New iPhone apps worth downloading: Scratch Hard, This Day in Classic Rock, Where's My Water? update

Posted November 20, 2012 6:00am by Phil HornshawTags: Fresh Apps, new apps

Get ready for this weekend’s intense shopping with Scratch Hard, another deal-finding app that adds a few lottery-style discounts you can unlock from digital scratch cards. This Day in Classic Rock gives you a little break from thinking about turkey and 5 a.m. sales with its classic rock trivia, and an updated Where's My Water? now has new brain-busting puzzle levels.

Scratch Hard (Free)                          

What’s it about? Scratch Hard finds local deals and sales and compiles them on your iOS device. It also includes special scratch-off offers that you can redeem.

What’s cool? With Black Friday and Cyber Monday fast approaching, Scratch Hard can make it easier to find the best deals at local stores. You can use it to plan out your shopping trip ahead of time, which is particularly useful if you plan to start at 5 a.m. The app’s scratch cards, which are like digital lottery tickets, might result in additional savings on some items, adding a degree of unique fun to all that deal-searching.



Who’s it for? Power shoppers who want to get the most out of every sale and every store.
What’s it like? TGI Black Friday and TGI Cyber Monday are a pair of deal-finding apps that seem particularly effective for the week’s upcoming shopping extravaganza.

This Day in Classic Rock ($2.99)

What’s it about? Classic Rock Magazine’s official new app includes a ton of information about the genre, geared around bringing historical updates to you each day.
What’s cool? If you want to know more about classic rock bands, This Day in Classic Rock fulfills daily your quick fix for information. It also includes a couple of cool additions, including a trivia game and a classic rock quiz to test your fandom. There also is a huge number of Song Notes articles covering 50 different tracks, where you can read and learn more about the music and the people who created it.
Who’s it for? Obviously, this one’s specifically for people who really dig classic rock.
What’s it like? For more music quiz action, give Trivia Tunes a go. Classic Rock Radio brings music from the genre your way by using your device’s streaming capabilities.
Advertisement: Ten Giggly Gorillas from Wasabi Productions offers a complete sensory reading experience and with text highlighting, positive social / moral lessons and 100% family-friendly features, it’s an excellent choice. It’s also on SALE this week for $0.99 (usually $2.99) so why not download today to enjoy with your 2-6 year old!

Where's My Water? update ($0.99)

What’s it about? Physics puzzler Where's My Water? requires players to use touch controls to dig through the earth and make a path to move water through pipes belonging to Swampy the Alligator.


What’s cool? There are lots of smart puzzles found in Where's My Water? already, requiring players to turn water into steam or freeze it into ice in order to complete them. Now, Disney is offering additional free levels every week – three of them, to be exact. But you need to log into Where's My Water? each week and download the levels, or you’ll miss out on them forever. If they’re as diverse and challenging as the levels already available in the game, they’ll definitely be worth the effort.
Who’s it for? Though it’s geared toward kids with its cartoon mascot, Where's My Water? is brainy enough to appeal to puzzle fans of all ages.
What’s it like? The Phineas and Ferb-themed spin-off Where’s My Perry offers a similar puzzle experience, and for a similar feel, try Cut The Rope: Experiments.
Download the Appolicious Android app



Stock Market

Date : 26-SEPT-2012

Telefónica Spanish Stock MarketLast Change Today´s Range Volume

time:17:35


10.71 €

-0.53 11.09 - 10.70 23,570,057

Pct.Chng. Annual Range Capitalisation (mill. €)

-4.67% 15.96 - 7.90 48,718.71



[1d
5d
3m
6m
1y
2y]

Number of Telefónica shares trading on the market: 4,551,024,642

Telefónica in other Stock Exchanges



Last Change Pct.Chng. Time High Low

TELEFONICA S.A. (ADR NY)* dol 13.67 -0.60 -4.20% 19:03 13.82 13.64

TELEFONICA ADR (LIMA)* dól 13.55 -0.66 -4.64% 18:13 13.58 13.55

TELEFONICA (ARG) pes 88.80 0.00 0.00% 18:50 0.00 0.00

* ADR=1 share.



Professor Stephen Hawking reflects on Paralympics 2012

Professor Stephen Hawking reflects on Paralympics 2012

10 September 2012 Last updated at 23:40 

Hundreds of thousands of people have lined the route of a victory parade through London to cheer Britain's Olympic and Paralympic athletes. Competitors were also honored with a flypast over Buckingham Palace, the day after the end of the 2012 Paralympics.   News-night's Stephen Smith spoke to Professor Stephen Hawking, who reflected on how society's attitude to disabilities has changed.

Paralympics opening ceremony attracts 11 million

A peak audience of 11.2 million watched Channel 4's broadcast of the Paralympic Games opening ceremony in the UK, giving the broadcaster its biggest audience for more than 10 years.

An average 7.7 million tuned in to see Wednesday's four-hour show, which featured appearances from Sir Ian McKellen and Professor Stephen Hawking.

Some 500 people complained about adverts interrupting the event.

Channel 4 said the ads were necessary to fund its coverage of the Games.

According to Stuart Cosgrove, Channel 4's director of creative diversity, the complaints were not "in any way comparable to the levels of support that we've had for the fact that we've invested significant amounts of money to bring the biggest ever Paralympics to television".

In an interview with BBC live, he said the broadcaster made "a lot of effort to reduce the number of adverts that we'd normally play in prime time within its programming".

Paralympics coverage online

There were no ad breaks during the creative element of the ceremony, he continued. But he admitted there were three during the athletes' parade.

"Those breaks were taken at strategic moments where we maximized where we thought we could take legitimate advertising breaks to generate the revenue that pays for the entire coverage," he said.

"It was a very hard call because we were making choices about what we thought the viewers wanted to see. On balance we decided the viewers wanted more extensive coverage of the Paralympics.  

"We're doing 150 hours on Channel 4 from breakfast to midnight. We thought the vast majority of people, 95% of people in the UK, accept that big sporting events have to be paid for."

Viewing figures on Channel 4 on Wednesday hit 11.2 million around the time The Queen entered the stadium at 20:45 BST.

They began to tail off from 22:00, with an average 4.3 million watching by the end of the ceremony at midnight.

'400% increase'

Cosgrove said Channel 4 was providing a "400% increase" in coverage compared with the BBC during the last Paralympics in Beijing.

During that opening ceremony in 2008, an average of 2.2 million viewers tuned in to watch on BBC One.

Last month a peak audience of 26.9 million people watched the Olympic Games opening ceremony on BBC One.

Averaging 22.4 million viewers, it was the UK's 13th most-watched programme ever.

THE LONDON 2012 OLYMPICS ARE HERE.

London - 2012 Olympics

Are you part of it?



Facebook shares fall 10pc in after-hours trading on maiden results

 

Facebook shares slumped to a record low after the social network site's first results as a public company showed its growth has slowed.

Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook in a Harvard dorm room.

By Richard Blackden, and Andrew Trotman

11:20PM BST 26 Jul 2012


The Californian company had been under intense pressure to deliver strong results given the almost 30pc drop in its share price since the $104bn (£66bn) flotation in May.

Although revenues climbed 32pc to $1.18bn in the second quarter, beating analysts' estimates, it failed to convince investors who had seen saw revenues climb 45pc in the first quarter. At the same time its spending on sales and marketing more than tripled to $392m in the period.

As had been forecast, the cost of share-based pay plan for employees saw Facebook report an overall loss of $157m for the quarter. But as founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg made an appearance on the company's conference call with Wall Street analysts on Thursday night, the focus was squarely on how quickly the social network site will be able to drive revenues.

"They've got a real business there," said Daniel Ernst, an analyst at Hudson Square Research. "It's just not growing as fast as it used to."

Mr Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's highly-regarded chief operating officer, were at pains to stress that the company had introduced several initiatives to squeeze more revenue from a base of users that grew 29pc to 955m by the end of the quarter. That included the launch of advertising known as "sponsored stories" in the newsfeeds that Facebook users get when they access their accounts. By the end of June, they were generating about $1m a day in advertising, with half of that coming from mobile devices, said Ms Sandberg. Total advertising revenues rose 28pc to $992m in the quarter.



The ability of users to recommend, or "like", products to other friends on the site has always been seen as a potential goldmine for Facebook. Having long resisted taking Facebook public, Mr Zuckerberg did so at a time when millions of people are now using a mobile device, rather than a PC, to access the web. A central concern of investors is whether Facebook can make enough money from advertising on mobile devices, and the 28-year-old billionaire admitted that "there are a lot of challenges". However, he denied reports that Facebook was consdering building its own phone, arguing it "wouldn't make much sense for us".

Having sold shares at $38 each on May 17, they tumbled as much as 12pc to $23.75 in extended trading in New York. David Ebersman, Facebook's chief financial officer, said that "we are disappointed how the stock is trading".

Amazon shares also tumbled on Thursday night after the world's largest internet retailer's second-quarter profits fell short of Wall Street's estimates. Profits dropped to $7m in the period from $191m in the same quarter last year as Amazon stepped up spending on warehouses and its Kindle Fire tablet lost market share.