Brain Hood

A new report by Market Research Group shows that Apple Distimo is now three months Mac App Store is off to a slower start than their counterparts IOS in terms of some volume, however, is more an indicator of playability and more on the Mac OS platform.

The report follows data from the App Store on IOS and Mac OS, Google also evaluates the Market, Microsoft Windows 7 Phone App World Marketplace BlackBerry, Nokia, Ovi, catalog and Palm App for the month of February.

According to Distimo, the Mac App Store reached 2,225 applications in two months, which was about a quarter of what the iPad had in app volume during the same time period. Even given the smaller pool of apps, the report found that developers who have their application in the Mac App Store’s top 300 rankings generate “half the revenue of a top 300 iPad app on average.”

Part of the reason for those centers on pricing. Just 12 percent of applications on the Mac App Store were free at the time of the report, leaving the rest in the paid category. That’s compared to a split of 35 percent free and 65 percent paid of iPhone and iPod Touch apps, and a 29 percent free and 71 percent paid split for the iPad.

One very important tidbit about pricing is that the average price of the top 300 Mac App Store paid apps is much higher than their iPhone and iPad counterparts.

“The average selling price of the top 300 applications is seven times higher in the Mac App Store ($11.21) than on the iPhone ($1.57) and almost three times higher than on the iPad ($4.19),” Distimo said.

While the report doesn’t spell out why this may be the case, one of the reasons the App Store on the iOS side was so disruptive in the first place was that developers tended to price their mobile applications lower that had been the norm on other platforms–especially compared to desktop software. While there have been numerous cases of developers proving that wrong with lower pricing for App Store apps (including Apple, which charges $80 for Aperture on the App Store, vs. $199 for the boxed version), many still charged the same, with some even going higher to make up for part of the proceeds going to Apple.

Along with the numbers of pricing and application volume, Distimo makes note that the Mac App Store library is venturing in the same direction as it is on iOS, with games seeing a rise in popularity.

“In the Mac App Store, gaming is still less popular than on the iPhone and iPad, with iPad having over 50 percent more games listed among the most popular applications than the Mac App Store,” the report says. “However, the popularity of games in the Mac App Store combined with the fact that there are already 646 games in the store, signals the Mac App Store could boost Mac gaming.”

By comparison, Valve’s Steam platform, which lets users download digital copies of games, has a library of 176 titles available for download. Unlike games purchased on the Mac App Store, these can be played on both the PC and Mac, and pack on social features through the Steam game client. Valve launched Steam for the Mac in May of last year.

Mac App Store library is now at about 2,867 applications AppShopper tracker third parties. In addition, Apple’s own applications dominate the list of top 15 paid 99 cents face-time path followed by Xcode, iPhoto, Pages, iMovie, Keynote, Aperture, GarageBand, and the number of different third-party applications in between.

Play station online game save storage launched March 10. A couple of huge announcements were released in the gaming world today as Sony expands its functions KINECTS More PlayStation and Microsoft Xbox 360, get the Guinness World Record for the biggest selling consumer electronics peripherals.

Sony will launch an online storage space for the PS3 game saves in the morning, which will be part of the annual fee of $ 50. This new feature allows users with a space of 150 MB in the cloud at the disposal of 1,000 store files and copy files can be saved prohibited as long as users can recover files deleted from their system once per day.

In addition, games to be released in the future will be able to save directly to the PlayStation Network. This will be released tomorrow in PS3 firmware v3.60, allowing users to completely bypass their local HDD.

While PlayStation gamers celebrate the new features unveiling tomorrow, Microsoft has some celebrating of its own to do.

Microsoft announced today that KINECTS for Xbox 360 was named the fastest selling consumer electronics device of Guinness World Records. To date, 10 million sensors sold worldwide KINECTS, with another 10 million self KINECTS games sold to date.

MWEB discusses an effort to boost online games offered by your Internet service.

MWEB has been stirring things in the local Internet market in the last year. They were the first to bring affordable broadband service cuts back in March 2010, and recently (November 2010), they made a stand at the high costs of local transit in South Africa rather be free and open peering agreements.

Despite protests that have sprung up around this feature has now got MWEB offers open and peering between most major carriers, including Internet Solutions, MTN and Vodacom Business. Only Telkom Saix network has yet to yield to pressure peering MWEB.

The peering war of November 2010 was a time of uncertainty for gamers, with MWEB customers wondering how their latencies would be affected.

Now that peering agreements have been struck between three of the four major network providers, the MWEB ISP gaming division looks to be turning their sights to bolstering their service appeal for the gaming community; likely an attempt to convert this important segment of the market to their Internet service.

MWEB has recently advertised a position for an ‘Online Gaming Manager’ giving us a hint as to their plans. Some key elements of the job speak of a new ‘MWEB gaming strategy and the implementation thereof,’ ‘content implementation for MWEB gaming sites (web and mobile),’ and mention of ‘gaming products and services.’

Derek Hershaw, CEO of MWEB ISP, discussed how MWEB will be expanding into the online gaming space.

“We’ve definitely identified online gaming as a key part of our strategy going forward, with a focus on MMOG [(massive multiplayer online gaming)] rather than casual gaming.  And now that we have a much bigger portion of the end-to-end access layer under our own control, we’re in a better position to manage and support the customer experience,” said Hershaw.

The end-to-end access layer speaks of the equipment used to transmit data traffic. With this section of a network under their control, MWEB can reduce third party costs and interferences.

Hershaw discussed some of the steps that MWEB has taken to bolster their online gaming service offering.

“The launch of affordable Uncapped ADSL has and will continue to play a significant role,” said Hershaw. This is indeed true, as an uncapped connection opens up a world of fixed cost opportunities for both PC and console gamers.

“The fact that [MWEB now has] a 2-node IPC network [(Cape Town and Johannesburg)] has also helped tremendously in terms of reducing latency (the closer the aggregation points are to the customer the better),” explained Hershaw. Previously, Cape Town based MWEB users would have to make a data round-trip to Johannesburg and back. The implementation of an IPC node in Cape Town has improved the latency for Cape Town users.

“We are hosting (exclusively) COD Black Ops in our CT and JHB data centres, and we plan to add even more titles in the very near future. We have just deployed our own Steam servers in CT and JHB,” said Hershaw.

The addition of Steam content mirrors to the MWEB network is great news for those using MWEB ISP, as this means that Steam data content will be served from a local source, reducing download and response times. It will also reduce the costs incurred by MWEB for traffic utilised on international undersea cables, hopefully reducing service costs to the end-user in the long run.

When asked about the possibility for gamer specific products which may feature services such as prioritised gaming traffic, Hershaw said: “I think that if we can continue to bring popular titles onto our own network – hosted locally – then we won’t need to look at traffic prioritisation and gamer specific products. Our standard uncapped ADSL products will give our customers a great experience – that’s what we want to achieve.”

Speaking of plans to overhaul the current MWEB Gamezone portal Hershaw said: “We have plans in place to overhaul the site. Not only in terms of gaming specific content but also the levels of engagement we have with our customers and that they have amongst themselves.”

“Gambling is a social experience and the site can’t escape that. It is not necessarily a big bang approach, but gradually in the coming months we will begin the introduction of new functions & services” Hershaw said.