With the rise of so-called “crowdfunding,” game makers are finding fans online who are willing to pledge a few bucks toward a game they’d like to see produced.

The primary site where these connections are being made is Kickstarter, a three-year old company. Since Kickstarter got off the ground, the games category has garnered $29 million in pledges, according to the New York Times. Other popular categories include film/video, music and design.

Further, it was reported that 854 game developers successfully reached their fundraising goals, raising an average of $29,409 apiece.

Most impressively, three game companies have raised more than $1.5 million each since the beginning of this year: Double Fine raised $3.3 million from 87,000 backers; Wasteland 2 raised $2.9 million; and Shadowrun Returns secured $1.8 million.

Another site, Gambitious, which will be exclusively dedicated to helping game companies raise money, is preparing to launch on June 5 in Los Angeles as part of E3, the industry’s big annual conference.

The shift to nontraditional fundraising is now even catching the eye of megapublishers like Electronic Arts. Last week, EA said developers who crowdsourced funding will be able to sell their games on Origin at no cost for three months.

Origin is the company’s online game store, which allows users to download PC games electronically and counts up to 12 million users worldwide.

“The public support for crowdfunding creative game ideas coming from small developers today is nothing short of phenomenal,” said David DeMartini, EA’s SVP of Origin, in a release. “It’s also incredibly healthy for the gaming industry. Gamers around the world deserve a chance to play every great new game.”

EA doesn’t disclose how much it charges because it says fees can vary, but through this program, developers will now receive 100 percent of sales during the 90-day window plus any pre-sales that are generated before the title officially launches, a spokesman confirmed.

It’s unclear whether crowdfunding is a fad and consumers will tire of it quickly, and to be clear, not every company that requests money is able to get it.

But it pairs nicely with a broader trend in the industry that AllThingsD’s Eric Johnson wrote about last week. He explained that game developers are increasingly finding it advantageous to stay small, rejecting the notion that productions need big budgets in order to create blockbusters.

The evolution has been aided by the rise of three new distribution platforms, Apple’s App Store, Facebook and Valve’s Steam Store (and to a lesser extent, EA’s Origin, which is catching up). With these digital platforms, developers can reach customers without having to package up their software and sell it at retail, saving thousands of dollars.

With the crowdfunding phenomenon completely under way, Videogame Analyst and Consultant Scott Steinberg saw the opportunity to write an e-book on the subject called “Crowdfunding Your Business: A How-To Guide.” In the recently released book, he argues that crowdfunding helps developers identify projects that consumers are willing to pay for, before they’ve wasted the money and time on developing them.

He writes that by “requesting feedback or recruiting help from public donors via open calls for assistance — you can gauge demand for and create bankable products from day one.”

In yet another huge stride toward bolstering its app platform, the company announced plans for its own central app hub inside Facebook itself, making it easier for users to discover Facebook-integrated apps, as well as easier for developers to submit and feature their apps on Facebook itself.

Until now, users had a handful of ways of discovering apps through Facebook; the company touted “social discovery” as its strong suit, as users were encouraged to find apps through their news feed. The idea is, you’ll find the apps that are most relevant because they’re the ones your friends use. They’ll surface in your newsfeed, and you’ll pick the ones you like while ignoring the ones you don’t care about.

So this is somewhat different. To be clear, it’s not exactly a proper “App Store” competitor to take on the likes of Apple or Google’s respective hubs. It’s more of a centralized location so that everyone — users and developers alike — knows where to go to find Facebook apps. And that didn’t exist before.

But the social discovery part still plays a huge factor. The apps that show up when you visit the App Center will be those that Facebook finds most relevant to you — that is, ones your friends are using, or ones that are scoring particularly high on Facebook’s own internal ratings system that judges just what apps should show up.

“Success through the App Center is tied to the quality of an app,” wrote Facebook employee Aaron Brady in a blog post. “We use a variety of signals, such as user ratings and engagement, to determine if an app is listed in the App Center.”

This is a big deal for building out the future of the platform. Part of what will determine just how much time users spend inside Facebook is the amount of content they have to play around with, and the company relies on outside developers for that. The unveiling of the Open Graph at Facebook’s F8 developer conference last year was the first step in this direction, making it easier for third-party developers to fully integrate their applications into the Facebook ecosystem. Then came the different verbs with appropriate apps — like “Listening” with Spotify and “Watching” with Netflix — broadcasting user activities across Facebook, thereby upping the potential for others to try out those third-party apps.

But as Facebook seems to realize with Wednesday’s announcement, developers can’t rely entirely on social discovery for their apps to grow. Sure, you’ll get the occasional breakout successes like SocialCam, Viddy or Pinterest through organic growth, but users still need a home page to browse through apps.

What’s more, the new App Center will feature additional ways for developers to get paid. The only initial payment options for developers who actually wanted to earn money through Facebook apps were via in-app purchases. So for an app like Farmville — which relies on users buying virtual goods to make money — the original sort of system works well. Now Facebook will give the option for developers to offer paid apps. That makes it easier on developers’ apps for which in-app payments make little sense.

So if the App Center takes off, the impetus for an app to succeed isn’t dependent on a sudden burst of viral growth. In theory, a developer’s app can simmer inside the App Center and eventually bubble up to the forefront of users’ App Center dashboards.

It’s also another potential revenue stream insofar as splitting the cash on paid apps and in-app purchases. And more app use, of course, means more engagement within the Facebook platform. That means more ads. And with the wealth of new data Facebook will receive by looking at the apps its subscribers are using, it also means better targeted ads.

Now it’s up to developers to make apps worth downloading. And what’s good for developers is good for Facebook.

Apple’s stringent guidelines on submissions to its App Store are no secret to developers: Abide by our rules or prepare to get your app nixed.

So why, then, did Dropbox recently blow by Apple’s guidelines with its software development kit?

Here’s the deal: Last week, developers utilizing Dropbox’s SDK in their own iOS apps started getting rejection notices from the App Store after submitting their apps for review. As evident from this saucy exchange between a developer and an Apple employee, Dropbox’s SDK included a link to the desktop version of its site, which allows users to purchase an upgrade in storage space for the service.

That’s a feature that Apple has explicitly banned in any iOS apps submitted to its store. According to section 11.13 of Apple’s App Store penal code (er, review guidelines): “Apps that link to external mechanisms for purchases or subscriptions to be used in the app, such as a ‘buy’ button that goes to a web site to purchase a digital book, will be rejected.”

Apple confirmed to AllThingsD that this was indeed the guideline Dropbox had violated with its SDK.

As first noticed by The Next Web, developers were peeved at their apps’ sudden rejections, and rightly so. Resubmitting an app can take a matter of weeks to move through Apple’s approval process. And in the fast moving mobile world, time is money.

“I hope you enjoy rejecting decent apps for having normal functionality while letting all the fart apps through,” wrote independent developer Goran Peuc in an exchange with an Apple representative.

Dropbox’s response to the dust-up? An ever-so-subtle dig at Apple: “Apple is rejecting apps that use the Dropbox SDK because we allow users to create accounts,” a spokeswoman for Dropbox told me in an emailed response (emphasis mine). “We’re working with Apple to come up with a solution that still provides an elegant user experience.”

Update: Dropbox elucidated further after this story was first published, claiming that the problems lie in the inherent difficulties of Apple’s In-App Purchasing mechanism. “Apple requires paid services that allow account creation to offer the option to upgrade via In-App Purchase (IAP),” a Dropbox spokeswoman told AllThingsD in a statement. “We abide by this policy in our app, where we offer upgrades only via IAP. However, we are unable to offer IAP in our SDK to third-party developers due to limitations of IAP. Additionally, our SDK allows only free accounts to be created from third-party apps and has never been used to promote our paid plans.”

And to Dropbox’s credit, the SDK has already been patched, so developers shouldn’t come up against the issue any longer.

It would seem, then, that initially one of a few scenarios occurred: It was an oversight, and Dropbox accidentally left a link in the SDK, and it went unnoticed by Apple for the better part of seven months (which is how long Dropbox’s SDK has gone without alteration). Alternately, it was intentional, and the company wanted to see if the app could slide through undetected. Or perhaps the link seemed innocuous enough to Dropbox that the company thought Apple wouldn’t make a stink.

Obviously, the latter outcome wasn’t what happened.

Dropbox didn’t respond to my request for further clarification, but one would think that the company would have been wise to this beforehand. The slew of iOS app rejections in the past few years have been highly publicized in the tech press, especially the instance in which Apple rejected Sony’s Reader app last year.

In other words, Dropbox should have known better. If there’s a way for you to sell your product within Apple’s ecosystem — be it virtual goods, e-books or online storage — Apple wants its cut and always has. There’s really no way around it.

Perhaps Dropbox wanted to play the honey badger this time — and we all know that honey badger just don’t give a s#!*.

(Image courtesy of Mark Bridge/Flickr)

Now, 10,000 apps is a paucity compared to the 600,000 or so apps available in the iOS App Store. But remember, the Mac App Store is a PC software store that’s changing a longstanding software purchasing paradigm. And changing a decades-old paradigm is far more difficult than creating a brand new one.

As part of the announcement, the retailer is also confirming that it will take a 30 percent cut of each transaction, which is the standard across Apple’s App Store, Facebook and Google Play (Correction: In an earlier version, it stated that Google takes 5 percent, which only applies to the Google+ game network.)

The announcement is not a huge surprise, since Amazon has been testing in-app payments over the past few months with a number of developers in the Amazon Appstore, which runs on the Kindle Fire and a number of Android handsets.

The payments platform utilizes Amazon’s well-recognized and trusted “1-Click” purchasing experience that so many consumers are familiar with from shopping online. By bringing it to mobile, it will make it easy for consumers to purchase a few more coins inside a game or to subscribe to a magazine.

But while the announcement sounds fairly basic, the rollout is important for Amazon to get right, since developers’ initial reception to the Appstore was a little strained — and stories of making money on the platform have been mixed.

That’s because, unlike other app stores, Amazon has decided to dictate how much an app sells for, and in some cases, the company elects to make apps free as part of its Free App of the Day promotion. In doing so, developers sometimes make less revenue than they would normally expect (especially since there was no potential upside from in-app purchases).

Developers and publishers will be able to set the price of the items within the store, including virtual goods or subscriptions, an Amazon spokesperson said.

Based on developers that participated in the beta tests, so far Amazon’s Appstore looks like it has been monetizing well.

Storm8, which was one of the game developers that participated in the beta test, told AllThingsD that it generated $700,000 in revenue from in-app purchases in March — before Amazon’s cut. The Redwood City developer said it has 10 free-to-play apps in the store, including such titles as Kingdoms Live, Nightclub Story and Farm Story; at one point, four of its games ranked among the five most popular free apps on Amazon.

Flurry, which provides analytics software to developers, also estimated  that Amazon’s in-app payment platform monetizes well, and that it outperforms Google Play, but falls short of the industry’s gold standard, which is Apple.

Still, it’s unclear whether Amazon will be able to woo developers, given that it is so much smaller than the other players. Last month, after celebrating its first year in business, Amazon confirmed that it had more than 31,000 apps in its store, which is far fewer than either Google or Apple.

It’s also unclear how many devices the Appstore is installed on, since Amazon does not share much information, including how many Kindle Fires it has sold.

According to a report by IHS iSuppli, Amazon shipped 3.9 million Fires in the fourth quarter, to claim 14.3 percent of the market. That makes it the world’s second-largest tablet vendor, surpassing Samsung, which has been in the market far longer, with many more devices.

In the future, what could potentially be even more interesting for developers than in-app payments is if Amazon will let them use apps to sell merchandise, such as Rovio’s plush toys, or DVDs and other cross-promotional items.

An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on the possibility.

The top ranking will go a long way in quieting the critics who believed Zynga was foolish to acquire OMGPOP for $180 million on the day of Rovio’s big launch, only to see it fall to second place the next day.

In addition to climbing its way back to the top, Zynga also disclosed that the game has now been downloaded more than 50 million times in 50 days, making it the fastest-growing mobile game ever — or so it believes.

In other words, that would be like everyone in England downloading the app in less than two months.

While it still may end up being true that Zynga overpaid for OMGPOP, there is little doubt that the game is an overnight success.

If you are one of the few people who haven’t already played it, Draw Something challenges players to use their finger to draw a picture of a person, place or thing; for example, “hoodie,” “golf cart” or “Rihanna.” The completed picture is handed off to another player, who must guess what is being drawn, sort of like Pictionary.

Inside the game, players can pay for additional features, such as new colors that can help make the illustrations easier to guess, new words if they don’t like the choices that are presented to them, or bombs that will eliminate some of the letters to make guessing an illustration easier. The free version has ads; users can pay 99 cents to get rid of them.

Zynga also said that since the game launched, more than six billion drawings have been created (that’s 120 for every resident of England), and that at the game’s peak hours, it generates 3,000 drawings per second. The most popular words are “starfish,” “pregnant,” “six-pack,” “Hangman” and “boom box.” The least popular word is “latrine.”

The mobile game also registers as the most popular game on Facebook, because it allows people to log in to the game on the phone using their credentials.

However, people do not have to register using Facebook, so the number of players using it is actually bigger than what’s being reported by AppData, which tracks application usage on Facebook.

Still, AppData reports that the game has 14.4 million daily active users, where it has plateaued for the past week. The next most popular game, also owned by Zynga, is Words With Friends, which draws about eight million daily users, slightly more than half of Draw Something’s crowd.

And now it appears that the company plans to build apps for the iPhone, as well.

A March 20 RIM job posting shows the company seeking a Senior iOS Mobile Developer to build enterprise applications; specifically, “an experienced iOS/Objective-C developer capable of architecting, designing, developing and testing complex applications for iPhone and iPad devices.”

Among the job requirements: At least two years of professional experience in writing iOS apps, and the ability to show off a few of them in the iTunes App Store at the time of the candidate’s interview.

What does RIM want with its own iOS developers? That’s not clear, and the company has not responded to requests for comment; it is in the quiet period prior to reporting earnings next week. Perhaps it has something to do with RIM’s BlackBerry Mobile Fusion effort, though presumably that wouldn’t require app developers. That said, given the consumerization of IT and RIM’s efforts to hold on to enterprise clients that might be slowly slipping away from it, having a BB Fusion app in the App Store might be a wise idea.

Another theory: The company is indeed working on bringing its popular BlackBerry Messenger service to iOS, as has been rumored before.

Below, the full text of the recruitment ad. RIM removed the original listing following the publication of this post.

UPDATE: Turns out my first theory is the more accurate of the two. In a statement given to AllThingsD, RIM said the iOS dev job is related to its BlackBerry Fusion efforts.

“As you are aware RIM announced BlackBerry Mobile Fusion on November 29, 2011 and the job posting you are referencing is to help continue the development of this product offering,” a spokesperson for the company said. “In order for BlackBerry Mobile Fusion to perform advanced management functions for iOS devices, RIM will develop an on device client to be included as part of the overall solution.”

Yesterday, it acquired OMGPOP, the developer that suddenly unseated the social game giant after its overnight success with Draw Something.

Draw Something, which challenges players to guess what another person is drawing, much like Pictionary, has been downloaded more than 35 million times in the past six weeks.

In the words of OMGPOP’s CEO Dan Porter, that’s pretty “Drawsome!”

But in making the acquisition, Zynga may have inadvertently set the expectation that if it doesn’t create the No. 1 game on Facebook — it will acquire it.

In this case, that wasn’t a cheap thing to do.

Zynga declined to say how much it spent on OMGPOP, but our sources say it paid $210 million, including $30 million in employee-retention payments. 

The message Zynga is sending with this acquisition is that it is committed to having the most popular games — a difficult and expensive proposition, especially if acquisitions are always the answer.

Just ask Porter how difficult it is. It took him 34 attempts and six years to build a hit.

“You are always trying to figure out what everyone wants,” he said in an interview. “But a hit is a hit for reasons that are hard to understand. I’ve told investors before — if I could, I would only make those games, and not the other games.”

Porter likened it to the music business, where he started his career. While busy signing every hot band he could find, the unexpected runaway hit was the “Dirty Dancing” soundtrack.

Still, the stock market rewarded Zynga’s decision yesterday, sending the company’s stock up about 5.3 percent, to $14.45 a share, after getting confirmation of the acquisition at noon. However, by the end of the day, enthusiasm waned, and shares closed at $13.72 a share.

Since going public in December, it’s been a rocky ride for Zynga.

After raising $1 billion to make it the largest Internet IPO since Google, it has traded as low as $7.97 and as high as $15.91. Based on yesterday’s closing price, the stock is now up 37 percent.

Acquisitions are hardly a new strategy for the company.

Last year, it set a pace of buying more than one company every month, seeking both employees and new games to maintain its rapid growth rate.

In this case, OMGPOP’s 40 New York employees will join forces with Zynga’s existing New York office, and Porter will become the new VP and GM.

What really stands out about this acquisition is the price — at $210 million, it’s the most expensive company Zynga has purchased. Prior to this acquisition, Zynga’s largest buy was the $53 million purchase of Newtoy, the developer behind Words With Friends.

That’s not to say that Zynga hasn’t attempted other big purchases. In 2011, it courted Rovio, the maker of Angry Birds, and unsuccessfully bid for PopCap, which instead sold to Electronic Arts for $750 million.

Although Draw Something has been proven to be astonishingly popular in the short term, it doesn’t have the same kind of track record as Rovio or PopCap.

The mobile game sits atop the iTunes “top paid,” “top free” and “top-grossing app” lists, an unusual accomplishment. On iTunes, it beats every single Zynga title — including Zynga Poker, which is frequently one of the highest-grossing apps.

As mentioned at the top of this post, Draw Something is also the most popular game on Facebook. However, what’s interesting is that the game isn’t available on the social network. Instead, it uses Facebook credentials as a way for players to register on their mobile phones.

From what we’ve heard, it has also been generating a lot of cash, based in large part on in-app purchases made by players. People familiar with the company told my colleague Peter Kafka that it has recently been netting around $250,000 a day from the game — after Apple takes its 30 percent cut.

In an interview, Zynga’s Chief Mobile Officer David Ko said OMGPOP’s acquisition represents more than a hit game for the company.

“It was about the team and how well we connected,” he said. “We found a great leader in Dan, and an amazing team around him. I couldn’t be happier in partnering with the team.”

Indeed, that’s Drawsome.

And, of course, there are apps for that.

Disney Publishing has just released the first in a series of new Chinese-language apps for the iPad, based on the international teaching method known as Diglot Weave. The first app, called Learn Chinese: Toy Story 3, includes multiple versions of Pixar’s “Toy Story 3,” broken up into five parts that offer layers of Chinese-language instruction with sequentially increasing degrees of difficulty.

That’s right: Woody and Buzz speak Mandarin!

The app offers background music and sound effects, audio and visual translations of individual words (using Pinyin, the standard system for transcribing Chinese into Latin script) alongside one-tap pronunciation guides, and voice-recording capabilities, so users can practice and compare their pronunciations with the audio narrator.

It’s available for iPad only, though Russell Hampton, president of Disney Publishing Worldwide, says Disney plans to expand eventually to other tablets, and will offer more apps and Disney-owned titles. This one costs $4.99 in the iTunes App Store.

There are currently more than 300 Chinese-language instructional apps for kids in the App Store; more than 200 results come up for Mandarin-language apps in the Android marketplace, though it appears that many of these are for adults and are also geared toward traditional language learning through repetition and exercises. The Diglot Weave method that Disney is going with involves teaching the language through a story that’s told partially in the learner’s native language and partially in the foreign tongue, gradually increasing the level of foreign language used throughout the narrative.

Disney has been pushing foreign-language instruction since 2009, when it launched a handful of schools across China. While Disney said at the time that its goal was authentic English-language learning, the push was also seen as a way for Disney to expand its brand reach across a nation known for tightly-controlled media.

The satellite trucks are parked, the signs have gone up and the pundits have placed their bets.

Everyone seems to think they know what Apple has in store at its event on Wednesday: Namely, a higher-resolution iPad and, perhaps, a revamped Apple TV.

But it’s Apple, so you can never be too sure that there won’t be a surprise.

Whatever the company has to say, AllThingsD will be on hand to give live coverage and analysis. Check back here, starting just ahead of the event at 10 am PT.

9:35 am: We are being let in now.

9:54 am: Okay, took us a bit to get set up, but we are online and with a backup system in place, as well.

9:57 am: Tim Cook has taken the stage and offered up his “good morning,” to applause.

He promises he has a great morning planned. “I want to get started by talking about the post-PC revolution. … It is happening all around us, and at an amazing pace.” And, of course, he says Apple is leading.

9:59 am: Such devices have to be way easier than any PC has ever been.

We have three blockbuster post-PC devices, Cook says: The iPod, the iPhone and the iPad.

“Any company would be thrilled to have just one of these devices,” he said. Apple has all three. It sold 172 million post-PC devices, accounting for 76 percent of the company’s revenue, he said.

“Apple has its feet firmly planted in the post-PC future,” he said.

10:02 am: Stores are important because these devices are new to many people, Cook said, showing pictures of the company’s newest store, in Amsterdam, which marked its 362nd outlet.

Some 110 million people visited a retail store last quarter, Cook said.

10:04 am: Cue video of Apple’s new Grand Central Terminal store.

10:04 am: Another key element of our post-PC success is iOS, Cook says, showing an iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, with 315 million such devices sold through last year, including 62 million last quarter alone.

Now he’s talking about Siri and playing some clips of Siri from other parts of the world, such as Australia and France.

“Siri is your best friend, your intelligent personal assistant who gets things done just by asking,” he said. “Our customers tell us that they love it.”

In France, by the way, Siri is a guy.

Today we are bringing Siri to Japan, Cook announces.

10:07 am: Siri in Japan is part of iOS 5.1, an update being made available today.

10:08 am: More stats:

There are now 585,000 apps in the app store, which Apple announced on Monday has crossed 25 billion downloads (free and paid).

10:09 am: Talk has shifted to iCloud, which will now support movies in addition to music and TV shows. You can re-download movies you have purchased, and movies and TV shows will now be available in 1080p.

New Apple TV will now support 1080p. “I’ve been using one of these; the (quality) is off the charts.”

10:11 am: Eddy Cue comes out to demo the new Apple TV.

10:12 am: Tweaked interface. Also easier to get to third-party content, Cue said. Photo Stream also shows up automatically on new Apple TV, and in 1080p.

10:15 am: New Apple TV remains $99 and goes on sale next week, though you can order now.

“That brings us to iPad,” Cook said. “We think the iPad is the poster child of the post-PC (era).”

10:16 am: The set-up for the new iPad is classic Apple — momentum stats, glowing reviews, etc.

10:17 am: Goal of the iPad was to be the best device for some of the tasks people do every day, such as Web browsing and checking email.

“This is a tall order,” he said.

But, he said, Apple’s research seems to bear this out. Many iPad owners who have a PC and smartphone said iPad was their favorite Web browsing and email device. The iPad also won out over e-readers for book reading, and against game consoles and handheld game players for gaming, Cook said.

10:19 am: Cook notes that more than 100 tablets came to market last year, but they don’t offer the experience of the iPad. He shows Twitter running on a Samsung tablet, saying it is more like a blown-up phone application experience, while on the iPad it is a totally different experience.

Same thing with Yelp, he said.

“This is a key reason why momentum on iPad continues to build and the competitive tablets aren’t gaining traction,” Cook said.

Everyone keeps wondering who will come out with a product better than iPad 2.

“Stop wondering,” Cook said. “We are.”

A screen of new iPad shows in background. “It is amazing,” he said. “We are redefining the category that Apple created.”

10:22 am: Marketing chief Phil Schiller on stage to show off the new iPad.

10:23 am: First new feature is the Retina display, as expected. “Until you see it, you can’t understand how amazing this is,” Schiller said.

10:23 am: The giant wall display behind him, Schiller said, actually has fewer pixels than the new iPad.

The new iPad has 31 million pixels, with resolution of 2048 by 1536 pixels. That’s one million more pixels than an HD TV, Schiller said, and 264 pixels per inch.

“That is enough to call it a Retina display,” Schiller said. The iPhone has it when held at 10 inches from the face. The same is true of the new iPad, when held at 15 inches away or even somewhat closer.

10:27 am: The new iPad is powered by an A5X chip, with quad-core graphics needed for new high-resolution display. Apple says the older A5 chip had twice as much graphics power as Nvidia’s Tegra 3, while new A5X has four times the graphics power — again, according to Apple. “This is the best mobile display that has ever shipped,” he said.

10:28 am: New iPad has 5 megapixel camera with technology brought over from the iPhone 4S.

Schiller shows off some of the photos taken with the new iPad.

10:29 am: For more on the new iPad, check out this post from colleague Peter Kafka.

10:30 am: The iPad now has 1080p video recording, Schiller said.

10:31 am: The new camera also has image stabilization, Schiller said, showing a demo of that.

10:31 am: The new iPad also has voice dictation, thanks to a microphone button on the iPad’s virtual keyboard.

It supports U.S., British, and Australian English, along with French, German and Japanese.

10:33 am: New iPad will also support next-generation 4G LTE networks, such as the ones from Verizon and AT&T.

It will also support two other faster network technologies — HSPA+ and dual-channel HSDPA. That’s important, because LTE is rolling out slower globally than it is here in the U.S.

10:35 am: And we’re getting a demo of the real-world difference such high-speed networks can make when doing things like playing streaming video.

10:36 am: Working with AT&T and Verizon in the U.S., and Rogers, Telus and Bell in Canada on LTE, with other high-speed network support elsewhere in the world.

10:36 am: In the U.S., there will be two versions of iPad with LTE — one for AT&T’s LTE network, and the other for Verizon’s LTE network, because the two use different bands. It also can act as a hotspot, and can roam onto 3G networks worldwide.

10:37 am: Schiller in sales mode, recapping key new features.

He notes that a lot of these things sound like they would eat up a lot of batteries.

The iPad 2 boasted 10 hours for regular use and nine hours for 3G data use. And the new iPad has the same battery life.

10:39 am: It’s 9.4 millimeters thick and 1.4 pounds.

The new iPad will start, as the iPad 2 did, at $499 for 16 gigabytes, with $100 more for 32GB, and $200 more for 64GB. 4G wireless models cost an extra $130.

This is all the same as with iPad 2.

New iPad available March 16, with preorders starting today.

10:41 am: Schiller is talking about how software looks on the new display. Some stuff happens automatically, such as text size. But if developers do some work on their own, they can more fully take advantage of the new chip and display.

10:42 am: Schiller said they asked a few companies to try out the technology for a week and see what they could do. First demo is from Namco, a game designer known for Pac-Man and other titles.

They show a glimpse of a new flight-simulation game. The new iPad helps make the game more immersive, the company said, making it easier to lose yourself in the game with things like heat haze coming off of the plane’s engine.

Nice fly-by of the Golden Gate Bridge, too.

Game is Sky Gamblers: Air Supremacy, Namco said, which comes out later this month.

10:45 am: Next app demo is from Autocad creator Autodesk.

The company already has a line of programs, including SketchBook, for iOS.

Program being demoed is a new title, SketchBook Ink, a drawing app for line art.

10:47 am: Meanwhile, here are some of the things we are waiting to hear about: What will the data plan pricing be for new iPads? Will Sprint have an iPad to sell?

SketchBook Ink will be available in April, Autodesk said.

10:49 am: Third and final app demo from Epic Games, with president Mike Capps onstage.

It’s the latest version of the Infinity Blade saga: Dungeons.

The gamers in the crowd seem happy.

10:54 am: Apple’s productivity software, iWork, is being updated for the new iPad. So is iLife, with GarageBand players now able to jam with one another.

10:56 am: The iWork apps are available today in the App Store, for $9.99 apiece for new buyers. GarageBand remains $4.99 for new buyers, and both are free updates for those who have already bought them.

10:57 am: The iMovie app for iPad is also getting an update, including some new features, such as creating a faux movie trailer (or a real one, I suppose).

11:00 am: Apple is also bringing the third iLife app, iPhoto, to iPad. The iPhoto app joins the camera and photo library apps, Schiller said, for those who want to do more with their photos.

Among features are multitouch editing, professional quality effects, brushes, etc. Photos can be beamed among iOS devices. New way to share photos with friends — photo journals using iCloud.

11:03 am: Colleague Peter Kafka notes that while iTunes will now support re-downloading purchased movies, not all studios are behind the feature, so it will work with some flicks, but not others.

11:06 am: Apple demoing how multitouch can make photo editing more intuitive, such as changing the shadow or saturation in one part of a photo.

11:08 am: There are finger-powered brushes for doing all kinds of things, such as lightening a dark face in an otherwise well-exposed photo.

All the editing tools are nondestructive, meaning you can go back to the original.

There are a bunch of different effects, too, from different monochrome options to artsy and vintage ones.

Photo Journal creates a layout of photos, with those favorited or with a caption made larger. It looks a bit like how Facebook’s Timeline handles photos from an album.

You can throw in a map of the location, a date based on when photo was taken, even a weather icon that will use historical weather data to show what the temperature was like.

The resulting “journal” can then be stored on iCloud and shared as a Web link.

The new iPhoto works on both iPhone and iPad.

It will be $4.99 on App Store, starting today, Schiller said.

“We’ve now brought all of iLife to the iPad,” Schiller said. “Don’t let anyone ever tell you you can’t create on an iPad.”

11:14 am: And, cue video for new iPad.

11:14 am: So far, it’s just being called “the new iPad,” not iPad 3, iPad HD, or other names thrown about in recent days.

11:17 am: My recap:

Here’s what they’ve announced

New iPad with higher-res display, A5X processor, LTE support, improved 5 megapixel camera and 1080p recording. Same models and prices as iPad 2 was priced at. Separate LTE versions for AT&T and Verizon.

Apple TV with support for 1080p at $99.

And iPhoto for iOS, $4.99, starting today. Other iLife and iWork apps updated.

Apple also keeping iPad 2 in the lineup, starting at $399 for 16GB model, a $100 price chop.

11:21 am: Consensus seems to have nailed things pretty well, so far.

Cook now showing Apple’s TV ad for new iPad.

11:22 am: Cook, as Jobs did before him, wraps up by thanking Apple staff.

Again repeats his phrasing that leading Apple is the “privilege of a lifetime.”

Cook ends with a tantalizing tease.

“Across the year, you are going to see a lot more of this kind of innovation. We are just getting started,” he said.

11:23 am: And he exits, stage right.

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App-o-Day, a new mobile app launching today, is branding itself as the “Groupon of apps” and serving up an app deal of the day. For example, an app that might normally be 99 cents might be free for a limited time; another app might be featured because there’s a good deal offered within the app.

The free iOS App-o-Day app was created by Iddiction, a new start-up from mobile games veteran Andrej Nabergoj. He employs a team of 15 people who go out and speak with developers, then handpick and test the apps that are promoted in App-o-Day.

But App-o-Day isn’t just about helping users find a good app deal. It’s also about helping them find mobile apps in general, as apps for searching apps become increasingly valuable.

The most recent evidence of this trend is Apple’s acquisition of app search engine Chomp — which helped users find apps in both iTunes and the Google Android marketplace — as its App Store numbers balloon to over 500,000 apps and nearly 25 billion downloads.

AppTap, an app recommendation and advertising network that works across mobile platforms and Web sites, just raised $4 million in Series A funding to continue to build its business. AppTap has said it thinks app discovery isn’t — and shouldn’t be — limited to app stores, and that more context can aid in search discovery.

And Argentina-based Kinetik recently took its iOS-based app discovery service to the Web, TheNextWeb reports; the service will now allow app users to “share apps, post comments and discover your friends’ recommendations,” all part of an effort to enhance the app-search process.

Despite the fact that many apps are free or very inexpensive, the app economy continues to grow, with research firm iSuppli projecting that total download revenue from mobile apps and games will hit $5.6 billion in 2012, $6.9 billion in 2013, and $8.3 billion in 2014. Increasing smartphone adoption, in addition to the growing number of apps available in app stores, is likely contributing to this.

With everyone getting app-happy, it’s easy to see why good app-discovery apps are becoming a trend (and why mobile developers like the idea, as well, since their apps can easily get lost amid hundreds of thousands of apps).

It’s one thing if consumers can search for a specific app based on a friend’s recommendation — as more than half of them do, according to a report put out last year by Latitude and MTV Networks. It’s easy enough to search for, say, Instagram, and come up with the desired app.

But mobile app searches often don’t perform as well when a smartphone owner is looking for a specific function, such as an app that makes photos look vintage-y and hip, which can result in frustrated mobile consumers and developers — and advertisers. We’ll likely see more developers try to solve the search problem, as there are even more apps to search for.

Until this month, when it released Draw Something.

The game is essentially a mobile version of Pictionary and, for whatever reason, it’s a huge hit. Maybe it touches on some of the same things that Words With Friends mines, except it doesn’t require spelling.

In any case, it’s currently atop both the free and paid charts at the iTunes App store. And because it’s the kind of game that gets better as more people play it, it’s probably going to stay there for a while.

CEO Dan Porter says Draw Something, which didn’t exist a month ago, is now averaging two million active users a day. So how does a start-up ride that kind of rocket growth? Bigger question: Now what?

I asked Porter to jot down some thoughts about what he’s learned over the last few weeks, and what he thinks happens next. This is an edited version of his email replies:

All Hands On Deck
Two weeks ago there were five people working on the game. Now there are 40 people. We redeployed resources from a ton of other projects, and with the growth even those people are maxed out. If we were a 10-person company now instead of a 40-person company we would be dead. It causes disruptions when people are quickly moved from one thing to another, but everyone likes being associated with a winner.

Self-Reliance
We started out heavily reliant on Facebook and Amazon S3. We started making too many calls to S3, and almost took down one of their data centers. They throttled us and it took us a while to figure out what was going on; for a while our numbers cratered as users could not connect.

We had to move completely off of Amazon and host everything ourselves. As soon as we did that, our growth exploded again. Going from the 25th to the 1st most popular app was as much about performance as anything.

We also use Facebook to log people in. When Facebook is slow our app is slow, except that users don’t blame Facebook. They blame us.

A Tale of Two App Stores
The hardest thing about navigating the iTunes App Store is that there is a process for submission and approval. I understand why — it’s how Apple keeps things nice. But when you find a problem in the game, you fix it in a day or two but then have to wait a week to get approved. It is stressful. And very different than operating on the Web, where you can push live multiple times a day.

Android accounts for about 15 percent of our installs. The pro is we can push changes to the game live immediately. The challenge is that with their algorithm and so many different app stores, we are low in the charts. It’s hard to believe the game could be blowing up as big as it is and be somewhat invisible on Android, but that’s how it is.

Meanwhile, no single Android device makes up more than 3 percent of the downloads. In other words, we are on more than 50 devices, and not one of them is larger than 3 percent. That is really difficult to support.

Hot Ticket
With the success of the app, investors, celebrities and brands have all come out of the woodwork looking to get involved. The first inclination is to say yes to everyone, especially when you haven’t had that type of attention. But you have to protect the brand and make very strategic choices.

Attack of the Clones
You always feel like as soon as you are successful other folks are going to come after you. Cloning is inherent in the games business. So you need to think long and hard about how to maintain your advantage against well-funded, well-run companies.

Draw Something is about building the network for the game. When all your friends are in the game, as Zynga has proved with Words With Friends, then the network is the value of the game. Now we have more than two million players using the game daily. That’s a powerful network. Great offense, and great defense too.

Thanks, Norway! You Too, Instagram.
We’re huge in Sweden and Norway. We’ve been #1 there from day one and I have no idea why. And the activity on Instagram, as people share their drawings, has been tremendous. Spreading the game on Instagram would never have been on my radar in a million years.

But one of PopCap’s original developers, Roy Liu, believes he has come up with an alternative. Gimmie, based in San Francisco, has created an incentives platform for mobile app developers.

It launches today with 10 mobile app developers in its beta program.

It works like this: In return for using the app, a player can earn points which can be redeemed for real-world products. It’s sort of like a traditional arcade, where players earn tickets that can be redeemed for candy and toys, but instead of gumballs and baseball cards, Gimmie primarily doles out game downloads and other mobile content.

Gimmie is also announcing today that it has raised $200,000 in funding from Tandem, an incubator in Silicon Valley.

Liu, who was one of the lead developers on Plants vs. Zombies for PopCap before it was purchased by Electronic Arts, co-founded the company with CEO David Ng.

The idea is not so different from other in-game incentive programs, which ask users to fill out a survey or download a different game in exchange for free virtual goods or other benefits.

Those types of programs, served by companies like TapJoy and others, have been immensely successful — although more recently, they have been received poorly by Apple and others because they can affect the most popular games list.

Gimmie believes what it is doing is different because it rewards users with items outside of the app for performing actions inside it.

Other companies are also trying to come up with alternative advertising platforms for mobile games. In games, banner ads are often completely ineffective because people are focused on playing the game, and don’t take the time to read the ad or leave the page to investigate it further.

A Chicago-based start-up called Tap.me is creating an ad network for virtual goods, which can gain advertisers on a broad scale for generic items, such as being able to jump higher or more energy across many games.