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Facebook's $1 billion acquisition of photo-sharing start-up Instagram has shifted the spotlight to the newest phenomena in mobile apps: uploading personal videos from smartphones.

Did "sexting" just get safer? Maybe, but probably not. A free and increasingly popular iPhone app called Snapchat allows users to take a picture, send it and control how the message is visible – between 1 and 10 seconds.

The technology industry is working on viewing options that could include apps, a move that could transform cable television’s interface and business model.

Poor Instagram users. First, their beloved photo-sharing application moves from iPhone-only exclusivity to the Android phone masses. A week later, Facebook swallows up the tiny startup behind the app for $1 billion. The purchase sparked worries that Facebook might shutter Instagram or change it for the worse by harvesting their personal information or shoving ads into their carefully curated photo streams.

Can a two-year-old photo sharing app really be worth $1bn? It would buy you some some 2,100 Rolls Royce Phantoms. Or 200 million mosquito nets to fight malaria. Or the whole of the New York Times company (with $50m change to spare). If you are Microsoft, it buys you some 800 AOL patents to fight the next patent war.

At the moment, one of the chief unmet needs is simplicity, says Guenther, who was president of TiVo before joining NIM. While iPad users, for instance, can find most of the magazines they might want to buy in Apple‘s Newsstand app, they still have to download each magazine’s reader app individually and manage their subscriptions separately. NIM’s answer, which it’s unveiling Wednesday, is a unified tablet newsstand in which users can jump between dozens of different titles. At launch, it will be available on Android tablets running the Honeycomb operating system or higher, but Morgan says the company plans to submit its iOS app to Apple for approval in the next few weeks.

As AT&T gets ready to launch a new wave of Windows Phones to the pubic, independent analysis of Microsoft's app store reveals more than 80,000 applications have been submitted.

Oleg Kostour moved from Canada to Mountain View to build a 3D software startup. Instead, he built an app to stay in touch with the girlfriend he left behind in Canada. The iPhone app, Pair, launched in the app store this week. It creates a private shared timeline for couples that allows them to easily swap SMS messages, photos, videos and locations.

“OMG! A big Zynga group hug to OMGPOP, talented creators of Draw Something,” tweeted social games titan Zynga Wednesday. Apparently, in this universe, a “big Zynga group hug” translates to $180 million, the price that All Things D claims Zynga paid to acquire the makers of the most popular mobile Facebook app.