If you’re like me, you like to have fun, knock back a few drinks with your friends, and party the night away. Simple, right? Yes, this all may seem very carefree – but, shockingly, mistakes, misjudgments and social faux pas are made while under the influence. Consuming alcohol, as you may know, seems to have some kind of mysterious effect on our judgment and our ability to make smart decisions. This is perhaps the reason you can’t enter into a contract or operate a motor vehicle while under the influence. But what about when it comes to operating a phone? Yeah, there’s an app for that. Fortunately…

There was never a doubt that iOS and Android are much bigger than Windows when it comes to mobile OS adoption, but a report by MetroStore Scanner that the Windows Store has only recently broken the 50,000 app barrier is both a little embarrassing to the company and at least a little alarming to developers who are looking for long-term homes for their apps. By comparison, iOS is tracking to hit 800,000 in April and Android is tracking to hit 900,000. The fear of developers is manifesting in a slowdown of new apps. In November, 2012, the average daily count of new apps submitted to Windows Store was a brisk…

Apple announced today that the App Store has had over 40 billion downloads since launching and that nearly half of those came in 2012 alone. This comes on the heals of an up and down year for Apple that is still operating in the shadows of its deceased co-founder Steve Jobs. “It has been an incredible year for the iOS developer community,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services. “Developers have made over seven billion dollars on the App Store, and we continue to invest in providing them with the best ecosystem so they can create the most innovative…

There are plenty of ways to use mobile devices to promote a business. The merging of social, local, and mobile into the SoLoMo buzzword of 2012 is starting to became a reality for 2013. With YouTube’s latest app for iPhone and iPod Touch, the video giant has given a powerful tool to businesses who rely on showing people their wares before they make the drive. For example, the internet has expanded the reach of car dealerships. People are able to look at more industries in minutes than they used to be able to look at in an entire day of shopping. They can identify the dealerships that have a vehicle that…

For every valid, working app on the App Store, there are two apps that are considered “walking dead” by German mobile analytics firm Adeven. By their count, there are 400,000 apps that do not get downloaded, are invisible to users, and have no ratings. “The reality is there are only a couple of thousand apps that really make some kind of downloads,” Christian Henschel, Adeven CEO, told David Meyer at Gigaom. “This is based on Apple’s closed system — it’s tough to discover those kinds of apps. You don’t have proper search, so the only way to discover new apps is through the top listing.”…

As our society becomes increasingly globalized, the ability to speak more than one language becomes increasingly useful. Members of today’s youth population who learn to speak more than one language are likely to have a huge advantage over their monolingual peers in terms of job prospects in the future. Fortunately, technology is making language learning less difficult and more enjoyable for both kids and adults. New apps for tablets and smartphones, in particular, are beginning to break boundaries and revolutionize the way people learn to speak different languages. A Palo Alto-based…

It’s about time! Finally there is an iPhone app for Facebook page administrators to be “on-the-go” and still be up to date with their fans. As a community manager, my business associates and I feel this app will be a great addition to our methods of managing our client’s pages. With social media comes a feeling of instant gratification. I think with social media, there should be timeliness with the response on a post that fans want to see. Everyone has immediate access to what you post and everything that they post, they want an immediate response on. For a community manager it allows for your…

Apple rolled out a subscription service today that will allow publishers to put their content on apps and charge for them through the App Store. The subscription billing service is based upon what they and News Corp have done with The Daily. By applying the App Purchases billing system to a content subscription model, publishers will be able to set prices and lengths of subscriptions and offer them to consumers at various levels of commitment. By putting it all in a centralized location specific to content publishers, users will be able to manage and monitor all of their subscriptions at once….

Geeks love smart phones, but if I see another “fart” application, I might just go kamikaze on my Droid X. Barring that potentiality, it has now become known that 26 percent of all applications are only used one time after installation, before becoming a waste of space, according to Localytics. And I think that fact is impressive. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that most of the mobile applications we install are stupid; they don’t do anything useful, they don’t do anything productive, and they don’t warrant the time spent downloading and installing them. Is it because the applications…

So the Mac App Store won’t have demos. How about that. Demos, trials and ‘Lite’ versions are hugely popular on iOS, helping drive sales – but the Mac App Store is having none of that bullspit up in hurr. Apple is pretending they’re still down with demos, at least in concept, as indicated by a statement made in the announcement: Your website is the best place to provide demos, trial versions, or betas of your software for customers to explore. The apps you submit to be reviewed for the Mac App Store should be fully functional, retail versions of your apps. Come on, Steve – that’s a pretty crappy deal. Believe…