"app stores" entries

Upward mobility: TVs are the new mobile

Mobile developers to gain a new set of platforms for their apps

photo: EricaJoy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chromecast_dongle.jpg One of the perennial technologies that regularly appears at the Consumer Electronics Show is the smart TV set, but they never seem to gain the kind of traction that the manufacturers hope that they will. This may finally be coming to a end, however, as a new generation of smart TVs are poised to enter the market. Even Apple is finally supposed to release their own products in this space this year. And when these hyper-aware TV sets enter the Internet of Things, they are likely to do it running mobile operating systems.

The reasons for this are several. From a purely economic standpoint, the margins on televisions don’t really afford room to pay for a full-blown desktop operating system license, nor the hardware required to support a rich desktop environment. It’s also unclear that anyone would want to run Microsoft Word or other general types of software on their TV. While a free operating system such as a desktop Linux OS might fit the bill, especially since it is famous for being able to run on a meager amount of hardware, it is equally unclear if it will be able to run the software that manufacturers and users are going to want to see on a TV.

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Commerce Weekly: Slow in-app purchasers are worth the wait

Digging into in-app purchase data, Bitcoin draws attention outside tech, PayPal and HomeDepot expand point-of-sale trial.

Study finds that users who wait to make their first in-app purchase are worth more. Also, Bitcoin's popularity is rising, and PayPal expands its point-of-sale program. (Commerce Weekly is produced as part of a partnership between O'Reilly and PayPal.)

Commerce Weekly: Yahoo's new CEO has data focus

Yahoo gets a data-savvy CEO, a big week for apps, and Robert Scoble goes shopping with eBay.

Yahoo's new CEO sees gold in the company's datasets, and the week between Christmas and New Year's Day is chock full of app downloads. (Commerce Weekly is produced as part of a partnership between O'Reilly and PayPal.)

Commerce Weekly: Yahoo’s new CEO has data focus

Yahoo gets a data-savvy CEO, a big week for apps, and Robert Scoble goes shopping with eBay.

Yahoo's new CEO sees gold in the company's datasets, and the week between Christmas and New Year's Day is chock full of app downloads. (Commerce Weekly is produced as part of a partnership between O'Reilly and PayPal.)

ePayments Week: Financial Times bets on its web app

Financial Times goes all-in on its web app, Flickr puts up fences, and daily deal fatigue sets in.

The Financial Times says subscriber data trumps Apple's reach, Flickr introduces geofencing to keep things private, and the cracks in the daily deal world start to show.

Intellectual property gone mad

Sweeping patent changes aren't likely, but small solutions may curb patent trolls.

Patent trolling could undermine app ecosystems, but who can mount a legitimate challenge? Here's four potential solutions.