comScore’s new mobile behavioral measurement service, Mobile Metrix 2.0, has revealed that the lion’s share of media engagement comes from apps. I don’t find this to be surprising, as apps are usually much easier to use versus most mobile site counterparts. However, I was a bit surprised to learn that as much as 82 percent of time spent with mobile media happens via apps. That’s a pretty high percentage and makes having a mobile app for your media almost a necessity.

Apple’s explosive success since the launch of the iPad has helped propel the company higher up the ladder of of the Fortune 500. This year the company broke into the top 20 – nabbing the number 17 spot.

The higher ranking shows consistent growth by Apple – last year the company broke into the top 50 to land at number 35. In 2010 and 2009, the company scored 56 and 71 respectively.

It’s likely this would be an entirely different story if Steve Jobs was still at Apple’s helm, but the Cupertino company has now agreed to drop a number of its infringement claims against Samsung, roughly cutting the case in half, in a bid to ensure that a trial goes ahead this summer.

Likewise, Samsung has agreed to do the same — dropping five of its 12 complaints  — but both companies continue to bicker over the “copycat products” that have made Samsung the world’s number one smartphone vendor. 

NFC isn’t a new technology. Android and BlackBerry phones with NFC capabilities have been available for a while now and various companies have started looking at implementing NFC as a mobile payment or digital wallet solution. Google Wallet being the most well-known while MasterCard’s new PayPass Wallet Services, which the company announced on Monday is the newest and potentially broadest in scope

Apple, however, hasn’t shown much interest in adding NFC to the iPhone. The lack of NFC hasn’t kept mobile payment options off the iPhone – as we’ve recently reported T.G.I. Fridays and Tabbedout, Boston’s light rail commuter service, and AmTrak have all moved to offer mobile payments using the Starbucks app/virtual card model.

A new deal between Apple and location-based deals startup Pirq, to offer daily food and drink deals to the company’s employees in silicon valley could be a sign of Apple testing the waters with both a deals network and whether such ecommerce options make sense for iPhone users.

Recent data shows that nearly half of all companies offer or provide Macs to employees and that the Macs represent about 7% computers in the workplace. That’s according to a Forrester report that was issued last month and that prompted me to write a feature about how deploying and managing large Mac populations in enterprise environments differs significantly from supporting a handful of Macs.

In that that article, I covered a lot of the tools IT departments rely on to handle large scale Mac deployments. Knowing what those tools are is a great starting point, but there are also several key skills that IT professionals managing and/or supporting Macs in business need regardless of whether they’re dealing with a half dozen Macs or upwards of a thousand.

Back from when the internet was too slow for video, we had animated GIFs. Now, in the days of fiber connections and YouTube, we still trade GIFs. Or we would, if we actually knew how to make them.

Enter Gifture, an Instagram-a-like app which makes animated GIFs instead of still photos. It shoots sequences, puts them together and lets you apply filter before sending them off to the web to share.

Sprint CEO Dan Hesse has handed back $3.25 million of his own salary in a bid to appease shareholders who have been upset by the carrier’s iPhone deal with Apple. Shareholders spoke out against the arrangement when it was discovered that Sprint did not consider the financial effect of carrying the iPhone when it calculated employee bonuses.

Meet iCandy, a device with one, simple purpose: distracting children. The iCandy is a bracket that screws into the bottom of your SLR camera and holds your iPhone out in front of it, ready to entertain children and stop them from getting bored during portrait sessions. Think of it as a kind of digital version of the plush Mickey Mouses held up by ambidextrous photographers of the past.

If you’ve been following along at home, you’ll have made several changes to your Mac via the Terminal app. Surely you’re tracking all these changes on a spreadsheet, right? I mean, what if you wanted to go back and find out what changes you’ve made? How else would you track it than by laboriously typing out each change by hand in some sort of database? Well, today’s tip will show you how to automate this process and put all your changes into a text file automatically.

PlayForge, the developers behind the popular undead farming sim Zombie Farm, have confirmed that a sequel will make its App Store debut within the coming weeks, bringing plenty of “changes and upgrades.” It’ll also let you transfer all of the progress you’ve already made in Zombie Farm — including your stock of brains — so that you can pick up right where you left off.

Twitpic, the photo-sharing service for Twitter, has finally gotten its own standalone app. You can use is to post pictures to Twitter from your iPhone, and you can also browse previous photos you have uploaded to the service (and you probably will have some there already, as many Twitter apps use Twitpic).

You can also use the app as a client to browse photos taken by people you follow on Twitter.

We’d usually advise jailbreakers to avoid Apple’s iOS updates just after their release, until hackers have confirmed that the latest software can be jailbroken. But one report claims that it’s perfectly safe to update your A4-powered devices to iOS 5.1.1 without losing your Redsn0w jailbreak.

One of the features iPad users have been consistently calling for since the device made its debut back in 2010 is multi-user support, which would allow families and small businesses to share one device between a group of people who all have their own account, with their own wallpaper, their own apps, and their own settings.

According to one iOS developer who recently contacted Apple about this feature, the Cupertino company is aware of the issue, and it is currently being “investigated by engineering.”

Apple’s iPhone is about to be implemented into the American railroad system in a big way. Amtrak, the government agency that oversees the nation’s train services, will be adopting the iPhone as a digital ticket scanner. The 1,700 conductors who currently work for Amtrak have been undergoing training with the iPhone since November, and the new initiative will be fully rolled out by late summer.

Good news for potential iPad buyers: Apple has slashed $20-$50 off refurbished first and second generation iPads in its online store. The original iPad and iPad 2 models are now being offered at significant price reductions in different color and storage variants.

When Daniel Chase Hooper posted the concept for his simple text editing technique on the iPad, he most likely had no clue it would snowball into something so huge. After nearly every tech site on the internet posted the concept, a jailbreak tweak was made available a couple days later. Jailbroken iPad owners can use the editing techniques Hooper outlined right now (yes, they’re that good), and we’re hoping that Apple will add the functionality in a future version of iOS.

Now Hooper’s concept is making its way to the App Store in the form of an upcoming iPad app called SlideWriter.

Apple released iOS 5.1.1 for iOS device owners today over-the-air and in iTunes. The update brings several bug fixes and improvements, including a fix for certain iPads that loose connectivity when switching between 2G and 3G networks.

An important security update has also been included in iOS 5.1.1 for a URL spoofing technique in Safari that made the news a couple weeks ago.

Not many surprises here. According to the latest research from the NPD Group, Android and iOS continue to dominate the OS arms race. Combined, these two powerhouse operating systems account for 90% of smartphone sales. Report after report, we continue to see the same thing: Android an iOS on top.

Apple sold all of the seats to its Worldwide Developer Conference this year in a matter of only two hours, and the conference sold out before most of the west coast had even crawled out of bed. If you didn’t signup fast enough, you didn’t get a pass to the hottest developer gathering in town.

WWDC demand has spawned several alternatives, including Indie Developer Lab in San Francisco. Many developers were unable to attend WWDC due to how fast the event sold out, and Apple has killed the ability to resell tickets this year.

Mobile game maker CocoaChina has put together a site that aims to get Apple’s attention regarding the pent-up-demand for WWDC 2012.

May is Mobile Management Month at Cult of Mac, where we will be profiling a different mobile management company every weekday. You can find all previous entries here  and read our Mobile Management manifesto here.

Excitor produces the DME line of mobile management tools. The lineup currently offers a device management component that includes basic app management functionality and a secure messaging component. The secure messaging component offers companies a fully secured on-device message, contacts, and calendar data store that is separate from Apple’s Mail, Contacts, and Calendar apps – this helps ensure business data is not readable on a lost or stolen device even if that device is unlocked. Excitor has announced two additional DME components that, according to the company’s website, are not yet available. The first, is focused on creating an on-device secure data store while the second is a secure mobile browser.

After a weekend deliberation, a federal jury in San Francisco handed Oracle a partial victory by finding Google guilty of copyright infringement yet remaining deadlocked on whether Google’s use of the Java APIs fell under “fair use.” The jury found that Google infringed a minimal amount of Java source code with Judge William Alsup indicating that Oracle would only be entitled to statutory damages as a result. This certainly wasn’t what Oracle was hoping for and when Oracle’s lawyer seemed to suggest they were entitled to more than just statutory damages, Judge William Alsup quickly put the kibosh on that notion based on the minimal amount of code infringed, stating what they’re seeking as “bordering on the ridiculous.”

Tony Stark — otherwise known as the Invincible Iron Man, as seen in this weekend’s mega blockbuster hit The Avengers — is probably the superhero mentioned most often in the same breath as Apple. Apple’s LiquidMetal is often called Tony Stark stuff, and Iron Man’s perfect amalgam of advanced tech and cool style is rightly compared to Apple’s own design ethos.

That’s why we love this awesome video by Matt’s Macintosh, showing Tony Stark “designing” his Iron Man armor using StarkPaint on a 1984 Starkintosh… which just happens to look pretty much identical to a vintage 1984 Macintosh.

Source: YouTube
Thanks: Thomas F.!

The iPad’s status in larger enterprise businesses is nothing sort of spectacular – it pretty much is the entire enterprise tablet market. As great as that is for Apple, the company has put a lot of effort into courting small and mid-size companies – Lion Server being one example.

According to a new study, that effort is paying off as more than half of small businesses have begun integrating the iPad or some form of tablet.

Today, I’d like to try something a bit different. I love getting email from readers of the tips posts here on CultofMac, and I got one the other day that I thought would be great to answer for everyone who might be in the same boat. Here’s the email:

Dear CultofMac,
I wanted to ask for your help. One day, I used my iPod all the way until the battery life depleted. When I plugged it to charge, it showed the plug into iTunes prompt. It said I needed to upgrade. After hours of waiting for the update to download, I began the update. When it was about near completion, it said error! It’s outrageous! Is there another way to revive my baby? It’s a 3G.

Sincerely,

Marcela

By the way, I really enjoy your blog.

Let’s hear that again. Apple is taking in 84 percent of all mobile gaming revenue in the US.

With all the fooferaw about how many more Android handsets are selling than iPhones, it’s easy to think that Apple may be on the way out. Not so, says a new report from NewZoo, a market research company in the gaming space.