The Newest Handphone: ReadWriteWeb Daily Recap

Apple Reportedly Buys iCloud.com, Music Streaming Service Around the Corner?

Apple's long-rumored, cloud-based music service may be coming to fruition. According to reports, Apple has acquired the domain name iCloud.com from Swedish cloud services provider Xcerion for $4.5 million. Coupled with the 500,000 square foot data center that is being finished in North Carolina, Apple may finally be ready to make its big cloud push.

The speculation so far has been that the data center will be for iTunes storage and streaming. Think "iTunes Everywhere." It is also likely that Apple will rebrand its existing cloud product MobileMe at some point, perhaps with the iCloud designation. Either way, with a $4.5 million price tag for the domain name, it is likely that iCloud will be a significant chip in Apple's portfolio.

Who's Winning the Battle for the Best-Stocked App Store?

The app store analytics firm Distimo has released its latest report on the size of the various mobile app stores, as well as the types and prices of apps that are most successful there. The report compares the Apple App Store for iPad, Apple App Store for iPhone, Apple Mac App Store, BlackBerry App World, GetJar, Google Android Market, Nokia Ovi Store, Palm App Catalog, and Windows Phone 7 Marketplace. Despite all the buzz surrounding apps and mobile devices, the report finds that these stores only experienced moderate growth over the last few months.

No surprise, the Apple App Store still dominates, fueled primarily by the number of apps available for iPhone. However, when you separate that store into two - iPhone apps and iPad apps - you get a different picture. Despite being the largest store, the Apple App Store for iPhone was among the slowest growing stores in terms of relative growth. Even so, that growth was still second only to the Google Android Market in terms of absolutely growth.

How Color is Being Used

Yesterday we compared the recent launch of new photo and video sharing app Color to the arrival of Twitter five years ago. Like Twitter, Color is an innovative app that has intrigued early adopters and has the potential to catch on in a big way. It's also popularizing a new buzzword: proximity. Yesterday we looked at an early use case for Color: photo sharing at the premiere of a Hollywood movie. However, it wasn't clear what value Color users at that event got from the app. So we asked the company for more information about the user experience so far and to give us more examples of how Color is being used.

In this post we explore some of those other examples of Color usage, including a concert and a BBQ. Also we talk to Color's Chief Product Officer DJ Patil and ask him to explain more about the product vision.

iPad Predicted in 1994 (Video)

The iPad is a futuristic looking device, but imagining something much like it isn't terribly new. In the video below, the former newspaper giant Knight-Ridder shows its vision of the newspaper's future - delivered by tablet computer. Circa 1994. It's amazing how much the company got right. The tablet's user experience, design and impact on media as a whole sound just about right. The timeframe predicted was 10 years too early. And the vision of tablets used without wireless content downloads is amusing, isn't it?

Study: 77% Don't Want to Share Location on Smartphones

For the last two weeks, it seems like anything anyone can talk about is the fact that our GPS-enabled smartphones are tracking our location. First, it was the iPhone, then the Android and finally Windows Phone 7. Why has this struck such a chord?

According to a study by TRUSTe, a leading Internet privacy service provider, privacy is the leading concern for smartphone users, with security following close behind.

Firefox Creates a Smarter Browser Bar

A new add-on to Firefox combines resources location and category search to the toolbar while protecting your browsing activity.

AwesomeBar HD is a spin-off from the Home Dash project designed by Mozilla developer Edward Lee to improve browsing and content discovery without the use of a toolbar. AwesomeBar is the opposite of Home Dash: instead of getting rid of the toolbar, it makes the address bar much more intuitive.

Extensions Bring Facebook's New "Send" Button to Google Reader, WordPress & More

Earlier this week, Facebook announced the "Send" button. Like the long lost sibling of the "Like" button, the "Send" button lets users share content with their friends, but more selectively. While clicking on "Like" sends a message across your entire Facebook network, "Share" lets you chose specific users, email addresses and Facebook Groups to share content with.

The new feature launched on Monday with 50 partner sites, including a number of major mainstream media outlets, but missed out on a number of great sites we love to share from. What if you use Google Reader to read your blogs but you want to share with your Facebook friends? Well, you'll just have to install one of these two extensions to bring the "Share" button to your browser of choice.

Is RIM Acquistion Tungle.me Headed for the PlayBook?

Research In Motion is continuing its "development by acquisition" strategy as it announced today that the company has acquired calendar and scheduling application Tungle.me.

The words "calendar" and "BlackBerry" have been together a lot recently. That is because RIM's new tablet, the BlackBerry PlayBook, shipped without a native calendar, contacts or email clients, all of which RIM has promised for "later this summer." There is no official word yet if RIM plans on integrating Tungle into the PlayBook but it would make a lot of sense.

India Enacts Repressive Online Speech Laws

An innocuous-sounding set of rules called the "Information Technology (Electronic Service Delivery) Rules, 2011" [pdf] went quietly into effect last month in India. These rules, possessing the force of law, practically guarantees that no user of electronic communications in one of the world's largest countries will ever be completely safe from persecution again.

Under the new rules, anyone who objects to content online will be able to effect that content's immediate removal. The justifications for removal are so extensive and so vague that virtually anything will qualify for removal.

Charge It: Square Gets a Visa Investment

Visa may have just launched In2Pay, a mobile payments solution of its own, last December but why should that stop it from funding rival mobile payment systems? The answer is that it shouldn't and it hasn't.

This morning, Square, the mobile payment solution founded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, announced that it had received "an undisclosed 'strategic investment' amount from Visa, the No. 1 credit card company," according to The Wall Street Journal.

The Newest Handphone

Thursday, April 28, 2011

ReadWriteWeb Daily Recap

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