhone is only available in the Japanese App Store, but an English version is coming in March. A port for Windows Mobile devices is also under development.

Originally called "Blog Networks," the creators decided to change the application's name to "NetworkedBlogs" when they purchased the external, independent web site at networkedblogs.com where an online blog directory is maintained. The application itself has not changed - it has only grown and improved. The company recently ramped up their infrastructure to handle pulling a lot more feeds and released a feature to pull the blog feed directly to your profile on Facebook. They're also continuing to improve their feed reader by adding more social elements to it.

Although we saw the potential for a simple but powerful community-building app such as this back in June, there was no way to know for sure whether or not it would catch on with Facebook users whose app preferences tend to favor games and other time-wasting applications.

As it turns out, NetworkedBlogs is fairly popular...at least among blog applications.  They currently boast nearly 450,000 active users - that is, people who interact with the application by reading, commenting, adding a blog, etc. And the total number of installs sits at just over 700,000. That's huge when compared to the other blogging apps out there. Unfortunately, Facebook doesn't have a category just for blogging apps, but a search for "blog," "blogs," and "blogging" shows that their nearest competitor hasn't even cracked 100K, and, in many cases, other apps haven't even gathered 5000 users. 

Additionally, bloggers who are using the NetworkedBlogs application are adding about 500 blogs per day, bringing the current total to 125,000 blogs available via this Facebook blog network.

What's New: A Network Widget for Your Blog (+Invites)

The latest big addition to the network is a new Network Widget which can be added to your blog's web site. When the widget is clicked, a Facebook Connect window pops up allowing your visitors the opportunity to follow your blog on Facebook. The widget is currently in beta, but the first 50 ReadWriteWeb users interested in trying it out can let us know in the comments. You can see the widget in action here on this blog (see the column on the right).

But the real magic happens when two Whiteboard users come into close proximity of one another. Using the built-in wi-fi functionality, Whiteboard gives users the option to wirelessly tether two handsets together. The result? A collaborative sketchpad where users can draw on the same surface - even if they're across the room from one another.

Our expectations weren't high. We expected some lag between drawing on one surface and having it appear on the other iPhone. But we were pleasantly surprised. The app is incredibly responsive. Watching the drawings on one iPhone almost instantaneously replicated on the other user's screen is, if nothing else, entertaining. And entertainment is most likely going to be the most prevalent use.

Granted, using Whiteboard to sketch wireframes before your big client meeting or drawing a quick diagram of a process for your colleague are all perfectly reasonable and serious uses of the tool. But it's far more likely that - as fun as the app is to use - you'll find yourself using Whiteboard to engage in games of Tic-Tac-Toe and Dots & Boxes with colleagues during meetings.

Whiteboard is a free application. To try it, download it from the App Store or search for "Whiteboard: Collaborative Drawing" from the App Store on your iPhone.

Was MemoryUp a "Rogue" Application?

Whether or not MemoryUp actually destroyed personal data and spammed people's contacts, as it was said to have done, is unknown. However, it would have been difficult for it to have accomplished those things. The app required no special privileges to install, so it's hard to imagine how it could have accessed the data and email addresses or how it could have sent out the spam. Also, for what it's worth, the company behind the app adamantly denies the claims. Says Robert Lee, chief technical associate for eMobiStudio, "We are very disturbed by these reports. Whatever damage is out there has not been done by our product."

...Or a Victim of Community Backlash?

The truth about this application may be that it just wasn't very good, not that it was dangerous malware. Many comments about the app in the Android store (prior to the app's removal) and in the forums weren't about losing data but about how the app wasn't worth installing because it provided no real value to the user.

What's even more apparent, though, in reading through the posts and comments about MemoryUp, is that many members of the Android community seemed to have a grudge against the app's creator, Peter Liu, whose drive-by advertising in forum postings got under people's skin. "How many times are you going to advertise this on here?" wrote one user. Later, others bragged and joked about running the "Memory folks out of town." "Peter needs to get a life," said yet another user.

It stands to reason that a handful of Android community members decided to disparage the application to get back at the app's developer...but something like that could never be proven, only suspected.

Yet, if that was the case, those people inadvertently ended up hurting Android in the process. By raising questions about the safety and security of Android platform, they helped to spread "FUD" (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) about this new mobile OS. Even worse, these rumors make the iPhone's closed and "by approval only" model look like the safer, smarter choice when it comes to phones. But as anyone involved in the open movement will tell you, that is not necessarily the case.