Twitter tried to buy Instagram before Facebook did

 Last week, Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion, neutralizing an incoming threat for Facebook and making nine Instagram employees instantly rich. Apparently, Facebook didn't have any competition for this acquisition. Or did they? Not if a New York Times report claiming that Twitter tried to acquire Instagram in the months before Facebook did is true.

According to the report, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tried to acquire Instagram in the months before Facebook tied up the deal, but they only managed to raise the price that Facebook paid to $1 billion. It's not hard to tell that Dorsey isn't happy about this; all his spokespeople declined to comment, and he no longer uses Instagram to upload photos to Twitter.

The report also includes information about how Instagram will change after its acquisition by Facebook. The app isn't going away, but it'll be working with Facebook to build the service. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, said that they'll try to "build on Instagram's strengths, not absorb its features." You'll still be able to post pictures onto other social networking sites, And yes, that list will include Twitter.

Microsoft Creates Touchscreen With 100x Less Lag

Touchscreen technology is becoming more and more popular. Not only is it showing up in consumer technology, it shows itself at ATMs, airplane entertainment systems, and much more. But there's one major problem with the trending tech; it lags. Most touchscreen panels experience a 100 ms delay between when you touch the screen and when it registers your touch. And that's all quite fine for most actions you'll make on a touchscreen device like tapping or swiping slowly. But the lag is really noticeable when your swipes speed up. For example, when you're quickly doodling in a painting app, you'll notice that your finger is often ahead of the line you're making.

Well, the engineers over at Microsoft Research may have found the solution. Microsoft has just created a touchscreen panel that lags bu only 1 ms. This delay is unnoticeable, even when you're drawing really fast. But don't get too worked up; we don't know if the screen will be in a future piece of technology, and the video just shows a box on the screen following a quickly-moving finger. Nevertheless, this discovery does give us hope for overcoming the touchscreen dilemma.

iTether is Back With HTML5 Version

Amidst a chaotic scene on the web (AT&T ranting, Tether's site going down with all the traffic, tweets and posts everywhere), Tether's $15 iTether app, which let you tether devices to your iPhone without a monthly charge, was somehow allowed on the app store (even though Apple actually came to the CEO's house to test out the app, and said they would let it in). It reached the Top 10 app downloads list in a matter of hours, but 20 hours after they accepted the app, Apple removed the app from the store, likely after complaints from AT&T and Verizon.

 "It was clear from our initial application iTether, there was enormous demand within the iPhone ecosystem," says Tim Burke, CEO of Tether. "It was unfortunate that Apple decided to remove our application, only 20 hours after we launched. However, this caused us to innovate. Our underlying patent-pending technology behind Tether for iPhone is unlike anything on the market."

Tether's new version for the iPhone is purely based on HTML5 and creates a completely wireless connection over AdHoc. This circumvents the need of buying the application directly from Apple's App Store and allows any iPhone or iPad with a data connection to allow tethering.
Well, Tether now has a new solution; an entirely HTML5 based tethering system. Their new system, which is available from Tether's site for only $30 per year, uses HTML5 in a completely wireless system (thanks to AdHoc), where you don't need to download anything from the app store to tether for much cheaper. Yes, there is a yearly charge this time, but it's much better than AT&T's $20/mo. tethering plans.

Apple Hits 25 Billion App Downloads. And 500 Apps Downloaded Every Second (Update: The Winner is Announced!)

25 billion     Total app downloads
15 billion     Apple's current rate of app downloads per year
550,000       Apps on the App Store
45,000         avg. downloads per app
10,000         credit, in dollars, on the iTunes gift card the winner of Apple's countdown promotion got
476              apps downloaded every second from the App Store
9                  days longer it would've taken to hit 25 billion if Angry Birds was never introduced
4                  years since the introduction of the App Store
3.6               avg. app downloads per person on the Earth

True, a lot of things in the world of technology are quite shocking, but it's hard to find numbers like this. I mean, who would guess that almost 500 apps are being downloaded every time the second hand on their clock moves? As ridiculous as these numbers may sound, Apple isn't stopping any time soon.

The App Store just reached 25 billion downloads, and somebody (their name has yet to be revealed) has won a $10,000 iTunes gift card as a reward for downloading the 25 billionth app. If you saw the counter during the promotion, you have a sense of how successful Apple is (The thousands digit counter was turning every 2 seconds. Literally.).

Update: The winner of the promotion was an unnamed person in China, who downloaded "Where's My Water" as the 25 billionth app. Congratulations!

Apple Allows Free Tethering App iTether, Then Pulls it Hours Later

Believe it or not, Apple briefly allowed iTether, an app that allowed you to tether other devices to your iPhone, in the App Store before pulling it. In the few hours that the $14.99 app was available, it almost instantly became the top grossing app in the entire store. The app was so popular that all the traffic made the Tether website go down, making it impossible to run the iTether app because the app connects to the website on every run. People who got the app before it was pulled will still be able to use the app.

Tether is an application that allows your Mac and PC to take advantage of your smartphone's data plan, providing you access to the Internet on your laptop anywhere there is cellular coverage from your smartphone.


Tether is easy to install, easy to use, works practically anywhere, and is very cost-effective.


To download the PC software visit:
http://tether.com/i/Tether-iPhone.exe


To download the Mac software visit:

http://tether.com/i/Tether-iPhone.dmg

 It is certainly possible that Apple pulled this app when carriers of the iPhone objected to their approval of this app. This seems likely because Apple asked the developers a lot of questions and asked for a demo, so they certainly knew what the app they were accepting was capable of doing. However, carriers have been known to hate free tethering apps. A few months ago, AT&T started to send out text messages to users who had been illegally performing free tethering on their iPhone by jailbreaking it and using apps like MyWi that can only be downloaded on jailbroken phones.

This scene seems almost identical to 2008, when Apple approved a similar app called Netshare that allowed you to tether devices to your iPhone, but very quickly pulled it. In a few years, Apple would allow tethering on the iPhone, but only with additional plans starting at $20/month.

More Fuel Added to the Kindle Fire

Next week, we'll get to see if the $200 Kindle Fire really will be a match for Apple's iPad. A price $300 lower already gives it a pretty good advantage, but now Amazon has announced that they've got even more coming.

First, they announced that "several thousand" apps will be available on the Kindle Fire, including Facebook and even Hulu. That doesn't sound like it have as many apps as the iPad (over 100,000), but it's quite a start anyway

Second, they said that over 400 magazines will be coming to the Kindle Fire; all in full color! Some of the magazines include The New Yorker, Reader's Digest, and Us Weekly.

Third, they announced that interactive books will soon be coming to the Kindle Fire. These interactive books will have built in audio and even video. That sure puts paper to shame.

Data for iPhone, iPad, and Mac App Stores; Average Mac app is 7x as much as average iPhone app, 3x as much as average iPad app!

Now that there are apps for three different devices- iPhone and iPod Touch, iPad, and Mac- we can compare the prices of these apps against each other. This concludes that Mac apps are very pricey compared to iPhone and iPad apps; in fact, they are cost 7x as much as iPhone apps and 3x as much as iPad apps. Studies also show that 11% of Mac apps are free, compared to 33% of iPhone apps.

The Mac App Store is also not as popular as other app stores. 2 months since launch, it has 2,225 apps. 2 months after the launch of the iPad, there were 8,099 apps avaliable. Yet more studies have calculated the average price of apps for all three devices. These are $1.57 for iPhone, $4.19 for iPad, and $11.21 for Mac.

I have to say, however, that these prices will probably drop. Designers making the first apps to appear on the Mac App Store probably thought that they could bump up the price a little, as they didn't have as much competition. Now that the number of apps should soon hit 4,000, designers will have to reduce the price of their apps. However, Mac software is far more complicated than iPhone software, so expect average prices to stay above $8.

Amazon's Appstore App Shall Let You Purchase Apps Without a Device!

Apparently Appstore for Android (by Amazon) will let you buy apps even if the device you want to run them isn't on hand yet! Unfortunatley, we do not know when this app will launch. We can guess however, that Google could find itself making less money from the Android Market.

The Mac App Store has Opened!

Yes, you saw that correctly; the Mac App Store is now open! Apple told us it would open in summer 2011 along with Mac OS X Lion, but they decided to open it now! Though it only opened days ago, it already contains more than a thousand apps like Compartments (a home inventory app), Flight Control HD, webpage-designing apps, image editing apps, workout partner apps, drawing apps, recipe apps, and more! And yes, Angry Birds is on there also. This really is something Microsoft will have to compete with. My guess is that the next version of Windows could have an app store.