The Apple App Store's ban on third-party apps that include location-based advertising has added a new twist to the exciting war movie - er, the contest to gain ad revenue - that developers have been watching with a mixture of trepidation and cynicism, writes Christopher Backeberg...

Paid location-based apps for Blackberry cost almost twice as much as Apple's paid LBS apps. This is one of the findings in a report by Distimo, in conjunction with Skyhook Wireless, on the top downloads and pricing trends from the leading app stores.

 

Apple has just logged iPhone app number 100,000 into the iTunes store - and not surprisingly, location-based services (LBS) are only sparsely represented among the huge selection of apps now available.

The reason this comes as no surprise is that none of the app stores for any smartphones carry a large percentage of LBS apps. And as testers and reviewers have found out, the number of really good LBS apps for any make of phone or mobile operating system is low indeed.

The online GPS Business News interviewed Fraser Campbell, CEO at Wcities, a company that provides digital content for travel and tourism. Campbell will be talking at the MetaPlaces conference in San Jose, California, on September 22-23, about the monetisation of location-based content.

No likely winner has emerged yet in the Apple-Google dispute over Google Voice. There appear to be only losers so far, writes Christopher Backeberg, and they are the American iPhone users...

The new Sweb Apps service from Sweb Development turns anyone into an iPhone app builder. No technical expertise is necessary - it's as easy as following a set of menu prompts.

Palm Pre users should be pleased and maybe relieved to learn that the Palm will open its app store for the Pre next month. The Pre launched with a much lower number of available apps than other new smartphones