For Harry Potter fans, King's Cross is where one boards the train for Hogwarts at "Platform 9 3⁄4."

For The Guardian's new media mavens, it's the setting for King’s Cross, London – Streetstories, an immersive app featuring an audio guide about the historic area which automatically activates sounds, music and stories relevant to your GPS location.

The free mobile app, available for iPhone and Android devices, launches with ten stories, while Streetstories Extra (available on iOS) has more than 70 stories and two hours of audio material downloadable via Wi-Fi.Continue reading...

The United States Postal Service is in the midst of massive layoffs and soul-searching about its future, as it looks to cut 35,000 jobs as a way of dealing with its $18.2 billion annual loss, but it's still trying to innovate in a digital era when hand-delivered mail seems quaint.

The U.S. Postal Service has just launched a new mobile application for iPhone users that lets the device's camera scan barcodes on shipping labels for "quick, easy and convenient tracking of their packages and other mail. The application stores the label numbers so customers can easily recheck the status of their shipments. The scanner function is available on iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and iPad 2."Continue reading...

This week saw the iTunes store add an iPad app that will make guitar, rock and Beatles fans gently weep.

Keeping the Beatles' b(r)and alive and well on digital, George Harrison's son Dhani this week showed Conan O'Brien a new iPad app that catalogs his dad's iconic collection of guitars, with narration by the late guitarist talking about why he loved particular brands and guitars, and how they were used on the Beatles and solo songs they were featured in.Continue reading...

Apple is revisiting the approval process for products in its apps store after a fake Pokemon game went all the way up to No. 2 in its Apps Store this week.

"Pokemon Yellow," which cost 99 cents to download, made its debut on Friday and soared in popularity, but there was one problem, as CNN reports: it was published by Home of Anime rather than the actual owner of Pokemon, Nintendo.Continue reading...

In the contemporary version of a sales brochure, Volkswagen has released an iPad app to support the 2012 Golf R. Dubbed the Volkswagen Golf R Drivers Forever iPad app, it aims to give the really interested fan or prospective buyer (according to the press release) "everything you've ever wanted to know about the all-new 2012 Golf R, from the storied history of the Golf model and the community that rallies around it, to the elite engineers of Volkswagen R GmbH, this app covers it all."

Microsoft (so far) is letting this leaked glimpse at Skype's upcoming iPad app remain on YouTube.

Plenty of marketers have learned the beauty of the contextual ad: pushing a coupon to a consumer on his or her smartphone when he or she walks by the specific store. Now, Adobe is suggesting that marketers should step it up a notch and offer contextual apps.

Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch demonstrated the use of such apps at the Open Mobile Summit in London, showing how they could change “depending on their exact location, who they are near, and which other devices are close by,” Marketing Week reports.

Lynch (as you can watch below) showed off the notion of "Apps near you," and “how a mobile user arriving at the Tate Modern could be presented with an app to guide him around the gallery and point out the latest exhibitions,” MW notes.

Then the consumer could go to the café and order lunch through the app rather than dealing with the waitstaff. If a friend came to the café and sat nearby, the app would notify the person that their friend was nearby. (If the app then picked up the tab and listened to your woes, who needs the friend?)Continue reading...

Project Emporia from Microsoft Research FUSE Labs (short for FUture Social Experiences Labs) and England's Cambridge University is a mobile news reader that aggregates stories from the social web.

Created as a Twitter app, the project evolved into a mobile search app for Windows 7 devices. Users can customize the feeds and vote up or down the headlines pulled in, as the app serves up a continuous stream of fresh content based on the community.Continue reading...