Monday, December 28, 2009

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Avatar: The Making of the Bootleg

Posted: 28 Dec 2009 08:28 AM PST

A (four day old now) spoof of all the “making of Avatar” videos is out there. It makes fun of James Cameron’s 15 year journey to create Avatar. And yes, telesync versions of Avatar are available on BitTorrent now. And watching it that way is nothing at all like watching the movie in a theater in 3D.

Via Mathew Ingram.

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Consumer Groups Lobby FTC To Block Google’s Acquisition Of AdMob

Posted: 28 Dec 2009 07:58 AM PST

Google recently revealed that the Federal Trade Commission was intensely reviewing the search giant’s recent $750 million acquisition of mobile ad network AdMob. Last week, Google said the FTC has made a second request for further information about the deal. Today, two consumer groups, Consumer Watchdog and the Center For Digital Democracy, have asked the FTC to block the deal on anti-trust grounds and possible privacy issues.

In a joint letter to the FTC (embedded below), the two groups say that Google’s acquisition of AdMob would lessen competition in the mobile advertising market, having a potentially negative impact on consumers, advertisers and application developers and others. AdMob is the leader in the mobile advertising space, which is chock full of competitors, including Greystripe and others. We’ve all been speculating on what the impact of a Google-backed AdMob would have on the rest of its competitors, and the mobile advertising market in general.

The letter also raises concerns about consumer privacy. The groups claim that both AdMob and Google have access to large amounts of data relating to consumer behavior, including their location. It’s important to note that consumer groups typically make these sorts of complaints during antitrust reviews because it’s when these groups have the most leverage and the ears of regulators.

Google has high ambitions for AdMob, which was one of Google’s largest acquisitions since it bought DoubleClick for $3.1 billion in 2008. The rise of mobile advertising attracted Google to this space and with the acquisition of AdMob, the search giant could indeed dominate a growing space. AdMob, which some say is approaching a $100 million business within the next three years, could be an extremely profitable channel, especially when the platform is plugged into AdWords and DoubleClick.


LtrFTCfinal –

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Google Is About To Get Caffeinated With A Faster Search Index

Posted: 28 Dec 2009 07:55 AM PST

Google is getting serious about realtime search, adding Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace streams into results and adding a recent “updates” option which is addictive. But behind the scenes Google is also getting ready to push out an entirely new way for indexing the Web. Codenamed “Caffeine,” Google has been testing it since last summer in one datacenter, and is now getting ready to push it out across all of Google. Some SEO-minded tipsters say that they are starting to notice faster search response times, but Google is sticking to the party line that Caffeine won’t roll out until after the New Year (in part so that everybody can enjoy the holidays).

When Caffeine does roll out, what can you expect? Most people won’t even notice. The look and feel of Google results won’t change. Caffeine is an under-the-hood upgrade to Google’s search index algorithms. But it will significantly speed up how fast Google can present results, especially across different media types such as photos and videos. Overall, search will be more realtime because Google considers the speed of its index to be a competitive advantage.

An independent study conducted in September by SEO firm Summit Media suggests that for generic search terms, Caffeine gives more weight to news and social media results, while more specific keywords are more likely to turn up websites about that topic. The Summit Media study compared Caffeine against Google’s current index for about 10,000 keywords. Summit’s findings include:

  • Rankings are unlikely to fluctuate. Taken across all of the keywords for a client there should be a tiny percentage change in ranking.
  • Websites that do lose rankings are likely to be relying on older, archived content that's not been updated in years. Keeping your site fresh to be crawled by Caffeine will be important.
  • There have been no changes to give one sector any new advantage over another.
  • Generic terms against long tail terms in Caffeine show a greater priority for News, Information and Social Media – which fits with generic terms being less clear in terms of the searcher's intent.
  • Only 5% of urls contain exact matches for the searched keyword, 6% of the total point score is made up by exact match urls.

When Caffeine does go live, not only should Google feel zippier, but many of the results will feel more newsy and realtime, particularly for generic searches. I wonder if Websites that come up more in long-tail searches will try to catch the Caffeine buzz by mimicking news sites or plastering Twitter and Facebook updates on their front page. I just hope Caffeine can tell the difference between real news and fake news.

Photo credit: Flickr/mararie.

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Purported Google Chrome OS Netbook Specs Don’t Quite Add Up

Posted: 28 Dec 2009 07:30 AM PST

A handful of sites are linking to a post on NetbookNews.de, which links to a post on a UK-based site called IBTimes titled Google Chrome OS-based netbook tech specs are out.


Flurry: App Store Sees Record Breaking Christmas, 50% Growth From November To December

Posted: 28 Dec 2009 12:34 AM PST

As predicted here on MobileCrunch earlier this month, Apple rocked it this holiday season, and the early numbers are showing it.

According to Flurry, the biggest mobile app analytics company, iPod Touch download volume saw a nearly 1,000% jump in downloads on Christmas Day. Overall, the App Store saw a 51% increase in downloads from November to December (downloads only increased by 15% from October to November). Christmas also marked the first day that iPod Touch app downloads surpassed iPhone app downloads, which makes sense (the iPod Touch is a more common gift than an iPhone; more on that later). Furthermore, the Android Market saw a nice 20% bump in app sales as well, sparked primarily by an uptick in downloads from the Motorola Droid.

Read the rest of this post at MobileCrunch >>

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Privacy Theater: Why Social Networks Only Pretend To Protect You

Posted: 27 Dec 2009 11:00 PM PST

Editor’s note: The following guest post was written by Rohit Khare, the co-founder of Angstro. Building his latest project, social address book Knx.to, gives him a deep familiarity with the privacy policies of all the major social networks.

I'd be wishing everyone a happier New Year if it were easier to mail out greeting cards to friends on Facebook and colleagues on LinkedIn. I'd like to use knx.to, our free, real-time social address book, but their 'privacy' policies prevent us from downloading contact information, even for my own friends.

At least those Terms of Service (ToS) that force us to copy addresses and phone numbers one-by-one also prevent scoundrels from stealing our identity; reselling our friends to marketers; and linking our life online to the real world. Right?

Wrong. When RockYou can stash 32 million passwords in the clear; when RapLeaf can index 600 million email accounts; and when Intelius can go public by buying 100 million profile pages; then our social networks have traded away our privacy for mere "privacy theater."

With apologies to Bruce Schneier's brilliant coinage, "security theater" (e.g. the magical thinking behind forcing passengers to sit down and shut up for the last hour of international flights), social networks have been dogged by one disaster after another in 2009 because they pursue policies that provide the "feeling of improved privacy while doing little or nothing to actually improve privacy."

As long as the same information that social networks piously prohibit their own customers from using is being bought and sold on the open market by giant marketing companies, social networks are only pretending protect your privacy.

Industrial-Scale Identity Theft

Last week's headlines brought news that RockYou had accumulated 32,603,388 identities over the past few years — and negligently stored them in plaintext in an incompetently protected database.

RockYou's official bluster about "illegal intrusion" should fool no one: blaming Imperva, the firm who exposed the flaw, or accusing the hacker(s) of being the identity thieves is misdirection: it was actually RockYou who stole those credentials, and RockYou should be held to account.

I realize that I'm using the incendiary terms "identity theft" and "stole," even though I would agree that users voluntarily consented to type their passwords into RockYou's forms. I assume that both users and RockYou's developers actually only intended to share some particular bits of information: a contact list, a user photo, a friend's gender; but the bottom line is that instead of sharing that specific data, RockYou retained enough secrets to impersonate those users at will.

  • Don't blame the victims. Bemoaning the absence of open standards for users to share their own data; or complaining about the weaknesses of users' password choices is merely changing the subject.
  • Don't blame "security" technology. More encryption, better encryption, or stronger firewalls would not help, since the default RockYou username in this case was a user's primary email address. For anyone who chose to use a popular Webmail service, that granted access to every other online service they've ever used — because of those ubiquitous "Forgot your password?" buttons to email it back to you (just ask Twitter how much fun that is).
  • Don't blame RockYou's partners, who hosted their widgets. They just wanted to give their users some fancy new slideshows and scoreboards and other features to put on their pages; that shouldn't have required an all-out war for viral growth that demanded users to log in and advertise their new widgets to all of their friends.

The fault, dear Reader, is not in our stars; it lies with sites that pretend to waive all care and duty by idly warning their users not to share their account passwords with anyone else.

In the absence of vigorous enforcement of those ToS agreements, any RockYou developer who passed up the opportunity to, say, phish MySpace passwords was putting their own employer at a disadvantage to any other startup that was willing to race them to the bottom.

APIs: Automating Privacy Intrusions?

RockYou minimized the scope of this breach by maintaining that it only affected their "legacy platform" for widgets rather than its larger "partner applications platforms" that use "industry standard security protocols." After all, the advent of social networks' partner APIs was supposed to make impersonation and scraping obsolete.

Those APIs came with their own new ToS agreements that added new, overlapping, and sometimes-contradictory restrictions as they worked through all of the implications of letting third parties in on the fun. The ACLU released a fun quiz that makes quite clear how much information is at stake, from your hometown to your friends' sexual orientation.

For example, if you upload a photo of me that I find embarrassing, I could prevent you from tagging me in it, but I can't forbid you from keeping your own photo online (or keeping it private, bugs aside). I can't even forbid another friend of ours from caching a copy in his or her browser.

However, the Facebook API ToS can (and does) prevent a third-party application from caching a link to the photo for more than a day (a week on Orkut). Unfortunately, direct links to the photo server didn't double-check the privacy policy, so a third-party app would be at risk of leaking images users thought were private, unless the developer remembered to make a separate API call every time to re-verify every photo on a page.

He (or She) Who Must Not Be Named

In an ideal world, a third party developer shouldn't have to store any personally-identifiable information (PII). In many jurisdictions, PII is akin to toxic waste, because of the regulatory burdens and civil, even criminal, liability for acquiring and disposing of it.

Here again, Facebook is the pacesetter: it's possible to display "She liked 7 photos uploaded by Mr. Smith two weeks ago" using little more than a numeric user id. The developer writes a sentence in Facebook Markup Language (FBML), and Facebook's servers will dynamically substitute the name, gender, item count, and ensure grammatical agreement of pronouns, singular/plural choices, and time intervals.

OpenSocial gadgets have to copy PII into the browser to format a sentence like that. LinkedIn's partners even have to copy PII to their own servers, since their Open API is currently incompatible with AJAX authentication.

Even though copying PII is the root of all privacy risks, there are three reasons it can be necessary: latency, history, and agility. Without caches, slow API calls can make an app's performance suffer. Without archives, analyzing only the most recent events can mislead an app's trend detection or recommendation services. Without "offline" access, waiting for a user to log in again delays an app's reaction to events in real-time.

There aren't many technical countermeasures once data has been copied. LinkedIn spent more than a year tinkering with their public API, but the only substantial difference is that it now encrypts every member id with the identity of the developer and application to trace the source of a breach. I applaud them as an industry pioneer — though they're so dependent on search-engine optimization that they still include the public numeric ids in the profile page URLs anyway.

Exporting PII with legal strings attached is the best policy we can hope for. While Amazon's ToS requires its associates to display accurate, up-to-date prices, Twitter has only recently realized the implications of searching deleted tweets and doesn't yet oblige its API partners to update their copies when tweets are deleted or protected.

Buying Back Your Own Data? Priceless.

If PII is so hard to protect, then the only way for social networks to protect their users' privacy must be to prohibit partners from accessing contact information in the first place. I might not be able to export my holiday card mailing list from my favorite social network— a roach motel for our data — but giant marketing corporations can buy and sell our private information with impunity.

I could go to Rapleaf right now to buy an analysis of any list of email addresses to learn its makeup by gender, income, residence, and all manner of other demographic data. Who's to say how short that list could be—it's a slippery slope from aggregate info to personal info. Or I could shop at one of Intelius' many fronts and affiliates who are selling PII explicitly (TRUSTe-certified!). Or I could barter some of the stray business cards on my desk on Jigsaw to fill in the rest of the puzzle. All of these businesses depend on PII data harvested from social networks.

How is that possible? None of the social networks that we've integrated with has an API for reading email addresses — but all of them have no problem asking you to "Invite your friends!"  After all, most social networks remain hypocritical enough to phish passwords to other social networks themselves as soon as they ask you to "Invite your friends" for their own viral growth!

Putting aside the hypocrisy of phishing passwords to scrape those friends' email addresses in the first place, the subtler flaw is that social networks are more than happy to search their member database for those addresses to share a list of suggested friends. That's how a Rapleaf could take a mailing list, pretend that those are all friends of theirs, and slowly accumulate a "reverse phonebook" that maps emails to social network profiles.

Or you could just crawl their websites. Social networks depend on search engines for traffic, so they almost universally have public pages for every member with well-known URLs and directory listings by name for crawlers to index. A mini-boomlet in funding “people search“ startups underwrote this massive exercise, but they sold their archives to less-than-savory marketers.

Now, merely indexing public web pages can't be evil—but reconciling online identities and 3rd-party advertising cookies with real-world credit reports, government records, and other databases can be. Adding in all that information doesn't increase Mr. Smith's anonymity; Jeff Jonas has made a small fortune proving that semantic reconciliation dramatically collapses uncertainty. Just think about combining Spock's 100M profiles with Intelius' 20B other data points; or Wink's 200M profiles with Reunion MyLife's 34M members and 700M records…

Whose Data Is It, Anyway?

The philosophical question at hand is what rights do I have in my friends' information. When I accept a business card from someone I've just met, I don't believe I have the right to re-sell it on Jigsaw in good conscience (they'd disagree 18M times). If it's a colleague's card, on the other hand, I might take the initiative to forward a new lead, or even buy a gift subscription to a magazine. Does that constitute a violation of their privacy, or spam?

Social networks haven't let their users make their own decisions on this issue. Through selective enforcement of their policies, some startups get locked out while big partners get exemptions. Power.com ended up in (and out of) court. Plaxo found out the hard way that they couldn't assist their paying customers to OCR Facebook email addresses; or to synchronize with LinkedIn. It says a lot about LinkedIn's draconian ToS that even with paying customers demanding it, Comcast hasn't signed up for their API. Even if users manually download their own LinkedIn address books, it won't even include links back to folks' public profile pages.

Don't Accept Incompetence

I also claim that social networks are engaging in Privacy Theater because there's no shortage of examples of organizations on the Web that process vast quantities of PII while providing real privacy protection. Do you think that the "bad guys" haven't gone after Webmail services to phish passwords and harvest contact information? Aren't e-commerce sites sharing product information and reviews out to legions of affiliates without leaking your purchase history? How long do you think RockYou would have gotten away with it if they were asking for your online banking username instead of your email address?

Social network sites have not (yet) demonstrated the high degree of proactive surveillance and enforcement characteristic of other organizations that deal with PII on the Internet. Users see worms on MySpace and viruses on Facebook, but not on Hotmail — because they defend against cross-site-scripting attacks. Users find malware distributed on Slide, but not on Wikipedia — because they filter content aggressively. Users are blocked by DDoS attacks and DNS attacks on Twitter — but Amazon stays up because they can react in real-time (mostly). How much more quickly do Cease & Desist letters for putting up a fake PayPal logo go out than for impersonating a Facebook Page?

From personal conversations, I'm beginning to wonder if the recent rise of Hadoop is part of the problem, surprisingly. Trying to detect patterns of abusive crawling and suspicious bursts of activity from partner apps by analyzing yesterday's log files alerts you too late to react. The culture of many social networking websites seems to emphasize page load times (especially after the great Friendster meltdown), which isn't quite the same as the enterprise IT, networking, and transactional database backgrounds of other leading Web architects. And unlike the formal (and informal) networks of security officials at online financial institutions to track distributed threats, I fear we have little evidence of coordinated responses to privacy threats that correlate identities across social networks.

I have first-hand experience that it takes more time (and more money) to ship applications that comply with social networks' privacy policies. If we weren't living with Privacy Theater, that might not have been a wasted investment. Inevitably, Gresham's Law kicked in, and the good guys are being driven out by the bad guys (spammy apps, scammy apps, sneaky apps, conniving apps).

Privacy Theater: The Show Must Go On…

Naturally, I prefer to think of myself as one of the 'good guys.' I prefer to believe that privacy protection is a competitive advantage that users (citizens!) really value. Until this outrageous RockYou breach, I didn't fully realize how irrelevant that is.

I'd argue that the hapless state of ToS enforcement by the major social network platforms only provides the feeling of improved privacy while doing little or nothing to actually improve privacy: that's privacy theater.

Unfortunately, that analogy is still unfair: TSA may screen children at the airport, but at least their security theater doesn't obscure the fact we haven't had a catastrophic security failure in the US air transportation system (yet). Our major social networks' privacy theater is distracting us from ongoing, large-scale identity theft and misuse of private and personally-identifiable information.

If the industry expects self-regulation to forestall government regulation, well, here's what I think it would take: An immediate ban on all of RockYou's applications by all of their partners, pending a public audit of all of their apps. That's taking a page from the audit provisions of LinkedIn's ToS and adding sunlight by publishing the results.

Sounds harsh? I thought the market was supposed to provide swifter, surer justice than some pesky regulator with its clunky old notions of due process and presumptions of innocence. API agreements are a private matter between ruthless corporations. Heck, if they really wanted to put the rest of the ecosystem on notice, they ought to audit every application funded by Sequoia, Partech, DCM, and Softbank, all lead investors in RockYou.

It's not like lawsuits are being filed, as Marissa Mayer announced by going after work-from-home scam artists in an interview with Mike Arrington at LeWeb. It's not like this is Scamville 2.0, since this isn't stealing users' cash, only their dignity. It's not like there's a legal spotlight on the issue, since there's only $9M set aside for a hazy new privacy foundation in the latest Facebook class-action settlement. It's not like it's a political issue in the headlines, since a Facebook Chief Privacy Officer is running for Attorney General, the top law-enforcement office in California. It's not like it's as complicated as "don't be evil," since I can give you one simple tip to eliminate privacy theater: enforce your ToS and obey others' ToS — or else stop setting unrealistic expectations and just let users have their data back!

(Photo credit: Flickr/FaceMePLS).

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Diggnation’s Alex Albrecht launches an iPhone app: Duel

Posted: 27 Dec 2009 09:40 PM PST

Alex Albrecht is on Wikipedia. Therefore, he is important. Not only that, but he also made a cool iPhone app that hit the store for just $1. Cheap. Like all the other iPhone apps. Unlike most other $1 iPhone apps, this one is pretty fun.

The concept is simple: Duel enables you to host a duel on your iPhones. (Don’t fret, parental-types; though this iPhone duel will pay homage to the duels of the Wild Wild West, it will differ in one major way: nobody’s gonna get shot.) Instead, should you lose, you will simply find your fellow dueler’s ugly mug laughing hysterically in your face. Here’s how you duel: All you need is two people with two iPhones. Both need to have the app (so you could argue this app really costs $2, which is still cheap). You connect your iPhones via Bluetooth, and then you raise your phones vertically. The timer on the phones counts down from 3. Once it hits zero, you turn your phones horizontally to shoot. First one to shoot wins.

Read the rest of this entry at MobileCrunch >>

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Relax, You Can Still Buy An iPhone In New York City. Just Not Online.

Posted: 27 Dec 2009 08:31 PM PST

If you live in the New York City metropolitan area, as I do, and try to buy an iPhone from AT&T’s website, you will probably get the same message I did after I entered my zipcode: “Sorry this package is not available in your area.” Apparently, this is a big story. (Hey, it’s the tail end of a long holiday weekend, and there is nothing else going on). For instance, the Consumerist called some hapless AT&T customer service rep who confirmed that “the phone is not offered to you because New York is not ready for the iPhone.”

Given AT&T’s history of bandwidth problems, especially with the iPhone, the idea that AT&T’s network can’t handle the iPhone is not entirely outlandish. Remember Operation Chokehold, and the resulting tiff between Fake Steve Jobs and AT&T? It was a failed attempt to bring AT&T’s network to its knees by everyone using their iPhones at once as a way to protest how much AT&T’s data network sucks. When AT&T called him irresponsible, Fake Steve responded:

I mean, consider this fact:

AT&T, a huge wireless provider in the United States, cannot reliably connect calls in New York City.
How can this be? —Fake Steve Jobs

And now, here it is, on a silver platter: AT&T is no longer selling iPhones to people in New York City! Well, at least not online. Is this AT&T’s sneaky way of limiting bandwidth consumption in its largest market? If only, then we’d have a story.

After I went to AT&T’s website and generated the message above, I logged in, since I am a customer. When I tried to upgrade my phone to a newer iPhone, I encountered no problems. Then I called customer service, and was told they could ship me a new iPhone, no problem. I called once more, but this time didn’t say that I am an existing customer. The only phone available was an 8GB refurbished iPhone. AT&T’s online store was out of stock of everything else. Then I tried one last time and gave a different Brooklyn zipcode. The sales rep again told me the online store was “currently out of stock” and that “you have to go into the store.” It appears that AT&T’s phone and online orders come from a different warehouse (duh) than the ones which service its stores.

So if you really want to buy an iPhone in New York City, go to an AT&T store, or an Apple Store. Or try Apple’s website. That seems to be taking orders for New York City residents just fine ( I got up to the checkout).

And, yes, I’ve contacted several PR people at AT&T. But like I said, it’s the holidays.

Update: AT&T PR responds with this cryptic one-liner: “We periodically modify our promotions and distribution channels.” Thanks, way to clear things up. There are also reports that fraudulent activity may be the cause of the problem.

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JibJab’s Year In Review Plays Off 2009, With Help From Keyboard Cat

Posted: 27 Dec 2009 05:31 PM PST

2009 is coming to a close, which means it’s time to reflect on the events that shaped the last twelve months. And there’s nothing like a whirlwind animated musical to put everything into perspective. Cue JibJab, which has just released their annual Year In Review: a two minute video romp that recaps the last year in all its glory. The video is packed will everything from momentous events like the induction of our first black President to moments of unparalleled stupidity (Balloon Boy). Even Three Wolf Moon made the cut.

This is the fifth year that JibJab has produced their Year In Review, and we’re told it will be seeing airtime on a number of national television networks tomorrow. For those wondering how the video was made, the company has put together a thorough blog post detailing its production.

Aside from the video, CEO Gregg Spiridellis tells us that JibJab is having a very strong holiday season. The entertainment portal, which offers customizable Flash videos, greeting cards, and a variety of other content, drew 33 million unique visitors in the last month according to Quantcast. Spiridellis adds that the site has served 90 million video views this quarter alone (which was likely helped in part by its always popular ElfYourself feature).

Watch the video in the embed below:

Try JibJab Sendables® eCards today!



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Can Jolicloud Win In A Chrome OS Netbook World?

Posted: 27 Dec 2009 02:38 PM PST

Only the truly adventurous are running Chrome OS on their computers today. But it’s the elephant in the room whenever Jolicloud, an ambitious netbook operating system startup, is discussed.

We first covered the startup in late 2008, when netbooks were mostly running Windows XP or Linux. In June, when the first invites to Jolicloud went out, it looked like a winner.

But less than a month later Google announced Chrome OS, their own operating system tailored to netbooks.

Jolicloud soldiered on, raising a high profile $4.2 million venture round and finally, earlier this month, releasing a public beta of the product at Le Web in Paris.

I caught up with CEO Tariq Krim and Director Partnerships Brenda O’Connell backstage at Le Web and asked them how Jolicloud would compete with Chrome OS.

Krim doesn’t have a full answer, but he says that part of the answer is Jolicloud’s focus on partner services like Dropbox. Google will rely mostly or entirely on Google services to run Chrome OS, although you’ll be able to access website services.

Jolicloud netbooks will be able to run local high definition video, which is hard to do over the browser today. And with services like dropbox users can store files locally on their netbooks and sync them to the cloud. Chrome OS users won’t be able to store files locally on their machine, other than via offline browser access.

It’s not clear Krim believes that’s much of an advantage, though. He says in the interview that hardware is becoming unimportant and that people will start to spend that money on cloud services instead.

Jolicloud is negotiating partnerships with hardware manufacturers to ship their OS directly with devices. Eventually consumer decisions will say whether there’s a place for Jolicloud in a suddenly crowded netbook OS market. Krim, who has fought Google successfully before with Netvibes (which competes with iGoogle), seems reasonably optimistic.

The video is below:

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Game Rush: Mobclix And PlayHaven Predict Record iPhone Game Downloads During The Holidays

Posted: 27 Dec 2009 09:30 AM PST

Between the presents, family time and the eggnog, iPhone users will be hitting their device for competitive entertainment, says gaming community platform PlayHaven and mobile ad exchange Mobclix. According to data released today, the two companies predict that iPhone game usage is likely to set record in the week between Christmas and New Year's Day, called a “Game Rush,” with usage 28 times greater than the same weekly period last year.

PlayHaven says as the number of games on the App Store increases (there are currently more than 15,000 games available), consumers can turn to their iPhone for entertainment vs. consoles. PlayHaven also predicted that in the coming year, discovery of games and applications is increasingly going to originate outside the App Store. By the end of 2010, PlayHaven’s founder and CEO, Raymond Lau, said up to 25 percent of iPhone app purchases may originate at some location other than iTunes or the App Store as companies like PlayHaven seek to capitalize on the increasing complexity of app discovery in a universe of more than 125,000 titles.

Lau may be right. More and more app directories have emerged to help users make sense of the 100,000 plus Apps on the App store. Appolicious, mPlayit, Chorus, Sidebar, and many others not only provide customized recommendations for your application tastes and interests, but also lead users directly to the App Store to purchase and or download the apps. Many of these directories also allow you to share your apps on Twitter and Facebook.

Mobclix and PlayHaven’s "Game Rush" forecast is based on analysis from Mobclix’s mobile ad exchange. Mobclix used historical app download data and calculated a projection based on the increased number of Apple mobile devices sold during the year.

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