In this week's reminiscent app roundup:

Music, comprehended! Transformers, done justice to!

Zombie defense, executed within the bounds of Newton's laws!

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See Also:

• The Top 10 March Madness iPhone Apps
• The Best iPhone Apps Of The Week
• The Best iPhone Apps Of The Week

Engadget's Joshua Topolsky pens a lengthy article on what has gone so terribly wrong at Palm over the last year. His solutions aren't perfect, but it's worth reading. —Ed.

Oh Palm. Just a little over a year ago your future seemed so bright, so renewed. You walked away from CES 2009 reborn, held aloft by a completely innovative new mobile operating system, a striking piece of hardware, and a feeling amongst the press and investors that you were back in the game and playing to win. Now, less than a year and a half later, you've nearly returned to the dark and desperate place you'd found yourself in at the end of 2008; a rapidly declining mindshare, the bottom falling out of your stock, and bad dips in phone sales.

Continue reading at Engadget >

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During an event to introduce the first living organ donor registry in the country today, Apple CEO Steve Jobs told a crowd he "almost died" waiting for his own transplant in 2009.

According to The Mercury News, Steve told California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger that 21,000 Californians are waiting for organ transplants.

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• "And Boy Have We Patented It"
• How Steve Jobs Screws With The Press
• Steve Jobs: We're Hoarding Cash For 'Big, Bold' Moves

With 8.2 million unique visitors viewing over 600 million pages per month, photo-sharing, meme-making 4chan.org is an extremely popular Web site.

But it's not worth much -- just a little less than a Lexus GS10.

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Over the past few months, mobile ad networks have reported substantial growth in ads from devices running Google Android, presenting mobile marketers with an increasingly viable alternative to Apple's iPhone and iPod touch devices.

Continue reading at ClickZ >

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From GigaOm: The first time you walk into an Apple Store and pick up an iPad, you’ll understand the hype: Apple has managed to create a beautiful, thoughtfully designed, compelling product in a space where mediocrity was, until now, status quo. But odds are you probably won’t buy one — at least not yet. And that’s OK.

Continue reading at GigaOm »

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Steve Myers at Poynter gathers some thoughts from journalists about the most important lessons they learned at SXSW.

We narrowed down the results to the most important points:

• Use gamelike features to keep users engaged and refreshing your Web site.
• Work with city citizens and dig deeper into the data that is all around us.
• Manor Labs in Manor, Texas "turned the town of 6,500 people into a virtual R&D lab to tackle major civic innovations via crowdsourcing and game-driven mechanics." Amazing.
• Learn how to support different Web fonts with each browser and create rich graphics on the iPhone without Flash.
• The Deck, an all-sponsorship ad network teaches us to stop selling CPMs and only use sponsorships, so advertisers will "pay for time in front of your audience rather than impressions."
• Infuse creativity into every aspect of your work.
• Learn that vision is our strongest sense, and humans are wired to process images quickly. Move beyond text.
• Social media is exciting. But sites "like Facebook give us a limited set of choices for our participation, and we shouldn't be lulled into a false sense of control."
• "Geeks care about journalism."
• Measure reader engagement in hours, not minutes like online. "That allows for higher ad rates; it's another reason publishers should move faster in developing for tablet devices."
• Don't just shuffle content onto an iPad and add videos and graphics. Really think about reinventing content. And add social media.
• Web applications will probably win out over installed apps. "That may be unpopular to the folks who think iPhone/iPad apps will save journalism or make them rich, but developers are growing weary of developing for three to seven different platforms."
• The Web is accessible everywhere, especially on mobile devices.
• Social gaming is going to be huge. Use it in all aspects of your site, including comments.
• "Those who can't or won't reinvent themselves don't really have a place in a culture that places such a high value on innovation."

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• Here's Why You Should Give A Flying Crap About All The SXSW "Nerd Birds"

Apple's iPhone App Store is still crushing its peers, especially in the number of applications available to consumers.

Mobile apps have been around for years, but Apple was the first to make them popular with normal people. Now everyone else in the mobile industry is struggling to catch up, and it's been a big advantage for Apple's iPhone and iPod touch. (And, coming soon, the iPad.)

Apple currently has about 170,000 apps available, according to AppShopper.com. Its next closest competitor, Google Android, has about 30,000 apps available, a company exec recently said. Research In Motion has more than 5,000 apps available, according to the company. And Palm has "over 2,000 apps" in its app catalog, CEO Jon Rubinstein said yesterday on his company's earnings call.

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• CHART OF THE DAY: Here's How Much A Unique Visitor Is Worth
• CHART OF THE DAY: There's A Reason They Call It 'Old Media'
• CHART OF THE DAY: Apple's Mac Sales Set To Beat The Street Again

Apple developers at media companies and elsewhere are getting this email directly from Apple with the subject line: "Now Accepting iPad Apps."

Any guesses on how many iPad Apps will be submitted during the next few weeks?

From: Apple Developer <noreply@adc.apple.com>
Date: Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 2:51 PM
Subject: Now Accepting iPad Apps.

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• You Won't Believe What Apple Is Making Developers Do To Get Early Access To An iPad

During 2005 to 2008, YouTube execs said a lot of dumb and nasty things to each other in emails and instant messages.

Thanks to Viacom's lawsuit against YouTube-parent company Google -- and the court's decision to release a "statement of undisputed facts"  -- you get to read it all!

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• Inside The He-Said, She-Said Of The Viacom-YouTube Dispute

How can our government help us transition to renewable sources of energy, break our dependence on the Middle East, and keep pace in a booming new global industry (cleantech)?

It can start by taxing carbon emissions, says Bill Gross, the founder of eSolar, a leading solar energy company.

For centuries, the country has acted as though fossil fuels come at no cost to society.  But they do.  And it's time we acknowledged that.

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Productivity is plummeting this week. Everybody (well, 3 million people) are watching March Madness instead of doing work, according to CBS Sports and the NCAA's March Madness stats for CBSSports.com.

According to their NCAA March Madness on Demand traffic figures through Thursday, March 18:

• 3.4 million total hours of live streaming video and audio consumed
• 3 million unique visitors to the NCAA March Madness on Demand video players
• 1.7 million clicks of the "Boss Button" - over 60% of the total clicks of the Boss Button for the entire 2009 tournament. (2.77 million)
• The most watched game from 3/18 was the double-overtime Florida vs. BYU game with 521k hours of streaming video and audio. That's +50% over 2009's most watched game from the first day of the first round (Washington vs. Mississippi State) which had 348k hours of streaming.
• The most watched hour yesterday was 2:00-2:59 p.m. ET with 533k streaming hours (16% of the total for the day). It peaked at 2:45 p.m. with 147k streaming hours between 2:45 and 2:59 p.m. ET.

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• CBS Scores $37 Million In Online Ad Sales For March Madness
• Re-Live The Best March Madness Moments With The NCAA's Cool New 'Vault'

Yahoo chief technologist Sam Pullara is quitting to become entrepreneur-in-residence at at Benchmark Capital, TechCrunch reports.

Sam follows EVP Ash Patel and sales boss SVP Joanne Bradford out the door.

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• AOL Gave CTO Ted Cahall A $354,000 Retention Bonus 10 Days Before He Left The Company
• AOL's Golden Parachutes: $28.4 Million For Four Former Executives
• Arthur Sulzberger Jr.'s Nephew David Perpich Joins New York Times To Prepare For Paywall

After news broke this week that that Yahoo's ad boss Joanne Bradford was quiting, EVP Hilary Schneider quickly emailed employees to say that she'd hold down the fort in the interim, a spokesperson tells us.

See Also: Yahoos Want Seth Dallaire As The Next Sales Boss

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• Former Spoiled Magazine Editors Get Rude Awakening In Post-Print World
• Yahoo Finally Announces Deal To Integrate Twitter
• Yahoo! News Hires Bookforum Editor Chris Lehmann, 'Cajun Boy' Brett Michael Dykes

Everyone’s been talking about the “real-time web” for quite some time, but it’s easy to focus on speed while forgetting real-time is dependent on trust. 

When things move faster, trust matters more. If you’re in the heat of battle, you don’t have time to question your commander the way you might second guess your boss during peace time — you just need to trust him. Before the web went real-time, you had time to research and analyze. Is this eBay seller reliable? Spend 10 minutes reading the 100s of ratings he’s received to find out. Is this breaking news tweet about an impending disaster in your area reliable? You’d better already trust the source. 

In their quest to increase users, existing social networks haven’t done a great job building trust networks. How many of your Facebook friends and LinkedIn contacts would you trust on an important matter? How many of them have you even talked to more than once in the last year?

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• Clever: Facebook Funds A Privacy Watchdog Group
• Google Responds To Privacy Concerns With Unsettlingly Specific Apology
• Google Explains How It Blew Buzz Privacy

As the cost of delivering video continues to get cheaper every year and video syndication to devices and platforms continues to grow, it seems more and more people are under the impression that access to premium video content should be free.

Frankly, I don't see where this idea of "free" comes from. Video content costs money to produce, to distribute and to consume. Yet even with those costs, many seem hell-bent on the idea that business models can somehow survive based on the consumption of free video content supported solely by an ad model. But in reality, that simply can't happen.

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• Walmart Should Buy Netflix, Not Vudu, If It's Serious About Streaming Movies
• Walmart Buying Vudu To Go After Apple's iTunes, Netflix, Cable
• Walmart Says It Has "No Plans" To Carry The Nexus One

Are executives at AOL saying one thing about pay and doing another?

The corporate stalkers over at Footnoted.org think so.

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• Just Like Larry And Sergey Used To, Tim Armstrong Approves Every Hire At AOL
• An AOL-Yahoo Merger: The Miracle Carol Bartz Needs
• AOL Gobbles Up Gourmet Orphans For New Foodie Site: KitchenDaily

Remember Google Wave? Perhaps one of the most overhyped products in years, Google's email-service-from-the-future is still not gaining a following. Despite a huge spike when beta invites became available, Google Wave is still toiling in obscurity, according to this chart from Hitwise.

As we noted last time we checked up on Wave, it's still early. Few Web services are homeruns on version 1.0. It is of course possible that Google Wave could still be successful and popular someday if Google makes a bunch of improvements and perhaps figures out more practical use cases for it. (Or if another company does.)

But for now, it's not something many people have found a need for.

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See Also:

• CHART OF THE DAY: Remember Google Wave?
• Gmail Creator Unimpressed With Google Wave
• Google Wave Explained In Two Minutes (CLIP)

As a start-up, it's often your dream to see yourself in the press (especially if it's good things they are saying).

And so you cultivate reporters, hoping to become that next darling like Twitter, or like Foursquare is now, knowing that drives buzz, investment and ideally users.

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See Also:

• 163 Ways To Be More Awesome At Your Business
• 10 Ways To Stay Ahead Of The Competition
• Why It's Worth Creating Great Ideas That Your Customers Throw Away