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| Top 10 Tech This Week [PICS] | | Saturday, March 03, 2012 4:17 PM | Charlie White |
|  It was a livelier tech week than we've seen in a long time. On the heels of the big smartphone and mobile tech convention in Barcelona, the tech world braced itself for a huge auto show in Geneva next week, leaking pics of cool cars like a sieve. We've sorted out the best of the techno-goodness, just for you. SEE ALSO: Previous editions of Top 10 Tech This Week In the meantime, rumors abound, and we have our ears to the ground. Find out the latest scuttlebutt, experience gadgetry from the present and future, and hold on for dear life as we bring you the latest edition of Top 10 Tech This Week. Here's last week's Top 10 Tech. |
| Apple's App Store Hits 25 Billion Downloads | | Saturday, March 03, 2012 3:13 PM | Sarah Kessler |
|  Apple customers have collectively downloaded 25 billion apps from the App Store, the company has announced on its webpage. That's more than three apps per person in the world. The milestone signals not only a vast appetite for apps, but also growing smartphone penetration and Apple profits (the company takes a 30% cut from every app or in-app purchase). People with iOS devices are downloading an increasing number of apps. One 2011 study, for instance, concluded iOS owners download about 60 apps each, which is 50 more apps that the same researcher found each iOS owner downloaded in 2008. And as the number of apps per device has grown, so has the number of devices. In a 2011 Pew Survey, 35% of the 2,277 U.S. adults questioned in English or Spanish said that they owned a smartphone. Pew released another study this week that found this percentage has since jumped to 46%. More Americans now own smartphones than feature phones, and the world bought 37 million of them from Apple last quarter alone. Growing app downloads and growing device sales are a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation: Do people buy iPhones because they want to download apps or do they download apps because they have iPhones? Combined net sales for the iTunes Store, App Store and iBookstore in 2011 was $5.4 billion -- just 6% of Apple's net sales, but a 33% increase compared to 2010. Whether devices are driving app sales or the app store is driving device sales (or, more realistically, some combination of both), growing app demand and growing mobile device penetration have served Apple's bottom line quite nicely. The company reported its highest revenue and earnings ever last quarter. If you go by its market cap, it is now worth more than all the tea in China. In this context, the $10,000 gift card Apple promised to give away when it hit the 25 billionth app from its App Store looks less over-the-top. Apple hasn't yet announced the winner, but considering that to enter the contest, users were required to agree to publicly share some App Store picks with the Apple community if they won, we'll likely be meeting the lucky winner soon. |
| 7 New Apps You Don't Want to Miss | | Saturday, March 03, 2012 2:38 PM | Sarah Kessler |
|  Smartphone users got a variety of new app options this week. In just the top seven of them we selected from the virtual haystack, there are new ways to imagine yourself on a post-apocalyptic zombie chase during a daily jog, focus your phone's camera on one point while adjusting exposure in another (if, of course, the zombies let up long enough for you to take a snapshot) or spend some time catching up on the election. Apps featured in the gallery above will also show you what the other apps you've downloaded are telling ad networks about you (if you're feeling private) or send up to 30 images from your iPhone at once (if you're in a sharing mood). When you're done with all that, you'll no doubt be hungry. In which case, you can use Seamless's new iPad app to order some food for delivery. Have you tried any of these apps? Which is your favorite? What other apps have launched this week that you would add to the list? |
| Mercedes Rolls Out Invisible Car [VIDEO] | | Saturday, March 03, 2012 11:55 AM | Charlie White |
|  When Mercedes wanted to promote its new fuel cell vehicle, instead of placing it squarely in front of everyone in the world, the company decided to make the car invisible. We have video. In this clever publicity stunt, Mercedes wanted to emphasize that its F-Cell vehicle has no omissions, making it virtually invisible to the environment. If you take a look at the gallery below, you'll see how these clever dudes did it: by placing a mat of LEDs across one side of the vehicle and mounting a video-shooting Canon 5D Mark II digital SLR camera on the other side. We saw a Halloween costume like this once. Mount an iPad on your belly, surround it with costuming that looks like a hole, place a webcam on your back shooting backward, and then feed that video into the iPad. Voilà! It looks like you have a gory hole going all the way through you: Mercedes is doing basically the same trick. As you can see in the Mercedes video, even though people could still tell there was a car going by, they seemed impressed by the "invisible" fuel-cell vehicle. Mercedes says its hydrogen-powered drive system is "ready for series production," but other reports have its commercialization set for 2014. However, fuel-cell technology is still notoriously expensive, partly because hydrogen is a difficult fuel to store and transport. The materials needed to create a viable fuel-cell are still hovering in the pricey stratosphere. Practicality aside, we applaud Mercedes and its efforts to create a vehicle with zero emissions and less impact on the environment, and admire the lengths to which these artists went to bring home that point. By the way, with all the ultra-cool cars in the Mercedes stable, why did the company pick a minivan for this showy demo? Oh, we get it: more surface area to mount that video screen. |
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