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"News and magazine apps are a segment where the momentum is likely to shift towards the Web within the next two to three years," noted senior analyst Aapo Markkanen. "Since news and media content already account for a large share of smartphone usage and are likely to play an even bigger role in later adopters' usage, changes in this segment alone will make subscribers on average download fewer native apps." The next wave of smartphone owners in mature markets like the U.S., Western Europe and Asia will download fewer apps than the first one-third of mobile consumers who bought smartphones, according to the report on mobile app storefronts. At the same time, ABI expects that in the games and utilities categories, the mobile Web will probably never catch up with native apps, due to the difficulty in matching the user experience. ABI's outlook on the future of apps appears at odds with a separate report released Tuesday by Strategy Analytics, which maintains that the emergence of HTML5 won't put much of a dent in the app economy. Instead, it predicts the Web programming language will lead to the spread of hybrid apps that combine HTML5 with native APIs (application programming interface) to harness the best of native and open standards.

But it's AOL's own properties the company aims to build up as a go-to premium buy for brand advertisers. Display revenue on AOL properties grew by 2 percent. The company is betting on premium ad formats such as its rich-media laden Project Devil units to entice brands to spend more. AOL reported that more than half of the advertisers who bought the ads in Q1 re-upped this past quarter. Armstrong admitted that last year the company's focus was not data-driven, and stressed the firm's renewed mission to ensure that data - meaning results-related numbers proving the value of buying AOL's ad products - is at the heart of its sales approach. People cannot leave the building without data, said Armstrong. Mobile and video ad revenue are key to future growth for AOL, said Armstrong, who said that last summer 75 percent of insertion orders included both platforms. Today, it's close to 100 percent, he said. The company reported that videos, video views, and video revenue rose at double-digit rates, though it did not break out revenues for video advertising.

The more I read about the idea of content curators, the more I think it may currently be called "trendspotter." 

Lisa Marino notes that advertising has become a good source of revenue for them. "In the case of Zoo World, that franchise generates 40% of its net revenue after Facebook Credits from ad units. It's very, very highly tuned to ads because we found that our ARPPU overall was much higher than trying to continue to tune for digital goods monetization in games that are very 40-year-old mom-centric." Marino was bullish on the future of advertising for RockYou. "We've always been huge pioneers on the advertising side, and we're beginning to expand that to third-party games that we don't own and operate," she noted.

Academic work out of HP Labs showing social media as an accurate predictor of Hollywood box office success or failure.

"Publishers seem to have no end to their appetite for apps. This year through October, 9,125 publication-related apps were released for the iPad, twice the number released in the year-ago period, according to McPheters & Co.'s iMonitor app-tracking service. Hearst led publishers with the most number of apps (89), followed by Time Warner, Condé Nast, Future Media and Bonnier Corp. But as publishers expand to more and more platforms, they're pulling back on the number of costly and time-consuming enhancements, as are advertisers. That's unfortunate, since not only readers are more likely to read enhanced ads, they mean more money in publishers' coffers."

"Microcontent sharing takes this to the next level: What if you could break down an article into its constituent parts and share them independently? Perhaps one day aggregators could reassemble not just articles into a personalized newspaper, but also individual quotes, images and videos? I'm so excited about microcontent sharing that we've implemented it into the new Mashable.com. If you visit an article on the site and hover over an image or quote, we provide options to share that piece of content to your social networks. We hope to take this idea even further in future iterations, but it's a start."

Yelp is the first almost entirely crowdsourced media entity entities to go public. Yelp's entire business is built on the more than 25 million reviews that it has accrued over the years from its users. That user-submitted content is the reason that Yelp attracts more than 66 million unique visitors a month.

If AT&T buys Time Warner it will be by far the largest content and distribution company in the world

the future of "QR codes" AR, invisible electronic code -- Blippar, AR News App, Touchcode

The end of the mass market brand.

1/3 of people globally using VR for "entertainment" by 2020