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?

The Bad Robot Interactive unit chose not to put out another cheesy movie promo app throwaway that is clever for all of ten seconds. Instead, the company's Action Movie FX app has been a presence scoring high on the App Store's Entertainment chart for about a month now. No Spock. No Kirk. And thank God (or the "Eighth Dynamic," as Scientology might have it) -- no Tom Cruise.

The dirty little secret of iTunes is that it really is not an optimal interface. In a shop with half a million items, there has to be a better way to surface the most relevant and valuable content than walls of icons.

With many media brands working on a range of apps and mobile sites, they need to come to the ad market with a reliable number that also reflects the true reach they can offer a marketer. Not surprisingly, one of the industry standards for verifying the measurement of analog and Web media has stepped into the new mobile frontier.

According to the invite sent out for its January 19 event at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Apple will do something regarding education. "Join us for an education announcement in the Big Apple," says the invite, reproduced on The Loop site.

The Economist yesterday launched a nifty little number at Electionism.com. This site contains the latest election coverage from both 'The Economist' and CQ Roll Call. The Web app aggregates links its journalists like and a roll-up of relevant Twitter feeds from both the candidates and related media. All this in HTML5 on the Web that lives outside Amazon, Apple or Android app stores.

Despite all of the hype and hoopla over consumer electronics this past holiday, the NPD Group reports that for the five weeks ending Nov. 2, 2011, sales in the category declined 5.9% from the same period in 2010, which itself was down 6.2%. The consistent losses in consumer interest seemed to revolve around the gadgets that smartphones are challenging.