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When Smule's Ge Wang, Lyricfind's Darryl Ballantyne and Tapulous' Bart Decrem got together to discuss mobile applications at the San Fran Music Tech Summit, the hottest subject was application pricing. While music publishers have searched far and wide for better monetization strategies, few facets of the business have shown the same revenue growth as mobile apps. Thanks to the iPhone, customers are used to paying for mobile applications and according to Appsfire, all but one of the top grossing apps is priced above $2.99.

According to a research report released by Denmark's Strand Consult, the iPhone is not the profit-generating machine that people have made it out to be...that is, unless you're Apple. For carriers, however, gaining the exclusive rights to sell the iPhone isn't exactly a winning situation. The report says that the hidden costs of the phone, which include things like the subsidies and the revenue share Apple demands, have actually hurt rather than helped mobile operators' earnings.

AT&T just announced that MMS for the iPhone 3G and 3GS will become available on September 25th. While the iPhone itself already supports this feature, AT&T held back on making it available to its customers, much to the disappointment of many iPhone owners. MMS, which basically allows users to send images, audio, and short videos to other phones just like a text message, will be enabled through a software update for the iPhone. According to AT&T, the company didn't enable this feature any earlier because it needed to upgraded its infrastructure to the point where it was ready to handle the traffic it expects to see once this feature becomes available.

Developers and enthusiasts have hoped that official support for Augmented Reality (AR), the display of data on top of a view of the real world, would come to the iPhone in early September. Today's announcement of a big Apple event on September 9th that's focused on the iPod, however, gives reason to suspect that the next version of the iPhone operating system will spend more time in the oven.

AR startup Acrossair reportedly told the LA Times in July that Apple told it that official support for AR was coming in iPhone OS 3.1. Acrossair may have introduced the hope that 3.1 was coming in early September. It's still possible that we might see AR support in a week and a half, but other developers tell us they wouldn't be surprised to see some more beta versions tested before it launches.

This week, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office revealed a patent filed by Apple for "Transitional Data Sets" - a technology that would update an iPhone's home screen based on your current physical location. Of course, as with all patents filed by major technology companies, a patent won't necessarily translate to an actual feature - it just represents intellectual property. For this reason, we don't typically report on every new patent application that comes through the U.S. PTO, but in this case, we couldn't help ourselves. The concept behind the location-aware home screen is one we want now. It represents everything a smartphone should be.

Parties are fun, but a really great party means the morning after is spent untagging photographs on Facebook. You were having a perfectly good time until some amateur lens jockey decided to give you the double chin treatment and then have the gall to tag it. If you're at all modest (or vain), you might as well start changing your privacy settings now. According to Justin Smith at Inside Facebook, Engineer Joe Hewitt just submitted the official Facebook for iPhone 3.0 app to the App Store for review. The new release will build upon a number of the community's social features including the ability to create albums, zoom into images, improve photo tagging and add video.

Radiohead's frontman Thom Yorke announced that the band will no longer release full-length studio albums and instead focus on downloadable singles. In response, Fast Company's Kit Eaton, declared that the concept of albums is still alive and simply evolving. Part of that evolution is Apple's Cocktail interactive album effort. He argues that albums maintain their purpose to communicate musical themes, "the same way that a curated collection of a painter's works does". Nevertheless, it may be that in some cases, the album will thrive for the exact opposite reasons.

Everyone is falling all over themselves to talk about tablets. Yesterday Wired.com topped them all in the hype department by declaring 2010 to be the year of the tablet. But let's just slow down a minute. Yes, a big old pane of multi-touch goodness is a thing of beauty, and we're just as susceptible to its magic as you are. But there's a reason tablets haven't caught on to date.

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has the Midas touch. In anticipation of the company's US launch, the on-demand music streaming site is finalizing what is rumored to be a $50 million dollar round of investments. According to the Financial Times, if Spotify closes the round with Wellington Partners and Li Ka Shing Foundation, the Swedish company will be valued at $250 million dollars.

A little over a month ago, the next update to the iPhone firmware - OS 3.1 beta - was released to developers. With the updated firmware, there are a number of bug fixes and a few new features, including voice control over Bluetooth, copy and paste for phone numbers, vibration feedback when re-arranging screen icons, and more. However, the most notable change in the latest OS update is the re-inclusion of MMS. For unknown reasons, this feature was removed from the fifth beta and the public release of the OS, but now it's back and enabled by default. Although the functionality isn't working over the AT&T network yet, there are reports that the next iPhone update will indeed enable MMS. The only question is when?

This weekend, developers, UI designers and testers combined forces to share ideas and collaborate at the third annual iPhone Dev Camp. The event encourages individuals at all levels to continue to stretch the development boundaries of the iPhone and iPod touch. The event's Hackathon competition offers an exhibition of attendee projects and is a showcase of some of the industry's brightest innovators. Below are some of the latest trends amongst those innovators.

Apple has never been one to be overly communicative with their developer community and the iTunes App Store is no exception. There is often little communication between Apple and developers when it comes to why an app is rejected or why its launch in the store is delayed. Now with the recent removal of all Google Voice related applications from the App Store - and again, with no explanations - at least one developer has had enough.

But lack of communication is only one of the issues with today's App Store approval process. O'Reilly Research is reporting today that the incubation period for apps is now trending upward - a figure that seems to speak to Apple's becoming overwhelmed by the number of submissions. And finally, courtesy of Apple's mysterious approval process, they've accidentally let yet another "adult"-themed application into the App Store once again.

Apple recently countered against the Electronic Frontiers Foundation's request to the US Copyright Office to make an exemption to the DMCA and permit iPhone jail breaking. Apple claims an exemption would leave a phone's baseband processor (BBP) open to malicious hackers. From here, hackers could then circumvent data and call payments, make anonymous phone calls "desirable to drug dealers" and even initiate commands to render cell towers inoperable. The argument that phone hacking is particularly "desirable to drug dealers" and corporate terrorists is an amusing one given that Apple's co-founders are themselves known to have experimented with phone phreaking in their youth.

In an unsurprising move, Apple is said to be working with major record labels to provide an "interactive album" to consumers. The company is rumored to be working with EMI, Sony, Warner and Universal to bundle photos, lyric sheets, liner notes and videos with album purchases in the iTunes store. According to the FInancial Times, the move is meant to increase album sales. Nevertheless, a number of critics have already argued that the attempt will be ill-fated. While it's true that "interactive" music material has already been executed in various iterations, Apple's move may have a extremely positive affect on the music industry as a whole.

Last week, iPhone developers were taken by surprise when Apple unceremoniously removed their ability to promote their "mature" applications (ages 17+) using promo codes. These codes allow application creators to raise awareness about their work by sending out free copies of apps to select individuals, such as those working in the media, in the hopes of having their new app reviewed. Now it seems that Apple has reversed this earlier, controversial decision and is allowing promo codes once again. But we have to wonder: why were they ever removed to begin with?

Earlier today, Apple announced that iPhone and iPod touch users have now downloaded over 1.5 billion applications. According to Apple, there are now also over 100,000 developers in the iPhone Developer Program and over 65,000 apps in the store. The number of actual iPhone developers might be a bit lower than Apple reports, as a lot of people only joined the paid version of the program to get their hands on the betas of the iPhone 3.0 OS, but there can be little doubt that the App store is a runaway success, both for Apple and developers. Given this huge success of the App Store, it is worth thinking about the factors that contributed to the App Store's success and what Apple could do to make the store even better.

According to Dominik Balogh, the developer of a push-enabled "to do" list application for iPhone called NotifyMe, the Push Notification technology provided by Apple does not appear to be working on any "unlocked" iPhones. Unlocked phones are those that have been modified to work on unsupported carriers. For example, in the U.S., this would mean phones that were hacked to work on T-Mobile's network instead of on AT&T. This is different than "jailbroken" phones, which are phones modified to allow the installation of unapproved third-party applications.

At first, you might dismiss this problem since it only affects a small subset of users, but Balogh brings up an important question: "what should the developers do?" People who have purchased his application are now angry that it doesn't work, yet there's nothing he can do to help them.

When Apple launched the iPhone 3.0 update, we were pretty excited about a number of the new features in the OS, but push notifications, which Apple billed as an alternative to battery-draining background processes, were on the top of our list. After a few weeks with the iPhone 3.0 OS, however, only a very small number of push apps have made it into the store, and even some of the best ones, like BeeJive IM (iTunes link) and the AP Mobile app (iTunes link) suffer from major drawbacks.

Venrock has quite a history as a VC firm. In the 1930s, Laurance Rockefeller pioneered early-stage financing by investing in the entrepreneurs who started Eastern Airlines and McDonnell Aircraft. In 1969, Venrock was founded to continue this heritage of investing in and building entrepreneur-backed companies, beginning with Intel. You will find a bunch of household names in its portfolio, such as Apple, as well as more recent Web tech ventures, such as CC Betty, BlogHer, Bungee Labs, and SlideShare. Venerable, perhaps, but not one to rest on its laurels, as Brian Ascher explained in our recent interview.

Think Major League Baseball's stats and live video iPhone app is cool? Imagine what Apple could do with technology it was granted a patent for this week: a network of sensors that deliver real-time velocity, impact, rotation and other data from sporting event participants to the web. Imagine your iPhone's accelerometer placed inside a boxer's glove, a snowboarder's snow suit or a NASCAR driver's car - with the information captured delivered to your iPhone or Apple TV while you watch the competition either in person or remotely.

Would you pay a premium for an event ticket that includes real time stats like that delivered to your iPhone? I would. Of course Apple is granted all kinds of patents all the time and only some of them amount to anything - but this one is very cool.