Friday February 05, 2010 01:46 PM
The AT&T FamilyMap app brings a streamlined approach to helping families stay up to speed on each other's whereabouts by locating wireless devices within a shared family account. The app provides iPhone users with access to FamilyMap's popular features, which until now, were only accessible through a computer.
The FamilyMap service is priced at $9.99 per month for two phones or $14.99 per month for up to five phones charged to the customer's AT&T bill. The iPhone application carries no additional charge beyond the monthly subscription.[ 73 comments ]
Friday February 05, 2010 10:51 AM
In a posting on its news page for iPhone developers earlier this week, Apple encouraged developers to integrate the Core Location framework into their apps, offering the ability to deliver information to users based on their location. Perhaps more importantly, Apple also clarified that the use of such geolocation solely for serving ads to users is not permitted.
If you build your application with features based on a user's location, make sure these features provide beneficial information. If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user's location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store.
Apple's exact motives for the restriction remain unclear, although some have speculated that Apple may be seeking to give Quattro Wireless, its own mobile advertising unit, a leg up on competitors such as AdMob. The restriction does not, however, prohibit all location-based advertising, instead requiring useful content to also be served using the technology. Users are typically required to confirm that they wish to allow an application to access their location, and thus it seems possible that Apple merely wishes to restrict such required user input to applications that are actually providing useful location-based information to users.[ 20 comments ]
Tuesday February 02, 2010 02:27 PM
TechCrunch reports that French game developer Gameloft reported its 2009 financial results today, specifying "iPhone revenue" of 17.6 million Euros, or about $24.5 million. That number was up 231% over 2008, and was responsible for approximately 14.5% of Gameloft's total revenues for the year. Gameloft's iPhone revenue was even more impressive when considered only under the fourth quarter of 2009, where the segment was responsible for nearly $10 million in revenue, or 22% of the company's total revenue.
Gameloft withdrew from boxed games in January 2009, and says mobile games accounted for 94% of the company's sales for the whole year. The remaining 6% are related to consoles game sales.
Full-year revenues from the mobile game segment grew by 12%, self-reportedly due to the success of the games the company distributes through Apple's App Store. To demonstrate this growing importance for the company, you need only look at its revenue figures for the fourth quarter of 2009: iPhone revenues for the company reached €7 million ($9.75 million), while initial expectations were €4.4 million.
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Monday February 01, 2010 02:27 PM
The Wall Street Journal reports on data from technology market research firm ABI Research showing that the iPhone's share of the worldwide smartphone sales market slipped in the fourth quarter of 2009 to 16.6%, down from 18.1% in the previous quarter. Despite strong performance from Apple during the quarter, the overall market grew even faster, resulting in a dip for Apple's market share.
Apple's sales still grew, just not as quickly as everybody else's. Apple sold 8.7 million iPhones in the fourth quarter, which is 18% more than in the quarter before. But the overall smartphone market grew 26% in the same period of time, as Motorola Inc. introduced its first devices on Google Inc.'s Android platform and Nokia Oyj boosted its sales by 4.6 million alone.
Not mentioned in the article is the fact that Apple's sales, with only a single iPhone model, tend to follow something of a cyclical pattern centered around new handset launches in June or July of each year. While Apple experienced record-high iPhone sales for the fourth quarter coming on the heels the third quarter's first full sales period for the iPhone 3GS, the margin of improvement was likely smaller than otherwise would have been if the third quarter had not had the boost of new hardware behind it. Manufacturers offering multiple models of smartphones are more likely to see more consistent performance reflecting overall industry trends as they introduce new and updated models at staggered intervals.[ 39 comments ]
Monday February 01, 2010 10:34 AM
9 to 5 Mac reports that Apple has updated its App Store Review Status clock on its iPhone developer news page, now offering aggregate data for app review processing time for both new applications and updates over the past week.
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