Facebook on Wednesday evening announced new applications that can be used to populate users’ Facebook Timelines with new information. The initial launch apps include Foodspotting, Foodily, Ticketmaster, Pinterest,Rotten Tomatoes, Pose, Kobo, Gogobot, TripAdvisor and several others. “If you’re a traveler, you can add the Gogobot and TripAdvisor apps to bring a virtual passport to your timeline, and show your friends where you’ve been and share tips about your favorite spots from...

Microsoft recently revealed a number of details on its Windows 8 Windows Store, an application storefront that will launch in February in tandem with Windows 8 Beta. Microsoft corporate vice president Antoine Leblond explained that developers will receive 80% of all revenues from applications sold after earning $25,000 in revenue, before which developers will receive a 70% cut. Apple, by contrast, offers developers 70% of app revenues. Microsoft is also taking a different approach to subscription models. The ...

Research In Motion announced on Monday that it will soon offer BlackBerry users 12 free “premium” applications through December 31, 2011 as an apology for its recent BlackBerry service outage. In addition, the company said it will provide its enterprise customers with one month of free technical support. “Our global network supports the communications needs of more than 70 million customers,” RIM Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis said in a statement. “We truly appreciate and value our relationship with ...

Nokia recently announced that its Ovi Store has served a record 7.62 million downloads in a single day. The figure is a large jump from the 3 million daily downloads Nokia said the Ovi Store was serving in October of last year. The phone maker attributed its app store’s popularity to the decision to remove a registration and login requirement from the shop. In addition, Nokia said downloads more than tripled in India, the top country in terms of overall download volume. To put the Ovi Store figures in p...

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration may soon approve or reject mobile health applications. The government agency said on Wednesday that it is proposing to oversee the applications in an effort to ensure the apps perform as advertised and aren’t actually hurting users. “There are advantages to using medical apps, but consumers and health care professionals should have a balanced awareness of the benefits and risks,” FDA policy advisor Bakul Patel said. The administration hopes to approve and reject...

Microsoft’s Windows Phone Marketplace is now home to more than 25,000 applications, according to the app tracking website WindowsPhoneAppList. That’s a rapid jump from the 18,000 applications that were available in May but it’s still a far cry from the competing app stores offered by Apple and Google. The Android Marketplace is populated with more than 200,000 applications, and Apple said in May that its iTunes App Store boasts more than 500,000 apps. The top-5 paid apps in the Windows Phone...

The iTunes App Store is now home to more than 100,000 iPad applications. According to MacStories, Apple and its developers set a record by hitting that milestone just 453 days after the iPad made its debut on April 13th of last year. That’s approximately four months after Apple hit the the 75,000 iPad app mark in March, too. The most popular paid iPad Apps of last year included Pages, GoodReader for iPad, Numbers, Angry Birds HD, Keynote, and more. That list isn’t very different today. At the time...

We now spend more time using mobile apps than on the Internet, according to a new research report from Flurry. The firm, which pulls its data from more than 85,000 applications, noted that in June 2011 the average person spent 81 minutes using mobile applications each day and just 74 minutes surfing the web. That’s up from December, when the firm found that users spent more time surfing the web (70 minutes) than using mobile apps (66 minutes). More surprisingly, it’s a 91% jump from last year when...

The original Google TV products were met by lukewarm reviews at best, and according to Geek.com, the search giant is hard at work on its new Google TV 2.0 product. Developers have been joining Google’s new “Fishtank” program to get early access to tools that will allow them to create compelling new content for Google’s next attempt at entering our living rooms. Google TV 2.0 runs a barebones version of Android 3.1 (Honeycomb) and there are reportedly only 50 developers partaking in the...

Facebook is set to launch its own iPhone photo-sharing service that will compete with the likes of Instagram and Path. Tech Crunch has obtained 50MB worth of data about Facebook’s project, including documents and actual images of the work in progress. The service is being called “WithPeople” or “Hovertown” internally, and it’s possible that it will be launched as a built-in feature to Facebook’s existing iPhone app or as a separate application entirely. Judging from t...

Apple introduced iOS 5 and its new widget system just last week during WWDC, and a day later it was jailbroken. Now, Cydia developers have taken iOS 5 a step further by providing new third-party applications that allow users to tweak the Notification Center with new widgets. iOS 5 currently only offers widgets for viewing the weather or a stock ticker, but one app — UISettings — will allow users to quickly toggle their network and phone controls, too. Similarly, a widget called MusicCenter is being develo...

Verizon Wireless on Thursday announced that it will carry a 4G LTE version of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 Android Honeycomb tablet. The device — currently the thinnest tablet on the market — will be available in two capacities, 16GB and 32GB, and will launch in two color schemes: “metallica gray” and “glossy white.” Save for its 4G LTE radio and updated operating system, the tablet is nearly identical to the special edition that we reviewed earlier this month: it offers a 1GHz ...

Microsoft’s senior director of the Windows Phone Marketplace, Todd Brix, has announced that Microsoft will launch a new web-based Windows Phone Marketplace for Mango phones. Brix explained that customers will be able to read reviews, view screen shots, and even promote applications on social networks. Purchases can be made with any credit card associated with your Windows Live ID, and you can choose to download the applications over-the-air to your phone. We’ve seen similar interfaces before: Goog...

According to new data from Chop, 148apps, and Chillingo, Apple’s iTunes App Store has approved more than 500,00 applications. In an infographic posted on Facebook, the group notes that Apple has worked with 85,569 different developers and that the average price of a paid application is $3.64. Similarly, 37% of all applications are free. The most popular iTunes categories (ranked by downloads), are games (15%), books (14%), entertainment (11%), education (8%), lifestyle (7%), and utilities (6%). If it se...