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Whether Newsstand was Apple’s strategy all along, I don’t know, but I think it might have been. The app is the unit of distribution for newspapers and magazines, not the “issue” or the “article”. This puts more work on the publishers’ shoulders — they need to design, create, and maintain software, not merely publish content — but it gives them more control over the reader experience and more potential for creativity and differentiation.

Why not the same thing for TV channels? We’re seeing the beginnings of this, with iPhone and iPad apps like HBO Go, Watch ESPN, and the aforementioned Bloomberg TV+. Letting each TV network do their own app allows them the flexibility that writing software provides. News networks can combine their written and video news into an integrated layout. Networks with contractual obligations to cable operators, like HBO and ESPN, can write code that requires users to log in to verify their status as an eligible subscriber.

Why not the same thing for TV sized displays? Imagine watching a baseball game on a TV where ESPN is a smart app, not a dumb channel. When you’re watching a game, you could tell the TV to show you the career statistics for the current batter. You could ask the HBO app which other movies this actress has been in. Point is: it’d be better for both viewers and the networks1 if a TV “channel” were an interactive app rather than a mere single stream of video.

Near-field communications (NFC) technology will be built into one in five smartphones by 2014 as mobile payment and interactive promotions take off, according to a report from Juniper Research.

Over 23 million NFC-capable smartphones are expected to be in circulation by the end of 2011, said the NFC Retail Marketing & Mobile Payments report.

This willl rise to around 300 million by 2014, and half of these devices are expected to be active in the US.

Twitterers paid to spread Israeli propagandaIsrael’s foreign ministry is reported to be establishing a special undercover team of paid workers whose job it will be to surf the internet 24 hours a day spreading positive news about Israel. Internet-savvy Israeli youngsters, mainly recent graduates and demobilised soldiers with language skills, are being recruited to pose as ordinary surfers while they provide the government’s line on the Middle East conflict. The existence of an “internet warfare team” came to light when it was included in this year’s foreign ministry budget. About $150,000 has been set aside for the first stage of development, with increased funding expected next year. About 50,000 activists are reported to have downloaded a programme called Megaphone that sends an alert to their computers when an article critical of Israel is published. They are then supposed to bombard the site with comments supporting Israel.Read more at www.globalresearch.ca This kind of knowledge warfare was pioneered by the Russians and must now be used extensively by all governments. As Clipper abailart says: “One wonders whether it is worth it since the sort of chattering ‘politico’ twits who bounce soundbites off each other seven days a week are fortunately hermetically sealed in their own collective fantasies.” However, the manipulation of statistics as Trending Topics which muddies the water. Unfortunately, open also means open to abuse. I wonder if it means that those of us who want open discussion (and meaningful inferences from the flow) will need to do it in closed groups?

A few weeks ago, iPhone users were outraged to discover that their iPhones were tracking their every move, storing the information (in an unencrypted file, no less), and sending the data directly to Apple when synced with iTunes. Even more shocking was the news that iPhones do this even when they do not have location-based services enabled. Users concerned about their privacy were left vulnerable, with nothing they could do about it while they waited for Apple to offer a patch.

Enter Ashley Madison.

Ashley Madison is an online dating service owned and operated by Toronto-based Avid Life Media Inc. Nearly ten years old, Ashley Madison claims to be the world's largest dating site, with nearly 9.3 million members. What truly distinguishes Ashley Madison from its competitors, however, is its target demographic: married people.

The leading computer company plans to build a system that will sense when people are trying to video live events — and turn off their cameras.

A patent application filed by Apple revealed how the technology would work.

If an iPhone were held up and used to film during a concert infra-red sensors would detect it.

Research group Gartner issued a special report on Thursday, noting that Apple will have a "free run" in the tablet market this holiday season as rivals continue to lag. The group sees worldwide media tablet sales as on track to reach 63.6 million units this year, a 261.4 percent increase from 2010.

Gartner predicts Apple will hold on to a dominant 73.4 percent of the market this year, though down from 83 percent in 2010. Android is expected to remain in second place, with the firm assuming that no other platforms will manage a 5 percent share of the market in 2011.

By the end of 2015, the company's tablet share is expected to slide to 46 percent.

Just under half of the UK population now owns a smartphone, and Google's mobile operating system Android is powering half of those those being sold – followed by RIM's BlackBerry models with 22.5% and Apple's iPhone at 18.5%.

The pace of smartphone sales is accelerating rapidly, too. In the 12 weeks to 2 October, they comprised just under 70% of mobile phones, according to new research from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech.

Dominic Sunnebo, Kantar's global consumer insight director, warned that the next year could see a lot of jockeying for customers.""Over the next six to 12 months, the current group of Android owners will be coming to the end of their contracts and looking for an upgrade," he said."Our data shows that when these consumers upgrade they tend to remain fairly loyal to Android itself – 62% buy another Android mobile – but considerably less so to the handset manufacturer."

As social media and social networks become a larger part of our online lives, the race to become the default identity platform for the social web continues to intensify, with Facebook, Twitter and Google all hoping to control — and profit from — the ways that users connect to various services. Although Facebook and Google both have massive resources to deploy in this battle, venture capitalist Mark Suster of GRP Partners argues that Twitter stands the best chance of becoming the go-to identity player for many users, and there are some pretty compelling reasons to believe he’s right.

While Facebook recently added an asymmetric feature called “Subscribe,” Suster says that Twitter is still the preferred network for this kind of behavior, and I think he is probably right: So it is now very common for news organizations to announce on the air, “to follow my updates please follow me on Twitter at @myname. Twitter has become one of our major online identities and that is becoming mainstream in ways that people aren’t really talking about. Nearly every day now I see public figures telling people their Twitter identity instead of Facebook, email or other forms of identity.

To take just one recent example, a Mexican soccer team put the Twitter handles of all of its players (and of the team itself) on the backs of their jerseys instead of their actual names, to make it easier for fans to tweet about them during games.

Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL  ) filed a patent at the tail end of 2009 dubbed "Local Device Awareness," which describes automated connections between a number of close-range devices. Some potential applications could be device position targeting (think locating your keys) or proximity-based gaming.

If Apple's patent seems overly broad, patent hoarder InterDigital (Nasdaq: IDCC  ) has gone for specificity. It holds some 33 known patents covering machine-to-machine communication.

Motorola and Google seem to be behind in patents, with only one highly technical machine-to-machine patent showing up for Motorola Mobility, and none for Google. But as you'll soon see, the two companies might be hoping for a more open environment.

Inuit’s GoPayment reader, which competes directly with Square, is about to become more attractive to small businesses. The company has made the decision dropped the transaction fee ($0.15 per transaction) for both new and existing customers for Visa, MasterCard and Discover cards, both swiped and key-entered as well as qualified and non-qualified transactions. The move will go into effect on Monday.

Launched two years ago, GoPayment offers a complimentary app and credit card reader to allow small businesses to conduct charges via their smartphones. GoPayment is available for iOS, Android and Blackberry phones. So now, businesses using the mobile payments reader will only pay a flat 2.7 percent fee of a transaction for any swiped cards. Intuit will charge 3.7 percent for both key entered and non-qualified transactions.

This is surely a competitive move against Square, which also dropped its transaction fee (which was $0.15) recently in favor of a flat 2.75 percent fee for all transactions. One important fact to note—Intuit will still charge the transaction fee for transactions using American Express but this is something the company is working on negotiating. Square does not charge a fees for transactions on Visa, MasterCard, Discover and American Express.

Contrary to the many rumours in circulation on-line, the ‘Nozomi' or Xperia HD was actually only the codename for the first in the, now only Sony, Xperia range of mobile phones. The Sony Xperia S is now the official name of the device, which was launched this week at Las Vegas' Consumer Electronics Show.

Sony has been eager to show off the high definition display of the newest Xperia on the block, with a resolution of 720 x 1280 pixels. The phone has two front-facing cameras; one with 12MP camera that is capable of 720p video recording and a front-facing version, for video calling. The Exmor ‘R' sensor also makes a welcome return, which is essentially an image sensor with enhanced imaging characteristics. Introduced to the original Xperia series, this feature helps you to capture high quality, bright pictures especially under poor light conditions. In order to further heighten the camera's specification, there is a 3D-sweep panorama feature and low aperture value - allowing more light to reach the sensor.

The Xperia S is also NFC enabled, and offers up 32GB of internal flash storage space, as opposed to the widely considered 8GB that came close to causing mass uproar. The device itself weighs in at 144grams, which is only fractionally more than the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. This is actually quite impressive, given the bulk of the design

Mobile ad network Millennial Media is announcing an expansion to the Asia-Pacific region. Millennial is one of the largest remaining independent ad networks after AdMob was bought by Google and Apple acquired Quattro. There’s no doubt that many technology companies have eyed Millennial as an acquisition target, but the company has managed to remain independent despite the increased consolidation taking place in the mobile ad space.

So why Southeast Asia? Gartner forecasts that the mobile advertising industry in Asia Pacific will grow from $1.6 billion USD to $6.9B in 2015 and Millennial wants to be in a position to capitalize on this. The company is also eyeing Korea, Japan and China as other expansion areas.

In May, Bloomberg reported that Millennial was talking to bankers about an IPO, which could come in the Fall or in early 2012 and would value the company at a whopping $700 million to $1 billion (AdMob was sold to Google for $750 million). And the company is now seeing $50 million in revenue.

Strobe, an App Delivery Network that facilitates getting HTML5 apps up and running on various platforms and app stores, has joined Facebook, CEO Charles Jolley announced today.

Jolley is also the creator of the SproutCore JavaScript framework for web apps that is used to quickly build web apps in the browser. It’s used by companies like NPR, Second Story and Sports Illustrated, as well as being popular among Facebook app developers.

Before Jolley created SproutCore, he was responsible for Mobile Me app development at Apple.

At the Nordic Exceptional Trendshop (NEXT) conference in Aarhus, Denmark today, Clark Dodsworth gave a talk about how contextual awareness will transform our usage of devices such as mobile phones. Contextual awareness uses a variety of sensors in a device to give you information that’s relevant to what you’re doing. Imagine your phone being able to offer relevant alerts for traffic when it knows you’re driving, for example. As Dodsworth notes, Apple’s purchase of ‘virtual assistant’ service Siri last year is one example of how this is set to become a reality. He believes contextual awareness features will soon be built into mobile operating systems as standard.

In all the rumor-crazed lead-up to the launch of the iPhone 4S, one feature that was speculated about but never that likely was the inclusion of near field communications. Next year, when the iPhone 5 is actually, finally released, there's a very good chance it will have NFC, according to a report from DigiTimes.

Citing sources at Taiwan-based smartphone manufacturers, DigiTimes says Apple's new iPhone will be one of several devices to ship with NFC in 2012, although we expect the sometimes faulty iPhone rumor mill to churn on until the device is unveiled next year.

If the iPhone 5 does include NFC, it will be far from the first smartphone of its class to include the technology. In typical Apple fashion, while it may not be the trailblazer, it's sure to popularize the feature and push it toward widespread adoption. Some say the iPhone's inclusion of NFC could propel the technology's penetration from below 10% to more than 50% in just a few years.

Starbucks, the coffee chain, is installing a mobile payment system in the form of an iPhone app into 700 of its outlets across the UK and Ireland, following a successful US roll-out.

The Starbucks app will be available for iPhone and iPod Touch users from 5 January and allows consumers to pay for their items through their phone with the aim to reduce transaction time by around 10 seconds.

Consumers who own a registered Starbucks Card, part of the chain’s loyalty programme, will be able to link the balance on their reward card to the Starbucks app.

At the close of an almost three-hour hearing on cell-phone tracking, Sen. Al Franken said Tuesday that he still has "serious doubts" that consumers' privacy rights are being respected when it comes to location-based services via iOS and Android. "I think that people have a right to know who is getting their information, and a right to decide how that information is shared and used," said Franken. "After having heard today's testimony, I have serious doubts that those rights are being respected in law or in practice."

"We need to think seriously about how to address this problem, [especially since] mobile devices are only going to become more and more popular," he continued. "This is an urgent issue we'll be dealing with." Franken, a Minnesota Democrat who chairs the new Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, heard testimony from Apple and Google executives today about how their mobile platforms collect and use location-based data, and what type of control users have over that information. Google said that any location-based data it collects via its Android mobile operating system is anonymous in nature and the majority of that information is deleted after one week. "The location information sent to Google servers when users opt in to location services on Android is anonymized and stored in the aggregate and is not tied or traceable to a specific user," said Alan Davidson, director of public policy at Google. "The collected information is stored with a hashed version of an anonymous token, which is deleted after approximately one week."

PARIS — Nokia, the cellphone giant battling to maintain its position in the face of competition from the iPhone and Android, said Tuesday that it was abandoning its 2011 profit targets after an unexpectedly poor second-quarter showing. Shares in Nokia tumbled 17.5 percent, closing at €4.75 in Helsinki, after the company, which is based in Espoo, Finland, said “multiple factors are negatively impacting” sales, particularly lower selling prices and a reduced sales volume.

“The Symbian portfolio is in terminal decline,” Mr. Jeffrey said, “so the importance of the Windows phone is even greater now.”

Nokia lowered its forecast for second-quarter sales in its devices and services business to “substantially below” the range of €6.1 billion to €6.6 billion, or $8.8 billion to $9.5 billion, it had previously forecast.