Best links - week 8

Facebook Announces Credits Terms For Developers (via @jaggeree)

Facebook will soon roll Facebook Credits out to even more application developers, so it has publicly announced that it will take 30% of the revenues earned for goods sold via Facebook Credits, reports All Facebook and Mashable.

Long Tail iTunes Book Apps Are More Expensive

O'Reilly Research has put together animated graphics that trace the evolution of prices in the iTunes Book category. In Q3-2009 the book category exceeded 10,000 paid apps. Long tail book apps have on average tended to be more expensive than their more popular counterparts.

Twitter Ad Platform 'Imminent'

According to chief executive officer and co-founder of socialmedia.com, Seth Goldstein, Twitter is planning to launch an advertising platform in about a month, reports Media Post. Twitter representatives confirm that they are working on an ad platform, but claims that the platform is "only in the test phase".

Twitter and Yahoo Strike Content-Sharing Deal

Twitter has sealed a content-sharing deal with Yahoo, reports The Los Angeles Times. The deal is a wide-ranging content-sharing deal that will place Twitter information all across Yahoo's properties, although the exact details have not yet been disclosed. Mashable has some addition information.

Walmart Buys Digital Home Video Service Vudu

Walmart is about to make a move into the field of digital home entertainment: the company has confirmed that it is buying online/embedded movie service Vudu. No financial terms have been disclosed but rumor has it that it is around $100 million. paidcontentUK has the full story.

3D-Capable TVs to Achieve 1.2M+ Shipments in 2010, 15.6M in 2013 (via @jaggeree)

In the newly launched Quarterly TV Design and Features Report, DisplaySearch predicts that the number of 3D-ready TVs globally will grow from 0.2 million units in 2009 to 64 million units in 2018.

Modern Warfare 2 Sales Top $1 billion (via @enckelli)

Slightly old news, but still breathtaking: In November 2009, game company Activision released their biggest success so far, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, in stores around the world.  The game brought in approximately $550 million in its first five days and after only two months the $1 billion dollar mark was passed. To compare: Modern Warfare 2 has garnered "nearly as much as the entire US console and handheld gaming industry brought in for the month of October 2009".

Smartphone Sales Up 24 Percent, iPhone's Share Nearly Doubled Last Year

Last year, Apple's iPhone nearly doubled its worldwide market share of smart phone sales to 14.4%, up 6.2 percentage points from 2008, writes TechCrunch. The figures come from the latest market share report by Gartner.

Mobile Cloud Computing: $9.5 Billion by 2014

According to a recent study from Juniper Research, the market for cloud-based mobile applications will grow with 88% the next five years. The market was just over $400 million in 2009 and is expected to reach $9.5 billion in 2014.

Here's Who's Paying For All Your Free Content Online

Business Insider has the list of which US advertisers are spending the most money online in 2009. Phone companies AT&T (US$ 84,336) and Verizon (US$ 56,818) bought the most. All according to comScore.

A Collection of Social Network Stats for 2010

Altimeter partner/analyst Jeremiah Owyang has put together a great collection of social network statistics for 2010. The list will be updated continuously during the year.

BBC iPlayer Traffic Doubled In Last 12 Months

The popularity of BBC's iPlayer service keeps growing. January UK requests doubled from last year to 120.3 million, writes paidcontentUK.

How Publishers Charge for Digital Content

Content manager Alistair Bruce from MSN UK has put together a great summary of how 34 publishers charge for content, as well as the consequences of the different methods. 

People Will Still Pay for (Access to) Content

Forrester Research's Vice President James McQuivey discusses the fact that he believes consumers pay for access to content rather than for content itself and says: "If I were making media company decisions I would immediately reevaluate my strategy in light of this, asking myself these questions: 1) what unique content can I provide and expand access to? 2) what connections and devices must I support or partner with to make sure my content is in the right access venues? 3) what experience can I wrap around my content to make access to it feel worth paying for?"

FarmVille Surpasses 80 Million Users (via @JohnEi)

Mashable reports that Zynga's Facebook game FarmVille surpassed 80 million monthly active users this week (Facebook has 400 million users in total). Currently, the number of active users is growing by around 10 million users per month.

Video Games Score 5% of U.S. Household Entertainment Budget

Nielsen Games has surveyed more than 3,000 U.S. consumers in order to examine their overall entertainment spend. The results indicate that the video game category represents 5% of total U.S. households' entertainment spending; 9% in households that are active game consumers.

When It Comes To iPhone Games, What Sells Is Action, Adventure, and Arcade

At the recent the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona, mobile app analytics startup Distimo presented some interesting statistics, reports TechCrunch. For example, the iPhone App Store grew by 13,865 apps between December 2009 and January 2010, whereas the Android app store grew by 3,005 new apps and Nokia Ovi with 734. Android is the fastest growing App store and the Android market has more free apps (57 %) than Apple (25%).

Miscellaneous:

Be Lucky - It's an Easy Skill to Learn

20 key trends at Mobile World Congress 2010: 1-10

E3 2009: Project Natal Milo demo (via @jonasfrid) [YouTube]