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AOL is launching its entry into the increasingly crowded iPad magazine space with the new application AOL Editions. The app is somewhat similar to other high-profile efforts like The Daily, Flipboard, Plus and Zite, but attempts to find its niche by offering a personalized, social, once-daily experience which is also publisher-friendly.

But most importantly, in an effort to further define itself, AOL has made the bold decision to forgo real-time updates in favor of a magazine that you can actually finish reading throughout the course of the day.

Today Tableau announced a new iPad app and a tablet-optimized version of its hosted business intelligence and data visualization solution. "All Tableau views, from both Tableau Server and Tableau Public, are now optimized for touch and gesture experiences when accessed on the iPad," according to the company's announcement.

Version 6.1 of Tableau also brings performance improvements to its in-memory analytics engine, additional maps and French and German localization. More information about the update can be found here.

Mobile application search and discovery service Chomp has released its June 2011 report on app search trends and found that, for the second consecutive month, paid app downloads on Android have increased. The increases are small; paid Android app downloads increased just 2% from April to May and only 1% from May to June.

And in total, only 6% of all Android downloads on Chomp's network were paid.

American Express' new digital payments platform Serve has just announced its second operator partnership here in the U.S. will be with Verizon Wireless. This news follows last month's report that Sprint would also integrate the Serve platform into select Android phones on its network.

According to Verizon, its customers will be able to sign up for Serve accounts on both Verizon phones and tablets, although it did not specify which devices those would be.

Trover, a photo-driven app for exploring places, has launched out of private beta. Trover lets users share location-tagged photos and browse them by time and location.

Though Trover is a photo-sharing app, it is organized for exploration, not just for browsing images. Don't think Instagram; Trover's roots within Seattle-based travel startup Travelpost are apparent. Trover shows what's around you to help you explore the place.

Mobile phones could be used to track peoples' physical activity and other health factors, using data gathered from existing community groups to track performance against baseline standards for health, rewarding individuals and groups exhibiting healthy patterns, and changing our relationship with food, exercise, medicine, insurance and general health. That's the bold vision of the future articulated by Dr. Brigitte Piniewski, Portland, Oregon-based Chief Medical Officer of PeaceHealth Laboratories, in a must-read interview on Mobile Health News this weekend.

Piniewski says young people in the United States are experiencing widespread hopelessness about their employment and insurance prospects for the long term. In part as a result, they are developing habits today that will aim them in very bad directions for their long term well-being. A data-driven realignment of our relationship with health, to move us away from crisis-prompted medical reaction and towards a culture of prevention and self-care, could not only help remake our society here in the United States. It could also help provide models that the developing world, where mobile device penetration is high but processed food consumption is low, could use to leapfrog our own experiences with self-destructive individual and collective behavior.

When Membase and CouchOne merged earlier this year to form Couchbase, the newly formed company promised to release a merged version of the NoSQL database servers the company sponsors: Apache CouchDB and Membase.

Today Couchbase made good on that promise with the release of the first developer preview for Couchbase Server 2.0, which combines the elasticity of Membase with CouchDB's distributed indexing, bidirectional replication and JavaScript-based map-reduce querying.

Dell has published an infographic collecting various statistics about the progress of the consumerization of IT. We've covered some of this data before, such the studies sponsored by Unisys, but this does a nice job of pulling several piece of information together.

I don't care for the conflation of IT consumerization with the labor movement, but it's otherwise a nice visual summary of the changes occurring in the enterprise.

Geographic data provider SimpleGeo announced yesterday that it now offers US census data for any location an app queries for, along with all the other types of data about what surrounds that place. Gender breakout, commute time, age, housing prices and other data gathered by the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey is now included in the offerings of one of the most interesting companies on the market.

I'm not going to write at length about this, because too few people will appreciate it, but I do want to say that I think this is downright magical. A service that breathes life into latent data about the places users find themselves, to be served up by mobile apps built by independent developers, that's magical. Census data is just all the more exciting.

You can't hug every cat and it's hard to test apps on every phone, too. "One of the major challenges for [mobile] platform vendors, carriers, and handset manufacturers is how to make sure the best apps are available on their products," writes mobile developer Jason Grigsby, co-founder of a new nonprofit organization called Mobile Portland.

"One of the biggest challenges for mobile developers and businesses is getting access to devices for testing. Not even the largest of companies can afford to purchase all of the possible devices on which their software or services may run on." Mobile Portland hopes to find a solution in the place where those two challenges come together and is building what it believes will be the first community mobile device testing lab in the United States. It's a very ambitious project.