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xScope, Fantastical, more available for just $10 in new MacHeist bundle
The latest bundle from MacHeist has just gone live, and it's a good one. There are six apps in the bundle, and they're a steal at a price of just US$9.99: You'll get the great xScope measuring tools for designers, Fantastical's excellent calendar app, Boinx's stupendous iStopMotion, tutorial-maker Clarify, invoice-creator Totals and CleanMyMac 2, which will help clean all sorts of old cache files and cruft out of your system. In addition to those (any one of which is worth the price as-is), the excellent indie game Little Inferno is set to be added to the bundle at 10K sales, and PathFinder should also be added in at some point. Plus, there are two more spaces on the site for more apps, and 10 percent of your purchase will go to charity, so there's quite a few reasons to just go grab it now and treat yourself to some excellent Mac software. And if that's not enough, there's also a Name Your Own Price Mac bundle sale going on over on Stack Social, where you can get 10 more great Mac apps (including CrossOver 12, DiskTools Pro and Paperless) all for a price you name yourself. If you beat the average (currently $7.77), you get all 10 apps, so if you combine this with the MacHeist deal, you could pick up 18 of the best apps on the Mac for under $20. It's a great day to be a Mac owner for sure.
2011 boasts record holiday season for online shopping, especially from mobile devices
2011 has only just ended, but I have a sneaking suspicion that even when we look back on it in another 12 months from now, we'll find a pretty revolutionary year in terms of the quality and quantity of our shopping. For example, UI expert and project leader Luke Wroblewski has compiled a list of facts about shopping during the holiday season last year, and the list provides a lot of solid insight on just how different 2011 was. Online buying was up both on Christmas Day and during the holiday season as a whole, and a large percentage of that buying was done with mobile devices. Over 90 percent of mobile device shopping was done with iPads and iPhones, making 2011 a really landmark year in how we use these devices to make purchases and spend money. Spending on these devices wasn't always for material goods, either. App downloads were up by 125 percent on Christmas Day last year, which makes it a record day not only for 2011, but for the history of both the iOS and Android marketplaces. The week ending December 18 and the last shopping weekend before Christmas were both record periods for spending overall. In other words, this past holiday season was kind of a landmark in more than a few different ways. We'll have to see how the industry reacts to this next year; there will likely be an even bigger emphasis on spending and shopping from mobile devices in the future.
$345 million invested in virtual worlds so far this year
"There's gold in them thar online worlds!" That, at least, is the diagnosis of the guys over at TechCrunch Virtual Worlds Management (they're actually the ones who did the research for second quarter) -- they tallied up all the money given to virtual world developers this year, and ended up at a whopping $345 million. That is a lot of investment dollars sunk into worlds that don't exist -- about the gross domestic product of Western Africa's Guinea-Bissau. Which, come to think of it, doesn't sound quite as impressive as we'd hoped, but still, venture capitalists clearly think this online thing might have staying power.Turbine was one of the big winners so far this year -- their $40 million investment will give the Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online developer lots of leeway in their "business strategy shift." But 9You, as previously reported on this very site, was the biggest cash-in so far this year -- $100 million was passed out to them to work on its product called GTown.Of course, investment only means so much, and there are only so many hours in the day people can spent in virtual environments. Some of this money is being thrown away. But we're only halfway through 2008, and deals are being brokered left and right -- it's a virtual world boom!
