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The Zombies, Run! story sounds like a fairytale. A group of people come up with a great idea for an app, and get some funding to build it. Except this fairytale doesn’t go like most Silicon Valley stories. This time, the funding came from people who really want to use the app, not from an angel investor or VC firm.

Powering the world's creativity. Aviary makes an easy-to-use photo editing API for web and mobile apps which allows developers to focus exclusively on making great apps, while enabling their users to make their photos amazing.

VentureBeat's Dean Takahashi interviews Disney Mobile chief Bart Decrem about Appmates Disney Pixar Cars + iPad game

Gabe Zichermann and Christopher Cunningham: Gamification by Design. Implementing Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile Apps. O'Reilly, Sebastopol 2011, 169+xix pages. In the course of but one year, "gamification", the use of game design elements in non-game contexts, has managed to grow from a self-description used by some vendors and proponents to a placement on the Gartner hype cycle - and in the IT business, it doesn't get much more 'official' than that. Yet the term still stirs hot debate. On one side, game designers and scholars despise the whole notion as an "inadvertent con" (Margaret Robertson). On the other side, proponents counter that gamification already 'delivers' (in terms of numbers), yet is still in its infancy. Hence it would be premature to call foul on something so young, with no time to learn from failure and sort wheat from chaff. So who's right, who's wrong? For one answer to this question, let's have a look at the new book by Gabe Zichermann, Gamification by Design. Zichermann is one of the most public gamification proponents today, and chair of the Gamification Summit, now in its second iteration this September 15-16 in New York, where the book will be officially launched.