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It’s no secret that Apple’s App Store has been leaps and bounds more succesful than Android’s comparable Market, but it isn’t often we get concrete data that shows just how poorly Android’s store is faring in comparison. Today Android developer Larva Labs has posted some of the sales figures for its top applications, and the results are not impressive: Larva has two apps in Android’s top paid apps list called Battle For Mars and RetroDefense, ranking #5 and #12 respectively, and between them the company has raked in an average of $62.39 per day over the last month. Ouch.

Larva’s Matt Hall attributes this poor performance in part to Android’s shoddy App purchase flow. Unlike the iPhone’s integrated App Store, Android Market doesn’t have screenshots of apps, forces you into the browser at times, makes you use Google Checkout, has some unintuitive navigation issues, and a handful of other problems. These issues are widely known — you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks the purchase process is as smooth as it is on the iPhone — but they’ve been around for quite a while.

Hall also points out the poor sales of the smash-hit iPhone game Trism, which pulled in hundreds of thousands of dollars on the App Store. On Android, it has seen fewer than 500 downloads. Granted, there’s no guarantee that lighting will strike twice when there are many other games available for both markets, but that isn’t exactly an encouraging statistic.

Hall also writes that the rumored Android market size of $5 million a month (which still pales in comparison to the App Store’s) is likely an overestimate. He concludes that if Larva is considered an average developer, then half the other developers on the platform would have to be seeing similar sales figures to reach that figure, which isn’t likely.

This news comes at a time when many developers would be happy to leave Apple’s troubled App Store, with its ridiculous approval policies and poor treatment of developers, in favor of greener pastures. With a slew of new devices coming out this year and policies that are much friendlier to developers, Android has the opportunity to give these apps a new home — now it needs to build out a marketplace that gives the App Store a run for its money. Google has said improvements will be coming soon, likely with support for PayPal, credit cards, and carrier billing; let’s just hope these come sooner rather than later.

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Yazzem, the simple topic creator for Twitter or FriendFeed, has launched version 2 of their online service. Yazzem allows you to start topics about anything you want, basically creating a new way to interact with both Twitter and FriendFeed. Once the topics have been created, anyone can join your topic to connect and discuss about it in 140 characters or less. Yazzem launched in June 2008, and has picked up quite a user base for a very specific core audience.

Launching in version 2 of Yazzem is a redesign of the Yazzem site, themes that users can choose from for their page, and latest activity streams for all your friends. Also launching with this version is subscribers, which is similar to Twitter followers or FriendFeed subscribers. Another key feature that is launching is user stats, so now users will be able to see information like number of subscribers and activities a particular user has deciding whether or not to subscribe to them.

Yazzem also launched a new mobile version of Yazzem which is basically just a redesign of the old mobile version that fits much better for iPhone and iPod Touch users when browsing on the go.

It’s unclear how Yazzem will make money, but for such a young company, Yazzem does show some promising features and a future. Yazzem was started by Zachary Collins and Dustin Snider, who are both 14 years of age.

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Are you addicted to FriendFeed? Can't get enough of Robert Scoble's incessant posts? Want to keep up with them even when you're on the go? Are you praying to the heavens that Facebook doesn't screw up FriendFeed post-acquisition? Then Stir (iTunes link) might just be for you. Created by StructLab Stir is an iPhone app that allows you to get your fill of FriendFeed anytime, anywhere. You can use it in the bathroom at work (guilty), while watching a lame chick flick with your girlfriend (guilty) or if you're on the couch and don't want to walk the 10 feet to your desk (umm, yes, guilty). Of course, it is hardly the first FriendFeed app for the iPhone, but it's the first one I've looked at and it's pretty damn good. Mind you, I only started using FriendFeed last week. Twitter is still my micro-blogging platform of choice, but I quickly noticed that FriendFeed has some obvious benefits. And Stir takes advantage of all of them.

We just wrote about the dominance of number of .com domains and we’ve also reported that .com domain registrations were starting to turn around again after a poor 2008. Today, another .com domain passed the million dollar mark, with Call.com selling for $1.1 million via domain brokerage Sedo to an undisclosed buyer.

The domain was sold by Live Current Media , which had sold, then reacquired the domain over the past years. Live Current apparently sold the domain as part of a package of domains including Makeup.com, Automobile.com, and Exercise.com. Part of the deal was that Live Current would get royalties from any revenue earned from the domains. The company ended up buying back Call.com in 2006, and nullified the royalty stipulation. According to Domain Name Wire, the value of the royalty stream was $250,000 in future revenue, which makes the $1.1 million sale a good bet. Live Current also recently sold Cricket.com for a cool $1.75 million. Last year, Live Current experienced some financial difficulties and was looking to raise cash to survive by liquidating its domain names.

Other large domain purchases this year include the sale of Candy.com for $3 million, ToysRUs’ acquisition of Toys.com for $5.1 million, the sale of Fly.com to Travelzoo for $1.8 million, and the sale of Ad.com for $1.4 million.

Image via Flickr/greggoconnell.

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On its iGoogle Developer Blog today Google issued a warning to developers: Optimize your gadgets for speed, or we’re labeling them as “slow” in the directory.

Starting in late September, Google says that any widget that doesn’t meet a speed requirement, will get a nice “slow” badge attached to its directory listing. The only detail it gives about the requirement is that it will get the badge if it’s “slow enough to cause speed-related user dissatisfaction.”

That sounds pretty arbitrary, and that it could lead to a lot of developers complaining that their apps aren’t really slow, but are labeled as such. But we all know how much Google loves speed, so this move isn’t all that surprising.

To make sure your gadget doesn’t get the Scarlett Letter, check out these optimization tips from Google.

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NTT America announced today that it has leased a new 15,000 square foot data center in Santa Clara, CA. Big deal, you might think, a network provider expands its capacity. Except this network provider has a very high-profile client: Twitter.

Though Twitter is never actually mentioned in NTT’s press release, the blog Data Center Knowledge put two and two together, recalling a quote in June from NTT America COO Kazuhiro Gomi: “traffic generated by Twitter is getting so big, it’s basically eating up a lot of our data center network resources, especially the segment where Twitter is hosted. Other customers are riding on the same segment.”

NTT America’s name came up quite a bit recently during the DDoS attacks that crippled Twitter. As Twitter’s network partner, NTT put in place many of the safeguards that slowed the attack enough so that Twitter could get the service back up. You may recall that Twitter also worked closely with NTT to reschedule a planned maintenance in June to make sure that the Iranian protest messages could continue to flow over the service.

Eventually, if Twitter continues its rapid growth, you’d think they would want their own data centers, like Google and Facebook have. But the leasing of this large new data center would seem to indicate that Twitter will be onboard with them for the foreseeable future. Twitter has been with NTT America since early 2008, following widespread reliability issues.

The idea of Twitter going down in the event of a major earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area is occasionally brought up when the question of Twitter as a reliable form of communication is raised. NTT America says this new data center “meets seismic zone four specifications.” NTT also notes that the data center, “is equipped with redundant power feeds, and carrier-class uninterruptable and back-up power. Optimal systems performance is maintained by fully redundant water cooling systems coupled with advanced humidity and temperature controls. Continuous monitoring ensures that all systems are fully operational.”

Could this really mean the end of the Fail Whale?

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“That’s right. That’s - that’s good. That’s good. Unless, of course, somebody comes up with 6-Minute Abs. Then you’re in trouble, huh?” - Ted (Ben Stiller), There’s Something About Mary

The more top level domains that are approved by ICANN, the less each of them is worth. People continue to flock to .com: 82 million of the 111 million non-country specific domains registered are .com. Everyone else splits what’s left, with .net and .org taking the bulk of the leftovers.

That means if you’re running the, say, .biz or .info domain registry businesses, with 5 million and 2 million domains registered, respectively, it’s time to come up with some marketing genius.

.Biz is first to market with, yes, one character domain names. These domains, previously reserved, will be auctioned off on September 23 at 12 noon EST via Sedo. A total of 36 domains will be sold (26 letters and 0-9). If you want to be the proud owner of 1.biz or whatever, the details are here.

“These domains are rare and potentially very valuable” says Neustar, which runs the .biz registry. Presumably whatever you pay in the auction is a one-time fee, and normal registrar rates of a few dollars a year will apply after that.

If you’re thinking of buying these to do a quick flip, think again. We hear .com will release one character domains within the year, too.

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A week ago I had a chance to sit down for a hour-long one on one interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt. There were no rules, and the whole interview was on the record. Part of the interview was on video as well.

There’s so much material that we’ve broken the interview notes up into a few different subject areas. We’ll post separately with his thoughts on the future of search, books, news, mobile and more. Schmidt also spoke candidly about the Microsoft/Yahoo search alliance, Twitter (he mentioned them before I did!) and Facebook.

What Is Google?

I started the interview with a simple question: What is Google?

Most people think of Google as a search engine, a place to start and end the day. People also think of it as an advertising company. But Google is obviously more than that.

Google says its mission “is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” But that’s too much of a 50,000 foot view of the company - and it’s so vague it’s not very useful.

Schmidt describes Google:

I think of Google as a set of overlapping things. It’s a consumer platform, consumer phenomenon of which search is its fundamental activity, but there are many other things you can do than search…I think of Google as an advertising company who services the broader advertising industry in the ways that you know. And the first and the second are inter-related. The third is I think of us as a network of partners and infrastructure. I don’t know how many billions of dollars we hand to everybody. But by the time you look at the publishers, the use of AdSense and so forth, it’s literally billions of dollars going through Google and to other people which we hope fund additional software, additional web applications, additional content and so forth and we care a lot about that.

He also says Google has a certain way of doing things internally, a theme comes up repeatedly later in the interview. It involves the small cultural things, like free soft drinks, snacks and lava lamps. But he also says Google has always focused on solving big problems:

And then I also think of Google as a cultural phenomenon in and of itself, you know, the lava lamps and the way in which Google is run and so forth. That’s how I like to think about it. With respect to product buckets, we’ve always taken the position of we want to do things that matter to a large number of people at scale. So, we don’t define ourselves as search only or ads only or what have you. We sort of wait until something comes along which could actually affect, in a positive way, a lot of people. We don’t want to work on problems that only affect a small number of people.

Five years ago (about the time Google went public), Schmidt says, he sat down with founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to talk about Google’s strategy:

And so, we had a - Larry and Sergey and I had a strategy meeting five years ago…I said, OK, well, let’s write down our strategy. We never really had a strategy. And so Sergey basically got up and said, our job is to do things that matter to the world at scale and it should just boom, boom, boom like that. And that became our strategy. And then Larry and I wrote down in detail some of the ideas that happened from that. But it’s not just a search company or not just an advertising company. It doesn’t even have to be just an Internet company, although obviously, the Internet is key.

More interesting conversation from the interview coming up in additional posts today and tomorrow. We’ll also update this post with links to those, too.

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Yahoo India has decided to shut down SpotM, the social network it launched less than a year ago in India. According to the site, SpotM. which never exited private beta, will be shut down on Sep. 1. Yahoo launched SpotM as a social network for the 16-24 age bracket in an attempt to capture the growing market in India.

It appeared that SpotM had potential to take off due the popularity of social networks in India and the addition of a few differentiating features. Yahoo said that SpotM would allow users to make friends with other users and if they wanted, to make those friends private so other users wouldn’t know about the relationship. SMS integration with anonymous chat would let users correspond via SMS without revealing their phone number.

But it appears that SpotM couldn’t compete with other social networks that are dominating in India. Google’s Orkut is the leader in the space, with 16 million unique visitors in July, according to comScore stats. Facebook, which is growing incredibly fast in India, reached a high of 7.5 million unique visits in India, according to July’s comScore numbers. In May, Facebook launched availability for several Indian languages including Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam. Perhaps Yahoo is planning to focus its social networking efforts in other parts of the world with the recently launched Yahoo Meme.

Thanks to Ashish Sinha for the tip.

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