What's all the fuss about the Apple iPad Apps?

As I entered Google Reader and perused TechCrunch's latest stories about the digital world, I felt bombarded by the sheer number of consecutive titles lauding or criticizing the Apple iPad. Even though both pros and cons are presented, all the buzz is just getting ridiculous. But at least for Apple, buzz is better than no buzz...

The iPad Apps were released live in the iTunes store before the actual launch of the tablet. With over 2,000 iPad applications, the choices are plentiful, yet overwhelming. In another TechCrunch article, it's been reported that only 20% of the iPad apps are free. According to Erick Schonfeld, here are some of the most popular free and non-free apps for the latest technical toy on the market that will be continued in subsequent blog posts:

iBooks:

Apple rivals the Amazon Kindle with iBooks, which transforms the tablet into an electronic book reader. The iBook allows readers to flip through virtual fingers with a simple touch equipped with a built-in search option and dictionary. Other features include font size/brightness adjustment, book-marked/highlighted pages, and a choice of vertical or horizontal viewing. The book store provides options just like the iTunes format with best-seller and most-popular lists, but this application definitely has its downsides. While the application is free, the actual electronic books are not. This cost could add up to big bucks depending on how much individual reading you do. While some books are free, many range in price from $9.99 to $14.99.

iPad Kindle:

Although I just described the advantages and disadvantages of the iBook application, the Amazon Kindle app has brought new and old offerings to the table. It has a full-color touchscreen, animated page-turning, font-size and brightness adjustments, vertical or horizontal options, and a direct iPad download feature once purchased from iTunes. But Amazon has a larger book selection: 450,000 compared to iBook's 60,000. Thought it doesn't have a search and dictionary function, Amazon's Whispersync technology links the Kindle, iPhone Kindle App, Blackberry, Mac, and PC together and knows what page you last left off. Luckily, the Kindle application all offers all the customer reviews from Amazon customers, so the data and information is backed by their hard-earned reputation.

The application itself is also free, but the books are also priced differently on iTunes.

Since reading comprehension is so important in school, perhaps we should all order Apple iPad's for everyone in class. And at the top of the list, it's apparent how important and vital reading is to life and society...or just how lazy Americans oftentimes are.

YouTube as Essential to our Education

Who said that YouTube was only for entertainment?

Now YouTube EDU has celebrated its 1-year-old birthday and has found a ton of success. YouTube EDU, similar to its original founding brother YouTube.com, is a collection of videos from universities and colleges all around the world. Now there are some stats to track its accomplishments.

Over 300 accredited sources contribute to the video portal with a wide-range of content from 10 different countries and 7 languages. In addition to the large amount of content, YouTube uses auto-captioning, which automatically translates English lectures to other languages.

iTunes U also plays a large factor in contributing to online educational videos. Over 600 universities and colleges, twice the amount of YouTube EDU, has over a quarter of a million free lectures, films, videos, and resources -- however, there are some major differences that favor YouTube EDU. Schools partnered with iTunes U can restrict certain content to students, while YouTube videos are public and available to everyone with computer access and internet access.

So maybe we'll all soon be watching YouTube videos during class...as an assignment from the professor...

Zynga Goes Local

Although Zynga has made its mark on online social media sites, such as Facebook, it has jumped off the digital screen into the physical world.

Zynga, the gaming company that owns and develops online games, is now selling pre-paid game cards at dozens of major U.S. retailers for their games. Some of these major retailers include 7-Eleven, Best Buy, Target, and GameStop – all of which are big corporate companies that will sell gift certificates to nearly 13,000 stores. Of course, the most popular games we all expect to see and recognize will have corresponding gift cards available such as FarmVille, YoVille, and Mafia Wars.

Zynga, following the steps of Playdom targeted in Walgreens and British retailers, started developing this idea last fall and hopes to garner revenue from a dual stream. For those who do not have a credit card or bank account can now purchase money and take control of their status; this is a great marketing tactic especially if a large sector of the target audience consists of young teens not yet responsible for owning their own account.

This strategy will help establish and popularize itself even more as it continually rolls out more games and reaches a larger demographic. With over 67 million global users and 235 active users reported per month, Zynga doesn’t look like it’s going to crash anytime soon. In fact, the gaming site raised $180 million last December.

Now that’s a pretty penny…

Voicemail Gets a Makeover

If you’re like me, I frequently find out that my mailbox is full only after people tell me. Why is that? With text messaging so prevalent with almost every cell phone provider and carrier nowadays, who has time for voicemail?

But to be perfectly fair, voicemail isn’t as inconvenient as I just made it seem. But settling just isn’t in our 21st century digital vocabulary anymore. Now we have YouMail: Love Your Voicemail. And now we can do just that. This “digital secretary” service offers cell phone users visual voicemail, voice-to-text transcripts based on voice analytics, custom greetings, and smart filtering.

With over 1 million users strong only available in the United States, YouMail has dealt with over 300 million calls since its introduction in 2007. It’s safe to say that the numbers have hit the ground running. Good news for those with the iPhone, Android, and Blackberry is that free applications have been made available.

Most of the user-base consists of service professionals who cannot miss essential voice calls or want to personally greet callers by name or with a message. Luckily, the YouMail service is free and supported by advertisements. On the down side, the especially appealing voice-to-text transcription is only available through a paid, premium service.

Backed with $6.4 million from Vantage Point Venture Partners and Tech Coast Angels, its main competitor is Google Voice. However, the advantage difference with YouMail includes an API, Facebook integration, and personalized caller greetings. It’s nice to see a company facing a Google sector head on.

Just like the logo shows, there’s a new reason to smile.

Piece of Twitter Up for Sale!

Bit.ly for Twitter Part II for songs? It's all yours for a low price of $50,000!

Song.ly is a new web service that allows users to share music links through Twitter and hopefully allow more unique discoveries. And Flippa can put it right into your hands -- to own.

The auction on this website has two options to acquire it. Anyone can "Buy It Now" for a mere $50K, but the auction will continue for 12 days with a minimum bid of $15,000. All joking aside, not that money grows on trees, I'm surprised that this price is so reasonably low. Anything associated with Twitter with a decent domain name is an attractive catch.

All you have to do is enter a song title into Song.ly and the web service searching for those tracks. Simultaneously, the links shorten in order to accommodate for Twitter's character limitation and compacts the song in a Flash player that works with Firefox and Internet Explorer with possibilities as an open API.

AND! When you order now, for a limited time, the sale comes with the Twitter account "@ song_ly". The PageRank is at 5 and attracts about 175,000 pageviews per month. The creators of the content claim that they have not considered monetizing the site, which means either it's a risky move or there is much potential to tap into. To run the service would only require about an hour and $80 per month to upkeep.

So make your bid and don't take no for an answer...

Twision de Espana

What's the deal with all the rumors about a possible Twitter television show? Ridiculous...yet enticing.

Last year, talk of a potential Twitter television show was heating up around some American networks to pull in tweets on a talk show. What's the catch? So far, it's only in Spain.

Twitter's VP of Communications tweeted that Twision is the new Spanish show that debuted a couple weeks ago. While it airs late at midnight (which is considered early in that culture), the hour-long show allows viewers to send in live tweets that two hosts, with laptops and a large television screen in the background, can interact with.

The two talk show hosts are set into a studio where they show videos and other content via Twitter to talk about. The latest stream of tweets also comes up next to the video player. This will pave the way for social media to pervade other outlets and I think it'll be a great success as long as they keep it light and casual, yet informative for the audience. I expect the demographic to primarily reach college students and young adults.

Though it's in Spanish, we may be able to anticipate a new show in the making in the U.S.

"Just Dance...It's [Definitely] Gonna Be Ok"

Whoever said that Lady Gage wasn't an innovative, avant-garde artist may be right, but how do you explain her accomplishment of passing 1 billion views on her viral videos?

Surprisingly, Soulja Boy's "Crank Dat" video is currently ranked as the number 1 watched video of all time at 722 million views. However, Lady Gage just soared to the top of the charts as the first artist to pass one billion views across three of her extremely popular videos including "Poker Face" with 375 million views, "Bad Romance" with 360 million views, and "Just Dance" with 273 million views. How's that for measuring popularity? If not popularity, then it's just plain curiosity.

But how are these extraordinary numbers calculated to the tee? Visible Measures estimates views across all the major video-sharing sites including the embedded links. They just updated their Hundred Million Views Club of viral videos, but essentially there is no guarantee that the numbers are exactly accurate because some smaller videos sites may not have been taken into account. So far, there are 65 videos with over 100 million views, with most of them music videos.

Some of the most popular videos demanded today include Beyonce's "Single Ladies", Britain's Got Talent contestant Susan Boyle, and the Twilight Saga trailers reaching 984 million views. But some user-generated videos about kids have created quite a stir among web browsers of all generations from YouTube: Charlie Bit My Finger Again (with 289 million views) and David After Dentist (with 113 million views).

Who knew that a simple home video could create so much buzz with such little effort?