App downloads are expected to exceed 4.5 billion world-wide in 2010, up from an estimated 2.5 billion last year, according to recent data from Gartner Inc. (IT). For TheyMakeApps, an online app-developer directory, this surge could mean more business. The site, which was launched in December and won the business category award at this month’s South by Southwest interactive festival, already lists an estimated 900 app developers.

At TheyMakeApps, developers can create their listings and upload a few samples of their apps for free after creating a profile on the site. They also can choose to upgrade their profile for $89 a month. For this price, they get more exposure on the site and can display more information about their apps than those who go with the free option.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The newest plaintiffs were officially added Tuesday in an amended complaint filed by two law firms, the Weston Firm of San Diego and Beck & Lee Business Trial Lawyers of Miami. The new plaintiffs include a Chicago bakery, a Washington, D.C., restaurant and a California furniture store, among others.

The original plaintiff in the putative class action suit, a veterinary hospital in Long Beach, Calif., said it had asked Yelp to remove a negative consumer review that violated Yelp’s site guidelines. According to the complaint, San Francisco-based Yelp initially removed the review but it reappeared and Yelp later declined to remove it and other negative reviews. The suit alleges that Yelp’s sales representatives repeatedly contacted the hospital offering to hide any negative reviews if it bought advertising from Yelp.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The nomination was proposed by the Italian version of technology magazine Wired and has so far been endorsed by 11 people including 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi and Nicholas Negroponte, founder of One Laptop Per Child.

Backers of the Internet’s candidacy for the prize cite its achievements in bridging differences and promoting dialogue among different nations. On the promotional site for the Internet’s campaign, called Internet for Peace, supporters contend that the Internet “is much more than a network of computers; it is an endless Web of people.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Fans trying to locate the original “RickRoll” video on YouTube on Wednesday were greeted with this message: “This video has been removed due to terms of use violation.”

Twitterers were outraged by the removal of the video. “OMG! This is like a declaration of war!” tweeted Mike Cane.

Karl Puzon, another Twitterer, called the removal “the end of an era,” and a person with the Twitter handle “deignacio” lamented that “a little bit of the Internet died today.”

Perhaps the furor on Twitter was best summed up by Robin Malau, who wrote that people behind the decision to pull the plug on the video should be “Rickrolled” themselves: “Stupid label executives should be rickrolled.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The furor was kicked off by comments from Anamitra Banerji, the head of product management and monetization at Twitter, who told MediaPost.com that “We are working on an ad platform, but it’s only in the test phase.” He declined to give an exact date on when the micro-blogging site would launch an ad platform, according to MediaPost.com.

Twitter didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Mediapost.com, quoting Seth Goldstein, a panelist and the CEO of Socialmedia.com, said that Twitter plans to launch its ad platform in about a month. In an email sent to Digits, Mr. Goldestein said that he doesn’t know when, and if, Twitter will launch any ad platform.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The average U.S. visitor spent seven hours, one minute and 41 seconds on Facebook in January, compared with just over two hours each on Google and Yahoo, 25 minutes on Amazon and 16 minutes on Wikipedia.

While Google and Yahoo still have a bigger audience than Facebook, the social-networking site outpaces the competition in how much time its users spend on its pages. Facebook was also the only site listed in Nielsen’s Top 10 to see an increase in time-per-month, growing 9.7 percent from December.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The “Cyber ShockWave,” hosted by the Bipartisan Policy Center, began at 10 a.m. ET at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington, and is expected to last until 10 p.m. The group, whose advisory board includes Bob Dole and Tom Daschle, said participants will react to the threat in real time, as intelligence and news reports drive the simulation.

Participants are tasked with advising the president and crafting a response to the attack without a prior knowledge of the scenario, highlighting the difficulty of split-second decisions in response to an unfolding and often unseen threat.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Data use will surge as cellphone makers produce more Web-enabled handsets. Cisco (CSCO) says there could be more than five billion such devices connected to mobile networks in four years.

The company expects smart phones and Internet-enabled laptops to drive 90 percent of mobile traffic within five years, by which time 400 million consumers will access the Internet through a mobile connection only.

India will see the highest increase in smart-phone penetration, which will triple over the same period, and the sharpest uptick in smart-phone users, which is expected to quintuple.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Iran-related keywords, including “iranelection” and “22bahman” (a reference to today’s date in the Persian calendar) were popular on the microblogging service Thursday, as users discussed Iranians’ rights to free speech and the rallies outside Iran’s notorious Evin prison.

“This is what Iran’s police have become, thugs,” Michael P. Whaley tweeted, linking to a YouTube video that purports to show authorities beating a protester. Others, such as Raymond Morrison, shared photos from Tehran in their posts.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

“Honestly, I didn’t think Buzz was *that* bad,” Alistair Coleman said in an update, a quip echoed in dozens of tweets linked to reports of the ban. “Iran hates Google Buzz so much it shuts down Gmail,” tweeted Aaron Spencer, who added the hashtag “#halfkidding.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

New York-based iLuv Creative Technology unveiled on Thursday a new line of iPad products, including hard and soft carrying cases and screen protectors. It’s also selling water-resistant sleeves that have two front cover pockets for accessories and a secure lip to keep the iPad protected while on the move. The products, which will be available next month, each cost $20 to $40.

Also Thursday, Belkin introduced three 10-inch sleeves designed with reinforced panels to protect the iPad’s touch screen from scratches. Its products will be available in the spring, with prices comparable to iLuv’s cases.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Among its findings: Younger consumers find the Kindle “old” compared to their smart phones, while older consumers miss the traditional newspaper fixtures that they get in the print edition.

During the six-month study, conducted by the university’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, participants read the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on the Amazon (AMZN) reader and provided feedback.

For younger adults, the Kindle fell short because it lacked a touch screen and multiple applications–from music to surfing the Internet–available in many smart phones.

Older adults were overall more receptive to the concept of an e-reader, but missed the crossword puzzles and comics available in traditional papers.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Bloggers quickly began speculating as to which device is better, with many pro-Kindle reviewers calling the reader less distracting, while the Apple camp cites the iPad’s multi-purpose nature as a selling point.

An iPad “does so much more–games, photos, videos, email,” wrote Fred Vogelstein in Wired. “I might eventually ditch my laptop for it too.”

GigaOm also sees the Kindle as a defunct device. “The Amazon Kindle is dead thanks to the rich media capabilities of the iPad as well as the full software-based keyboard,” Stacey Higginbotham wrote.

But are those bells and whistles distracting to those who just want to curl up with an e-book? Brad Stone wrote on Bits that the Kindle “will continue to be the best device for lovers of long-form reading, period…when you read a book, you just don’t want to have email, Twitter and the ESPN Web site beckoning from the browser.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The pope’s message proclaimed that “priests can rightly be expected to be present in the world of digital communications as faithful witnesses to the Gospel” through means such as “images, videos, animated features, blogs [and] Web sites.” A brief clip of the speech that the pope gave can be viewed through the Vatican channel on YouTube.

This pope’s message this year stood in sharp contrast with a speech he gave late last year when he accused the mass media of poisoning human souls and making us callous to violence.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

This comes after the Internet-calling service settled a class action lawsuit representing customers who had expired credit accounts.

The plaintiffs accused Skype of improperly seizing money on their accounts after 180 days of inactivity. They claimed that seizing money on inactive accounts flouts various state laws–including gift certificate consumer protection. And according to the consumer protection law, there is no expiration on gift cards.

Skype denied any wrongdoing, and contended that plaintiffs’ claims were meritless. However, the company agreed to a settlement instead of litigation. The company agreed to discontinue its Skype Credit expiration policy and implement a Reactivation Policy by which Skype Credit will no longer expire after 180 days of inactivity, but rather be deemed “inactive” and subject to reactivation.

In general, computer-to-computer Skype calls to anywhere around the world is free of charge, but the settlement refers to a service called SkypeOut that allows customers to make phone calls to people on cellphones or landlines. SkypeOut calls cost a penny or two a minute and users can add credit to their SkypeOut accounts.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

New languages have been added to the traditional lists and Arabic, in particular, has been in demand recently. I spent the past few weeks tinkering with four free online services, translating various texts from English to Arabic and vice versa to test their speed and accuracy. I tested Google’s Language Tools and services from Applied Language Solutions, WorldLingo Translations and Systran.

Customers who have been waiting for such services to be perfected will find improvements are slow in coming. Overall, I found the Arabic-English translations rife with syntactic and semantic errors — from the merely too-literal to the laughably bad.

For the purposes of my test, I selected different texts: conversation, news stories, and legal and scientific documents. First, I picked an Associated Press story that started with the sentence: “A wintry storm caked the center of the nation with a thick layer of ice Monday…”

I got a variety of imprecise translations into Arabic (which I’m interpreting below).

Applied Language and WorldLingo offered identical translations, which were slightly better than the other two: “A storm covered the center’s storm from the nation with a thick layer snow Monday.”

Systran: “A stormy storm covered the center for the mother with a thick layer snow Monday.”

Language Tools: “The storm grilled bloc in the middle of the nation with a thick layer of snow Monday.”

The translations would have been nearly impossible to understand were I not fluent in both languages. It’s worse in Arabic than it seems above. Arabic has masculine and feminine nouns, verbs and adjectives that have to agree in a sentence; otherwise, the sentence makes a native speaker wince.

Next, I processed some longer news stories. Only Language Tools didn’t set text limits. WorldLingo and Applied Language each had a 150-word limit. Systran didn’t specify a limit, but it rendered only a short part of the text.

Language Tools came out ahead this time. It was the only one to translate the word “Taliban” from Arabic to English contextually correct, as a movement. The other services translated it literally from the Arabic as “two students.”

The services were better at translating everyday phrases, but even these sometimes came out missing a word, or were scrambled.

In this category, I again found translations by Google’s Language Tools closest to the original texts. Still, there is much room for improvement. Google, for example, translated from Arabic to English the simple question, “Do you speak English?” as “Do they speak English?”

Other services got the pronoun right but botched other parts of the sentence. With the exception of Google, all three services, oddly, attempted to write the Arabic word for “English” in the Roman alphabet (aalaanklyzyh) in the middle of an Arabic sentence.

All the services did a terrible job with metaphors and other figurative uses of the language, whether Arabic or English.

The weakest performance by all the services was the translation of legal and scientific texts. Only Language Tools correctly translated the word “noncompliance” in a legal text, for example. Instead of using the proper word in Arabic, the other services transliterated it phonetically into a meaningless word.

All four services have an interface that is easy to use, with a pull-down menu listing several languages. Each has two text boxes, one for the original language and the other for the desired translation. They also translate entire Web sites, but the translation again tended to be awkwardly verbatim.

Google also has a feature that lets you translate search results free. (It also offers users an option to send in a better translation.) The others require you to become a paid subscriber. English and Arabic results appeared side-by-side.

I also liked WorldLingo and Applied Language’s email-translation feature. After clicking the email button, a window with two text boxes pops up. You enter your name and email address, and the recipient’s name and address. When you send the message with WorldLingo, both recipient and sender see the message in both languages. Neither Google nor Systran has this feature.

Systran has a convenient swap button that lets users easily flip the source and target languages. This saves time when going back-and-forth between two languages. The other services have you use pull-down menus. Systran’s interface also allows prompt translation of a text as soon as it’s pasted in a text box, without the need to click a “translate” button.

Free online translation tools help travelers or those curious about languages, but I found them unreliable for important documents. Use with caution.

Write to Sarmad Ali at sarmad.ali@wsj.com Walt Mossberg is on vacation.

The latest versions of the devices are getting smaller in size, compared with the old ones, and have more features. You can use them to scan photos, ID cards and checks, among other things — just so the item is no more than slightly bigger than card size.

I have been testing two products: the OptiCard 821 from Plustek Technology, of Cerritos, Calif., and the IRISCard Pro 4, from Belgium-based Image Recognition Integrated Systems, or I.R.I.S.

Plustek’s OptiCard 821

I found that both scanners have a quick and easy way to organize business-card information, but their software isn’t as easy to work with when manipulating the resulting digital images. Also, the machines work best at their originally intended task, and so are better at scanning business cards than at scanning photos, for example.

The software in both devices, overall, created clear images of the names and numbers from most of the typical cards; that is, those cards written with dark ink against a light background. The scanners did a poor job when they had to read cards that were printed on dark-colored stock.

Installing the software was easy enough, and took only a few minutes. After inserting the software CD into your computer, small pop-up windows open to guide you through the process. When the installation is finished, you connect the scanner to your computer’s USB port with the cord provided.

To begin scanning, you just feed the cards into a front slot on the devices and push the scan button. The scanners pull the cards across the scanning head and spit them out the back, saving the cards in the process.

The first time you use the scanners you will be asked to calibrate them to set the parameters for color, shadows and light. It’s an easy task: You just insert a special card that comes with the packages.

The scanners’ software can recognize and categorize cards written in several languages, including Spanish, French, German, Italian, Arabic and Chinese. Scanning a business card using either machine didn’t take more than five seconds; photo-scanning took much longer.

Both machines have two buttons on the top for scanning and for further customizing the scan. The scan buttom has a few standard configurations for capturing the image from the card and transforming it into a PDF file.

The custom button begins with the same process, but then allows you to manipulate the results. When I inserted a card into one of the scanners and pressed the custom button, a window pop-up opened for me to choose details such as language, color, dimensions, the specific file to which I wanted to send the image and the storage format.

You can edit the cards as you store them and make any fixes you might have from botched scans. The images are saved in the folder you chose when you configured your scanning options. You can opt to arrange them just alphabetically, too.

The scanners come with software that can help make the scanning and organizing process more efficient, but could also be a bit confusing for some users because of all the choices.

To test the new OptiCard, which costs $150, I processed 20 random business cards with white backgrounds. I found that scanning was swift; 13 white-background cards came out perfectly or with such minor glitches that they didn’t require any editing. An additional four needed some editing but fixing them didn’t take more than a few minutes. Three cards needed major retyping, replacing missing numbers and redoing a name that got scrambled into a phone number.

I also tried scanning two dark-background cards but to no avail. One didn’t come out at all and the other had black splotches.

I found the $200 IRISCard Pro 4 slightly more accurate in scanning textual information from the same 20 cards. Only two needed minor editing — replacing a hyphen with a comma, for example — and just one card required major retyping, replacing skipped information. The scanner, however, was no better at the dark cards.

I also scanned a couple photos in both devices, but the copies were too blurry to save.

Both scanners are smaller than many TV remote controls. The OptiCard is 1.5 inches high, 6.9 inches wide and 2.4 inches deep. The IRISCard Pro 4 is 1.3 by 6.2 inches and is two inches deep. I was able to take them to work in one of my jacket pockets. I could imagine bringing the device along for a days-long seminar to keep up with card-collecting. Both are compatible with Windows PCs and Macs.

While the interface between the scanners and the user’s contact data program could offer more features to make organizing easier, these tools are worth a try. At least you can get those cards off your desk before the pile topples.

• Email me at sarmad.ali@wsj.com. Walt Mossberg is on vacation.