Smart, the iconic automotive brand, has launched its first iPhone application which brings to life the extensive customisation capabilities of Smart’s new design service, BRABUS tailor made.

Inspired by smart BRABUS tailor made, a service which gives owners the chance to put their individual stamp on their car, the smart car designer iPhone application allows users to virtually create the smart of their dreams.

There are four in-built design features; ‘design your own’, ‘surprise me’, ‘find your inner smart’ and ‘save’

• The ‘design your own’ option allows smart fans to instantly customise a variety of exterior and interior sections of the car to create their very own individual smart
• For those looking for some design inspiration, users can simply shake their device to create a differently styled smart. The ‘surprise me’ option responds to movement, meaning the more vigorously it’s shook, the more the design will vary
• For a bit of fun, users can find their ‘inner smart’ by taking a quick personality quiz to establish which smart model they are most like
• With the ‘save’ option, previous designs from ‘design your own’ and ‘surprise me’ can then be stored to a personal gallery for editing or viewing at a later date. ‘Find your inner smart’ designs can also be saved. Users can browse the ‘Showroom’  to view other users’  designs and share their own with friends and family via email or MMS

Smart car designer application features

Design your own smart fortwo

• Custom design a smart fortwo using any colour in the RGB spectrum. Colour 13 different components of the exterior and 7 components of the interior
• Reset the colours at any point with a single tap
• Switch from interior to exterior with a single tap
• Colour picker remembers up to three of your recently used colours for easy reselection of your favourite colour

Surprise me!

• Simply shake your iPhone to generate a randomly styled smart car. The harder you shake it the more customisation occurs
• Works on interior and exterior shots

Find your inner smart

• Answer three personality and lifestyle questions and smart car designer will match you with a specially designed smart modelled on a selection of iconic cars from the past and the present.
• 20 different possible routes with 20 different results
• Save and share the pre-designed smart you are presented with

Save

• Save your designs to your personal gallery on your own phone
• Save your  designs to a public gallery
• Browse designs from other app users throughout the UK in the public gallery
• Rate other users designs (1-5)
• View designs by:
  • Your designs
  • Public designs
  • Highest rated
• Save other people’s designs to your phone
• Share your designs by emailing them or sending an MMS from your photo gallery on your phone

The smart car designer application can be downloaded free from the App Store for use on iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. 

We’d heard the rumours that one million users grab Opera for iPhone but just couldn’t understand why so many tech savvy people out there would want Don Giovanni or Tosca!

Seriously though folks, the gurus from Norway must be over the moon the over a million of us have downloaded the mini version of their Opera software suite.

Up to know, we’ve had two choices – Safari or no browsing.  Three weeks ago Apple was asked to approve Opera Mini and we now have pages that are drawn from compressed servers, meaning much faster response times for iPhone and iPod users.

“We were at the top of the charts of every 22 App Stores,” said Dag Olav Norem of Opera.

Norem wouldn’t tell us the figures by region but it is clear that the USA and UK were at the forefront of their minds, given the iPhone user base in those countries.

Opera Mini is in the App Store now !

We all love to digg and be dugg and can now do so on the move. Digg have released a free iPhone app that means we can get up and coming articles and news events on the go. The free app also allows users to add comments and save things locally to look at later.

Digg have inevitable included tie-ins with the normal social bookmarking sites and Digg users can access their accounts on the fly.

Get the Digg iPhone app from iTunes, we certainly digg it!

Even after the emergence of several competitors, demand for the iPhone is only increasing and hence so is the demand for free iPhone Apps. One would wonder, after developing the perfect iPhone application, what are the best ways to put it out there and make it sell putting into consideration that there is fierce competition from other developers? What are the ways to make it stand out and catch the attention of buyers?

Below are 10 ways to easily promote an iPhone Application:1. Create a YouTube account and make a good Demo Video for your application. Ensure that you promote this and you get some views. You can do this by back linking from your blog or articles.
2. Use a name that is catchy, interesting and easy to remember.
3. Offer a free trial. This will make sure that your buyers have a chance to experience what you are selling to them for some days before making the actual purchase.
4. Use social networking sites like twitter and face book to promote your application.
5. Place an ad on Craigslist.
6. Use Word of mouth to Promote your App. This can involve telling your friends and relatives about it.
7. Send out a press release to media houses.
8. Create a website for your application.
9. Use Google PPC and make campaigns that will link to your website.
10. Use Social Bookmarking sites like Digg.com and Stumbleupon.com to promote your App.

If you follow the above tips and implement them well, you will rest assured that your iPhone application gets the attention it deserves and you also get to make some sales from it!

Wow, amazing if it’s true (albeit limited to the USA), take a look at this article reproduced in full from Bits …..

A recently released app that offers free text messages on the iPhoneis welcome news to parents of teenagers upset over the cellphone bills of their hypertexting children. But can it be a sustainable business?

TextPlus is a free iPhone 3GS  application that offers unlimited free text messaging from iPhones or iPod Touches and includes group text messaging. It is the first app from Gogii, a start-up backed by $5.2 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’ iFund, which invests in firms making iPhone applications.

iPhone or iPod Touch users can download the app free from the iPhone app store. Then they can send as many text messages as they want to other phones that use any carrier. TextPlus pays the text messaging bill to AT&T in exchange for showing ads to its users. (Though the iPod Touch does not have cellphone capability, textPlus users can send texts from the device over the Web and Gogii converts them and delivers them to the recipients.)

Since textPlus came out in June, its 800,000 monthly users have traded 80 million text messages, with the flow currently about 1.6 million a day. All those texts get expensive for Gogii, which pays AT&T for them to be sent. Scott Lahman, Gogii’s chief executive, concedes that the revenue from ads so far does not come close to the amount of money Gogii pays AT&T.

“Free texting does not work and would not work,” Mr. Lahman said. “We think of it more as sponsored texting. And I don’t think our texting would be monetizable if not for the rich app” provided by the iPhone, he said.

Mr. Lahman thinks textPlus has some advantages that will enable it to make more money from advertising than mobile Web services have so far been able to do. For one, about two-thirds of its users are teenagers, which makes sense, since the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that texting is teenagers’ top communication activity.

“Advertisers have lately been scratching their heads about how to reach teens,” Mr. Lahman said. “Text is the way they want to be reached.”

He also plans to experiment with different text-message ad models. “We’re trying to innovate the text platform, but we’re just as eager to innovate the ad platform,” he said.

Today, most of the ads on textPlus — and on the mobile Web as a whole — appear as banner ads on the app, placed through mobile ad networks like AdMob and Quattro Wireless.

Soon, though, Gogii plans to offer its own ads, including some within text messages. These will go beyond banner ads and could include SMS ads or video, for example. Mr. Lahman said Gogii would also survey its users to find out which types of ads are acceptable to them and which kinds of companies they are interested in hearing from.

Though Gogii expects advertising to be its main revenue stream, it will also have others, possibly including selling virtual goods or offering a paid version with additional features.

Mr. Lahman and his Gogii co-founders, Austin Murray and Zachary Norman, also co-founded Jamdat Mobile, a mobile gaming company that sold paid games. It went public in 2004 and was sold to EA for $680 million in 2006.

Free, ad-supported text messaging could have traction, said Charles S. Golvin, a principal analyst at Forrester Research who studies the mobile market. The cost of sending text messages is decreasing and mobile advertising is growing.

“It’s not going to rival broadcast TV advertising, but I think it’s going to grow steadily, because this really is a very personal channel,” he said. “If you do a good job, you can give them very relevant and timely advertising.”

Still, he questions whether advertisers will want to reach a group of people who do not want to pay the relatively low prices that carriers now offer for unlimited texting. “You have to ask: how attractive is that category of consumer to the people who are trying to advertise to them?” he said.

Gogii hopes to eventually negotiate a deal with the cellphone carriers to share ad revenue with them instead of paying them per text message.

Mr. Golvin is skeptical. Carriers are extremely interested in finding other revenue streams, particularly advertising, he said. But “they have designs on being that enabler of advertising to their customer directly,” not through a third party like Gogii.

Facebook for iPhone has just the big 3.0 – the new version is a major update to the social networking app, with lots of new features. read on for more details of one of the premier timewasting apps for the iPhone.

The new Facebook app has just hit the App Store, bringing with it some great new features and some improvements to the existing one.

The new iPhone app has much better photo handling – you can zoom into opics, create new photo albums and upload photos to any album. 3GS owners will now be able to upload video directly from thei phones too.A new home screen will let you arrange profiles into different pages that you can flip between just like the iPhone home screen.

The app also integrates better into the ‘phone’ function of your iPhone. You will be able to call or message people directly from your Friends list and you will no longer lose messages that you were typing when you get an incoming call.

Some users are reporting that the App Store is still listing version 2.5 as current – if this happens to you, you can delete the app from your phone and then download it again – you shuld get the correct version 3.0.

Source: Mirror UK