This just in – people like playing games on their iPads. In fact, one-third of all iPad-only applications are games at this point. Also in today’s iPad Industry Roundup, we look at the crush Rupert Murdoch and Newscorp have on the iPad, preview Apple’s mobile advertising platform, and and give a fist bump to PayPal and its iPhone app updates that has been downloaded one million times in three weeks.
Games rule, and more early iPad app stats
While it is not surprising that one-third of iPad-only applications available in the iTunes App Store during the first day of the iPad’s availability are games. Game developers for months have identified the iPad as their primary mobile platform. One such newspaper that has almost always charged for its digital content is the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ’s iPad app, but requires weekly or monthly subscriptions to dig into its articles on any meaningful basis.
Newcorp, which owns the WSJ, is run by Australian newspaper scion and global media mogul Rupert Murdoch. As someone who understand early the opportunities and creative destruction the Internet and digital publishing would bring to the newspaper industry, it is notable that Murdoch is quite smitten with Apple’s new tablet computer.
“It may well be the saving of the newspaper industry”, he told the National Press Club in Washington earlier this week. “”There’s going to be tens of millions of these things sold all over the world.”
Innovation on the iPhone
Tomorrow’s iPhone developer event will likely unleash the next front in the increasingly hot war between Apple and Google. As speculated by All Things Digital, Apple’s entry in to the still nascent mobile advertising space will instantly alter the competitive landscape and perhaps inspire Google to “tell the FTC” what it thinks about Apple’s encroachment into the territory.
Three weeks after incorporating a feature from Bump Technologies that allows consumers to process payment transactions merely by touching devices, PayPal just registered the one millionth download of its new and improved iPhone application.
