According to sources close to the situation, Apple is planning an important — but not large-scale — event to be held in New York at the end of this month that will focus on a media-related announcement.

Per the usual caveat, the tech giant is well known for moving around their public show-and-tells, so this could certainly change at any moment.

But, for sure, several sources underscored that the event is not related to an upcoming version of the iPad 3, the next iteration of the popular tablet device that many expect to be available in 2012.

Also unlikely, the rollout of Apple’s large-scale rethinking of the interactive television initiative that it has been working on. While the company is expected to launch a new Apple TV product later in 2012, such an event would almost certainly be held in the heart of the industry in Hollywood or at least in Silicon Valley.

That leaves some kind of advertising or even publishing announcement, which might be the case, since Apple SVP of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue is reportedly involved.

Cue is in charge of a large swath of Apple’s media units, including the iTunes Store, App Store, iBookstore, as well as iAd and its iCloud services.

It’s well known in the ad industry that Apple has been searching for a new head of its mobile advertising unit, since Andy Miller left last summer.

But such an appointment has not been made as yet, said sources.

The last time Cue was in New York for an event, by the way, was nearly a year ago, when Apple helped launch News Corp.’s online magazine, The Daily.

And Apple also recently opened a splashy new retail store in Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal, and has been refurbishing its flagship glass cube on Fifth Avenue, too.

The holiday-having Apple PR team declined comment, but wished me a “happy, happy new year.”

Mobile-software developers have long complained about Apple’s limits on them. Chief among their gripes is Apple’s rule that developers registered through its standard developer program cap testing of their app to 100 devices before the software is sold in the app store. Developers say the rule curtails the amount of feedback they receive to improve their apps.

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According to All About Windows Phone, which tracks Windows Phone app submissions, the Marketplace has seen more than 50,000 apps published to it — 50,126, to be exact.

Notably, Windows Phone reached that 50,000 app milestone in 14 months, faster than Android, Symbian, or BlackBerry (but slower than iOS, which hit that mark in about a year).

Clearly, the platform is picking up steam. While it took a little over a year to reach 40,000 apps, it took just 40 days to accumulate the next 10,000.

That bodes well for Windows Phone in 2012. Of course, it needs to drive that growth higher still, if it ever hopes to match its rivals in the space. Though a noteworthy milestone, 50,000 apps is still a paucity, compared to the App Store’s 600,000 and Android Market’s 500,000.

Apple’s App Store is on pace to exceed 10 billion downloads this year alone, which is twice the number it recorded over the three previous years combined.

The Android Market is also setting records. Over the past seven months, it has achieved more than 7 billion downloads, which more than triples its life-to-date downloads of 3 billion reached in May 2011.

At those rates, both operating systems are generating roughly one billion downloads a month, or the equivalent of 33 million a day.

The data was reported by Flurry Analytics, which creates tools that thousands of developers use to track usage of their mobile applications.

Christmas Day was one of the big catalysts for achieving huge end-of-the-year records.

Flurry found that application downloads more than doubled on Christmas compared to the average number of downloads occurring during the first 20 days of December.

On Dec. 25, it registered 242 million app downloads, jumping more than 125 percent over an average day.

In addition, because of its insight into application usage, Flurry is also able to see the number of new devices activated. Phones and tablets are always a hot Christmas item and this year was no exception.

On the average day in December, 1.5 million phones were activated, but on Christmas, 6.8 million were activated, representing a 353 percent spike. Last year, Christmas held the previous single-day record with 2.8 million device activations.

A new start-up, Openspace, is launching a physical store where consumers can visit and discover the latest mobile applications.

“If your iPhone has a problem, you take it to Apple. If your Android tablet has a problem, you take it to Verizon, AT&T or Best Buy,” said Openspace founder Robert Reich. “But if you have a question about which camera app would be great for taking pictures this weekend on the slopes, where can you turn?”

To help solve that problem, Openspace opened its first physical storefront last week in Boulder, Colo. Open six days a week, the store is staffed by “App Gurus” who make recommendations and try to eliminate “app-rehension.” (Their joke, not mine.)

Previously, Reich founded Boulder-based OneRiot, which uses social data to make mobile advertising more targeted. The company was acquired by Wal-Mart in September.

Openspace is just getting off the ground, so all the details haven’t been nailed down — like how the operation will make money. But in the next year it hopes to partner with developers to take a percentage of sales that result from applications promoted in the store.

Consumers can also do things the old-fashioned way and visit the company’s Web site to get recommendations. On the site, the company categorizes applications by interests — many of which won’t be found on iTunes — including such nontraditional subjects as Occupy Wall Street, zombies or “games a 10-year-old girl will enjoy.”

Developers often complain about how difficult it is for their applications to be discovered, and frequently pay for advertising or third-party promotion. So it’s possible that a physical app store could be one more way to get the word out.

Whether Openspace will be able to make enough money off referrals to offset the high costs of real estate and full-time staff will be the bigger question.

Loosely modeled on the iTunes App store for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, Apple created the store last year as a reliable place to get Mac software. It follows the same 70-30 revenue split, where software makers share 30 percent of their sale with Apple, unless the app is free.

Unlike the iOS App store, the Mac App store isn’t the only place to get Mac software. You can still find good Mac software from sites like MacUpdate.com which has been a go-to for Mac fans for years; it is still buzzing along, referring users to software and generating 100,000 downloads a day.

Still, the Mac App store is now the biggest online software store in the world.

Apple’s statement is below:

CUPERTINO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Apple today announced that over 100 million apps have been downloaded from the Mac App Store™ in less than one year. With thousands of free and paid apps, the Mac App Store brings the App Store experience to the Mac so you can find great new apps, buy them using your iTunes account, and download and install them in just one step. Apple revolutionized the app industry with the App Store, which now has more than 500,000 apps and where customers have downloaded more than 18 billion apps and continue to download more than 1 billion apps per month.

“In just three years the App Store changed how people get mobile apps, and now the Mac App Store is changing the traditional PC software industry,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “With more than 100 million downloads in less than a year, the Mac App Store is the largest and fastest growing PC software store in the world.”

“With Autodesk products in both the App Store and Mac App Store, we can reach hundreds of millions of Apple users around the world,” said Amar Hanspal, senior vice president of Platform Solutions and Emerging Business at Autodesk. “With our free AutoCAD WS and the more powerful professional drafting tools of AutoCAD LT, we’re using the Mac App Store to deliver new products and reach a growing base of new Mac customers.”

“The Mac App Store has unparalleled reach and has completely transformed our distribution and development cycle,” said Saulius Dailide of the Pixelmator Team. “Offering Pixelmator 2.0 exclusively on the Mac App Store allows us to streamline updates to our image editing software and stay ahead of the competition.”

“In less than one year we’ve shifted the distribution of djay for Mac exclusively to the Mac App Store,” said Karim Morsy, CEO of algoriddim. “With just a few clicks, djay for Mac is available to customers in 123 countries worldwide. We could never have that reach through traditional channels.”

The Mac App Store offers thousands of apps in Education, Games, Graphics & Design, Lifestyle, Productivity, Utilities and other categories. Users can browse new and noteworthy apps, find out what’s hot, see staff favorites, search categories and look up top charts for paid and free apps, as well as user ratings and reviews. The Mac App Store is included with Mac OS X Lion and is available as a software update for any Mac running Mac OS X Snow Leopard. For more information visit, www.apple.com/mac/app-store.

Mac developers set the prices for their apps, keep 70 percent of the sales revenue, are not charged for free apps and do not have to pay hosting, marketing or credit card fees. To find out more about developing for the Mac App Store visit, developer.apple.com/programs/mac.

Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and has recently introduced iPad 2 which is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices.

After years of leaving it to Windows software makers to sell their own wares, Microsoft’s flagship operating system is finalizing its plans to get into the app store business.

The move won’t come until the debut of Windows 8 — expected next year — but Redmond will share more details on Tuesday at an event in San Francisco.

Back when it first showed the revamped interface at our D9 show in June, Microsoft revealed that Windows 8 would have a built-in software marketplace, though at that point the company wouldn’t comment on the “Store” icon that was clearly visible in the home screen it showed. Microsoft did offer a few more details at its Build developer conference in September.

I’m sure we’ll learn a lot more on Tuesday (and, naturally, AllThingsD will be on hand to get the full skinny) but here’s what we already know.

As of earlier this fall, the plan was that the store will be the exclusive way for developers to distribute new-style Windows 8 apps. Microsoft didn’t share the business details at its developer conference, though several documents made reference to some sort of revenue-sharing arrangement. The store will support free and paid apps, as well as trial versions and in-app payments. Businesses will also be able to make available internal apps to their workers using the store mechanism.

Traditional Windows apps will continue to be sold in the same way they have been — directly from developers and through online and brick and mortar stores. The store won’t be a way for users to directly purchase older-style Windows apps (the ones that run on Windows 7 and earlier versions in addition to Windows 8), but developers of those apps can create a landing page for those apps so they can be found in and linked to from the store.
The Windows Store itself is a new-style Windows 8 app that is linked to from the main start page.

Thanks to the iPhone, app stores are all the rage these days. Google has one for Android and Apple has transferred the concept to the Mac, with the marketplace it built into Lion.

Even though it is basically just following the trend, putting an app store in Windows is a big bet for Microsoft. Windows remains the company’s most important product and a key source of its revenue and profit. Inserting itself into the software distribution process opens up a potentially huge new income stream for Redmond, but also risks alienating developers — many of whom are trying to figure out just how much attention to give Windows these days, especially since new-style Windows apps use a different set of programming languages than those Microsoft has traditionally employed.

While Windows is one of the last to the app store game, Microsoft has considerable experience in this realm, already running online app stores for the Xbox and Windows Phone.

Among the key details to watch for on Tuesday will be what Microsoft’s business terms are for software developers, including the cut it hopes to take and other policies.

It will also be interesting to see if Microsoft has more to say about when it might release a beta version of the software. It handed out an early developer preview at the Build conference, though that edition had none of the code for the store. Developers will clearly need to start kicking the tires on the store fairly soon if Microsoft wants to have its virtual shelves stocked at launch.

If you’d like to, you can compare Google’s store and locker to Apple’s long-established iTunes store and just-launched iTunes Match locker. For instance, Google’s locker is free and lets you store 20,000 songs. Apple’s locker costs $25 a year and lets you store 25,000 songs. Warner Music Group songs aren’t available at Google’s store but are at Apple’s. Etc.

[UPDATE: Because at least one of you asked - Google's service doesn't offer the "Match" feature that Apple does, which means that users will have to upload every song they want to access from Google's locker. For a user with a decent-sized library and a conventional residential broadband connection, that process could take a very long time, perhaps several days.]

But that’s sort of missing the point, because few people will make that comparison in the real world.

Instead, real people will make a simple non-decision: If they use an Android phone, they can’t use Apple’s store or locker. So now they can use Google’s. And while it will be theoretically possible for iPhone users to use Google’s store and locker, it will involve some kludgy sidesteps that won’t appeal to mainstream users.

And that’s about it. In the end, this isn’t about helping Google “catch up to iTunes” — it’s about filling the big, gaping, musical hole in Google’s mobile business. But as market report after market report has pointed out, the lack of a music store — and a decent music player, for that matter — hasn’t hurt Android sales.

The flip side is also true: Music sales have always been a side business for Apple, and that’s even more true now in the app economy. ITunes sales grew 28 percent in the last year, but Apple says that’s primarily due to the App Store’s expansion into new territories.

The most interesting part of the rollout is the sharing feature — that’s the “twist” that Android boss Andy Rubin hinted at last month. It’s a limited-use case — you actually have to buy a song or album from the Google Store in order to share it, and most people don’t buy a whole lot of music, period — but if it does work, the chief beneficiary will be Google+, Google’s newish Facebook-fighter.

Google claims that more than 40 million people are using Google+, but I haven’t met a soul who isn’t in the tech nerd industrial complex who has used it, and I’ve been wondering how Google would convince a “normal” to sign up for another social service. Perhaps a free song will do it.

In a blog post by one of its execs, titled “Flash to Focus on PC Browsing and Mobile Apps; Adobe to More Aggressively Contribute to HTML5,” Adobe said what had already been reported: That it would no longer be developing its well-known Flash for mobile devices.

Here’s the key graph:

“Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook. We will of course continue to provide critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations. We will also allow our source code licensees to continue working on and release their own implementations.”

Last night, reports surfaced that the high-profile software company — whose Flash technology has been a flagship product — was halting development on the mobile version of its browser plug-in.

Now, Adobe will focus its PC Web browser business on tools that allow Flash developers to create mobile apps by packaging their code to run on Adobe’s AIR platform.

The move has big implications for Adobe going forward and also for mobile device makers, such as Google and Research In Motion. But not Apple.

As Ina Fried wrote:

“The move, if true, would be a major blow to Android device makers, who have long touted Flash compatibility as a key competitive advantage over Apple’s iPhone and iPad.

It would also mark a posthumous vindication for former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who took a controversial stand by not supporting Flash on Apple’s mobile products.”

Turns out Jobs was prescient, as usual.

Here is the full version of the Adobe blog:

Flash to Focus on PC Browsing and Mobile Apps; Adobe to More Aggressively Contribute to HTML5

POSTED BY DANNY WINOKUR, VICE PRESIDENT & GENERAL MANAGER, INTERACTIVE DEVELOPMENT AT ADOBE ON NOVEMBER 9, 2011 5:59 AM IN BUSINESS PROFESSIONALS, CREATIVE PROFESSIONALS, DEVELOPERS, VIDEO

Adobe is all about enabling designers and developers to create the most expressive content possible, regardless of platform or technology. For more than a decade, Flash has enabled the richest content to be created and deployed on the web by reaching beyond what browsers could do. It has repeatedly served as a blueprint for standardizing new technologies in HTML. Over the past two years, we’ve delivered Flash Player for mobile browsers and brought the full expressiveness of the web to many mobile devices.

However, HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively. This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms. We are excited about this, and will continue our work with key players in the HTML community, including Google, Apple, Microsoft and RIM, to drive HTML5 innovation they can use to advance their mobile browsers.

Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook. We will of course continue to provide critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations. We will also allow our source code licensees to continue working on and release their own implementations.

These changes will allow us to increase investment in HTML5 and innovate with Flash where it can have most impact for the industry, including advanced gaming and premium video. Flash Player 11 for PC browsers just introduced dozens of new features, including hardware accelerated 3D graphics for console-quality gaming and premium HD video with content protection. Flash developers can take advantage of these features, and all that our Flash tooling has to offer, to reach more than a billion PCs through their browsers and to package native apps with AIR that run on hundreds of millions of mobile devices through all the popular app stores, including the iTunes App Store, Android Market, Amazon Appstore for Android and BlackBerry App World.

We are already working on Flash Player 12 and a new round of exciting features which we expect to again advance what is possible for delivering high definition entertainment experiences. We will continue to leverage our experience with Flash to accelerate our work with the W3C and WebKit to bring similar capabilities to HTML5 as quickly as possible, just as we have done with CSS Shaders. And, we will design new features in Flash for a smooth transition to HTML5 as the standards evolve so developers can confidently invest knowing their skills will continue to be leveraged.

We are super excited about the next generations of HTML5 and Flash. Together they offer developers and content publishers great options for delivering compelling web and application experiences across PCs and devices. There is already amazing work being done that is pushing the newest boundaries, and we can’t wait to see what is still yet to come!

Here’s the direct quote taken from the transcript:

“IPhone continues to be adopted as the standard across the enterprise with 93 percent of the Fortune 500 deploying or testing the device, up from 91 percent last quarter and 60 percent of the Global 500 testing or deploying iPhone, up from 57 percent last quarter. A recent example of iPhone’s enterprise success is Lowe’s. Lowe’s is in the process of rolling out over 40,000 iPhones with a custom application to allow their store associates to execute real-time inventory checks, product orders and interactive customers with how-to videos.

Additional examples of companies around the world supporting iPhone on their corporate networks include L’Oreal, Royal Bank of Scotland, SAP, Texas Instruments, Jacobs Engineering Group, Tenet Healthcare, Jaguar Land Rover, Takeda Pharmaceuticals, Lincoln National and CSX Corporation. And of course, we’re thrilled to begin shipping iPhone 4S this month.”

And later, a similar section devoted to the iPad:

“Every day, we learn about innovative new ways our enterprise customers are using iPad. The airline industry is a great example of the momentum we’re seeing. United Continental Holdings is putting iPads in every cockpit to replace heavy, paper-based flight bags. In Japan, All Nippon Airways is now using iPad in training programs for flight attendants.

Sonic Automotive is using iPad for customer check-in at the service department and also to provide analytics to regional managers. Aflac, Biogen and General Mills have developed internal apps that their field sales teams leverage daily, and technicians of Siemens Energy are bringing iPads along when they do maintenance work at the top of their wind turbines.”

It turns out that it’s not a new thing, exactly. Cook has recited similar lists on Apple conference calls before. But as recently as 2008, when Businessweek published its cover story called “The Mac in the Gray Flannel Suit” (which, full disclosure, I worked on), Apple was generally considered an outsider in the enterprise IT business, and Apple products a novelty in the office. In broad brushstrokes, Macs tended to show up at media and advertising companies, and in the creative and marketing departments of other companies. The iPhone, and later the iPad, changed all that.

Here’s about as good an indication of that trend as I’ve ever seen: Intermedia, a company that operated a hosted Microsoft Exchange service for small and mid-sized businesses, said earlier this month that among its 41,000 customers, 78 percent are using Apple devices to get their mail, contact lists and calendars.

Meanwhile, look at all the companies that have developed enterprise applications for iOS: Salesforce.com, NetSuite and Citrix immediately come to mind. And Tidemark — the business intelligence start-up I wrote about yesterday — is iPad-ready from the start. There are probably hundreds, if not thousands, of examples I’m missing.

Apple has cumulatively sold 40 million iPads since the device launched last year. The company doesn’t offer much in the way of a data breakdown of how many of those are sold to businesses, but it almost doesn’t matter, because in so many cases, people buy one and just take it to the office. When you hear the phrase “consumerization of IT,” which already feels pretty worn out to me, it refers mostly to people who want to use iOS devices at work, and to a lesser extent, Google’s Android. A recent survey of 750 IT managers found that the iPhone led the pack of personal devices used at work, followed by Android Phones and the iPad.

I probably shouldn’t be surprised by all this, but when I heard Tim Cook list all those big companies using iThings to get things done, it finally dawned on me: Apple is as much an enterprise story as it is a consumer story.

Consider the wall of apps in this photo of the company’s new shop-in-a-shop in Italy’s Centro Sicilia, which appears to feature not only the iOS icon for Apple’s mobile Safari browser, but the icon for the company’s iOS App Store — three instances of it.

Embarrassing, particularly given Apple’s allegations that Samsung “slavishly” copied the design of its iPhone and iPad devices. It’s hard to imagine there’s a reasonable explanation for this. Samsung phones don’t support iOS apps and I can’t imagine Apple is making the company a version of Safari.

Now it’s possible this was a display left over from some other event or product, but still.

Samsung has not yet responded to a request for comment.

But one of the most important elements of today’s news will take place outside of Facebook’s walls. A crucial part of the new strategy involves letting people sign up for someone else’s site, or service, with a single click, using their Facebook ID.

In other words, lots of big players are going to start sharing their locks and keys with Facebook.

The trade-off is straightforward: You give up (some) control of your own territory, with all the attendant risks that come with that, and in return you get a lot more people showing up at your door.

The media companies that are working with Facebook today are familiar with this dynamic — it’s quite similar to the one they face when they work with Apple and its App Store.

And my guess is they’re now more willing to engage so deeply with Facebook precisely because they’re already deep with Apple. This helps them gain a bit of leverage back.

Hollywood, for instance, doesn’t want Tim Cook to control digital access to their stuff in the way that Steve Jobs locked in the music industry. So it’s likely to let Facebook become an authentication system for various locker/cloud strategies the studios roll out, most notably their Ultraviolet program coming out this year. The cable industry has talked about the same thing.

I don’t think you’re going to see this kind of really deep integration announced today, though. Instead, you’ll see the groundwork for it.

Warner Bros’ Flixster, for instance, will be a launch partner, and that service’s new features allow users to share their collections of movies they watched and would like to watch with their friends. And once you’re signed up for that, it’s easy to imagine registering collections of movies that you actually own with Flixster, too. And once you’ve done that, you could access them from a locker/cloud service, all using your Facebook ID and password.

That’s a (potentially) very big deal. Keep your eyes open.

[Image via Shutterstock/Péter Gudella]

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Opera launched its mobile store in March, offering apps for BlackBerry, Android and Symbian, among other platforms.

“Opera is evolving from being a browser company into a fully integrated mobile services company and this acquisition is an important step in that direction,” Opera CEO Lars Boilesen said in a statement. Based in Northbrook, Illinois, Handster powers app stores for various carriers and device makers, including Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Huawei and LG.

Asked what the deal might mean for Appia, an Opera representative told AllThingsD, “We will continue to work with Appia in a limited capacity, but long term, we will rely more on our own technology and team.”

An Appia representative did not immediately have a comment.

Update: Appia VP Dov Cohn said in a statement to AllThingsD that “Appia continues to power the Opera Mobile Store, and Opera remains one of several key partners of Appia’s that includes Vodacom, Zedge, Telcel and others.”

Several social and Jewish groups had urged Apple to withdraw the application, saying it breaches French laws that ban disclosing people’s religion without their consent as well as compiling data about people’s religions. Groups that objected to the app included a council representing French Jewish institutions known as Crif, France’s Jewish student union, and an anti-racism group called SOS Racisme.

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Carousel, which initially will work on Macs and iOS devices when the service launches later this month, is designed to allow people to access, share and edit their entire photo libraries from all of their devices, though support for Windows and Android isn’t planned until next year.

The $60-a-year service (or $5.99 a month) allows users to upload an unlimited number of photos and have them synchronized to all of their Macs, iPhones and iPads. Adobe will also offer new users a month of the service free to kick the tires.

With a subscription, Carousel users can create up to five different photo collections, each of which can be shared with up to five additional people. Those with whom photos are shared can add photos of their own or edit pictures without needing their own subscription. Individual photos can also be shared through Twitter, Facebook, Tumber or via email.

On the editing side, the tools are a mix of image effects, which Carousel calls “looks,” as well as slider tools for controlling settings such as contrast, white balance and exposure. And no matter what edits are made, the original photo is preserved.

The photos themselves are stored in the cloud as well as, typically, on a primary machine. The Mac version of Carousel creates its own photo library, meaning that users will need a lot of extra hard drive space if they plan to store their full collection of pictures in Carousel.

Carousel is the latest effort by Adobe to create products that work across computers and mobile devices. Earlier this year, the company showed off several tools that aim to allow the iPad to work in conjunction with Photoshop in various ways.

The chief selling point for Carousel over various products from Adobe and others is the fact that the product synchronizes edits and photos automatically. That, says Adobe’s Chris Quek, is what users expect out of mobile photo services.

“It has to work right out of the box,” Quek told AllThingsD. “If it is difficult to set up and doesn’t integrate with the rest of their lives they are not going to use it.”

There are some significant limitations. On the Mac side, Carousel requires Lion — the just-released version of MacOS X. Support on the iOS side is a bit broader, working with iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 as well as all iPads and the latest version of the iPod Touch.

Adobe will also find a number of competitors in this area, including Apple’s soon-to-launch iCloud as well as a variety of other photo sharing and editing services.

The company is expected to announce the move later on Wednesday. Forman, who was executive chairman at location-based service app Where until it was acquired by eBay earlier this year, has also worked at EarthLink, Yahoo, Time Warner (and AllThingsD owner Dow Jones).

Though not well known in its own right, Appia powers app stores for some big names, including Opera, Samsung, T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon Wireless. Appia, which was formerly known as PocketGear, raised $10 million in venture funding back in March.

The move comes two months after Apple instituted new rules that required developers either to sell subscriptions through iTunes or take down any e-commerce links to outside sites.

The FT, which had been vocal about its opposition to the rules, did neither, and now its apps are gone, though for the present existing downloads will still work.

“We removed the app after amicable discussions with Apple,” says FT spokesman Tom Glover. “ITunes will remain an important channel for new and existing advertising-based apps.”

That makes the financial newspaper the only big player to date to pull a big app out of Apple’s store altogether. Other content companies have either signed on for Apple’s subscription service (the New York Times, Conde Nast) or dropped the links in their apps (Amazon, Hulu, and The Wall Street Journal, which, like this site, is owned by News Corp.).

The FT is directing users to its Web-based app, which it introduced earlier this year amid a back and forth with Apple over the new subscription rules. Glover says the Web app now has 550,000 users, a number he says “has overtaken users on our native Apple iOS apps combined, and it’s now delivering the largest share of subscriptions from our mobile channels.”

The majority of e-commerce sites share a single thing in common: They were built by dudes.

That hasn’t escaped the founders of Snapette, a social photo-sharing app built by women, explicitly for women.

The three-person company recently graduated from Dave McClure’s 500 Startups incubator.

According to Snapette co-founder Sarah Paiji: “Men go to a store to solve a problem — to replace something. For women it’s less about fulfilling a particular need.”

The app, which launched in Apple’s App Store a few weeks back, focuses on the experience of shopping and leaves out buying altogether — for now.

Being a guy, all I’ve got to go on is my one X chromosome, but Paiji’s argument does make some sense.

Sites like Amazon, she said, are “all search and filters — you need to know what you are looking for. That’s how men shop.”

Snapette takes it in a different direction — somewhere between Yelp and Instagram.

Users open up the app and are presented with pictures of shoes or bags, snapped by other Snapette users in stores both nearby and far away.

Why limit the app to these fashion accessories?

“The focus on accessories keeps it about the products,” said Paiji, implying that she didn’t want the app to be about rating how an item looks on a person.

The trio who founded Snapette are currently making the rounds, seeking about $500,000 in funding, and are hoping for investors who really “get it,” said Paiji.

But finding money that “gets it” hasn’t been easy in Silicon Valley’s male-dominated venture capital culture, she added.

“We have gotten a lot of interest, but lots of VCs are holding off and taking the app home to their wives and mothers before getting back to us,” said Paiji.

VC sluggishness notwithstanding, Paiji expressed confidence in Snapette’s monetization prospects, alluding to subject-area strengths relative to apps like Instagram.

“How do you monetize a picture of a sunset?,” she said. “Our path is much clearer, with partners and brands.”

As for what’s next, Snapette plans to continue to “focus on discovery,” according to Paiji, which means continuing to isolate the experience of shopping from the process of buying — something that makes relatively little sense to me.

But that’s probably the point.

Maybe co founder Sarah Paiji can explain it in this video:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110829/snapette-aims-at-women-shoppers-in-its-social-photo-and-shopping-app/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110826/the-lowdown-on-lou-reeds-vanished-app/ http://allthingsd.com/20110826/the-lowdown-on-lou-reeds-vanished-app/#comments Fri, 26 Aug 2011 19:52:06 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=114365 Yes, it feels just a little weird to be writing about Lou Reed’s iPhone app right now. But since not all of you are consumed with geography and weather, here you go: Did you know Lou Reed has an iPhone app?

Or more accurately: Did you know Lou Reed used to have an iPhone app, but doesn’t anymore? But that he probably will again?

The beginnings of this one come to us via Eliot Van Buskirk and his excellent Evolver.fm blog, which pointed out today that Reed’s web site promotes an app called “Lou Zoom.”

This one tweaks the address book on Apple’s handsets, apparently, and it looks sort of interesting. I don’t really need the font magnifier, yet. But I do find the search function on the iPhone’s stock address book pretty limited. So that could be cool. Alas, as Buskirk notes, the app isn’t actually in the app store right now.

But, it turns out, it has been: Reed and his team introduced the $1.99 app back in the fall of 2009. And it would still be in the store now except someone has let some kind of registration lapse, says Ben Syverson, the developer who built the app.

Syverson says Reed’s management is trying to sort out whatever’s keeping the app out of the store, and assumes it will be back there shortly. He also says he think he’ll end up building an Android version, too.

My hunch is that Lou Zoom was not a huge money maker for Reed and company, or else they’d be paying much more attention to their app store status. Still, they did find time to make this promotional video, featuring the man himself, and some very exotic glasses. And a sword?

And now I gotta run, so I can stock up on essentials. Talk soon!

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