In a post published on its official Tumblr, the digital newspaper The Daily claims it is now the “top-grossing iPad app in the world”.

While the post included a screen capture from Apple’s Top Chart, we decided to go check for ourselves, and found out that The Daily is indeed the top-grossing iPad app in the US App Store:

However, there is a catch; as far as we know, Apple doesn’t publish a worldwide Top Chart. While the US App Store is the top-grossing App Store, there’s no way to know if other apps are more popular globally than The Daily when you add up its revenues in each country.

After all, The Daily’s appeal is non-existent outside English-speaking countries, which isn’t the case of ‘Smurfs’ Village’ and many other popular paid apps.

We have reached out to The Daily to ask for more details about its methodology – but for now, all that we know for sure is that its iPad app is doing very well in the US.

Yet, this is already quite an achievement; launching a newspaper that is only available via subscription on Apple tablets was a gamble, and it apparently turned out quite well – though we’d now recommend you to take its math with a pinch of salt.

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NYC-based second screen startup Umami TV is launching new features that let users instantly select and share images from the TV programs they’re watching, the company announced today.

Timed for the Academy Awards broadcast this Sunday, the additional options are now available as part of the latest update of Umami’s free iPad app.

Launched in November, Umami uses audio fingerprinting to recognize what viewers are watching in real time. It then uses this data to offer relevant second-screen content, from social conversation to useful information.

While other companies such as Miso and GetGlue offer a fairly similar service, Umami’s app is both quite exhaustive and well-designed – and the features it launched today could contribute to differentiate it further from its competitors, who have opted for different strategies.

Umami is indeed introducing a new functionality called FreezeFrame, which give users the option to grab images from the shows they are watching and share them via Twitter and Facebook. Here’s how FreezeFrame looks like:

If you wonder who may be interested in this feature, the company points out that it could please fashionistas interested in snapping the best and worst dressed on the red carpet this year.

More generally, this update is aimed at “making the conversation around TV more visual,” the company’s CEO Scott Rosenberg explains. “TV is the ultimate lean-back, visual medium, and we’ve always felt social TV should mirror these characteristics,” he says.

With Freezeframe, Umami is also surfing on a bigger trend, as the exponential success of Pinterest comes as a sign that users enjoy collecting things they like in a visual manner. Applied to TV, this could range from sharing actors’ pictures to recipes and other personal favorites.

While FreezeFrame caters to eye-candy aficionados, Umami is also launching a feature that will interest data geeks. Called Dishboard, it is a dashboard that lets people monitor conversation data around a show in real-time thanks to infographics:

With so much data to look at on our tablets, we could almost do away with our TVs, couldn’t we?

➤ Umami TV, also available via the App Store

Currently only available for iOS, TvTak is eerily good at its job. Tap the ‘Point’ button, hold your camera up to the screen while watching one of the supported TV channels, and you’ll see the software identify the screen within your viewfinder. Assuming you’ve got a clear view of your TV, the app will identify the TV show in a couple of seconds.

From there, you can share the show you’re watching with other TvTak users or on Facebook. The Feed tab shows the latest ‘check-ins’ from users, while the Buzz tab shows channels that are currently receiving the most check-ins.

TvTak also offers a ‘Win’ tab, which at launch supports TV ads by PepsiCo’s snack brand Walkers (what’s known as Lays or Frito-Lay outside the UK). Walkers is currently running a promotion involving a mystery flavour of crisps. Identifying one of the accompanying ads with TvTak will offer a clue to help users work out what the flavour is. The deal is a result of TvTak being a winner in the first PepsiCo10 Europe competition, which identifies startups to work with the food giant on pilot projects.

How does it work?

As we reported when TvTak launched at Techonomy, the identification technology relies on servers continually monitoring multiple TV channels. This allows the image recognition to be fast – identifying shows quicker than Yahoo’s IntoNow service can manage with its audio-based solution. We did experience a couple of glitches where it misidentified the channel or couldn’t get a lock on the screen, but it’s generally fast and accurate. In the UK, TvTak has launched with support for popular channels that are part of the BBC, ITV, Channel Four, Channel Five, Sky and MTV brands.

While TvTak is impressive, and you’ll probably have fun showing it off to your friends, it’s fair to say that the social side of the app is a little under-developed. At present, you can’t see shows shared just by people you know – there’s just a feed of all users, and sharing stills of TV shows isn’t necessarily the most rewarding social experience over time.

That said, TvTak’s real selling point is its technology, and if it can integrate with media-focused services that have already built up more solid audiences, such as GetGlue, it could be a real benefit to users by taking the pain out of checking in.

While TvTak is currently only available in the UK, the startup’s technology is used in Orange’s TVcheck app in France. TvTak is working on launches in Brazil, the Netherlands, Australia, Mexico, Spain and the USA in the coming months.

➤ TvTak

The scourge of pirate music websites is well established and receives more than its fair share of global headlines, but the less-acknowledged trade in pirate eBooks has been gaining more coverage in recent weeks. And we’re not talking about Treasure Island either.

As we noted a couple of weeks back, two websites that made thousands of eBooks available illegally as free downloads were forced offline after being served cease-and-desist orders from a global alliance of publishers.

The pirate operation was thought to be turning over more than £7m each year, netted through advertising, premium-level accounts and user-donations. Library.nu had acquired more than 400,000 copyrighted eBooks, and made them available for free on a site masquerading as a legitimate provider. The same operators also ran the affiliated fileshare hosting service at ifile.it, which facilitated the uploads.

Now, publisher Hachette UK is moving to have its eBooks taken off Mobiles24, and has issued a ‘letter before action’ to the site’s owner, Mark Worthington, after the site allegedly made a number of its eBooks available to download for free, without permission.

Hachette UK is made up of several publishing companies and imprints including Headline Publishing Group, Hodder & Stoughton, John Murray, Orion Publishing Group, Octopus Publishing Group, Little, Brown Book Group and Hodder Education Group. It’s owned by Hachette Livre, a global publishing group based in France.

As The Bookseller reports, Worthington has been given until Wednesday 29th February to comply with Hachette’s request to remove all unauthorized Hachette content.

“We have said repeatedly that we will take action against anyone who infringes our copyright and the rights of our authors,” says Hachette UK’s CEO Tim Hely Hutchinson. “The explosion in legitimate sales of eBooks has encouraged some people to appropriate files and we view this as theft. We take any infringement extremely seriously and we will do everything we can to protect the rights of our authors including, where possible, pursuing copyright infringers through the courts.”

It’s not just little download sites that are being taken to task over their illegal publishing exploits. Last May, we reported that a trio of French publishers was suing Google for almost €10m, after claiming that the Internet giant had scanned thousands of its books without consent as part of its on-going Google Books project.

This triple whammy followed a similar case two years previous when La Martiniere – another French publisher – sued Google for the exact same reason, and it was successful in its claim. It won €300k, though it had been seeking around €15m.

Whilst music and movie piracy continues to gain global attention with sites such as The Pirate Bay facing a number of  legal wranglings, it seems that the rise of the eBook industry is heralding a new wave of piracy. I think we can expect to see a fair few more cases come to light through this year and beyond.

MATTER, a Kickstarter project that promises to bring back long-form journalism, took a major step towards becoming a reality after it passed its target of $50,000 in donations on the crowdfunded website.

More impressively, the money was raised just 38 hours into the month-long campaign to financially support the idea. With their target reached, MATTER’s founders — journalists Jim Giles and Bobbie Johnson — are keen to push on and raise more funds to secure it beyond launch.

Here’s the update that is posted to its Kickstarter page:

We made it! 100% funding in just 38 hours. We’re absolutely blown away by your commitment to independent, quality journalism. With $50,000 pledged, we can commission our first stories and build our website.

But it’s not over yet.

We still have plenty of time left on the clock. The more pledges we get, the stronger MATTER will be. Every extra dollar will help us pay for more stories. We won’t have to wait for the money from one article to pay for the next, making MATTER more robust from day one.

If we reach $75,000 we’ll upgrade everybody’s subscriptions by way of saying thanks. And extra funds would help us speed up work on the fantastic experience for the iPad that we’re planning.

For those that aren’t aware of the idea, it is a response to the decline of long-form, feature-based reportage. The reasons why long-form reportage is disappearing may depend on your opinion — for example, is social media to blame? — but there is no doubt that MATTER is a very welcome concept all the same.

The website will cover just one story a week but it will be “unmissable” and, importantly, more than 10,000 words in length, as Giles and Johnson explain:

MATTER will focus on doing one thing, and doing it exceptionally well. Every week, we will publish a single piece of top-tier long-form journalism about big issues in technology and science. That means no cheap reviews, no snarky opinion pieces, no top ten lists. Just one unmissable story.

Stories on the site will cost $0.99 to read and will be accessible from the website, via the Kindle store, and on Apple and Android smartphones.

A key part of the funding success has been the creative donor packages that have been put together to encourage people to get involved with the project.

MATTER offers a series of packages that range from $10, which gets 3 free articles, a mention on the website and a commemorative postcard. Those wanting a piece of the action themselves can pay $1,000 to become a co-pilot, which grants them a guest editor spot and a load of goodies.

The top price is corporate sponsorship level, $3,000, which gives the donor exclusive branding on all MATTER subscriptions and the website for one month.

MATTER has already gathered a team of experienced writers to contribute and we look forward to seeing how much more it raises, and, of course, how it kicks off and develops its promising concept.

➤ MATTER (on Kickstarter)

YouTube is now available in four additional Indian languages – Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu, Google’s video platform announced in a blog post today.

This comes in addition to Hindi and English, but also Urdu, Marathi, Bengali, and Tamil, as YouTube has been constantly adding new languages since its launch in India in May 2008.

With these new translations, YouTube is now available in 58 languages across the world. While sizable, this still leaves room for improvement, and chances are that other versions will be added in the future.

With these 4 additional versions, Google is reaching the 200 million users who speak Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu, and may otherwise stay away from the platform.

Besides navigation, YouTube has also added content in each of these languages, from Tollywood movies and regional news to vegetarian cooking channel and  clips licensed from partners such as Shemaroo and Hungama.

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YouTube has released the second version of its Creator Playbook, Google’s video platform announced today in a blog post written by its audience development strategist Ryan Nugent.

First released in July 2011, YouTube Creator Playbook includes tips, tricks and advice for content creators who upload videos on the platform.

While part of the changes simply reflect the fact that YouTube itself has evolved and introduced new features, it also includes several improvements.

Among the most interesting new sections, YouTube added a glossary that will help users get familiar with terms related to the platform, from ‘metadata’ to ‘vlog’.

As part of YouTube’s global push and international expansion of its Partner Program, the playbook now also includes advice on how to reach optimize content for viewers around the world.

On a higher level, the purpose of this Playbook is to give content creators the keys to make sure a wide audience will engage with their videos. After all, increasing the volume of high-quality channels is a central element of YouTube’s strategy for the upcoming months.

While YouTube makes it clear there are no set rules for good content, the presentation shares best practices from successful YouTubers, from MysteryGuitarMan to KnowYourMeme - and encourages everyone to emulate them.

Here’s the Playbook in its entirety:

On the same day BBC Worldwide announced that its global iPlayer app was booming in Australia, the BBC’s commercial arm has revealed that its News app has launched internationally for larger screen Android Tablets.

Last month we reported that the tablet-focused app had been launched in the UK, with the international version touted to follow suit shortly after.

The Android News app launched in May last year and has been downloaded more than three million times since. It has always been available on all Android phones and tablets running software versions 1.6 and above, but it didn’t support those with Android 3.0.

This latest incarnation of the app gives an optimised experience for larger tablets – devices running Honeycomb and above. Smaller 7.1-inch tablets will still receive the non-optimized smartphone app.

On the same day Rupert Murdoch essentially kick-started a Sunday newspaper price war by announcing the all-new Sunday Sun would hit shelves for £0.50 (USD$0.79) – whilst simultaneously dropping the Saturday edition from £0.60 to the same price – it was announced the digital editions of his other News International titles, The Times and Sunday Times, will double in price to £4 ($6.28) a week beginning in March.

The Times’ UK paywall was erected back in June 2010, with readers initially having the choice of paying £1 ($1.57) per day for access to the site, or paying a promotional rate of £1 for 30 days’ access. Users who took this promotional rate were then bumped onto a £2 ($3.14) per week subscription once the trial period was over.

But, in a move to drive up subscriptions before this imminent price-hike, if you sign-up before March 1, you will remain on £2 a week until 2013, giving you unlimited access to the times.co.uk, thesundaytimes.co.uk, and the iPad and Android apps, not to mention access to The Times archive dating back more than two centuries. So the updated price-plan is just for new subscribers for the time-being.

As the Guardian notes, The Times has 119,255 subscribers to its digital service, whilst 114,000 access the Sunday Times. Despite rumours that Murdoch’s daily tabloid The Sun may fall behind a paywall too, last year the title denied it was planning on charging readers to access its content digitally. Back in October, The UK’s Independent newspaper moved behind a paywall for international readers, following a trend that has seen a number of publishers seek to drive revenues due to declining newspaper sales.

It’s an interesting move for sure – News International is basically undercutting its rivals by launching a new Sunday title for more than half the price of the competition. For context, rival newspapers the Sunday Mirror and People cost £1, while the Sunday Express and the Mail on Sunday cost £1.50.

Whilst it’s clear News International is serious about winning its share of the Sunday newspaper market, which it lost when Murdoch killed his flagship News of the World paper last July following serious phone-hacking allegations, it’s looking to claw back at least some of the money through hiking the prices of its other national titles.

Zinio, one of the world’s largest digital newsstands and bookstores, has announced a suite of new tools designed to stimulate interactive content creation among publishers and advertisers.

Founded in 2001 in San Francisco, with offices in New York, London, Paris, Barcelona and Taipei, Zinio is a cross-platform service that holds a massive selection of magazines from almost every major publisher, giving readers around the world access to thousands of titles, such as Wired, NME and GQ. Indeed, it’s available in 33 languages across twenty currencies.

Its latest release, Zinio Fusion, is three tools aimed at content creators to enhance design and interaction for digital publications.

Fusion Web, for example, is a Web-based DIY tool that lets publishers embed rich media, such as audio and video, across any Zinio platform, whilst Fusion Design offers a build-out for interactive and multi-layered pages. Fusion Link brings integration and content transcoding (digital-to-digital data conversion) for third-party authoring tools.

Zinio Fusion has been in beta with a small selection of publishers and advertisers in the build up to its full release, with the likes of Robb Report, Oakley, Golf Monthly and a number of others first up to test-drive the new tools.You can see it in action for yourself here:

Zinio has native apps for both iOS and Android, letting users shop for, download and read digital issues of magazines. It also lets you archive back issues to read in the future, and synchronizes your library to multiple devices – e.g. iPhones and iPads. You can also view interactive content and video, switch between high-fidelity and plain text modes, bookmark and share articles.

“The digital publishing industry is constantly evolving,” says Zinio President & CEO Rich Maggiotto. “Zinio prides itself on staying a few steps ahead of the market and designing innovative ways to create strong connections between a publisher’s content and their community. At the end of the day, success is contingent on providing the best and most convenient experience. Zinio Fusion suite enables publishers of all sizes to continue to engage their readers.”

When you download the Zinio app in the iTunes Store, two free Fusion-powered issues from Robb Report and One Icon will be available in the library when you first register.