The holiday smartphone giving season is famous for driving record downloads as lucky gift-getters unwrap and test their shiny new things on the latest app. It is also a period of fierce competition among the app developers for visibility, which drives up marketing costs.

Yahoo announced it was yanking ten of its early-in apps from both Android and iOS stores and discontinuing support for them. The defunct apps list includes the news, movies, answers apps on Android and shopping, sketching, and deals apps on iOS.

Anyone can buy a print book easily and cheaply enough, but an e-book generally works best on a dedicated device -- the kind of thing that a dedicated book reader would buy. The key seems to be getting the power reader acquainted with the device and the use of e-books.

With the nominations announced on Tuesday, Oscar Awards season formally begins. And so too does ABC's now-annual attempt to leverage multimedia enhanced experiences for the show.

Because we just don't have enough "year of" lingo flying about the mobile world, telecom market analysts at Ovum seem ready to declare 2012 the "year of Android." In a new survey of developers, the company claims that "Android looks set to replace Apple's iOS in terms of importance to developers within the next 12 months."

Hulu is glomming ad dollars and YouTube has traffic and now more original content. But according to a new research note from Needham's analyst Laura Martin, those are small potatoes compared to the ad money TV media will bring with its content across platforms. Not only will this scale "dwarf" current digital entities like Hulu and YouTube but she sees this revenue as low risk and additive rather than cannibalistic of the TV business.

Late last week, Microsoft released Dance Central Dance Cam, an iOS, Android and Windows Phone app that can capture and synthesize a gamer's dance moves into a music video. Marketers should be taking note. The second screen could be their most direct route "into the game" of consoles.

Basically, Paramount's anniversary app gives us a century of its filmmaking with some nice light history, a ton of stills, too few video clips, and a Scene It game in a free package. It is a brand giving itself a wet kiss, but this is still fun to watch. At the very least, it is quaint to think that someone out there (perhaps just Brad Grey) is under the delusion that a movie studio name matters to anyone but its stockholders anymore.

According to app analytics firm Localytics, it takes over 10 sessions with an app for 44% of eventual buyers to make their first purchase. Only a third (33%) buy in 2 to 9 uses of an app.

The prospect of having apps on the TV breeds a certain expectation, still thwarted, that we should have easy interoperability of the app experience across platforms. Netflix can do this -- why can't everyone else?