Software, Mobile App | featured news

The Windows Phone Marketplace continues to grow at a steady rate. In little over a year, the Marketplace now has over 40,000 published apps according to an estimate from All About Windows Phone. This number is not the total available to consumers, but the total number that has been submitted to the online store. An estimated 5,500 apps are no longer available to consumers because they were removed by Microsoft or the developer.

How do you like those Apples? An unnamed New Yorker claims Apple's new "Find My Friends" app -- which uses GPS to locate any of your friends that have allowed you access to their location -- led to a stunning revelation: His wife has been cheating on him.

After the wild success of its mobile application, IMDb is branching into games and releasing its first title, a trivia game that draws on the company's extensive movie and TV database.

Following a nearly four-month trial period, Google is taking its mobile commerce application, Google Wallet, nationwide. In a blog post announcing the news, the search giant said it needed the time to extensively test the app, which lets users pay for goods by tapping their smartphones against special wireless readers, which are powered by MasterCard’s contactless “PayPass” technology.

What was born just before YouTube and Twitter, powers whole websites with open source code and has now been downloaded 25 million times? Joomla! The popular Content Management System with an exclamation point in its name passed a major milestone this month and now says its future will be based on helping developers build all kinds of other apps.

PhoneGuard is an app which disables a phone's texting functions whenever it detects the user moving more than 10 miles per hour-like when they may be behind the wheel of a car.

I got an average Joe to tackle one of the worst household chores imaginable—cleaning a Mt. Everest size pile of my dirty dishes. Think casserole pans with lasagna baked on and red wine-stained glasses from a dinner party two weeks ago.

The Finns behind Angry Birds seek global domination... “We think we can hit a billion downloads by the end of next year,” Vesterbacka says, casually. Then, almost as an aside: “We think we can be the leading entertainment brand in China by 2012.” Excusez-moi? “We think we can be bigger than Disney in China,” he clarifies. As growth projections go, this sounds absurd. Rovio grossed $20 million (the company is profitable) in the first three months of 2011. Disney will spend that amount every ten days for the next five years building its 1,000-acre theme park in Shanghai.

For the first time ever, the numbers of minutes spent each day using mobile apps has surpassed the number of minutes spent surfing the Web, both on the desktop and mobile devices. Read this blog post by Lance Whitney on Digital Media.

ING Direct customers can now transfer payments to friends with the bump of a cellphone — no account numbers needed. The bank released an updated version of its iPhone app on Wednesday morning that integrates an API from Bump Technologies, a startup that makes it easy to transfer information between phones by tapping them together.