Angry Birds, YouTube among top apps of 2012

TORONTO (Reuters) - Angry Birds, Instagram and Facebook continued to be among the most downloaded apps of the year but rising stars also earned coveted spots on smartphones and tablets.

This year consumers spent on average two hours each day using mobile applications, an increase of 35 percent over last year, according to analytics firm Flurry. The number is expected to continue growing in 2013.

"2012 was a transformative tipping point in the way consumers use apps," said Craig Palli, a vice president at mobile marketing company Fiksu, adding that the biggest shift is in consumers' eagerness to turn to apps for a broad range of day-to-day tasks.
Categories such as social networking, media and entertainment, photo editing, and games, continued to captivate consumer interest, with YouTube and Angry Birds being the top free and paid apps respectively at Apple's App Store.

Meanwhile, several apps released this year quickly joined the ranks of the top downloaded and revenue grossing apps of the year.

The game Draw Something for iPhone and Android quickly gained widespread popularity when it was released in February, and despite dropping off, is still the second most downloaded paid app of the year Android and Apple devices.

"It had a big run and other multi-player puzzle-oriented games like newcomers LetterPress and ScrambleWithFriends proved popular, too," Palli said. "But in many respects these titles were inspired by the more revolutionary Words With Friends."
Songza, a music-discovery app for iPhone, Android and Kindle Fire, saw significant growth in both the United States and Canada, where it is now one of the top free apps on the App Store.

Paper, a sketchbook app for the iPad, is estimated to be one of the top grossing apps released this year according to Distimo, an app analytics company. It was named by Apple as the iPad app of the year.

But the real revolution, according to Palli, is among consumers who are eager to turn to apps for their day-to-day tasks, such as finding a taxi or hotel, following current events or increasingly, making payments.

"It is really consumers who are turning to apps first and traditional methods second," said Palli.

Uber and Hailo, which allow users to book limos and taxis, and AirBnB and HotelTonight, for finding accommodations, began to move mainstream in 2012, Palli said.

Payment apps such as Square, and Apple's introduction of the Passbook has further positioned the smartphone as a digital wallet.

This year, during major events such as the Olympics, Hurricane Sandy and the U.S. presidential election, the top apps on the App Store reflected those events, said Palli, showing the demand for keeping up with current events through apps.

Your Snapchats aren’t safe: How to secretly save videos from Snapchat or Facebook’s ‘Poke’

Snapchat

Argue though its executives might, Snapchat is good for two things: sending photos and videos of yourself making stupid faces, and sending photos and videos of yourself naked. The latter, of course, is the more compelling function since that is exactly what the app was designed for. When users send pictures or videos, the recipient can only view them for a set amount of time before they “self-destruct.” Yes, a recipient can take a screenshot but the sender is automatically alerted when that occurs — then, as the saying goes, fool me once… As it turns out, however, Snapchat users (and users of “Poke,” Facebook’s (FB) Snapchat ripoff) can easily save photos and full-length videos received through the service without the sender ever knowing.

[More from BGR: Five tech resolutions for 2013]

As recently relayed by BuzzFeed’s Katie Notopoulos, saving photos and videos from Snapchat or Poke is as easy as connecting a phone to a computer and opening a file browser. The file browser is free and the “trick” requires no jailbreak or any other kind of hack.

[More from BGR: Can Samsung survive without Android?]

Start by leaving the photos and videos you receive in Snapchat or Poke unopened; as soon as a file is viewed, the countdown to its deletion begins.

Then simply connect to a computer and open a free iPhone file explorer like i-FunBox. Open the “User Applications” folder, navigate to the “Snapchat” entry and voilà, all of the photos and videos you have received and not yet opened are available to be copied to your computer’s hard drive.

Then go back and view them normally in the app and the sender will be none the wiser.

The file path is a bit different for Facebook’s Poke app but the end result is the same.

Sony shows off pictures of new Xperia smartphones

Sony Xperia Z, ZL

Sony (SNE) on Tuesday tried to get out ahead of rival smartphone manufacturers in 2013 by showing off pictures of its two new Xperia smartphones. Per Engadget, Sony has put out pictures of both the Sony Xperia Z and the Xperia ZL ahead of their rumored launches later this month. We first got leaked details of the Xperia ZL this past fall back when it was codenamed “Odin” and was revealed to have a 5-inch display with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels, a quad-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro processor and 2GB of RAM. The Xperia Z, which had previously been known as the “Yuga”, features very similar specs to the ZL including a 5-inch display with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels, a quad-core processor, a 12-megapixel camera and 2GB of RAM.

Fed up with a market full of failed Google TVs, Intel eyes own set-top box and cable service

Intel

Intel (INTC) looks primed to give the cable industry some much-needed competition. Unnamed sources have told TechCrunch that Intel is “preparing to launch its rumored virtual cable TV service and set-top box… on a city-by-city basis so Intel has more flexibility in negotiating licensing with reluctant content providers.” TechCrunch’s sources say the reason Intel is getting into the set-top box is simple: the company has failed to convince manufacturers to put its chips in their “smart” television sets and the company wants to show the industry how it’s done. Or as one source puts it, Intel is annoyed that “everyone [is] doing a half-assed Google TV so it’s going to do it themselves and do it right.”

[More from BGR: Can Samsung survive without Android?]

Colleges help students scrub online footprints

BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) — Samantha Grossman wasn't always thrilled with the impression that emerged when people Googled her name.

"It wasn't anything too horrible," she said. "I just have a common name. There would be pictures, college partying pictures, that weren't of me, things I wouldn't want associated with me."

So before she graduated from Syracuse University last spring, the school provided her with a tool that allowed her to put her best Web foot forward. Now when people Google her, they go straight to a positive image — professional photo, cum laude degree and credentials — that she credits with helping her land a digital advertising job in New York.

"I wanted to make sure people would find the actual me and not these other people," she said.

Syracuse, Rochester and Johns Hopkins in Baltimore are among the universities that offer such online tools to their students free of charge, realizing ill-considered Web profiles of drunken frat parties, prank videos and worse can doom graduates to a lifetime of unemployment — even if the pages are somebody else's with the same name.

It's a growing trend based on studies showing that most employers Google prospective hires and nearly all of them won't bother to go past the first page of results. The online tools don't eliminate the embarrassing material; they just put the graduate's most flattering, professional profile front and center.

"These students have been comfortable with the intimate details of their lives on display since birth," said Lisa Severy, president-elect of the National Career Development Association and director of career services at the University of Colorado-Boulder, which does not offer the service.

"The first item on our 'five things to do before you graduate' list is 'clean up your online profile,'" she said. "We call it the grandma test — if you don't want her to see it, you probably don't want an employer to, either."

After initially supplying BrandYourself accounts to graduating seniors, Syracuse University this year struck a deal with the company — begun by a trio of alumni — to offer accounts to all of its undergraduate and graduate students and alumni at no additional charge. About 25,000 people have access to it so far.

"It's becoming more and more important for students to be aware of and able to manage their online presence, to be able to have strong, positive things come up on the Internet when someone seeks them out," said Mike Cahill, Syracuse's career services director.

Online reputation repair companies have been around for at least a couple of years, often charging hundreds or thousands of dollars a year to arrange for good results on search engine result pages. BrandYourself, which normally charges $10 a month for an account, launched two years ago as a less expensive, do-it-yourself alternative after co-founder Pete Kistler ran into a problem with his own name.

"He couldn't get an internship because he was getting mistaken for a drug dealer with the same name," said co-founder Patrick Ambron. "He couldn't even get calls back and found out that was the problem."

An April survey of 2,000 hiring managers from CareerBuilder found nearly two in five companies use social networking sites to research job candidates, and 11 percent said they planned to start. A third of the hiring managers who said they research candidates reported finding something like a provocative photo or evidence of drinking or drug use that cost the candidate a job.

"We want our students and alumni actively involved in shaping their online presence," said Johns Hopkins Career Center Director Mark Presnell. Students are encouraged to promote positive, professional content that's easily found by employers, he said.

BrandYourself works by analyzing search terms in a user's online profile to determine, for example, that a LinkedIn account might rank 25th on Google searches of the user's name. The program then suggests ways to boost that ranking. The software also provides alerts when an unidentified result appears on a user's first page or if any links rise or fall significantly in rank.

Nati Katz, a public relations strategist, views his presence online as a kind of virtual storefront that he began carefully tending while in graduate school at Syracuse.

Google his name and up pops his LinkedIn page with a listing of the jobs he's held in digital media and the "500+ connections" badge of honor. His Facebook account is adorned with Katz smiling over an elegant Thanksgiving dinner table. There are a couple of professional profiles and his Tumblr link, one after another on the first page of results and all highlighting his professional experience.

Before his 2011 graduation, he took the university up on its offer of the BrandYourself account and said it gave him a leg up with potential employers and internship supervisors.

"Fortunately, I didn't have to deal with anything negative under my profile," said Katz, who used the reputation website BrandYourself.com while pursuing dual degrees in public relations and international affairs. "What I was trying to form was really a nice, clean, neat page, very professional."