Now that the first run of iAd campaigns has concluded, AllThingsD is reporting that Apple has decided to cut the minimum required spending in half from a steep $1 million to $500,000. The change has presumably been made because whilst it has been reasonably successful, the number of ads being presented and filling ad spots actually decreased this year. As a result Apple may be wanting to attract some smaller scale advertisers which couldn’t afford to enter the platform previously and fill those ad spots.
Posts tagged with "iPhone"
Apple Cuts The Minimum iAd Buy In Half
#MacStoriesDeals - Tuesday
So, an unofficial iPad 2 announcement for Wednesday, March 2. Do you believe? Here are today’s deals on iOS, Mac, and Mac App Store apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get ‘em while they’re hot!
Wunderlist For iOS Gets A Hefty Update To 1.2.0
Wunderlist is an excellent, cross-platform alternative to apps like Things if you want to access your to-do lists anywhere, and today there’s a big update that brings even more functionality to the already flexible manager. Alongside visual improvements to the interface between a new icon, some sidebar adjustments, and three new backgrounds, the iOS version has been updated to support landscape mode, push notifications, and email tasking (manage your tasks from your inbox). Wunderlist also sports a new date picker and an “optimized” detail view for tasks. If you’re a Wunderlist user, check the App Store to download the latest free update.
Photopod Aggregates Your Photos From the Cloud: Flickr, Facebook, Dropbox, Twitter
It’s been rumored that with the next versions of iOS, and most notably the MobileMe service, Apple will heavily rely on the cloud to allow users to store media like photos, music and videos online and stream them at any time on the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. A move to cloud-based storage would allow the company to produce cheaper devices with less internal storage, and let users access personal content anywhere as long as an Internet connection is available at the same time.
Photopod, an iPhone app available in the App Store and developed by Dear Future Astronaut, wants to become the ultimate photo aggregator and manager by providing a unified interface to browse pictures stored on a variety of online services. Think of it as a way to access content anywhere (and download it) using an application that does everything automatically through a tabbed “accordion” UI that brings Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Dropbox, Picasa and your Camera Roll all together.
Once authorized with the aforementioned services in the Settings (note that Twitter will only fetch images shared through TwitPic on your account), the main screen of the app will display a series of vertical tabs you can expand to reveal their contents – namely photos. As you open a tab, a list of thumbnail previews slides down allowing you to see all the photos you’ve stored locally or online. Tapping on the share button in the upper right corner will let you select multiple photos at once to upload them to a specific service. It’s very cool as it also lets you upload pictures from one service to another, or from your device to the cloud. You can also download photos to view them offline, or enter a basic editing mode that enables you to rotate and crop pictures. Everything is kept simple and accessible. Flickr, Facebook and Picasa even get menus for sets and menus you’ve organized your photos with.
I like Photopod because it brings the most popular photo sharing services together into a beautiful package that’s easy to use, fast, reliable and intuitive. The app is available here at $1.99, don’t miss it.
iSocial - Upload Photos from Camera Roll to Facebook and Twitter with A Single Tap
With Facebook integration in apps such as iLife, you’d think Apple would have already considered it across iOS. Well, until that happens, iSocial by CoreLab, is going to help. The Cydia Store will soon have a tweak that will allow you to upload images from your camera roll inside Photos.app to Facebook and Twitter with a single tap (after authentication of course).
Open Photos.app, select the photo you want in your camera roll then click the cloud button in the bottom right and choose your social network of choice. There, simple enough for you? We don’t know for sure if it works on bulk uploads but according to the video, it looks as if you can only send one at a time. iSocial will be available soon in Cydia Store at a cost of $1.99, via repository BigBoss.
[via iSpazio]
Socialcam Aims At Becoming Instagram for Video
There is no doubt Instagram has changed the way iOS users look at image sharing on their iPhones: with a few taps, you can take a picture with your device, apply some filters to make it “cooler”, send it to the Instagram’s cloud to share it with your friends and everyone else. Instagram’s appeal lies in the simplicity of the concept, and 2 million users in a few months can’t be wrong.
But the App Store image sharing scene isn’t just about Instagram. Service picplz has collected a pretty huge userbase lately as well, making it the direct competitor to Instagram and one of the most popular apps to quickly share photos from an iPhone. Videos, however, have always been one kind of a problem for iOS aficionados: put simply, there is no easy way to share a video with your friends. Email is slow with attachments, Facebook’s video uploading isn’t intuitive at all (and again, uploading is slow), Youtube is more meant for videos that need to be viewed publicly.
TechCrunch offers a preview of Socialcam, a new iPhone app from the creators of Justin.tv that, like Instagram, will allow users to upload videos with a few taps and share them with their friends using Facebook’s Connect feature. Socialcam, currently in beta and launching in the first weeks of March, has a tabbed interface with a huge “Camera” button in the middle similar to Instagram’s UI and will let you upload, browse videos shared by others, like and comment them.
The app, which will be available for both Android and iPhone, is pretty simple: after firing it up you’re asked to log-in via Facebook Connect, which is currently the only login option. The app presents you with a list of your Facebook friends who are already on Socialcam and asks if you’d like to ‘Follow’ them (Socialcam uses a one-way follower model like Twitter). After that, you’ll spend most of your time looking at the stream of Socialcam videos posted by your friends. Each video is represented by four frame grabs — tapping on one will cause the video player to pop open the clip will start playing immediately. You can leave comments and ‘Like’ each video, and you can also tag your friends in clips. If you tag a friend who isn’t on Socialcam, it will still show up on their Facebook wall (and the video is playable directly from there — you don’t have to click a link).
You can sign up to be notified about Socialcam news here, and hopefully more details will be available in the coming weeks ahead of the app’s launch.
#MacStoriesDeals - Monday
Ah Monday, so will we see new MacBooks this week? Tuesdays are usually hardware update days for Apple. Here are today’s deals on iOS, Mac, and Mac App Store apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get ‘em while they’re hot!
WiFi2HiFi Makes Streaming Music From Your Computer to a HiFi Easy
Just released today is WiFi2HiFi, a new iPhone and iPod Touch app that effectively allows you to use your device to stream audio from your computer to an iPod dock, stereo system or anything else that can connect to the 3.5mm jack or the 30-pin port. It virtually emulates the AirPort Express feature of streaming audio from a computer to connected sound system, but how well does it work? I was given a pre-release build to review and a review follows the break.
Are Existing iPhone Owners Buying The Verizon iPhone?→
Are Existing iPhone Owners Buying The Verizon iPhone?
Marco Arment makes the case for non-record initial Verizon iPhone sales due to the fact that the device is mostly selling to existing iPhone owners coming from AT&T. Why the analysis? Because Instapaper’s numbers in the App Store haven’t gone under the usual increase of a new product release / major update / holiday season:
And my sales haven’t noticed. Ranks have held nearly constant, but so have volumes.
Assuming the correlation is approximately sound, this can be explained by three possibilities:
- Very few Verizon iPhones have been sold. I don’t think this is likely.
- Verizon iPhone owners are buying very few apps relative to other iPhone owners. This also seems unlikely.
- Most Verizon iPhones have been sold to existing iPhone or iPod Touch1 owners, who therefore already own most or all of the apps they want. This seems like the most likely explanation by far.
Assuming the analysis is correct, I guess we’ll see a lot of Verizon iPhone sales when contracts are up in June. Also in June: iPhone 5, quite possibly available on Verizon as well. This summer is going to be interesting for U.S. carriers.