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The tiny iPhone/iPod Touch developer Tapulous has noted that they are approaching $1 million in revenue per month, an extremely high number for the company which has 20 employees and only makes one type of game, the popular Tap Tap Revenge 3 and its variants.

Tapulous says its series of games have been installed on 20 million iPods and iPhones, and 600 million songs have been played. ComScore says the game is installed on a full 35 percent of all Apple app user's phones or devices.

Even more importantly, the company is now profitable, joining a select few of app developers such as Zynga and PlayFish to make it big and remain profitable.

"It's going to be big and all of a sudden people are going to say, 'holy cow, where did those guys come from?'" adds CEO Bart Decrem.

Tapulous, which can be compared to a Guitar Hero-esque music rhythm game, makes money by charging for special Tap Tap games (such as a Lady Gaga or Dave Mathews Band version), through ad sales, and by selling individual tracks for the game.

A group calling themselves the Iranian Cyber Army temporarily took down the microblogging service Twitter yesterday, re-routing users from the site to their own page.

That page had a picture of a green flag followed by the words: "This site has been hacked by the Iranian Cyber Army."

It is still unclear whether the group has any actual ties to Iran, and how serious the breach was.

Twitter admitted that "its Domain Name Systems' records were temporarily compromised but have now been fixed. The site says it will update with more details once we've investigated more fully."

The Motorola Droid, the Time Gadget of the Year for 2009, supports multitouch, but not very well.

There are alternatives for users who want to pinch and zoom like iPhone users can, such as the Dolphin Browser, however native support is still lacking and should be even with the release of firmware 2.1 next month.

However, a post on AllDroid.org is touting a new alpha version of a multitouch ROM, which is based on the European Droid (Milestone).

The ROM creator says the ROM will kill your Google Maps Navigation GPS however.

Interested users can read the full post here: Mr. Milestone meet Mr Droid... V0.5

According to The Consumerist, some customers who pre-ordered the Barnes & Noble Nook e-reader may not receive their device by Christmas, and the company is offering a $100 online gift card to those who will not get their order.

The company says it is trying its hardest to have all early pre-orders in buyer's hands by Christmas Eve but if it does not happen, B&N says "with our sincerest apologies, we will send you an e-mail notification on December 23rd with a $100 Barnes&Noble.com Online Gift Certificate." Consumers will then get their devices on the 29th.

Added Barnes & Noble spokeswoman Mary Ellen Keating in response, via Cnet: "The vast majority of customers who pre-ordered nooks and were given a pre-holiday estimated shipping date should receive their devices in time for the holidays. We are working very hard to keep up with the demand and to get all nook orders out the door and to customers on or before Dec. 24. Unfortunately, there may be a very small percentage of customers who may not receive their nooks before the holiday. We communicated with this handful of customers yesterday, offering our sincere apologies and providing them with the following: a nook holiday gift certificate so that they have something to wrap and give if it was bought as a gift as well as a bn.com gift certificate that can be used online. Any customer who has not yet received their device but whose ship date prior to the holidays has changed in anyway was notified yesterday of updated timing."

Bing! Information Designs LLC., a small computer-based design firm in the midwest, has sued Microsoft today over the name Bing, the name Microsoft chose to relaunch their popular search engine as.

Bing! alleges trademark infringement as well as unfair competition, claiming "Microsoft's use of the name dilutes the value of it and confuses the public about the companies' relationship to each other." The design company has used the name since 2000 and has pending application for registration of the mark.

The design company is looking for "actual and punitive damages including having Microsoft pay for corrective advertising to remedy the confusion it caused." The actual monetary amount was not disclosed.

Microsoft did not seem too bothered by the complaint, with spokesman Kevin Kutz adding: "We do not believe there is any confusion in the marketplace [between the search engine and the design firm]."

Bing currently owns around 10 percent of the search engine market, a far cry from Google's 65 percent share.

Comcast has launched the streaming TV service Fancast Xfinity TV this week, featuring shows that have not been available online until now.

Originally dubbed Comcast On Demand Online, beta testing for the service began in June for Comcast ISP subscribers. The service will be available through Fancast.com and Comcast.com.

Xfinity TV will include programming from 27 networks including A&E, AMC, Discovery Channel, History, TLC, and TNT.

Comcast just recently acquired a majority stake in NBC Universal from GE and Vivendi.

Warner Home Video has announced that beginning in the Q1 2010 all of their new Blu-ray releases will include a standard definition DVD copy as well, making all Warner releases the aptly dubbed "Combo Packs."

All Combo Packs will include a digital copy as well.

Making the move even more aggressive is that Warner will no longer offer straight Blu-ray films, and the Combo Packs will remain the same price as current Blu-ray releases, with no added premium.

Most of the major studios now offer combo discs, with Disney and Warner pioneering the way.


Additionally, Warner will begin offering Blu-ray Double Features beginning in February, which will offer two BD catalog films for an MSRP of $25 USD. The first to be released are includes Dirty Harry/Magnum Force, Analyze This/Analyze That, Presumed Innocent/Frantic, Miss Congeniality/Miss Congeniality 2 and Grumpy Old Men/Grumpier Old Men.

Struggling Internet TV startup company ZillionTV has announced the addition of Major League Baseball to their content providers list, giving access to MLB.com through the oft-delayed VOD service.

Programming will be ad-supported and will give access to archived games, both classic and more recent.

Originally set to launch in the Q2 2009, Zillion has been pushed back until the Q3 2010, despite full backing by the major Hollywood studios Sony, Fox, Universal, Paramount, Warner and Lionsgate.

Zillion will also offer movies, TV and other merchandise for rental or sell-through through the service.

“We’re one of the first on-demand services to bring major league sports content to our viewers right from the start,” added Mitch Berman, executive chairman of ZillionTV, via VB. “The addition of MLB.com to our content portfolio means that we’re helping expand the reach of major professional sports within the growing digital space and attracting a new generation of fans who are eager to watch sports programming on their schedule and their terms.”

According to new reports, Verizon is upgrading their network in preparation for the iPhone in 2010 as well as the Palm Pre.

PhoneArena is reporting that there is a Palm Pre Plus listed in Verizon's internal inventory system, and that it will be available in very early 2010, after Sprint's exclusivity agreement ends.

It is not clear what the "Pre Plus" brings that warrants the "plus," but it is unlikely that the device will be much different than the current Pre.

Additionally, Verizon is "tweaking" their network so it can withstand the high data usage of iPhone users. AT&T users have criticized the carrier unmercifully over dropped calls and slow receiving of emails and text messages through their iPhones. AT&T also has an inferior 3G map, and speeds are lacking.

Amazon said this week that the Kindle e-reader has already had a record month in December, despite the month being only in its third week.

Although not disclosing the exact sales figures, the e-tailer has said Kindle sales are at an all-time high, thanks to massive holiday order volume. Unlike in 2008, the e-tailer has enough stock to keep up with demand this year, notes Amazon.

As a way to push even more sales, the company is offering free two-day shipping on Kindle orders, with the offer lasting until the 22nd meaning any buyers will have their Kindle in time for Christmas, guaranteed. The Kindle DX does not have the same promotion.

Mozilla announced this weekend that the final release of Firefox 3.6 had been delayed into early 2010, while at the same time releasing 3.5 beta 5 instead of a release candidate.

Beta 5 has 130 new bug fixes, including a major TraceMonkey JavaScript rendering engine bug that was causing crashes. Additionally, the private browsing mode, password retrieval and fast startup mode were updated.

"Beta 5 builds are being tested by QA now, targeting a Thursday release unless we get to RC [Release Candidate] first," Mozilla had said earlier in the week. "We are really, really close to being code-complete & only need 8 more patches and a TraceMonkey merge. If we can go to build today or tomorrow, QA will scrap Beta 5 and we'll release RC to the beta audience ASAP."

"Mozilla released a fifth version of Firefox 3.6 to its more than 600,000 beta users as part of its continuing program to gather feedback and get fixes into the hands of the people evaluating the preview," added Mike Beltzner, director of Firefox, via CW. "We expect to be able to issue a release candidate before the end of this year, but we'll likely hold off on the official release until early in the new year."

VideoLAN, the group behind the extremely popular free media player VLC has said that development for the Mac version of the software may come to an end soon, as volunteers have almost completely disappeared.

All VLC versions are developed on a volunteer basis but it seems that the Mac version has had its volunteer corps drop to zero for most of the time.

A 64-bit Mac VLC has already been put on indefinite hold and VideoLAN says that VLC 1.1.0 may be the last Mac version, ever, unless more developers are found.

Active volunteers have deep knowledge of C, Cocoa and Xcode.

RIM announced its quarterly earnings on Thursday, showing record BlackBerry smartphone sales and a 59 percent increase in Q3 profit, smashing expectations.

Another notable figure was that 80 percent of all new subscribers were non-corporate, showing that RIM's push into the consumer smartphone market is working. RIM originally sold mainly to corporate customers but has moved towards the larger non-corporate market with phones such as the BlackBerry Pearl and Storm.

"The consumer side is growing real fast," co-Chief Executive Jim Balsillie added. "It's not like this isn't a competitive space with big companies trying to do well and yet we're No. 1."

10 million BlackBerry units were sold in the quarter, a record for the company. In comparison, Apple sold 7.4 million iPhones in the same quarter, although they make higher margins per phone.

According to a new British Phonographic Industry (BPI) survey, illegal downloading is not decreasing at all despite a new plethora of legal alternatives.

BPI CEO Geoff Taylor specifically cited a rise in downloads from blogs and newsgroups and called the results of the survey "very disappointing." The online poll surveyed 3000 people in the UK between the ages of 16 and 54.

Perhaps even more notably, users that currently downloaded from unauthorized services even said they planned to increase their pirating in the next six months.

Adds Taylor: "There are now more than 35 legal digital music services in the UK, offering music fans a great choice of ways to get music legally. It's disappointing that levels of illegal peer-to-peer use remain high despite this and the publicity surrounding imminent measures to address the problem. It's vital that those measures come into force as quickly as possible. The growth in other, non-peer-to-peer methods of downloading music illegally is a concern, and highlights the importance of including a mechanism in the Digital Economy Bill to deal with threats other than peer-to-peer."

Putting to rest any worries that PlayStation 3 owners may have had that their online gaming would soon turn to a pay-for service such as Xbox Live Gold, a leaked survey showing off the company's considerations for premium subscriptions shows that online gaming will remain free for everyone using the PSN.

The survey, posted on CVG, shows that for $70-a-year, a premium PSN subscription would give users free access to PSOne Classics, full game trials, cross-game voice chat, Netflix without the disc in the tray at all times, user-to-user challenges, cloud storage and even an extended warranty.

"Sony is considering offering a premium PlayStation Network subscription in the future," reads the survey. "The subscription offering would provide new premium features you could choose to pay for and are in addition to the features currently available for free such as access to online multiplayer gaming (current features would remain free)."