Apple has found an unexpected, underserved cohort of consumers who can't get enough of the iPad — animals.

According to the Associated Press, six orangutans at Miami's Jungle Island are using iPads as part of an experiment in communication and mental stimulus. Their adoption habits pattern that of humans.

"Our young ones pick up on it. They understand it. It's like,`Oh I get this,'" said Linda Jacobs, who oversees the program. "Our two older ones, they just are not interested. I think they just figure, `I've gotten along just fine in this world without this communication-skill here and the iPad, and I don't need a computer.'"Continue reading...

Tired of carrying a stack of loyalty cards with you everywhere? Well, your mobile phone is calling with a solution. 

Like pretty much everything else a consumer desires, the data from your loyalty programs can be stored on your mobile phone. And now, if you happen to spend any time in Singapore, you can use it to keep track of just how loyal you are to Subway. 

QSRweb reports that customers at more than 80 Subways with phones on any Apple iOS or Android-based operation system can join the Pointpal program and earn themselves a free six-inch Subway meal after collecting eight stamps. If you sign up in the next month, you get two stamps right off the bat.

"We want to continually innovate and provide the best possible customer experience and this is increasingly around a mobile loyalty rewards program,” stated Sarah Lee, franchisee of 10 Subway restaurants in Singapore. “Customers are rewarded for their purchases, and can use their mobile phone to capture and redeem these rewards across participating franchisees and as part of this local-store marketing activity.Continue reading...

Amazon.com is joining the market invented and led by Google and Apple, testing a service that lets users subscribe and/or purchase in-app items.

Mobile app sales from downloaded software have proven a viable revenue stream for companies and developers. The burgeoning in-app market is projected to reach $5.6 billion in revenue in 2015, up from $970 million in 2011, according to Isuppli.

Amazon could use mobile app sales to generate more business for its Kindle Fire tablet, but the company lags behind Google and Apple, with about 1400 apps in its Amazon Appstore, compared to over 450,000 each for Google and Apple. Continue reading...

Tattoos are far more socially acceptable now than they were a few decades ago and some brilliant mind at Nokia saw this as an opportunity for the company: Why not tap into the vast body-art marketplace out there with some cool technology?

The idea is that the tattoo and a user’s phone could communicate with each other so that when the person gets a call, text, email, or whatever, he or she could feel a little buzz in the tattoo.

Nokia (according to CNET) filed for a patent with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office last September to use magnetic waves to create the effect, which could also produce an invisible tattoo, apparently, if the person wasn’t interested in sticking Mom on his or her shoulder or a scene from “Where the Wild Things Are” across his or her back.Continue reading...

Close to 50 years ago, the British musical scene invaded America. Now an American music icon is seeing what kind of cultural damage it can do across the pond.

In an effort to maintain its coolness with teen consumers, MTV has launched a new mobile app called MTV Under The Thumb that “allows users to watch MTV on-demand content simultaneously with friends and chat about it in the app at the same time,” according to Econsultancy.com.

As unveiled at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the co-viewing app launches this month in seven European countries  for Android and iPhone users. Users can also use their smartphones as a remote control and watch the content in a Web browser on a computer, the site notes, as well as share their favorite shows via Facebook.Continue reading...

The Nokia Lumia 800 is sure doing everything it can to promote itself - even if it means projecting a free light show onto a huge skyscraper with musical guest deadmau5, or constructing a 32 foot version of the phone. (Not to mention the 55 foot Windows phone put up in New York's Herald Square.)

The towering Lumia 800 is currently on view in Paris, France, on the city's famed Avenue des Champs-Élysées (where residents and visitors can also check out Absolut's subtle outdoor advertising). This is the first Windows Phone that Nokia has produced, and it's hard to speculate how well it will do until Nokia releases their Q4 financial results.Continue reading...

Panasonic Corp. is having a rough go these days. The expectation is that it will have a $5.5 billion annual loss, Reuters reports, even though it announced in October that it was going to ditch its loss-making television division. 

Panasonic also announced that it would move away from consumer electronics and into green technology, but the siren song of the growing smartphone industry has apparently enticed Panasonic to throw its efforts into that ring.

Reuters reports that Panasonic will introduce a new smartphone in Europe in 2012 and then roll the unit out into the U.S. and Asia with the goal of selling 15 million of the phones annually by the end of the fiscal year that finishes up in March of 2016. 

The challenge, of course, is that the smartphone business is already saturated with powerhouses and two of them — Apple and Samsung — so dominate the industry that it makes it difficult for even such brands as HTC, the world’s fourth-largest smartphone manufacturer, to turn a large profit, Reuters notes.Continue reading...

Oscar Wilde’s infamous 1889 essay, The Decay of Lying, gave us the notion that "Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life." The art of texting and tweeting, now an inextricable part of our everyday lives, has moved beyond imitation to reality as one more taboo against the 24/7 smartphone tether consuming our world bites the dust.

A concert hall in Seattle is the harbinger of things to come, choosing to embrace texting and tweeting before and during the curtain’s rise. Tateuchi Center, Bellevue, Washington, scheduled to open in 2014, will be wired to allow patrons to post updates to Twitter and Facebook.

The 2,000-seat venue plans a laissez-faire phone policy, all in the hopes of drawing a younger audience accustomed to smartphone usage anywhere, anytime.

It may indeed be generational. Older theater-goers have hoped for stricter policies against phone usage, but newer paradigms, like Tateuchi, are proposing that a cell phone etiquette will emerge — given a place to flourish, in a non-disruptive way, without censure.Continue reading...