Google Play’s top downloads in 2017: And the award goes to …

Google this week released its list of top downloads on Google Play for the year 2017. There were some surprises, like seeing the King of horror play second fiddle to a self-help book, or a liquored-up animated scientist and his grandson beating a zombie juggernaut.
Without further ado, here’s the list of top five most downloaded Apps, games, songs, movies, TV shows, and books on Google Play in 2017:
Apps:
Games:
Songs:
Movies:
TV shows:
Books:
Right off the bat, the list of most popular apps is full of drama and intrigue. And not just because TopBuzz Video made the list. FaceApp, which admittedly has some pretty cool functionality, had quite an interesting year thanks to a determination to be off-putting .
The real gem on this list is Boomerang, of course, because the 80s were awesome. If you weren’t around for them, then Yarn might be more your thing. Scary stories told in text message? That’s called dating.
We all knew Super Mario Run would be the biggest thing since the last big thing Nintendo
brought to Android .. Honestly, Nintendo, it’s starting to feel unfair. Super Mario Run is a platformer based on other platformers that are based on an obscure game from the past called Super Mario Bros.
The top 5 most downloaded songs, like the rest of the entire planet, is mostly just Kendrick Lamar and Ed Sheeran.
It’s crazy that Doctor Strange is the fifth most downloaded movie, because it proves that babies randomly smashing buttons on their parents phones are a large portion of purchasers. If it were up to me, I’d just put Wonder Woman in the top five twice. Scratch that, all the movies in 2017 should be Wonder Woman.
On the small screen, Game of Thrones took the coveted number one spot – good show, well deserved – but Rick and Morty in second? Firstly, Archer – this is what happens when it’s hard as hell to find somewhere to watch your latest season. You don’t get to win Google by avoiding streaming services. And second, bravo humanity. Rick and Morty is an excellent show that has to be watched a few times to appreciate – like reading Herman Melville.
And now that JK Rowling is done ruling Earth, we actually have new books to read. In January, if you’d told me that Mark Manson’s book with an F-bomb in the title would be downloaded more than IT by Stephen King, I would have called you a fool. Well, who’s the fool now? Me. Well, played Mr. Manson. Video games, fantasy, and suicide round out the rest of the Potter-free books.
Here’s hoping your favorites made the list this year! If they didn’t, maybe Google isn’t your thing. Check out Apple’s top downloads here and see if you’re more of an iOS type.
APPS GOOGLE GOOGLE PLAY 13 hours ago
1
FaceApp
What The Forecast?!!
Boomerang (Beta)
TopBuzz Video: Viral Videos, Funny GIFs &TV shows
Yarn – Chat Fiction
Super Mario Run
Bubble Witch Saga
Magic Tiles 3
CATS: Crash Arena Turbo Stars
Ballz
HUMBLE. by Kendrick Lamar
Shape of You by Ed Sheeran
DNA. by Kendrick Lamar
Mask Off by Future
Body Like A Back Road by Sam Hunt
Moana
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
Wonder Woman (2017)
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
Doctor Strange
Game of Thrones
Rick and Morty
The Walking Dead
The Big Bang Theory
Doctor Who
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson
It by Stephen King
The Battlemage by Taran Matharu
Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.

World’s first AR app for Twitter is a preview of what’s to come

Twitter in augmented reality is exactly as cool as it sounds.
TweetReality brings tweets, search, mentions, profiles and all your favorite features and displays them neatly on a virtual screen that overlays your iPhone or iPad display (sorry
Android fans).
Navigating is a bit different, but fairly straightforward and intuitive. You can still retweet, reply, and heart status updates much like you would on the mobile app. And while we wouldn’t call TweetReality a “polished” app just yet, it’s entirely usable and a great start.
While AR is cool no matter where you use it, this is the type of technology that improves as better wearables come out to take advantage of it — whether that’s cool new AR glasses from Apple , or a slimmed down Hololens from Microsoft .
TweetReality is available now. You can take it for a spin by downloading it at Apple’s App Store .

Google search now has celebs answering questions about themselves

Celebrity trivia buffs are going to love
Google’s latest update to its search engine, which sees movers and shakers in entertainment answer questions about themselves on results pages on mobile.
It’s rolling out right now in the US, but I found that it works here in India too. Fire up Google search on your phone and search for, “Where did Priyanka Chopra grow up?” to hear the Bollywood superstar respond in person in a short video clip.
It’s kind of like Wired’s video series , in which celebs team up in pairs to answer frequently asked questions about themselves. In addition to Chopra, Google’s roped in Will Ferrell, Tracee Ellis Ross, Gina Rodriguez, Kenan Thompson, Allison Williams, Nick Jonas, Mark Wahlberg, James Franco, Seth MacFarlane, Jonathan Yeo, and cronut creator Dominique Ansel to pilot the new feature. It plans to add more celebrities to the list in the coming months.

YouTube reportedly plans to take on Spotify with a streaming music service next year

YouTube is gearing up to launch a paid streaming music service by March 2018,
reports Bloomberg .
That could help the company take on the likes of Spotify and Apple Music – but given that YouTube already has a Music app , as well as a paid subscription service (called YouTube Red ), and Google already has a streaming service and music store, it’s an odd strategy to start on at this point.
Of course, the reason is most likely money. Earlier this year, Goldman Sachs predicted in its Music in the Air report that the streaming music market would grow to $28 billion per year by 2030, and Google will certainly want a large slice of that pie.
The one major advantage YouTube could have over its rivals is a huge catalog of video content to complement its music library. The service, which is internally referred to as Remix, is slated to feature video clips alongside tracks, and YouTube is said to be courting artists to help promote Remix when it’s closer to launch.
At any rate, YouTube will certainly have its work cut out for it, between creating a well thought out service and apps to contend with seasoned ones like Spotify, and securing licenses from major record labels and distributors to fill its catalog and make it available worldwide.
It’ll also be interesting to see what this spells for Google Play Music, which has been around since 2011, but still feels like a work in progress in some respects. There was also some talk about merging YouTube Red with Google Play Music, but it seems like this new development might derail those plans.
We’ve contacted Google to learn more and will update this post if there’s a response.

PhoneWagon raises $1.2M to track when marketing campaigns lead to phone calls

When it comes to tracking the effectiveness of online advertising campaigns, PhoneWagon CEO Ryan Shank said there’s been a big piece missing for most businesses — namely, how often those campaigns lead to phone calls.
Shank has plenty of experience in local marketing, having worked in sales at Yext, then serving as COO Mhelpdesk, which was sold to IAC’s HomeAdvisor .
And he’s announcing that PhoneWagon has raised $1.2 million in seed funding, led by Birchmere Ventures, with participation from Active Capital. The startup was part of the most recent class of startups at Techstars NYC , and its angel investors include early Yext employees Adam Liebman, Adam Kaplan and Dave Greenberger.
Shank acknowledged that there are existing call tracking services like CallRail , but he argued that their pricing and the difficulty of setup puts them out of reach for many small businesses.
“These other guys, they even speak too technical about it,” he said.
With PhoneWagon, Shank aimed to build something that was “easy-to-use, beautiful, simple” and therefore usable by SMBs.
Businesses just install a few lines of JavaScript on their website, then when someone comes to the site thanks to an online ad, they’re presented with a dynamically generated phone number.
If you’re the kind of company that gets a lot of business over the phone, these dynamic numbers make it easier to break down which traffic sources, keywords and campaigns drove the most valuable calls.
Other features include integrations with Google AdWords and other platforms, as well as the ability to show local and toll-free phone numbers to each visitor.
PhoneWagon already has nearly 150 customers and is added 40 new customers every month, Shank said.

The price of bitcoin has doubled in two weeks, now above $16K

The cryptocurrency’s gains Thursday morning hit new heights, striking well above $18,000 across widely varying exchanges, coming to rest above $16,000 while the popular Coinbase exchange had been suffering major issues due to “record high traffic.”
Bitcoin was trading below $8,000 two weeks ago.
This is a truly, truly volatile game at this point; the swings didn’t appear as consequential when the market cap rested in the low billions, but as institutional pocketbooks push that cap to nearly $300 billion, the stakes are raised considerably.
What’s further disturbing is how widely the prices are varying across exchanges — there doesn’t seem to be a stable consensus on where the price is. While bitcoin prices on Coinbase’s GDAX exchange approached nearly $19,000 (!!!) this morning, others had the price sitting at thousands of dollars less.
via http://www.worldcoinindex.com/coin/bitcoin a few minutes ago
The price is currently trading at $15,499 on Bitfinex and $17,639 on GDAX. Coindesk’s
bitcoin price index currently has the cryptocurrency trading around $16,000. These figures have probably swung by several hundred dollars since I typed this sentence.
The fact that even the most established exchanges are having trouble holding consensus on price isn’t great for buyers who can stand to lose (or gain) to exchange volatility on a currency that already has volatility baked into its ethos at this young stage.
The arbitrage opportunities appear to be significant here; generally, that alone is enough to correct the markets, but extreme congestion in both the bitcoin and ethereum blockchains are making it much harder to move bitcoin and ether between exchanges. For example, New York-based Gemini had temporarily suspended both bitcoin and ether withdraws this morning because the odds of a transaction actually processing were so low.

Coinbase hits top spot on Apple’s US App Store despite struggling to handle bitcoin demand

Ignoring recent price rises for a second, if you can — there’s no greater sign of bitcoin fever than an app that lets you buy the cryptocurrency becoming the most downloaded app in the App Store.
That’s exactly what happened on Thursday when Coinbase, the $1.6-billion-valued company behind what is arguably the world’s best-known exchange for converting fiat into crypto, hit the top spot for free apps in Apple’s U.S. App Store for the first time as the price of bitcoin rocketed past $17,000 thanks via a price jump of over 20 percent in 24 hours.
The irony of Coinbase hitting the mainstream is that, for many customers, the service was actually unavailable for large portions of the day. The Coinbase app was hanging for many — making it impossible to check an account balance let alone buy into The Next Great Bitcoin Rush — and its web-based service didn’t fare any better. The site was “down for maintenance” for large chunks of the day, frustrating customers looking to buy, sell or merely access their account.
BREAKING: Coinbase unavailable.
The company now has more customers than Charles Schwab and has opened as many as 300,000 accounts in a day.
Today has unprecedented volume and demand.
There are litterally so many people trying to buy Bitcoin that exchanges are crashing.
pic.twitter.com/ZzMKkplyga
— Bruce Fenton (@brucefenton) December 7, 2017
Things appears to have stabilized at the time of writing and, to be fair to Coinbase, it wasn’t the only fiat-crypto exchange that buckled under the pressure and its capacity has clearly improved significant since its last major outage when bitcoin passed $2,000 .
Still, it’s insane that an app can race to the top of the App Store despite not actually functioning for many users that very day. But hey, we live in a world where one bitcoin is worth north of $18,000 so ‘normal’ is becoming harder to define.