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AT&T just launched FamilyMap, the company's newest iPhone app, which allows you to track the location of your family members directly on your iPhone. The app (iTunes link) allows you to see the exact location of your cellphone toting family members. You can also set up recurring alerts, which allows you to check if your child arrived at school in the morning, for example. Given that this is an AT&T app, it doesn't come as a surprise that the service is only available if you pay a monthly subscription fee. Tracking the location of two phones costs $9.99 per month. For $14.99 per month, you can track up to five phones.

We are still in the early days of location-based apps, but according to new data from Skyhook, there are now over 6,000 location-based iPhone apps, 900 Android apps and 300 BlackBerry apps. Skyhook, the company that allows non-GPS enabled devices to triangulate locations by using nearby WiFi signals, also found that only a small number of these location-based apps are currently available across the three major app stores. There are currently only 43 cross-platform location apps.

Apple has posted a shocking, if vague, warning to iPhone app creators in its developer forums: submit an app that uses user location data "primarily" for targeting advertisements and that app will be sent right back to you to be changed.

Many mobile developers are planning on monetizing their apps precisely through location-based advertising. There's no clear criteria for how much advertising is too much, and perhaps Apple will exercise discretion in recognizing advertisements as merely supplemental to other features in many apps, but the language used by the company is wholly disconcerting and is another great example of the perils of developing on a closed platform like the iPhone. This is crazy.

Swiss researcher Nicolas Seriot claims it's possible for "rogue" applications to make their way into the iTunes App Store where they could then be used to steal personal data from victims' iPhones. According to Seriot's research, the problem has to with Apple's lax approval process for applications as well as a flaw in an iPhone security feature that provides access to more data than is necessary. If a malicious application was installed on someone's iPhone, it could use this loophole to quietly harvest personal data including phone numbers, address book information, the phone's unique identifier and more. Then, using the phone's Internet connection, it could send that data back to remote servers, all unbeknownst to the iPhone's owner.

Apparently Microsoft is talking profit in the midst of 15 straight quarters of losses, according to a Paid Content article this morning. The company is looking to Bing to pull it out of its nearly four-year long slide, Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft senior vice president of online business, said in an interview last night with Reuters.

According to the interview, Bing is looking at becoming a "credible No. 2" as soon as Microsoft closes a deal with Yahoo, making Bing the backbone for Yahoo search. We do see a few areas where Bing has been gaining ground and wonder if Microsoft may be able to come back out of the red.

The latest word on Skype for 3G is "soon" according to a blog post on its website today. You may have missed out last week, amid all the iPad hubbub, but Apple removed its restriction on VoIP calls on 3G with the release of its latest iPhone SDK.

The return of Skype to the iPhone is something we've not-so-patiently awaited since it was banned only a short time after being released last March, and it looks like we won't have to wait much longer. And this time around, we're hoping video chat isn't far behind.

"I still can't believe this! All this hype for something so ridiculous! ... I want something new! I want them to think differently! Why oh why would they do this?! It's so wrong! It's so stupid!"

Sound familiar? That wasn't a reaction to yesterday's Apple iPad launch, that was a MacRumors commenter in 2001 reacting to the launch of the iPod. The iPod, the device that symbolized personal electronics more than any other product in the last decade, was widely criticized when it was unveiled. It was "just another MP3 player."

Yesterday's iPad launch continues to dominate the tech news today. Besides announcing the iPad, however, Apple also quietly announced a major change to its iPhone policies yesterday: Apple now allows developers to use a 3G connection to make VoIP calls. The first application to make use of this is iCall (iTunes link), but chances are that Skype, Truphone and other VoIP providers are already working on updated iPhone apps as well.

With yesterday's reveal of the iPad now past, we can finally put myth and speculation behind us and focus on the reality that is Apple's entry into the tablet PC business. Whether the iPad is revolutionary or evolutionary is still hotly debated, but what we do know is that the computer, despite its elegance and blazing fast speed, is a decidedly first-generation device. Although one day after the product's announcement may be too soon to discuss what's coming in the next version of the iPad, we've already come across several reasons to wait... and some of those reasons are hidden away in the new iPad SDK (software development kit) itself.

A week ago, the cat was let out of the bag: Apple and Microsoft were in talks over replacing Google with Bing, and have been for weeks, as the default search engine on the iPhone. Immediately, there were questions over the implications of this move, both for the companies involved and the users.

Today, online advertising network Chitika has released some numbers that show just how big of a move this could be for all parties involved.

Google launched a new web-based version of its telephony service Google Voice on the iPhone today at m.google.com/voice, built on HTML5 like Google's other iPhone apps are. This after a long and heated battle with Apple over allowing Google Voice on the iPhone. Once it's a website, though, there's nothing Apple can do about it.

HTML5 makes for a relatively nice experience, with its local caching for speed and its responsive interface, but there are some things about the Google Voice web app that just don't feel quite right. It's hard to know which of its problems are just oversights to be fixed and which of them are rooted in the fact that it's a web app. What do you think, is an HTML5 telephony app good enough? Or does your phone need to, you know, be on your phone?

While we recently reported that Google's Nexus One had a slow start coming out of the gate, the Android operating system, which is spread across a number of devices, is not having the same issues. A report by Myxer, a mobile entertainment company with over 30 million members, says that visits to its mobile site by Android users grew 350% in 2009, strongly outpacing the iPhone, which grew 170% during the same period.

Developer Tobias Schneider has created an interesting proof-of-concept Flash runtime that allows Flash to work on the iPhone. The project, a JavaScript with SVG called "Gordon," allows Flash files embedded in HTML to be viewed within the iPhone's web browser Safari. Although this workaround to Apple's restriction of Flash content on their ever-popular mobile device is a bit cumbersome and impractical for real-world use, it's a geeky and fun project for developers who want to run Flash on the iPhone...just so they can say that they did so.

...Before the Mobile Website!

The White House announced the release of a new White House iPhone app via a late-night blog post on WhiteHouse.gov. Included in the mobile application are features like news items, photos, blog posts, videos, and even live video streaming. That's right - live video. According to White House blogger Dave Cole, the app lets users watch public events like speeches and press briefings in real time using their mobile device. Next week's State of the Union address by President Obama will kick off this effort, delivering live video of the speech to anyone running the free application on their Apple iPhone or iPod Touch.

Business review service Yelp will update its mobile apps soon to include a feature called "check-ins," a feature similar to one that several smaller location-based social networks have built their businesses around. This according to several other blogs that were given early access to the feature - blogs that, co-incidentally, are less likely to mention complaints about Yelp, like that it is hated by many business owners, is believed by some to be full of extortionists, and is believed by many to be filled with self-absorbed, chronically snide hipsters.

Those common criticisms aside, Yelp is pretty awesome and the addition of check-ins could make it even more awesome still. Or it could be really annoying. It's hard to say for sure, but it's definitely going to be a big deal.

Nike launched a new iPhone app yesterday called True City (iTunes link) with the slogan "Make the hidden visible." The app provides hyper-local, real-time information for 6 European cities. It combines expert curation of news and events info, crowdsourced information discovery (with a chance to become an official guide), push notifications, QR codes printed and posted around the city and apparently a little Augmented Reality. Of course True City also lets you learn about shoes you can buy.

It was built by AKQA, the same design firm that made the truly useful Augmented Reality app for the US Postal Service that lets you see if an object you're holding up to your computer will fit in a postal shipping box.

Google is trying to come just one step closer to answering any question you might have before you even ask it. This time around, the increasingly omniscient search engine will now cater its search suggestion list on Android-powered devices and iPhones according to your location.

The search suggestion list is that set of terms that appears below the text entry field on Google, made famous by often listing the things we only think - or type into Google.

An iPhone application released this week from a company called i-Doodz tracks those who have "defriended" you on the social networking site Facebook. Defriended, as the app is called, takes its name from the slang word that means "to remove from one's list of friends (e.g. on a social networking site)", according to Wikitionary, an open content dictionary that operates like Wikipedia for words.

The Defriended app gives you an easy way to track these defriending events since Facebook itself doesn't provide this feature - or at least that's what the app did until Facebook blocked its operation. Apparently, the social network thinks defriending should be a private matter. As of now, the app is no longer available for download in the App Store.

According to an independent analysis performed by investment-watching blog 24/7 Wall St., Apple's iTunes App Store has lost $450 million due to iPhone app piracy since it opened for business back in July of 2008. Although that number sounds high, they note it is small in comparison to the overall size of the App Store marketplace and the millions it generates in revenue each quarter - revenue that ranges from $60 million to $110 million according to previous estimates from a Bernstein analyst report cited in 24/7 Wall St.'s post.

However, in order to generate the $450 million figure, the author of the post uses some questionable back-of-the-envelope calculations that raise some flags. Our sources say that the real number is closer to $15 million to $20 million instead.

According to Mplayit CEO Michael Powers, the size of a mobile platform's app store is now mostly irrelevant. Facebook-based mobile app store Mplayit took a close look at the most popular apps for Android, BlackBerry and the iPhone and found that the most popular apps on all three platforms tend to be very similar. As the popular app stores continue to grow, users on all the major platforms also drift towards the same known brands and hits like EverNote and Pandora.