Fantasy Football gets Google Hangouts – live draft parties, meetups, trades

Google announced today a pretty major deal with the NFL which will help it to grow adoption of Google+ Hangouts. With a full rollout coming later this month, NFL.com will soon be offering one-click access to Google+ Hangouts, allowing fantasy football players to video chat with their league in real-time. This is big news not just for …

Obama campaign launches iPhone app, Obama for America – 100 days till the election

With the 2012 election less than 100 days away — 98 days, to be exact — Team Obama is giving its supporters, volunteers and voters a digital push. The president’s campaign and the Democratic Party have launched Obama for America, a mobile app that packs election information, grassroots organizational tools, campaign news and more into …

Apple finally releases a Podcast app – with subscriptions, top charts, skip forward/back

Earlier this month, it was reported that Apple would be launching a standalone podcast app in iOS 6. Instead of waiting for the next version of iOS, Apple posted the Podcast app on the App Store today. Podcasts app is the easiest way to discover, subscribe to and play your favorite podcasts on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. …

Apple Adds Gay and Lesbian Couple Icons to iOS 6

The new version of Apple’s iPhone operating system comes with new emojis, the popular emoticons that are often used in texting and email, especially by young kids and nerdy adults like me. Two of these new pictograms represent gay and lesbian couples for the first time. The icons are placed next to the previous relationship-related emojis …

Apple’s WWDC 2012 Conference Preview – iOS 6, new Macs, iCloud update

This Monday, June 11, Apple will host one of its biggest events of the year, WWDC, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA. First thing in the morning will be the famous Keynote presentation where Apple’s top brass takes the stage to preview the latest treasures in their chest. Here are just a few …

iTunes University – free online education – is booming with 100s of millions of downloads

This month both Stanford and Open University reached 50 million downloads of their iTunes U content, a major milestone for online education. Altogether, the service from Apple reached 700 million downloads in January 2012.   Stanford News: In subjects ranging from human behavior to linguistics, Stanford lectures…have been downloaded a whopping 50 million times. The …

Apple has staged a massive comeback, stopping Android…for now

In the past three months, Nielsen says, Apple has grabbed a 43% share of the smartphones sold in the U.S. Android’s share has increased versus a year ago–it still leads the market with 48%–but Android’s share gains appear to have stalled. Apple’s gains are the result of a few key factors, all of which demonstrate …

China’s meteoric rise makes it the second largest app economy

Flurry recently quantified China’s meteoric adoption of iOS and Android applications. While China ranked 10th in application sessions at the beginning of 2011, it finished the year in 2nd place, only behind the United States. With its large population and rapidly emerging middle class, adoption of apps vaulted China into the position of world’s 2nd …