Google’s Android system for smartphones and devices quickly outpaced anyone’s expectations within its few years of operation, at least in terms of sheer size. This has plenty of work for software developers who want to contribute to the growing cloud. The best online schools with degree programs in app development are preparing students with the programming expertise their burgeoning careers require.

In 2010, predictions by Android’s developers at Google indicated that the fledgling software system might be installed by 200 million users as early as 2013. A CNET News article from May 2012 reports an updated trajectory that predicts 700 million users by 2013, the 200 million threshold having been crossed in 2011. Interestingly, the article reports that the explosive growth hasn’t resulted in huge profits for Google, but the 370 million Android devices activated by May 2012 places it among the most rapidly expanding technologies in our society.

Much of the strength of the Android system comes from the development of web applications, commonly referred to as “apps.” These software programs work as digital tools that aid the owner of an Android device by storing data, improving communication and allowing access to digital accounts across the cloud.

Many applications are being designed to allow Android users to communicate with different technology interfaces and protocols. Tech review website PCWorld released a list of the top five cloud apps for Android devices in May 2012. Each of these software programs acts as a portal, allowing an Android user to contact a software interface available over the web, such as Amazon clients or Linux-based cloud machines. This creates a lot of available work for web designers.

With each passing day, Android devices are becoming more like digital Swiss army knives as they continue to add hundreds of tools. Some are very basic in practicality, such as flashlight apps or schedulers. Some apps let users create with photos, play with music or express creativity in many other ways. Thousands of game apps exist that serve no purpose except for providing a diversion. And there’s still room for more.

Learning about web application development lends itself to online colleges as most of the work is performed through digital media anyways. The best online schools for web application development focus on a number of important topics, including web-based user interfaces, different Internet languages, web servers and Internet marketing techniques. For successful web application development, it’s important to encourage cross-platform communication with other interfaces. Learning to market effectively is also helpful as developers often work in smaller firms to develop these Android applications.

Software developers have a unique opportunity to jump on the bandwagon of a strong software platform experiencing incredible growth because of its open development policy; once an application is completed, it’s very easy to publish it to the Android market. Learning how to capitalize will require some additional education in most cases. Luckily those students with a computer science degree or advanced knowledge of software development may only need a course or two in Android-specific practices. With an audience topping hundreds of millions, Android applications are proliferating faster than just about any technology available on today’s market.

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• Things to Consider With Mobile Application Development (bestiphoneapplicationdevelopers.wordpress.com)
• Amazon Appstore now allows Android users to Test Drive apps (bgr.com)
• Amazon launches Test Drive app for Android Devices (thegeeksclub.com)
• Amazon Appstore rolls out Test Drive app previews to select Android devices (theverge.com)
• Android offers lots of options and some annoyances (larrysworld.com)

It’s about time!

Finally there is an iPhone app for Facebook page administrators to be “on-the-go” and still be up to date with their fans. As a community manager, my business associates and I feel this app will be a great addition to our methods of managing our client’s pages. With social media comes a feeling of instant gratification. I think with social media, there should be timeliness with the response on a post that fans want to see.

Everyone has immediate access to what you post and everything that they post, they want an immediate response on. For a community manager it allows for your fans to be even more engaged. With quicker response times and responses that occur all throughout the day and not just all at one shot, fans will be intrigued to keep checking back on the page for responses.

Even further, the community manager is able to gain a few insights as well. You can see “Total Likes” which can be useful if your client needs an insight quick and you don’t have it available. As far as “People Talking About This” and “Weekly Total Reach,” it might not be incredibly useful, but it is better than nothing when you are in a pinch for some analytics. Along with a nifty graph at the bottom for “Trends,” there are no exact numbers but at least you can get an idea of what is increasing or decreasing.

As community managers, we are in charge of our client’s social media platforms and take full responsibility of posting and responding. We are supposed to engage and speak with users of the page as if we are the client. The release of this app allows us to be in the zone at all times and provides our clients with the best possible service we can offer all from an iPhone.

I suggest this app to all community managers as it is starting to help me, I will guarantee it will help you.

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“It’s a well known fact that people tend to overestimate the impact technology will have in the short term, but underestimate its significance in the longer term,” Page said. “Many users coming online today may never use a desktop machine, and the impact of that transition will be profound–as will the ability to just tap and pay with your phone.”

Along with the handset giant, Google gets more than 17,000 patents, not a small reason for the lofty purchase price. Despite Motorola‘s prominence, handsets by themselves have turned into commodities with all of the Android players fighting to get a small chunk of the puzzle. This will instantly position Motorola as a preference for many Android fans despite Google’s assurance that the mobile OS will remain available and fully upgradeable to their new competitors.

“Googler” Dennis Woodside will assume the role of CEO, vacated by Sanjay Jha.

Related articles

• China approves Google purchase of Motorola Mobility (techi.com)
• Motorola Mobility Says $12.5B Google-Moto Deal Will Close Tuesday Or Wednesday. Includes An Android Rider. Layoffs Coming? (techcrunch.com)
• China Greenlights Google-Motorola Mobility Deal (pcmag.com)
• Google-Motorola Deal Approved By Chinese Authorities (itproportal.com)
• Google acquisition of Motorola to close this week (intomobile.com)

Play Angry Birds with chop sticks. Browse web pages without a mouse or touchscreen. Sign a document within 1 centimeter with pinpoint accuracy. These are just the tip of the possibilities iceberg for Leap Motion, the gesture-control technology unveiled today in the video below.

The San Francisco startup says you can “Say goodbye to your mouse and keyboard.” The accuracy of the device may make that claim a reality for some considering that it’s reportedly 200 times more accurate than anything on the market today and can track the movements of all ten fingers inside a 4-cubic-foot space down to 1/100th of a millimeter.

All of these specs sound like something that is expensive, large, and not available for a couple of years. Fortunately, that’s not the case. Pre-orders of the device that’s not much larger than a pack of gum are starting now for $69.99 and will be available this winter.

According to their blog, “The future is now.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hat Tip: Rick Chavoustie

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• Leap 3D $70 Gesture Control System Is 200 Times More Accurate Than Kinect (video) (geeky-gadgets.com)
• Is This The Best Gesture Control System Ever? [Gesture Control] (gizmodo.com)
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• Leap 3D System Offers Amazing Gesture-Based Control of Your Computer for Just $70 (popsci.com)
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• Leap Motion takes on Kinect: cheaper and more accurate (slashgear.com)

If you’re going to build a startup, you have a better chance of success if you have a proven track record. Uberconference CEO Craig Walker has such a history as the founder of GrandCentral (which became Google Voice) and Dialpad before that (which became Yahoo Voice).

Unlike most conference call services, there is no pin required from Uberconference which uses the dialing number as the authentication. Anyone who has tried to join a conference call while switching back to email on their phone to get the PIN can appreciate this feature.

Another nice feature is the rude background noise attendee deterrent; if someone is making noise, they are easy to identify and get muted by the organizer.

The service is free with optional premium services.

This entertaining promotional video shows times when this particular service might come in handy.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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Day one was a disappointment as there was no “pop”. Day two was even worse, showing the shares slide 11% to close at $34.03. Is this a bad sign for the long term?

No. Not necessarily. The new billionaires in Palo Alto will not become millionaires any time soon and the shares aren’t going to drop much further than they already have. They likely won’t go much higher than their IPO value, either, until some big news about how the infusion of money is being invested hits the wire. Until then, expect a few gains, a few losses, and an overall stabilization of the stock for the next few weeks.

This was all created by a simple mistake. They priced it too high. The market is reacting to uncertainty and they killed their chances of being a big hitter by coming out of the gate higher than expected. It’s quite possible that if they launched at $34 where they were supposed to open, that they might be over $40 today. Instead, they overestimated the demand and underestimated the uncertainty with their revenue model.

At the end of the day (the first day, at least), there were a lot of rich people coming out for their first high-dollar weekend. Here’s how they stacked up:

Created by: MBAOnline.com

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I don’t know about anyone else, but I think Apple has a huge “underground” stronghold on social media – and they don’t pay a damn thing for it.

Apple for some reason or another has an unparalleled ever surrounding hype about itself that just attracts everyone in the technology era. Especially now with the Worldwide Developers Conference coming up the second week in June, I am seeing an increasingly steady trend of Apple product rumors.

As a social media marketer, it is unbelievable to me that Apple is able to have users do it on their own for them. That is part of why Apple is as successful as it is. How often do you hear about Microsoft and their new products? The only new thing I have heard about recently is their new Windows mobile phone. I think they are having a tough time keeping up with Apple – mainly because of social media.

Constantly in my Twitter feed are comments and posts about Apple rumors and guesses about what is to be unveiled and the conference and even who will be speaking and what particularly about. It is amazing that they can make the money they do when people do their own marketing for them.

Have you ever visited Apple’s Facebook page? Maybe – but there is not one bit of content on their besides a photo. They have 6.5 million followers and they do not engage them because they don’t have to. People do it for free, for Apple and they don’t realize it.

So is it luck? Did Apple just fall into this and say, “Booya! Let’s leave it alone!”? They knew it was going to happen. They market themselves so that people are engaged everywhere at the same time without having to do any work.

It is my opinion that Apple has mastered the art of marketing and has no need for social media marketing. It is an unbelievable feet of achievement and should not go unrecognized.

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It was only a matter of time. Google Chrome, the internet browser they introduced in 2008, has been growing like crazy, passing Firefox to become the 2nd-most popular browser worldwide in the last quarter of 2011. Last week, it took the top spot from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which has held that position for what seems like decades.

Global traffic analytics company StatCounter has been tracking the data for years. Following Firefox are Safari at #4 and Opera at #5.

One asterisk on the numbers: Firefox allows users to block their usage data making it invisible to StatCounter. With some estimating that up to 10% of their users taking advantage of these privacy settings, it’s not enough to move them up on the list but it makes it as close to a 3-way tie as possible with all three likely holding around 30% of the worldwide non-mobile browser web traffic.

Last month, we reported that Chrome is already dominant in South America and in the lead in Asia.

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Microsoft is throwing its hat into the niche-social arena by going after students in a bold and likely-futile move with so.cl (pronounced “social”).

“With So.cl you can share your search and help others discover what they might be looking for,” they say on their website. “Fun commentary and discussions usually follow.”

This is a bad idea. People do not want to share their search. College students are hooked in to Facebook and have study groups already positioned there. Microsoft does not have the clout to be able to muscle their way into social the way Google has and the way Apple could, not because they’re too small (they’re much bigger than Google) but because their online clout is minimal by comparison. They’re a software company first.

ReadWriteWeb said, “File this in the ‘we-try-it-out-so-you-don’t-have-to’ category. So.cl is a derivative social network that may be useful to students, but it won’t fly elsewhere.”

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. We’ll monitor for developments at so.cl, but at this point there’s no need to waste your time. It’s nothing special.

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“Take a Bit Out of Crime” is a phrase that was often uttered by McGruff the Crime Dog, a fictional dog who despised criminals for reasons I am unsure about (we never did see his origin story, here’s to hoping for a Christopher Nolan directed “McGruff Begins”). The famous PSA character did his best to provide a good example and keep people from committing crimes. Now, Facebook may be doing the same exact thing by accident.

More and more people are committing crimes, whether they are aware of it or not and then they brag about their illegal exploits on their Facebook page. It’s never a good idea to commit a crime, but I’d say it’s an even worse idea to commit one and then publish an account of it for the entire world to see.

Another poor idea is to walk into an internet café, login to your Facebook account, and then rob the place and flee before logging out. Two criminals in Colombia recently did this exact thing and were promptly caught when an employee at the internet café relayed their Facebook information to the police.

The main point I am trying to make is to not commit crime; it’s a bad idea. However, if you absolutely feel the need to commit a crime and want to increase your chances of not getting caught, avoid social media at all costs. Unless you hire an online marketing firm that is really good at managing your reputation social media just isn’t going to work out for you. Move over McGruff, there’s a new sheriff in town called Facebook and his first deputy is a man named Zuckerberg.

Now that the company is public, the employees are rich, and the CEO is married, Facebook is ready for some serious business. They’ve slayed most of the dragons they’ve needed to face up to this point, but the game has changed. They can’t just sit back and make money as a side effort. They have to generate more revenue and profits for their numbers to stay strong on the NASDAQ. For the first time in their history, they really have to try from a business perspective.

Up until now, making money was a side-effect of their efforts to make the most popular and addictive social network on the planet. They are approaching a billion users and the spread is wide across the globe. This graphic by CNN comes to us from Nissan Dealer Auburn and shows some of the mind-boggling numbers on a worldwide scale that Facebook has been able to achieve.

Can they keep up the pace?

Will their revenue catch up with their userbase growth, particularly on the mobile side?

How long until the Instagram deal is finalized? Will Twitter and Google be in a better place for mobile picture sharing before it makes it through?

There are dozens of questions surrounding the network as it falls under the scrutiny that is a part of going public. One thing that is not being questioned is size; never before has a website controlled so much out the world’s time online.

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It looks like Pinterest. It acts like Digg. The newest player in the social media sphere adds some features from Stumbleupon and Twitter to the mix to form Thruzt, now entering into public beta.

Unlike many of its predecessors, Thruzt encourages networks to be formed within the community to draw attention to submissions. Users select content on the web that they find valuable or write up their own stories on their blogs and submit it to Thruzt. Then, the “game” is on to get it enough votes to get popular.

The first thing people will notice when visiting is that the layout is very similar to Pinterest. Rather than the linear display people are used to on Digg and Reddit, Thruzt has a multi-column layout that adjusts based upon screen size and resolution. On a 17″ monitor at standard resolution, for example, the site stretches 5-columns across.

Instead of the categories that Stumbleupon uses, the newsrooms that Digg uses, and the subreddits that Reddit uses, Thruzt is organized by paths. There is a wider variety than on Digg but not an open-ended array the way that Reddit does it.

While self-promotion of submissions is strongly encouraged, spam is still not tolerated. There are both algorithmic and manual filters in place to prevent users from blasting their content out there for their own benefit if it’s low quality. They use the “nofollow” attribute (which eliminates Google and Bing SEO value from the link) on stories that have not reached the popular page, making SEO spamming unlikely while still rewarding high-quality content. The attribute is removed for stories that become popular.

“Thruzt was built with two main foundations,” said founder Zetadog. “First, to rebuild a strong social media community, and second to give bloggers, journalists and others a way to get attention and send traffic to their blogs and websites.”

The community is still small. Most stories do not get over 20 “thruzts”, but features such as public “nixes” (downvotes), post tagging, the ability to upload an appropriate thumbnail (a feature not present on other social news sites), and the general feel of community gives high hopes that this site will pick up where others have left off.

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E-mails, eBooks. and e-cigarettes. Now e-bikes? According to a recent press release from Audi, the automobile makers will be displaying the prototype for a new bicycle that’s part traditional cycle, part digital machine – the Audi e-bike Wörthersee. “The Audi e-bike Wörthersee puts in its first major appearance at this year’s Wörthersee Tour, the 31st meet for Audi, VW, Seat and Skoda fans; trial biker Julien Dupont and downhill specialist Petra Bernhard will demonstrate their stunts and streetbike skills.”

According to the press release, the e-bike comes with a touchscreen on-bike computer that can sync with a rider’s smartphone. And then, suddenly, a cyclist’s bike also becomes their favorite app, “Video images of the trial drive or of a trick, as recorded via the in-helmet camera, are uploaded to the Internet in real time via your smartphone. Each trick performed successfully is then awarded success points, and as the number of points awarded grows, the cyclist receives awards and the challenge level rises, too.” It’s like social media meets extreme sporting.

Apparently gone are the days of cruising around on your traditional bicycle and now we’re welcoming in a hybrid bike that runs on a lithium ion battery. Or is it?

I’m a technological junkie – I love learning about things like this e-bike. But would I ever trade in my simple, classic cruiser for a machine with LED lights and an on-bike computer and touch screen? While I’m curious, I trust my legs to get me from point A to point B much more than a bike.

While this newest cycle seems like a pilot episode for a new show called “Pimp My Bike,” one can’t argue that the design is sleek and stunning and the potential it offers commuters and cycling enthusiasts is great. But maybe in this case, I’m an old fashioned girl and I just can’t see myself on anything other than the cruiser in my garage. With innovations like this, it makes me wonder how long it will be before my cousin’s brand new mountain bike falls into the category of “retro bikes.”

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Google cleared its last big hurdle, the Great Wall of China. Now, the search giant will be able to move forward with its purchase of Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion.

The caveat is a minor one that would have likely been the case anyway, but China wasn’t going to take any chances. As part of the approval, Google must agree to keep Android free and available to other device makes for 5 years. They also joined the US and Europe in voicing the sentiment that Google must make Motorola patents available for fair licensing.

“Our stance since we agreed to acquire Motorola has not changed and we look forward to closing the deal,” a Google spokeswoman said in a statement.

The deal is expected to close as soon as next week.

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The best that could have happened in tech blogging would have been for Facebook‘s IPO to “pop”. We still would have watched closely but there would have been no need to analyze it in-depth. As any good doctor after a successful operation, we would have clapped our hands and monitored. Instead, we’re stuck trying to break down exactly what happened on Friday and more importantly what will happen in the coming weeks.

In short, Facebook ruined a lot of tech and business bloggers’ weekends.

Here is a video of analysis that will help to determine if this was simply Facebook and its bankers pricing the IPO exactly right or if there is something more to worry about over the next few weeks. Below is an infographic, almost a warning: is Facebook a bubble that’s going to pop (in the wrong way) the way other recent tech IPOs have? Is there any chance that Facebook really will be the worst tech IPO in history?

Click here to view the embedded video.

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