iPhone Apps by the Numbers
Apple is fond of quantifying the success of its products and services in terms of great big numbers, and Steve Jobs has told the Wall Street Journal that in the iPhone’s first month as a platform for third-party applications, 60 million programs have been downloaded from iTunes’ App Store, generating $1 million a day in sales. I don’t have a current figure for the total number of first- and second-generation iPhones in the world, but that’s unquestionably a bunch of apps per iPhone. Small wonder that T-Mobile says it’s dumping the traditional cell-phone company “deck” approach to marketing applications to phone owners in favor of something more similar to Apple’s approach–and betcha that other phone manufacturers and service providers will follow suit.

Read more at: GigaOM

What’s in a CPU Name?
The upcoming Intel CPU that’s carried the code-name “Nehalem” has an official name: Core, with the first chips to be known as “Core i7.” At first blush, it’s a tad confusing given that Core is the next generation beyond Core 2 Duo, which sounds like it should have been the sequel to the sequel to plain old Core. No word on what, if anything, the “i7” stands for. The first Core chips, which introduce improved multithreading capabilities, are due to show up in the fourth quarter of this year.

Read more at: CNET, Engadget

Best Buy in a Box
The 800-pound gorilla of electronics retailing is coming soon to an airport near you. Partnering with a company caled ZoomSystems, Best Buy is installing vending machines in 12 U.S. airports–ones that vend digital cameras, MP3 players, cell phones, and other gadgets. Let’s hope that the prices for the products honor the name “Best Buy,” which would be a refreshing departure from most items for sale in airports. And I do have one other question: I get why you might buy a phone or camera at the last moment as you leave on a journey, but wouldn’t that be an odd moment to buy an MP3 player–unless you happened to be traveling with a meaningful percentage of your music collection?

Read more at: Crave, Gizmodo

Future Macs: Video Stars?
Silicon Valley insider is musing on a tip it received that new Macs will include chips dedicated to encoding and decoding QuickTime video. The Insider calls that “pure speculation,” and it may be nothing more than a rehash of the theory, expounded several times by PBS’s Robert X. Cringely, that future Macs will include dedicated H.264 video chips. None of this scuttlebutt has really explained why dedicated video chips would make sense, though if Apple has been working on this for awhile, it might help explain why no Mac has included video-recording capabilities to date.

Read more at: Silicon Alley Insider

Charlie Hacking the MTA
A Boston judge told some MIT students that they couldn’t give their planned presentation at the DefCon hacker confab in Las Vegas concerning vulnerabilities in the CharlieCard fare-card system used in the Boston subway system. Not that I’m in favor of bad guys learning how to cheat the T–using a fake card would presumably a lot easier than hopping over a turnstile–but DefCon’s sessions are rife with information that that, if abused, could spell trouble for organizations and institutions in our lives. This CharlieCard presentation would have been only one example. I’d love to see a case of this sort go high enough up in the judicial food chain to establish once and for all what the law permits when it comes to open discussion of specific security vulnerabilities. (Side note: It took an amazingly long time for Boston to introduce a modern fare-card system at all…when I left the city in 2002, subway stations were still full of guys in little booths selling tokens.)