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"R2 Studios, which is developing home-media and automation technology, has remained largely mum about its plans but last year released an app that turns Android phones into touch panels for controlling heating and lighting systems wirelessly. R2 Studios also holds some patents related to controlling electronic devices and interfaces."

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Socialcam states it is competing with YouTube, not other mobile video apps.

Utility company creating a SimCity-like interface for managing the grid and running scenarios

"Pandora-like interface" that lets you mark dishes as "want it," "loved it," "tried it," or "hide it." The latter lets you hone your recommendations and weed out the types of dishes that you want to avoid

Mobile messaging application Viber has released version 2.2, introducing group messaging as well as improved call quality and several user interface enhancements. The company also said it has reached 90 million users, with users making over 1.5 billion minutes of calls each month. This is a jump of 20 million users in just over two months.

"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.

In a reversal of today's content publishing model, print magazines pretty soon could start looking a lot like their app equivalents. "The next redesign of our titles will see them redesigned with our tablet versions in mind," magazine publisher Future's tablet editor-in-chief Mike Goldsmith told an industry forum this month. As publishers extend their print titles to iPad, they can choose either to repurpose the paper originals, which can seem lazy and ill-suited to the touch screen, or to custom-produce interactive apps with a native interface in mind, which is expensive.

This means that users of StumbleUpon's Android app can take advantage of Android Beam to share any content they discover on the app to other NFC-enabled devices running ICS. The app will also feature the Android Action Bar, allowing users to explore the Web via the Android navigation interface.