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March 23rd, 2009 in Productivity
The Idea Generator Brings Brainstorming to the iPhone and iPod Touch Platform

idea_generator2
Considering the variety of applications you can download for the iPhone and iPod Touch
from Apple’s comprehensive AppStore, it was only a matter of time until someone introduced a brainstorming tool for these popular devices: The Idea Generator. Developed by creative consultancy The Director’s Bureau, this intriguing tool uses randomly-displayed words to help you generate ideas for your next creative project.

The user interface of the Idea Generator is a marvel of elegance and simplicity, and it’s fun to use. Three concentric circles fill the screen, emblazoned with random words. Situated horizontally across the middle of the screen is a display bar, which appears to have a magnifier embedded within it. This window displays the words selected by the Idea Generator. At the hub of the wheel is an icon with two arrows, which, when pressed, spins the counter-rotating wheels. You can also spin the wheels by shaking the iPhone, adding a fun element to your brainstorming session. When the wheels stop spinning, the display bar shows three words, which you can use as stepping stones to creative ideas.

For example, one recent session displayed the words “multi-lingual,” “rubber” and “hotel.” Sounds kinky, eh? Actually, you’re not supposed to take the words literally. Their main value is to be a stepping stone to productive ideas. For example, the words multi-lingual and hotel could lead to a new concept for a chain of hotels with the atmosphere of an international youth hostel. Or you might take the word rubber and spend some time thinking about its inherent qualities (cushioning, resilient, etc.), and how you could apply one of those to your current creative challenge.

If none of these randomly-selected words connects with your muse, you can simply push the spin button or shake the iPhone again, and three more random words will appear in the selection window. If you find one or two words that

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Whirling Dervish Drivers
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

One night several years ago, my mom slipped and broke a bone in her neck. I stayed late at the hospital with her. Driving home on a mostly deserted road, I checked my cellphone messages.

I didn’t notice either the red light coming up or the car stopped at the light. I banged into the back of it, and even though the damage was minor, it was a scary moment.

I admitted that I was upset and distracted, took the blame and swore to myself I’d never use a cellphone in a car again. But, of course, I did. D.C. police will pull you over if they see you using a cellphone that you’re holding up to your ear, but not if you’re hands-free.

Ominously, research by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration — suppressed for years and released on Tuesday after petitions were filed by advocacy groups — shows that there are “negligible differences” in accident risk whether you’re holding the phone or not. Hands-free devices may even enhance the danger by lulling you into complacency.

It is the conversation that pulls focus. My greatest fear is that I’m going to be in a taxi when the driver gets a call from his wife to tell him that she’s run off with his sexy cousin.

In a March New Yorker profile, Tony Gilroy, the screenwriter of “Michael Clayton” and “Duplicity,” told the nightmare tale of being in a New York taxi when the cell-chatting driver ran a red light and hit another car.

“So they’re lifting the other guy out of the car, and I’m thinking, I’m lucky,” he said, adding: “Then I see them come at my cab with those things, the Jaws of Life.” He’d fractured his rib and hip.

Studies show that drivers who talk on cellphones are four times more likely to be in a crash and drive just as erratically as people with an 0.08 percent blood-alcohol level.

In one study cited by the highway safety agency, “drivers found it easier to drive drunk than to drive while using a phone, even when it was hands-free.”

The agency buried its head in the sand, keeping the research to it

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Documents: Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration

* Original Document (PDF)

The following body of research, conducted by the Department of Transportation and completed in 2003, has not been made public until now. The documents pertain to the safety of using wireless communication devices while driving. The New York Times obtained the research from the Center for Auto Safety and Public Citizen, two consumer advocacy groups that earlier this year acquired more than 250 pages of undisclosed material through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. Related Article »
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Politicians, can you hear me now?

By Derrick Z. Jackson | July 21, 2009

BIG BROTHER, take the wheel! Take the cellphones out of our hands!

Short of a federal ban, it seems no common sense is in sight for yakking on cellphones or text-messaging while driving. Just what is it that we are waiting for, with many drivers mauling pedestrians and distracted mass transit drivers crashing a train or a bus?

For over a decade the dangerous technological obsession has been studied with no uniform political action. In 1997, a study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that the risk of crashing the car quadrupled if the driver was talking on a cellphone. A 2003 Harvard study found that cellphone use was involved in 636,000 accidents, causing 330,000 moderate to critical injuries, 2,600 deaths, and $43 billion of health and property damage.

University of Utah researchers found in 2006 that driving while talking on a cellphone slows down reaction time so dramatically that it is the equivalent of driving drunk. They also found no difference in the effect of hand-held vs. hands-free talking devices. Talking on a cellphone while driving is so intense, with drivers deluding themselves that talking is an act that can be taken for granted, the researchers said “drivers may not be aware of their own impaired driving. . . . There appears to be a disconnect between participants’ self-perception of driving performance and objective measures of their driving performance. . . . One consequence of using a cellphone is that it may make drivers insensitive to their own impaired driving behavior.’’

Because of these and many more studies, the National Safety Council, whose board of directors represent a wide swath of American industry, is campaigning for Americans to not use cellphones while driving. Similarly, the National Transportation Safety Board has called for federal bans on cellphone use by bus drivers.

David Teater, senior director of transportation strategic initiatives for the National Safety Council, says, “It’s just

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Google Voice Goes Mobile
By Miguel Helft

Google Voice, the universal voice mailbox and call-routing service that Google rolled out in March, has always been accessible from mobile phones. Users dialed their Google Voice number and could access their voice mail or hit a button and be prompted to make a call.

But it was clunky, especially for placing calls. For example, users had to type in numbers they wanted to call, rather than accessing them directly from their address books.

Now Google is unveiling a mobile application that will address these kinds of problems. The app, which is only available for BlackBerrys and Android phones, will allow users to make calls directly from their phones. Those receiving the call at the other end will see the user’s Google Voice number, rather than their mobile phone number. Text messages will also appear to have been sent from a user’s Google Voice number.

These features have the potential to make Google Voice’s Internet calling service, a potential rival to Skype, far more useful.

The Google Voice app will also allow users to access their voice mail, to view message transcripts and have the app read them in what Google calls “karaoke style,” with the app highlighting the words being read.

The nifty new features will only be available to the limited number of Google Voice users. In June, the company said it was beginning to expand its user base by notifying people who had requested an invitation that they could sign up. A Google spokeswoman said the company was still working through a backlog of requests.

Google says it is working with Apple to bring its Google Voice app to the iPhone. In the meantime, iPhone users can access the service through their Web browser.

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‘N’ marks the spot for sharing data wirelessly

By Mark Baard
July 6, 2009

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Boston’s MBTA stops may soon be plastered with more radio frequency identification (RFID) tags than “Obey’’ stickers if folks at the Wakefield-based NFC Forum get their way.
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The NFC Forum (NFC is an acronym for Near Field Communication, a short-range RFID protocol) has released a logo, called N-Mark, that will signal the presence of an RFID tag embedded in a movie poster or print ad, or a wireless payment device.

By waving an NFC phone near an N-Mark tag, or tapping it with the phone, you might be able to download a movie trailer, a song, or a coupon. You could also tap the NFC tag to pay for a ticket, or to get into a ballgame without a paper ticket.

You will also be able to swap data wirelessly with other NFC phones.

Some of the more privacy-and-security conscious among us will probably turn off their phones when they see the N-Mark logo. You never know: RFID hackers might also be drawn to places where they know people are making wireless transactions.

Only a handful of NFC phones are currently available. But that’s likely to change, and quickly. A Sony Ericsson executive told a trade audience last month that all new mobile phones (not just Sony Ericsson’s) will include NFC modules by summer 2010. And with American Express, Visa, and PayPal all backing NFC, I expect the N-Mark symbol will begin dotting the cityscape around the same time.

NFC Forum members, meanwhile, are dreaming up ways to draw consumers into using the technology.

In one trial, by Telefónica O2 UK Ltd., British National Health Service workers tap NFC phones against special tags in their patients’ homes to record the times and durations of their visits. (Telefónica is an NFC member.)

A patient in the O2 Homecare trial can also touch his own NFC phone to the tag in his house, to display the time of his next scheduled visit from the health servi

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One call rings them all . . .
and tells you who’s calling so you can decide how to handle it

By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff | July 2, 2009

After years of wasting our time with built-in cameras, music players, and casual games, cellphone makers are finally giving us something we really need: one plug to charge them all. Next year, the world’s leading phone manufacturers will adopt a universal interface, so that one power adapter will charge any phone.

But the most important telephone interface is nowhere near universal. I refer, of course, to the phone number. We’ve got home numbers, work numbers, cell numbers, sometimes several of each. They all do the exact same job, only with different phones. What we need is a universal phone number that can ring any or all of our phones.

And soon you’ll be able to get one, courtesy of Google Inc. The company has begun rolling out Google Voice, a service to let us manage our telephonic lives through a single, Internet-connected phone number. There’s no charge, although you still have to pay for your regular phone services.

Go to voice.google.com to sign up for a free account. The service is still in trial mode, with new users being added a few thousand at a time. But that was also true of a little Google service called Gmail when it launched five years ago; today it’s used by more than 100 million people. Google Voice could someday be at least as popular.

Google didn’t originate the concept. In 2007, it bought GrandCentral, a start-up that issued phone numbers the way the government hands out Social Security cards. The GrandCentral number didn’t belong to a particular phone or phone company; it belonged to you, for life.

GrandCentral had planned to charge a monthly fee for its services. But Google makes its money from selling advertising on its various websites. It merely needs to keep us coming back to those sites, with features and services we’ll come to regard as indispensable - such as a master control system for all our telephones.

Log onto Google Voice and you c

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SUNNYVALE, Calif. — By all accounts, Palm’s new Pre smartphone is elegant and powerful. On sale for just a few weeks, it has a crisp touch screen, a pull-out keyboard aimed at e-mail devotees and a new operating system that can manage multiple applications at the same time.
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John Gress for The New York Times

Palm hopes the Pre, left, can challenge the iPhone, right, but it has a few dozen applications, not the thousands for iPhone.

But in a world crowded with iPhones, BlackBerrys and other smartphones, success for the Pre — and possibly the survival of Palm itself — is going to take a lot more than a well-designed device.

These days, it is all about the apps.

Industry experts and programmers say that the company needs to cultivate a system of developers eager to write and publish small useful programs, or applications, for the Pre and its core software, WebOS. Palm also needs to provide an easy way for Pre users to download, pay for and install those apps, similar to Apple’s App Store.

So far, Palm is off to a slow start. Palm’s App Catalog has just a few dozen apps, even as Apple boasts that iPhone users can download 50,000 apps that do everything from receiving baseball videocasts to unlocking a rental car.

The payment system for the Palm app store — important if the company wants to charge for certain programs — is still under construction. And most crucially, Palm has yet to open its software development kit, the main set of tools needed to write apps, to most of the thousands of developers who have expressed an interest in creating programs for the Pre.

As a result, some developers are wary of the new platform, said Ben Gottlieb, the president of Stand Alone, which has been creating fitness, game and calendar applications for Palm devices since 1995 but is focusing its new development efforts on the iPhone.

“The WebOS looks like a great comeback, but there’s a little bit of trepidation there,” Mr. Gottlieb said. “Most Palm OS de

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Adobe CEO Shantana Narayu has promised a Flash player for mobile phones in October, but that’s a long way off in the current market. Meanwhile, enterprising application designers and developers are eager to get something into the iPhone App Store now, not next week.
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Ansca, a new startup led by two former Adobe employees, is jumping into the gap with a software development kit that simplifies app development by bringing Flash-like qualities to an iPhone development environment.

Ansca’s product, Corona, is a software development kit for the iPhone. It allows less-technical designers to create applications much as they would using Flash. Corona supports a simpler set of programming commands than Apple does, yet it still allows developers to use the iPhone’s built-in accelerometer (which lets you control an app by moving the phone around, rather than tapping on the keyboard) Â and built-in graphics acceleration.

The combo turns out to be good for people trying to quickly develop apps. ”It’s a terse language, it’s quick, and it appeals to designers,” developer Evan Kirchoff told me over the phone. His company, Comrade Software, specializes in Flash application development. But Comrade has been able to build iPhone apps such as PokerArcade (pictured) using Corona, much as if they were developing in Flash.  ”It reduced our development time on the iPhone from weeks to a few days,” Kirchoff said.

Ansca is privately funded. The management team aren’t experienced startup managers, but they have years of immersion in Flash culture as Adobe employees. Â CEO Carlos Icaza has 20 years’ engineering and management experience. He ran teams at Adobe, most recent

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Mind Your BlackBerry or Mind Your Manners
Jessica Ebelhar/The New York Times

Nadia Ries Shen, left, using an iPhone at DMD, a marketing company in New York, while Amanda Huber works nearby.

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By ALEX WILLIAMS
Published: June 21, 2009

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Investors Bet on Payments via Cellphone (June 22, 2009)
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Smartphone use has become routine in meetings in the corporate and political worlds but retains the potential to annoy.
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For the first half-hour of the meeting, it was hardly surprising to see a potential client fiddling with his iPhone, said Rowland Hobbs, the chief executive of a marketing firm in Manhattan.

At an hour, it seemed a bit much. And after an hour and a half, Mr. Hobbs and his colleagues wondered what the man could possibly be doing with his phone for the length of a summer blockbuster.

Someone peeked over his shoulder. “He was playing a racing game,” Mr. Hobbs said. “He did ask questions, though, peering occasionally over his iPhone.”

But, Mr. Hobbs added, “we didn’t say anything. We still wanted the business.”

As Web-enabled smartphones have become standard on the belts and in the totes of executives, people in meetings are increasingly caving in to temptation to check e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, even (shhh!) ESPN.com.

But a spirited debate about etiquette has broken out. Traditionalists say the use of BlackBerrys and iPhones in meetings is as gauche as ordering out for pizza. Techno-evangelists insist that to ignore real-time text messages in a need-it-yesterday world is to invite peril.

In Hollywood, both the Creative Artists Agency and United Talent Agency

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Turning the Masses Onto Mobile Broadband
By KEVIN J. O’BRIEN

BERLIN — After two years of rapid growth, mobile broadband, the wireless industry’s most successful innovation of the past decade, is at a crossroads as operators struggle to maintain fast, omnipresent service in the face of exploding Internet traffic.

Since mid-2007, when the first services came on the market, about 16 million people worldwide have signed up for mobile broadband, according to Screen Digest, an industry researcher. In 2008, the number of subscribers almost doubled.

But the rapid deployment — and mounting Internet traffic from video streaming and file sharing — have caused many wireless broadband services to slow down or interrupt from data overload.

“A significant number of people have had unsatisfactory experiences with mobile broadband,” said Ronan de Renesse, a senior analyst at Screen Digest in London. “Getting a good connection can be difficult. Many consumers are frustrated.”

As technical glitches spread, consumers are becoming wary and mobile broadband sales are slowing.

This year, Mr. de Renesse said, he expected growth in global subscribers to slow to 38 percent, as the total reaches 21.8 million. In 2010, growth will halve again to 19 percent, reaching 26 million subscribers, he said. In Europe, which currently has two-thirds of all mobile broadband subscribers, growth will be just 4.9 percent.

Network operators remain upbeat on the technology, saying the start-up problems have been exaggerated and expansions and improvements to networks will solve traffic and coverage problems.

Orange, the wireless unit of France Télécom, has 739,000 wireless broadband customers in France, Spain and Britain. In the first quarter of this year, mobile broadband helped lift Orange’s revenue from data by 23 percent in France, 19 percent in Britain and 16 percent in Spain.

“We have seen wireless broadband take off in the last 12 to 18 months,” said Vivek Badrinath, an executive vice president for networks, platforms and infrastructure at

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MapQuest Launches iPhone App

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By FREDERIC LARDINOIS and READWRITEWEB
Published: June 15, 2009

Not too long ago, for most of us, MapQuest was the default online mapping service, and even today, after a number of changes to its site, MapQuest is still one of the most popular places to get maps and directions online, even though other services like Google Maps or Microsoft's Bing Maps (formerly known as Live Maps) offer more features.
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Today, MapQuest released its first iPhone app, MapQuest 4 Mobile (iTunes link), and after testing it for a while, it quickly became clear that MapQuest's app is a worthy challenger for the iPhone's built-in mapping application, which is based on Google Maps.

BlackBerry users already had access to a similar app on their devices since last year, but thanks to the iPhone's multi-touch screen, this new app should be a lot easier to navigate.

Directions and Local Businesses

Just like the MapQuest web site, the iPhone app focuses on finding local businesses and directions. One of the nicest features of the app is that you can save your maps and routes on the MapQuest.com web site and then retrieve them on your phone. Finding local businesses is also very easy thanks to a carousel with different types of businesses that sits at the bottom of the map. You can just click on the gas station icon, for example, and the map will highlight all the local service stations in the area.

With regards to giving directions, MapQuest 4 Mobile offers a number of very useful features, including the ability to add multipl

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Study: Wireless carriers aren’t offering enough sync options
By PAUL BOUTIN, VentureBeat

Now that we carry so much of our lives on our easy-to-lose phones, the ability to sync personal data between the phone and a reliable storage service is more important than ever. According to a new study by Funambol, which provides “cloud sync” services for smartphones, there’s a big gap between the services offered by wireless carriers and what’s available on consumer desktops. AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile offer little, if anything, beyond address book syncing. They’re missing an opportunity to make themselves into a sync brand and lock in customers by syncing more kinds of data. As long as they don’t deliver, consumers will likely sync through cloud services like Microsoft My Phone, Mobile Me or Funambol.

The study assigned points to different sync features. Two obvious patterns occurred in the results shown below. (Funambol did the study, so we note their high self-rating with a grin.)

First, the very popular BlackBerry Internet Service lags other cloud sync services in features. Possibly, BlackBerry wants to avoid undermining sales of its own BlackBerry Enterprise Server. ”BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) scored lower than the rest because it only provides push email,” Funambol VP of marketing Hal Steger wrote VentureBeat. “It does not sync contacts, calendars, tasks, notes, photos or anything else, and it has a very minimal web portal.”

Second, wireless carriers simply have not implemented as many features as the cloud sync vendors. That means they’re unlikely to become their customers’ preferred sync solution. Which means that customers will have one less reason to stick around rather than change carriers for a better price.

Funambol’s study is downloadable here, registration required.

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Smartphone Rises Fast From Gadget to Necessity
By STEVE LOHR

In today’s recession-racked economy, penny-pinching is a national pastime. But people are still opening their wallets for smartphones.

Sales of BlackBerrys, iPhones and other smartphone models are rising smartly and are projected to increase 25 percent this year, according to Gartner, a research business. Widely anticipated new models like the Palm Pre, which went on sale nationwide on Saturday, will help fuel that growth. Meanwhile, total cellphone sales are expected to fall.

The smartphone surge, it seems, is a case of a trading-up trend in technology that is running strong enough to weather the downturn. And as is so often true when it comes to adoption of new technology, the smartphone story is as much about consumer sociology and psychology as it is about chips, bytes and bandwidth.

For a growing swath of the population, the social expectation is that one is nearly always connected and reachable almost instantly via e-mail. The smartphone, analysts say, is the instrument of that connectedness — and thus worth the cost, both as a communications tool and as a status symbol.

“The social norm is that you should respond within a couple of hours, if not immediately,” said David E. Meyer, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. “If you don’t, it is assumed you are out to lunch mentally, out of it socially, or don’t like the person who sent the e-mail.”

The spread of those social assumptions may signal a technological crossover that echoes the proliferation of e-mail itself more than a decade ago. At some point in the early 1990s, it became socially unacceptable — at least for many people — to not have an e-mail address.

Smartphones are not cheap, particularly in tough economic times. The phones, even with routine discounts from wireless carriers, usually cost $100 to $300, while the data and calling service plans are typically $80 to $100 a month.

But recent smartphone converts are often people who count pennies, including many fr

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AT&T: Tethering and MMS Coming to the iPhone
By Brad Stone

There were titters and Twitters from the crowd at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference today when Apple seemed to suggest that AT&T, its exclusive carrier in the United States, was delaying its support for two new features in the iPhone’s new software: tethering and MMS.

Tethering is the ability to connect your mobile phone (either wirelessly, over Bluetooth, or via a cable) to your PC and use it as a wireless modem. MMS is a format for sending multimedia, such as photos, over the wireless network. In both cases Apple displayed lists of carriers around the world who would support these features, and AT&T was not on them.

But Mark Siegel, media relations executive director of AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets, said the carrier would roll out both soon. “It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when,” he said. MMS functions would be active by the of the summer, and tethering would be supported, but AT&T is not ready to announce a time frame or whether there is an additional monthly price for the feature.

He said the delay has nothing to do with network issues, but declined to say why AT&T was slower to embrace these features than other carriers. That incomplete explanation may not satisfy iPhone fans in the United States, who have grown increasingly frustrated with Apple’s exclusive American iPhone partner.

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local news updates
updated
Saturday, 2:19 PM
From the Metro staff at The Boston Globe
New smart phone draws a tech-hungry crowd on Boylston Street
June 6, 2009 12:23 PM Email| Comments (0)| Text size – +

steve_salmon_060609.jpg
(David Beard/Globe Staff)

Success! Steve Salmon with his new Palm Pre.

By David Beard, Globe Staff

Tech-obsessed Bostonians lined up at a Sprint store in Boston's Back Bay by 5:30 a.m. today to get their first crack at the new Palm Pre, the most-anticipated cellphone since Apple's iPhone.

But only early birds were able to buy the $299 phone in the store, which came with a $100 rebate. By shortly after 11, all of the 55 phones were sold at the Boylston Street store.

A store employee said there wouldn't be a new shipment until Monday.

Steve Salmon of Cambridge was one of the lucky ones, lining up for one of the last phones, eager to swap it for his heavy Palm 700XW.

"I try to keep up with my kids," said Salmon, a rehab technician from Cambridge. Salmon almost missed his shot because he lined up at 9:15 and the store had opened two hours early at 8.

Another customer, James Groarke of Boston, said the new phone offered everything that he needed. He said he wasn't tempted to buy the trendy iPhone instead.

"I've had no luck with anything Mac, despite its popularity," he said. "I know some of my friends will kill me for saying this."

Sales personnel knew that business would tail off before noon today. "Unfortunately," said Ryan Pugh of the Back Bay, who estimated that at one point 40 people were lined up outside the store. Pugh and others said they expected a busy week ahead.

Sprint Nextel Corp. CEO Dan Hesse said today's release of the Pre, which is made by Palm Inc., represents a "coming out party" for Sprint as it seeks to reverse subscriber losses, The Associated Press reported Friday.

Industry analysts also consider the Pre to be Palm Inc.'s best hope for fighting back against Research In Motion's BlackBerry and Apple's iPhone. Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Palm needs a boost, as sale

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Google Voice Makes My Life So Much Easier
By JAMES KENDRICK and GIGAOM

I have too many phones. I feel better having admitted that. Right now I have the flagship smartphone on every major U. S. carrier — Verizon BlackBerry Storm, T-Mobile G1 (Android), AT&T iPhone 3G and the Sprint Palm Pre. Wow, that’s a real mouthful! Now, before everyone jumps all over me, I readily admit I don’t need all of those phones — in fact, I could get by with one just like everyone else. My work here, though, means I need to cover not only these phones, but the carriers, too, so thus the stable of smartphones. Having four phones (and phone numbers) has been driving me crazy, but this week I got into Google Voice, and I am living free and easy now.

Google Voice is still in private beta — you have to get invited in to get an account. It’s been running for a while now, and those who had Grand Central accounts (Google bought them) got grandfathered in, so quite a few of you are already enjoying Google Voice. I didn’t have an old account, so I never got an invite, and I’ll truthfully admit I pulled some strings to get one. I won’t name names, as I don’t want anyone to get in trouble, but thank you, you know who.

Once I had the account active, I entered in each of my four phone numbers. The security was top-notch; after entering in a phone number, Google called that phone and asked me to enter the security code on the phone that was displayed on the computer screen. Once that was done, my phone was activated on the Voice account. I repeated that three more times, and all four of my phones were activated for Google Voice.

Why is Google Voice making me so happy? I now have the one Google-supplied phone number to share with others. That one number now reaches me, either phone calls or text messages, no matter which of the four phones I am using at the time. Yes, when someone calls me at the Google Voice number, the service starts trying to reach me on all of the phones. Whichever one I am using rings, and I talk away. If I don’t feel like t

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Apps Boom as Companies Seek a Place on Your Phone
By JENNA WORTHAM

Developers of programs for the iPhone have already managed to make a decent living selling hundreds of thousands of copies of games from their living rooms or garages.

But now, a new way to profit from writing software for the iPhone is emerging: Sell the apps, then sell your company.

With the number of downloads through Apple’s App Store topping one billion and more than 40 million iPhones and iPod Touches sold since 2007, an increasing number of companies are seeing the mobile industry as a source of sustained revenue. Recently, IAC/InterActiveCorp, the Internet media conglomerate founded by Barry Diller, and Amazon.com, have bought app developers. Smaller companies have begun to assemble properties.

Since Apple showed that new apps sell phones, the market for apps is expanding quickly. Palm, Research in Motion, Nokia and Microsoft are all building app stores to work with phones running their operating systems. Apps can also be built for phones running Google’s Android software.

Most of the action is still in iPhone apps, which is what makes Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference this week in San Francisco of interest to developers and potential investors.

Developers will be showing new products running on Apple’s latest software, which allows users to buy subscriptions to applications and easily buy add-ons like access to higher game levels or additional city guides. The potential for added revenue should increase interest from buyers looking for acquisitions.

“There’s going to be a lot more interest in iPhone applications after the upgrade,” said Greg Yardley, a co-founder of Pinch Media, a mobile analytics firm. “We’re going to see some really neat business models emerge because of the new ability to sell virtual goods.”

The increased interest in app developers is being driven by companies seeking to build cellphone apps for their products or services. They see it as a way to reach beyond the Web for consumers. Though many apps are

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Machines with touch screens dangled the promise of escaping the tyranny of the keyboard in favor of intuitive finger-pointing. And, in back rooms, phone companies aggressively promoted tiny computers that bridge the gap between smartphones and laptops.

Roger L. Kay, one of the most prominent analysts of the PC industry, described the new generation of machines as “Franken-products,” a reference to the monster cobbled together from various parts.

For years, the popular industry term used to describe the collision of computers and cellphones has been “convergence.” But based on what’s coming soon to a store near you, it seems that “divergence” may be the more apt moniker. There is now a quasi-laptop for just about every need and want.

This month, consumers will start to see a fresh crop of cheap, thin, ultra-light notebooks arrive at chains like Wal-Mart Stores and Best Buy. Top-of-the-line computers in this category used to cost around $2,000, but the newer products will sell for less than $600.

Too expensive? The computer industry offers other options. Companies like Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Acer and Asustek Computer are introducing lines of netbooks, the sub-$400 laptops aimed at simple tasks.

And if all you want to do is browse the Web, the latest netbooks shown here, built around cellphone chips, can display high-definition video and still last for up to 18 hours on a single charge. They should start appearing in stores this fall for less than $150 and weigh less than two pounds.

At the feathery end of the weight scale, Asustek, the Taiwanese company that created netbooks, even promoted a computer that is just a keyboard with a small screen attached to its right side. The keyboard connects wirelessly to the Internet and lets people crank away at their e-mail, instant messages and documents.

On the show floor, it seemed that anything with a display took on laptop-like functions. There were pads to scribble on, smart photo frames that connected to the Web and videoconferencing systems aimed at consumers rat

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As Apple prepares for its Worldwide Developers Conference next week, where it will lay out how it plans to maintain its lead in the simmering battle of smartphone platforms, there is some interesting new data about the use of applications on mobile devices.

Gravity Tank, a Chicago-based creative consulting firm, surveyed over a thousand iPhone and Android G1 users in April and May. (Both devices, unlike older smartphones, have easy access to a range of free or low-cost applications.) Through research firms, the firm contacted people with smartphones who had agreed to participate in such surveys.

The results from the study, called “Apps Get Real,” show the different ways in which these programs are changing the way people use their phones, spend their time and organize their lives.

Among some of the findings from the report: respondents have downloaded an average of 23.6 applications to their phone and use an average of 6.8 apps every day.

Nearly half (48 percent) of phone owners report shopping for apps more than once a week. About the same number (49 percent) report using apps on their phone for more than 30 minutes a day.

The survey shows apps are also using up lots of people’s time — to the detriment of other technologies and types of media. Thirty-two percent said they used portable gaming devices less because of their app-enabled phones. Other technologies and media also suffered; 31 percent said they read newspapers less; 28 percent use GPS devices less; 28 percent use their MP3 players less; and 24 percent are watching less television.

“With apps, the phone has really become a kind of digital Swiss Army knife that people are using in all sorts of new ways,” said Michael Winnick, Gravity Tank’s managing director. “People have always valued their mobile phones, but to this point applications have been very focused. Now we see an incredible diversity of app use. In our research, we’ve seen people use apps to turn their phone into a running coach, a comprehensive physician’s anatomy guide, a metronome, a

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