Mobile apps have captured much press and imagination this week, as Google has unveiled its App Inventor project, but Conduit is reminding everyone that web apps are big business.

The company has announced that its network has grown to over 250,000 app publishers & 170 million users, with adoption of apps by end-users increasing 233% between last July and last month.

"While most of the buzz in the media is about mobile apps, the reality of the situation is that 118 million more people use Conduit-powered apps than iPhone and Droid apps combined," says Conduit president Adam Boyden. "In fact, the Conduit Network of app publishers and users is so large that we are able to identify unique trends about web app usage."

Some of these trends? According to Conduit:

- 60 million end users consume apps from the Conduit App Marketplace every day.

- Since August of 2009, the number of web publishers that have more than one million users has grown from 1 to more than 40

- Over 8 million people got the Coke Zero-Avatar App last December in the first 10 days after launch. After the success of that app, digital agency Mediatronica built another and the recently launched Coke Zero SWAT App, already has 2.5 million users.

- The Pitsi mini-game app generated more than 66 million engagements during the first 10 weeks of 2010.

"Conduit is doing for web apps, what iPhone did for mobile apps and in a bigger market – the browser," says Boyden.

"The last year has been phenomenal for C/> [...]

Fri Jul 16, 2010 06:51 am

Google said today it is increasing its funding for 12 university projects to further advance research in areas the company is interested in developing.

Google Focused Research Awards, totaling $5.7 million, include four categories: machine learning, the use of mobile phones as data collection devices for public health and environment monitoring, energy efficiency in computing, and privacy.

"These are all areas in which Google is already deeply invested, and yet there is a long way to go. We're excited to see what these projects contribute to the body of research in these important areas," wrote Alfred Spector, Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives, Google.

"These unrestricted grants are for two to three years, and the recipients will have the advantage of access to Google tools, technologies and expertise."
 

Related Articles:

> Google Profiles Go to the SERPs

> Google Launches Social Search Experiment

> /> [...]

Tue Feb 02, 2010 07:15 am

Apple just announced some major additions to its iBooks e-reader application. Most importantly, iBooks users can now read their PDF files in iBooks. PDF documents will get their own bookshelf in the application. In addition, iBooks users will now be able to write notes within the app and create bookmarks with a single click instead of having to highlight a word to create a bookmark. These new features will be available later this year.

Sponsor

Obviously, most of this feature - and especially notes - should have been in the original iBooks app. It's good to see that Apple is finally adding this functionality, which is already available in almost every other e-reader application on the market today.

2.5 eBooks Per iPad

With regards to eBooks on the iPad, Steve Jobs also announced that Apple has sold about 2.5 books per iPad since the launch. That, of course, is far behind Apple's numbers for iPad apps (users have installed about 17 apps per device) - though 2.5 books is not a bad number, especially given that most books are retailing for at least $10. Sadly, Apple did not disclose how many of these books were paid downloads. In total, iPad owners downloaded 5 million books so far.

Jobs also stressed that publishers are telling Apple that iBooks now accounts for 22% of their e-book sales.

Image credit: [...]

Mon Jun 07, 2010 11:00 am

Hulu Adds New Options to the Queue

Share |

Popular online video destination Hulu has added a new default view for the user's queue. The new view groups all videos within the queue by show. In the past, users could only sort everything by show by clicking on the title and information column.

"As we've added more content and as users' queues have grown in size, grouping by show as a default was a logical update," says Eugene Wei VP, Product at Hulu.

With the new layout, there are two display options. One of them is a vertical text list of videos for each show, and the other shows them more visually with thumbnails, horizontally. You can see both displays below.

Both views contain a link that says "Play All," which will allow users to simply play the videos in order from oldest to most recently aired. "As before, clicking on any video within a show in your queue will activate continuous play, but in this new 'group by show' view, we’ll only play through all the videos from that particular show," notes Wei.

In addition to the new display options for the queue, Hulu has made it easier to add entire seasons of shows. On show pages, there is now a link that says "+ all". Clicking this will have a whole season of a how queued up for you.


Related Articles:

[...]

Thu Dec 17, 2009 08:15 am

---