It would appear that finger skating is about to go "pro" with a Tony Hawk game for iPhone. The pro skater recently tweeted, "In the PR world, this is considered 'going rogue,' but I'm too excited. This is real & dropping soon." The attached picture, as you can see above, appears to be an iPhone version of his venerable skating series. The message has since been deleted, but as we saw it on the feed of an Activision employee, we feel pretty confident it's on the level. Man, Tony just couldn't be more of a rebel, could he? Not only is he a skateboarder, putting curb wax on church steps and listening to rock 'n' roll too loud ... on his boom box, now he's using his Twitter feed to take on the corporate fat cats! Is there such a thing as too extreme?

Tony Hawk says iPhone game is 'dropping soon' originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 15 Mar 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A reader sent me this email expressing his frustrations about AT&T’s lack of iPhone tethering. I couldn’t agree with him more:

Where the heck is our AT&T tethering!?  I can’t believe that the iPhone still doesn’t have tethering in 2010!  Promise after promise, time just seems to pass with the same “coming soon.” We’ve heard that it will be out at the end of summer 2009 then at the end of 2009 but now it’s all just “coming soon.”

Blackberries do it, Palm Pre does it better (with a wireless hot spot!), my old Sony-Ericsson from 2003 did it. I understand the overwhelmed network argument to a point, since in some locales AT&T is just doomed with infrastructure inadequacies, but it is starting to frustrate.

It is time that they get their act together, with the iPad on the horizon how are they going to handle it? If there is going to be such network demand, that means there is a market for it and I can’t see why AT&T isn’t glad to take our money and run. Make the investment AT&T so we can finally catch up with the rest of the world.

Amen brother.

Rhapsody to offer offline song saving capability on its updated app for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Originally posted at iPhone Atlas

I’m here in Austin, Texas, where MOG CEO David Hyman is introducing the service’s new mobile functionality. This is a major step for MOG, and may be an inflection point in the success of the service. Up until now, users have been restricted to using MOG’s streaming music service on their computers. That’s fine for casual listening at work, but as we’ve seen with the success of the mobile versions of Pandora, users want mobile. And that’s what MOG is unveiling today. Read below for my notes.

Hyman kicked off the talk with some background information. MOG Music Network, the editorial-based site hosted at MOG.com, reaches 16 million unique visitors a month. In December, the company launched Mog All Access, its streaming music service that costs $5/month for all-you-can-eat streaming music. The company is getting 17% conversion from its 3 day free trial (which is high). MOG, Hyman says, is a music service people will actually pay for. But the key will be portability.

MOG’s mobile applications for Android and iPhone will launch in Q2, featuring on-demand streams, downloads, MOG Radio, your library and playlists, High Quality audio, and a $10/month price tag (which includes both mobile and the web version of the service).

First, MOG showcased its Android application. As with the desktop version of MOG, users can stream any song on demand (they can also edit their playlists and upcoming song queue). Along with playlists and individual songs, users can also tap into MOG Radio, which generates a playlist of songs based on one of your favorite artists, albums, or songs (it’s a bit like Pandora, but you can dynamically adjust the content of your station using a slider and can jump to new songs as many times as you’d like). One other very slick feature: on Android, the service will feature voice commands, so you can simply say the name of the artist you’re looking for.

Next, MOG showed off the company’s iPhone application. In general, MOG is looking to keep the interfaces of the iPhone and Android applications consistent.  From a feature perspective, the iPhone and Android applications are identical (save for the Android voice search), and the applications are being developed side by side.

Offline Playback All of MOG’s on-demand streaming functionality looks great, but the killer feature is offline downloading. Using this, users can tap on a song or album they like and choose to download it to their iPhone or Android device, allowing you to seamlessly use the application when your phone doesn’t have connectivity. Hyman says that other offline services that have caching just cache your playlists — MOG lets you select any playlist or album on the site and immediately begin downloading it. Mobile web streaming and downloads will default t0 64kb AAC+ but users have the option to download 320kb/s files (which would obviously take much longer.  Streaming and downloading works over Wi-Fi, 3G, and EDGE.

Regarding whether or not MOG was worried Apple would turn down the application, Hyman said that historically Apple has allowed other subscription applications that feature local caching (he alluded to Spotify). But as always, nothing is certain with the App Store.

MOG will be facing off with plenty of competitors. Last fall, Spotify released applications for both iPhone and Android, but the service still isn’t available stateside. Pandora has become very popular on both iPhone and Android, but it doesn’t let you play any song you’d like on demand (it’s free, so plenty of people are looking to overlook that). From a feature perspective, Rhapsody is most similar to MOG (especially once it gets offline playback for its iPhone application, which is coming soon), but it’s $15 a month compared to MOG’s $10.

CrunchBase InformationMOGInformation provided by CrunchBase

Let's get this out of the way right up front: the estimated number of iPads sold in the first 72 hours is nowhere near official. And if the numbers hadn't been scraped together by a well known amateur Apple analyst who regularly trumps the pros then we'd be skipping the fruits of his black magic algorithms altogether. Nevertheless, Daniel Tello (aka, Deagol), has applied his proven approach of extrapolating Apple web order numbers to come up with a 120,000 total for first day iPad sales that slowed to 152,000 after 72 hours (not including iPads reserved for pick-up). Tello toldFortune, "My best guess, although very tentative given the early stage and few data we have so far, would be that they hit the 1 million unit milestone by the second week after it ships." For those keeping track, it took the original iPhone 74 days to hit 1 million. Quite an accomplishment if these numbers pan out (and that's a big if!) considering that only 3 to 4 million tablets are sold globally each year.

iPad pre-orders estimated at over 150,000 -- possibly ahead of iPhone rate originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Mar 2010 10:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal looking at iPhone use by Microsoft employees. But does it matter what phone (or any other tool for that matter) that people use, as long as they get the job done?

As Apple goes on the offensive against Android, it risks alienating more and more developers. Today, another prominent developer is chose the opposing side. Tim Bray, the well-known software architect and blogger, is joining Google to help rally even more developers around the Android mobile operating system.

Bray is the co-inventor of the XML Web standard, and most recently worked at Sun Microsystems. In a blog post, he explains that he is drawn to Google in part because he hates the iPhone, or at least its closed and controlling environment from a developer’s perspective.

The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger.

I hate it.

He also notes that Android is catching up to the iPhone in terms of sales:

As of now, they’re selling around 90K iPhones per day compared to around 60K Android handsets. It’s a horse race!

In February, Google noted partners are selling 60,000 Android handsets a day, and Apple sold 8.7 million iPhones last quarter, or about 97,000 a day. Android is making steady gains in market share.

Bray’s decision to throw his hat into the Android ring is just the latest example of a growing backlash among developers to Apple’s autocratic ways. Facebook developer Joe Hewitt famously quit the iPhone over similar issues. Apple cannot afford to alienate developers because, given the choice, they will shift their attention and their apps to other platforms.

CrunchBase InformationTim BrayAndroidiPhone 3GSInformation provided by CrunchBase

For $9.99, iPhone users can now grab Capcom's popular fighting game to take down opponents through a series of punches, kicks, and other street fightin' moves.

Are Microsoft employees “nuts for the iPhone?” According to a Wall Street Journal piece, yup… and that’s starting to cause some problems at Redmond as they prepare to roll-out their own would-be iPhone OS killer, Windows Phone 7. Essentially, everyone within Microsoft knows that their current smartphone operating system, Windows Mobile 6.5, chonks hoad. Microsoft employees [...]

Gary Katz, patron saint of kids and parents stuck indoors with his iPhone theater in a box, has now developed a download version. (The mail-order version cost $20.) For just $12 you get high-quality images and a choice of walls, ceilings, roofs and curtains and plus extras for a touch of customization. It comes with instructions, you [...]

When it comes to apps, the iPhone platform is now bigger than the Facebook platform, according to a report by Flurry, a San Francisco-based mobile analytics company. The company says that today Apple’s iTunes app store has over 140,000 applications in comparison to 60,000 apps available on the Facebook platform.

“Since the App Store launched in July 2008, 35,000 unique companies have released applications, which translates to 58 new companies launching apps each day,” Furry said in its Smartphone Industry Pulse report for February 2010.

It is quite amazing, considering that Facebook launched its platform over a year earlier than the iPhone platform and has more than 400 million users. In comparison, the iPhone OS platform has about 70 million devices. The developer momentum for the iPhone platform isn’t going to wane anytime soon.

Why? To paraphrase Jerry McGuire, Apple is showing developers the money. Thanks to its one-click payment option makes it easy for app developers to make money – whether it is selling apps or selling virtual goods within apps.

With the iPad showing up as a platform extension, more developers are looking to focus their energies on the iPhone platform. “Over six weeks since Apple announced the iPad Flurry continues to measure a significant increase in iPhone OS new application starts within its system,” the Flurry said. Much of it is said to be developers looking to adapt their applications for the larger format device.

The most interesting part of the Flurry report was the iPhone developer DNA. Their analysis revealed the following categories:

1. Native iPhone: Companies founded to create applications for iPhone (e.g., PageOnce, ngmoco) 2. Traditional Media: Companies established on Film, TV, Print and Radio (e.g., Disney, TBS, New York Times) 3. Mobile: Companies having started on J2ME, BREW, BlackBerry, etc. (e.g., Digital Chocolate, eBuddy) 4. Retail & CPG: Brick-and-mortar companies or ones that manufacture goods (e.g., The Gap, DKNY, Kraft) 5. Online: Companies who began on the web including e-Commerce, social networks, online gaming, streaming music, etc. (e.g., Google, eBay, Facebook, Pandora, PopCap, Zynga) 6. Traditional Gaming: Video game companies from console, portable or PC (e.g., EA, Activision, Namco, etc.). Despite the fact that the App Store is now maturing, reaching its two year anniversary this summer, we are encouraged that native iPhone application developers are still relevant, representing 20% of the heritage pie, the second largest category. This means that the barrier to entry is still low enough for start-ups to enter and innovation to flourish. However, those days may be numbered as “discoverability” has become a significant issue, and now “marketing muscle” is starting to count more in the App Store.

TomTom listened to our concerns in the navigation app battlemodo, and has not only been dropping the price steadily since, but has just released update 1.3 for its iPhone app—which comes with live traffic updates aplenty. More »

Our Monday giveaway is looking pretty good! This week we’re giving away eight apps aimed at keeping you entertained to six random Twitter Tweeters. Make sure you follow @cultofmac on Twitter and tweet this to be entered to win a sweet app bundle of fun: All the true gamers go to @cultofmac for Monday Giveaways! #cultofmac Contest ends [...]

This week's tip will make you a faster typist on your iPhone. Rapidly select symbols from the 123 screen and return to typing letters in mere seconds.

I guess when you're Tony Hawk you can do whatever the hell you want when it comes to your games. That's why the skateboarding legend decided to reveal that one of the originalTony Hawk Pro Skatergames is headed to the iPhone. 

"In the PR world, this is considered 'going rogue,'" he tweeted, "but I'm too excited to contain it. This is real and dropping soon."

He then decided to post an image of the game, which looks like it might be Neversoft's 2000 sequel. While RIDE was a bit of a disappointment, thePro Skatergames are legendary. Despite the formula getting a bit stale, if you go back and play one today, you'll find it's just as fun as it was the first time you held and then released X before mashing the square and the d-pad. 

No word on release date, price, or if it'll be impossible to play on the iPhone. But I'll probably be buying it regardless.

Original Tony Hawk Pro Skater coming to iPhone?! [Gamesradar]

iPhone users tend to use their devices in the evening and on the weekends, reports Localytics, a Cambridge, MA-based start-up offering mobile analytics services. According to as study conducted by the company, the mobile app usage in the US peaks at around 9 pm EST on week days. Over the weekend, the usage is at its peek during afternoon and nights.

These findings are not surprising — during regular week days, many of us are busy working and more often than not, use the device to make phone calls or send text messages. The report says that iPhone “app usage on weekends and weekdays is both different in usage patterns and overall scale.”

The iPhone users typically generate 7% more traffic on the weekend than the average weekday. Saturday traffic ramps quickly from a morning low at 6:00 am to over 90% of peak usage by 11:00 am—and stays near the peak for the rest of the afternoon and evening. By comparison, weekday app usage is more concentrated in the evening with a slow ramp during the working day and a peak at 9:00 pm EST, when East Coast users are at home and West Coast users are commuting home.

In short, iPhone is still quite a ways off from becoming a “business” phone. The report also concludes that these heavy weeknight and weekend app usage could be interpreted as a sign that consumers may be willing to try more convenient devices than their laptops to entertain themselves, plan a trip, check sports scores and listen to music. No wonder Apple has big hopes for its iPad.

iphone application development with iphone developers. offshore iphone development company providing iphone development outsourcing.

Now, these may have been around for ages, we can't really be sure because, truth be told, it's pretty rare for us to troll the aisles of Kohl's makeup section looking for KIRFs. Regardless, a helpful, hawk-eyed reader snapped this shot of an eyeshadow palette -- called eyemobile -- that's got the distinct iPhone aura going on, though we're 100 percent certain this is an unauthorized use case. It's hard to say from the photo, but it also looks like there's a lip gloss palette in the background (which we assume is called lipmobile), and that, friends, we would pay money for. Lots of money. [Thanks, Bill]

Keepin' it real fake: iPhone hits discount retailers as an eyeshadow palette originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 14 Mar 2010 21:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In our Scamville series of posts last October we exposed the massive user fraud occurring Facebook and MySpace social games. Fake quizzes tied to long term mobile subscriptions, malware-laden toolbar downloads and other scams were the center of the controversy. The industry did a lot of talking in the wake of those posts and some long term changes have been made. For the most part, for example, Fake quizzes and the Video Professor scam are off Facebook (but see below on what’s still there).

But now we’re seeing the same old scams hit the iPhone. And the same players, particularly OfferPal Media and SuperRewards and now Google, are powering those scams. Specifically we’re seeing SMS-subscription offers, which trick users into putting long term subscriptions on their mobile phones (or their parent’s mobile phones).

New Offerpal CEO George Garrick promised to take a leadership position in cleaning up scammy ads. He said “It will be a fundamental part of the Offerpal culture that any offers we distribute meet stringent standards of integrity and quality, as specified by our partners, credible industry experts, and good old common sense.”

We’ve seen very misleading SMS subscription ads on a variety of applications with Admob ads. We’ve reached out to Google for their comment.

Tap Defense, an iphone game created by TapJoy, contained multiple version of the SMS subscription scam until today. The offers were being run by Offerpal. After we contacted Offerpal about this story the offers were removed and they gave us the following statement:

Offerpal and I have done everything we said we would do following the initial social-game offer controversy back in November. We quickly adopted strict compliance rules modeled on Facebook’s requirements, and we have been working closely with the major social platforms and game developers to ensure that only the highest quality offers have been run and we have succeeded. Our offers and other “alt pay” options have been running continuously and there have been no compliance issues since, and these “alt-pay” offers are many times more popular than cash purchases with social game users. Consumers love them and they provide additional monetization for developers

We also led the formation of an IAB standards board to set industry guidelines for lead-gen offers on social networks, and Offerpal is the ONLY offer-network who is participating in this effort. So the issue of offer quality on social networks has been properly addressed and is considered by the industry to be an issue of the past.

Recently, we have begun to test offers in a few mobile games and apps, in particular on the iPhone. Offerpal has been participating in this effort at the request of a couple of iPhone developers and we have also just opened a direct dialogue with Apple to jointly establish standards and guidelines for offers in iPhone apps before any general rollout. In the meantime, we have been applying the same quidelines that we have been successfully using in Social Games to the few mobile apps that are carrying offers. However the vast majority of the “offers” that are running in iPhone apps are simply installs of other iPhone apps, as can be seen for example in “Tap Tap Revenge 3”.

However, Mike has raised the question of whether mobile quizzes and other apps resulting in PSMS subscriptions may still not be clear enough in citing their terms since users may not realize they are opting in for an ongoing PSMS subscription. Although such quizzes and PSMS offers are currently in wide distribution by most of the major mobile ad networks, Mike raises a valid question. So in the interest of being conservative and wanting to operate in the best interests of the collective mobile user experience, we have immediately removed the quizzes in question and any offers resulting in PSMS subscriptions from distribution pending a further review of the concerns Mike has raised.

Over the next week or so we will accumulate as much feedback as we can from developers, publishers, mobile platforms, and others in the industry, and on Monday March 22 we will publish on our website and via a press release a written statement of our guidelines and policies regarding alt-pay offers in mobile apps.

George Garrick

Chairman and CEO, Offerpal.

These types of offers are particularly insidious. Users are offered virtual currency in exchange for answering a quiz or some other seemingly harmless offer. But once they click through and awswer the quiz questions they’re told they need to enter their mobile phone number to get quiz results. Often there is fine print outlining the charges. But the already tiny print is completely unreadable on a mobile screen, making that disclosure meaningless even when it appears.

SMS subscription scams are among the most lucrative offers to game publishers because users get a recurring fee of $10 – $25 per month until they are able to terminate the subscription. Many users never notice them, and those that do usually have a lot of trouble getting them shut off.

Zwinky Back On Facebook:

We’ve also seen offers for the Zwinky toolbar back on Facebook games. When Zynga CEO Mark Pincus said “I did every horrible thing in the book to, just to get revenues right away” he was talking about Zwinky, one of the most hated malware wrappers on the Internet. Too see it back on Facebook offers, through both Offerpal and SuperRewards (we saw offers from both companies on Fishworld by TallTreeGames) is disconcerting.

More screenshots

Rhapsody just released a little teaser video for the next version of its iPhone app (to be followed closely by its new Android app) that marks a major change for the service: You can now download songs instead of streaming. More »