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Apprentice App Challenge: The app market is already overcrowded, but there’s money to made. You can be sure something has jumped the shark when it even tangentially involves Donald Trump. Count apps at that point. On the latest episode of The Apprentice U.K., the challenge was to create a mobile phone app. The challenge was to come up with an app in 24 hours. The real takeaway is that the app gold rush is clearly attracting get-rich-quick schemers, dreaming up ways to make millions off a fart application or some such nonsense. Check out how The Apprentice’s UK version of The Donald, Lord Sugar, described the app world: You didn’t need to go to a bank and ask for millions of pounds in investment. “You used your brains to come up with a product that you could develop quite simply and you can go and put it up on the Web and make some money. Because that’s the beauty of this business.” It sounds so easy, much like building a gold coin collection as a path to permanent financial riches! Don’t hold your breath for a big payday, considering the apps conceived included “Slangatang,” a soundboard app for regional dialects and Ampi-App, another soundboard but this time for animal noises. Digital Spy
Augmented Reality Coming Soon: LG’s Optimus 3D smartphone will be released this summer, and it features the world’s first augmented reality browser. LG partnered with Wikitude to create this augmented reality browser. Check out the vid. Mashable
Wikitude World Browser 5 from Wikitude on Vimeo.
Mango: Microsoft has a lot planned for their Windows Phone Mango, but there won’t be official announcements until the fall. Until then there are of course speculations. Rumored new features include the Bing application (which means barcode scanning, OCR, QR tag recognition, and scanning of books, CDs, and DVDs), and Bing Audio, a Shazam like feature that recognizes songs. There will also possibly be a dictation feature for text messages. Ars Technica
No Chrome for Tabs: Google announced on the second and last day of I/O that they will not be bringing Google Chrome to tablets. Sundar Pichai, Senior VP of Chrome, said that they will continue to focus on Chrome for laptops. Endgadget
Mobile OS Maze: If you are a developer, how do you choose which platform to develop your app for? Check out Wireless Week’s platform-by-platform overview of advantages and disadvantages of the top mobile operating systems for developers. Wireless Week
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